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

burger wrappers, pop cups, and cigarette butts to mark where it had been. I
remembered our one trip to the beach, when I was eight --how the tide had left
the same litter of dead seaweed, trash, and broken shells on the clean white
sand. I'd found a dead seal, all bloated, with empty eye sockets and grinning
yellow teeth. There were ghosts there, too-- harder to see, like shadows, but
they were there.

"What's your name?" The Rainmaker was looking at me with this thoughtful sort of
expression.

"Donald," I said.

"Dimitri." He offered me a pudgy hand and I shook it solemnly. Dimitri sounded
foreign. Russian or something. "Saturday hours are precious ones," he went on.
"Thank you for giving up a few of them for me. Here." He handed me the folded
umbrella, nodded at a dusty blue Dodge Caravan parked on the far side of the
lot.

It wasn't a good car for the desert. But when he opened the back, I saw camping
gear, some canned stuff in a box, and a couple of five-gallon water jugs. Full.
Okay, he wasn't stupid anyway. I got into the front seat beside him, wondering
how he'd explain it when the rain didn't come. "What?" I said, when he just sat
there staring at me.

"Your seatbelt."

I buckled it. Only Morn ever nagged me about the seatbelt. "Left on Highway
Twenty," I said. "Take the first right after the gas station."

He turned the key, frowned as the engine sputtered. When it finally caught, he
gunned it and pulled out of the motel lot. Clogged fuel injectors, I wanted to
tell him. Pour some cleaner in the gas tank before you have to pay to get 'era
fixed. "Turn here," I said, when we got to the track that led back to our spring
pasture. 111 get the gate. A ghost was walking along the fence line as if he was
checking the wire. He had a weathered face and wore tattered work pants held up
by suspenders. I waited until he passed by before I unhooked the wire gate and
pulled it aside.

When I climbed back into the front seat, the Rainmaker was staring at the place
where the ghost had vanished. He looked at me, nodded, but didn't say anything
more as we bounced slowly along the track. Something metal was rattling in the
back. Pots and pans, sounded like.

"Do you really call the weather?" I licked my dry lips, wishing he'd go faster
so we'd get a breeze. "Or are you a phony?"

"That's a refreshingly direct question." He chuckled. "Your uncle thinks I'm a
phony." We topped a rise and the Rainmaker halted the car. Turned off the engine
and opened the door. "This feels like a good place," he said.