Because the Rain (17 page)

“You know these?” he said.

“I have four memories of Vietnam,” Annie said. “Neither of those pictures are among them.”

“This lawyer, Mike Rosen, was just murdered,” he said. “The killer dressed him up like the VC. Then I saw a naked guy running an alley with this picture taped to his chest. Both of them were actively against the Vietnam War. The detectives won’t do the work.”

You did this for me, Goetzler? Annie thought. I bet you wish you could believe that.

“You looking for police rank?” she asked the cop. “Are you a lifer?”

“The killer’s anger is toxic because many men will love him,” he said. “I know his hate.”

Annie smiled at the cop but her smile was lost upon him. She walked closer until he lowered the pictures. This cop, she decided, responded only to the questions he wished he were asked.

“These pictures started appearing after I met you,” the cop said. “It must stop. I can’t think about this killer’s anger anymore.”

“I allow you to sleep,” she said. “That is all.”

“Why did you start calling me soldier the first night?”

“Because you run like the soldiers on recruiting commercials.”

“I want you to be more specific.”

Annie smiled at his cop talk, the poetry of declarative sentences. Maybe he would go quiet and become the runner again.

“Only my face is Vietnamese,” she finally said to him.

“You came to me in a white silk dress. I read that schoolgirls only wear the white
ao dai.
I think you are acting something out. You understand something about this killer.”

Annie smiled and walked closer to Mike, but he was stiff like a room key. She let down her hair by pulling one pin. He didn’t put away the pictures.

“Why did you keep calling me soldier?” he said again.

“An American Vietnamese would never do this. We can make too much money here. Why should we care about our bad memories?”

The cop moved the pictures closer to her by locking his elbows. Annie couldn’t exhale easily, and she inched the air through her nose. From the paper weight, she knew the cop cut the prints from the same photographic history of the Vietnam War that Goetzler kept on an end table. If Goetzler did this, Annie knew he took amphetamines to prolong his will; men like Donald Goetzler didn’t have very good legs, and displays of courage were artificially fueled. She then pointed to Kim Luc Phu in the print and wondered, like always, what she was screaming.

“This picture means something to me,” she said.

The cop dropped his hands and let his eyes soften.

“Yes,” she said. “Every night I thank God I wasn’t that girl. Who would want to be known forever as a nightmare?”

“Is that why you don’t like being Vietnamese?”

“No,” she said. “I just decided not to be a bad memory.”

When she went to touch him, he recoiled, then stopped himself. Her hands slid beneath his leather jacket and the leather made his shirt warm enough for the starch to gum her palms. His ribs felt like tool handles. She looked at his wet chin and he stared at the wall.

“I’ll only do this once,” she said.

She then raised her nails along his back, but he still didn’t move.

“You know something about this?”

“Yes,” she said, “that you think too much about getting double yolks in one egg.”

He pushed away from her and turned on a heel, starting down the stairs without closing her door. Annie thought she heard dogs. She stood watching the cop, the way his shoulders receded to the darkness, and disciplined herself not to think beyond her own opinions.

*   *   *

Twenty minutes into a two-hour call, Annie sat on the couch, Goetzler in the chair. He turned the brandy snifter in his hand, making full circles, and looked at himself in the window. He’d lit a Cubano and let it burn and talked to her about flow theory, using a pen and a legal pad to demonstrate, but instead of looking at her, he followed the smoke up from the ashtray. Now, he was quiet and rocking the snifter without watching himself. Annie noticed the smoke slow before the cigar went out. She pointed to the ashtray.

“You do that because you can afford it?” she said.

He kept watching himself, his eyes like sky in wet windows. He’d started making small waves with the brandy. She waited, but he never asked her about the missed week.

“I like the smell of good cigars,” Goetzler said, “not the smoke in my lungs.” He hadn’t wanted to talk.

Annie glanced again at the coffee tables, this time with one eye. Art books, Degas, Pissarro, Cezanne. Matthew Brady’s Civil War pictures. But the photographic history of the Vietnam War was gone. She looked another time, her eyes wet from the old smoke. The book wasn’t beneath the long lamp that he never lit.

“You should use that lamp,” she said. It was copper and green-shaded, a library light.

Goetzler didn’t look at her. He sank into the chair, one palm on the leather.

“It hits my eyes sideways,” he said.

“Then move it.”

“I bought the lamp for that table and this is my chair.”

“It’s a waste,” she said.

They sat and looked together, trying to see the lake in the darkness. When Annie knew the book was gone, she uncrossed her legs and let herself become comfortable. In the glass, she watched herself smile before watching Goetzler set down the brandy. Tonight, he couldn’t keep the act going: he quit the physics lesson too soon, and never told a war story. Annie then took off her boots and brought up her legs, marveling at what they’ll do for a dream of themselves. For gratitude, she’d forget the envelope if Goetzler kept quiet and didn’t touch her. But if he started with the stories, the offer didn’t stand.

21

Mike went down into an alley puddle after the shadowed man hit him. He landed hard on his knees, and his heart punched from having just run six miles. Mike saw the legs of the others in the headlights before the man patted his face and pushed him back flat. He watched their ankles while they laughed like kenneled dogs. When the white flashlight hit his eyes, he felt his running shoes being taken off, then heard them hit the open Escalade doors. He thought himself the dived fighter in a boxing movie.

“The gook isn’t your butterfly, copper,” the man said. “The gook is someone’s investment. Meaning, you don’t let her fuck you for free. Do I need to keep talking?”

Mike listened for the other men, but they were quiet. He could not see their pants and shoes, only their ankles and shod feet.

“Just shake your fucking head and I’ll go away forever.”

Mike looked into the white light, hoping it would still his eyes.

“Fucking difficult prick,” the man said.

Mike heard a click, then a flame pinched his wet-stockinged foot.

“This is just the Zippo,” the man said. “Next time, I’m pouring on the fucking gas.”

There were footsteps and closing doors before the headlights receded backward and the alley went dark. He lay alone, hemmed by streetlight, and believed every word they said. These men hoped they could avoid blood, too. Like cops, they were lifers at heart.

Annie was dead to him. It wasn’t even a decision. Like most things in his life, she was a fantasy taken too far.

Come spring, Mike would leave these sad men for Mexico when the airfares dropped. Selling the condo would give him sixty grand after taxes. He’d forget the skyline, the pictures, and his reasons for writing the novel when he first took the 727 seat. He’d fly to Zihuatanejo in late May to see the mangoes and fresh-caught snappers hauled in cyclos, the wet-lipped women built like flour sacks and drinking Coke, then rent an Audi A-4 and drive the seaside road to Guatemala where the brown Pacific waves hit rocks and sprayed the asphalt. He’d use the windshield wipers and pretend it was an autumnal storm blown across Lake Michigan so the wave force wouldn’t scare him. He knew this water got violent enough to slam a Ford Festiva against the kopje rock faces lining the shore, and he’d spend the extra money for the Audi.

But now, beaten in the puddle, he wasn’t sure if he could leave and breathe easy and understand that most of your points were never truly made. This killer might follow him down to the sunshine. When Mike returned to Mexico with pencils, steno pads, and a lone sharpener, he didn’t want to have any doubts about thinking he could incite any man to care about another’s pain.

Mike and Susan went to Ixtapa in the off-season, $800 for air and eight nights at the Las Brisas, burnt-orange bungalows with hammocks on the patios, but the water around the reefs was too muddy for snorkeling. In Chicago, he’d bought them fins, masks, and snorkels, not even considering the sea change of late June. He’d seen the price online and booked the trip. Susan had looked over his shoulder at the screen, and it didn’t even bother him. In Mexico, he’d swim her into the schools of fish and they’d make love in the shallow water while the sailboats evaporated in the hard sunlight. Her wet hair would be dark like her eyes, and he’d taste the salt on her tongue. Most things between them, he believed, could get washed away. But the hot current hits Pacific Mexico from Tahiti, the concierge told him, and the water stays brown from May through the summer.

They spent their days walking Zihuatanejo, near the muddy waterfront, the ocean roily and broken by waves. The gift shops were closed and nobody sold T-shirts near the wharf where fishermen muscled dying marlins from the paintless boats. Susan wore a white linen dress, the train above her ankles, and the wind blew the slack between her knees. All afternoon, she’d been calming him about the poor snorkeling conditions. He knew he was getting too mad, and the hotel had no responsibility to report the water visibility on its Web site, the way he’d told the concierge it did after calling him a “flimflam” man. But Mike couldn’t forget the bilgey water, even if he understood his anger was about Todd not caring about his book, and the only stories he could tell were about how soldiers end up.

He pointed to the ruined bay, the reef hidden by the brown water. Susan smiled while dirty-legged children ran past, their tongues orange from papaya sorbet.

They practice the bait and switch here, he said.

You were never baited.

The water was blue on the Web site.

They push the season, Susan said. That’s how they make money.

The water is brown.

It’s not the season, she said. That’s why we got the price.

He looked at Susan in her white dress, then the palm shadows black on the yucca bushes. His wife was beautiful, her hips soft in the linen. When he found her eyes again, she blew air like it was cigarette smoke. He looked back at the palm shadows.

We don’t need snorkeling, she said of his plan.

It would be better.

I wouldn’t like the fish swimming up against me.

They’re wet like the water, he said. You wouldn’t even know.

I’d see them doing it, she said, and I’d convince myself I felt them.

You sure about that?

You know how I am.

When they rode back to Las Brisas and their bungalow air-conditioned enough to chill brewed coffee, the highway was closed by a toxic spill, anhydrous fertilizer running from a tipped truck, and the bus took a coastal road where the Pacific waves rose and broke on the craggy asphalt. The coach was empty except for the thin man playing a guitar in the open doorway: “La Bamba” on catgut strings, the musician’s pant legs wet from the salt spray. Mike watched Susan hold the seat edge and bounce with the bus, her face red from sun and motion sickness, then closed his eyes against seeing the wrecked ocean, listening to the stranger sing.

*   *   *

In the precinct lot, Mike Spence stood on the milk crate, his coat open, and hosed down the wagon floor before starting his shift. The cigarette butts shot against the front wall, bounced, then flushed back over the rear bumper. When he’d frisk a wagon mope, the jukebox drinkers, the ex-cons happy they could have a pizza sent to the bar, he took their cigarettes, but some left on benders expecting the flex-cuffs and the wagon, so they hid cigarettes in their shoes. Mike never figured how they smoked Kools with bound hands; no mope ever looked limber enough to hold a squat. He thought about the possible contortions while he hosed, and decided they used their teeth and farmer matches. He sprayed the butts down the grated manhole cover.

When he touched the welt on his cheek, he saw his breath in the dark, and his gloved finger came away wet. He’d broken the scab again and the cold stung his warm, thin blood. For some reason, he kept checking to see if the welt was still there, even after he’d made himself quit.

He figured Annie was a hooker because she believed she needed the cash to leave a world within fifteen minutes. She’d never stopped being a boat person. At night, he watched her come and go in cars, always dressed beyond the neighborhood, black suits and boots. In the late morning, before his shift, he’d watch her skip rope through the windows, and then do handstands. But he felt she was a hooker by the way she kept running her fingers when he’d stood stiff and thought of old trees. Call girls touched with typist hands, but Annie floated you over the rocks and disappeared like a cut-loose kite.

When he stayed the hose gun to hear the water run into the sewer, Kenjuan Mills walked up in the light rain. He decided to stop understanding the killer’s side.

“It’s picture-in-the-paper,” Mills was saying. “The hero on the shit wagon. The Phoenix.”

Before Mike looked at Mills, he’d already imagined the oldest guy in a ghetto club. All week, the sergeant walked the precinct house in his hooded leather jacket, telling guys how wise he was for moving to the West Side and leasing a BMW 5291. All the trim needs to see is the car, he’d say. The K-Town Niggers don’t bother it because my bull sleeps in the garage. Mike kept seeing Mills taking Lakeshore Drive, wearing sunglasses in the dark, and sipping a glass of Heidsieck Brut. He laughed about it for a morning.