James Burke - Rain Gods

While Preacher spoke, he had not looked directly at Esther. His back was turned toward her, his bone structure as stiff as a scarecrow’s inside his coat, the Thompson hanging straight down from his arm. His face lifted toward the sky, his nostrils swelling. Now he turned slowly toward her, taking the measure of her mood, his gaze seeming to reach inside her head. “I’ve scared you?” he said.

“He was your friend.”

“Who?”

“The man in the mine.”

“It’s not a mine. It’s a cave. You know the story of Elijah sleeping outside the cave, waiting to hear the voice of Yahweh? The voice wasn’t to be found in the wind or a fire or an earthquake. It was to be found at the entrance to a cave.”

As she looked into his face and listened to his words, she believed she had finally come to understand the moral vacuity that lived behind his eyes. “You’re going to kill us all, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“You weren’t listening. I said you’re going to kill us all.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re going to kill yourself, too. That’s what this is all about. You have to die. You just haven’t found somebody to do it for you yet.”

“Suicide is the mark of a coward, madam. I think you should treat me with more respect.”

“Don’t call me madam. Did the man in the cave have a gun?”

“I didn’t ask him. When Molo is done cooking, fix me a plate and one for yourself. The plane will be here by ten.”

“Prepare you a plate? Who do you think you are?”

“Your spouse, and that means you’ll damn well do what I say. Get in the tent and wait for me.”

“Señora, better do what he say,” Angel said, wagging an admonishing finger. “Molo already gave him food that makes him real sick. Señor Jack ain’t in a very good mood.”

She went back inside the tent, her temples pounding. She sat down on the cot and picked up the box of uneaten brownies she had prepared for Mrs. Bernstein. She placed her hand on her chest and waited until her heart had stopped racing. She hadn’t eaten since the previous evening, and her head was spinning and gray spots were swimming before her eyes.

She slipped the string off the box and took out one brownie and bit off a corner. She could not be sure, but she believed she might be holding a formidable weapon in her hand, at least if her intuitions about Preacher’s refusal to eat the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches were correct. She had learned the recipe from her grandmother, a woman whose life of privation had taught her how to create culinary miracles from the simplest of ingredients. One of the grandmother’s great successes had been brownies that were loaded with government-staple peanut butter but were baked with enough chocolate and cocoa powder to disguise their mundane core.

Esther closed her eyes and saw Nick and her son and her twin daugh ters as clearly as if she were looking out the front window of their home on the Comal River. Nick was cooking a chicken on the barbecue grill, standing downwind, his eyes running, his glossy Hawaiian shirt soaked with smoke, forking the meat as though that would improve the burned mess he was making. In the background, Jesse and Ruth and Kate were turning somersaults on the grass, their tanned bodies netted with the sunlight shining through a tree, the river cold and rock-bottomed and swift-running behind them.

For just a moment she thought she was going to lose it. But this was not a time either to surrender or to accept the terms of one’s enemies. How did her grandmother put it? We didn’t give our lives. The Cossacks stole them. A Cossack feeds on weakness, and his bloodlust is energized by his victim’s fear.

That was what her grandmother had taught her. If Esther Dolan had her way, the man they called Preacher was about to learn a lesson from the southern Siberian plain.

When Preacher opened the tent flap, she caught a glimpse of mesas in the distance, an orange sunrise staining a bank of low-lying rain clouds. He closed the flap behind him and started to fasten the ties to the aluminum tent pole, then became frustrated and flung them from his fingers. He was not carrying his weapon. He sat down on the cot opposite her, his knees splayed, the needle tips of his boots pointed outward like a duck’s feet.

“You’ve been around men who didn’t warrant your respect,” he said. “So your disrespect toward males has become a learned habit that isn’t your fault.”

“I grew up not far from the Garden District in New Orleans. I didn’t associate with criminals, so I didn’t develop attitudes about them one way or another.”

“You married one. And you didn’t grow up by the Garden District. You grew up on Tchoupitoulas, not far from the welfare project.”

“Lillian Hellman’s home on Prytania Street was two blocks from us, if it’s any of your business.”

“You don’t think I know who Lillian Hellman was?”

“I’m sure you do. The public library system gives cards to any bum or loafer who wants one.”

“You know how many women would pay money to be sitting where you are right now?”

“I’m sure there’re many desperate creatures in our midst these days.”

She could see the heat building in his face, the whitening along the rims of his nostrils, the stitched, downturned cast of his mouth. She picked up a small piece of brownie with the ends of her fingers and put it in her mouth. She could feel him watching her hungrily. “You haven’t eaten?” she asked.

“Molo burned the food.”

“I made these for my friend Mrs. Bernstein. I don’t guess I’ll ever have the opportunity to give them to her. Would you like one?”

“What’s in them?”

“Sugar, chocolate, flour, butter, sometimes cocoa powder. You’re afraid I put hashish in them? You think I bake narcotic pastries for my friends?”

“I wouldn’t mind one.”

She held out the box indifferently. He reached inside and lifted out a thick square and raised it to his mouth. Then he paused and studied her face carefully. “You’re a beautiful woman. You ever see the painting of Goya’s mistress? You look like her, just a little older, more mature, without the sign of profligacy on your mouth.”

“Without what on my mouth?”

“The sign of a whore.”

He bit into the brownie and chewed, then swallowed and bit again, his eyes hazy with either a secret lust or a sexual memory that she suspected gave birth to itself every time he pulled the trigger on one of his victims.

PAM TIBBS PULLED the cruiser onto the shoulder of the dirt road and stopped between two bluffs that gave onto a breathtaking view of a wide sloping plain and hills and mesas that seemed paradoxically molded by aeons and yet untouched by time. Hackberry got out of the vehicle and focused his binoculars on the base of the hills in the distance, moving the lenses across rockslides and flumes bordered by mesquite trees and huge chunks of stone that had toppled from the ridgeline and looked as hard and jagged as yellow chert. Then his binoculars lit on a large pile of bulldozed house debris, much of it stucco and scorched beams, and four powder-blue polyethylene tents and a chemical outhouse and a woodstove and an elevated metal drum probably containing water. A truck and an SUV were parked amid the tents, their windows dark with shadow, hailstones melting on their metal surfaces.

“What do you see?” Pam asked. She was standing on the driver’s side of the cruiser, her arms draped over the open door.

“Tents and vehicles but no people.”

“Maybe the Mexican construction guys are living there.”

“Could be,” he said, lowering the glasses. But he continued to stare at the sloping plain with his naked eyes, at the bareness of the hills, the frost that coated the rocks where the sun hadn’t touched them. He looked to the east and the growing orange stain in the sky and wondered if the day would warm, if the unseasonal cold would go out of the wind, if the ground would become less hard under his feet. For just a second he thought he heard the sound of a bugle echoing down an arroyo.