Because the Rain
Authors: Daniel Buckman
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Contents
In memory of Jack Daniel Pomon 1980–2003
The pure products of America go crazy.
—
William Carlos Williams
1
The rain streamed off the porch roof and the black sheets dissolved Chicago and they thought themselves behind a waterfall. Mike put his hand on Susan’s cheek, her hair windblown against his knuckles. She held her breath and they bit each other’s lips. After twelve years, it was what they did to make things feel new. But the rain kept coming, beating the leaves from the maples and the elms, turning the gutters into rivulets floating Starbucks pastry bags.
They went upstairs to lie down and the rain fell harder with the late darkness. He held his wife against him, her back warm and damp. She felt the rain through the screen, more than he did, and pushed into his chest until he moved. There had been long days of rain and they never knew the rain from the sky. If the sunlight came, it showed hard before the dusk, and made the streets steam. But there were two weeks before they would talk about the wet summer, a month before the rains ruined July with low, gray skies.
Mike Spence had told Susan he was going to be a cop over delivered Thai food. His academy class was starting in three months down on Monroe by Rico’s, where they once drank vodka martinis, singing Dean Martin songs with a bartender friendly over past tips and watching the fall outs from the police trainee runs spit and hold their sides. Who the hell could they chase, he’d laughed. No soldier would lower himself to be a cop. Now, he was thirty-five, a paratrooper discharged fourteen years ago, and he hadn’t won a thing.
I wrote a book about me, he thought. Winners and losers. That was the risk.
“You’ll stay a year,” his wife said.
“I start in ninety days.”
“I don’t think it’s what you want.”
She sat up and drew the bedsheet around her breasts and pointed in his face. He looked out the window. A writer, he was thinking. Just because that idea moved him didn’t mean it was moving. He felt crazy sometimes, even undone, like he’d been climbing hard but the ladder was up against the wrong wall. In the early darkness, her eyes searched his face.
“Why do you still get this way,” she said.
“I’m no one way anymore,” he said.
“You get these ideas,” she said, “but life isn’t a story. You were just talking about going to Iraq with Quakers. Last year, you were going to backpack through Cambodia. You always attach yourself to something that is not your own.”
He looked at her and then at themselves in the wall mirror. Her biceps were bruised from wrestling with autistic boys from her special education class. In grocery stores, people eyed her arms and stared at him while she scanned cat food and mangoes through the self-checkout. A dyke is going to hit you someday, she’d laugh. Just leave you for dead.
“You’re not a character,” she said.
“You don’t know?” he said.
“I know you’re not a character.”
Mike Spence listened to the rain. He knew his wife saw a bloated cop parked in the wagon outside a 7-Eleven while his partner got a coffee and eyed the Indian girl’s breasts. Pooja, she’d be thinking. My husband’s partner will be eyeing Pooja.
Later, in his shaded room, Mike read his work when Susan was quiet outside the door, listening. There were noises she made, noises she thought he didn’t hear, the way she coughed from breathing slowly through her nose, the floor creak from her shifting weight. As a kind of game, he made his voice like slick rocks, doing Barry White, Al Green, Isaac Hayes. He tried making her laugh, breaking her cover, but she was silent. The abortion had been the price to keep his life, not hers. It was making her eyes hard. A cop, she’d said. After we did it for you to write. He forgot her coughing between the fan creaks and read in the bulb light.
I saw these guys who looked like Todds in the Loop after rush hour. I gave them last names.
Todd Miller. Todd Turner. Todd Stevens.
They were always squinting from the white heat still glinting off bus windows. Six thirty was the earliest I ever watched them leave the First National Building, humping the sidewalk in the white heat of summer, swinging a briefcase up Dearborn Street, then long-stepping among the women with popcorn in the Picasso’s shadow. Todd’s father taught him how to stay low and know how much things cost. He kept a fraction in his head and headed to the El after ten hours at Sidley and Austin, jamming down the subway stairs slick from spilled popcorn. He moved like a golden retriever and loosened his tie. Humiliation for Todd was going from wild-caught sockeye salmon at Whole Foods to the flash-frozen farm-raised fish Costco lets you buy if you pay the fifty dollars a year. He had to ask Jennifer to eat that, look her in those swim-team blue eyes and say things were weird at work.
I wrote a book about my having been a soldier for Todd. He needed to see drunken barracks fights on the weekends, know what he missed when Jacky Bozak and Ernie Chopper threw hands, strung out on crank and Michelob, and my best friend Edward Dilger had Charge of Quarters after the top sergeants went home to duplexes and house trailers. I didn’t hold back for Todd. He read how Dilger beat his knuckles bloody on Bozak’s plate face, himself a new corporal and six months to discharge, but couldn’t make the wired Pollack stop choking the hillbilly. Todd couldn’t leave this earth, suddenly and beautifully with Jennifer in the collapse of a Whole Foods parking lot, and not experience Bozak’s frozen skull take Dilger’s punches. It was like watching a sledge head begin breaking up concrete. Chopper strained to keep his eyes open while his lips went dark.
I waited at Whole Foods meat counters after the novel came out and bought chicken while Todd picked free-range T-bones, his hand cart heavy from organic artichoke hearts in cans. He wore fleeces and suede slipper walking shoes and I knew he’d mess himself if Dilger even aimed his eyes at him and got cold. Edward Dilger taught himself to have still eyeballs by shooting coyotes with a .223 Ruger for the twenty-dollar bounty in Tom Hall County, Texas. Todd never watched a guy like Dilger get dragged off by two MPs for having punched Bozak too long, until his eye hung sideways, and he collapsed against Chopper’s back and dripped blood on his shaved head.
Todd never paid twenty-two dollars to know about guys like my buddy. He did pay dearly for chicken breasts already rubbed with herbs. The army paid Dilger and Sidley paid Todd. The guy couldn’t see the problem.
I’d written about how Dilger was a good soldier but when the MP sticked him by the stairs, four of his teeth bounced off the cinder-block walls like pellets. The CO took his stripes three days later for not calling the MPs first thing. Todd couldn’t be human unless he saw Dilger in Key West two years after the army, Dilger making manhattans at Sloppy Joes, and knew that he’d started shooting speed under his tongue. But Todd probably had some college friend whose parent committed suicide junior year, just after a year in England, and finding Dilger dead in his apartment bathroom didn’t shock him. He loaned heavy for Northwestern Law School and didn’t spare cash for other people’s pain. If he died tomorrow in the collapse of the Whole Foods parking lot, he’d sleep forever in his Range Rover like the pharaohs in mountain tombs.
* * *
In May, after the abortion, Mike and Susan drove Interstate 80 from Chicago to the Rocky Mountains. They rented an old timbered cabin in the pines at the bottom of Estes Canyon. There was good shade from the trees and there was a fast stream coming down from the mountains and a narrow gravel road that dropped steeply from the highway and stopped in the jagged black stumps at the bank below the cabin. There were cottages up the highway, circled by birches, and if there were people, they did not see them. It was early in the season and very cold and rainy at night.
The stream came straight from the Continental Divide, where water became other water, all powerful and cold, but the trout were gone from the shallows and they could not drink the water any more than they could from the Chicago River. If they’d not sent the deposit, he would have left over it. An alpine stream, the Internet ad read, cold, clear snow runoff. He assumed he could dip his cupped hand and drink sloppily, letting the water numb his mouth, but the rental manager dropped off two cases of Evian for the week. Screw this place, Mike said. But Susan calmed him, the way she did after the happiness about his first novel faded like a new car smell. She made him look north where the woods and the canyon walls were all one thing, like a great idea, strangely jagged and soft, but always the same. They were here to let go. They were here to wash it all away and see if they could feel clean again. Relax, she told him. She lowered her voice to say it.
At night, they wrapped themselves in one blanket and sat watching the clouds blow down from the high range. The sky turned green and the lightning splayed like fingers. They tried to make love and it went badly so they held hands and talked about getting new cats and perhaps their own house in the cornfields south of Chicago. They talked like they believed the abortion was not the sad and humiliating thing it truly was. They were cautious with each other. They never talked about the bad dreams or the weak feeling that went to their knees. Sitting still under the blanket, they would make themselves laugh by naming the new cats after cartoon characters or friends they’d had. When the jokes went, they listened to the slackening rain, holding each other, both seeing him in the waiting room with
People
magazine while she lay dilated before the doctor. Then later, when the clouds blew through the canyon, they would decide the farmhouse they wanted must have white clapboards and a long front porch and stained glass in the eastern windows to color the sunrise. I’ll build a fireplace from river rocks, he said. I’ll cut the wood, good hackberry. She lay her head against his shoulder, her hair wet from the leaky awning. I’ll sweep the porch and try not to wake the sleeping cats, she said.
All week they held hands and hiked trails of slate rock slick from the wet spring. They came upon elk herds sleeping in scrub meadows, ground squirrels running between holes like vaudeville comics, and one night watched a coyote nosing by the car. They stopped and studied waterfalls, shooting rapids, boulders dropped among birch trees like monoliths. She took pictures, holding the camera up and down to get in his height. We pick up from here, she said. One day after the next, he thought. Like walking.
They took Interstate 80 home through the stout hills of Nebraska where cattle herds balded pastures and fat kids with sunburned legs waved from overpasses. The sunlight was low and even and white. Susan found new stations when the distance beat the signal. Outside Cheyenne, they heard Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” on college radio, and listened through the static. He wished they could sing it together, let go the way dogs howl.
