Hard Rain Falling (10 page)

“What a mess. We was goin to take this gambling joint down in South City, an the guy who cased it said all you have to do is grin at the guy at the door and he lets you in, an then pull the guns and yell for everybody to hit the floor; the money’s right there in a big wooden cabinet between the tables, an the cat with the green apron has the key, dig? Well, it sounded easy; the caser said no problem. He always said that, no problem, cause he never went along so everything was always real easy, all you got to do is scare hell out of everybody an pick up the money. What a joke.

“So anyway, I’m standing there at the door telling the guy to lemme in, wearin this big topcoat with my hands on the guns in my pockets, and he swings the door open and I blaze in there with the guns out, yellin like hell, and everybody’s jumping for the floor an tippin tables over an turning green and all that shit, and there I am standing there lookin at myself in one of these great big mirrors, you know, set into the far wall. Man, I like to shit right on the spot. I knew goddam well there was a couple of nasty wops or something back of that fuggin mirror with a couple of big tommy guns or shotguns or something, you know, laughin their asses off at me an just itchin to shoot. So there I am, starin at myself, and everybody in the room is cuttin out or yellin or eatin sawdust on the floor; and I decide to fire a couple shots into the mirror, you know, to scare them off or something, and then I thought, oh, fuck it, and went for the guy with the green apron and he opened the money box and gave me the cash like he did it every day or didn’t give a shit, and I stuffed the money in my pockets and yelled for everybody to stay down an split. Man, I could practically
feel
them bullets going up my ass, but I got all the way out to the car an nothin happened, and I jumps in and tells Tommy, `
Make it!
’ and we zoom off, an nothin happened at all. Can you figure it?”

He laughed and looked at Jack puckishly. “You know, them poker clubs are legalized, and the next day’s paper said we got away with eighty thousand dollars. So I knew why the guys back of the mirror didn’t just cut loose and turn the corpse over to the cops; the boss himself was probably back of the mirror and says, `Hey, let the asshole rob the joint; we’ll clean up off the insurance company.”’

“How much did you really get?” Jack asked.

Denny snorted. “Eighteen hundred, total. What crooks!”

Jack smiled. He was glad he had run into Denny after so many years. “So you’re a big thief now,” he said.

“Well, I ain’t done anything for a while. We really got fucked up. Let’s get out of here.” They got up and left the poolhall where they had accidentally met, walked up Turk Street a few doors, and went into a bar. It was the middle of the afternoon, and there were only a few people in the half-darkened place. They took a table in the back, and Denny said, “We was gonna knock over Playland, out at the beach, you know? We really had a big one planned, this caser guy I was tellin you about, he worked on it for weeks, goin out there, wanderin around, lookin for the money and getaway routes and stuff, and then we got together a bunch of guns, too; man, we must of had ten or twelve guns, rifles, automatics, revolvers, tear-gas guns, everything; and so one night we go out there, Tommy, the guy that drove for us, had just bought himself a brand-new personal car, and we had all the guns in the car, like, and we went out there, and Tommy parks the short and we get out and look around, ride some of the goddam rides, play the machines, really have a pretty good time, and then we go back to get the car, and man you wouldn’t believe it—Tommy’d parked the fucker in a
towaway zone!
It was gone. The cops had took it to one of their garages. Guns and all. So we were out of business, like. Tommy took off for Mexico. It was his car, registered in his name and everything. You ever go to Mexico?”

“Once or twice,” Jack said. “Down through Laredo and that’s about all.”

“What have you been doin with yourself all this time?”

“Well, you know.”

Denny waited a few moments, but Jack did not say anything more, so he laughed. “Well, yeah.”

“I been boxing,” Jack admitted. “Southwest circuit, Los Angeles. I just quit.”

“Hey, no kidding? A fighter?”

Jack nodded and drank some of his beer. He did not add that he had also bucked logs, worked in a cannery and a furniture factory, robbed gas stations, rolled drunks, and lived in half a hundred arid furnished rooms, pretended the vacuum was freedom, wakened almost daily to the fear that time was a dry wind brushing away his youth and his strength, and slept through as many nightmares as there were nights to dream. He just sat and smiled at Denny and saw what time had done to him and wondered, now comfortably, why he was so bothered by time. It happens to everybody this way, he thought, we sit here and get older and die and nothing happens.

“Listen,” Denny said. “This is great. I got a couple of chicks on my back; picked up one of them and the other come along, and we’re all stuck together. You can take the other chick, okay? What’d be greater?”

“Too much,” Jack admitted. He felt something coming loose inside him, and he decided that he was glad it was going away. This would be much easier. There would be time to think.

Denny’s hotel room had one double bed and a very small single bed over in the corner. Sitting on this Jack could look down at the crowds of people on Turk Street, eddying around the entrances to theaters, clubs, hot-dog palaces, magazine stands, barbershops. He had a barrel-shaped thick hotel glass half full of whiskey in his hands, and Denny was spread-eagled on the double bed, thumbing through a comic book. There were comic books all over the room, and girls’ clothes piled on both chairs, dripping off onto the thin carpet. Packages, empty sacks, wadded string, yellow-orange cheeseburger wrappers were on the floor and under the beds, and in the corner beyond the small bed Jack was on were the torn halves of the room’s stock Bible among the dust motes.

How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn’t anybody’s fault but your own. Of course that was the problem.

All right. Everything is a dream. Nothing hangs together. You move from one dream to another and there is no reason for the change. Your eyes see things and your ears hear, but nothing has any reason behind it. It would be easier to believe in God. Then you could wake up and yawn and stretch and grin at a world that was put together on a plan of mercy and death, punishment for evil, joy for good, and if the game was crazy at least it had rules. But that didn’t make sense. It had never made any sense. The trouble was, now that he was not asleep and not awake, what he saw and heard didn’t make sense either.

Mishmash, he thought. You know enough to know how you feel is senseless, but you don’t know enough to know why. Sitting in another lousy hotel room waiting for a couple of girls you’ve never seen before to do a bunch of things you’ve done so many times it makes your skin crawl just to think about it. Things. To do. That you dreamed about when you couldn’t have them. When there was only one thing, really, that made you feel good, and now you’ve done that so many times it’s like masturbating. Except you never really made it, did you. Never really killed anybody. That’s what you’ve always wanted to do, smash the brains out of somebody’s head; break him apart until nothing is left but you. But you never made it.

Even before the reform school had shown Jack its worst he had tried to kill a guard, so the urge had been in him already; he knew that he, or the urge to kill in him, was not the result of a process of brutalization in the reformatory, he was not a victim of their stupidity and cruelty. Actually, the reform school was a model of life without artifice, without the gilding of purpose and reason to brighten the truth: that men were units to be taken care of and kept quiet—nothing else mattered except you weren’t supposed to kill them. Jack did not understand this last rule, and the only way he could comprehend it was to think that if the guards killed all the prisoners then they would be out of work. Either that, or they didn’t have the guts. He had a long time to think about it.

The guard—night watchman, really, but a man who thought of himself as a guard—had called them out of their cottage late at night just to brace them against the wall and accuse them of unnatural sex practices and walk up and down in front of them, daring them to make a move, while he sent his yellowish eyes up and down their bodies looking for signs of perversion; a stupid, illiterate central Oregon hick who couldn’t get any other kind of job, lantern-jawed and snaggle-toothed, ordering the boys around because they were the only humans on earth who had to stand still for it, his awful eyes gleaming with desires he didn’t have the guts to satisfy—and when the kid next to Jack giggled sleepily and muttered something, the guard shot his hand out and grasped the kid by the neck and jerked him out of the line, down onto his knees, and backhanded him across the face. The kid yelped in surprised anger, and Jack, out of control, feeling the pure blast of pleasure, moved toward this perfect target for his ambitions, spun the guard, hit him twice and knocked him against the wall of the cottage and fell on him, driving his fists coldly and carefully into the guard’s face and throat, Jack’s knee coming up into the guard’s groin sharply; picking him up and slamming him against the wall, one hand on his throat and the other smashing into his face—murdering him with his hands. And he would have killed him, too, if the other watchmen hadn’t heard the noise and come and pulled Jack away from his victim, clubbed him and dragged him down to the punishment cells—the hole—and left him there naked, the murder urge still burning unsatisfied in his heart; left him there for four months and three days—126 days without light—to remember, to think, to dream about his discovery.

The punishment cell was about seven feet long, four feet wide, and six feet high. The floor and walls were concrete, and there were no windows. In the iron door near the bottom was a slot through which he passed his slop can, and through which his food and water were delivered to him. They did not feed him every day, and because of that he had no way of knowing how much time had passed. After a while time ceased to exist. Time stopped in a strange way. First, he was aware that there was no present, no such thing as a moment; there was only the movement of his thoughts from past to future, from what had happened to what would happen. Then what had happened ceased to be real, as if his mind had invented a past his body could not remember; his senses were betraying him into dreams and the dreams eventually lost all contact with the senses. At first, he could not see because there was no light in his cell; then that became a delusion, and he could not see because he could not see, and then even that lost its reality, and he could not see because there was nothing to see, and never had been—his mind had tricked him into believing that there were colors and shapes, and he knew that there were no such things. At times, all his senses deserted him, and he could not feel the coldness of the concrete or smell his excrement, and the small sounds he made and the sounds that filtered in through the door gradually dimmed, and he was left alone inside his mind, without a past to envision, since his inner vision was gone, too, and without a future to dream, because there was nothing but this emptiness and himself. It was not uncomfortable, not comfortable. These things did not exist. It was colorless, senseless, mindless, and he sometimes just disappeared into it.

But then there would be a clank and a rattle at the door, followed by the smell of the food, and everything would rush back into him as the smell of the food hit him and aroused him and he would begin to tremble and slather and giggle, quickly locating his bucket and passing it out in exchange for the food and the cup of water; and for a few seconds every sense in him would rush into full operation and his mind would unfold in a glorious picture of what the food would be, and he would stick his fingers into it, whatever it was, and he would begin to gobble the food wolfishly, stuffing it into his mouth and swallowing, greed and terror knotting his stomach so badly that after only a few seconds he would feel engorged, and as likely as not begin to vomit up the food. Afterward he would lie back, panting from the exertion, and wait for the excitement to pass; then he would slowly and carefully eat what was left, and then drink his water. Then he would sit cross-legged in the middle of the cell, waiting for the reaction. Because sometimes they put soap powder into the food, he did not know why, and he would have to put up with the humiliations of diarrhea for hours. Jack never knew whether his food was going to be dosed or not; he could not, after the first few times, taste the soap, or feel the grittiness on his teeth, and so he would just have to sit and wait for the first cramping pang to hit him. There was no question of not eating; when they put the food into his cell he gorged himself without thought. It did not matter if they fed him twice in an hour, the same thing would happen. After a while he did not even hate them for it.

When he was first thrown into the hole what bothered him most was not the lack of a blanket, the cramped space, or the early terrors of the dark; it was the fact that he was naked, that he had been stripped of his dignity. It did not matter that there was no one to see him; what mattered in increasing dimensions of hatred was the humiliation of his nakedness, which seemed to deprive him of any kind of pride, took away his self-esteem, his humanity, his right to think of himself as a man. Squatting over his bucket, waiting for the next hapless squirting from his agonized bowels, he would dream of a future in which they would eventually let him out and there would be somebody there for his rage to murder; dreaming of the glory of that murder. It was a thought he clung to as long as possible, and it was always the last thing to desert him as he slipped again into nothingness: they had taken away his dignity, and he would kill them for that.

He went through self-pity very quickly. It occurred to him after he had been in endless darkness beyond all question of time that he would die in there, simply die of the immense loneliness, and that when he died no one would know about it for days, and when they finally did find out, they would unlock the door and remove his body and put it into a wooden coffin and bury it somewhere, without a marker, and that they would put into the files that his case was terminated, and that Jack Levitt was no longer an administrative problem. He would be dead, and gone, and nobody would mourn his death. They would be relieved, because they could terminate his file. They would get a sense of satisfaction from having the whole file completed, and maybe they would send to the orphanage and get all the papers on him there, and send to Portland and get the police report on him, and write to the places he worked and get his work cards, his pay records, every piece of paper on earth with his name on it, and make a big bundle (no, not so big, a small folder, maybe a Manila envelope) of it all, and take that out of the ACTIVE file and put it into the INACTIVE file, and then in a few years when they needed the space in the big green filing cabinet, they would take his folder out of the file and burn it, and he would be gone from the earth, and not one single human being on the face of the earth would know or remember who he had been, or care that he was gone. Not one single human being on the face of the earth would mourn his death.