Because the Rain (11 page)

Posing for the cop, like the summer nights, might calm her hands, but his window was rainy dark, and he was off on a long run. His woman was gone because the candles never lit the windows, and men never thought of those details unless a hooker was coming over. But watching the cop run was better than posing, and made her forget she had hands. She imagined him a dog, a German shepherd, who could be ordered into emotions.

Sometimes, the cop went south first, and ran calmly, but if he started north into the city, he came back like a boxer, throwing restrained punches at the darkness: the one-two, but never a third jab. She didn’t want love from him. She knew closeness with an open heart would make him too real, and he’d cease calming her hands on the nights she must work. He must stay beyond the window.

12

Mike ran down Cornelia, beneath the Ravenswood Metro tracks, and watched blond men wind Christmas lights around their town house fences. They laced the cords with garlands. The night was also good for running, humid cool between the rains. The men weren’t smiling, and they strung the lights like soldiers did concertina wire while wives watched from windows, so he turned back toward the lake, relieved he could add three more miles without having to explain the extra time later. He started to look back, but stopped himself, knowing the men would remind him how he didn’t miss the riddle-life he and Susan led after the abortion.

But Mike never let himself think this very long. His pace would slow and he’d not sleep later because his body felt cheated and awake. He’d start missing her toes against his ankle, and soon he’d remember that he lay beside her many nights wishing her a random lover. In the beginning, he’d tell himself, he was sure neither one of them did that. Now, there were places he was learning not to go.

The wind quit off the lake and he was sweating in a long-sleeved T-shirt. He ran in the street, but stayed close to the parked cars. There were more men stringing Christmas lights and garlands, disgusted men, and they all worked like their neighbors. He cut down the first alley, hoping to keep his mind on the streetlit puddles, not the decorators, but it was too late. He’d already started remembering the last year of his marriage.

The medical examiner told Mike that Susan hadn’t felt a thing. The killer swung the baseball bat and she just died. It was painless for her, he said.

She was gone six months now. No cops asked Mike if he missed her. They looked at him in the precinct’s locker room like they would a guy at the YMCA. There was little to gain by knowing the wagon driver.

He kept quiet and spent his days driving domestic batterers and car thieves to bond court, letting the silence of her death drone with the arrestee’s heel knocks against the wagon walls. He’d sometimes forget by looking at blond women in Volvo wagons, and imagining himself feeling as convinced about things as them, but Susan always returned behind his eyes.

Mike hated knowing she died when they were straining to see love in each other, and his mother-in-law reminded him with a Christmas card. Thinking of Suzy, she wrote. He smelled her Benson and Hedges on the envelope and remembered how mother and daughter sat at the kitchen table and imagined the ways they’d die. Susan went in a motorcycle accident on a warm country night, but her mother saw herself all alone in a room. He also hated knowing his wife blinked her eyes in a rainy alley and never opened them. Her last sight may have been a car lot fence, he thought.

At University of Illinois, where Mike studied on the GI Bill, he first saw Susan walking through yellow leaves, Ophelia in a black skirt, her eyes brown like Illinois rivers. She sat on bar stools beside him and listened to his Fort Bragg stories, drinking Glenlivet, while he told her about how in 1988 a C-130 full of paratroopers exploded on a demonstration jump for their families, and how he and Dilger manned a drop zone water point and watched the bodies fall on fire with the wives and the little sisters. Later, Dilger and he never talked about it; they just got drunk off-post and found hookers in a tobacco field house trailer; and neither Dilger nor he could look at each other right forever after. They’d seen themselves on fire.

Mike wanted to make the rich pay. Somehow, their young never fall and burn.

Susan understood. Back in her Illinois town, her father, a short sheet-metal worker with a squirrel head, beat her when he was laid off longer than a week. He fought in Korea with the USMC, freezing in the Chosin Reservoir with Chesty Puller, and never got over having survived a forgotten war. He claimed nobody knew how to listen. Susan got drunk and gave the reasons for her beatings, but never the details. The morning she wouldn’t eat pancakes, the time she wore makeup at twelve. Her mother could remember none of it. But Mike loved her because they both had eyes that were as curious as they were afraid of life, and she never turned away his stories. She felt his slurred words, but ran home conflicted after last call. On the bar, she’d leave her poems about clotheslines, airport roads, and dry cleaners that press the stains in farther. She wasn’t comfortable explaining herself.

They came together. They ran from each other. They crossed paths like this for ten years, the stakes getting higher. One day, after the book sold, they got married at City Hall between Cuban and Sri Lankan couples, and spent two nights at the Hilton and Towers having the best sex of their lives. Susan missed her period the next month.

But Mike Spence believed himself a tough guy until his thirty-fifth birthday. He’d walked into the blurry waste of the Mojave Desert, pack mule fashion, one dreamy grunt among many. Before meeting Susan, he soldiered in Honduras and Panama; he ran triathlons, competed in power lifting, boxed at The Windy City Gym, covered dope at federal court, and backpacked through the Balkans after the war. But it did nothing against the sadness of seeing Susan thirteen years after the yellow leaves, the abortion having broken her in her weak places because he wrote a novel about soldiers who got sad after watching their buddies burn in the sky.
We saw ourselves on fire, he’d tell her. My father beat me when Chicago lost to Green Bay, she told him, and I was getting potato chip crumbs on the couch.

Whenever he forgot Susan and let himself remember running the Sacré Coeur steps with Dilger, he wished he could time the lapses. It would help him gauge his progress in forgetting her. But Parisian leave with Dilger and the French girls who feigned repulsion to their dog tags was something he couldn’t let himself remember either. He guessed Dilger wasn’t Dilger anymore, the handsome son of the dirty-crude oil fields, but something kept him from calling his mother in Burkburnett, Texas, and checking to see if he’d recovered from the night the MP sticked him. If Dilger had, Mike would only feel weaker.

Mike ran across Irving Park and passed Orange Garden Chop Suey, the last of the neon-lit takeaways. He drew the cold air without coughing, and became all body, his stride longer, more deliberate.

He turned down the alley and the pole lamps were bright in the puddles. When he found himself sliding on his knees, he couldn’t remember going down. The asphalt barked his shins and he stopped himself with his hands. He breathed and spat before turning to see legs stuck before a rat-proof garbage can.

The woman was small and Asian. She lay on her back with closed eyes, her tiny shoulders lost in a trench coat. He crawled over and pushed her hair from her eyes, the thin wet strands, but they never opened. He touched her dripping throat. He put his ear to her chest, pulling away when it rose and touched him.

Looking at her, he thought of cut flowers. He stood while the puddle water diluted his knee blood.

“Hey,” he said.

The rain hit her forehead where she lay quiet, her head on blue-bagged newspapers.

He bent down again and touched her shoulder, then shook it, but her head rolled left. He looked at her neck, head, the stomach of her trench coat. There was no blood. He put his nose to her mouth, smelling for liquor, but she was clean. When he stood with her, he thought he held a cat. He’d decided to sprint for Ravenswood Hospital when she said, “You’d remember me without my trench coat.”

Her eyes opened and they held the alley light. She looked at him without blinking.

Mike knew it was the woman from across the street. She left the windows when Susan died and he forgot imagining the tautness of her body. She was strong, small, and smelled like scented candles.

“You keep your head,” she said. “I like that. You are a good soldier.”

“How do you know I was a soldier?” he said.

“It is the way you run,” she said. “Your upper body never moves. I always wonder if you run with a quarter between your teeth.”

He didn’t know how to answer the woman, but it felt good holding her. He was walking now and the rain had started small and warm. He hoped she wouldn’t ask to be let down.

“Soldiers are quiet,” she said. “Cops are loud. That is another way I know.”

“That’s not always true.”

“Sure,” she said. “Soldiers are younger and lack confidence. You all stay confused and that keeps you from speaking quickly.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“You are confused enough to keep carrying me,” she said.

“You haven’t told me you are not hurt,” he said. “I will carry you until then.”

“I think you’ve wanted to carry me for a long time.”

Mike stopped and let the rain disappear into them.

“Let me down,” she said.

He watched the woman walk between two garages, lay on the wet leaves fallen from the black trees, then open her trench coat. Her knees raised and her feet turned flat. She wore a white T-shirt and it was quickly wet.

“You know me now,” she said.

Mike did, but he kept quiet. The night was warm for the time of year.

He guessed the woman a hooker. She looked at him with eyes that gave orders. He’d dreamed them softer, maybe a girl looking for a way back to the village, but not such a porno dream. After he lay with her, she rubbed her lips with her finger and nodded in the direction of what she wanted pleasured, then smiled and licked her teeth when he complied.

They lay on the leaves a long time. For a while, he didn’t even hear the barking dogs. He kept looking for the village in her eyes, but they only mirrored his own.

*   *   *

Mike idled the paddy wagon outside the precinct house on Addison. The morning light had come windy, but not cold. He was watching the street dry and waiting for his partner-of-the-day.

Last night, he hadn’t gotten the woman’s name, but he touched her and kissed her hips. The rain washed her from him between the times they made love, and she kept moving like she knew it. You sprint now, she said. Your legs stretch and I want you to carry me.

The woman made him swim and he’d never felt he expended any effort to please her. Lying with her, he forgot Susan. She gave him a lapse from all of it, but he decided to take her only when she came. He couldn’t get used to the quiet mind she gave him. There were still many things to remember.

This morning, he was hoping for a partner-of-the-day he could like, the way he did every morning, just a guy who might use running shoes and read something about the Civil War, enough Shelby Foote to debate whether Stonewall Jackson was fragged at Chancellorsville, or shot by nervous sentries. They’d drive and weigh the variables. Jackson had marched his men barefoot through the Shenandoah, in icy mud and spring snow, making thirty miles a day and surprising federal cavalry so often that General Hooker couldn’t believe the Stonewall brigade didn’t ride horses. The men might have hated Jackson enough to shoot him off his horse where he sucked lemons against his constant nausea. He did execute deserters, and refused his men whiskey, but he tried teaching them to read. Mike would argue either side. The debate could make the day a minute.

Sometimes, Mike wished he drove the streets with Dilger and they both felt the way they did at nineteen. Dog soldiers, amateur drunks, and free to blow off home and spend leave in Paris. In Mike’s dream, he never watched Dilger get sticked by the MPs, but they were older and somehow better read. He thought them warrior poets in the classical sense, like Dennis Hopper said in the movie. They’d seen the boys fall ablaze, but Dilger was never made goofy by a beating.

The women were walking for the El at Sheffield, the working rush that died after 8:20, a hundred young ones in Donna Karan from T.J.Maxx, all heading toward bank jobs on LaSalle Street and the bottle-eyed Board of Trade guys who drank beer with lunch. They held their skirts down against the wind while the cops got out of the double-parked squads with handled thermoses, changing shifts, the midnight guys having warmed the seats through the long morning dark. Blow wind, Mike knew they were thinking. Let those skirts fly up to their necks.

He was trying to imagine white see-throughs when Petersen got into the wagon. He was the partner-of-the-day, a pretend lifer who sold stereos until he was thirty-one, then became a cop when he lost sixty-five grand day trading in the week after 9/11. He wore blue uniform pants, the creases like cleavers, and Mike could see the wet marks on his fly from urine afterdrip.

“The navy taught me how not to piss on my hands,” Petersen said.

He took off his hat. Mike waited to pull into traffic. Women drove by in Caravans and Navigators with baby-on-board stickers in the back windows.

“You know why?” Petersen said.

“No,” Mike said. “Why couldn’t you piss on your hands?”

“So I wouldn’t have to waste time washing them.”

He smiled at Mike like he’d told the punch line that made the spots seem routine.

“The navy’s pretty ingenious,” he said.

“They taught you something good.”

“If you don’t wash your hands,” he said, “you can save a full minute on any head call. It was losing the navy money.”

This guy was a slider, Mike thought, a little hamburger that comes boxed and speckled with rehydrated onions. He’d tell you how he got blabby drunk at summer day games, drilling Wrigley Field Budweiser in paper cups, while the Irish tricolor tattooed on his ankle got red from a sunburn. He trolled the bleachers, the people talking on cell phones between Sosa at-bats, and looked for two girls sitting alone, blondes with brunettes. Petersen always played to the dark hair: maybe she’d been bulimic because she was more Joyce Dewitt than Suzanne Somers and the crumbs weren’t crumbs to her. I’m a cop, he’d say. The women always paid attention until they understood there was no trouble.