Rain Gods (Hackberry Holland 2)

?Because if you did, that would be an insult. But you?re not that kind of man, right??

Jesus lowered his head and folded his arms, his face drawn with fatigue and his inability to deal with Preacher?s convoluted rhetoric. A purple haze was settling on the mesas and vast wasteland that lay to the south, the dust rising off the hardpan, the creosote brush darkening inside the gloom. Not far away, Jesus saw a coyote digging hard into a gopher?s burrow, flinging the dirt backward with its nails, darting its muzzle into the hole.

?You got any family, people who can help take care of you, boss?? Jesus said.

It was a question he shouldn?t have asked. Preacher lifted his head the way a fish might when feeding on the surface of a lake. There was an unexpected and unreadable bead of light in his eyes, like a damp kitchen match flaring on the striker. ?I look like a man with no family??

?I thought maybe there was somebody you wanted me to call.?

?A man inseminates a woman. The woman squeezes the kid out of her womb. So now we?ve got a father and a mother and a child. That?s a family. You?re saying I?m different somehow??

?I didn?t mean nothing, boss.?

?Go back inside.?

?When it?s cool, the mosquitoes come out. They?ll pick you up and carry you off, boss.?

Preacher?s expression seemed to go out of joint.

?I got you, boss. When you?re ready to eat, my little girl made some soup and tortillas special for you,? Jesus said.

Jesus went through the back door, not speaking until he was well inside the house. Preacher watched the coyote dip a gopher out of the hole and run heavily and stiff-necked across the hardpan, the gopher flopping from its jaws. Jesus?s wife came to the window and stared at Preacher?s silhouette, her fist pressed to her mouth. Her husband pulled her away and closed the curtain, even though the house was superheated by the propane cooking stove in the kitchen.

In the morning a windburned man with an orange beard and blue tats on his upper arms delivered a compact car for Preacher?s use and then left with a companion in a second vehicle. Jesus?s little girl brought Preacher his lunch to him on a tray. She set it on his lap but did not go away.

?My pants are on the chair. Take a half dollar out of the pocket,? he said.

The girl took two quarters from his trousers and closed her palm on them. Her face was oval and brown, like that of her mother, her hair dark brown, a blue ribbon tied in it. ?You ain?t got no family?? she asked.

?You ask too many questions for a person your age. Somebody should give you a grammar book, too.?

?I?m sorry you was shot.?

Preacher?s eyes lifted from the girl?s face to the kitchen, where Jesus and his wife were washing dishes in a pan of greasy water, their backs to Preacher. ?I was in a car accident. Nobody shot me,? he said.

She touched the cast with the ends of her fingers. ?We got ice now. I?ll put it on your foot,? she said.

So Jesus had opened his mouth in front of his wife and daughter, Preacher thought. So the little girl could tell all her friends a gringo with two bullet holes in him was paying money to stay at their house.

What to do? he asked himself, staring at the ceiling.

Late that afternoon he had a feverish dream. He was firing a Thompson submachine gun, the stock and cylindrical magazine turned sideways so the recoil would jerk the barrel horizontally rather than upward, directing the angle of fire parallel to the ground rather than above the shapes he saw in the darkness.

He awoke abruptly into the warm yellow glare of the room and wasn?t sure where he was. He could hear flies buzzing and a goat?s bell tinkling and smell the odor of water that had gone sour in a cattle pond. He picked up a damp cloth from a bowl on his nightstand and wiped his face with it. He sat on the side of the mattress, the blood draining down into his foot, waiting for the images in his dream to leave his mind.

Through the kitchen doorway he could see Jesus and his wife and little girl eating at their kitchen table. They were eating tortillas they?d rolled pickled vegetables inside, their faces leaning over their bowls, crumbs falling from their mouths. They made him think of Indians from an earlier era eating inside a cave.

Why?d Jesus have to blab in front of the kid? Preacher wondered. Maybe he plans to blab to a much wider audience anyway, maybe to the jefe and his khaki-clad half-breed dirtbags down at the jail.

Preacher could feel the coldness of the .45?s frame protruding from under the mattress. His crutches were propped against a wood chair in the corner. Through the window he could see the tan compact Hugo had ordered delivered for his use.

The veterinarian was coming back that evening. The veterinarian and Jesus and his wife and the little girl would all be in the house at one time.

This crap was on Hugo Cistranos, not him, Preacher thought. Just like the gig behind the stucco church. It was Hugo who?d blown it. Preacher hadn?t invented how the world worked. The coyote?s ability to dig the gopher out of its burrow was hardwired into the coyote?s brain. A hundred-million-year-old floodplain disappearing into infinity contained only one form of meaningful artifact: the mineralized bones of all the mammals, reptiles, and birds that had done whatever was necessary in order to survive. If anyone doubted that,

he needed only to sink the steel bucket on a backhoe into one of those ancient riverbeds that looked like calcified putty in the sunset.

Jesus brought Preacher his supper at dusk.