Rain Gods (63 page)

Hackberry paused at the cave’s entrance, his .45 holstered, the Beretta still tucked inside the back of his gun belt. He smelled a dank odor like mouse droppings or bat guano and water pooled in stone. He felt the wind coursing over his skin, flowing into the cave. “Can you hear me, Collins?” he said.

There was no answer. Hackberry stepped inside the darkness of the cave as though slipping from the world of light into one of perpetual shade.

The body of a man lay behind a boulder. The wounds in his chest and stomach and legs were egregious. The amount of blood that had pooled around him and soaked into his sheep-lined leather coat and bradded orange work pants seemed more than his body could have contained.

“You can do a good deed here, Jack,” Hackberry called out.

After the echo died, he thought he heard a rattling sound in the dark, farther back in the cave.

“Did you hear me, Jack?”

“You’re backlit, Sheriff,” a voice said from deep in the cave’s interior.

“That’s right. You can pop me any time you want.” Hackberry paused. “You’re not above doing a good deed, are you?”

“What might that be?”

“Mrs. Dolan has children. They want her back. How about it?”

“I’ll take it under advisement.”

“I don’t think you’re a man who hides behind a woman.”

“I don’t have to hide behind anyone. You hear that sound? Why don’t you come toward me a little more and check out your environment?”

“Rattlers are holed up in here?”

“Probably not more than a couple of dozen. Just flatten yourself out against the wall.”

“Your voice sounds a little strange, Jack.”

“He’s had an anaphylactic reaction to peanut butter. It may be fatal,” a woman’s voice said.

“You shut up,” Collins said.

“Is that right, Jack? You want to go to a hospital?” Hackberry said.

But there was no answer.

“I was a navy corpsman,” Hackberry said. “Severe anaphylaxis can bring on respiratory and coronary arrest, partner. It’s a bad way to go, strangling in your spit, your sphincter letting go, that sort of thing.”

“I can squeeze this trigger, and you’ll be a petroglyph.”

“But that’s not what this is about, is it? You’re haunted by the women and girls you killed because your act was that of a coward, not because you robbed them of their lives. You don’t want redemption, Jack. You want validation, justification for an act you know is indefensible.”

“Sheriff Holland, don’t bait this man or try to reason with him. Kill him so he doesn’t kill others. I’m not afraid,” the woman said.

Hackberry gritted his teeth in his frustration with Esther Dolan. “That’s not why I’m here, Jack. I’m not your executioner. I’m not worthy of you. You already said it—I’m a drunk and the sexual exploiter of poor third-world women. I’ve got to hand it to you, for good or bad, you’re the kind of guy who belongs to the ages. You screwed up behind the church, but I think the order for the mass shooting came from Hugo Cistranos and wasn’t your idea. That’s important to remember, Jack. You’re not a coward. You can prove that this morning. Turn Mrs. Dolan loose and take your chances with me. That’s what real cojones are about, right? You say full throttle and fuck it and sail out over the abyss.”

There was a long silence. Hackberry could feel the wind puffing around him, blowing coldly on his neck and the backs of his ears. Again he heard a rattling sound, like the wispy rattling of seeds inside a dried poppy husk.

“I’ve got to know something,” Collins said.

“Ask me.”

“That night I went inside your house, you said my mother wanted me aborted, that I was despised in the womb. Why would you treat me with such contempt and odium?”

“My remark wasn’t aimed at you.”

“Then who?”

Hackberry paused. “We don’t get to choose our parents.”

“My mother wasn’t like that, like what you said. She wasn’t like that at all.”

“Maybe she wasn’t, sir. Maybe I was all wrong.”

“Then say that.”

“I just did.”

“You think your words will make me merciful now?”

“Probably not. Maybe I’ve just been firing in the well.”

“Get out of here, Mrs. Dolan. Go back to your family.”

Unbelievingly, Hackberry saw Esther Dolan running out of the darkness, her shoulder close to the right wall, her arms gathered across her chest, her face averted from something on the left side of the cave.

Hackberry grabbed her and pushed her behind him out into the light. He turned and went back into the cave, lifting his revolver from his holster. “You still there, Jack?”

“I’m at your disposal.”

“Do I have to come in after you?”

“You could wait me out. The fact that you’ve chosen otherwise tells me it’s you who’s looking for salvation, Sheriff, not me. Something happen in Korea you don’t tell a lot of people about?”

“Could be.”

“I’ll be glad to oblige. I’ve got fifty rounds in my pan. Do you know what you’ll look like when I get finished?”

“Who cares? I’m old. I’ve had a good life. Fuck you, Jack.”

But nothing happened. Inside the darkness, Hackberry could hear the rilling sound of small rocks, as though they were slipping down a grade.

“Maybe I’ll see you down the road, Sheriff,” Collins said.

Suddenly, a truck flare burst into flame far back in the cave. Collins hurled it end over end onto a rock shelf where diamondbacks as thick as Hack’s wrists writhed among one another, their rattlers buzzing like maracas.

Hackberry emptied his .45 down the cave shaft, then pulled the Beretta from the back of his belt and let off all fourteen rounds, the bullets sparking on the cave walls, thudding into layers of bat guano and mold, ricocheting deep underground.

When he finished firing, he was almost deaf, his eardrums as insensate as lumps of cauliflower. The air was dense with smoke and the smell of cordite and animal feces and the musky odor of disturbed birds’ and rats’ nests. He could see the snakes looping and coiling on the shelf, their eyes bright pinpoints in the hot red glare of the truck flare. Tarantulas the diameter of baseballs, with black furry legs, were crawling down the sides of the shelf onto the cave floor. Hackberry opened and closed his mouth and swallowed and forced air through his ears. “I get you, Jack?” he called out.

He listened for an answer, his head slightly bowed. All he heard in response were feet moving farther down the shaft, deeper into the mountain, and the voice of an impaired man saying, “Ma, is that you? It’s Jack, your son. Ma?”

EPILOGUE

T
HE WEEKS PASSED, then months, and Hackberry Holland’s life slipped back into routine. Search teams and spelunkers crawled deep into the tunnel where Jack Collins had disappeared. A geologist borrowed from the University of Texas, with a flair for the poetic in his report, described the tunnel as “serpentine in pattern, in places as narrow as a birth canal, the floor and ceiling ridged with sharp projections that lacerate the palms, knees, and back simultaneously, the air akin in its foulness to a water well with a dead cow in it.”

Everyone who went into the cave conceded that somewhere on the other side of the mountain there was an air source, perhaps a small one hidden behind brush growing out of the rock, but an opening of some kind that allowed water and light and small animals into the mountain’s interior, because on the far side of the spot where the tunnel bottomed and then rose at a forty-five-degree angle, there were seeds from pińon trees that had drifted down from above, and on a flat rock a hollowed-out depression that had probably been used as an Indian grinding bowl.

The official statement from a government spokesman indicated that Jack Collins had probably been wounded by gunfire and died inside the mountain, and his remains would probably never be found. But local residents began to report sightings of an emaciated man who foraged in landfills and Dumpsters and wore rags that were black with grime and a rope for a belt and whose beard grew in a point to the middle of his chest. The emaciated man also wore cowboy boots whose soles were held on with duct tape, and a fedora with holes in the creases.

When a reporter asked Hackberry Holland about his speculations on the fate of Jack Collins, he thought for a moment and said, “What difference does it make?”

“Sir?” the reporter said.

“Preacher’s kind don’t go away easily. If Jack isn’t out there now, his successor is.”

“You sound like y’all had a personal relationship,” the reporter said.

“I guess you could say I got to know him in North Korea.”

“I’m confused,” the reporter said. “Korea? You’re saying the guy’s a terrorist or something?”

“How about I buy you coffee up at the café?” Hackberry said.

No charges were ever filed against Pete Flores, in large part because the perpetrators of the massacre behind the church were thought to be dead and no local or federal official wanted to see a basically innocent and decent man inserted into a process that, once started, becomes irreversible and eventually destroys lives for no practical purpose. If there was any drama at all in the aftermath of the events that took place on the mountainside above Jack Collins’s burned and bulldozed cottage, it occurred in an idle moment when Vikki Gaddis was sorting through her purse at the kitchen table and found a business card she had put away and forgotten about.

“What’s that?” Pete said. He was drying the dishes, glancing back at her from the kitchen counter.

“A guy from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band left it at the steak house. He liked my music.”

“Did you call him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why should I?”

He didn’t have an answer. A few minutes later, he picked up the card from the table and walked outside and over a bare knoll dotted with clusters of prickly-pear cactus. From the top of the knoll, he could see a half-dozen oil wells methodically pumping up and down on a rolling plain that seemed to bleed into the sunset. The air smelled of natural gas and creosote and a stack of old tires someone had burned. Behind him, the ever-present dust gusted off the road and floated in a gray cloud over the clapboard house he and Vikki rented. He opened his cell phone and dialed the number on the business card.

Six weeks later, Vikki Gaddis cut her first record at Martina and John McBride’s Blackbird Studio in Nashville.

For Hackberry Holland, the end of the story lay not in the fate of Jack Collins or Hugo Cistranos and Arthur Rooney or any of their minions. By the same token, it did not lie in the fact that justice was done for Pete Flores and that the talent of his wife, Vikki Gaddis, was recognized by her fellow artists, or even in the fact that Vikki and Pete later bought a ranch at the foot of the blue Canadian Rockies. Instead, the conclusion of Hackberry’s odyssey from Camp Five in No Name Valley to an alluvial floodplain north of the Chisos Mountains was represented by a bizarre event that remained, at least for him, as an emblematic moment larger than the narrative about it.

It involved the unexpected arrival of Nick Dolan, the former operator of a skin joint, on Collins’s property, driving an SUV that had the lacquered brilliance of a maroon lollipop, a stolen American flag with a broomstick for a staff mounted on the rear bumper, his passengers a blue-collar community-college student who thought it perfectly natural to sing Carter Family spirituals in a beer joint and a former American soldier who was so brave he had forgotten to be afraid.

The three of them made for an improbable cast of heroes. Perhaps like an ancient Roman watching a Vesuvian mountain grow red and translucent until it exploded and rained its sparks on a dark sea, they did not recognize the importance of the events taking place around them or the fact that they were players in a great historical drama. They would be the last to claim they had planned the charge across the hardpan into Jack Collins’s camp. But that was the key to understanding them: Their humility, the disparity in their backgrounds, the courage they didn’t ac knowledge in themselves, the choices they made out of instinct rather than intellect, these characteristics constituted the glue that held them together as individuals and as a people. Empires came and went. The indomitable nature of the human spirit did not.

Or at least these were the lessons that Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs tried to take from their own story.

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EPILOGUE