Rain Gods (Hackberry Holland 2)

?Pete??

The change in her voice made him turn his head and forget about the reflection on the hillside or his story about Afghanistan.

?I?m afraid,? she said.

?You?ve never been afraid of anything. You?re braver than I am.?

?I think you?re right about Montana or British Columbia. I think we?re about to turn over our lives to people we don?t know and shouldn?t trust.?

?Sheriff Holland seems to be on the square.?

?He?s a county sheriff in a place nobody cares about. He?s an elderly man whose back is coming off his bones.?

?Don?t let him hear you say that.?

?It?s the goodness in you that hurts you most, Pete.?

?Nothing hurts me when you?re around.?

He put his arm over her shoulders, and the two of them walked past the last fence on Hackberry Holland?s property and followed a trail between two hills that led to a creek and the back lot of an African-American church where the congregation had assembled in the shade of three giant cottonwoods. The creek was of a sandy-red color and had been dammed up with bricks and chunks of concrete, forming a pool that swelled out into the roots of the trees.

The men were dressed in worn suits and white shirts and ties that didn?t match the color of their coats, the women in either white dresses or dark colors that absorbed heat as quickly as wool might.

?Will you look at that,? Vikki said.

?You didn?t get dunked when you were baptized??

?There?re no white people there at all. I think we?re intruding.?

?They?re not paying us any mind. It?s worse if we walk away and make noise. There?s a willow tree yonder. Let?s sit under it a minute or two.?

The minister escorted a huge woman into the pool, the immersion gown she wore ballooning up like white gauze around her knees. The minister cupped one hand behind her neck and lowered her backward into the pool. Her breasts were as taut and dark and heavy as watermelons under her gown. The surface of the pool closed over her hair and eyes and nose and mouth, and she grasped the minister?s arm with a rigidity that indicated the level of her fear. On the bank, the leaves of the cottonwoods seemed to flicker in the wind with a green-gold kinetic light.

The minister raised his eyes to his congregants. ?Jesus told the apostles to go not unto the Gentiles. He sent them first unto the oppressed and the forlorn. And that?s how our shackles have been broken, my brothers and sisters. I now baptize Sister Dorothea in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And we welcome our white brethren who are watching us now from the other side of our little Jordan.?

Vikki and Pete were sitting in the shade on a pad of grass under the willow tree. Pete plucked a long, thin blade of grass and put it in his mouth. ?So much for anonymity,? he said.

She brushed at a fly on the side of his face, then looked in a peculiar way at the back of her hand. ?What?s that?? she said.

?What?s what?? Pete said. His arms were locked around his knees, his attention fixed on the baptism.

?There was a red dot on my hand.?

?Just then??

?Yes, it moved across my hand. I saw it when I touched your face.?

He got to his feet and pulled her erect, looking up through the leaves at the side of the hill. He pushed her behind him, deeper into the shade, under the cover of the tree.

?Give me your hand,? he said.

?What are you doing??

?Looking for an insect bite.?

?I wasn?t bitten by an insect.?

He looked out again from under the tree?s canopy at the hillside, his eyes sweeping over the scattered rocks, the pinon and juniper spiked into soil that was little more than gravel, the shadows inside an arroyo and the scrub brush that grew along its rim, the shale that had avalanched down from a collapsed fire road. Then he saw a glassy reflection at the top of a ridge and, for under a second, an electric red pinpoint racing past his feet.