Hard Rain (20 page)

He laughed. He laughed and laughed. Jessie watched. He looked like a windup troll toy, run amok. “The point of the story. The point of it. Point. Point. Oh, wow. You're really something.”

Abruptly, the laughing stopped.

Gato Flenser lit another joint. He gave her the soft red look, holding out the joint. Jessie pushed away from the desk, crossed the room, took out her wallet and gave him twenty-five dollars. He let it drop.

“Do you have to go right away?”

“Deadline,” Jessie said.

He nodded. “I don't want your money.”

“Keep it.”

Jessie picked up the van Ronk album. She walked out of the back room, out of the gloom, into the cold wind. Before the door closed, a needle scratched vinyl; music followed her down the street. The volume on Gato's record player was turned up high. Leon Russell did have a zippy way of playing the piano.

18

Route 9 unreeled like a long movie about white lines. No plot, no dialogue, no characters, but it absorbed Jessie like
Citizen Kane
or
The Seven Samurai
. Only when a car honked or flashed by would she remember what she was doing and glance down at the speedometer, to find the needle dipping down to forty, thirty, twenty-five miles an hour.

The pressure behind her eyes slowly eased. By the time she reached the stoplight at Route 8, the fog had lifted from her mind, leaving her somewhat like a country after a long drought: dry-mouthed, inert and wanting a shower. In her case the weather had been internal, and any famine mental.

A mailbox marked the third turning on the left. No name appeared on it, nothing but faded homemade decorations: blue flowers curling around what might have been a peace symbol; the paint was too weathered to tell.

After a few hundred feet, the road narrowed abruptly and the pavement ended. Jessie steered around the ruts and bumps, up a long hill lined on both sides with bare trees and banks of fallen leaves. At the top of the hill, she stopped the car. A broad meadow lay on the other side, stretching to a wooded rise in the distance. Tucked into a clearing at the base of the rise was a farm: white house, red barn, unpainted sheds. Spacious Skies. Jessie looked up: the sky was a single low dark cloud, like a cast-iron lid over a simmering pot, and darkening with the approach of night. She drove down the hill.

The house looked better from a distance; big and rambling, it might have been something long ago. But now the white paint was peeling; water stains darkened the dormers; and the porch sagged. Jessie parked beside a rusted engine block and a heap of bald tires, climbed the steps and knocked on the door. Nothing happened.

She knocked again, harder. No one opened the door. No sound came from inside. “Hello?” she called. “Hello?” Silence.

The door, heavy and scarred, had a crescent-shaped window at eye level. The glass was cracked and held together with masking tape. Jessie peered through it.

She saw into the front hall: a high-ceilinged room with faded wallpaper and a bare wooden floor. A down jacket hung on a wall hook; stairs led up into darkness.

“Hello?”

Silence.

Jessie walked around the house, thinking a car might be parked on the other side. There was no car, just a dirt yard with a fat brown turkey pecking in it. Jessie crossed the yard to the barn.

This wasn't the kind of barn Norman Rockwell would have liked: most of the red stain had faded away, lingering only in patches like a skin disease; the boards were warped, cracked, rotting. There were no windows to peek through, and the big sliding door was closed. Jessie knocked, but got no answer. She didn't hear shifting hooves or the flapping of clipped wings. Had the farm been abandoned? Only the presence of the single turkey said no, and the down jacket in the front hall.

Jessie reached for the handle of the barn door. Entering someone's house without permission was wrong, but what was the rule on barns? City people couldn't be expected to know. Jessie slid the door open.

The barn was almost empty: no horses, no cows, no birds, no hay, no machinery. Just cobwebs and a big hump under a tarpaulin at the back. Then she looked up. And saw—

What?

A second-rate reproduction?

An oversized joke?

Or the Sistine ceiling of a hippie chapel?

The ceiling of the barn was covered with an enormous painting of the album cover of
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
. John, Paul, George and Ringo, and all those other faces, heads and in-jokes, blown up bigger than life-size. They gazed down in silent splendor, frozen in 1967. The signatures of the artists were strewn among the red flowers that spelled “The Beatles”: Digger, Hank, Jojo, Jim and Ruthie, Blue, Oddjob, Hart, Rama, She, François et Marlene, Disco, Stork, Sunny, Lara, Susie, Cityboy, Pat, and others she couldn't read—the paint, applied directly to the wooden boards, was fading.

Jessie stared up at
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
for a long time. Then she walked through the shadows to the back of the barn. She wanted to see under the tarpaulin. It was coated with dust and mold. She raised one corner.

There was a car underneath. A blue car, the same shade of blue as the BMW. Jessie tore off the tarpaulin in one jerk; but it wasn't the BMW.

The car was a Corvette, shiny and unmarked. Jessie was about to replace the tarpaulin when she realized there was something odd about the car. It was immaculate, but not new. The design reminded her of the model Buzz and Todd drove in “Route 66.” The blue Corvette must have been as old as
Sgt. Pepper
.

Jessie opened the door and checked the odometer: eighty-seven miles. It was what it seemed—an old car that had hardly been driven, with a Vermont vanity license plate:
PAT
69. Jessie covered it with the tarpaulin and went outside.

The turkey was still pecking at the dirt. All at once it straightened, twisted its head around, paused. Jessie heard a car approaching. She walked quickly around to the front of the house.

A scraped and dented pickup was bouncing up the road. It stopped beside Jessie's car. A woman got out of the cab. Clothes: flannel shirt, down vest, peasant skirt, hiking boots. Face: broad, with even features. Hair: salt and pepper, parted in the middle, hanging down to the small of her back. Makeup: none. Jewelry: a big gold hoop in one ear.

The woman faced Jessie: “Looking for something?”

“A woman named Blue,” Jessie said. “I was told I could find her here.”

But Jessie already knew she'd found her: the woman had eyes of Wedgwood blue, clear and hard as porcelain.

“By who?” the woman asked.

“A man who owns a record store in Bennington.”

“Not Gato?”

“Yes.”

“Shit. Is he still around?” Jessie nodded. The woman gave her another look. “If you're in real estate, you're wasting your time. I'm not selling. I thought all the agents knew that.”

Jessie shook her head. “My name's Jessie Shapiro. I'm not a real estate agent. I'm looking for someone and thought you might be able to help me.”

“Who?”

“Pat Rodney.”

“Pat Rodney?” Jessie felt the clear blue eyes probing hers. She herself could read nothing in them, although there was something familiar about Blue. She couldn't identify it. Perhaps she was simply a familiar type—earth mother—grown older and harder.

“That's right,” Jessie said. “He used to live here, didn't he?”

“Did Gato tell you that?”

“No.”

“Who, then?”

Jessie's mind quickly sketched in a lie involving
Rolling Stone
and communes recollected, but she abandoned it. Hadn't the truth swayed Buddy Boucher? Yes, but he had children. Jessie had seen no sign of children at Spacious Skies, few signs of life of any kind. She went with the truth anyway.

“Pat told me himself,” she said. “He's my ex-husband.”

Blue's mouth opened, wide enough for Jessie to see she was missing a molar. “He is?”

“Yes. He's disappeared with my daughter, Kate. Our daughter. I know he's in Vermont, and I thought he might have come here.”

Blue quickly turned and looked down the road. It was empty. She took a deep breath. “I haven't seen him,” she said. “Not in years. What do you mean he's disappeared?”

“He didn't bring Kate back from a weekend visit. And he hasn't been seen since last Friday.”

The blue eyes seemed to focus on something far away. “Where is this?”

“Pat lives in Venice, California.”

Blue nodded, almost imperceptibly, as though that made sense. “You came all the way from California?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you think he's been here?”

Jessie told her about Buddy Boucher. Blue's eyes stopped gazing far away; they looked quickly at Jessie, then glanced off. She muttered something Jessie didn't catch.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Blue looked down at her; she was slightly taller and much broader than Jessie. “He really has a kid?”

“Yes.” Jessie showed her the picture; Blue barely glanced at it. Jessie saw no sign of recognition on her face.

“And you were married to him?”

“Yes. You make it sound strange.”

“I do? You just don't seem his type, that's all. If you don't mind my saying so. Maybe he's changed.”

“Why don't I seem his type?”

“I didn't mean anything by it. You're too … straight-looking, I guess.”

Jessie swallowed her annoyance. Nothing would be gained by quarreling with Blue. “You're probably right. We're divorced, after all.”

“A real divorce?”

“What does that mean?”

“You were really married? Officially? Or just living together?”

“Really married. It happens.”

“I heard. But it doesn't sound like the man.”

“Pat?”

“That's right. Pat. He wasn't the marrying kind, at least not when I knew him.”

“When was that?”

A cold gust of wind blew across the meadow, whipping Blue's long hair across her face. Overhead the sky was the color of charcoal, and even darker in the east. “You might as well come in,” Blue said. “If you don't mind watching me work.”

Blue unlocked the door and led Jessie into the house. It wasn't much warmer inside. They walked through dusty, unlit rooms—furnished with dilapidated chairs, stained futons, shelves of bricks and boards, rickety card tables—into the kitchen at the back of the house.

Blue turned on the light over the sink, revealing a country kitchen that would never be featured in
Town and Country:
unsanded, unpolyurethaned floor; yellow walls that hadn't been painted in a generation; dirty windows overlooking the barnyard. Only the stove and refrigerator didn't fit: they were big and new.

Blue took a stainless steel bowl full of dough out of the refrigerator, mixed in a package of chocolate chips and started scooping cookie-sized blobs onto baking sheets. Her hands moved quickly, without wasted motion. Not once did she dip a finger into the dough for a taste. Jessie had never in her life baked cookies without sampling the dough.

Blue turned on the oven. “Did he … did Pat ever mention me?”

“No. He didn't talk much about the time he spent here.”

Blue slid the baking tins onto the oven racks. “It's been a while,” she said. She closed the oven door. Suddenly the implication of Blue's question hit Jessie, and she felt the full force of her fatigue. She'd spent a lot of time coping with the women in Pat's life during their marriage; she'd never thought about those who came before. She sat down at the kitchen table.

“Yeah, sit,” Blue said. “Like some tea?”

“Please.”

Blue boiled water, sprinkled tea leaves in mugs a little less lopsided than Gato's. Her tea, too, smelled of dandelions. Jessie didn't need dandelions. She needed caffeine, and lots of it. Still, she was grateful for its warmth; a cold draft came through the walls and found its way down her back. Blue didn't seem to notice; but she wasn't wearing a thin wool sweater from Bullocks; she had on her flannel shirt and down vest and a turtleneck underneath.

Blue opened the window by the table and flung out a handful of birdseed. The turkey squawked and ran stiff-leggedly across the yard, an intense look in its tiny eyes. Blue sat down. “Six more days of birdseed,” she said.

“Six more days?”

“Till Thanksgiving. What kind of car did he buy?”

“A black van with red flames on the sides.”

“Red flames?”

“Have you seen it?”

Blue shook her head. “Red flames don't sound like him.”

Jessie was getting impatient with Blue's expertise on Pat's character. “Will you keep an eye out for it at least?”

Blue's mug hovered, halfway to her lips. “Sure,” she said. “But why would he come here? I haven't seen him since nineteen sixty-nine.”

“Because I think he's come back to look up some old friends. There was one with him when he bought the car.”

“Oh? Who?”

“I was hoping you'd have some ideas.”

“Sorry. Everyone's gone from those days.”

“Not everyone, apparently. The car dealer saw Pat, Kate and another man.”

“Another man?”

“Yes.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don't have a description. The friend didn't go inside.” Then she remembered that he might have.

Blue sipped her tea. She was staring at the liquid over the rim of the mug. Jessie said, “Do you have any children?”

“No.”

Blue rose and took the cookies from the oven. Jessie smelled buttered almonds and chocolate, but she wasn't hungry: the tuna sandwich was stuck inside her. Blue didn't offer one, anyway, didn't try one herself. She began putting them in brown paper bags, six to a bag.

“How long did Pat live here?