Rain Gods (Hackberry Holland 2)

When Pete woke from the dream the third day in the motel, the room was cold from the air conditioner, blue in the false dawn, quiet inside the hush of the desert. Vikki was still asleep, the sheet and bedspread pulled up to her cheek. He sat on the side of the bed, trying to focus on where he was, shivering in his skivvies, his hands clamped between his knees. He stared through the blinds at a distant brown mountain framed against a lavender sky. The mountain made him think of an extinct volcano, devoid of heat, dead to the touch, a geological formation that was solid and predictable and harmless. Gradually, the images of a third-world street strewn with chunks of yellow and gray stone and raw garbage and dead dogs and an armored vehicle funneling curds of black smoke faded from his vision and the room became the place where he was.

Rather than touch her skin and wake her, he held the corner of Vikki?s pajama top between the ends of his fingers. He watched the way the air conditioner moved the hair on the back of her neck, the way she breathed through her mouth, the way color pooled in her cheeks while she was sleeping, as though the warmth of her heart were silently spreading its heat throughout her body.

He did not want to drink. Or at least he did not want to drink that day. He shaved and brushed his teeth and combed his hair in the bath room with the door closed behind him. He dressed in a clean pair of jeans and a cotton print shirt and slipped on his boots and put on his straw hat and carried his thermos down to the café at the traffic light.

He put four teaspoons of sugar in his coffee and ate an order of toast spread with six plastic containers of jelly. A Corona beer sign on the wall showed a Latin woman in a sombrero and a Spanish blouse reclining on a settee inside an Edenic garden, marble columns rising beside her, a purple mountain capped with snow in the background. Down the counter, a two-hundred-pound Mexican woman with a rear like a washtub was bent over the cooler, loading beer a bottle at a time, turning her face to one side, then the other, each time she lowered a bottle inside. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and removed Pete?s dirty plate from the counter and set it in a sink of greasy water.

?Those bottles pop on you sometimes?? he asked.

?If the delivery man leaves them in the sun or if they get shook up in the case, they will. It hasn?t happened to me, though. You want more coffee??

?No, thanks.?

?There?s no charge for a warm-up.?

?Yes, ma?am, I?ll take some. Thank you.?

?You put a lot of sugar in there, huh??

?Sometimes.?

?You want me to fill your thermos??

He?d forgotten he had brought it with him, even though it stood right by his elbow. ?Thanks, I?m good,? he said.

She tore a ticket off a pad and put it facedown by his cup. When she walked away, he felt strangely alone, as though a script had been pulled preemptively from his hands. He could hear the bottles clinking inside the cooler as she resumed her work. He paid the cashier for his coffee and toast, and gazed out the front door at the sun lighting the landscape, breaking over arid mountains that seemed transported from Central Asia and affixed to the southern rim of the United States.

He walked back to the service counter. ?It?s gonna be a hot one. I might need one of those singles with lunch,? he said.

?I don?t have any cold ones,? the Mexican woman said.

?I?ll put it on top of the air conditioner at the motel,? he said. ?Fact is, better give me a couple.?

She put two wet bottles in a paper bag and handed them to him. The top of Pete?s shirt was unbuttoned, and the woman?s eyes drifted to the shriveled tissue on his shoulder. ?You was in Iraq??

?I was in Afghanistan, but only three weeks in Iraq.?

?My son died in Iraq.?

?I?m sorry.?

?It?s six-thirty in the morning,? she said, looking at the bottles in his hand.

?Yes, ma?am, it is.?

She started to speak again but instead turned back to her work, her eyes veiled.

He walked back to the motel and stopped by the desk. Outside, he heard an eighteen-wheeler shifting gears at the traffic light, metal grinding. ?We got any mail?? he said to the clerk.

?No, sir,? the clerk said.

?What time does the mailman come??

?Same time as yesterday, ?bout ten.?

?Guess I?ll check by later,? Pete said.

?Yes, sir, he?ll sure be here by ten.?