Four Kinds of Rain (28 page)

Bob looked at the screen and saw the two men and the woman starting to have sex with a huge, hairy thing with one eye. Behind them was a paper moon.

Bob felt ashamed for being in such a place.

He slipped out into the main aisle, light-headed, and walked down toward the screen. He looked in each aisle, many of which held two or three single men, all of them with newspapers on their laps.

On the screen a character was saying, “We are the gods of Venus,” and Bob had a thought that soon we could send porn to other planets. Porn and sex toys, and wouldn’t that be fine.

Yeah, eventually a scientist could look through the Hubble telescope and see a used condom on the moon. Hey, hey, hey!

He felt faint again and for a second forgot why he was here in the … theater, which he could no longer name. And in fact, was it even the theater, or was it the Lodge? He peered down the dark rows, his gun in his hand, and saw someone else he thought he knew … who was that?

The guy looked like Young Finnegan, and he was really working it there, up and down with his hand, and making “ahhhha ahhhh” noises. What was he doing here, Bob thought. Why was Young Finnegan here at the Lodge jerking off to a porn movie? Bob staggered on, his throat dry, the pain now radiating all over his body like a radio signal, and he had forgotten just why it was … and how … and he wished the couple on the other planet would stop humping the moon man.

He was in row three when he saw Meredith and Rudy and they were screwing right there in their seats and they were very young and had long hair and they saw him and gave him the black power sign, the old clenched fist … and he heard this dripping and felt hot stuff leaking down his legs and into his groin.

Oh yeah, this was the dawning of the Age of fucking Aquarius, didn’t they all know? Why don’t we do it in the road?

And on the screen there was a dog in the story now and he had on silver underpants and Bob didn’t want to look at that for too long.

He walked farther down the rows and saw more people he knew, or felt like he knew … people wearing berkas, and in the second row there was something lying there that might have been a body, but it had no head, and Bob felt as though he would throw up, and there were all his old patients in row one, smiling and waving at him, Ethel and Perry and whoa … Emile, too … but with a bashed-in head … Bob felt a wave of compassion for him … tenderness even, and gratitude, too, because he’d obviously forgiven Bob and come here to the Lodge today or tonight, whatever, to hear the Rockaholics play.

And then there was something else, something he hadn’t counted on. There was a hot, red rain leaking down from the roof, and at first he couldn’t understand what it was … but then he remembered the three other kinds of rain from the hospital and he knew that this was it, the fourth, the last.

A red rain, dripping down and covering them all … all his friends and all his enemies sitting in the COOL theater in the middle of the afternoon.

And he knew what it was, of course. He knew exactly what it was. It was a rain of blood.

And wasn’t that something? They said no man could make rain—why, only God could do that—but Bob had proved them wrong.

He had made this rain without any divine assistance. Yes he had, a rain of blood dripping down over all of them, and he knew Utu would like it, too….

Yes, he would. Wasn’t that what he was about? Wasn’t that what all gods were about. Four kinds of rain, but only one was fit for mankind.

Then he saw somebody coming from out of the left side of the theater and he looked up and saw Jesse running for the left exit and he felt so happy to see her. What a great combination they were onstage. He wanted to get over to her, tell her what the playlist was going to be tonight, today … but she was already at the exit door. And she was working it, really working it, pushing the exit bar on the door, but the bar was stuck … ha ha, in reverse gear, Bob thought.

She couldn’t get out, either. No one could escape the past, why even try? You try and try and try to transform yourself, but you won’t make it, dude … all you can do is change your hair. Ha ha.

He was standing next to her now and he touched her back.

She turned around and looked at him.

“Get away,” she said, pointing the gun at him. “I’ll kill you. I will.”

Bob smacked her in the face and her head snapped back. He reached for her neck, but she smacked him in the head with the briefcase and he fell back.

She ran by him, up the battered little steps to the stage in front of the screen, and Bob looked at her up there, caught in the spotlight, the movie playing over her face, and when he looked back at the crowd he saw old friends waving to him, old movement pals who had long ago moved to the burbs and left their politics behind. He saw his mother and father out there, as well, and they were looking out at him and shaking their heads in disapproval, oh, but what did they know?

And there was the
Today
show crew with their cameras, and there was Dave and Lou Anne with their faces bleeding and their eyes and tongues gouged out, but hey, they’d made it. And there was the old gang at the Lodge screaming for him and Jesse to get up on the stage and do their thing one more time. Old and Young Finnegan and Abbie and Nixon, too … all of them out there like the old
Sgt. Pepper’s
album … and Lenny and Terry and all the wise guys.

And then from behind him Bob heard a moaning sound, and he turned toward the screen and saw the fat little actor wearing the mask of Utu as he severed off one of the actress’s pale arms with his electric saw. That was perfect, Utu had shown up, too, and maybe, maybe he was running it all …. Yes, wasn’t it funny if the old Sumerian god had been playing with them all this time strictly for his own entertainment.

Bob had always laughed at such ideas as Fate, but now it seemed entirely possible. Anything seemed entirely possible….

They were all there except two guys and now remarkably Bob saw them coming in at the back of the theater. The gendarmes. Yes, Geiger and Garrett were there, too. All of them convening for a very special episode of
The Life of Bob.

The two detectives were standing there in the back of the theater talking to the little black ticket man and he was pointing down the rows, and the cops were holding their hands over their eyes and squinting and trying to see through the pouring red rain, and now Jesse was up on the stage, frozen there in the spotlight, and Bob was somehow up on the stage with her, not ten feet away, but she was blinded by the film and he aimed his pistol at her head.

“You deserve this, you bitch,” he yelled.

Jesse turned and tried to lift her own gun, but she was several seconds too late. Bob had her dead in his sights. Dead on, and wouldn’t this be a treat for the bloody crowd who might just be too jaded for a simple rock concert. No, they had all been through way too many oldies concerts to get any kick out of them anymore. They needed something raw. Something rawer and realer than reality TV, something that could match the blood dripping from the ceiling. And Bob knew just what it was they needed.

She was his.

He held the gun on her, staring her down, wanting to pull the trigger, wanting so badly to do the one right thing, the definitive thing …
blow the bitch away
and with her all the years of haplessness and failure…. He needed to do this, he should just go ahead and pull the trigger, but instead he found himself thinking of the baby, the goddamn baby he never wanted. The kid, his kid with blue eyes and a round, smooth, pink-cheeked face.

The child who looked up at him and smiled. And said, “Daddy.”

It was no use, no good.

Bob turned the gun away from her. And saw Garrett and Geiger racing down the aisles, their own guns drawn.

Bob aimed the gun at the first one. Saw him clearly. Saw him so clearly, and held his hand lightly on the trigger.

Good old Geiger, Bob thought, as the first bullet tore through him.

He felt it rip through his arm (whoa, that hurt), and behind it, a second one hit his chest, and finally, the third came for him from the left side.

It did what he had never been able to do, take his head out of gear.

And as he fell he saw them all out there waving and screaming his name. They loved him, they all loved and understood his sacrifice, Bob thought, all of the people he had known and would like to have known … cheering and calling his name.

“Bob … Bob … Bob … Bob …”

The third bullet blew out his brain, and as he faded Bob saw an assemblage of stars, and in the distance a lovely woman, running, running over a starry staircase and disappearing into a whirlpool of red rain.

“Where’d that Reardon woman get to?” Geiger said, as they watched the ambulance pull away.

“I don’t know,” Garrett said. “But she’s a waitress without much dough. How far can she go?”

“Heard she’s from West Virginia,” Geiger said, as they watched the wrecker tow Jesse’s car away.

“So we’ll get out an all points there,” Garrett said.

“Only one problem, though,” Geiger said.

“What’s that?” Garrett said.

“She does have some money and runs to a foreign country, I’m not sure we can bring her back for questioning. I mean, we got nothing else on her.”

“Yeah,” Garrett said. “That’s right.”

“Anyway, that’s the sad end of Dr. Bobby. Know what?”

“What’s that?” Garrett said.

“Between you and me? I’m gonna miss that guy.”

“Miss messing with him, you mean,” Garrett said.

“Well, yeah, what else?” Geiger said, as he got into their Crown Vic. “But there was something about the guy. You gotta admit. He was a special kind of asshole.”

“Right,” said Garrett. “I’ll give you that.”

“Yeah,” Geiger said. “Funny thing.”

“What’s that?” Garrett said.

“Thing is,” Geiger said, “I had a real jones about shooting that son of a bitch. But when I finally did it, it didn’t feel right. ‘Cause just before I fired I saw his face.”

“Yeah?” Garrett said.

“Yeah,” Geiger said. “And the bastard was smiling at me.”

“Weird,” Garrett said. “You think it was death by cop?”

“Yeah, I do,” Geiger said. “And I ask you, partner, where is the great satisfaction in that?”

“Know what you mean,” Garrett said. “The pleasures in this job are few and far between.”

Geiger nodded in agreement, then stomped on the gas, and the two detectives shot down Broadway toward a crab cake, a bottle of beer, and a shot back. At Bertha’s, their favorite hang.

The beach at Maya, Mexico, is white and the surf is perfect. In the morning Jesse walked down it to a little palm frond bar called the Frog and had coffee and eggs with
chili verde.
Then after reading the
International Tribune
and talking to a couple of Canadian expats, she went into the small town where she’d found a woman, Sylvia Hernandez, who had agreed to teach her Spanish. Jesse had worried that she might not be able to pick it up, the same worry she’d always had since she was a kid. That she wasn’t too bright, that she couldn’t learn things that other people took for granted. But as usual, she was wrong. In fact, Sylvia said as they studied on the back porch, she had a real aptitude for languages. Of her five new students, Jesse was by far the best.

That was good, Jesse thought, because she wanted her boy to be multilingual. The world was changing so quickly. What was important was to keep up with it, to understand that the changes didn’t come every ten or fifteen years now but within weeks, or months.

Everything was connected now, she thought, through computers, satellites, and what you knew one day was outdated the very next.

Of course, there were some things that changed more slowly, and here in the village by the sea she could enjoy them for a while. The sea, the beach, the trees, the birds … the Mexican music. In town there was even a bar where a blues band played. She heard them as she rode by on her bicycle just the other day.

She could feel the tug of the place. The idea of going in there and singing, playing blues again … it was pretty appealing. Maybe after she had the kid she’d stop down, see if they needed a singer.

That was what she missed most when she thought of Bob. He was a great guitar player, unselfish, not the kind that went on endless jams but spare, playing only enough notes to make the tune work.

That’s what had attracted her most about him. Not his endless talk, his anger, his obsession with money. Just the way he played the guitar and hung out with the band after the gig. She’d only asked him about the money so they wouldn’t end up broke. What she really liked was everyday life, not having to struggle just to make ends meet. And that was what she wanted to give Bob Junior.

Yes, she thought, as she walked down the beach. She’d call the baby Bob, after his dad. She owed him that much. He was a madman who lived in a dream world and she saw now that he had always wanted to die. That was the point of the whole thing, she thought, as she felt the warm water rush over her ankles.

If he couldn’t make the past come to life then he would hurry the present to its end. He hadn’t thought that was the point of it all, but really it was. Bob would have never made it as a roving citizen of the world … he had invested everything in the past. That was where he was comfortable, living in a dream. A dream of purity and goodness, and anything less sent him into some kind of rage.

Well, when the baby came, Jesse thought, there would be no more of that. The sixties would never be mentioned in her house, nor would any of its heroes or ideals. The past was an octopus, and its tentacles would pull you right down to the bottom of the sea.

She looked up at the moon and felt the wind on her face. It felt so good, so clean, and Bob Junior was growing daily inside her.

She wondered what he would look like, of course, but even more so, she wondered what he would be like. Strong and practical, she prayed, with maybe a musical bent.

And helpful, she thought as she felt the waves splash on her legs. Yes, she had no doubt that Bob Junior would be a very bright and helpful child.