Hard Rain

by Waverly Fitzgerald

  As I pulled into the narrow gravel parking lot above the marina, I saw Matt’s red Firebird just driving in the other entrance. I got out of my Jeep and strolled over. He seemed abstracted and it took him a moment to register my presence.

  “Sorry, Rachel,” he said, when I got his attention. “I was in court today. Testifying.” I knew about the trial. It was the final episode in a big case that had taken Matt back to Vietnam earlier in the year. He had come back even more haunted by the past than when he left.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “Not good. I have to go back tomorrow to finish up my testimony,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “I’ve got good news for you.”

  He looked puzzled for a moment.

  “I found another one of the guys in your platoon.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. Come on in. It’s a beautiful day. We can have a drink on the deck.” Matt, like my mother, is always forgetting that I don’t drink any more. He led the way down the path to the narrow dock and past the two and three story mini-mansions-on-the-water to his low-slung home. While he rooted around in his pocket for his key, I stood at the end of the dock admiring the view. The sky was a faded blue and the lake reflected back the same color: it was so flat and calm. I watched a kayak swoosh by and then a duck family paddled over: two adult ducks, the male a glossy green, the female a drab brown, and two little yellow ducklings. Clearly they expected a handout.

  “Sorry, guys,” I said, holding out my empty hands, as I followed Matt indoors.

  His stereo was playing. It was a Jimi Hendrix song: Let Me Stand Next to Your Fire.

  “Funny,” Matt said. “I don’t remember leaving the radio on.”

  “What do you want to drink?” he asked, heading for the kitchen.

  “Got any coffee?”

  “I’ll put a pot on,” he said.

  I went over to the sliding glass door that leads onto the narrow deck. The duck family had swum around the houseboat and were approaching from the other side. The sun glinting off the office buildings downtown dazzled my eyes.

  I pulled at the sliding glass door but it was old and sticky.

  “I thought you said you were going to fix this,” I said, tugging at the handle.

  “Just lift up on it, before you pull,” he said.

  That seemed to work. I wrenched the door open and stepped outside.

  The next thing I knew I heard a shout and something as hard as a cannonball thudded into me and sent me rocketing over the edge of the deck and into the cold waters of the lake. I opened my mouth to yell and filled my lungs with water instead. My body seemed to be falling down through layers of water, dark and full of shadows, and then, as I began to struggle, I found myself heading towards the light which seemed to sparkle just out of my reach.

  I broke the surface, gasped for air and began coughing. Matt was next to me in the water, his hair sopping. I realized he had pushed me into the lake. He was still trying to push me. He looked like a mad man, his eyes crazed with fear.

  “Matt, what the hell?”

  And then there was a big thwump—a flare of bright orange and a wave of heat and pressure that pushed me down deeper into the lake. I tumbled head over heels into a vortex of churning water.

  Chapter 9

  When I woke up I was lying on the dock and two guys in white uniforms were pounding on my chest.

  “Ow!” I said. “Stop it! That hurts!”

  Then I saw Matt shouldering aside the smaller of the two guys. His face was smeared with soot and his eyes were wild. “Thank God, you’re alive, Rachel,” he said.

  “No thanks to you!” I said. “What the hell were you doing?”

  “Didn’t you see it? The trip wire on the deck?” he asked. “Someone set up a bomb and I don’t know why it didn’t go off right away, but if it had, we’d both be dead.”

  I closed my eyes and thought about the bomb planted in the ROTC building. My perception was shifting from sympathy towards the student radicals to sympathy for the victim.

  “I should have known it when I heard the Hendrix music playing,” Matt said.

  “What?”

  “There’s a Hendrix connection with all of this.”

  I opened my eyes and saw a coil of black smoke rolling up into the soft blue of the sky.

  “Your houseboat?” I asked.

  “It’s gone,” he said. “My ducks are dead too.” And he turned away, I thought, to hide the tears in his eyes.

  The EMTs insisted I had to go to the hospital. They thought I might have a concussion. Matt wanted to come along but they wouldn’t let him. It was cramped in the back of the aide car. The gurney took up most of the space. An attendant sat in the narrow space that was left, with his fingers on my wrist, taking readings and calling them into the hospital in that jargon that medical personnel use.

  I kept insisting I was fine all through the rush into the emergency room, the exam in a sterile room under fluorescent lights, the taking of the x-rays. Still they wouldn’t let me go. They insisted I needed to get a ride home.

  My departure was complicated by the fact that my clothes were dripping wet; they had stripped me to check for injuries. I didn’t want to get into a cab wearing the little blue and grey cotton hospital gown they had provided. I called my neighbor, Thom—luckily he was home instead of out at one of the gay nightclubs he frequents—and begged him to go over to my apartment and bring me a change of clothes. He promised to deliver them as soon as he could.

  They left me alone then, in an alcove in the emergency room, surrounded by pale blue cotton curtains. I could hear voices murmuring around me and a machine beeping.

  Then I heard footsteps approaching.

  “Wow! That was fast,” I started to say, thinking it was Thom. But when the curtains parted, jingling a little on the metal rings, a tall black man in a dark blue uniform swam into view. He had dark eyes and a bald head that gleamed under the fluorescent lights.

  “Hello, Miss Stern, I’m Darrell Darnell of the Seattle Police Department,” he said. He slipped his fingers into the pocket of his shirt, just under the shiny badge and drew out a small notebook and pen. “I’m here to ask you some questions about the bombing.”

  My mind clouded with images of glass shattering, flashes of light and bursts of violent sound that I could still feel vibrating in her body. For a moment I was confused about where I was and what had happened. On campus. The ROTC building. The Sixties. Chanting. Waving signs. The blare of a bullhorn. “Hell, no, we won’t go!”

  “I don’t really know much about it,” I said. “I was just reading about it in the paper.”

  Darrell narrowed his eyes. The pen hovered over the surface of the paper. “You read about this incident in a paper?”

  “No, the bombing at the ROTC,” I said. “Back in 1969.”

  His pupils dilated and his nostrils flared. “Was that related to this?” he asked.

  “What’s the this?”

  “The bomb at the houseboat.”

  He wrote something down in his little notebook. I couldn’t figure out what I said that was worth recording.

  “We don’t know too much about it yet. They’re investigating, as we speak. But we’re talking to all the people involved. What were you doing there?”

  “I was visiting my friend, Matt,” I said. “Where is he? Is Matt OK?”

  Darrell’s eyes narrowed again. It seemed to be his way of expressing disapproval. “I assume you’re talking about the owner of the houseboat. He’s disappeared.”

  “You mean, no one’s seen him…”

  “Oh, no, we saw him. But he refused medical treatment and then just left, after being told that he needed to stay around for questioning.”

  “That sounds like Matt,” I said. “He has a problem with authority figures.”

  “How well do you know him?”

  “Now what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just that. How well do you know him?”

  �
��We’re not, you know, that way, if that’s what you mean.” I shifted uncomfortably under his scrutiny. His dark eyes seemed to be able to penetrate my mind and determine if I was telling the truth.

  “Then how do you know him?”

  “We were working together.”

  “On what?”

  “Look, I really should talk to Matt before giving you any more information.” My head ached.

  “This is a criminal investigation. You were almost killed. The houseboat was destroyed. We need to find out who did this and stop them from doing it again. So any information you provide would be most useful. If you refuse to answer my questions and someone else is harmed, you could be held liable…”

  I frowned. “No need to be play the bad cop. It’s just that I don’t see how it could have anything to do with what we were doing…” My voice trailed off.

  “And just exactly what was that?’

  “Well, Matt’s a private investigator and he asked me to do some research for him.”

  “What?”

  “He wanted information so he could contact the members of his old platoon. Vietnam, you know.”

  I started shaking as the images came back. The Hendrix music playing on the stereo. Jiggling the handle of the sliding glass window. The shock of the cold lake water. Gasping for air.

  “Look, Miss Stern…”

  “How do you know my name?” I was suddenly suspicious.

  “We had to get your personal information to admit you to the hospital!”

  “I don’t want to be admitted. I want to go home!” I looked around for my clothes, for my purse. “Where are my belongings?” I suddenly realized that my purse had been over my shoulder when I went out on the deck. Was it at the bottom of the lake? With my keys, my ID, my bank cards, my notebook.

  “You’d have to ask the staff about that,” he said.

  “Then how do you know my name?” I returned to my earlier question.

  “We know a lot about you, Miss Stern,” he said. “We know where you’ve been and who you’ve been talking to. I advise you….”

  “I advise you to either arrest me or leave,” I said. I am, after all, a lawyer’s daughter. “I’m not saying another word without my lawyer present.”

  “And would that be,” Darnell flipped through his notebook, “Joel Wiseman?”

  I schooled myself to show no reaction to that name but my thoughts were racing. How could the police possibly know about Joel? I remembered our cover story. “Mr. Wiseman is an acquaintance, not my lawyer. But my father is a lawyer—”

  “Yes, we know about your father.” Darnell said, flipping to another page in his notebook. “Marty Stern. Unsuccessful defense attorney. Disbarred divorce lawyer.”

  “Don’t you dare denigrate my father!” I said, struggling to sit upright. Acknowledging at the same time that every word was true. My head began to spin and I laid back down, crossing my arms across my chest.

  “I’m not saying another word.”

  Chapter 10

  Darrell Darnell

  Darrell was thirteen when his uncle died. He still remembered the day. He had been hanging out with his friends at the park, shooting hoops, just an ordinary day. When he saw his mother standing at the edge of the court in the gathering gloom, he knew something was wrong. She had his little sister, Dory, with her, and the new baby in her arms. There was no reason for her to leave the house to come get him. He would come in on his own once it got dark.

  He wanted to run to her, but he had to act cool. He took another shot, then sauntered over to her. He could see right away things were bad. Her eyes were bloodshot. She had been crying. Crying hard.

  He waited for her to speak. Even back in those days, he was stinting with his words. Never say anything that wasn’t necessary. That was the rule in his family.

  “It’s K,” she said. That was what they all called his Uncle Kirby. “He’s in the hospital. What are we going to do?” She swiped at her nose with the back of her hand. The baby started to cry.

  “Don’t worry, Mama. I’ll figure it out,” he said, leading her away from the playground and his friends. He remembered it ever afterwards as the moment he stopped being a kid and became a man.

  His dad had been gone since he was five or six. He didn’t really remember the man. Just knew that his mother didn’t want to talk about him. The baby was his step-brother by her latest boyfriend, the one who had beat her up. That’s when they moved in with Kirby in his house in the Central District.

  Uncle K was a bachelor. He lived alone in that run-down house, and he was glad to have a woman around who could clean and cook for him. He worked hard. Forty hours of janitorial work at the University every week and side jobs on weekends and nights. When he came home, he liked to read. He was the first adult Darrell ever saw reading. His mom just watched TV. K read the paper back to front every day and took classes at the UW for which he read books. Books of philosophy and political science.

  Thanks to K, they acquired a family too. K’s parents lived in Madrona, which was where they had raised their brood of boys. They were a loud and rowdy bunch. One of K’s brothers was in jail. Another was a Black Panther. Another was a drug addict. But to Darrell, who had grown up without an extended family, it was wonderful to go over to the Jackson house on Fourth of July and run around in the yard setting off fireworks with the kids he called his cousins while his uncles sat around on the deck, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.

  With K gone, that would all end. Darrell got his mother calmed down, he called K’s parents, they called their pastor, and eventually, they got to the hospital. But when they let Darrell into the room (his mother broke down wailing and screaming in the hall), it was too late. He could see immediately that K was gone.

  They had the sheet drawn up to his chin. His skin was a strange color: The flesh had settled in ways that Darrell did not expect. His uncle looked almost Chinese, a sage, perhaps, with an inscrutable, secret smile.

  Things did go all to hell after that. It turned out that K had been squirreling money away—he had a substantial amount of money in the bank and a nice retirement fund. But since he didn’t have a will, it all went to his parents. They didn’t want to pay the mortgage on the house and his mother couldn’t cover it with the money she got from DSHS, so eventually they were evicted.

  By then, his mother had started drinking heavily. She barely got out of bed until the afternoon and then made her round of the neighborhood bars, looking for anyone who could buy her a drink. Darrell stayed up waiting for her. Sometimes she brought home a strange guy and then he would just go to bed and try to ignore the noises coming from the other room. Other times, she came home so drunk, he had to help her into bed or clean up after she threw up. She was sick a lot and he stayed home from school to take care of her and his sister and brother.

  Someone called Child Protective Services—he suspected the Jacksons—and, for a while, the kids were all in foster care. The next time he saw his mother, she was brighter, happier. She had a new boyfriend, and they moved in with him to a motel. But things didn’t go well. His mother was sliding into the drug addiction, which would eventually kill her.

  Back and forth, into foster care and out. That was his life for several years, with a few stints in juvie for petty crimes like shoplifting. His younger sister, Dory, got adopted by her foster family. His younger brother was taken in by the Jacksons. Maybe that’s because his mother claimed K was the baby’s father. Darrell always wondered about that.

  But no one wanted him. He was too old and already had a record. It wasn’t like he was a bad kid. He wasn’t tough. He knew that, although he knew he had to act tough. So when his friends suggested “borrowing” a car one day, shortly after his eighteenth birthday, Darrell couldn’t figure out how to back out. He went along for the ride. The result: a police chase that ended in a crash with property damage, jail time, and a judge offering him a choice: he could either go into the Army or go to jail.

  He though
t about Uncle K and how proud K had been of his service in the Korean war and he enlisted. It seemed like a good choice. The Vietnam war was winding down. U.S. troops were withdrawing. Darrell got sent to Germany and his whole life opened up. The Germans didn’t see him as a black man. They saw him as an American.

  He had friends. Good friends who liked to talk about philosophy and politics. He had girlfriends too: pretty German frauleins with their blond hair and blue eyes and pale skin. He travelled to Italy and saw great art. He went to France and ate great food. He developed a taste for wine.

  No one expected him to act like a thug. He was free to be who he really was. He became a bit of an aesthete, with a refined palate, a preference for German Reislings, and a voracious reader. He signed up for the Great Books and read his way through them.

  Why did he go back to Seattle after his tour of duty was up? He asked himself that question a lot. Because it all fell apart back in Seattle. There was no room for a cosmopolitan straight black man in Seattle. There were a limited number of roles he could play. So he fell back into the one that was most comfortable. He got a job working for the police force. He bought a little house in the Central District, just a few blocks down from where K had lived (that house was long gone, replaced with a fancy three story town house). And he became the Uncle K for his sister’s kids.

  Dory needed him. She was the one now struggling with addiction. He took care of her kids while she was in rehab. He read to them and took them on the weekends so she could have a break. He knew he was turning into Uncle K in other ways as well. Bitter and lonely. The world didn’t work the way he thought it should. Neither did the police department. He tried to change things but that just got him a reputation for being a trouble-maker. “Not a team player,” said his personnel review.