The Rain-Maker
by Phillip Challis
Published with permission May 18th, 2009

Morgan Booth looked up at a stretch of wide blue sky and waited for the miracle to happen. With the winds kicking up, little dust devils tumbled across the plains and scoured the land. Standing on the edge of town, Booth found himself surrounded by a sizable crowd of townsfolk. Their mood struck him as electric, like the static carried on dry winds that sometimes threw blue sparks off wire fences at night. That’s how it was with the people. They had an excited air about them. He could see a few had even gone so far as to throw coarse blankets down on the bare ground. Families tucked into their picnic dinners and children played in what used to be fertile soil now gone to lifeless powder.

This town was just the latest in a string of used up little communities he’d wandered into and out of again over the past few months. The past few summers had seen withered crops and wasted stock across much of the rolling countryside out west of the Big Muddy. In his gut Booth knew a lot of places wouldn’t make it past another winter. Even at the tender age of nineteen those towns tended to rattle him. They were too full of empty houses and empty fields that had dried up. Wheat, corn, cattle, and sometimes even the people went to dust and blew away. The town, he decided, felt like death and he avoided them whenever he could.

Today though, Booth saw the crowd of townsfolk out milling around and it raised his curiosity. Arriving on the coach an hour earlier, he’d made a point of finding what few stores lined the main street. There wasn’t much to see, and his hopes of finding work weren’t great. He walked from one end of the street to the other in the space of five minutes and that’s when he saw all the people. Ambling over, he quickly learned the reason for all the fuss. It was a man standing atop a wagon the likes of which Booth had never quite seen before.

The handbill pasted across the wagon’s side proclaimed the man to be a rain-maker. The crazy looking collection of kettles, copper drums, and India-rubber tubes in his wagon was apparently a ‘patented gas generator’. Dressed as he was in dusty spats, a powder white frock coat, and matching white top hat of the old John Bull variety, he looked to be an eastern dandy, a snake oil man, or both. (more…)

Share This

“Stand back everyone, I’m from Cincinnati!”, I yelled, intelligently, at the frightened masses huddled inside of the aeroplane cabin, their faces ugly with fear.

There I stood, alone, amidst the crowd, looking over a rather broken man, who was gasping in pain, clutching at his own hideously twisted form.

“Just what does being from Cincinnati have to do with medical emergencies?” huffed she, a rather pointy-faced old lady, who by the tone of her voice, and the sheer stupidity of her question, was obviously from Toledo.

“Well,” I said ”Cincinnati is 683 feet above sea level, and 31 miles from the ocean, which of course makes me the anti-christ.”

“And who better to save the life of this poor man than one with such awesome and incredible powers of deduction as I?”, I added, peering around the innards of the fast-falling machine – looking for makeshift tools to do the job at hand.

There was little time remaining; The injured man’s leg was bleeding profusely all over the fine low-pile cobalt-blue carpet, his bones jutting awkwardly outward like the eyes of a strangled Cambodian prostitute.

“I will have to do a tracheotomy” I shouted, reaching my clutching hand empty towards the crowd. “I will need something very heavy”.

“Like your suitcase perhaps?” interrupted a rather interrupty and daft fellow with a manged and mangled weasel for an upper lip. “Your suitcase that fell and broke the man’s leg, shortly after smashing the brains of the stewardess on its way down from the rack?”

“That one?” he added, as if I did not know what my suitcase looked like. ”What is in that thing anyway, that it is so heavy?” he questioned, his mustache growing bigger and bigger with every dumb word.

“Well, what is the one substance on earth that could make something so small, so heavy?” I asked him, in a deservingly sarcastic and condescending tone. And since he was too poorly dressed to answer in a timely fashion, I answered for him: ”Why bowling balls of course, cunningly crushed into tiny little pieces! Any idiot would know there is not a case or bag out there which will fit whole bowling balls in the overhead compartment these days! BEHOLD! The powers of deduction!”

“Who would crush bowling balls just to bring them on board an aerocraft?”, he asked, as if he had completely missed the entire preceeding paragraph. I would have been embarrassed for him, were he not German.

“This is exactly why I am in charge! ‘Further demonstrated by my uncanny ability to deduce precisely what was in this bag!”, I remarked, holding the suitcase high above my head with surgical precision.

I then leaned attractively over the dying man, hammering and hammering at his throat with my suitcase, again and again – but it was too late; He expired soon after, despite my brave and dashing actions. I was just too late.

Off I ventured into the cargo bay with my loud and panicked admirers hounding my every step, and clutching at my fine wool jacket; This, perhaps in the all-too-common hopes that its swatches would heal their vapors or perhaps help their crops to grow.

Having no time for their foolish superstitions, I closed the cargo door behind me, and locked it; Saving these passengers was my job and my job alone, and I could not let myself be distracted or slowed by their screaming ways.

I grabbed a parachute from the wall, opened the hatch, and I was off. With luck, I would return with help before their situation became any worse.

I just had to try.

Share This