Hard Rain

by Waverly Fitzgerald

  “OK, be safe,” I said. I hung up, knowing that I would never get a gun. I would never need one.

  On my way up to Bellingham, I began to get the uneasy feeling that someone was following me. A black sedan stayed at an even pace behind me, several cars back. I got off to get gas at the exit for La Conner, a rather sleepy exit, and I didn’t see the car exit, but when I got back on the road, it—or a similar car—was back behind me. I told myself I was just being paranoid like Melody. I lost the car again when I got off at the Fairhaven exit and headed west, towards Bellingham Bay.

  Boo lived on the edge of Fairhaven, an older neighborhood in Bellingham on the south end of town. The house, a rundown three-story Victorian, was a psychedelic vision. I wondered how the neighbors felt about the choice of purple, orange and green paint. I parked my jeep behind a black Chevy Trailblazer and knocked on the orange door. There was a hammock on the front porch angled to look out across the bay and the sunset. Beneath it was an abalone shell full of ashes, cigarette butts and roaches.

  I noticed all of this, then the music seeping through the cracks of the door penetrated my consciousness. I could tell it was a Jimi Hendrix song but I couldn’t tell which one. I remembered the Hendrix song playing on Matt’s houseboat right before the bomb went off.

  I began to shake. My first thought was to run, to dive into the bushes before the whole house went up in flames. But I knew there were folks inside—I could hear voices. They were arguing but I couldn’t make out the words.

  I turned the knob and the door flew open. The house was full of sunlight and marijuana smoke. I followed the sound of voices through a cluttered hallway full of stacked newspapers and an old bicycle painted pink and into a living room with windows that looked out over a big backyard.

  The room contained two people: a woman who wore only a t-shirt and a pair of pink panties lounged on a sofa. She was the one smoking the joint. She paused at the top of her inhale and looked at me with sleepy eyes. The man had on more clothes, for which I was grateful. His belly poked out like a basketball under his Hawaiian shirt. He wore jeans that were unraveling at the bottom and his feet were bare. He had long blond hair back into a ponytail. His beard was a grizzled gray.

  “Who are you?” he said, looking me over.

  “Sorry to rush in like this,” I said. “I’m—” I paused. I had assumed these folks were possible victims of the Hendrix killer but suddenly it occurred to me that I might have just found Matt’s enemy.

  “I’m just a big fan of Hendrix,” I said. “And I’ve never heard that song before.”

  It wounded lame to me but neither of them seemed to think so. Maybe they were just too stoned.

  “It’s ‘Crosstown Traffic’ from Electric Ladyland,” the man said.

  “You must be really into Hendrix,” I said.

  “Not really,” he said with a shrug. “It just came up because of Matt…”

  The woman made a disgusted noise.

  “Matt was here?” I asked.

  The woman blew the smoke away and looked at me. Her eyes glittered through the curtain of her long hair.

  “You know Matt?” she asked, her voice suddenly interested.

  I nodded.

  “Girlfriend?” asked the guy.

  “No!” I said, perhaps too sharply. There was no denying the attraction I felt for Matt but it was probably because he was so fucked up. I have always been attracted to wounded men. That doesn’t mean I get involved with them. At least, not any more.

  “Too bad,” said the guy to the woman. She tossed her hair like a petulant teenager. “Grace can’t figure out why he would crawl out of her bed this morning and take off before the sun was even up. She thought maybe he had a girlfriend—or a wife— he needed to get home to.”

  I glanced at the woman. She was probably Matt’s age although it was hard to tell. Her hair was long and dark and her skin smooth and tan.

  “How do you two know each other?” I asked. As soon as I asked, I realized the question was far too prim. The woman erupted in laughter. A giant grin split the man’s beard.

  “We all go way back,” he said. “Say we should introduce ourselves.” He nodded at the woman. “That’s Grace.

  “Carnally,” she said. It took me a while to realize she was answering my earlier question. The guy ignored her. “I’m Boo,” he went on, holding out a hand. I took it and shook.

  “Rachel Stern,” I said. “I’m Matt’s partner.” That got me another sharp look from the woman. “Business partner. I’m a PI. I’m helping him with a case.”

  “Yeah,” Boo frowned. “He told us about it. Someone’s apparently bumping off members of our old platoon. Rivers. Now that’s no loss. But Anderson. Hey, he was a good guy.”

  “Yes, and we don’t know who’ll be next,” I said. “I was on Matt’s houseboat when it blew up. There was a Jimi Hendrix song playing on the stereo.”

  “Yeah, Matt mentioned that.” Boo said. “That’s why I got out my old albums and tapes.” He pointed at the entertainment center on the far wall. It was state of the art with giant speakers, an assortment of black boxes with blinking lights, and a turntable on which a record was spinning, sending out flickers of light. There’s something so seductive about records. I remember how much I liked watching them spin when I was a kid. My parents had a collection of old jazz records: Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Lady Day.

  I picked up the album cover which was propped against the cabinet. It was the album for Are You Experienced?, showing Hendrix wearing an orange feather boa around his neck and a shirt with eyes on it. Very trippy. I noticed a name on the cover and blinked when I saw it.

  “Ellie Foley,” I read.

  Boo lit up a cigarette.

  “That’s who I’m looking for,” I said. “How come you have her album?”

  “Thought you said you were helping Matt with his case,” he said.

  “It’s related,” I said, though it wasn’t really. Or at least it hadn’t been until this moment.

  “It’s a long story,” he said. He looked over at Grace who was watching us with bright eyes. “Hey, baby, will you go to the coop and pick up the cheese order.”

  She pouted, a strange look on a forty year old woman. Now I could see the lines radiating out from the corners of her eyes and around her mouth.

  “Why so you can talk about your revolutionary heroine?” she asked but she got up and left the room, not without a little butt waggle for the benefit of Boo. I think it was lost on him.

  “You lived with Ellie Foley,” I said.

  “Yeah. So?”

  “I’m writing an article on Ellie for Gus Holliday,” I said.

  Boo frowned. “He probably knew Ellie as well as I do,” he said. “Why would they assign some kid?—sorry, but you’re a kid to me—to write her story? You probably don’t know anything about the Sixties. I doubt you were even born then.”

  “1967,” I said. “I’m Marty and Sylvia Stern’s daughter.”

  “Wow!” He shook his head, as if shaking out the smoke. “Sure grew up to be a looker.”

  I couldn’t help feeling flattered though why I should want the approval of an aging stoner I’m not sure.

  “Well, go talk to your parents about her,” he said after a minute.

  “They’re not talking,” I said.

  Boo chewed on his lip for a few minutes. At least that’s what I think he was doing. His beard crumpled inward and wiggled back and forth. “I can see why that might be so,” he observed at last.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  Jimi launched into a screeching, swirling, soaring guitar solo.

  “Look, I sent Grace away so we could talk about Ellie but she’ll be back soon enough. What do you want to know?”

  “Were you involved with her?” I asked.

  “One of many,” he said.

  Just then Grace came through the front door. She was now wearing jeans and sandals. “Hey, I’m blocked in,” she said to m
e. “You’ve got to move your car.”

  “Sure,” I said, jumping up. I dug my key out of my purse and headed out the door. Boo followed behind. As soon as I got out the door, I saw there was another car parked behind mine: a black sedan.

  “That wasn’t here a minute ago,” Grace said. She looked around. There was no sign of a person in the car, although the windows were tinted and the sun was reflecting off them. We could hear music playing inside the car. It was another Hendrix song.

  “I don’t like this, Boo,” Grace said.

  “Damn it,” Boo said. “Matt’s got you all paranoid.”

  He started forward to check out the car, the two of us trailing behind. We were next to Boo’s Trailblazer when shots rang out. The bullets shattered the windows on the driver’s side. I screamed. Grace made a dash for the shelter of the house.

  For a big guy, Boo moved fast. He hit the ground and rolled under the car, then pulled me down after him.

  There was quiet for a minute. I’ve got to tell you, that’s an eerie kind of quiet, the quiet that follows gunfire. Then Boo inched up, opened the passenger door, still staying low, reached inside and pulled a gun out of the glove compartment. I was shaking.

  Another shot rang out, taking out the windows above us. Pebbles of glass rained down on top of us. Boo popped up and fired a shot.

  “It came from the back yard,” said Boo, nodding his head towards the back yard. “I’m going to check it out!”

  “Don’t leave me!” I said.

  “Then come with me,” he said. “Just stay behind me!” He stood up abruptly, gun at the ready, pivoting and checking out the scene. There was no one visible.

  He motioned to me and headed towards the back yard. I shadowed his footsteps. We went through a gate and into a long backyard full of structures. A yurt. A sweat lodge. A geodesic dome. As far as I was concerned, the shooter could have been hiding in any of those. But Boo seemed unconcerned. He headed down between the rows of a huge vegetable garden, full of chard and kale and pumpkin vines and waist-high marijuana plants. I saw what drew his eye.

  At the far back of the garden, was a compost heap and sticking up out of the pile of rotting debris was a record album: We stood staring at it. It was the cover of Are You Experienced? The Jimi Hendrix trio stood in a fish bowl in the center of an orange square with psychedelic purple letters on the top and the bottom.

  Suddenly we heard a car starting. We ran back towards the front and saw the black sedan backing up. Boo fired at it and hit a tire, causing the car to veer to the left momentarily but it kept on going.

  “He’s going to ruin that rim,” Boo said, lowering the gun.

  “Aren’t you going to call the police?”

  “Are you kidding? We’d have to get rid of all the dope.”

  Boo looked down at the ground behind the fence. “He must have been standing here,” he said, “when he first fired on us.” He looked down, scuffed at the dirt. “Look!” he said, coming up with a shell casing in his fingers. “Looks like a Makarov.

  “What’s that?”

  “Soviet era pistol. We had some in Vietnam.”

  Boo looked at me. “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “I think maybe Matt was right. Maybe there is someone after me.”

  “How do you know they weren’t after me?” I asked.

  Chapter 20

  William (Boo) Riley

  Back in Nam, Boo was just one of the guys. Maybe it’s true he was the leader, whenever it was time to get in trouble. But when out in the field, he knew his role: be a killing machine. And he was happy to do it. Do it without thinking about it. Do it and then go back to base and get high and put on a Jimi Hendrix tape (borrowed from Matt who was a big fan) and let it all drift away.

  But once back in the States, things were different. Boo stuck out at the University of Washington like a sore thumb. He was older than the other students—not so much by age, but by experience. They purchased their Army fatigues at Army/Navy stores and wore them ironically. His were authentic and probably somewhere deep in the fibers lingered traces of the blood he had shed. He tried to stay stoned but found the weakass shit that college kids smoked too mild for his taste so he took to growing his own.

  Luckily he was renting a three-bedroom house that had a garage he could outfit for his plants. He lined the interior with tinfoil, hung grow lights from the ceiling and started a little cottage industry. It supplemented what he got from the GI Bill but he kept most of it for personal use. He found he needed to be constantly stoned. It was the only way he could stave off the growing sense of unease.

  Roommates came and went. No one could live with him for long. He would go on rants, yelling and kicking at the furniture and throwing anything breakable atthe walls. The living room was a shambles. Each new roommate would come in, look at the empty living room, go out and buy an overstuffed armchair or a small shabby sofa at a secondhand store to fill the space. A few weeks later it would be destroyed. Boo would set it on fire with a dropped cigarette when he nodded off watching TV or he would kick it into splinters in one of his rages. The furniture often lasted longer than the roommates.

  Then one day a gorgeous redhead showed up at the door, wanting to rent one of the empty bedrooms. Boo didn’t want to rent to a woman—certainly not an attractive woman—but the rent was due in a few days and he was short. So he took her money and Ellie Foley moved in. Turned out that was a good idea. Turned out she was an activist on campus. Turned out she had all kinds of friends and they started hanging out at Boo’s house. Pretty soon he was surrounded by smart, interesting people who had open minds and wanted to hear about what he had experienced in Vietnam.

  He helped found the local chapter of Vietnam Vets against the War. He helped organize a protest rally which featured two hundred vets. He was one of the speakers, along with Aaron Dixon, head of the Seattle Black Panthers, at the Anti-War Training that took place at the Moore Theater.

  As Boo got more involved with Ellie’s life, he got more involved with Ellie. She believed that sex was just physical gratification. You had an itch, you scratched it. Love the one you’re with. At first, this suited Boo just fine. He waited for her to make the first move. Women’s lib and all that. She would knock on his bedroom door late at night. Maybe she would do a little dance for him. She had just started working at the strip club and she said she wanted to try out her moves but they both knew that was just an excuse. The one thing he noticed about Ellie. She needed to be in charge.

  That was fine for a long time, but it started to get on Boo’s nerves when she brought home other guys. The sound of her moans and sighs echoed through the house. And some nights, instead of knocking on his door, she knocked on his roommate’s door. For most of the time Ellie lived with him, that guy was Bob Roth, another UW student, a Poly Sci major, a slight guy with brushy hair and beady eyes. Boo couldn’t figure out why she would even waste her time on him. Roth had joined the Coast Guard instead of getting drafted and spent his mandatory three years of service on an island somewhere, monitoring radio signals. Pathetic. Roth hung around the fringes of SDS and was the kind of guy who would suggest the wildest escapades, though he didn’t seem to be around when the action went down.

  Ellie liked to hear Boo’s war stories. She got him to talk about a lot of things that he had never talked about, at night, in bed, after they were both spent. That’s when he first mentioned the grenade he had brought back. Ellie was really interested in that. She wanted to see it. He showed her where he kept it, locked away in an Army footlocker in his closet. She asked a lot of questions. How to handle it safely. How to set it off. He never figured she would steal it.

  He knew she was running some kind of renegade group with her women’s consciousness-raising group. She kicked him and Roth out every Wednesday night for these gatherings and the bombing happened on a Wednesday. He remembered it clearly.

  He was at the Blue Moon having a beer with Gus Holliday when Ellie burst in,
her cheeks pink, her eyes bright. She had a bandanna tied around her throat. She was bold like that—everyone knew the Amazons wore bandannas over their faces but ran around campus with their breasts bare. She was bouncing off the walls and he calmed her down with a couple of beers. Then the news started trickling in. The Amazons had thrown a Molotov cocktail into the basement of the ROTC building. Ellie listened to the reports with a sly smile on her lips, pretending to be amazed by the news. It was around midnight when they heard that the janitor had been injured, then that he had died. Ellie’s eyes got big and dark.

  “Take me home!” she said to Boo. “Take me home, right now!” She wanted to get high. She wanted to have sex. She wanted to blast her favorite song: “Foxy Lady” so loud that she couldn’t hear herself think. Boo understood.

  “You can’t run away from it,” he said. “You’ve got to turn and face it.” And she began sobbing. He held her while she cried.

  Then he told her stories: stories about his worst moments in Vietnam, the things he would never say again to any other person on earth. He told her about a bunch of guys shooting a water buffalo for a joke and how that mighty beast had staggered around in the rice fields spouting blood. He told her about a village where the sergeant ordered the platoon to hunt down and kill every person: elders, women, kids, babies. He told her about planting a grenade underneath the cot of that sick, sadistic bastard, only one of the orderlies picked it up instead and blew his hand off.

  “Collateral damage,” he said. “In every war, there’s collateral damage. You can’t prevent it.”

  About a month later, Ellie was arrested for the bombing, fingered by some informant. There was a lot of speculation about who it was. Boo always suspected Roth who had moved out right after the incident.

  Ellie was only in jail for a few days and once she got out on bail, she moved in with one of the women from the consciousness-raising group: Karen. And Boo could see that she was getting involved with her lawyer, Marty Stern. That was OK. Boo had had his own little thing with Marty’s wife, Silvia, at the Sky River Festival, when she was mad at Marty for flirting with another woman.