James Burke - Rain Gods

“I don’t have one.”

“Sit down anyway.”

She felt as if a hot coal had been placed on her scalp. Moisture was leaking out of the towel she had wrapped on her head. Her face stung, and her eyes burned. She could feel drops of sweat networking down her thighs like lines of ants. His eyes dropped to her loins, then he looked away quickly and pretended to be distracted by the noise the air conditioner made. She sat down at the small table against the wall, her knees close together, her arms folded across her chest. “Where’s Pete?” she asked.

“He was rescued by a friend of mine.”

“Rescued?” She paused and said the word a second time. “ Rescued? ” She could taste the acidity in her saliva when she spoke.

“Do you want me to leave without resolving our problem? Do you want to leave Pete’s situation undecided? He’s out there somewhere on a dark road in the hands of a man who believes he’s a descendant of Robert E. Lee.”

“Who are you a descendant of? Who the fuck are you?”

The fingers of Preacher’s right hand twitched slightly. “People don’t speak to me that way.”

“You think a mass killer deserves respect?”

“You don’t know me. Maybe I have qualities you’re not aware of.”

“Did you ever fight for your country?”

“You might say in my own way I have. But I don’t make claims for myself.”

“Pete was burned in his tank. But the real damage to him happened when he came back home and met you and the other criminals you work with.”

“Your friend is a fool or he wouldn’t be in this trouble. I don’t appreciate the coarseness of your remarks to me.”

Again she could feel a pool of heat building inside her head, as though the sun were burning through her skull, cooking her blood, pushing her out on the edges of a place she had never been. Her towel was starting to slip loose, and she gathered it more tightly around her, pressing its dampness against her skin with her arms.

“I’d like for you to go away with me. I’d like to make up for any harm I did to you. Don’t speak, just listen,” he said. “I have money. I’m fairly well educated for a man without much formal schooling. I have manners, and I know how to care for a fine woman. I have a rented house on a mountaintop outside Guadalajara. You could have anything you want there. There would be no demands on you, sexual or otherwise.”

She thought she heard a train in the distance, the massive weight and power of the locomotive grinding dully on the track, the vibrations spreading through the hardpan like the steady tremors given off by an abscessed wisdom tooth.

“Give Pete back to me. Don’t hurt him,” she said.

“What will you give me in turn?”

“Take my life.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“I put two bullets in you.”

“You don’t know me very well.”

“You know why you’re here. Go ahead and do it. I won’t resist you. Just leave Pete alone.” Her eyes seemed to go in and out of focus, the room shimmering, a dark liquid swelling up from her stomach into her throat.

“You offend me.”

“Your thoughts are an offense, and you don’t hide them well.”

“What thoughts? What are you talking about?” The skin under his left eye wrinkled, like putty drying up.

“The thoughts you don’t want to admit are yours. The secret desires you mask with your cruelty. You make me think of diseased tissue with insects crawling on it. Your glands are filled with rut, but you pretend to be a gentleman wishing to care for and protect a woman. It’s embarrassing to look at the starvation in your face.”

“Starvation? For a woman who insults me? Who thinks she can tongue-lash me after I saved her from a man like Hugo Cistranos? That’s right, Hugo plans to kill you and your boyfriend. You want me to hit the speed dial on my cell phone? I can introduce your friend to an experience neither of you can imagine.”

“I need to get dressed. I don’t want you to watch me.”

“Dressed to go where?”

“Out. Away from you.”

“You think you’re controlling the events that are about to happen around you? Are you that naive?”

“My clothes are in the dresser. I’m going to take them into the bathroom and dress. Don’t come in there. Don’t look at me while I’m removing my clothes from the drawer, either. After I’m dressed, I’ll be going somewhere. I’m not sure where. But it won’t be with you. Maybe I’ll end here, in this room, in this dirty room, in this godforsaken place on the edge of hell. But you won’t be a part of it, you piece of shit.”

His facial expression seemed divided in half, as though his motor controls were shutting down and the muscles on one side of his face were collapsing. His right hand trembled. “You have no right to say these things.”

“Kill me or get out. I can’t stand being around you.”

He stooped over and picked up the blue-black white-handled derringer from the carpet. He was breathing raggedly through his nose, his eyes small and hot under his brow. He approached her slowly, his white shirt catching the pink glow of the neon outside the window, giving his face a rosy hue it didn’t possess on its own. He stood in front of her, his stomach flat behind his shirt and his tightly notched belt, an odor of dried perspiration wafting from his suit. “Say that last part again.”

“I hate being in the presence of a man like you. You’re what every woman dreads. Your physical touch causes nausea.”

He lifted the barrel of the derringer to her mouth. Through the wall, she could hear the electronic laughter from the neighbor’s television set. She could hear the locomotive pulling a mile-long string of gondolas and boxcars between the hills, the reverberations shaking the foundation of the motel. She could hear Preacher’s dry exhalations just above her forehead. He put his left hand under her chin and lifted her line of vision to his. When she tried to turn away, he pinched her jaws and jerked her head straight. “Look into my eyes.”

“No.”

“You’re afraid?”

“No. Yes.”

“Of what?”

“Of what I’ll see there. You’re evil. I think you carry the abyss inside you.”

“That’s a lie.”

“In your sleep, you hear a howling wind, don’t you? It’s like the sound the wind makes at night on the ocean. Except the wind is inside you. I read a poem once by William Blake. It was about the worm that flies at night in the howling storm. I think he was writing about you.”

He released her, almost flinging her face from his hand. “I couldn’t care less about your literary experience. It’s you who’s the agent of the devil. It’s inherent in your gender. From Eden to the present.”

Her head was lowered, her arms still folded across her bosom, her back starting to tremble. He reached in his pocket with his left hand. She felt something touch her cheek. “Take it,” he said.

She showed no response other than to wrap herself more tightly in her own skin, and curl her shoulders and spine into a tighter ball, and keep her eyes fixed on the tops of her folded arms.

He pushed an object that was both sharp and yielding against her cheek, jabbing the jawbone, trying to force her head up. “I said take it.”

“No.”

“There’s six hundred dollars in the clip. Cross into Chihuahua. But don’t stop till you get to Durango. Hugo Cistranos’s people are everywhere. South of Durango, you’ll be safe.” He held the money clip with two fingers in front of her. “Go ahead. No strings.”

She spat on the money clip and on the bills and on his fingers. Then she began to weep. In the silence that followed, the pink glow of his shirt and the odor of his perspiration and the proximity of his loins to her face seemed to crush the air out of her lungs, as though the only reality in the world were the figure of Preacher Jack Collins hovering inches from her skin. She had never realized that silence could be so loud. She believed its intensity was like the creaking sounds a drowning person hears as he sinks to the bottom of a deep lake.