Hard Rain Falling

by Don Carpenter

  When he woke up the second time, Sue was awake, sitting up, and staring at him.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked her.

  “God, you’re mean-looking,” she said. “My head hurts.” She pulled the sheet up over her small breasts, and Jack saw bruises on her shoulders, tiny purple marks almost like tattoos. “Mona’s going to kill me,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you know? She’s really got the hots for you.”

  The information pleased Jack. “How about you?” he asked. “Do you have the hots for me, too?”

  “Denny’s my boy friend,” she said. “Oh, God, he’ll kill me.”

  “Listen, what do you think they’re doing?”

  She made a face. “You dragged me in here.”

  He got out cigarettes and matches, and they smoked for a few minutes without speaking. Jack wanted some coffee and a drink of whiskey.

  “You know,” she said. “It’s a good thing you showed up. It was getting kind of shitty in there with the three of us. I used to worry about Mona laying there listening to us.” She giggled. “I was afraid she’d say something, you know?”

  “Why didn’t you have her crawl right in with you?”

  Sue looked startled. “Are you kidding?”

  “Hell no. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Three people?”

  “Bad scene?” Jack asked. He was smiling at her obvious discomfort. “Aint you never kissed a chick?”

  But Sue did not want to talk about that. “But we couldn’t split up; we’re best girl friends. So it’s a good thing you guys happened to run into each other.”

  “Didn’t Denny try to get rid of her, though?”

  “He’s so sweet. I bet he’s not even fooling around with Mona. I bet they both passed out, too.”

  “Did you pass out?”

  She looked at him oddly. “Sure. Didn’t you? We didn’t do anything, did we?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Of course not.” She did a bad imitation of a girl trying to remember. “Gee, I don’t know. I was so drunk. Did I throw up or anything? My head sure hurts.”

  Under the covers, Jack put a hand on her hip, but she pushed it away.

  “Daylight bother you?”

  “Close your eyes. I have to get up and go to the toilet.”

  When she got back she climbed into the bed after only a moment’s hesitation, and snuggled up close. “Don’t do anything to me,” she said, “I just want to get warm and sleep.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’m fucked out anyway.” He giggled, and a sharp pain passed through his forehead.

  “You bastard,” she said. And a few moments later, “Did you really give Mona ten dollars?”

  Jack was surprised. “Did she say that?”

  “Yeah, but I think she was lying. Did you?”

  “Why, do you want ten dollars, too? Hell, I ought to charge you.”

  Sue was quiet for a long time, and Jack thought she had gone to sleep, but finally she spoke. “I think she’s afraid she’s going to turn into a prostitute. She gets real scared sometimes.”

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “Give me another cigarette. I’m sorry for her; she’s really scared. But I’m not. I don’t give a shit what happens to me.” She looked at him over her cigarette, now sitting up again, her breasts exposed. “Last night,” she said. Her eyes glittered oddly. “That was the first time I ever...well, you know? What you did to me. I remember. I never felt like that before. Is it you?”

  “No,” he said. “Maybe you just got drunk enough to forget about worrying.”

  “Oh, God,” she said. Her face twisted itself into a babyish frown. “You didn’t just screw me, did you? Didn’t you use a rubber or anything?”

  “No. You remember, you know I didn’t.”

  “But I’ll have a baby. Oh, Jesus Christ.”

  “Are you going to worry about it?”

  “No. The hell with it. Screw me again. What do I care?” She puffed angrily at her cigarette, stubbed it out, and put her arms around him, her mouth on his chest.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’m gettin old.”

  “I don’t care. Piss on it. I’m just a whore anyway.” She began to cry on his chest. He was amazed. She had gone through about ten emotions in ten seconds and now she was bawling. But that was just like a whore, wasn’t it? All of the whores Jack had known very well, no matter how cool and businesslike, turned hysterical in the end, went on shit or fell in love with other whores or sat around talking about suicide or pretending they were catching tuberculosis; and suddenly Jack knew that Sue and Mona were going to be just exactly what they were afraid of, and that so far no smart pimps had gotten hold of them and taken them over the bumps, or they’d have been turned out long before. It was just a matter of time, and Mona would learn about getting the money first, and Sue would forget about liking it; the life would soften them, and tears would come easier and love harder. It was depressing. A life of prostitution seemed so drab. But then he had to admit that the girls weren’t really cut out for any thing else, except maybe working behind a counter somewhere, going out with small-time sports and fading out into drab marriages and the bitterness of obscurity. Either way. What difference did it make? He felt a little sorry for them, for Sue, now silent and pretending sleep, and then he corrected himself angrily. To feel sorry for them was to pretend that he was any better, and worse, to pretend that he cared about them. Which was nonsense, both ways. He had whored a little himself, hadn’t he? What else could you call boxing? Of course, he had enjoyed boxing for a while, but then the girls would probably enjoy hustling, if only for the outlaw feeling it would give them, and the money and the sense of daring. But of course that never lasted.

  There was a knock at the door. Jack got out of bed and went to the door and asked who it was, and Denny answered. Jack opened the door.

  “What the hell’s goin on?” Denny said angrily; “you took my girl!”

  “He didn’t lay a hand on me, Denny, honest to God!” Sue said from the bed.

  “That’s right,” Jack said. “I was so goddam drunk I dragged off the wrong girl. No shit, I was so drunk I just hit the sack. We just woke up.”

  “Bullshit!” Denny looked betrayed and furious. His face was puffed with sleep, and his eyes red.

  “Honest to God, honey.”

  “Shut up!” Denny turned to Jack. Their faces were only a few inches apart. “Smart bastard! I thought you was my friend!”

  Jack made himself relax. “What’s the matter, wouldn’t Mona come across?”

  Denny swung at him and Jack blocked the punch easily.

  “Don’t start anything you can’t finish.”

  Denny stared at him stupidly. “You’re a boxer.”

  “That’s right. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  They stood that way for a few moments. Jack felt the tangle descending on him, and had an urge to tear it away, but he kept control of himself and said, “Listen, don’t get upset. We really didn’t do anything. Honest, Denny.”

  Finally the old Denny asserted itself, and he grinned. Jack noticed that his teeth were dirty. “Okay,” Denny said. “I’m sorry.”

  He kept apologizing all day, and it bothered Jack, because he had decided that he preferred Sue to Mona, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He did not want to hurt Denny, perhaps because it seemed so easy to do. Denny had changed a lot, he decided.

  After two weeks of it Jack was ready to quit. He could feel the tone deserting his body each morning when he got out of bed—a dull ache here, a thickness there—and he was tired, aw-fully tired, of the way their lives were going: a constant round of movies, dinners, long afternoons in the poolhall or across the bay at the track; bouts of lovemaking that by their very sameness destroyed any desire in him to make them different, coupled—practically glued—to Mona, whose only contribution to the act was to hook her legs around his and give her hips an occasional jer
ky thrust; who, during the few times he tried to investigate her body with his mouth, cried out in frozen anxiety and pushed his head away, leaving him with the choice of either quitting entirely or going ahead with what now seemed so unattractive; thinking, magnifying, Sue’s response to their one night together, until at last his mind was making a distinction between what he was doing with Mona and what he wanted to do with Sue, as the difference between satisfying an itch and making a discovery. He had never thought about sex in quite that way, and it gave focus to an otherwise endlessly empty round of days, and kept him involved with Denny and the girls when otherwise he might have checked out of the hotel and left them, gone off and done the serious thinking he had come to San Francisco to do in the first place—or so he sometimes thought.

  To live intimately with any person, however, is to pursue understanding, and after two weeks Jack felt that he knew more about Mona than there was to her, and since he was not going to release any of the hidden parts of himself to her, there were not even the satisfactions of being understood. Mona was a crafty girl but she was not intelligent in any real way; she had a line of patter to cover almost any situation she could expect, but when the unusual happened, she hid quickly behind a barrier of sarcasm, or a comically old-fashioned morality.

  She might come home from an afternoon of movies and shopping on Jack’s money, to find him on the bed naked, a can of beer in his hand, reading Ring Magazine. Nudity offended her.

  “My God,” she would say, standing there with an armload of packages, “were you born in a barn or something?”

  Jack would not bother to reply, and she would tap her foot angrily for a moment, and then begin undoing her packages.

  “Look what I got on sale at the City of Paris,” holding up a forty-dollar cashmere sweater or a cocktail dress.

  “Try it on,” Jack would suggest.

  “Don’t you even care what it cost me?”

  “I gave you a hundred, you spent it all.”

  Triumphantly, she would waggle a handful of bills in front of his eyes. “I did not! I’ve still got eighteen-fifty left for tomorrow!”

  “Try it on.”

  “Close your eyes, now.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  She would flounce into the bathroom to try on her new clothes, shoes, gloves, or whatever, and then make an entrance. Jack would stare at her. “That’s very nice on you,” he would say without conviction.

  “You don’t like it. Screw you.”

  She was right; he didn’t like it, or her. He did not think she looked good in anything. On the other hand, he thought—Sue looked better and better every day. He wanted her. He did not know why he did nothing about it. He wondered why Sue herself did nothing about it. Although they were friendly, Sue made a point of never being alone with him, or giving him secret looks, or even addressing remarks at him.

  One morning he woke up to see Mona sitting in the chair by the window, crying into her handkerchief.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Oh, never mind.” She was wearing only a slip, and her long hair was hanging down in front. Without makeup, her face looked plain and childlike, but her mouth was twisted in bitterness. “You’ll kick me out,” she said.

  “Come on, what is it?”

  She admitted tearfully that her period had begun. “You won’t let me stay with you now. I’ll smell bad for a week and you won’t be able to make me.” She tossed her hair back angrily, and Jack saw the shine of tears on her cheeks. “Goddam being a woman! It’s shitty!”

  Jack had never thought of it that way. Of course it was shitty, having to go through the bleeding and cramps, and have the babies or worry about having them; but that was the nature of things, and he could not, even with this small insight, really feel sorry for her. But he said, “No, now listen, don’t worry.” But she did have a right to worry, because all that was holding them together was their need to use each other. Her period was the same as if he ran out of money. So she had a right to some reassurance, because he did not really want to be rid of her. This surprised him a little. He was very nice to her all day, but as if to test him, she was moody, spiteful, and sullen. That night she had a sick headache and bad cramps, and the others went out without her. They went to a movie, and afterward, Sue went back to her room alone. Jack and Denny stopped in a small bar.

  “Listen, I’m running out of bread,” Denny told him. “I got about twenty-five left. I don’t know where it goes.”

  “I’m getting a little short myself,” Jack said.

  Denny drank a shot of whiskey and followed it with half a glass of beer. He wiped his mouth. “Why don’t we dump the chicks and go over to the East Bay? I know a liquor store we can score off of, down in the spade part of town. The cat has about fifteen hundred in a floor safe in the back, where there’s a little desk in a hallway between the front of the store and the place he keeps his cases. The clerks all know the combination. All we got to do is go in there late when the clerk’s sittin at the desk eatin, scare hell out of him, and get him to open the safe.”

  “I haven’t done anything like that in a long time,” Jack said.

  “We got to get money someplace,” Denny said. “Lissen. Tommy cased this one himself before he went to Mexico; we were gonna knock the place over just the two of us, because you know there wasn’t enough for everybody, and it’d only take a couple guys to pull off. Tommy went into the joint to pick up a pint or something, and there wasn’t anybody in the store, and like he was gonna just go around the counter and tap out the till, when he sees this curtain at the back, so he goes back there and pulls the curtain back, and there’s this sandwich and thermos jug on a table, and this guy comin up from way in the back, and Tommy hears a toilet back there flushin, and the guy comes runnin up with a magazine in his hand, but not quick enough, cause Tommy sees under the table the open door to the safe, one of those round countersunk jobs. So he gets his pint and cuts out. But we never did get around to it. He had to take off for Mexico. But we could do it. It’s a lockup.”

  Jack was on the verge of saying, “All right, let’s do it,” but something stopped him; not fear, certainly not the illegality—he had done much worse things—but perhaps the very cheapness of it. Robbing a liquor store, was that what he was cut out for? He had come to the city to think, and now he was being offered a proposition that again would make thinking unnecessary—but it all seemed so endlessly dull; an infinite series of holdups, parties, girls, bad dinners, and worse hotel rooms—he could not see any difference between this and working for a living, and with working there was not that nagging anxiety about being braced by the police. Jack had known a lot of people who stole for a living because they were bitter, and many who stole almost sexually, getting a secret charge out of the act. And Denny. He did not know why Denny was a thief, unless it was just habit.

  “Why don’t you get a job?” he asked.

  Denny looked at him strangely. “Fuck that shit,” he said. “Is that what you’re worryin about?”

  “Not really,” Jack said.

  “Lissen, man, I seen enough fuggin shit to last me the rest of my fuggin life. I seen guys get killed for nothin, I mean nothin, man. Fuck that shit.”

  “Were you in the Korean war?”

  “I was in the Third Marines, man, me and Dale. Remember Dale Phipps? He’s still in. He’s a staff sergeant now, I think. Man, what a bunch of shit that was. You know what that cocksucker did? We was on patrol him and me and we bust into this little hut. It really stunk in there, an the only light was from this greasy dish or somethin, and there was an old man sittin in the corner and this gook officer on top of this woman in the corner, on some straw or somethin, an they all look up scared when we bust in, the officer’s got his pants down, you know, and Dale sees all this and lets out a laugh and shoots the officer right in the forehead, man. the back of his head spatters all over the woman’s face and she lets out a yell and Dale plugs her, too, in the chest, and then he turns and shoots the
old man. Goddam, I never seen nothin like it; just about one second and all three dead, laying there, and Dale turns to me and laughs and says, `How come you didn’t shoot anybody?’ and I says, `Jesus Christ, Phipps, what the fuck are you doin?’ and he gets a mean look on his face and yells at me, `I’ll kill you too, you motherfucker, if you tell on me!’ an we got the hell out of there, an I asked him later what the fuck he shot all those people for, hell, the gook was on our side, you know, and he grins and says, `What the fuck difference does it make?”’

  Denny squirmed uncomfortably, and scratched his cheek. “He shot them because he got the chance to, you know? Man, I used to dream about it. That crazy bastard. He would of killed me, too, and we was partners.”

  But the pustule had burst now, and Denny laughed. “But that aint why I turned thief. It scared the shit out of me, but so did the whole goddam war. It’s funny, at the time it didn’t seem wrong, or anything, just, well, like he went crazy, and I was scared of bein hooked up with a crazy man. Lots of guys went crazy. I know one guy, there was another guy with the same name as he had who got killed, and this guy didn’t find out about it, see, but the Corps sent his mother a telegram sayin he got killed in action, and he finds out about that, see, about a month later, and so he knows this other guy with the same name was killed, and his mother was tryin to collect on his insurance, and man, he just plain flipped out. He run out and tried to get himself killed, but his sergeant coldcocked him and sent him to the hospital. I guess he got a discharge. I met Tommy when I was gettin out, and we hooked up together. He had some great plans.”

  Denny looked sad, now. “That’s what I ought to do. Run down to Mexico and find him. He run out on me, the bastard.” His eyes were intense, almost glassy. “We got to get some money, man. We just got to.”

  “Why don’t you hold up the joint alone? I don’t want to go. Fuck it.”

  “What’s the matter? Listen, I know a cat in Oakland’ll sell us a couple guns, and we can steal a car. Take this one quick and we both head for Mexico. Ditch these goddam broads. I’m burnt out on Sue, anyway. She’s the worst lay I ever had in my life.”