Rain Gods (Hackberry Holland 2)

?What about him??

?He was here.?

?When??

?Yesterday. He was looking for the guy named Hugo. I gave him that phone num

ber just like I did you. It belongs to a resort or something. In the background I?ve heard people talking about shooting cougars and African animals, the kind that got those twisted horns on their heads. I gave it to Preacher, and he looked at it and said, ?So that?s where the little fellow is.? If you?re gonna bust me, don?t cuff me in front of the kids. I?ll get in the cruiser on my own.?

Hackberry picked up the baton from the car hood and let it hang from his right hand. It felt heavy and light at the same time. He could feel the comfortable solid warmth of the metal in his palm and the blood throbbing in his wrist. In his mind?s eye, he could see images of things breaking?glass and chrome molding and light filaments.

?Sheriff?? Ouzel said. ?You won?t let the kids see me in cuffs, huh??

?Get out of my sight,? Hackberry said.

ON THE WAY back to the department, with Pam Tibbs behind the wheel, the weather started to blow. Directly to the north, giant yellow clouds were rising toward the top of the sky, dimming the mesas and hills and farmhouses in the same way a fine yellow mist would. Hackberry rolled down his window and stuck his hand into the wind stream. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees and was threaded with flecks of rain that struck his palm like sand crystals.

?When I was about twelve years old and we were living in Victoria, we had a downpour on a sunny day that actually rained fish in the streets,? he said to Pam.

?Fish?? she said.

?That?s a fact. I didn?t make it up. There were baitfish in the gutters. My father thought a funnel cloud probably picked up a bunch of water from a lake or the Gulf and dropped it on our heads.?

?Why are you thinking about that now??

?No reason. It was just a good time to be around, even though those were the war years.?

She removed her sunglasses and studied the side of his face. ?You?re acting a little strange this morning.?

?Better keep your eyes on the road,? he said.

?What do you want to do with that phone number Ouzel gave you??

?Find out who it belongs to, then find out everything you can about the location.?

?What are you planning to do, Hack??

?I?m not big on seeing around corners,? he replied. He heard her drum her fingers on the steering wheel.

At the office, Maydeen Stoltz told him that Danny Boy Lorca had been picked up for public drunkenness and was sleeping it off in a holding cell upstairs. ?Why didn?t somebody just drive him home?? Hackberry asked.

?He was flailing his arms around in the middle of the street,? she replied. ?The Greyhound almost ran over him.?

Hackberry climbed the spiral steel stairs at the back of the building and walked to the cell at the far end of the corridor where overnight drunks were kept until they could be kicked out in the morning, usually without charges. Danny Boy was asleep on the concrete floor, his mouth and nostrils a flytrap, his hair stained with ash, his whole body auraed with the stink of booze and tobacco.

Hackberry squatted down on one haunch, gripping a steel bar for balance, a bright tentacle of light arching along his spinal cord, wrapping around his buttocks and thighs. ?How you doing, partner?? he said.

Danny Boy?s answer was a long exhalation of breath, tiny bubbles of saliva coming to life at the corner of his mouth.

?Both of us have got the same problem, bub. We don?t belong in the era we live in,? Hackberry said. Then he felt shame at his grandiosity and self-anointment. What greater fool was there than one who believed himself the overlooked Gilgamesh of his times? He had not slept well during the night, and his dreams had taken him back once again to Camp Five in No Name Valley, where he had peered up through a sewer grate at the gargoyle-like presence of Sergeant Kwong and his shoulder-slung burp gun and quilted coat and earflapped cap, all of it backlit by a salmon-pink sunrise.

Hackberry retrieved a tick mattress from a supply closet and laid it out in front of Danny Boy?s cell and lay down on top of it, his knees drawn up before him to relieve the pressure on his spine, one arm across his eyes. He was amazed at how fast sleep took him.

It wasn?t a deep sleep, just one of total rest and detachment, perhaps due to his indifference toward the eccentric nature of his behavior. But his iconoclasm, if it could be called that, was based on a lesson he had learned in high school when he spent the summer at his uncle Sidney?s ranch southeast of San Antonio. The year was 1947, and a California-based union was trying to organize the local farmworkers. Out of spite, because he had been threatened by his neighbors, Uncle Sidney had hired a half-dozen union hands to hoe out his vegetable acreage. Somebody had burned a cross on his front lawn, even nailing strips of rubber car tires on the beams to give the flames extra heat and duration. But rather than disengage from his feud with homegrown terrorists, Uncle Sidney had told Hackberry and an alcoholic field picker named Billy Haskel, who had pitched for Waco before the war, to mount the top of the charred cross on the roof of the pickup and chain-boom the shaft to the truck bed. Then Uncle Sidney and Billy Haskel and Hackberry had driven all around the county, confronting every man Uncle Sidney thought might have had a hand in burning a cross on his lawn.

At the end of the day, Uncle Sidney had told Hackberry to dump the cross in a creek bed. But Hackberry had his own problems. He had been ostracized by his peers for dating a Mexican girl he picked tomatoes with in the fields. He asked his uncle if he could keep the cross on the truck for a few more days. That Saturday night he took his Mexican girlfriend to the same drive-in theater where he had already lost a bloody fistfight after the one occasion when he had tried to pretend the color line for Mexicans was any different than it was for black people.

As the twilight had gone out of the sky and the theater patrons had filtered to the concession stand in advance of the previews, Hackberry?s high school friends had assembled around the pickup, leaning against its surfaces, drinking canned beer, touching the boomer chain on the cross, touching the blackened shell-like wood of the cross itself, talking louder and louder, their numbers swelling as an excoriated symbol of rejection became a source of ennoblement to all those allowed to stand in its presence. That moment and its implications would stay with Hackberry the rest of his life.