James Burke - Rain Gods

“I’m through talking with y’all. I wish I’d never left New Orleans. I wish I had helped the people rebuild in the Ninth Ward. I wish I’d done something good with my life.”

Pam looked at Hackberry, blowing her breath up into her face.

THAT NIGHT A storm that was more wind and dust and dry lightning than rain moved across Southwest Texas, and Hackberry decided not to fly back home until morning. He and Pam ate in a Mexican restaurant on the Riverwalk, a short distance from the Alamo. Their outdoor table was situated on flagstones and lit by gas lamps. A gondola loaded with mariachi musicians floated past them on the water, all of the musicians stooping as they went under one of the arched pedestrian bridges. The river was lined with banks of flowers and white stucco buildings that had Spanish grillwork on the balconies, and trees that had been planted in terraced fashion, creating the look of a wooded hillside in the middle of a city.

Pam had spoken little during the plane ride to San Antonio and even less since they had left Nick Dolan’s yard.

“You a little tired?” Hackberry said.

“No.”

“So what are you?”

“Hungry. Wanting to get drunk, maybe. Or catch up with Jack Collins and do things to him that’ll make him afraid to sleep.”

“Guys like Collins don’t have nightmares.”

“I think you’ve got him figured wrong.”

“He’s a psychopath, Pam. What’s to figure?”

“Why didn’t Collins shoot you when your revolver snapped empty?”

“Who knows?”

“Because he’s setting you up.”

“For what?”

“To be his executioner.”

Hackberry had just raised his fork to his mouth. He paused under a second, his eyes going flat. He put the forkful in his mouth. He watched a gondola emerge from under a stone bridge, the musicians grinning woodenly, a tree trailing its flowers across their sombreros and brocaded suits. “I wouldn’t invest a lot of time thinking about this guy’s complexities,” he said.

“They all want the same thing. They want to die, and they want their executioner to be worthy of them. They also want to leave behind as much guilt and fear and depression in others as they can. He aims to mess you up, Hack. That’s why he tried to take me out first. He wanted you to watch it. Then he wanted you to pop him.”

“I’ll try to honor his wishes. You don’t want a glass of wine or a beer?”

“No.”

“It doesn’t bother me.”

“I didn’t say it did. I just don’t want any.” She wiped her mouth with her napkin and looked away irritably, then back at him again, her gaze wandering over the stitches in his scalp and the bandage across the bridge of his nose and the half-moons of blue and yellow bruising under his eyes.

“Would you stop that?” he said.

“I’m going to fix that bastard.”

“Don’t give his kind power, Pam.”

“Is there anything else I’m doing wrong?”

“I’ll think about it.”

She set down her knife and fork and kept staring at him until she forced him to look directly at her. “Lose the cavalier attitude, boss. Collins is going to be with us for the long haul.”

“I hope he is.”

“You still don’t get it. The feds are using Nick Dolan as bait. That means they’re probably using us, too. In the meantime, they’re treating us like beggars at the table.”

“That’s the way it is. Sometimes the feds are-”

“Assholes?”

“Nobody is perfect.”

“You ought to get yourself some Optimist Club literature and start passing it out.”

“Could be.”

She pulled at an earlobe. “I think I’ll have a beer.”

He fought against a yawn.

“In fact, a beer and a shot of tequila with a salted lime on the side.”

“Good,” he said, filling his mouth with a tortilla, his attention fixed on the mariachi band blaring out Pancho Villa’s marching song, “La Cucaracha.”

“You think I should go back to school, maybe get a graduate degree and go to work for the U.S. Marshals’ office?”

“I’d hate to lose you.”

“Go on.”

“You have to do what’s right for yourself.”

She balled her hands on her knees and stared at her plate. Then she exhaled and started eating again, her eyes veiled with a special kind of sadness.

“Pam?” he said.

“I’d better eat up and hit the hay. Tomorrow is another day and another dollar, right?”

HACKBERRY WOKE AT one A.M. in his third-story motel room and sat in the dark, his mind cobwebbed with dreams whose details he couldn’t remember, his skin frigid and dead to the touch. Through a crack in the curtains, he could see headlights streaming across an overpass and a two-engine plane approaching the airport, its windows brightly lit. Somehow the plane and cars were a reassuring sight, testifying to the world’s normality, the superimposition of light upon darkness, and humanity’s ability to overcome even the gravitational pull of the earth.

But how long could any man be his own light bearer or successfully resist the hands that gripped one’s ankles more tightly and pulled downward with greater strength each passing day?

Hackberry was not sure what an alcoholic was. He knew he didn’t drink anymore and he was no longer a whoremonger. He didn’t get into legal trouble or associate himself for personal gain with corrupt politicians; nor did he drape his cynicism and bitterness over his shoulder like a tattered flag. But there was one character defect or psychological impairment that for a lifetime he had not been able to rid himself of: He remembered every detail of everything he had ever done, said, heard, read, or seen, particularly events that involved moral bankruptcy on his part.

Most of the latter occurred during his marriage to his first wife, Verisa. She had been profligate with money, imperious toward those less fortunate than herself, and narcissistic in both her manner and her sex life, to the degree that if he ever thought of her at all, it was in terms of loathing and disgust. His visceral feelings, however, were directed at himself rather than his former wife.

His drunkenness and constant remorse had made him dependent on her, and in order not to hate himself worse for his dependence, he had convinced himself that Verisa was someone other than the person he knew her to be. He gave himself over to self-deception and, in doing so, lost any remnant of self-respect he still possessed. Southerners had a term for the syndrome, but it was one he did not use or even like to think about.

He paid Verisa back by driving across the border and renting the bodies of poor peasant girls who twisted their faces away from the fog of testosterone and beer sweat he pressed down upon them.

Why was he, the vilest and most undeserving of men, spared from the fate he had designed for himself?

He had no answer.

He turned on the night-light and tried to read a magazine. Then he slipped on his trousers and walked down to the soda machine and bought an orange drink and drank it in the room. He opened the curtain so he could see the night sky and the car lights on the elevated highway and the palm trees on the lawn swelling in the wind.

Not far away, 188 men and boys had died inside the walls of the Spanish mission known as the Alamo. At sunrise on the thirteenth day of the siege, thousands of Mexican soldiers had charged the mission and gotten over the walls by stepping on their own dead. The bodies of the Americans were stacked and burned, and no part of them, not an inch of charred bone, was ever located. The sole white survivors, Susanna Dickinson and her eighteenth-month-old child, were refused a five-hundred-dollar payment by the government and forced to live in a San Antonio brothel.

Pam Tibbs had taken the room next to his. He saw the light go on under the door that connected their rooms. She tapped lightly on the door. He got up from his chair and stood by the door, not speaking.