James Burke: Rain Gods

The owner, Junior Vogel, lifted the receiver from his ear and held the sound piece so it caught the full volume of noise from the counter and tables and jukebox and cooks dinging the bell at the serving window as they clattered plateloads of food onto the Formica surface for the waitresses to pick up. “You’ll make at least fifty bucks in tips. Cut me some slack here, Vikki.”

“I’m packing. I’ll be in at eleven. Junior?”

“ What? ”

“Cash, okay? It’s important.”

“You’re letting me down, kid.” He hung up, not angrily, but he hung up just the same, knowing that for the next three hours, she would worry about the manner in which she was paid or worry that he would be gone when she got there.

Now it was 10:51 as she drove down the two-lane state highway to ward the truck stop, the wind rushing at her through the glassless windows, the road grit stinging her face as the car body shook on its frame. The floor of the car was almost ankle-deep in trash-Styrofoam food containers, paper cups, oily rags, a can of wasp spray, a caulking gun, old newspaper black with footprints. Six weeks ago one of Pete’s army friends, a peyote-soaked Indian from the Pima rez in Arizona, had given him the car for forty dollars, a six-pack of Diet Coke, and a pocketknife. The car tags were valid, the battery good, the engine hitting on at least six of the eight cylinders.

Pete had said he would trade up and buy a good used car for Vikki as soon as he got a job roughnecking on a platform out in the Gulf of Mexico. Except he’d had two other offshore jobs, and in both instances the company oversight personnel decided that a man whose back looked like red alligator hide and who screamed in his sleep probably wasn’t cut out for communal living.

She had turned from the county road onto the state highway five miles back. Then a solitary vehicle had either followed her onto the state highway or come out of nowhere and remained behind her for at least the last six or seven minutes. She was driving only forty-five miles an hour because of the airflow through the windows, and the vehicle tracking behind her should have passed by this time. She accelerated up to fifty-five, then sixty, the low, humped hills dotted with dark brush speeding by. The pair of headlights, one slightly higher than the other, grew small and smaller in the rearview mirror, then disappeared into a glow behind the silhouette of a hill.

She could smell the nocturnal odor of the desert, like the smell of damp flowers crushed inside the pages of an old book. She could see the slick surface of a dried-out riverbed, the mud shining under the moon, the green plant life along the banks bending in the breeze. She had spent the first thirteen years of her life in the red-butte country of southwestern Kansas, but she loved Texas and its music and its people, whether others denigrated it or not, and she loved Pete, whether others looked upon him as a sad and doomed product of war or not, and finally, she loved the life she believed they could have together if only her love could prove greater than all the forces that seemed determined to destroy it.

When she had thoughts such as these, she wondered if she wasn’t grandiose and vain and driven by pride and ego. She wondered if the black wind scented by the desert and speckled with road grit wasn’t a warning about the nature of self-deception. Wasn’t the greatest vanity perhaps the belief that one’s love could change the fate of another, particularly the fate of an innocent and kind Texas boy who had made himself party to a mass murder?

The images those last words conjured up in her mind made her want to weep.

A brilliant glare appeared in the rearview mirror. A vehicle with its high beams on was coming hard up the state two-lane now, swinging wide on a curve across the yellow stripe. The reflected glare was like a white flame in her eyes. A Trans Am passed her, blowing road heat and exhaust and dust through her windows. The Trans Am’s windows were up, but for just an instant she saw the humped shapes of two men in the front seat, the driver wearing a top hat. Neither of them seemed to look at her. In fact, the man in the passenger seat seemed to keep his face deliberately averted. In the distance she could see the truck stop strung with lights, the run-down nightclub next door, a couple of eighteen-wheelers parked by the diesel pumps, their cabs lit. She realized she had stopped breathing when the Trans Am accelerated toward her back bumper. She let out her breath, her heart shrinking back into a cold place at the bottom of her chest.

Then the car with the uneven headlights was behind her again. But this time she was not going to be frightened. She took her foot off the accelerator and watched the speedometer needle drag down to fifty-five, fifty, then forty-five, thirty-eight. The car behind her pulled out to pass, its engine laboring. When it went by her, she saw a solitary man behind the wheel. His windows were half open, which meant his air conditioner was off and he was saving every teaspoon of gasoline possible, just as she was.

Pete had gotten a ride to Marathon, where he hoped to talk a distant cousin into selling him a used car off his car lot on credit. If the cousin refused, Vikki was to meet Pete in Marathon regardless, and they would lose themselves in a city, maybe Houston or Dallas. Or maybe head for Colorado or Montana. Everything they owned was in the trunk or on the backseat of the car, tape-wrapped or held together with twine. On top of all the boxes in the backseat was her J-200 sunburst Gibson.

The cell phone chimed on the seat. She opened it and placed the receiver against her ear. “Where are you?” she said.

“At the lot. We got us a Toyota with a hundred grand on it. The tires are good, and it doesn’t have any oil smoke coming out of it. You got your paycheck?”

“I’m almost at the diner.” She paused. Up ahead, the Trans Am was pulling in to the nightclub. A square of light from the truck stop slid off the face and shoulder of the man in the passenger seat. “Did any of those guys at the church have an orange or red beard?”

“No,” Pete said. “Wait a minute. I’m not sure. One guy in the dark had a beard. Why?”

“Some guys just pulled in to the beer joint. The driver is wearing a hat like the Mad Hatter’s.” Her tires began crunching across the gravel in the parking lot. “They’re staring at me. Think, Pete. Did you see a guy with an orange beard?”

“Get away from them.”

“I have to get paid. We don’t have any money,” she said, her irritability and frustration rising.

“Screw the money. Junior can mail it to us. We’ll make out.”

“On what?” she said. When there was no answer, she glanced at the cell phone’s screen. She had lost service.

Just ahead of her, the man driving the car with lopsided headlights parked by the entrance to the diner and went inside. He was thin and of medium height and wore an old suit coat, even though it was summer.

She parked next to his car, a beat-up Nissan, and turned off the engine. The men in the Trans Am had gotten out and were stretching and yawning in front of the nightclub. It had been a dance hall in the 1940s, and colored lights from inside shone through a window cut in the shape of a champagne glass over the entranceway. A tattered canvas canopy extended out from the door over a series of limestone slabs, on either side of which were two huge ceramic pots planted with Spanish daggers. A lone palm tree, as dark and motionless as a cutout, was silhouetted against a pink and green neon cowgirl holding a guitar, one booted foot raised. In the distance, behind the club, was a geological fault where the land seemed to collapse and dissolve into darkness, flat and enormous and breathtaking, as if an inland sea had evaporated overnight and left its depths as beveled and smooth as damp clay.