Red rain 2.0 (7 page)

Never did it, though. Never hunted any animal anywhere. Only men.

I slip three rounds in the magazine and one up the spout. The rifle's ready. Then I lean against an old oak for a while, just getting into it, just smelling the scent of the forest, settling, calming.

Gunny used to always tell me the Crotch attracted the few, the proud, the crazed. In most marine units, he claimed, but always in the spooky ones like Recon, you could count on finding at least one guy deep into some esoteric shit, working his way through some kind of mystical internal labyrinth. He knew one dude in Nam who was a Nietzsche freak, intensely into the ubermensch ideas. He read and reread, just absorbed until it was part of him. There was only one other guy in the unit who had a clue what he'd be talking about, and that was the CO, a major. So night after night, when ops weren't on, you'd see this sergeant huddled over joints with this major, discussing Nietzsche. Sometimes they'd talk all night, Gunny said.

Same in Special Forces. I knew a couple of Zen masters,
one had even spent a year as a monk in a monastery up in the mountains in Japan. They were wiggy, they seemed AWOL from this world a lot of the time. Until shit happened. Then they were concentrated like you could not believe.

"Give you the story short and sweet," one of them said to me. "Do a lot of archery in Zen, dig? And you know for sure you finally understand the first time you shoot and
feel you are the arrow.
Become one with the arrow. That's what's happenin', man."

I never did get that into it, but the idea never left my mind. When I squeeze off, I'm like outside myself, my vision's a very narrow tunnel or a tube headed straight to what I want to hit. The bullet just travels along that tube and hits the spot I'm staring at.

It's a gift. It's why I won all those shooting competitions. It's why I've got more than a hundred scalps on my belt that I'd like to be rid of, but never can.

It isn't happening today. After three magazines, the best I manage is a three-hole group just over an inch center to center. There have been days when I've put eight bullets into almost the same hole with this rifle at two hundred meters. I quit.

Half-hour later, the Camaro rumbles up to the curb in front of Ice Box's house, a red-shingled ranch on the usual quarter acre. He's out there in the driveway, wearing a guinea-T and too-tight shorts, hosing down a vehicle that's some computer-generated shade of deep, unearthly purple. It's a Dodge or Plymouth minivan, wearing temporary tags, but that's no reason in IB's mind not to gently and lovingly dry the thing with a big piece of real chamois. I'm within ten feet when he moves fast and gets the hose on me. Just a splash. Then he cuts the water.

"What are you doing, showin' up at my home uninvited? Trying to scare my neighbors, get me a bad reputation, get them calling the cops about suspicious characters hanging
around 1302 Knollton Road?" He grins. "Thought I told you to come only after dark, and park a couple of blocks away, so nobody would see you."

"Me and my vehicle not quite up to neighborhood taste levels, that it? What are they gonna think about this ... purple space turd you're massaging."

"I told him," I hear Mary Jo's voice from behind the screen door, "to go for the white one. But he saw his beautiful face reflecting back at him in metallic purple and fell right in love. Couldn't persuade him. Tried some pressures too. Didn't work either."

"Sure you did your best, MJ. If you couldn't make it happen, nobody could."

She's backing out the screen door using her butt, both hands holding a big wooden cutting board with a submarine sandwich on it that has to be nearly two feet long, balancing the board on her huge, protruding stomach.

"Looking real good, MJ," I say. She's a pretty brunette with liquid eyes, just a hint of a hook in her nose, hardly any varicose veins in the backs of her shapely legs.

"Lunch!" Ice Box says. "At last."

"Luther, you have always been so full of it," Mary Jo says to me. "I'm looking and walking like a hippo. Feeling like one too."

"How much longer?" I ask, reaching out to take the cutting board.

"Hey, don't you let that weasel near my lunch," IB calls.

"Six more weeks, if I live that long," she smiles at me. "Don't move, Luther. I'll be right back."

She lets the screen door slam behind her. Ice Box is headed my way. Then she's out again, a beer and a Coke in one hand and a big bread knife in the other.

"Hey, don't do that," IB says plaintively, but his wife makes a diagonal cut through the middle of the sub. "Put the board right here on the step, Luther, and eat something."

"Thanks, MJ."

"Yeah, thanks, giving away my food. I needed that," IB says.

"Ice Box, if they locked you in a cell for two weeks and only allowed you a glass of water a day, I doubt you'd come out more than a pound or two lighter," MJ smirks at him. He tries to pat her ass, but she slides away. She moves real well for a big woman.

IB thuds down next to me and we begin to eat the subs: salami, provelone, shredded lettuce, thin-sliced onions, some olive oil. He takes delicate bites all around the edges and then works into the center, but I've still got half of mine to go when he's finished. He looks at it.

"You want this, IB?"

"Nah, you eat it. She gave it to you."

"I'm full, man. You take it."

"Nah, finish it up. Don't want it."

"It's just gonna go to waste."

"You eat it."

I put it down on the cutting board. "Can't do it, dude. I'm full."

"You sure?"

"Oh yeah, IB. Couldn't take another bite."

So he polishes it off, then sucks on his beer. "Don't tell MJ I ate part of yours, right?"

I nod, light a cigarette.

"You know, I hate to see you doin' that, Luther. It's committing slow suicide."

"Easiest kind for everyone involved."

"Don't even go there, you fuck," Ice Box says. "I ain't talking with you about philosophies of life and death and so forth and so on. Why spoil a great day? C'mon, have a look at my new toy. Just picked it up this morning."

"And it got so soiled on the drive home you felt the need to wash it?"

"Gotta keep this clear-coat paint spotless, my man. I want it shining, really shining when I bring those twins home from the hospital."

"Got any names yet?"

"Two words for you. Just two words...."

"Hey Luther," Mary Jo calls from inside. "How does 'Chloroform' and 'Cholera' grab you?"

She's laughing. "You
told
her about all that?" I say, grabbing a fold of IB's T.

"Sure," he says. "Why not?"

"I was only being a smart-ass with that stuff, MJ," I call. "I never meant any of it."

"Really?" She's still laughing. "Too bad. I sort of liked the ideas you were coming up with."

"Check this action, Five-O," IB says, pointing the key ring at the minivan and pressing a tiny red button. The whole side slides back slick and silently until both front and rear seats are exposed. In the back I see two top-of-the-line infant car seats already snugged in tight. "Cool, yeah? You come strolling up, your arms are full of kids or groceries or whatnot, you touch your button, and just glide right into that very roomy and comfortable interior."

I laugh, pat him on the back. "Jammin'," I say. "Well, except maybe for the color choice."

"Do I ever criticize that junker making the whole street look like a slum?" IB says.

"Some, yeah."

MJ comes butt first through the screen door once more, carrying a light aluminum-and-webbing lawn chair. She sets up the chair facing us, and we start talking about the twins and how her family's going to go nuts and what IB's folks are going to do and on into imagined futures for lives that haven't even started yet. She looks so peaceful, even if she has to keep shifting her weight to stay comfortable.

I feel my head going jagged. IB's my age, Mary Jo's twenty-eight, married four years, nice house, nice life, lots of close relatives who stay in close touch, their own kids on the way, plans for more—all connected somehow with a world I can't grasp. I can see they're very happy in their state of being, see a deeper contentedness that counters all
the small, shitty irritations of living day to day. 'Cause they aren't living day to day, I decide. It's a path they're on, which, barring bad luck or disaster, will take them all the way out to the end.

So what's missing in me? Why does my life start fresh every morning when I wake up, and die when I fall asleep at night?

I hang out happily with Ice Box and Mary Jo until just before dinnertime, sticking to what they got like a fucking leech.

I answer my apartment door that night wearing only my yakuta. It's a lovely thing, falls all the way to my feet. From any little distance the superfine cotton appears to be blue-and-white checked, but when you look closer you see each bit of blue and each bit of white is actually a crane with wings spread, interlocking. Gunny got it for me in Japan. I've worn it maybe three times in my life.

Helen's there, smiling a big one, string bag with a change of clothing slung over one shoulder, baggy gangbanger shorts riding low on her hips so I can see her navel. She looks me up and down with approval, but before she can say anything I've got her in my arms and my lips locked on hers. She's cool about it, she wants to slide with me, I can tell by the way her body melts into mine.

So we slide, right there on the dining table. And later, in bed.

I jerk awake about four, dream-image in my brain—but so hi-rez it seems realer than real—of the last time I saw Vassily. Blood red's the dominant color, corpses torn and leaking the smell. Got to get smooth again. I slip under the covers and begin blowing softly on the blonde hairs of Helen's pubis. They float and shimmer, just barely visible in the little light from the parking lot that edges around the shades and into the room. I blow this way, then that way until she shifts her hips in her sleep. Then I lick once or twice, and blow again. Her hips are moving a bit, but she's
pretending to be asleep. I'm sure she's awake, though she keeps her eyes closed when I penetrate her. She moans softly, arms and legs stretched wide. She comes so quickly, but I can't get off.

"Oh God, Luther. I'm so far gone," she murmurs.

I keep at it, looking down at her spread-eagled, just letting things happen to her.

Nothing happens for me.

5

Hate Sundays. Have since I was a little kid, so little I hadn't even started school yet. Woke depressed and got more depressed as the day wore on until the very last hours of light, when it got almost unbearable. It was worse in the autumn and winter, when the days were so short. My mother used to hold me then and ask why I was so sad.

I never had any answer. Not even a lie. Just, "Hate Sundays."

I take Helen for brunch at Le Petite Marmot. Yeah, it's in a mall, but everything out here is in a mall, and at least this is an upscale mall and the Marmot owners are trying. They bake their own croissants and muffins, they make really dark, rich coffee, they can sling together decent eggs Benedict if you remind them to go light on the hollandaise.

"Today I get to be a cop," she says when we're walking back toward my apartment.

"What piece you gonna carry, Smith and Wesson?"

"A clipboard!" she says. "The seniors have to show all the freshies around, get 'em into their dorms okay, explain the rules, give some tours of campus facilities, that crap."

"Cool," I say. "How about we switch? I go guide all the new girls, the really nervous and impressionable ones, and you take the day off? I can be very reassuring."

"You know, I had a Lab like you once, Luther, he'd hump..."

"Can't believe I'm hearing this from the product of a fine women's educational institution," I say.

"You believe it when I suck your cock, though," Helen laughs, sliding into the new lime-green Volkswagen Bug she got over the summer. Her change of clothes turned out to be lime-green capri pants.

"It's a pandemic, capris and Bugs." I smile at her. "Who fixes things so thousands of girls all want the same thing at the same time?"

"We all get together over the Internet and take a vote on what boys are going to like seeing us in best."

She's bright, she's shiny, she's a happy kid. I wonder if any of that is due to me, or if she's just naturally this way all the time. Never any Sunday blues for her. She waves as she drives off.

I decide it's natural. All I give anyone is grief and sorrow. Or much worse, if I don't like them. I decide to go to work. Just jump in the Camaro and drive. The SIG's already on my ankle and I don't need anything else, off-duty on an August Sunday.

The engine stutters, then grumbles to life. Sounds like it's got grit in its cylinders. Used to love driving that car, used to love the low rumble it made. Now it just irritates me.

A lot of things I used to feel okay about just irritate me now. Mostly my brain. My damaged brain. Running ragged as the Camaro's engine too many days, these days. The Swiss doctors warned me that could happen, that there could be deterioration.