James Burke - Rain Gods

“I don’t want it.”

“Your mother gave you too many peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches when you were little? Maybe that’s why you’re always out of sorts.”

“My mother fixed whatever a gandy dancer brought to the boxcar where we lived. That was where she made her living, too. Behind a blanket hung over a rope.”

“What happened to her?”

“She took a fall off some rocks.”

When Esther didn’t reply, he said, “That was after she poisoned her husband. Or deliberately fed him spoiled food. It took him a while to die.”

“You’re making that up.” Before he could answer, she wrapped the piece of sandwich in the napkin and set it on his knee.

“I’ve always heard Jewish women are compulsive feeders. Thanks but no thanks,” he said, setting the sandwich square on the table.

She continued to eat, her shoulders slightly stooped, a demure quality settling over her that seemed to intrigue and arouse him.

“A woman like you is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of person,” he said.

“You’re very kind,” she said, her eyes lowered.

BY DARK HACKBERRY Holland and Pam Tibbs had had no luck finding the residence that might have been occupied by the man using the name B. Traven. On the back roads, in the blowing rain and tumbleweeds and darkness, they could find few mile markers or rural mailboxes with numbers or houses that were lighted. A crew on a utility truck told them there had been a giant power failure from Fort Stockton down to the border. No one, including the sheriff’s department, had any knowledge of a man by the name of B. Traven. One deputy who had worked previously at the tax assessor’s office volunteered that Traven was an absentee landowner who resided in New Mexico and rented his property to hippies or people who came and went with the season or tended to live off the computer.

At nine-thirty P.M. Hackberry and Pam took adjoining rooms at a motel south of Alpine. The motel had a generator that created enough power to keep the motel functional during the storm, the outside lights glowing with the low intensity and yellow dullness of sodium lamps. A number of revelers had taken refuge there, talking loudly in the parking lot and on the concourse, slamming metal doors so hard the walls shook, carrying twelve-packs and fast food to their rooms. As Hackberry looked out the window at the darkness of the night, at the lightning flashes in the clouds, at the leak of electric sparks from a damaged transformer that was trying to come back on line, he thought of candles flickering in a graveyard.

He closed the curtain and sat on the bed in the dark and called the department. Maydeen Stoltz picked up.

“You’re not on duty tonight,” he said.

“You and Pam are. Why shouldn’t I be?”

“So far we haven’t gotten any leads on B. Traven or the guy calling himself Fred C. Dobbs. Did you hear anything from Ethan Riser?”

“Nothing. But Nick Dolan was here. Boy, was he here.”

“What happened?”

“I put some earplugs in. I mean that literally. That guy has a voice like a herd of pygmies. He went into your office without permission and said he’d wait there until you got back. That’s not all.”

“What’s the rest of it?”

“Did you have the flag folded up in your drawer?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“I think he took it. The drawer was open when he left, and the flag wasn’t in it.”

“What does he want with our flag?”

“Ask him.”

“Where is he now?”

“I’m not real sure. He went to your house.”

“Don’t tell me that.”

“What can Dolan do at your house?”

“I gave Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores an approximate idea where we were going. I thought Collins might have said something to Gaddis that would link him to the properties he’s bought and sold under an alias.”

“That was the right thing to do, Hack. Don’t worry about it.”

“Early in the morning, get on the horn to Riser.”

“What do you want me to tell him?”

“Give him all the information we have on Collins. Tell him to send the cavalry or stay home. It’s his call.”

“Hack?”

“What?”

“Pam thinks Collins is trying to steal your soul.”

“So?”

“Pam’s feelings are not objective.”

“What are you telling me?”

“Don’t take chances with Collins.”

“The man has a hostage.”

“In one way or another, they all do. It’s what they use most effectively against us. You blow that bastard out of his socks.”

“Maydeen, you’re a good woman, but you’ve got a serious character defect. I can never be quite sure where you stand on an issue.”

After he closed his cell phone, he continued to sit on the side of the bed in the dark, the long day starting to catch up with him. Someone had left the engine running on a diesel-powered vehicle immediately outside Hackberry’s window. The sound vibrated through the wall and floor, staining the air with noxious fumes and a ceaseless hammering that was like a deliberate assault on the sensibilities. It was the signature act of the modern correspondent of the classical Vandal-senseless and stupid and at war with civilization, like someone graffiti-spraying a freshly painted white wall or smearing his feces on someone’s furniture.

Nazis were not ideologues. They were bullies and sackers of civilization. Their logos and ethos were that simple. Hackberry felt that he had lived into a time when gangbangers who sold crack to their own people and did drive-bys with automatic weapons were treated as cultural icons. Concurrently, outlaw white bikers muled crystal meth into every city in the United States. When they went down, it was only because they were murdered by their own kind. They were like creatures that had been incarnated from a Mad Max script. And like any form of cognitive dissonance in a society, they existed because they were given sanction and even lionized.

Who was to blame? Maybe no one. Or maybe everyone.

He opened the door and stepped out on the concourse. A bright red oversize pickup truck with an extended cab was parked two feet from him. The sound of the diesel engine was so loud he had to open and close his mouth to clear his ears. He could hear a party roaring two doors down. He walked out onto the lawn by the parking lot and picked up a brick from the border of the flower garden. The brick felt cool and heavy in his hand and smelled faintly of moist soil and chemical fertilizer.

He returned to the pickup truck and broke the driver’s window with the brick, setting off the alarm. Then he reached inside and unlocked the door and ripped the wiring from under the dashboard. He tossed the brick into a shrub.

A minute later, the driver, an unshaved man in greasy denims, was at his truck, aghast. “What the fuck?” he said.

“Yeah, too bad,” Hackberry said. “I’d file a report if I was you.”

“You saw it?”

“A guy with a brick,” Hackberry said.

Pam Tibbs had opened the door to her room and was drinking a beer in the doorway. She was dressed in jeans and a maroon Texas Aggie T-shirt. “I saw him running across the lawn,” she said.

“Look at my fucking truck.”

“The world is really sliding down the bowl,” Pam said.

A few minutes later, she tapped on the bolted door that connected her room to Hackberry’s. “Are you having a nervous collapse?” she said.

“Not me,” he said.

“Can I come in?”

“Help yourself.”

“Why are you sitting in the dark?”

“Why waste electrical power?”

“You thinking about Jack Collins?”

“No, I’m thinking about everything.” He was sitting at the small wood table against the wall. There was a telephone on it and nothing else. The chair on which he sat was as utilitarian as wood was capable of being. She walked into a blade of light from the window so he could see her face. “You think we’re firing in the well?” she said.