Hard Rain Falling

by Don Carpenter

  “Why, isn’t all talk bullshit?” she asked. She had her hands on her hips, and her face was in shadow. “I’ve been waiting for you to say something obvious, but you don’t seem to know how. Don’t you know how to score with chicks like me? You’re supposed to talk in double entendres, and then come up behind me while I’m mixing the drinks, and put your hand on my fanny. Then I turn around, grunting like a hog, and lay a big fat spitty kiss on you. Then we take off our clothes.”

  Jack stood up. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but if you want to go to bed, let’s go.”

  She grinned. “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “Aren’t you afraid I’m making fun of you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then; one of us is going to have to lead, and the other follow. One of us has to make the first move. Are you the type that likes to make the first move, or do you prefer the girls to do all the work? Or, I guess we could sort of stare at each other, and go ` Ooh! ’ and fall into each other’s arms.”

  “I want it without all the bullshit. I haven’t slept with a woman in a long time.”

  Something changed in her eyes, but her mouth was still amused. “Oh, really? Neither have I.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Well, why are we standing around talking?”

  “How the fuck should I know? Let’s go.”

  He took her hand and led her back into the bedroom. The bed was unmade. He was afraid she was going to ask him to ignore the mess, but he should have known better. She broke away from him, humming, and started to undress, slipping out of her slacks like a man, pulling her sweater over her head and coming up to Jack for him to unhook her brassiere. That cleared away the fog, and for the first time that night Jack began to feel really passionate and happy. In a very few moments they were on the bed naked together and not talking.

  Jack had been afraid that after all that time it would be over too quickly, and he tried to put off the moment of penetration as long as possible, and then even that became dangerous and he entered her quickly; he had been right, and they were finished almost before they started; but before Jack had time to feel sorry about it, Sally went down on him, her appetites increased rather than diminished, and Jack did not have time to consider what to do, it was there in front of him to be done, and he dissolved into the animality of it, and for the next hour vanished into an ecstasy he had forgotten existed. It was too good to think about, too sweet to investigate, and on his third climax he almost fainted, and although his eyes were open he could see nothing but bright colors, as if he had gone blind to form, and then with one final teeth-rattling spasm he did subside into unconsciousness.

  They were awakened around midnight by the telephone. It went on for fifteen sputtery rings before quitting, and by then they were smoking cigarettes in the semidarkness. He could feel her smooth skin against him, but he was beyond arousal.

  “I suppose,” she said, “that I ought to tell you what a wonderful lover you are. For your manhood’s sake. But I’m so sick of that macho crap. I think you’ve really got it. But not as a lover. You’re okay, but you don’t know much. You’ve got vitality, but any teen-age boy could do better. And of course any woman. But all you really need is practice. You’re out of practice.”

  Jack laughed. “God, you’re a nutty broad. You’ll talk about anything, won’t you.”

  “Can you think of anything too good or too awful to talk about?”

  “I guess not. I want a drink.”

  “So bring us both one, baby.”

  When he came back with the bottle and glasses, she was sitting up, with the nightstand light on. She looked very beautiful, and he was certain he was in love with her. He wanted to tell her, but he was afraid of what she might say. She seemed capable of making fun of him about it, or analyzing him. He did not want that.

  “How do you guys make it in prison?” she asked. Jack went all tight inside, but he managed to finish his drink without speaking. Then he said, “That’s none of your business.”

  “Oh. Did I step on something sacred? Or vulgar?”

  “It’s just that—”

  “I get it. You’re embarrassed. I guess I know what you do. I guess you have to. God, I wish I had a penis!”

  Jack had been angry and exasperated, but now he did not know what to think. “Huh?”

  She laughed. “None of that Freudian crap. I just wish I could be a man for a while, or me with a man’s penis. I’d love to do it to a woman or to another man. I love it so much I’d like to fuck the whole world, one, two, three at a time. The whole world! Don’t you feel that way sometimes?”

  “Hell no. You must be a nympho or something.”

  “Are you kidding? Do you know what a nympho is? It’s a skinny nervous woman who fucks to keep from going crazy. That’s not my problem at all. I’m not frigid; I’m just not tender and shy, like a textbook All-American feminine, that’s all.”

  “What is your problem, then?”

  “I just told you. I want everything sometimes. And I’m not going to get everything. Ever.”

  There was something terribly wistful about her face, and Jack leaned over and kissed her gently, knowing of no other way of telling her he understood. He was about to whisper that he loved her when she broke away from him, tossing her head impatiently. “Don’t. I don’t like to kiss while I’m thinking.”

  “Then stop thinking.”

  She laughed and then hiccupped. “Oops. Too much drink.” She held out her glass and he filled it halfway and took a long gurgling drink from the bottle.

  “Do you mind if I spend the rest of the night here?” he asked. “I’m too pooped to go home.” She didn’t answer right away, so he changed the subject. “Gee, I wish the fellows in Quentin could see me now.”

  “I know what,” she said. “Let’s go down to Vegas and fuck around for a few days.”

  “Tonight?”

  “No, silly. In the morning. We’ll fly down. Fuck all day and play the slots all night. Sound good?”

  To Jack it sounded very good, like an adolescent masturbation fantasy, but good anyway. “You’re really something,” he said. “You’re like a man, you know that?”

  She giggled. “In what way?”

  “The way you talk. That’s all. The way you think.”

  “Anything wrong with that?”

  “Hail, no,” he said. “Let’s go to sleep.”

  “If you feel anything funny during the night, don’t worry, it’ll be me. Playing little games.”

  Jack went to sleep thinking that he was a long way from San Quentin, a long way from anything he had ever known. It was easy to go to sleep thinking it would go on like this forever.

  In the morning he was a little surprised that Sally still wanted to go to Las Vegas. She said, “We’ll take a cab over to your place and get your things and then haul ass for the airport. We’ll probably get there by the middle of the afternoon.”

  Jack scratched his head. “How about letting me make breakfast for us? I cooked in the joint.”

  “Okay. I have to make reservations.”

  Jack went into the tiny kitchen. From the window over the sink he could see Alcatraz dazzling in the bay under a perfect sky. It was only seven in the morning, but there were already a few sailboats out, their white sails and bright spinnakers canting before the breeze. Jack could guess how the men on The Rock felt about the sailboats. They wished urgently that they could get their hands on one of them and sail off to Mexico or Venezuela. He wondered how the people on the boats felt about Alcatraz. If they didn’t suffer from guilt, they probably thought it was interesting—part of the attraction of the Bay area. Jack felt good just from knowing he wasn’t on The Rock; he did not feel sorry for the men out there; he didn’t feel sorry for anybody. He felt too good. His body could still remember the night, and for the time being he didn’t have a worry in the world. It was damned good to be out of prison. He thought about Claymore. Cla
ymore must have known how good it was. Jack had never known before. He had been a punk, with a punk’s outlook, a punk’s self-pity and conceit, thinking the world was out to get him. That was stupid; he was mature now, time to enjoy life. And how lucky he was to have fallen into this!

  “You know,” he called out to her, “if I hadn’t been railroaded into the joint, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

  She came into the kitchen, dressed in a light-blue sweater that almost matched her eyes, those remarkable, penetrating, honest blue eyes, that seemed in the morning light to have a tinge of lavender in them, like the eyes of a Siamese cat. He drew her to him and kissed her, and the kiss seemed to make her girlish and innocent, the way she put her hands up on his chest and looked at him.

  “Was it worth it?” she asked him.

  “What?”

  “The years in prison. To be here.”

  He laughed happily. “You’re goddam right it was.”

  “Would you do it again?”

  “Nope.”

  She laughed, and watched Jack light the burner, grease the pan, and break the eggs into the already sputtering fat, as if it were a ritual of the utmost importance.

  “You know,” Jack said, “it seems screwy makin eggs for two people. I’m used to workin in the hundreds.”

  “Do they have regular eggs up there?”

  “Mostly powdered, but once in a while we had fried eggs. A friend of mine, my partner for a long time, used to crack jokes like, `Hey, sixty-four sunnyside up, three hundert forty-three easy over, two hundert twenty-eight chopped an messed around, an snap it up!” They laughed, and Jack remembered Billy’s narrow shoulders hunched up in mock efficiency, his head canted forward in urgency. “And he used to say things like, `I wonder what the poor folks eat!”’

  “Speaking of poor folks, I made us reservations at The Sands.”

  They sat at the little table in the alcove to eat their eggs and drink coffee. “Listen,” Jack said, “I’d like to go, really, but I’m not supposed to leave the county without asking my parole officer; and I don’t think he’d go for the action. I’m supposed to be looking for a job.”

  Sally made a face. “Do you do everything he tells you?”

  Jack was a little irritated. “Listen, I don’t want to go back to the joint just for a little party. And besides, I aint got the money to go to Vegas.” He looked down at his plate. “So that’s it, baby.”

  “You big strong men kill me. I suppose you’d flip if I said I meant to pay for the trip. I have all kinds of money.” For a moment, Jack wondered if she wanted to be with him as much as he wanted to be with her; but he rejected the thought. She finished eating and lit a cigarette, puffing rapidly, flicking the ashes onto her plate. “Does your parole officer have to know?”

  “I goddam sure aint going anywhere without tellin him.” As he spoke, Jack wondered if it was true, or if he was just setting up conditions of behavior for her benefit.

  “Maybe I’d better get myself another man. You just don’t seem to have it this morning.”

  Now Jack was on surer ground. “Not enough macho, hey?”

  She leveled her eyes on his grinning face, and then had to laugh. “All right, I’m sorry. I never apologize. I don’t know why I apologized to you.”

  “Maybe because I’m bigger’n you.”

  “Partly that. Braggart.”

  After breakfast Sally cleaned up the kitchen, and Jack watched with approval. That was good, she was neat. A rich girl, but she had enough sense to keep her living quarters clean. As if, Jack thought with dismay, he was measuring her against his standard of what a “good woman” ought to be. As if he wanted to marry her. If, that is, she passed all the tests. Rich, neat, a good lay, attractive. Of course, she talked too much, and too much like a man, but he could knock that out of her after a while. He was disgusted with himself. He went and took a shower.

  Later they did what she wanted, flying first to Los Angeles, where Sally got into a telephone booth and made at least ten calls and talked for over an hour while Jack had a few drinks in the bar, and then getting on a flight for Las Vegas. There was a piano on the Vegas plane, and a man who played and sang requests. It was in the middle of the afternoon, but most of the people on the plane were half-drunk. They stayed in Las Vegas five days, and on the third day Jack got on the telephone to his parole officer and explained what was going on, and got his permission to marry Sally. The parole officer said he was as much as washing his hands of Jack, and that any slip at all would be enough to land him in prison again. Jack explained very carefully that Sally had lots of money and he could take his time looking for work, or even go to college for a while, but the parole officer was still angry, and told Jack he had committed enough violations already to land him back in San Quentin, and he, the parole officer, was stretching his own neck out on the block by not calling Jack on it. Besides, he said, he had found a job for Jack, which, if it panned out, could lead to big money. It was working for an outfit that sold carpets, as a carpetlayer. He told Jack these guys make around ten thousand a year when they get going. He had obviously done himself proud just to get Jack the chance at the job, and now he was mad because Jack was in Vegas marrying a rich woman. “I’ll want that job,” Jack told him. “That really sounds great. Goddam, man, you know I want that job.” The parole officer was somewhat mollified, and Jack promised he’d be back in a few days at the longest and ready to go to work. When he hung up he was sweating so much, even in the dark air-conditioned room, that he had to take a shower.

  Nineteen

  They had argued over whether he should call his parole officer. “You’re not doing anything criminal,” she said. “They can’t do anything to you. It’s none of their business.”

  “They think it is,” Jack said.

  “Well, I don’t like it. I don’t like the way they try to lead you around by the nose.”

  “Well, that’s the name of the game. I got to call him.” He reached for the telephone, and Sally walked out of the room. He didn’t see her again for two days.

  After his shower he went down to the casino, wearing the lemon slacks and blue sport shirt Sally had gotten him as a present, feeling the clamminess of the air conditioning through the thin shirt. Sally wasn’t at any of the tables or in among the slot machines, but Jack wasn’t worried yet. He felt too good about the way things were going. He had to keep reminding himself he was not in prison any more, not even working in a bakery, gagging over the lard barrel or wiping damp flour off his face. He was now a well-set-up gentleman of leisure, making the “Vegas scene,” a young man for whom life had done a complete turnabout, the fiancé of a rich and beautiful woman. Jack wondered what it would be like, never having to worry about money again. Of course, he had never worried much about it in the past, but now he could do anything he wanted. He decided he wanted to go to college and study the liberal arts. It would, he felt, give him a greater opportunity to appreciate life. He did not mean to waste his life, the way these people were wasting theirs.

  He watched them gamble: the fools at the little roulette setups making their nervous scattered bets, most of them with stacks of four-bit chips, one with a barricade of expensive domino-like plaques that Jack didn’t even know the value of; betting numbers or thirds or quarters, red or black or odd or even, betting against one of the most powerfully house-favored odds in the joint (it may have been a luxury hotel to some of the guests, but to Jack it was just a rug joint), bucking a vigorish that did not change no matter how trickily you bet. Jack had not always felt contempt for people who gambled, but now, with the prospect of being rich before him, he suddenly did not see the point of it. When he had gambled in the past it had always been for money, never for pleasure. The pleasure had come from winning money because he needed money. The people he saw around him in the casino did not look as if they needed money, at least not enough to buck the house. It was sensible, of course, to gamble against the house if your income was so small you didn’t have a
chance anyway. A man making fifty a week and without hope of ever making more could come against the house odds with the genuine hope that he would win a fortune at the risk of almost nothing, because when you start with peanuts all you can lose is peanuts. Negroes shooting craps with relief money were far more sensible than the middle-class gentleman wagering three hundred dollars he can afford to lose, for one reason: the Negro expects to win and the gentleman expects to lose. Gambling, Jack decided, belongs to the poor. The rich or the well-off just make asses of themselves. He liked this new attitude of his; it made him feel superior to everybody in the room.

  It bothered Sally that Jack, after the first few halfhearted bets at the dice table, quit gambling. She had the fever. She was a slot-machine player, thumbing the heavy dollars into the machine as fast as the wheels stopped and the machine clicked, while Jack stood by and watched ironically. Sally figured that the slots were the best gamble in the house because they were “fixed to pay.” So that people would take their slot-machine winnings and go to the tables, get hooked, and lose everything. But Sally was clever, she would win and quit; nothing could induce her to move on to the big deadly tables. Jack laughed at her.

  “Fixed to pay?” he asked. “How do you figure?”

  “Oh, everybody knows that. Some of these machines are set to pay off as much as ninety percent,” she said glibly.

  “Which is eight and a half percent worse than the line at craps,” Jack said.

  She gave him an odd look. “What are you talking about?”

  “Look, if you put a hundred dollars into this machine, it pays you back ninety. If you bet the same hundred, a dollar at a time, on the pass line at craps, you get back ninety-eight fifty. If the odds are working. Either way, you lose money. You can’t,” he said dogmatically, “change losing odds into winning odds. No matter what you do.”

  “Oh, nonsense. They must mean that the machines pay off ninety percent of the time; that’s entirely different.”

  “Horse-frocky.”

  “You’re infuriating.” But in a few minutes she moved over to a craps table and religiously bet the pass line, a dollar at a time. Over a period of seven hours, she lost more than three hundred dollars and went to bed with a splitting headache. She blamed Jack for the whole thing.