Rain Gods (Hackberry Holland 2)

Out on the beach, a mother up to her hips in the water was scooping her child from a wave, running with it up the incline, her dress ballooning around her, her face filled with panic.

?Don?t get up. If you get up, that?s going to make it a whole lot worse,? Preacher said.

?What are you doing with that? For God?s sakes, man.?

?My soul is going to be in the flames because of you. You invoke God?s name now? Put your hand on the blotter and shut your eyes.?

?I?ll get you the money.?

?Right now, in your heart, you believe what you?re saying. But soon as I?m gone, your words will be ashes in the wind. Spread your fingers and press down real hard. Do it. Do it now. Or I?ll rake this across your face and then across your throat.?

With his eyes tightly shut, Artie Rooney obeyed the man who loomed above him on crutches. Then Preacher Jack Collins laid the edge of his barber?s razor across Rooney?s little finger and mashed down on the back of the razor with both hands.

7

NICK HAD HEARD of blackouts but was never quite sure what constituted one. How could somebody walk around doing things and have no memory of his deeds? To Nick, the terms ?blackout? and ?copout? seemed very similar.

But after Hugo Cistranos had left Nick?s backyard, telling him he had until three o?clock the next afternoon to sign over 25 percent of his strip joint and restaurant, Nick had gone downstairs to the game room, bolted the door so the children wouldn?t see him, and gotten sloshed to the eyes.

When he woke in the morning on the floor, sick and trembling and smelling of his own visceral odors, he remembered watching a cartoon show around midnight and fumbling with a deadbolt. Had he been sleepwalking? He stood at the bottom of the stairwell and stared up the stairs. The door was still locked. Thank God neither his wife nor the children had seen him drunk. Nick didn?t believe a father or husband could behave worse than one who was dissolute in front of his wife and children.

Then he saw his car keys on the Ping-Pong table and began to experience flashes of clarity inside his head, like shards of a mirror recon structing themselves behind his eyes, each one containing an image that grew larger and larger and filled him with terror: Nick driving a car, Nick in a phone booth, Nick talking to an emergency dispatcher, headlights swerving in front of his windshield, car horns blowing angrily.

Had he gone somewhere to make a 911 call? He went upstairs to shower and shave and put on fresh clothes. His wife and children were gone, and in the silence he could hear the wind rattling the dry fronds of his palm trees against the eaves. From the bathroom window, the sunlight trapped inside his swimming pool wobbled and refracted like the blue-white flame of an acetylene torch. The entire exterior world seemed superheated, sharp-edged, a garden of cactuses and thorn bushes, scented not with flowers but with tar pots and diesel fumes.

What had he done last night?

Dropped the dime on Hugo? Dropped the dime on himself?

He sat at his breakfast table, eating aspirin and vitamin B, washing it down with orange juice straight out of the carton, his forehead oily with perspiration. He went into his office, hoping to find relief in the deep, cool ambience and solitude of his bookshelves and mahogany furniture and the dark drapes on the windows and the carpet that sank an inch under his feet. A bright red digital 11 was blinking on his message machine for his dedicated phone-and-fax line. The first message was from his wife, Esther: ?We?re at the mall. I let you sleep. We have to talk. Did you go out in the middle of the night? What the hell is wrong with you??

The other messages were from the restaurant and the club:

?Cheyenne says she?s not going on the pole the same time as Farina. I can?t deal with these bitches, Nick. Are you coming in??

?Uncle Charley?s Meats just delivered us seventy pounds of spoiled chicken. That?s the second time this week. They say the problem is ours. They off-loaded on the dock, and we didn?t carry it in. I can?t put it in the box, and it?s smelling up the whole kitchen.?

?Me again. They were pulling each other?s hair in the dressing room.?

?The code guy was here. He says we have to put a third sink in. He says he found a dead mouse in the dishwasher drain, too.?

?Nick, there were a couple of guys in here last night I had trouble with. One guy had navy tats and a beard like a fire alarm. He said he was gonna be working for us. I kicked them out, but they said they?d be back. I thought maybe you needed a heads-up. Who is this asshole??

?Hey, it?s me. There?s some flake on top of the toilet tank in the women?s can. I had Rabbit clean the shitters spotless early this morning. Farina was in there ten minutes ago. When she came out, she looked like she?d packed dry ice up her nose. Nick, babysitting crazy whores is not in my curriculum vitae. She wants your home number. You want me to give it to her? I can?t process these kinds of problems.?

Nick held down the delete button and erased every message on the machine, played and unplayed alike.

It was seventeen minutes to one o?clock. Hugo?s driver would be at the house at three P.M. to pick up the signed documents that would make Hugo Cistranos his business partner. The 25 percent ownership ceded to Hugo would of course be only the first step in the cannibalization o

f everything Nick owned. Nick sat in the darkness, his ears filled with a sound like wind blowing in a tunnel.

He had never confessed to anyone the fear he had felt in the schoolyard in the Ninth Ward. The black kids who took his lunch money from him, who shoved him down on the asphalt, seemed to target him and no one else as though they recognized both difference and weakness in him that they exorcised in themselves by degrading and forcing him to go hungry through the lunch hour and the rest of the afternoon, somehow freeing themselves of their own burden.

But why Nick? Because he was a Jew? Because his grandfather had adopted an Irish name? Because his parents took him to temple in a neighborhood full of simpletons who would later believe The Passion of the Christ was solid evidence that his people were guilty of deicide?

Maybe.

Or maybe they smelled fear on his skin the way a barracuda smells blood issuing from a wounded grouper.