The crowd broke out in an uproar. The preacher let out a great screech of indignation. Jeremiah had to forcibly hold back one of the Kaufmann brothers, while Chad stood frozen in the midst of the commotion, paralyzed by the realization that his personal equilibrium, both political and sexual, was under threat.
Jacob retreated to the trailer. “I strongly suggest you consider my proposal,” he said to the mayor before slamming his door.
Ignoring the jeers audible through the thin walls, he poured another whiskey. “The seed is planted, now I just have to watch it grow,” he said. Satisfied that events had been set into motion, he curled up on his bed and fell instantly asleep.
Outside, the preacher glared in disgust at the silver trailer as the crowd dissipated, wandering back to their lives. Cheri went to the hairdresser to rescue her hair. Chad drove to his office to meet with the town veterinarian who had more reports of dehydrated cattle. Rebecca strolled back to her bookshelves, secretly appalled at the small throbbing between her legs.
While Jacob slept he dreamed the shape of the settlement. It was his way of marking out his territory. Propelled by the image of himself carried in the minds of Sandridge’s residents, he shot high above the roofs of the town to float i
n the cloudless sky. He loved the sensation of disembodiment, as if his physical self had dispersed like a cloud of invisible droplets. He was nowhere and everywhere.
Below him he could see how people’s emotions stained their lives like color. The old widow’s grief, a dark blue-gray hue that seeped across her kitchen table as she sat staring out at the empty fields. Jeremiah, standing in his stable and remembering his dead son as a boy, his memory streaming pale mauve from his hand onto his shivering horse.
The beast glanced up knowingly at the rainmaker’s invisible hovering spirit. Jacob smiled down at the stallion and continued his journey, floating along Main Street, past the town hall, past the doctor’s surgery, past the diner with its tin walls glinting in the sun, past the bell tower of the church.
He paused at the church. From his position in the sky he sensed a most marvelous presence. Fascinated, he moved closer.
Who are you? The words manifested as clearly as sparkling icicles and hung in his mind as strongly as his own voice. A strange new emotion gripped him as he realized the presence was female. Before he could answer, the shimmering was hidden from him by an ugly darkness. It fell across the light and enveloped it. Help me! she cried out, her pain almost ripping Jacob’s head off.
“I have no power in this form!” he replied, panicking, pushing against his own skin, trying to transform spirit into muscle.
Whoever it was beneath the darkness struggled and then lay still. It was like watching a hawk tear apart a rabbit. Horrified, Jacob tried to bring himself awake but found that he could not. Instead his dreaming pulled him closer to the violence below. The barriers of brick and mortar melted away, and, looking down, he recognized the preacher, his thin pale buttocks pounding against a girl pinned beneath him. The air filled with the sound of screeching birds. Several starlings and an owl flapped wildly around the room, swooping and attacking the preacher, who paused only to beat them off with his arm. Transfixed, Jacob could not look away; it was both a terrible and an extraordinary sight, for the girl had the most exquisite soul he had ever experienced.
When the coyote nudged the rainmaker awake he was sobbing. Jacob touched the wetness in wonder, unable to remember the last time he had cried. He lay on the expensive Belgian bed linen, dread clawing at the pit of his stomach, the beauty of the young woman troubling him in an entirely new way.
He opened the door of the trailer and sat for a time on its steps. The coyote began a long desperate howl at the sun. As Jacob watched a line of fire ants divert around the cracks in the burned earth, he started to wonder whether there wasn’t a seam of heroism in his soul after all? Who was she? What was her connection to the preacher? Why hadn’t he seen her with the other townsfolk? Trailing his finger in the dust he found himself haunted by the thought of seeing her again. The question was—how?
His reverie was broken by a loud screech. The turkey vulture watched him from the top of the fence, its eye a swiveling raisin in the plucked anger of its head.
The sun shone and the drought continued. A dozen more of Jeremiah’s cattle keeled over, the tarmac began to melt and crack along the edges of the main street, and Chad was obliged to reduce water rations to one shower a week. It was miserable. The townsfolk despaired; three more farmers committed suicide; and several families packed up and headed east. But still the rainmaker continued to camp at the edge of town.
Jacob had taken to sunbathing on the roof of his trailer, naked except for a leather thong. His long lean body was like a panther’s. Reflected countless times in the mirrored surface of the trailer, he was an erotic deity filling the sky. Many of the women found themselves watching him. Each secretly found time to spy on the rainmaker as he applied coconut oil to his glistening flesh in languid studied gestures, his massaging fingers promising a sensual knowledge that made them tremble in anticipation.
As he lay there, the sun heating his flesh, he sensed the rising hostility of the menfolk. The drought would go on, for as long as he let it. This was a fact as true as his knowledge of the woman the preacher kept hidden. The image of her had begun to possess Jacob and he found himself conjuring impossible schemes: he would use the rain to distract the preacher and then he would rescue her. His mind whirled dangerously as the sun fried his skin.
The outrageous nature of Jacob’s demand had swept through the town and was debated at the bar and at every fireplace. One precocious seven-year-old even wrote a school essay about him. The whole community was in a fever. Publicly the town closed its ranks and condemned him; privately opinion was divided. The men wanted rain and the women…Well, the women had begun to want the rainmaker.
Cheri Winchester, the mayor’s wife, found herself dreaming of swimming naked with the bronzed stranger. One morning there was actually a little moisture staining the sheets, as if her body had retained and then released a liquid trace of the slow salty dance that haunted her nights. While in other beds, in other streets, other women twisted around those muscular limbs in somnambulant passion like ballerinas under water, to wake disappointed, their bodies still clenching around a void, beside their sleeping husbands.
At the book clubs and knitting circles the women’s vitriol knew no bounds. At the same time they blushed, terrified that the others might guess how they had been occupied during the night.
“Have you seen the way he struts up and down in that thong? He might as well be buck naked!” the postmistress hissed through her false teeth and dropped a stitch.
“You’ve got to admit, he’s a fine-looking fella,” replied the mayor’s mother, a well-preserved sixty-seven who wasn’t above a little sexual dalliance herself.
“I wish he’d lose the thong, then we’d be able to judge his wares, turkey neck and all!” cracked the schoolteacher, and the whole knitting circle, whose combined ages totaled over five hundred years, burst into raucous laughter.
Jacob managed to strike up a friendship with the postman, an irrepressibly cheerful Latino who delivered the mail on a huge Harley Davidson with a racoon skull strapped to the handlebars.
“So tell me about the preacher—has he got a woman?” the rainmaker asked casually.
“No, man, that unholy bastard lives alone. And I’ll tell you something else, ever since he moved into his house no one has been inside and he has it rigged up like a castle. High security—I’m telling you, the guy is one nasty gringo.”
Through the iron gate Jacob could see the bell tower rising up from the neat brick church. Under one of the eaves, hidden in the shadows, was a diamond-shaped barred window. It fascinated him. He turned in the direction of the preacher’s house and scanned the building, the tendrils of his intuition curling like invisible smoke across the walls. Regardless of sensing the girl’s presence, he couldn’t locate her.
On the other side of the brick wall the preacher sat crouched over his desk composing his sermon for the week. Its theme was the dangers of charlatans during times of natural disaster. Despite the dryness of his everyday speech, Bill Williams was a powerful orator. He had a certain charisma and his smooth manners were attractive to sectors of the ravaged rural community. His thinly disguised racism provided a convenient scapegoat in hard times. Three African-American families had left the town since his arrival; there had been an incident where masked men had severely beaten a young Mexican boy; and a “KKK” had been burned into the wooden walls of the local schoolhouse. Neither the sheriff nor the mayor had been able to catch the perpetrators. It was as if the town had closed ranks in a great wall of silence. Bill Williams relished such support. He knew the town officials were secretly frightened of him and he was determined to undermine their power.
As he wrote, a flock of finches nestling in the desiccated tree outside his window burst into song. Without turning around Bill Williams knew that his daughter had entered the room.