Because the Rain (8 page)

7

Goetzler sat with his friend for the last time in the sauna, his cell phone wrapped in a towel, and waited for Nick to call him back about Annie. Murphy sold his bungalow before the realtor had put out a sign. In the morning, he was leaving Lakeview, the Volvo-choked corner of Bosworth and Wrightwood, for a lifetime of cold-water kayaking in Lake Tomahawk, Wisconsin. Everything Mary Therese wanted to keep was already up north, he’d said.

Murphy’s house was solid, but nothing special. Chicago bungalows were only two-bedroom apartments with an attic and half basement.

He then tried telling Murphy about the cop he’d seen beating a man in the headlights of a Range Rover, but Murphy was too high from getting seven hundred thousand dollars after having bought the place for thirty-five. I was cutting through an alley, Goetzler told him. This cop was hitting a hairsprayed suit, holding his balled collar and giving him jabs.

Murphy was too nature-dreamy to listen.

“The guy must have mouthed the cop,” Goetzler said, “but the cop had the honor to smack him in front of the world. You could tell the guy had never been hit. But he’ll never learn that the law is not money.”

Murphy talked right over Goetzler.

“I’m trying to understand how the young couple who bought this bungalow for seven hundred thousand could move in with five percent down,” he said. “The salary he must have.”

“You were a public defender. This guy is a lawyer.”

“He’s thirty-five and she doesn’t work.”

“It wasn’t like this when you bought here,” Goetzler said. “These are different people than the people you know.”

“I know people.”

“The people a public defender knows.”

“You’re not going to make me bitter, Donny. You haven’t won yet.”

“I’m just telling you.”

“No. You’re wanting flesh and you don’t know how to get your pound. Just buy the cabin next to mine and we’ll think about other things.”

“And eat overcooked steaks in Wisconsin supper clubs?”

“Let’s just sweat, Donny.”

Goetzler would tell Murphy that the cop was tired of keeping the world fair for men who believed themselves absolutely correct. He serviced them, they humiliated him, and the cop was done with this two-stroke food chain. Aware of the possible price, the fallout from hitting a civilian, this cop took his pound of flesh anyway. But Murphy wouldn’t care enough to listen. He’d retired from the public defender’s office, the years of hopeless first-degree murder defenses, and only planned to see game wardens toting old .38s until his last sunrise. They sat quietly until Murphy told Goetzler he’d be back next summer and that he’d call him. They parted and agreed to sweat in June. Murphy would stall the cabin owner for a couple months so Goetzler could think about buying.

Later, in the locker room, Goetzler dressed. He used number 346 because it was close to the security mirror and he could watch men’s hands in the bubbled glass. Always keep watch of their hands, Kerm told him when he became a flatfoot. The one thing you know for sure is that you don’t know what will happen next.

After he got booted from the force, he sat in a windowless room for twenty-five years and ran focus groups of plumbing contractors, the fat sons of the guys who started the businesses, and reported on why they got all their safety boots from Weber Industrial Supply, but not their wrenches. He thought if he watched their hands that he might appear as a hunter among men who have never hunted. But it was always hard to get the guys to sit down, after they ate the free focus group pizza and had a few Heinekens. Goetzler would have to ask them five or six times.

After he tied his shoes, he looked up to meet eyes with Mike Rosen, the lawyer who almost forced him into group therapy. Rosen sat on a stool and talked into his cell phone while he threw towels on the floor. Melanoma scars flecked his back.

“I paid them extra money to use new paintbrushes,” Rosen said into the phone. “The fucking contractor assured me. I have it in writing.”

He squinted hard at Goetzler, but Goetzler never rang a bell.

“How do I know?” Rosen said. “Because the brush hairs are dried in my fucking trim. They come off old brushes like that.”

Life sure got you, Goetzler thought.

Mike Rosen left the ACLU in 1974 to take dope cases and cash retainers. The draft was over and his adolescence was never interrupted by Vietnam. He bought the first car phone and parked his red Mercedes in the fire lane outside criminal court. The yellow lines meant nothing like the signs stuck in the sidewalk. He talked loudly with the top down and waved his two-carat pinkie ring at the trustee inmates picking up cigarette butts. He’d tell people about getting oral sex while sailing off Sanibel Island. When the cops asked him to move, he lifted a finger and kept talking. But he had a spastic colon. His fancy Italian shoes were always flat behind a stall door in the second-floor men’s room at Cook County Criminal Court. He came out bloated and mean and made juries hate cops like strep throat.

He played juries like a matinee actor who had stock in the show. Goetzler watched him pit the West Side blacks against the South Side Irish in the paneled jury boxes. The tiebreakers were the Puerto Ricans from Chicago Avenue, and they’d bite their tongues to keep from laughing when he got a uniform two seconds away from yelling
Fuck off.
Poppy has something on his mind, they’d say of the cop. A real carbonis. They’d clap for Rosen after the verdict, dancing the samba in their padded chairs. We are the people, they’d sing. Rosen gave them his cards in the hallway and lent quarters for the pop machine.

Goetzler knew Mike Rosen wouldn’t remember him, even if reminded. There wasn’t a chance. The guy could see Goetzler every day until he went to die in Florida, and nothing would jar loose.

After thirty years, revenge seemed romantic enough that completing the act might make another man finally want Goetzler’s moments. But he needed a way to make Rosen see him without Rosen knowing he was looking. Goetzler walked slowly past Mike Rosen and threw his towel in the hamper. They’d been sharing the same gym these years, but coming at different times.

Rosen pointed at Goetzler on the stand and tapped his left tassel loafer, the courtroom hot and airless because Judge Hoey ordered the fans cut for making noise. He looked at the jury while they fanned themselves with notebook paper. He kept his finger aimed at Goetzler’s neck. The judge was watching dust motes in the window light. He sweat thick lines from his forehead.

Donald Goetzler didn’t have probable cause to arrest Harris Roosevelt, Rosen said, so he shot him.

He smiled and showed white teeth. Some jurors let their eyes close, others nodded. You stay quiet and eat it today, Kerm told Goetzler. Hoey likes to urinate his first Absolut martini by five o’clock at the Drake. He’ll push things along. Goetzler stared past Rosen, watching the kid he shot try remembering not to cross his legs. The kid was tall and his crutches leaned against an unused chair. Goetzler couldn’t pull him from a pair and thought that forgetting the kid made him more professional. Silence, he thought. He would just sit and look.

We know all about cops like Donald Goetzler, Rosen said.

The lady jurors fanned themselves and nodded. They were heavyset matrons in feathered hats with lace over their sweaty faces and held small purses from Woolworth.

They bring the jungles of Vietnam back to our communities, he said. He just shot this kid in an alley.

Goetzler heard a few jurors a-huh. The kid’s neck sagged from sleep.

Our children are not the Viet Cong, Rosen said.

The jurors mouthed no. Some even half said it.

Your Honor, Rosen said, I move you dismiss this case on the grounds of police misconduct. I also request that the court require Officer Donald Goetzler to undergo psychological testing before returning to duty. Judge Hoey banged his gavel. Request granted, he said. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his black robe. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and his hands were shaking. Goetzler rose from the stand while three Mexicans snuck into the courtroom with burritos. No matter what happens, Kerm told him, we got the fix.

8

It rained when the airport taxi turned down avenue Foch, a cold slanting rain, the way it rained when Annie stood on the gum stains at Charles de Gaulle Airport, forgetting the cop, and how he didn’t run last night with the streetlight in his sweatshirt. In the cab, Raymond Poincaré became Malakoff, and the city disappeared between wiper passes. There was only the Arab, herself, and his eyes rising into the rearview mirror. She drew the coat over her legs, and didn’t think about the cop running, or the way his eyes stuck to the ground. Paris was time for the quiet. Dreaming, she thought, kept you from living.

Without notice, Annie left Nick for short weeks like this, five days every four months, but never in the summer. Then, it was her heels on the Gold Coast sidewalks, Erie, Ontario, Chestnut with the cars’ headlights against bumpers, the virgin daiquiris with hedge fund managers from Atlanta, road time with Bobby up to the North Shore where oncologists paid big money to love her like a dream wife. Paris was long walks with headphones and Billie Holiday,
love that’s fresh and still unspoiled,
and the Peugeots with hard clutches going fast past the Invalides. Billie Holiday’s eyes lifted her until she thought herself the golden leaves. For five days, it was only she and the music: Gerry Mulligan and Stan Getz, their sounds like waves hitting rocks, the feral, bent notes of John Coltrane, Bill Evans making the silence loud enough to lilt. She wore the headset and didn’t talk for the week. Not a word. She played mute for the hotel staff and carried a notepad and wrote what she wanted in her University of Illinois French.

In Paris, she liked being jazz. Just one loud silence.

Goetzler and hotel johns gave her Dizzy Gillespie and “Night in Tunisia” on an iPod, and hot peppermint tea while the altitude winds pushed night clouds from O’Hare to de Gaulle. There were walks along Raymond Poincaré with the shop windows wet from the October storms, perfumed lotion in glass jars, a king-size room at Le Parc Mur, smuggled joints smoked slowly in hot baths, Miles Davis playing in the taxicab, his horn tense like cats about to fight, and the driver speeding across Pont d’Iena in the early night. They got her these five days.

The wind quit her last afternoon and the fading light turned oddly warm. The people walked up the Trocadero steps in their coats from the morning. She crossed to the left and walked along the brown Seine. Some pouty Germans went by in a tourist boat, then the winds came again. The river turned choppy and the current went sideways into the stern but the old men remained on the top deck, their hands upon the railings. She held her sunglasses to her face and wondered which men would try offering extra money to dig feces from her rectum. There was no way of guessing the type who’d ask. The first guy who did, a Lincoln Park intellectual property lawyer, inquired while he picked a toddler’s juice cup off the dining-room table. Is a hundred dollars enough, he said. There was a picture of his green-eyed wife, a wedding shot, some gazebo in the suburbs with Honda Accords passing in the background. It was on the mantel, the wall up the stairway, the nightstand. Annie had seen the picture for three paid hours and forgot the woman’s face every time she looked away.

Later, Annie sat on the Metro, the number ten to Place d’Italie, watching the people bounce in the next car. Only the windows truly moved, twisting and raising, but the people bounced the same.

*   *   *

In Vietnamese, Annie’s name was Vu Le Thuy, tornado teardrop, the family name written first. Her father believed the hard wind came before all. Huong meant perfume and a river the emperors once watched. Annie was wet on cheeks.

The woman from the Lutheran church, her foster mother, held up a card with her name written on it. Le Thuy in thick black letters. It was the cue for Annie to pronounce her name slowly. She practiced for the women that came for coffee, gray ladies with hard hair and plastic flower arrangements on their kitchen tables. She made Annie understand about going slow by moving her fingers like they walked. Le Thuy, Annie mumbled. She breathed twice between the two words of her name.

It is poetry, the ladies said. Pure poetry.

The woman never called her Annie, but she kept a special Annie room with posters from the musical. There were small dolls still in boxes. Three stuffed dogs. She’d sit in the room, her blue housecoat losing velour, and play an eight-track of the original score. She only sang certain lines, then hummed and stared at Andrea McArdle’s autographed headshot, smiling as if the actress’s mother. Her husband yelled for her to close the door. She heard nothing but the music and hugged a stuffed dog.

“I love you, tomorrow,” she sang.

He put cotton in his ears and turned up the TV. He liked shows about wild animals—the power of a mongoose’s jaw, the way badgers mate—and he sat up in his La-Z-Boy when lions got a zebra, wolves an elk. He’d smile and point at the screen with his cigarette. There it is, he’d say. All you need to know about anything.

The man was a master sergeant when he retired from the air force. Just a master sergeant, he told people, not a chief. In 1966, he helped build the airstrip at Phu Bai and hauled dirt in a dump truck through Hue City ten years before Annie was born. That was why she lived in Watega, Illinois, eating homemade beef stew with the man and his wife, and watching the sunlight streak the field mud outside the kitchen window. He bet he drove dirt right past this girl’s house. He got to know Hue City like a frequented diner. The woman’s face was round, her hair stiff, and she nodded while her husband spoke. She played the organ at Good Shepherd Lutheran where the pastor was hoping to sponsor a boat person. He asked for volunteers on a cold Easter Sunday in March.

“Christians know Christians by their circumcised hearts,” he said. “It is our mark.”