Rain Gods by James Lee Burke Page B

Hugo had ordered delivered for his use.
     
    The veterinarian was coming back that evening. The veterinarian and Jesus and his wife and the little girl would all be in the house at one time.
     
    This crap was on Hugo Cistranos, not him, Preacher thought. Just like the gig behind the stucco church. It was Hugo who’d blown it. Preacher hadn’t invented how the world worked. The coyote’s ability to dig the gopher out of its burrow was hardwired into the coyote’s brain. A hundred-million-year-old floodplain disappearing into infinity contained only one form of meaningful artifact: the mineralized bones of all the mammals, reptiles, and birds that had done whatever was necessary in order to survive. If anyone doubted that, he needed only to sink the steel bucket on a backhoe into one of those ancient riverbeds that looked like calcified putty in the sunset.
     
    Jesus brought Preacher his supper at dusk.
     
    “What time is the vet going to be here?” Preacher asked.
     
    “No is vet. Es médico, boss. He gonna be here soon.”
     
    “Answer the question: When will he be here?”
     
    “Maybe fifteen minutes. You like the food okay?”
     
    “Hand me my crutches.”
     
    “You getting up?”
     
    Preacher’s upturned face looked like the edge of a hatchet.
     
    “I’ll get them, boss,” Jesus said.
     
    Jesus’s wife had hand-washed Preacher’s trousers and shirt and socks and underwear, replaced his coins and keys and pocketknife in the pockets, and hung them neatly on the wood chair by the wall. Preacher worked his way to the chair, gathered up his clothes, and sat back down on his mattress. Then he slowly dressed himself, keeping his mind empty of the events that would take place in the house within the next few minutes.
     
    He had not tucked in his shirt, allowing it to hang outside his trousers. Through the front window, he saw the veterinarian’s paint-skinned truck clattering over the ruts in the road, churning a cloud of fine white dust in the air. Preacher slid the .45 from under his mattress and pushed it inside the back of his belt, then pulled his shirt over the grips. The veterinarian parked in back and cut the engine, just as the rooster tail of dust from his truck broke across the front of the house and drifted through the screens. Preacher lifted himself onto his crutches and began working his way toward the kitchen, where Jesus and his wife and little girl sat at the table, waiting for the veterinarian, who clutched a sweating six-pack of Coca-Cola.
     
    The veterinarian was unshaved and wore a frayed suit coat that was too tight on him and a tie with stains on it and a white shirt missing a button at the navel. He suffered from myopia, which caused him to squint and to furrow his brow, and as a consequence the villagers looked upon him as a studious and educated man worthy of respect.
     
    “You look very good in your clean clothes, seńor. Do you not want me to change your bandages? I brought you more sedatives to help you sleep,” the veterinarian said to Preacher.
     
    The veterinarian was framed against the screen door, the late red sun creating a nimbus around his uncut hair and the stubble on his jowls.
     
    Preacher steadied his weight and eased his right hand from the grip on the crutch. He moved his hand behind him slowly, so as not to lose his balance, his knuckles touching the heaviness of the .45 stuck down in his belt. “I don’t think I’ll need anything tonight,” he said.
     
    They all stared at him in the silence, the bare lightbulb overhead splintering into yellow needles, reducing the differences in their lives to pools of shadow at their feet. Now, now, now, Preacher heard a voice in his head saying.
     
    “Rosa made you some peanut-butter cookies,” Jesus said.
     
    Was that the little girl’s name or the name of the wife? “Say again?”
     
    “My little girl made you a present, boss.”
     
    “I’m diabetic. I cain’t eat sugar.”
     
    “You want to sit down? You look like you’re hurting,