Rain Gods (Hackberry Holland 2)

The sheaf of bandages and tape on his calf smelled of medicinal salve and dried blood, but the pain pills he had eaten and the veterinarian?s injection had numbed the nerves down to the ankle. The plaster cast on his foot was another matter. It felt like wet cement on his skin, and the heat and sweat and friction it generated turned his wound into an aching misery. Twenty minutes ago, the electric power had failed and the fan on the table by his bed had died. Now he could feel the heat and humidity intensifying in the walls, the tin roof expanding, pinging like a banjo string.

?Put some more ice on my foot,? he said to Jesus, the Hispanic man who owned the house.

?It melted.?

?Did you call the power company??

?We don?t got a phone, boss. When it gets hot like this, we got brownouts. After the day gets cooler, the electricity goes back on.?

Preacher pressed the back of his head into the pillow and stared at the ceiling. The room was sweltering, and he could smell a growing stench from inside the hospital gown he had worn for two days. When he closed his eyes, he saw the girl?s face again, and it filled him with both desire and resentment for the sexual passion she excited in him. Hugo had brought him his .45 auto. It was a 1911 model?simple in design, always dependable, effective in ways most people couldn?t imagine. Preacher ran his hand along the bottom of his mattress and felt the hardness of the .45?s frame. He thought of the girl, her deep-set eyes and her chestnut hair that was curled at the tips, and the way her tongue and teeth looked when she opened her mouth. He held the last image in his mind for a long time. ?Tell your wife to get a sponge and wash me,? he said.

?I can bathe you.?

?I look like a maricón to you?? Preacher said, grinning.

?I?ll ask her, boss.?

?Don?t ask. Tell her.

Hugo paid you enough money, didn?t he? For you and your family and the veterinarian who left me with all this pain? Y?all got paid plenty, didn?t you, Jesus? Or do you need more??

?It?s bastante.?

?Hugo gave you bastante to take care of the gringo. ?Bastante? means ?enough,? doesn?t it? How should I take that? Enough to do what? Sell me out? Maybe tell your priest about me?? Preacher?s eyes became hazy and amused.

Jesus?s hair was as black and shiny as paint, barbered like a matador?s, his skin pale, his hands small and his features frail, like those of a consumptive Spanish poet. He was not over thirty, but his daughter was at least ten and his overweight wife could have been his mother. Go figure, Preacher thought.

THAT EVENING THE power was back on, but Preacher could not shake either his funk or his misgivings about his environment and his caretakers. ?Your name is a form of irreverence,? he said to Jesus.

?Is a what??

?Try to speak in complete sentences. Don?t leave the subject out of your sentences. ?Is? is a verb, not a noun. Your parents gave you the Lord?s name, but you take money to hide a gringo and break the laws of your country.?

?I got to do what I got to do, boss.?

?Take me outside. Don?t put me downwind of those goats, either.?

Jesus set up the collapsible wheelchair by the bedside and worked Preacher into the seat, then wheeled him out the front door into the lee of the house, Preacher?s .45 resting on his lap. The view to the south was magnificent. The sky was lavender, the desert wastes bound not by earthy borders but by the arbitrary definitions of light and shadow. Few people would have found such a vista spiritually comforting, but Preacher did. The dry riverbeds were prehistoric, the flumes strewn with rocks the color of wizened apples and plums and apricots. Preacher saw wood that rain and wind and heat had carved and reshaped and hardened into bleached objects that could be mistaken for dinosaur bone. The desert was immutable, as encompassing as a deity, serene in its own magnitude, stretching into the past all the way back to Eden, a testimony to the predictability and design in all creation, a mistress beckoning to those who were unafraid to enter and conquer and use her.

?You ever hear of Herbert Spencer?? Preacher said.

?Who?? Jesus said.

?That?s what I thought. Ever hear of Charles Darwin??

?Claro que sí.?

?It was Herbert Spencer who understood how society worked, not Darwin. Darwin wasn?t a sociologist or philosopher. Can you relate to that??

?Whatever you say, boss.?

?Why are you grinning??

?I thought you was making a joke.?

?You think I need you to agree with me??

?No, boss.?