Because the Rain (20 page)

But the Cadillac was new: the oil hadn’t been changed, and the seat never molded to Odo’s backside, thick from prison carbohydrates. First thing, Kerm drove to Daytona because he was retired, and took a redheaded schoolteacher just turned forty-one. Goetzler imagined him holding the wheel with one hand, smiling more about the new car than this younger woman who had a thing for hotel rooms. Full sticker is for stiffs, Donny, he’d say.

Before Goetzler’s father died, he lay in the hospital sheets, whiter than the walls at Resurrection Hospital, asking Goetzler when Kerm was coming. Goetzler figured his uncle was shacked up and he just didn’t know where. The old man was calling his little brother “the shot,” shortened from big shot, never knowing he cuckolded him for ten years. Last year, Goetzler’s mother died from Lou Gehrig’s, and after her funeral at Rago’s, Kerm walked his father to the parking lot, perhaps intending a confession. They only talked about selling the farm in Gray’s Lake because they’d stopped hunting together.

“There’s no aptitude test to be a cop,” his father told Goetzler from the bed, “but you know there’s one to be a machinist.”

He’d learned not to hear him.

When Kerm returned with the grapefruit and the Clementine oranges, Goetzler’s father was already displayed at Rago’s. He came to the funeral parlor in a wrinkled madras, having seen the
Tribune
’s obituaries, and complaining about the traffic back from the schoolteacher’s condo in Lincolnwood. I found a Chicago paper north of Indianapolis, he’d said. The broad saw our name. Goetzler stood in his Weber Industrial Supply suit, charcoal gray, waiting for Kerm to notice his new gold oyster Rolex, but his uncle only talked about steak houses in Cincinnati.

Goetzler’s father had coworkers, guys like him who wore windbreakers to mass, but not friends. They left the wake after shaking his hand for the second time, and never gathered for Early Times and Schlitz. Afterward, Kerm ducked the priest and drove Goetzler down Lincoln Avenue in the rain, headed for the Fireside Inn on Wells Street because he knew the bartender poured heavy if you tipped a five after the first drink. There were still lipsticked Salem butts in the ashtray from the Florida trip, a half-full pint of peppermint schnapps under the passenger seat. He held the wheel with two fingers and sank into the bench seat the way Goetzler imagined him doing on I-65. His brother was dead from colon cancer, but Kerm played Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo a la Turk” on the eight-track and made smoke rings.

“Cincinnati had the best meat by far,” he said.

“Howard Street,” Goetzler said. “By the river.”

“How’d you know?”

“Weber flew me down,” he said. “I ran focus groups of electrical contractors. I’m studying the catalog’s effectiveness on contractors in the Ohio River valley.”

Uncle Kerm lit another Camel filter while he broke for the red light. The back tires locked and Goetzler felt them fishtail. He sat up in his seat.

“This schoolteacher,” Kerm said. “She’d go hootchie for a T-bone and a motel room. Just dirty like some guys talk about.”

Goetzler put his watch wrist on the armrest. He pushed back his jacket cuff.

“Is she a friend?”

“I know her.” Kerm then looked at Goetzler, the stoplight sheening his cheek. “You know,” he said.

“You meet her at the Drake?”

Kerm nodded and stared at the red light.

“You must have gotten her oysters?” Goetzler said. He lifted his wrist and the Rolex caught the dash light.

“It was this car,” he said. “That’s what got her to Florida.”

“She wouldn’t joy ride all the way to Daytona. Maybe to Oak Park.”

“It was about the car when I was twenty-five,” he said.

“Seventeen hours one way?” Goetzler feigned cool. “She liked you.”

Kerm smiled and tapped his cigarette ash through the cracked window, then wiped dry the stray raindrops on his thigh. He hadn’t yet looked at the Rolex. Goetzler bought the watch thinking his father’s bungalow would sell by next month, and he figured Kerm knew it. You can only buy a Rolex with the cash you score, he’d tell him at the restaurant. The light remained red.

“The woman’s waist was tight,” Kerm said. “She’d do her Jane Fonda workout in the motel rooms.”

“Tights and leg warmers?” Goetzler asked.

“The whole nine.”

“She’s looking for a father. She’d love you forever.”

Kerm squinted his eyes and gauged Goetzler’s seriousness.

“You don’t got a prayer, Donny,” he said. “You know that.”

“You could be happy.”

“I keep forgetting you came from your old man.”

When the stoplight changed, Kerm’s foot fell heavy on the accelerator, and the engine dragged the Cadillac down Lincoln. His uncle passed stuffed buses on the yellow line, the oncoming traffic honking and pulling close to the parked cars. The tires broke the light-bleary puddles and the speed forced Goetzler’s scalp into the headrest. Kerm kept a straight face, his blue eyes hidden away, and blew smoke rings at the wet windshield while he jumped the red light at Halsted and Fullerton. Goetzler looked at the Rolex, realizing it had stopped during his father’s visitation.

*   *   *

Goetzler drove around Annie’s block for the seventh time, wishing he’d put the .38 in his coat pocket instead of between his pant waist and hip. The gunmetal pinched his skin when he turned a corner. A welt was forming, and it would turn raw after three more circles. But Goetzler decided he shouldn’t move the pistol into his pocket with the silencer he’d made with a socket set from an Internet diagram. Changing his mind to avoid pain had become too much of a habit.

Goetzler would fire two bullets into Annie’s ceiling, then put the pistol to her forehead, reminding the hooker that she was bluffing. Goetzler figured Annie was too selfish to split this money, and after three days of her pimp stonewalling him, he believed that he was about to cut her loose. But Annie could keep the money he’d given her. He owed her a chance at the straight life. He also knew the cop would understand all of this. The wagon driver could never know, but he’d silently nod if he ever heard about it.

He’d scare her silent. Maybe turn her into a wall-eyed cat.

The last pass, he’d noticed light in her two-flat window, a vague yellowing of the glass. He knew her radiator hissed steam even if the January cold never returned when the rains quit. By law, the boilers were on timers from November to April. The apartment would be humid and breathless, and she might have opened her back window so the lake air could cool the hardwood rooms. He’d go inside face first with his pistol extended, and keep his money. Now, she was the VC.

Stay squared away, Goetzler, and you’ll own the glory road.

26

The mirror where Annie watched herself hold the yoga plank fogged and dripped. The open windows did nothing against the steamy registers, and the heat made vague clouds outside the screens.

The cop was Vietnam-gone to her. She imagined her hands would always go through him when they touched. She wanted a quiet mind and tonight she’d breathe until she met the stillness. The cop was her wish, not a real man.

Her stomach throbbed from the yoga positions, but she was happy to know the sequence, the dying warrior, the downward dog, the fawn, and didn’t need a brick keeping the book opened flat. When the sweat started, wetting her black bra straps, she knew her gray tom would come from under the bed and lick the salty water from her obliques, slapping her face with his tail.

The plank numbed her waist while she waited for the cat. He was still hidden away, scared by the street noise. She breathed like slow rain, and decided she’d take Goetzler’s money until she had one hundred thousand dollars. She’d split the sum between four banks, then cage her cats and fly away with them, an afternoon 767 to Charles de Gaulle, and watch the night pass in five hours, knowing she had eighteen months to escape the fat men in hotel rooms, or find another Nick. But the next morning she’d stand where the Trocadero Steps halved, looking east into the late-morning cold and trying to name the special gray of the Seine bridges. She’d decide on a top-floor apartment, three rooms with a balcony and nineteenth-century skylights, some Restoration colonnade between Sacré Coeur and the cemetery where the brick streets ran uphill. If there were tall windows, she’d never stand in them.

From the darkness, beneath the bed, the gray tomcat was two lit eyes. Annie called to him over the Brubeck while the wind jumped and guttered the candle flames. His eyes turned orange while she thought about the cop, then told herself she might become a hooker again after trying the world, something that would make him kill.

When Annie whistled for the cat with dry lips, she heard limp air, and the cat remained yellow eyes.

*   *   *

Her new uncle carried her to the boat while the waves took her face underwater. She left her eyes open and looked for her cats. She’d once dreamed them riding the backs of spearfish, their ears reared from the motion. Now, in her new uncle’s arms, she imagined something before it happened, and each time the sea washed her face, she waited to see the cats riding fish like the cigarette cowboys did horses in her father’s
Playboy
magazines from the war.

The boat was long and short, a fishing jig. She looked at the two sampans tied to the sides, then the people, a hundred shadows standing back-against-stomach, and knew her father was among them. He got stuck in the middle and couldn’t see her to call. Annie’s new uncle, a man who was only hands in the water, understood her father was trapped in the middle, but remained quiet, never telling her for certain because he might scare her cats. They were waiting behind the boat, the fish they rode like standing horses, and her uncle was afraid to speak.

When the waves calmed, the wind chilled Annie’s eyeballs, and she nestled into her uncle, searching for his heat, but the water swirled between them and took away his hard touch, making him like the sea. The boat teetered after the wind, and the people gasped until it righted, then coughed and spoke in low tones until the gusts came again. The cats must stay underwater because it was warmer.

Her uncle came upon the boat while the water calmed. It made sounds when the people reached for her, water lapping wood. She watched the silent faces, then lay back and smiled. If they’d stop reaching, the boat would steady, and she’d hear her cats laughing from the backs of the spearfish. She’d have her father tell them. When her uncle lifted her into the wind, she went numb and hoped a coughing person wouldn’t get her.

The woman got Annie by reaching the farthest for her. She took her beneath the armpits, and lifted her from her uncle, and his hands gave way very fast. The woman’s eyes were dark like her black
ao dai.
When Annie came into the boat from the sea, dripping in the night, the people were still reaching overboard for her, and she couldn’t hear her giggling cats. The woman sounded breathless, her face a shadow, and Annie looked past into the crowd, hoping to see her father. He’d make them stop tipping the boat.

Annie stood on the wet wood and kept looking. She wished it was morning, time for mangoes and bananas with coconut milk. Then, she could see her father because he always cut the fruit.

The woman had a little boy with a piece of jade around his neck. He wore silk pajamas, blue like rainy nights, and he faced her without smiling, touching her hips before kissing her. He ran his fingers up her thighs. The woman was laughing.

“A little wife for you,” she said.

He pressed his tongue against Annie’s teeth. She couldn’t see past his eyeballs.

“You know how to love her very well,” the woman said.

The people had stopped reaching and the boat calmed. The boy pulled their stomachs together while Annie closed her eyes and listened for the cats.

*   *   *

Annie held the plank, three minutes now, her shoulder blades splaying open. The gray cat’s tail swept her face while he licked the puddled sweat off the floor. It covered her mirrored nose, looking like a candy cane. When she blew the tail, a slow exhale, the cat reared his ears and looked behind himself, before running into her bedroom.

In the mirror, Goetzler’s head poked through the kitchen window, She rolled against the wall and assumed a yoga squat. She’d escape from her bedroom window and slide down the gray stones to the muddy grass. Her cat would be safe, hiding under the bed until she got the broomstick. She eyed Goetzler in the mirror before she moved.

His legs teetered and he couldn’t touch the floor. His belt buckle had stuck against the sill. He grabbed the radiator, burning himself, but remained quiet, fanning his palm in the dark room. The pistol fell away and spun across the linoleum, lodging beneath the refrigerator. Annie jumped and went for the gun. Goetzler reached for her like he was swimming.

She put her finger over her lips.

He looked at her with the .38, blinking his eyes twice, then burned his palm on the radiator again.

“Just teeter,” she said.

He didn’t know where to put his hands.

“You will keep meeting me,” she said. “Do you think I am alone?”

“No,” he said.

“But you came here to kill me?”

“I can’t talk like this,” he said.

“You can always talk, Goetzler.”

He was silent.

“If you killed me,” she lied, “you wouldn’t have gotten home.”

“I wanted my life,” he said.

“You’ll live,” she said. “I’ll live.”

His glasses slid down his nose. Annie knew he couldn’t breathe well enough to talk.

“There’s a picture of this wounded marine near the DMZ,” she said. “Larry Burrows took it. He’s reaching out to another wounded man who’s sitting in the mud. The other marines won’t let him.”

Goetzler tried resting his toes on the fire escape.

“Stop,” she said.

He resumed teetering. The radiator steam made his face red and fogged his glasses. She watched him burn his same hand three times.

“The marine has a bloody bandage tied beneath his chin,” she said. “The hills had been swallowing them for weeks, but the men stop him from reaching out. Do you remember the picture? The day looked steamy from the sun after the rain.”