Rain Gods by James Lee Burke Page A

bead of light in his eyes, like a damp kitchen match flaring on the striker. “I look like a man with no family?”
     
    “I thought maybe there was somebody you wanted me to call.”
     
    “A man inseminates a woman. The woman squeezes the kid out of her womb. So now we’ve got a father and a mother and a child. That’s a family. You’re saying I’m different somehow?”
     
    “I didn’t mean nothing, boss.”
     
    “Go back inside.”
     
    “When it’s cool, the mosquitoes come out. They’ll pick you up and carry you off, boss.”
     
    Preacher’s expression seemed to go out of joint.
     
    “I got you, boss. When you’re ready to eat, my little girl made some soup and tortillas special for you,” Jesus said.
     
    Jesus went through the back door, not speaking until he was well inside the house. Preacher watched the coyote dip a gopher out of the hole and run heavily and stiff-necked across the hardpan, the gopher flopping from its jaws. Jesus’s wife came to the window and stared at Preacher’s silhouette, her fist pressed to her mouth. Her husband pulled her away and closed the curtain, even though the house was superheated by the propane cooking stove in the kitchen.
     
    In the morning a windburned man with an orange beard and blue tats on his upper arms delivered a compact car for Preacher’s use and then left with a companion in a second vehicle. Jesus’s little girl brought Preacher his lunch to him on a tray. She set it on his lap but did not go away.
     
    “My pants are on the chair. Take a half dollar out of the pocket,” he said.
     
    The girl took two quarters from his trousers and closed her palm on them. Her face was oval and brown, like that of her mother, her hair dark brown, a blue ribbon tied in it. “You ain’t got no family?” she asked.
     
    “You ask too many questions for a person your age. Somebody should give you a grammar book, too.”

 
    “I’m sorry you was shot.”
     
    Preacher’s eyes lifted from the girl’s face to the kitchen, where Jesus and his wife were washing dishes in a pan of greasy water, their backs to Preacher. “I was in a car accident. Nobody shot me,” he said.
     
    She touched the cast with the ends of her fingers. “We got ice now. I’ll put it on your foot,” she said.
     
    So Jesus had opened his mouth in front of his wife and daughter, Preacher thought. So the little girl could tell all her friends a gringo with two bullet holes in him was paying money to stay at their house.
     
    What to do? he asked himself, staring at the ceiling.
     
    Late that afternoon he had a feverish dream. He was firing a Thompson submachine gun, the stock and cylindrical magazine turned sideways so the recoil would jerk the barrel horizontally rather than upward, directing the angle of fire parallel to the ground rather than above the shapes he saw in the darkness.
     
    He awoke abruptly into the warm yellow glare of the room and wasn’t sure where he was. He could hear flies buzzing and a goat’s bell tinkling and smell the odor of water that had gone sour in a cattle pond. He picked up a damp cloth from a bowl on his nightstand and wiped his face with it. He sat on the side of the mattress, the blood draining down into his foot, waiting for the images in his dream to leave his mind.
     
    Through the kitchen doorway he could see Jesus and his wife and little girl eating at their kitchen table. They were eating tortillas they’d rolled pickled vegetables inside, their faces leaning over their bowls, crumbs falling from their mouths. They made him think of Indians from an earlier era eating inside a cave.
     
    Why’d Jesus have to blab in front of the kid? Preacher wondered. Maybe he plans to blab to a much wider audience anyway, maybe to the jefe and his khaki-clad half-breed dirtbags down at the jail.
     
    Preacher could feel the coldness of the .45’s frame protruding from under the mattress. His crutches were propped against a wood chair in the corner. Through the window he could see the tan compact