"Mary Rosenblum - Rainmaker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenblum Mary)

looking around at the faces that surrounded him. Everybody had moved back a
little, making a ring, like you do when there's a fight out behind the gym.
"What you do should be against the law." He turned his attention back to the
little man. "It isn't, but we don't have to put up with your slimy kind." He let
his fingers curl loosely over the top of his holstered .44. The little man
nodded at the gun, his lips pursed.

"Are you threatening to beat me up or shoot me?" he asked mildly.

The silence around us got real tight and I looked away, thinking of the winter
night when I had watched through the steamed-up windshield as Uncle Kenny beat
up this ranch hand who'd been starting a lot of ugly bar fights in town.
"Sometimes you got to know the right language," he had said when he returned to
the car. He had wiped the blood from his hands carefully on a towel he pulled
from under his seat. "Jail doesn't scare his kind much. But now-- he'll mind his
manners. I'm just tryin' to save him from knifing somebody one night, and
getting himself a prison sentence for it."

I'd believed him. I watched my uncle's lips tighten.

"Tell you what," he said in a hard voice. "You're so sure you're God's
messenger, Mister Rainmaker, let's make a little wager. You make it rain on my
place, I'll pay triple your fee." He tilted his head slowly back to stare at the
hot, hard sky. Not a cloud anywhere-- not even a wisp of cirrus. "It don't rain,
then you move on and don't ever set foot in Hamey County again." He lowered his
head, his eyes as hard as the sky. "You willing to put it on the line,
Rainmaker?'

Whatever you want." The man shrugged. "But I don't make rain. I just call it."

"How 'bout you call it right now?"

"I can start right now." The Rainmaker pursed his lips into a little frown. "It
takes time for weather to happen. I don't do Hollywood special effects. We're
talking a shift in the jet stream, cold fronts and warm fronts. Big masses of
air and moisture. Takes time to move that much around."

"Yeah, got you." Uncle Kenny turned around slow, talking to the crowd now. "So
if it rains sometime next Christmas, you did it?" He winked. "That's how it
works?" People laughed, but the clear space got bigger around the umbrella and
the little man. Only Ms. Kramer didn't move .

"I don't think my cows can wait till Christmas," someone said.

"It won't take that long." The man answered solemnly, as if Uncle Kenny had
asked a real question. "Couple of days -- maybe four." He shrugged. "When it
gets close, I'll let you know."
"And it'll rain right on my land, huh.? Just there?"

"Why not our south pasture?" I spoke up. "Grass'd sprout in a couple of days