Jeff Burt

Rain

I had come to the Sand Hills of Nebraska to see wild buffalo in spring, and the migration of cranes at the Platte River. I had come to visit Rain Schultheiss, an old NCO friend from my four long years in the service, and to see his blooming lilacs, planted over an old outhouse hole. His actual name was Reinhold, but archaic names did not last long in a barracks or on the basketball court. His father had been a German Luftwaffe prisoner of war in Wisconsin in the 1940s, returned to Wisconsin after the war, and then settled in Nebraska. Rain had left Nebraska for the service as Reinhold, his proper name, had been captured and imprisoned in Viet Nam, and returned as Rain. I had not seen him since 1983.

I was on a transcontinental tour in my 1973 Key West soft green Monte Carlo, a last road trip for the Carlo as well as myself. At an average of thirteen miles per gallon, the Monte Carlo not only burned dollars, threw out carbon dioxide, but gave profit to many little mom and pop gas stations throughout the country.

My son had driven with me from California to Florida, and then back until we hit Chicago, when he got a job offer to do software coding and mapping for a firm doing artificial intelligence for self-driving cars and trucks. Their forte was trucks, and my son’s forte was mapping. Not only were the electric trucks and cars displacing the Carlo, the AI was displacing the driver, me. He flew from Chicago to San Francisco.

I had meandered from Chicago through Wisconsin and Minnesota, dropping down to Sioux Falls, Iowa, and had plans to take the Missouri River to Council Bluffs, cross over to Omaha, and then follow I-80 through silos and Herefords until I needed to turn off into no man’s land to see Rain.

My plan suffered a diversion in Sioux Falls. I stopped at a gas station about ten at night. The restrooms were already locked, so I shambled out back to take a leak by the light of my cell phone. As soon as I turned on the spotlight, I saw two small men hunched in between a couple of propane tanks. They were short, very short, with thick faces, and I took them to be from Central America.

“No ICE,” one said.

I laughed. “No, I’m not with ICE. Immigration doesn’t pee in the dark. You guys hiding?”

“Yes,” the older one said, coming out between the tanks. “We work at a packing plant. The plant got raided. Workers rounded up, taken. Fifty-six. Should have been fifty-eight, but we,” he gestured to his friend, “we ran.”

“You need food, water?”

“Yes. We need a ride.”

“Where to?”

“Nebraska. Grand Island. I have family there.”

“That’s what you are taught to say,” I laughed. “Really have family there?”

The older man laughed and snorted. “Yes, if you count friends as family.” He looked down at his shoes. “Some drunks have chased us. They have shotguns and fast pickups. We have only our feet. They are nearby, I don’t know where, but they have come by often.”

“You need a car to hide in, both of you?”

“Si.”

I thought of my son, his generosity toward migrants, his consistent attitude that eventually, with the economies of the global marketplace, we will all be migrants. I saw the two men hunched over as I had been as a child, kept in a closet when my fidgeting became too much for my mother, sequestered in the farthest chair in an elementary schoolroom, sometimes facing a corner for an hour to make me still.

“I’ve got a lot in my trunk. You’ll have to hide in the backseat. It’s got a lot of room, and my car has major horsepower and I can probably outrun their trucks. I am going towards Grand Island and you can go as far as I go.”

The man nodded, and interpreted for his friend, who then came out and shook my hand.

I brought the Carlo around and they climbed in the backseat and I gave them the two blankets I had and a sleeping bag. The younger man stretched out on the floor and covered himself with the sleeping bag. I could not see his head nor feet. The older man sat alert in the backseat, leaning forward, I am sure wary of me.

We headed south, and had not gone more than twenty miles before three pickups with high beams on came gunning past. The older man in the backseat dropped down. They shined a flashlight in my face even though going eighty, and must have liked what they saw because they kept on driving.

In Omaha hours later I decided to gas one more time and buy some doughnuts and coffee, and hid the car behind an empty mall.

The older man told me they had been in the U.S. for seven years, worked at the meat packing plant for six, paid cash for everything, and lived in a shack that had a toilet, a sink, a heater, and two beds. They sent money to Guatemala when they could. The people in the area knew they were undocumented, but didn’t hassle them. If anything, especially in the winter, they were nice to them. Two churches often brought them clothes and cookies and occasionally a gift card.

An hour later, outside of Lincoln, I got pulled over by a Nebraska State Patrol Officer for speeding and she shined a flashlight into the back seat before approaching me at the driver’s window. She asked for license and registration, and then asked for the IDs of the older man in the backseat, not yet seeing the young man on the floor.

The older man’s ID was a flimsy almost paper-like driver’s license issued by Mexico and a ragtag often folded international driver’s license that was valid for supposedly two more years, though they were never authorized for such a length. Much of the paper had water stains, and the signatures were washed out.

She cleared us without issuing a ticket or a warning, and then lectured me about how folks in the middle of the country didn’t appreciate Californians speeding through the state as fast as they wanted because they were bored with cornfields, soybeans, cows, and silos. I told her we were going to visit a friend in the Sandhills and she brightened like a meteor.

Good country, that. It’s the season for the cranes migrating, too. You should get a load of them.

I nodded, started the car, and left.

The older man giggled, said the international license always threw off the Iowa state troopers from asking more questions because they see them once in a lifetime and don’t want to take a chance on making an error. It’s like, he said, we are workers at an embassy. And it works in Nebraska, too.

We stopped in the morning near a truck stop just off I-80, I bought three breakfasts and brought them to the car. They ate them quickly. The coffees were all black, but I had taken a fistful each of creamer and sugar, and they shared, pouring all of the sugar and about half of the creamer into their cups. About a football field away graders, backhoes, and diggers chugged away, as if strip mining in the plains. Modular homes to the west of the truck stop lined the horizon in a single row, almost eerily suggesting a wall. All of those homes had workers involved in the construction, as if it were a company town.

The counter person said they had discovered some lithium, the new gold, and they had a permit to dig an old seabed up and discover if there was more lithium than the small amount that blew east from the top of the sand. She said it reminded her of Oklahoma and the oil jennies working non-stop to feed the thirst for oil. It won’t stop with EVs. People need to travel, food, relatives, jobs. But it’s that lust I don’t get, she said, it’s noxious, you can smell it in the air, it's money, it’s the smell of cheating the earth, death. It’s like we’re saying we can move and you can’t.

When I returned to the car, I told the men.

“I have worked in pits,” the older man said. “Gravel for roads. Once I saw a road slide back into a pit, like earth had called it back.”

The diggers worked furiously, chugging black smoke eastward. I wondered how many batteries would be required to compensate for the carbon fuel emissions. The diggers worked at the corners while the bulldozers worked in columns. White collar workers with ties and yellow hard-hats seemed as plentiful as the drivers.

On the highway, diggers and dump trucks seemed to swim slowly, at time clogging both lanes. The dump trucks headed to a massive mound about seven miles north that we could see from the road, like a ziggurat, tier after narrowing tier reaching toward the clouds. Diggers crawled at ten miles per hour, apparently the construction crew lacking enough flat beds to transport them south. I resisted laying on my horn, but I was among the few. In retort, many of the digger drivers feigned not being able to hear, removing their hands from the steering controls and cupping as if radar antennae. Up ahead was a large farmhouse with an overhead irrigation pipe spraying their lawn, a lush growth in a dusty land. On the edge of the corn fields, several brown-skinned males ran with plastic irrigation pipes until they disappeared into the corn.

After the delay, we zipped toward Rain’s, even though passed by nearly every other car and pickup truck. Rain had warned us that his mailbox had been leveled in the winter by a plow and he had not resurrected it, saying he lacked the faith required. In its place was an odd combination of metal sculpture—a road plate as a base, pipes sticking upwards like bats, and two rusted barbeque grills at different depths and heights suggesting a catcher and umpire. The grills had a matching set of actual catcher’s masks.

Rain staggered down the driveway when he saw the Carlo turn in. He had a six-pack of Coke dangling from his left, long arm, and a cigarette held towards his face in his short right arm. Even in the heat he wore his shirt buttoned to the top, and when he turned to walk back toward the house his shirt had so many creases that I could tell he had not washed it in a while, perhaps had slept in it.

Elizabeth Rivera stood near the front door, head up as if looking at the ceiling of the porch. She took one of the Cokes from Rain, but did not follow him as he went inside. I parked the car and the three of us got out and stretched, looked at the sky, scratched, and made our way to the house. Elizabeth stood at the door, made her greetings, but continued to look over at the Monte Carlo.

“The sun,” she said, “makes your car look like an emerald cove in tropical waters. Still that same dream,” she laughed.

“Your dream or mine?”

“Mine, of course. I have only been to Canada and Mexico.”

“Mexico has some light green waters on the Baja and the Atlantic side.”

“My people came from Sonora. Highlands. Blue skies, a few clouds. Your car, it makes me want to swim.”

Rain had not said hello, but grunted for us to take a seat on the couch, which when three men sat down the cushions sank almost to the floor. I told him about the ICE bust, the goons in the pickups.

“When you need to leave,” Rain said, “one of you will have to wriggle off the end of the couch and give the others a hand.” He winked. “No one following you any longer?”

We all shook our heads no.

“Hard to get shut up in a car for a long drive, and Nebraska is a long drive. Which one of you was the one that hid under the bag? Did you do that the whole way?”

“Si,” said the younger man. “Stayed warm, out of sight.”

“Like a lizard hiding in a hole,” Elizabeth said.

“No lizards here,” Ralph said. “You can walk around as free. Keep your head up. Try to find some cool air, if there is any. Just keep your hands to yourself, and be polite with this woman.”

“Tries to be my father figure,” Elizabeth said in a high-pitched voice. “Wants me to get my dates pre-approved. Shotgun at the door type. And I am over sixty.”

“Elizabeth, here. You remember her from the service? Worked in general services accounting keeping track of expense reports. What happened was that Elizabeth came for a visit but ended up at that sorry site of a parish we’ve got. She cleaned it, talked to the priest, and when she returned, she said she needed to stay with me for a week so she could get a place to live. She’d bought the diner. The diner! A losing money-pit full of losing people. Just like the parish. Said she wanted to make it into a truck stop, diesel, a place to rest overnight, an oasis in the Sandhills.

She endured and she prospered, Rain muttered. She added a gas station, then a new wing to the restaurant, then on to the sleeping sites and the battery hookups. I mean, Elizabeth’s a compelling woman, all rosy cheeked and smiling in the morning, coming with a cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun to your truck window. Said she got it from an old Swedish magazine where an old gent was serving the coffee into those little teeny demitasse cups. Said the drawing made him look like Mickey Mouse—only four fingers, because a fifth one would have obscured the cup from the picture. But when she did the coffee and sweets, once a customer stopped there, they always came back. And locals, and by locals, I mean people as far away as thirty, forty miles, they came, too.

She knows business. She knows money.

She’s endured a lot. Jokes about being Mexican, racism, hard work, desecration of the parish, not that it might not have deserved it. Hard to see her devotion to that faith when that faith subjugated her people. But she’s all about the personal relationship, you know, and I get it, the church ain’t the thing. It’s Jesus,” Rain boomed, raising his hands in the air.

“And now you bring these two migrants that should be kicked out but she’s bound and determined to show compassion, so I’m putting them up. I’ll pay for their work. Suddenly we are eating five to a table and Elizabeth will be happy, your two fellow travelers will be happy, you’re happy, and I’m happy. Go figure.”

Rain took me on a walk around his place, stopping at the lilacs, the outhouse, the sunflowers acting like a fence to the southern side of his property.

“Why did you stop working at the machine shop and move out here?” I asked Rain.

“It was not that I could afford to quit, to stop working. I had payments enough, and government checks meant a smaller apartment in a cheaper city, no new car smell even if it was an aromatic toxin. It wasn’t money. My hands had betrayed me, had swollen and lost the messages my mind gave, could no longer tumble a part, or twirl a tool or even detonate the space bar on a computer keyboard—they were stuck, the knuckle that adjoined to the palm had no strength left after fifty years of labor. All I knew was mechanical. Even the skills I had learned with meters, computers and touch screens were concussive—I touched hard here, or pressed hard there, or pounded keys as if they were rivets to be popped into metal.

I was obsolete. My thumbs failed, my hands, the very instruments I required to be steady in labor had become wobbly. My vision had never wavered. I don’t need glasses. My memory never lapsed, my feet and attitude still nimble and resolute. But my hands had betrayed me.

Look at these palms. Trace the lines. Sanded spots in the cushions of the palms. See? And the fingertips have been scorched and pierced so many times I can no longer leave a readable print of my identity. I stare into the future and no longer know who I will become.”

“Perhaps the effaced fingertips and palms whisper a transformation, time for new pursuits,” I said.

“No,” Rain laughed. “My job was to take old trucks and make them useful, to re-fashion, like an elephant made from the DNA of a mammoth in a frozen tarpit. I’d take the plow blade from one with no motor and attach it to the front end of one that had only one gear to push dirt where the transmission didn’t matter. Perfect for being a poor farmer out here.

Frankenstein, he called me, able to stick a bolt anywhere and force an electric charge and animate the dead. That’s all I know.

Elizabeth tidies the house once a week while I sit in a rocker on the little deck I made out of pallets and old rubber tires, she winks and says I will be a gentleman again after she’s done, trying for these many years to make me into what I am not, add a smiling plow for a grin, a little motor to my pace.”

We sat on the porch and didn’t speak, as if learning the history of Rain had brought an end to history itself, and there was no more catching up to do. It was an oddly fulfilling space.

Early morning, in the dark, Rain woke me and told me to dress. Lightning flashed too close to count, not striking pitchforks but wrinkled sheets making clouds into lampshades of quivering electricity so near the hairs on our arms lifted as if in cellular praise. We walked to a cliffside—we could not hear except for roar, that low rumble that oceans hide in abalone shells and caves pronounce the deeper one enters. As we stood on the top of the hill and all senses strobed, we heard a low moaning and when the sky lit the valley floor saw paired a baby and mother buffalo.

Other than a few “Incredible” and “Wow,” we didn’t speak on the way back, left our muddy shoes at the door, and went back to bed. Rain looked happy. It was the first time I had seen his cheeks uplifted.

Sometimes the simplicity of a place like the Sand Hills can lull you into a quiet that makes you think you could live there forever. Sometimes it’s the vistas, how far vision can extend. But often that is just a rest, a dozing, and the lack of electric pulse, of a population. But I needed to travel, to get away, maybe just to go.

I had always spun like one of those gyroscopes pulled by a wound string until I fell. I wasn’t through spinning yet.

Driving gave me both a way to cover space and to have space, a way to be solitary but not alone. I cannot describe very well what populates inside my head when I see low clouds racing across the sky before the grey skirt of thunderclouds, small branches looking as if they might almost break from the larger branches, but it is as if a person has spoken and I must carry on conversation with it. Or when a small orchard of apple trees appears near a creek in which a lone weeping willow stands, erect and full, branches like a large nineteenth-century skirt reaching to the ground. Or a dust devil race over a patch of dirt and dissipates forty feet in the air that brings memories of my mother crouching in fear that we’d be whisked from the grass into a neverland. Or over the hump of the Interstate when I can see the skylines of Oakland and San Francisco and the salt marshes near Fremont at the same time.

On this trip, at times, even with my son, I felt a need to take a spin alone, to feel the Monte Carlo horsepower first shake the car and then at a tremendous and unsafe speed the engine become fully harnessed such that the car not only did not shake, but seemed to pierce the air without touching the road, frictionless.

Rain, Elizabeth, and I mulled over what to do with the two stranded workers. Then Rain started his truck, and said he knew where we could go. We got our gear and Rain told us to get in the Monte Carlo, took Elizabeth by the hand, and then went silent. Where could we go? We were in the middle of the Sand Hills. There was no place to go but more of the Sand Hills. We had not gone three miles when he abruptly turned onto a dirt lane, and we drove for several rut-filled miles until we reached the top of a hill.

An old wooden church stood at the top.

“It’s got a kitchen,” Elizabeth said. “It’s got running water from a well, and I clean it every month, so it’s not dusty. It’s got a small room in the back with three cots. It served as the hideout for a Turkish husband and wife who the town thought had brought the Spanish flu that killed so many in 1920. It’s Methodist. They used to teach Lakota to read English there, and the Lakota learned that the white man’s Bible talked about justice and compassion and reconciliation, and they turned it back on the residents, who all they wanted to do was steal from and suppress the Lakota. Uncomfortable times. Deadly times.

The pastor of the church agreed with the Lakota, so the white farmers removed him as pastor. The Methodist church sent another young pastor, who ended up agreeing with the Lakota. The settlers almost lynched him. His pregnant wife hustled down to the tree where they’d hung a rope. After that the church never sent anyone, and all the preaching was done by men in the church, and then no one came any more. Like a boil that was pierced. The church has been abandoned, but like the Catholic parish, I tend to it now and again. I like how this church stands tall on the Sandhills, that cross in the skyline above everything, and the church empty below. It says a lot.

I can make sure the two men eat. I can have their laundry done.”

“Laundry,” Rain scoffed. “They’ve got to have clothes to do laundry. We’ve got to buy them extra shirts and pants and boots and jackets. Bedding. The whole list.”

Rain scuffed his feet in the dirt.

“I’ll put them to work, too. Got lots to repair. Work through the winter, I guess. If they can drive, I’ll give them my truck. I’ve been where they’ve been, and it’s a small space, a captivity. People say they want to force them out, the migrants, but really what they do is force them in. In their heads, these migrants, they live in a tiny, tiny world. Cramped, knees to the face. I’ve been there. They can work with cows from raising the calf, not cutting up the adult. Might be a refreshing change for them.”

“You,” he said, turning to me. “You need to get on the road. It’s what you’re traveling for. To travel. To go. That freedom of not being in a tin can getting to work, working in a tin can, and then coming home to a tin can. Getting to nowhere. That’s what this is for me. Home. Nowhere can be home, and this is my nowhere. You need to get in that Monte Carlo.

You just witnessed three of the four best things of spring around here, the returning of life. The cranes going north, the buffalo giving birth, the lilac sprouting. If you noticed on your walk, you’d have noticed how the prairie grass is growing, not even so much growing, as resuscitating from the winter, all dried out like noodles and then splashed with rain and back to full and green. That’s all I need to get through summer and fall and winter again, just those four things coming back to life. You don’t see those in Chicago or California. There’s grass, lawns, but not the rebirth of sod. There’s no buffalo, no cranes, no lilac that’s the only thing of color in five miles, bee-coupled, fragrant.”

I returned the items to the trunk and made sure I had nothing that could flap or fly out of the car, because I intended on having the windows down for much of the day, and at eighty miles per hour, the Monte Carlo had a vicious cyclone inside of it. I thought about Rain and Elizabeth having found their home, and how I’d never really found one.

I shook Rain’s hand. “Thanks for the use of your home.”

“Home?” Rain repeated. “You mean house. You can’t use a home. But I can smell it home from here. It has a scent, and more than anywhere else I have been I find that scent stronger. It’s the scent of a kitchen that you smell from a few blocks away, or of the wet soil off in the distance when you are standing on dry dirt. It’s the smell after clouds have passed over a field of prairie and the sun gleams on the bobbing heads of grass and grain again. It’s a scent of the person you love in the air outside the front door before you enter the house. And I’m close. I am close right here, and that’s enough. It’s enough to be close. I could wander through the rest of the Sand Hills, through Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California, like you, and all the way back and never find it. But here I am close. Not home, but where I belong. Welcome to obsolescence.”

When I drove down his lane and onto the country road and watched the dust kick up behind me, I hungered to be with my wife, I hungered to be near my children. I smelled asphalt, country dust, vinyl. Home was close. I spread my left foot toward the door, and nearly pinned the accelerator to the floor. The Carlo roared. I kept accelerating until I no longer could feel the friction of the tires or the impedance of the air.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, and has worked in electronics and mental health administration. He work previously in Muleskinner Journal, Gold Man Review, Brazos River Review, and Green Lantern Literary. He won the 2016 Consequence Magazine Fiction Prize.