Rain Gods (Hackberry Holland 2)

?I cain?t translate that.?

?What that means is I don?t think your legal value is worth horse piss on a hot rock.?

?Is that good or bad??

?I suspect both of us will find out directly.?

Pete stared in confusion at the sky and at the wind in the trees and at the shimmer of sunlight on the water brimming over the edge of the horse tank. ?I wish I?d ate an AK round in Baghdad.?

HACKBERRY HAD TOLD Pete and Vikki to stay close to the house, then had gone to town in his truck to buy groceries. Pete and Vikki sat on the gallery in the late-Saturday-afternoon haze and drank limeade from a pitcher that was beaded with moisture from the icebox. In the west, great orange and mauve-tinted clouds rose out of the hills, as though a brush fire were racing up the arroyos on their opposite slopes. Vikki tuned her sunburst Gibson and formed an E chord and ticked the plectrum across the strings, the notes rolling out of the sound hole.

Pete wore his straw hat, even though they were sitting in shade. ?You know those big herds the drovers used to move from Mexico up the Chisholm and the Goodnight-Loving? Some of them came right through here. Lot of those cows went plumb to Montana.?

?What are you thinking about?? she asked.

?Montana.?

?Maybe Montana is not all you think it is.?

?I suspect it?s that and more. People say British Columbia is even better. They say Lake Louise is green like the Caribbean and has a big white glacier at the head of it and yellow poppies all around the banks. Can you imagine having a ranch in a place like that??

?You?re the dreamer, Pete.?

?A song-catcher is calling me a dreamer??

?I said ?the? dreamer. Of the two of us, it?s you who has the real vision.?

?You sing spirituals in beer joints.?

?They?re not really beer joints. So there?s nothing special about what I?ve done. You?re the poet. You have faith in things there?s no reason to believe in.?

?Want to take a walk??

?Sheriff Holland wants us to stay close by.?

?It?s Saturday evening, and we?re sitting on the front porch like old people,? he said. ?What?s the harm??

She put away her Gibson, snapped the latches on the case, and set the case inside the door. In the south pasture, the quarter horses had moved into the shadows created by the poplar trees. The sky was golden, the tannic smell of dead leaves on the wind. Up on a hillside, Vikki thought she saw a reflection, an ephemeral glitter, like sunlight striking on a piece of foil that had gotten caught in the branch of a cedar tree. Then it was gone. ?I?ll leave a note,? she said.

They walked up the road into shade that was lengthening from a hill, the breeze at their backs, the two foxtrotters walking along the railed fence with them. They rounded a curve and saw a deer trail that switch-backed up a hillside. Vikki shaded her eyes with one hand and stared at the place where the trail disappeared into an arroyo strewn with rocks that looked like yellow chert. She stared at the hillside until her eyes watered.

?What are you looking at?? Pete asked.

?I thought I saw a reflection behind that boulder up there.?

?What kind of reflection??

?Like sunlight hitting glass.?

?I don?t see anything.?

?I don?t, either. At least not now,? she said.

?In Afghanistan, I?d pray for wind.?

?Why??

?If there were a lot of trees and the wind started to blow and one thing in the trees didn?t move with the wind, that?s where the next RPG was coming from.?