James Burke - Rain Gods

“I’ll get the tubes,” Nick said. “Eat your food slowly so you don’t get cramps.”

He went back to his office and locked the door. What was he going to do? He couldn’t even think of a way to safely dispose of the photographs, at least not in the daylight. ICE had his name, Hugo Cistranos was circling him like a shark, and his conscience was pulsing like an infected gland. He couldn’t think of one person on earth he could call upon for help.

He sat at his desk, his face in his hands. How long would it be before Hugo Cistranos was at his door, demanding his money, implying Nick was a coward, making remarks about his nicotine habit, his weight, his bad eyesight, his inability to deal with the catastrophe his careless words “Wipe the slate clean” had created?

To sit and wait for misfortune to befall him was insane. He had heard over and over about people “surrendering” control during times of adversity. Screw that. He thumbed through his Rolodex and punched a number into his desk phone.

“How’d you get this number?” a voice with a New Orleans accent said.

“You gave it to me, Artie.”

“Then fuck me.”

“Hugo Cistranos says you offered him your Caddy to clip me.”

“He’s lying. I value my Caddy. It’s a collectible.”

“Hugo is lots of things, but a liar isn’t one of them.”

“You should know. Hugo is your employee, not mine. I don’t hire psychopaths.”

“I’m not guilty of what you think.”

“Yeah? What might that be? What might you be guilty of, Nicholas?”

Nick could hear the telephone wires humming in the silence.

“You don’t want to say? I don’t think there’s a tap on my line. If you can’t wash your sins with your old podna Artie Rooney, who can you trust, Nicholas?”

“It’s Nick. You told Hugo my family name was Dolinski?”

“It’s not?”

“Yeah, it is, because my grandfather had to change it so him and his family didn’t end up in a soap dish. They had to change it so the anti-Semite Irish cocksuckers in Roosevelt’s State Department wouldn’t shut them out of the country.”

“That’s a heartbreaking story, Nick. Maybe you could sell it as one of those docudramas? Didn’t your grandfather used to sell shoestrings door-to-door along Magazine?”

“That’s right, with Tennessee Williams. They also ran a soup kitchen together in the Quarter. His name is in a couple of books about Tennessee Williams.”

Nick could hear Artie laughing. “Your grandfather and a world-famous country singer sold soup to winos? Famous, rich guys do that a lot,” Artie said. “When you’re in Houston or Big D, drop around. Life is no fun without you. By the way, tell Hugo he owes me. For that matter, so do you.”

The line went dead.

NICK DETERMINED THAT his angst and funk would not control the rest of his day. He rented huge fat inner tubes in town, big enough to float a piano on. He stopped by the bakery and bought a carrot cake glazed with white icing and scrolled with chains of pink and green flowers. He packed a half-gallon of peach ice cream in dry ice. He put on a pair of beach sandals and scarlet rayon boxing trunks that hung to his knees, and walked his children down to the riverside and ran a long nylon cord through all the tubes, lacing them together so they would not become separated as they floated downstream toward the rapids.

Nick was first in the chain, ensconced in his tube, his skin fish-belly white, wraparound black Ray-Bans on his face. The shade trees slid by overhead, the sunlight spangling in their leaves. He laid his neck on the rubber, its warm petrochemical smell somehow comforting, the current tickling his spine, his wrists trailing in the water. Up ahead was a partial dam that channeled the current through a narrow opening. He could hear the sound of the rapids growing in volume and intensity and feel the tug of the river redirecting his course.

Suddenly, he and his children were sliding with the waves through the gap, rocketing through white water and geysers of foam, their own happy screams joining those of the other floaters, the sun overhead as blinding as an arc welder’s torch.

The whirlpool by the deep cut under the embankment disappeared behind them, powerless to reach out and draw Nick’s family into its maw.

They dragged their tubes out on the shoals and paid a kid with a truck to drive them upstream so they could refloat the river. They stayed in the water until sunset, whipping through the rapids like old pros. At the end of the day, Nick was glowing with sunburn, his hair and oversize boxing trunks gritty with sand, his heart swelling with pride in himself and in his children and the things he owned and the good life he had been able to provide for his family.

They ate the cake and peach ice cream on a blanket next to the river while the sun burned away to a tiny spark inside rain clouds in the west. He could smell the odor of charcoal lighter and meat fires on the breeze, and see Japanese lanterns strung through his neighbor’s trees and hear music from a lawn party someone was hosting on the opposite side of the river. The summer light was trapped high in the sky, as though nature had set its own rules into abeyance. Somehow the season had become eternal, and somehow all of Nick’s concerns with mortality had been emptied from his life.

He walked his children back up the stone steps to his house, then went into his office, removed the manila folder of photographs from his desk, and picked up a can of charcoal lighter and a book of matches from beside his barbecue pit. When he returned to the riverbank, the sky was purple, the sky filled with birds that seemed to have no place to land, and he thought he smelled gas in the trees. The surface of the river seemed thicker, its depths colder. The blue-green lawn of the house across the water was now littered with beer cups and paper plates, the band still playing, like a radio someone had forgotten to turn off.

The sunburn on his face and under his armpits ached miserably. He pulled the photos from the envelope, rolled them into a cone, and squirted charcoal lighter along their sides and edges. When he struck a paper match and touched it to the fluid, the fire crawled quickly up the cone to his fingers. He tried to separate the photos and keep them burning without dropping them or injuring his hand. Instead, they spilled into the grass, the faces of all the women and girls staring up at him, the heat blackening the paper in the center, curling the photos’ edges, dissolving hair and tissue and eyes and teeth inside a chemical flame.

The odor of burned hair on the backs of his hands rose into his face, and in his head he saw an oven in southwest Poland, its iron door yawning open, and inside the oven he saw the barest puff of wind crumble the remains of his daughters into ash.

A HISPANIC MAN had called in a 911 on an injured or drunk man stumbling around by the side of the state highway in the dark.

“Is this man a hitchhiker?” the dispatcher asked.

“No, he’s by a car. He’s falling down.”

“Has he been struck by a vehicle?”

“How do I know? He ain’t in good shape, that’s for sure. He’s trying to get in the car. There he goes again.”

“Goes where?”

“On the ground. I take that back. He’s up again and crawling inside, Jesus, a truck just went roaring by. The guy’s gonna get mashed.”

“Give me your location again.”

The caller gave the number on a mile marker. But evidently, in the poor light, he read the numerals wrong, and the deputy who was dispatched to the scene found only an empty stretch of highway, tumbleweed bouncing across the center stripe.

AFTER HACKBERRY HOLLAND had gotten the name of Pete Flores from Ouzel Flagler, he’d called the electric cooperative and been told a P. J. Flores was a member of the co-op and could be found up a dirt road fifteen miles from the county seat, living in a house where the electricity was scheduled to be cut off in three days for nonpayment of service.