Rain Gods (Hackberry Holland 2)

?Do you know we covered a hundred square miles of Texas today??

?We might do twice that tonight.?

?I think they?re in Mexico.?

?Why??

?Because that?s what I would do.?

?Vikki Gaddis might. Pete won?t.?

The waitress returned to the table and took their order and went away. Pam sat stiffly in the booth, her shoulders pushed against the backrest. ?Vikki will blow Dodge, but Pete will hang tough? Because that?s what swinging dicks do? Girls aren?t swinging dicks, you?re saying??

?Pete is one of those unfortunate guys who will never accept the possibility that their country will use them up and then spit them out like yesterday?s bubble gum. Can you stop using that language??

She scratched at a place between her eyes and looked out the window, her badge glinting on her khaki shirt.

As they waited for their food, Hackberry felt the day catch up to him like a hungry animal released from its leash. He ate three aspirin for the pain in his back and gazed idly at the people in the restaurant. Except for the television set on the wall and the refrigerated air, the scene could have been lifted out of the year 1945. The people were the same, their fundamentalist religious views and abiding sense of patriotism unchanged, their blue-collar egalitarian instincts undefined and vague and sometimes bordering on nativism but immediately recognizable to an outsider as inveterately Jacksonian. It was the America of Whitman and Jack Kerouac, of Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis, an improbable confluence of contradictions that had become Homeric without its participants realizing their importance to the world.

If someone were to ask Hackberry Holland what his childhood had been like, he would answer the question with an image rather than an explanation. He would describe a Saturday-afternoon trip to town to watch a minor-league baseball game with his father the history professor. The courthouse square was bordered by elevated sidewalks inset with tethering rings that bled rust like a ship?s scuppers. A khaki-painted World War I howitzer stood in the shadows of a giant oak on the courthouse lawn. The dime store, a two-story brick building fronted with a wood colonnade, featured a popcorn machine that overflowed onto the concrete like puffed white grain swelling out of a silo. The adjacent residential neighborhood was lined with shade trees and bungalows and nineteenth-century white frame houses whose galleries were sunken in the middle and hung with porch swings, and each afternoon at five P.M. the paperboy whizzed down the sidewalk on a bicycle and smacked the newspaper against each set of steps with the eye of a marksman.

But more important in the memory of that long-ago American moment was the texture of light after a sun shower. It was gold and soft and stained with the contagious deep green of the trees and lawns. The rainbow that seemed to dip out of the sky into the ball diamond somehow confirmed one?s foolish faith that both the season and one?s youth were eternal.

Now Hackberry dipped a taco chip in a bowl of red sauce and put it in his mouth. He picked up his glass of iced tea and drank from it. A bunch of the kids from the church bus brushed by the table on their way to the restroom. Then they were gone, and he found himself looking through the latticework partition at the face of a man who seemed familiar but not to the degree that Hackberry could place him. The man wore a gardener?s hat, the wide brim shadowing his features

. The waitress working the back of the restaurant kept moving back and forth behind the latticework, further obstructing Hackberry?s view.

Hackberry pinched the fatigue out of his eyes and straightened his spine.

?You developed back trouble from your time as a POW?? Pam said.

?I guess you could say I didn?t have it when I went to Korea, but I did when I returned.?

?You draw disability??

?I didn?t apply for it.?

?Why is it I knew you were going to say that??

?Because you?re omniscient.?

He was grinning. She propped her knuckles under her chin and tried not to laugh, then gave it up, her eyes crinkling, holding on his, a smile spreading across her face.

The waitress brought their Mexican dinners to the table, gripping each plate with a damp dish towel, the heat and steam rising into her eyes. ?Be careful. It?s real hot,? she said.

LIAM WAS ORDERING dessert, his eyes doing a breast inventory as the waitress leaned over and picked up his dirty dishes.

?Want a little R and R across the border tonight?? he said after the waitress was gone.

?What I can?t understand is why we haven?t been able to find the motel. It?s the Siesta motel, right?? Bobby Lee said, ignoring Liam?s suggestion.

?I looked on the Internet. There?s no such motel down here. You want to get laid tonight or not??

?I want to find the soldier and his squeeze and do our job and go home.?

?That?s when we take care of Preacher??

?I didn?t say that.?