James Burke: Rain Gods

The tall man had many memories from his early life that he seldom shared with others. They involved images of snowy hills south of the Yalu River, and dead Chinese troops in quilted uniforms scattered randomly across the slopes, and F-80 jets flying low out of the overcast sky, strafing the perimeter to push the Chinese mortar and automatic weapons teams back out of range. The wounds on the American dead piled in the backs of the six-bys looked like roses frozen inside snow.

In his sleep, the tall man still heard bugles blowing in the hills, echoing as coldly as brass ringing on stone.

The spidery tines of the rake pulled a lock of black hair free from the dirt. The tall man, whose name was Hackberry Holland, looked down into the depression. He touched the rake at the edges of the rounded shape he had uncovered. Then, because of either a lack of compaction around the figure or the fact that it lay on top of other bodies, the soil began to slide off the person’s face and ears and neck and shoulders, down into a subterranean hole, exposing the waxy opalescence of a brow, the rictus that imitated surprise, one eye lidded, the other as bold as a child’s marble, a ball of dirt clenched in the figure’s palm.

She was thin-boned, a toy person, her black blouse a receptacle for heat and totally inappropriate for the climate. He guessed she was not over seventeen and that she had been alive when the dirt was pushed on top of her. She was also Asian, not Hispanic as he had expected.

For the next half hour, until the light had gone from the sky, he continued to rake and dig in the field that had obviously been scraped down to the hardpan by a dozer blade, then backfilled with the overburden and tamped down and graded as smoothly as if in preparation for construction of a home.

He went back to his truck and threw the rake and shovel in the bed, then lifted his handheld radio off the passenger seat. “Maydeen, this is Sheriff Holland,” he said. “I’m behind the old church at Chapala Crossing. I’ve uncovered the burials of nine homicide victims so far, all female. Call the feds and also call both Brewster and Terrell counties and tell them we need their assistance.”

“You’re breaking up. Say again? Did I read you right? You said nine homicide-”

“We’ve got a mass murder. The victims are all Asian, some of them hardly more than children.”

“The guy who made the nine-one-one, he called a second time.”

“What’d he say?”

“I don’t think he just happened by the church site. I think he’s dripping with guilt.”

“Did you get his name?”

“He said it was Pete. No last name. Why didn’t you call in? I could have sent help. You’re too goddamn old for this crap, Hack.”

Because at a certain age, you finally accept and trust yourself and let go of the world, he thought. But in reply, all he said was “Maydeen, would you not use that kind of language over the air, please?”

PETE FLORES NEVER quite understood why the girl lived with him. Her hair was chestnut-colored, cut short and curled on the ends, her skin clear, her blue-green eyes deep-set, which gave them a mysterious quality that intrigued men and caused them to stare at her back long after she had walked past them. At the diner where she worked, she conducted herself with a level of grace that her customers, mostly long-haul truckers, sensed and respected and were protective of. She attended classes three nights a week at a junior college in the county seat, and the previous semester had published a short story in the college literary magazine. Her name was Vikki Gaddis, and she played a big-belly J-200 Gibson that her father, a part-time country musician from Medicine Lodge, Kansas, had given her when she was twelve years old.

Her husky voice and accent were not acquired or feigned. On occasion, when she played her guitar and sang at the diner, her customers rose from their chairs and stools and applauded. She also performed sometimes at the nightclub next door, although the patrons were unsure how they should respond when she sang “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life.”

She was still asleep when Pete entered the paintless frame house they rented, one that sat inside the blue shadow of a hill when the sun rose above the horizon as hot and sultry as a broken egg yolk, the light streaking across the barren land. Pete’s scalp and face were pulled tight with the beginnings of a hangover, the inside of his head still filled with the sounds of the highway bar he had been in. He washed his face in the sink, the water running cool out of a faucet that drew on an aluminum cistern elevated on stilts behind the house. The hill that blocked the sunrise, almost like an act of mercy, looked made of rust and cinders and was dotted with scrub brush and mesquite trees whose root systems could barely grow deep enough to find moisture. He knew Vikki would be up soon, that she had probably waited for him last night and slept fitfully, either knowing or not knowing where he was. He wanted to fix breakfast for her, as a form of contrition or in a pretense at normalcy. He filled the coffeepot with water, and the effect of both darkness and coolness it created inside the metal was somehow a temporary balm to the pounding heat inside his head.

He smeared margarine inside a skillet and took two eggs and a piece of sliced ham from the ice chest he and Vikki used as a refrigerator. He broke the eggs in the skillet and set the ham and a slice of sourdough bread beside them and let the skillet begin to heat on the propane stove. The smell of the breakfast he wanted to cook for Vikki rose into his face, and he rushed out the back door into the yard so he would not retch on his clothes.

He held on to the sides of a horse tank, his stomach empty now, his back shaking, a pressure band tightening across his scalp, his breath an insult to the air and the freshness of the morning. He thought he heard the thropping downdraft of gunships and the great clanking weight of an armored vehicle topping a rise, its treads dripping sand, a CD of Burn, Motherfucker, Burn screaming over the intercom. He stared into the distant wastes, but the only living things he saw were carrion birds floating high on the wind stream, turning in slow circles as the land heated and the smell of mortality rose into the sky.

He went back inside and rinsed his mouth, then scraped Vikki’s breakfast onto a plate. The eggs were burned on the edges, the yolks broken and hard and stained with black grease. He sat in a chair and hung his head between his knees, the kitchen spinning around him. Through the partially opened door of the bedroom, through the blue light and the dust stirring in the breeze, he could see her head on the pillow, her eyes closed, her lips parted with her breathing. The poverty of the surroundings into which he had taken her made him ashamed. The cracks in the linoleum were ingrained with dirt, the mismatched furniture bought at Goodwill, the walls a sickly green. Everything he touched except Vikki Gaddis was somehow an extension of his own failure.

Her eyes opened. Pete sat up straight in the chair, trying to smile, his face stiff and unnatural with the effort.

“I was fixing you breakfast, but I made a mess of it,” he said.

“Where you been, hon?”

“You know, up yonder,” he replied, gesturing in the direction of the highway. He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. “Why would people throw away their tennis shoes but take the shoestrings with them?” he asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“In the places where the wets go through, there’s trash and garbage everywhere. They throw away their old tennis shoes, but they take out the strings first. Why do they do that?”

She was standing up now, pulling her jeans over her panties, looking down at her fingers as she buttoned her jeans over the flatness of her stomach.