Hard Rain

by Peter Abrahams

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Look around here.”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “Tell me a better one.”

  Barbara went outside. Jessie followed her. She tried once more. “Kate left Jane Eyre behind. She reads it in bed every night.”

  “So?”

  “And she left her Reeboks. They’re practically brand-new.”

  “So?”

  “That obtuseness may work in court; it doesn’t work on me. Those Reeboks mean as much to her as that ratty Peruvian poncho meant to you at Stanford.”

  Barbara laughed. “Shit. I’d forgotten all about that.”

  “Not me.”

  “No, not you.” For a moment Barbara’s eyes were unshielded, far away, back in the days of the Peruvian poncho, burning incense, all-nighters at the Fillmore. But she fought off memory, Jessie saw, and said, “You can’t make a case of the Reeboks. And she probably got sick of Jane Eyre. It’s pretty sickening stuff.”

  “I don’t think so. And she was halfway through the last chapter.”

  “You’re giving me a headache, Jess.” Barbara sighed. She took a last, deep drag from her cigarette. “Look, even if you could make a case out of a pair of shoes and fucking Jane Eyre, what case would you make?”

  Jessie had no answer. Barbara squashed her cigarette butt under her heel and got in the car.

  The bag lady was sitting on the sidewalk, writing hurriedly on a scrap of paper with a pencil stub. “I wish you’d heard the tape,” Jessie said through the car window. Barbara turned the key. Jessie took a deep breath. “Come on, Barbara, you know about these things. What do you really think? Has he gotten in trouble with dope dealers or something like that?”

  “It happens,” Barbara said. She revved the engine. “Parental kidnapping happens too.”

  “No,” Jessie said, holding onto the car. “It couldn’t be that. He’s never even asked for more time with Kate. Why would he kidnap her?”

  “Junkies do the damnedest things.”

  “He’s not a junkie. Junkies are heroin addicts. Pat smokes grass and does some cocaine, but it doesn’t interfere with his life.”

  Barbara’s voice rose. “Don’t be an asshole. You’ve been divorced for five years, and you’re still defending him. He’s a loser, Jessie. When you get Kate back …”

  “What?”

  Barbara softened her tone. “You’d better make some changes, that’s all.”

  Barbara drove off. Jessie watched the car until it turned the corner. Her hands were shaking. She put them in her pockets.

  The bag lady finished writing and stuck the pencil behind her ear. “Beam me the fuck out of here,” she whispered urgently. Jessie reentered the house.

  She went from room to room. Was Pat a loser? She looked at the flat stomach of the laughing woman on the wall and the fast-food containers on the table; she looked at the bag of cocaine in the bedside table; she looked at the Clinique bag too, but didn’t open it. She looked at Jane Eyre. She looked at the empty space where Jimi Hendrix’s Stratocaster had hung. If Pat was a loser, what was she? They’d lost their marriage together. Maybe she should have handled things differently; maybe she should have … Jessie stopped herself. It was over. All it had left behind was a residue of regret; and from time to time she missed him, a lot.

  Jessie looked at the hall table. Hadn’t there been unopened mail on top of it? She went through the drawers. She found advertising circulars, receipts from clothing stores, a few unpaid bills in small amounts, a handful of pesos, guitar picks, but no unopened mail. At the back of the bottom drawer, she found a crumpled piece of carbon paper. She smoothed it out. It was the copy of a money order, signed by Pat. On March 18, he’d paid ten thousand dollars to Eggman Cookies.

  The name meant nothing to Jessie. She called information for Eggman Cookies and found no listing in L.A., Santa Monica, Hollywood, the beaches, the Valley. She tucked the carbon in her pocket. Ten thousand dollars was a lot to pay for cookies.

  Could Eggman Cookies be the name of a band? Jessie went into the music room. Pat had hundreds of records, tapes and compact discs. He had Merle Travis, Carl Perkins, Muddy Waters, Doc Watson, Eric Clapton and everything Blind Lemon Jefferson had recorded. He had Charlie Christian, Django Reinhart, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Bucky Pizzarrelli. He had Andrés Segovia, Narciso Yepes, Julian Bream, John Williams. He had a rock collection that went from Abba to Z.Z. Topp and included Blue Cheer, the Blues Magoos, the Moody Blues, David Blue and Two Jews’ Blues. But he didn’t have Eggman Cookies.

  Turning to go, Jessie noticed a tape inserted in one of the cassette players. Just to hear what it was, she flicked it on. Joni Mitchell. She was singing about Woodstock and the future she hoped she had seen there. Not Pat’s kind of music, Jessie thought as she turned it off. Perhaps the woman with the flat stomach liked it.

  “Shit,” Jessie said. She went into the kitchen and splashed cold water on her face. As she dried herself with a paper towel, her eye was drawn again to the blackboard. She turned on the overhead light and examined it closely. She could make out the “T” and the “o.” Now she saw that the third letter was “i.” “Toi.” It was French for “you,” wasn’t it? And hadn’t the last word been “toi” as well?

  After searching unsuccessfully for a magnifying glass, Jessie unhooked the blackboard from the wall and carefully wrapped it in dry cleaners’ plastic. In her workroom at home, she had the big light, a powerful magnifier and fine brushes for uncovering chalk dust, layer by layer. She called a taxi. When it arrived twenty minutes later, she picked up her package and went out.

  It was late afternoon. A cool, damp wind was blowing in off the ocean. The blue oblong at the end of the street stretched to the horizon, turning gray under a graying sky. Rain was in the air.

  The taxi driver looked her up and down, then got out of the car to open the trunk for her. He had to step around the bag lady, who was leaning against her shopping cart, watching the sky; reflected clouds drifted over the lenses of her sunglasses.

  The taxi driver held out his hands to take the blackboard, but Jessie wanted to put it in the trunk herself. As she leaned forward, a metal wheel squeaked. Then the bag lady backed into her, knocking the package from her arms. The blackboard shattered on the pavement.

  “Christ almighty,” Jessie said, turning on her.

  The bag lady hunched down as though in the teeth of a storm, her gray head tucked into her thick shoulders. Then she spun around and hurried away toward the beach. The shopping cart ran over the blackboard, crunching fragments under its wheels.

  “Beam me, beam me,” the bag lady whispered.

  Jessie bent down and looked at the pieces. They were all there in the plastic, dozens of them.

  “Mierda,” said the taxi driver.

  A cold raindrop landed on Jessie’s face.

  7

  It was just like a jigsaw puzzle, except the pieces were all jagged and black. Find the four corners, find the four sides, fill it in. Under the five-hundred-watt bulb, Jessie’s fingers dipped into the plastic wrapper, found the piece they wanted, stuck it in place, working quickly and surely, like a well-trained team that didn’t need coaching anymore. The puzzle began to take shape on a big sheet of brown paper she’d laid on the worktable—“Night Sky with Milky Way,” or a rectangular blackboard with swirls of chalk dust. And under the chalk, Jessie could distinguish block capital letters: “T,” “o,” “i,” and now a “g” and “e” as well.

  When she had fit most of the pieces together, Jessie glued them, one by one, to the brown paper. Then she swiveled her magnifier into place, adjusted the focus, took her number eight flat brush and got to work. She knew that wiping with a dry cloth dislodges loosely packed chalk particles, spreading them over the blackboard, but underneath, unless the wiping has been very thorough, the tightly packed core remains. Particle by particle, Jessie brushed a narrow border around the “T,” the “o,” the “i,” the “g”; then she f
ound the top of the next letter, found its side, brushed away the covering layer of chalk dust: another “i.” By the time the doorbell rang she’d exposed it all: “Toi giet la toi.” It still meant nothing to her. She copied the words on a sheet of paper and went upstairs.

  Jessie opened the door and let Barbara in. Rain danced on the roof of her car, parked in the driveway. “Peace,” said Barbara, handing her a stack of Lean Cuisine packages.

  Jessie took them and went into the kitchen. “What’ll it be?” Jessie asked, going through the packages—Chicken à l’Orange, Turkey Dijon, Linguine with Clam Sauce. “Two hundred and twenty-two calories? Two sixty-seven? Or do you feel like pigging out on two ninety-six?”

  “I don’t care,” Barbara said. “What’s to drink?”

  Jessie shoved the frozen food into the oven and looked in the booze cupboard. “Wine?”

  “Check.”

  “Red or white?”

  “Red. Let’s live a little.”

  Jessie filled two glasses with Beaujolais and took Barbara down to the workroom. “Toi giet la toi?” Barbara said. “Isn’t ‘toi’ French?”

  “Yeah. But ‘giet’?”

  Jessie looked it up in her French-English dictionary. “Giet” wasn’t there.

  “Maybe you need a better dictionary,” Barbara said.

  “This is the Robert.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  They went upstairs. “Have you got anything I can put on?” Barbara asked. “I’d like to get out of this man suit.”

  “Why? It’s you.”

  “Fuck off,” Barbara said. “Blake’s picking me up a little later. Businesswear intimidates him.” Barbara reached for her Camels, shook one out and stuck it in her mouth.

  Jessie remembered the sleepy voice on the phone. “Who’s Blake?”

  Barbara’s eyes darted toward her, then away. She lit her cigarette, frowning over the match flame. “You’ll meet him.”

  Jessie lent Barbara a pair of jeans and a sweater. They were both tall, but Jessie had a bigger frame and more flesh on it. Barbara came out of the bedroom looking softer, as though she’d put on a boyfriend’s sweater.

  They sat down at the kitchen table. Jessie pried the tops off the Lean Cuisines and poured more wine. But neither of them ate. Barbara smoked and drank her wine. Jessie just drank.

  “I was at a meeting the other day where someone proposed we lobby the U.N. to declare the twenty-first century the International Century of Women,” Barbara said.

  “Why don’t we shoot for the whole fucking millennium?”

  They looked at each other. Barbara began to laugh. She threw her head back until the cords in her neck stood out, laughing and laughing. Smoke curled up between her parted lips. All at once, Jessie was laughing too. She too laughed and laughed. Her body shook with it; her stomach muscles ached. She laughed until only ugly honking sounds came out. She couldn’t stop. Tears rolled out of her eyes and down her face. The next moment she was holding onto Barbara.

  “Help me, Barbara. Help me get her back.”

  Barbara held her close. “Don’t worry, Jessie. We’ll get her back.” Barbara was crying too.

  They went into the bathroom, washed their faces, patted their hair. “God, he’s a shithead,” Barbara said. “This time we’re going to nail him to the wall, baby; I mean it.”

  “He’s really not that bad. His parents died when he was a kid, don’t forget, and he never finished high school. It was very destabilizing.”

  “My heart bleeds. Explain to me why he has to shove his dick into every woman that comes by.”

  But that’s what Jessie couldn’t explain. “He’s just a boy who can’t say no, I guess.”

  “‘Boy’ is the operative word, Jess. Boys are all that’s out there. I’m in a position to know. Boys in three-piece suits, boys with seven-figure salaries, boys with silvery hair like lions’ manes—like your friend Norman Wine. I heard a rumor of a man being sighted the other day, but it turned out to be false.”

  They stared at each other in the mirror: two heads of frizzy hair, two dark faces, one very thin and modern, the other a little fuller and classical. “How much did you get for Norman’s wife?” Jessie asked.

  “Ten grand a month.”

  Jessie whistled.

  “The schmuck can afford it. He’s making a killing in real estate.”

  “Norman’s a record producer.”

  “That’s his job. But he gets rich from real estate. Wake up, Jess. The music’s over.”

  Jessie woke up. The amount of Norman’s wife’s settlement reminded her of the Eggman Cookies money order. She showed it to Barbara.

  “Beats me,” Barbara said. “I’ll pass it on to DeMarco when he calls.”

  “DeMarco’s calling?”

  The thin face in the mirror smiled. “I figured DeMarco owes me one. So I told him he could pay me back by bending the rules a little and running a check for Kate.”

  Jessie put her arm around Barbara. Barbara went on: “They’re not actively looking for her, you understand. But if there are any reports having to do with Kate, Pat or … the car, he’ll find out. He should call sometime tonight.”

  “Thank you, Barbara.”

  “You can thank me by letting me nail him to the wall when this is over. Agreed?”

  Jessie didn’t reply.

  “Agreed?”

  “Okay. Agreed.”

  Barbara held out her hand. They shook on it. Their images shook hands in the mirror. “I wish I had your nose,” Barbara said.

  “You can afford it.”

  “Prices have gone up. What was yours—a sweet sixteen present?”

  “Keep guessing,” Jessie said.

  “Bitch.”

  “Hey,” called a voice. “Anybody home?”

  It was Philip. He came in carrying an artist’s portfolio and a small bag. He wore baggy white flannel trousers, a black T-shirt, a satin Lakers jacket and a little diamond in his left ear. “You should lock your door,” he said. “This is L.A.”

  “It’s Santa Monica,” Barbara corrected him. Jessie introduced them.

  “I’ve got something to show you,” he said, opening the portfolio with his quick, agile hands. “‘Valley Nocturne.’ This is just a study. The real thing’s twenty by thirty.”

  “Yards?” asked Barbara.

  Philip smiled uncertainly. “Feet,” he said, unwrapping the protective plastic. “The slides are coming tomorrow.”

  They all looked at “Valley Nocturne.” It was smooth and sleek, the colors mainly purple and silver, although the subject matter seemed to be an orange grove on a foggy evening. A naked girl was folded into it like a truffle in cream sauce.

  “Well?” said Philip.

  “Nice bod,” said Barbara.

  Faint pink patches appeared on Philip’s cheeks. He looked at Jessie. It was hard to hide from Philip. His soft gold-brown eyes saw everything. She tried to think of something to say. Philip’s paintings were already attracting attention. He was very talented. He could do with his brush, she suddenly thought, the kind of thing Pat could do with his guitar. She knew at a glance that “Valley Nocturne” had the commercial goods and would one day hang on a big wall in Palm Springs or Malibu. On the other hand, she didn’t like it.

  Before she could say anything, Barbara spoke. “Did you know that Kate was missing?”

  “Kate?” said Philip. He looked inquiringly at Jessie. “Did you mention that yesterday?”

  “I said Pat hadn’t brought her home yet. He still hasn’t.”

  Philip came closer and patted her shoulder. “I’m sure it’ll be all right,” he said. She felt his soft eyes on her. He patted her again, this time putting more into it. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Maybe there is,” Jessie said, taking out the sheet of paper on which she’d copied the foreign words. “What do you make of this?”

  Philip examined it. “French, isn’t it. ‘Toi’ is ‘you,’ and ‘la’ is ‘the.’ �
��You something the you.’ We just have to find out what ‘giet’ means.”

  Jessie explained that they hadn’t found it in the Robert. “No problem,” said Philip. “I’ve got a friend at Berlitz. I’ll call her tomorrow.” He folded the sheet of paper and slipped it into his portfolio; then he fished around in the bag he’d brought and drew out a bottle. “Do you like champagne, Barbara? I know Jessie does.”

  “She’s a real fun lover.” The patches on Philip’s cheeks went a little pinker.

  “Knock it off, Barbara,” Jessie said.

  Barbara saluted. “Champagne’s my fave,” she said to Philip. “Crack her open.”

  They drank the champagne. Philip talked about a series of paintings about California he had in mind, “Valley Nocturne” being the first. Jessie said it was a good idea. Barbara said nothing. They finished the red wine and started on the white. The doorbell rang. Jessie answered it. A young man stood on the doorstep, a very young man, twenty-one or -two. He had two giant pizza boxes in his hands. He also had clear green eyes, clear golden skin, shining golden hair, the body Michelangelo’s David might have developed if he’d spent time in the weight room and a shy smile. He was beautiful. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Blake. Is Barb here?”

  “Barb? Oh, yes. Come in.”

  Blake came in. “I brought some pizza,” he said. “I hope you like everything on it.” He gave Barbara a kiss. He towered over her. Her lips lingered on his. Jessie saw that her eyes actually closed. “Any beer?” Blake said. “I forgot beer.”

  “I’ll get some,” Jessie told him. “I could use a walk.”

  “It’s raining,” Blake said. “I’ll drive.”

  “That’s all right. I don’t mind the rain. What kind of beer do you like?”

  “Wet,” Barbara answered for him.

  Philip laughed nervously. Blake smiled his shy smile. Jessie threw on her big yellow slicker and went out.

  The rain was falling heavily now. Thunder rolled in the west. Jessie put up her hood and walked quickly, across Idaho, around the corner and south three blocks to the liquor store. She bought a case of beer. “Nasty night,” said the old man behind the counter.