Because the Rain (21 page)
Authors: Daniel Buckman
Goetzler tried balancing himself by outstretching his arms and legs. The sweat ran from his scalp into his eyes.
“I want you to go outside,” she said. “Then stand in the mud between the sidewalk and the street. Make like the marine who tried reaching out. Remember, there are men watching you on the street. If you don’t do it, you won’t make it home.”
When he slid backward, Annie cocked the hammer, and the sound of the cylinder locking turned him still.
“If you were Vietnamese,” she said, “what you did with the pictures could have worked.”
He rocked on his lower stomach, his lips open, his teeth wet. His palms kept hitting the radiator.
“Remember that you are wanting to help,” she said. “But the other men say no. The hills are swallowing you all.”
He let his toes touch the fire escape, then kicked back into the air. His glasses went to the end of his nose.
“How long?” Goetzler had sucked air through his nose to talk.
“Until you figure out why they never let the wounded marines touch.”
Sweat stuck the white hair to his forehead. Annie now held the pistol with both hands.
“Thursday at Marche,” she said. “One o’clock. Meet my cab. Sixty thousand.”
When Goetzler backed through the window, he came down hard on his knees. The frame cut his scalp. He looked at her before pushing the glasses up, his eyes like a scared dog’s, then his toes touched the fire escape. He stood and went down the stairs, hitting every second step. Annie uncocked the hammer and exhaled hard enough to bow her legs. When she walked the hallway, she let the pistol arm swing.
Her bedroom door had been pushed open by the running cat. In passing, she looked for his eyes beneath the bed, muted yellow, but he’d gone to the middle, and wouldn’t come out until she used the broom handle. He was scared under by car alarms and aerosol cans, like the cop, but the image of Goetzler stuck in the window might keep him hidden until morning. Even after the stick, the gray tom would pace the apartment while she finished the dying warrior, her last yoga position. The cat wouldn’t lick the sweat from her obliques. The activity made him skittish for the night.
Annie lit candles on her way to the mirror, flaming the end table, the mantel. She fired six incense sticks, setting them in a jar before the mirror, then lay the silenced .38 beside the rice mat and thought of new leaves on Parisian plain trees.
27
The airport limo was coming for Mike Spence in a half hour. He’d ride to O’Hare in a four-door Lincoln town car, bound for Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and ignore the complimentary
Sun-Times
and
Tribune
on the seat behind the Serb driver. He couldn’t live in a city without a decent newspaper. Instead, he’d read
The New York Times,
some obituary about a chess champion who was unknown to Mike, and sip Fiji water while the cell-talking driver moved through the late Kennedy traffic by using the shoulder. James Taylor might even be singing on 93.9 Lite FM:
Oh, Mexico, it sounds so sweet with the sun sinking low.
From the street, Mike knew cops often listened to the Lite to ward off panic attacks.
Maybe he’d feel like a writer on the ride to the airport and life again would have the theme music of a movie. If he missed nothing else about the two years he wrote, it was being able to elevate his movement through life by imagining theme music. There was AC/DC for the army, Radiohead for Susan and his last year together, and Bill Evans for all the lost ideas of himself. Things always felt more poignant and resolvable. But now, the car was twenty minutes away, and Mike was standing among his life packed into boxes, unsure of the right song. He stared at the wool blanket hiding the woman’s window from his eyes. After taking a beating, Mike still didn’t trust himself to look away.
He sat on his suitcase and looked at the blanket. It was Mike’s barracks bedspread, green and wool, and he noticed two small holes. The streetlight was leaking through them in narrow slants. He realized the army had been long ago, and he saw Dilger beaten only because he was there. He could have witnessed a rape in a fraternity house, and hated himself into manhood for thinking assholes were ever his brothers.
Let it go, he thought. Breathe the way you are supposed to.
But turning from the window, he looked at the blinds shadowed on the oak floor, and saw a cat print on the oak floor. He started talking out loud instead of breathing.
You would not know the place, Susan.
I knocked down the whole wall two months after you were gone. You wanted French doors so the cats could print them with their paws. I just kept going with the sledge until it was all done. You are too extreme, you’d say. I knew I’d come to care nothing about what you thought. You would walk off and close the porch door and pet cats and cry among the windows and the city dark.
I picked up plaster and cracked wall studs for two days. I lay with the rubble the first night, wound in the Indian blanket on one mattress. The cold wind fogged the windows and I could not see out. I then kept my eyes closed.
You have come to my dreams since you died and you smile in the warm rain between dripping trees and I know that somehow you are fine. But that is only in the dream. When I wake and stand in our window, the morning dark windy and furious between the trees, I know that I could never find you again. Sometimes my knees go and I hold the wall.
Mike went quiet long enough for a small rain to start. When the drops became cyclic against the window, the limo honked for him the way the dispatcher had said. Don’t worry if you miss the horn, the accented guy told Mike, the driver will call you on his cell phone. Please know that we take care of everything between the door and the terminal. Mike stood up with his two suitcases, wondering how much they charged hourly to care for him beyond the airport gate.
He didn’t think about Susan when he walked down the stairs. His suitcases were large in the tight space and he focused upon not scratching the walls. His wife would always be alive, and he needed to figure ways to forgive himself for never knowing how to love her that last year. In Mexico, he could change the way he remembered her. He’d take them back to when they tried reinventing love with water sex and warm wind, then forget the two years afterward by filling steno pads with the memories. He’d write without hope or despair, sitting in a lounge beside a plate of orange peelings, and then kayak in the Pacific so he’d come closer to something he felt more than he understood.
Oh, Mexico, it sounds so sweet with the sun sinking low.
His plan might go off like a pop song. Mexico in the morning dark could forever change the image the time of day brought to his mind: gentle, solitary gray light without the slaggy air left by late-night traffic, or the crows that scavenge the cold gutter leaves before dawn. He’d see the wind in palm leaves, not bare hickory branches, and the sun rising behind the ocean would never get lost in the black clouds blown down from Wisconsin. After running in the Pacific morning dark for two weeks, the beach appearing from the receding tide beneath his Teva sandals, he’d forget what Chicago looked like in the moments before dawn.
Mike wheeled the suitcases out the front door. It was colder than three hours ago when he came back from the real estate agency. Every other streetlight was dark, and the rain slanting through the lit lamps was on the verge of becoming snow. The Lincoln idled in the street and the trunk was open, but the driver stood inside his open door. Mike pulled his luggage to the sidewalk and saw that the driver was gray and Balkan. He laughed before he looked back at Mike.
“There’s a nutball here,” he said. “Look at him.”
Mike pitched his luggage inside the trunk. His eighteen months as a cop taught him to ignore anybody who drove professionally. Ambulance drivers and cabbies would talk like channels flipping on a Sony thirty-six-inch television, and this driver rambled with the same visual bytes. Mike wanted to leave Claremont Avenue like he’d snuff out a candle, then walk down the airplane steps into the Mexican white light and ocean-smelling wind. There was pain to bury with his kayak paddle into the blue Pacific waves. There were steno pads to fill and pencils to sharpen.
When he closed the trunk, the driver was pointing at a thin, gray man standing in the mud. His legs were splitting while his arms raised at the elbows. He reached out with small fingers, straining as if leashed, his eyes dead-set. He wanted to lay his small hands on something. The driver looked at Mike and nodded while he smiled around his rodent nose.
“This mad bastard won’t move,” he said. “You can tell him that his mother has balls and he won’t say a word. Why don’t you try?”
The driver grinned and pointed at the man. He waited for Mike to speak, nodding with great enthusiasm.
“Go on,” the driver said, “say his mother dances in the nursing home for pop-machine money.”
Mike realized that Annie was giving up her john. If this guy got a flat tire, people would drive by without noticing. The driver was laughing in the rain, and pointing harder for Mike to talk. This was nothing to see.
“You can’t give this up,” he said. “You can say anything to this goofy bastard. Tell him that his father likes boys.”
Mike tried to get into the john’s eyes, but the man was looking permanently away. He was beyond the three-flat roofs, even the sky made starless by the city lights. He didn’t even have a face. But Mike didn’t connect him to the killer until he recognized his stance from Larry Burrows’s picture “Reaching Out,” the famous shot of a post-battle marine rifle squad in the hills outside Khe Sanh. This john was the tall black marine stiff like a stunned boxer while they kept him from his wounded buddy. He was exact about holding himself back.
This hooker was sadistic. She wanted the john to understand that his options had vanished by using a Vietnam War picture against him.
Feel powerlessness, round-eye, the hooker said. You cannot touch what you think needs your help.
Mike walked and kept the car between himself and this mime-like john. The man saw him, but wouldn’t meet his eyes. The driver was pointing and laughing.
“Let’s go to the airport,” Mike said. “My
New York Times
is getting wet.”
The driver looked at Mike with unbelieving eyes.
“Why don’t you want to tell this zapped asshole to fuck off and die?” he said. “He won’t even move. You can let the crazy prick have it.”
Mike got inside the warm Lincoln. He opened his paper on his knees, but hadn’t looked at it. He took the Fiji water from his coat pocket. The only thing missing was a moving car.
“What could I say,” Mike said. “You took all the best words.”
The driver sat down and closed his door. He seemed calmer.
“I do pick good combinations of curse words,” the driver said. “I am hard to beat.”
Mike watched the john stand in the new snow and reach out while the car passed the street. The driver was green in the dash light and Mike noticed candle flames illuming the hooker’s windows. He let himself believe the sun hadn’t muddied the coral reefs outside Zihuatanejo. When he met eyes with the driver in the rearview mirror, the man seemed unnerved by Mike’s silence.
“I drove a cab in four countries,” he said, “but Lincolns in America. I can curse in four languages better than any whore. I also read three newspapers a day. I am in the streets, but I am not of them.”
Mike Spence held his laughter when he noticed the driver was playing Lite FM. Neil Young sang slowly, his voice like sunlit regret, but Mike couldn’t hear enough to know the exact song.
“I bet you always know right what to say,” he said to the driver.
ALSO BY DANIEL BUCKMAN
Morning Dark
The Names of Rivers
Waters in Darkness
Daniel Buckman served as a paratrooper with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.
Because the Rain
is his fourth novel.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
BECAUSE THE RAIN
. Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Buckman. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by St. Martin’s Press under license from Pan Books Limited.
For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, please contact Picador.
E-mail: [email protected]
The first chapter of this novel previously appeared in different form in
Chicago Noir,
edited by Neal Pollack and published by Akashic Books in 2005.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Buckman, Daniel, 1967–
Because the rain / Daniel Buckman.
p. cm.