Hard Rain

by Peter Abrahams

“You think it’s a fucking joke?” Disco’s voice cracked. He made ragged crying sounds in his throat, but no tears came. Jessie saw a bottle of Coke by the bed. She opened it and put it in his hand. Abruptly, he stopped crying—it was more like a trailer for crying than a feature-length presentation—and drank. His teeth were brown and rotting. “I hate when she leaves me alone,” he said.

  “Did Pat come here when you were alone?”

  “No. Why do you keep saying that? I told you I haven’t seen him. I haven’t seen him. I haven’t seen him. Now do you get it? I haven’t seen him.” He lowered his voice. “It’s the truth. Not since Woodstock.”

  “Woodstock?”

  “Yeah.”

  What have you heard about Woodstock?

  “Do you mean the festival?” Jessie said.

  “What else?” Disco drank more Coke, then pulled the blanket closer around him. “The fucking festival.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It was the end. My friend.”

  “The end of what?”

  “Everything. The commune, for starters.”

  “Why?”

  Disco shrugged. The movement pained him. He winced.

  “How was it the end of the commune?”

  “Everyone went away.”

  “Pat Rodney?”

  “Him and all the musicians.”

  “What musicians?”

  “They had a band. They were fucking good. Hendrix jammed with them in the woods.”

  “Jimi Hendrix?”

  “The one and only.”

  “Who was in the band?”

  “Lots of dudes. It kept changing. But it was mainly him and Hartley Frame. The two-guitar sound. Like the Stones, you know?”

  “Hartley Frame?” said Jessie.

  “Pat’s buddy from up at the college.”

  “What college are you talking about?”

  “Morgan. It’s the only college around here. Just across the state line.”

  Jessie had heard of it: a small liberal arts school with a stuffy tradition and a two-hundred-year-old endowment. “Is it in a town called Morgan?”

  “Morgantown. Mass. Not far.”

  “Is Hartley Frame still around?”

  Disco didn’t answer right away. When he finally spoke, his voice was much quieter. “No one’s still around.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Everybody split. Or aren’t you listening?”

  “Why?”

  “Why, why, why. Fuck.” His hand closed tightly around the Coke bottle. “You’re way off base. And you’re starting to bug me. How did you get into the house, anyway?”

  “The door was open. I thought Blue was inside.”

  “How do you know her, again?”

  “She’s helping me find Pat.”

  Disco’s head tilted to one side, as though he were trying to see things from a different angle. “What are you paying her?”

  “Why should I pay her?”

  “Huh? Are you stupid or what?”

  “What do you mean?” Disco didn’t answer. Jessie went close to him, touched his hand. It was hard and cold. “Disco?”

  He drew away. “How do you know my name?”

  “Blue told me.”

  “She’s got a big mouth, all of a sudden. Did she tell you about my flight?”

  “Your flight?”

  “Nonstop to oblivion.”

  “She said you hurt yourself in a fall, nothing more.”

  “Nothing more. Yeah.”

  She touched him again. “I think you know something you’re not telling me. You have nothing to be afraid of. If you tell me Pat’s been here, I promise you I won’t tell Blue. I just want my daughter back, that’s all.” A horrid thought struck her: What if Blue wanted children, but couldn’t have them for some reason? She pictured her family reforming without her.

  Again Disco drew his hand away. “What are you talking about? How could he be here?”

  “I told you—he’s in Vermont. He was in Bennington on Monday.”

  “And I told you—you’re way off base.”

  “How?”

  Disco began to laugh his grating laugh. It went on and on, pitching itself higher and higher and finally out of hearing. “Are you loaded?”

  “Loaded?”

  “Do you have lots of bread?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Then you’re as fucked as the rest of them.”

  “Who do you mean?”

  He laughed again, rocking back and forth as the sound rose; a tic quivered in one of his eyelids. Then it was quiet. Disco said, “I’ve got a nice buzz on now. And you’re bugging me.” His hands found the Walkman, put on the headset. He turned up the volume until Jessie could hear it: heavy metal music played by a thimble-sized band.

  Jessie rose.

  “And turn out the lights,” Disco said.

  Jessie turned out the lights, walked down the stairs, through the front door. She drove across the state line, booked a room at the first motel she saw and flopped on the bed. Her eyes closed immediately. Some time later, she awoke and hurried to the bathroom, where she vomited the remains of the tuna sandwich.

  After that Jessie couldn’t get back to sleep. Every time she tried, her mind filled with images of eyelids plastered to eyeless sockets; eyelids with long, soft lashes, curled and beautiful. She knew that if she slept she would dream, and if she dreamed, those eyeless eyes would turn into Kate’s.

  19

  The dark-haired woman knelt on the baggage room floor and started rummaging through her suitcase. Ivan Zyzmchuk watched from a distance. There wasn’t much in the suitcase—a pair of shoes, some clothing, a book, an envelope. The woman closed the suitcase and hurried away. Ivan Zyzmchuk watched until she was out of sight.

  He was very good at guessing people’s occupations from their appearance: for example, the two women in business dress, moving toward the carousel, were housewives—too much jewelry and too relaxed to be in the working world; and the man in the windbreaker by the exit was a cop—a cop who didn’t know how to watch without appearing watchful or how to buy a big enough windbreaker to conceal the gun in his armpit. But despite all the data Zyzmchuk had on the dark-haired woman—her LAX luggage tag, the old, expensive suitcase, what he’d seen inside it—he had no idea what she did in life. All he knew was that she was very worried, beyond the stage of being able to hide it in public. He wondered for a moment if she was sane. Then Alice Frame came down the escalator in a long mink coat, and Zyzmchuk stopped thinking about the dark-haired woman.

  Alice Frame looked worried herself, but to a much lesser degree. Glancing at the other Washington passengers, Zyzmchuk saw they were all worried. Air travel induced it. More than that, it was structured on worries, the way a Shakespearean play had five acts: delays, overbooking, security checks, stacking up, crashing; now, in the finale, the passengers worried whether their bags would appear.

  Alice Frame didn’t have to worry alone. She hadn’t quite reached the carousel when a limousine pulled up outside the door. A man in a gray suit and matching cap got out and hurried inside. Alice saw him and raised her gloved hand in the kind of gesture that gets a waiter’s attention. Together they turned to the carousel, now spinning the bags around. Alice’s job was to point. The man’s job was to grab her tapestry suitcases and place them in a neat row. When he’d collected all four of them, Alice started for the exit. Picking up the suitcases, the man followed.

  The plainclothesman’s eyes followed her too. Zyzmchuk didn’t blame him. She was a handsome woman and rich enough to afford mink, limousines, chauffeurs and a face ten years younger than she was.

  Zyzmchuk went outside. Alice was already in the backseat; the chauffeur was getting into the front. The Blazer was parked a few places behind, lowering the tone. A uniformed cop was there to uphold standards; he was frowning at Zyzmchuk’s license plate and taking out his ticket book. Zyzmchuk went past him and got in. The cop put his hand on the roof. “Ca
n’t you read, pal?” he said, nodding at the No PARKING sign.

  “Braille only,” Zyzmchuk replied. He started the car. The cop moved his lips, but still hadn’t formulated a reply when Zyzmchuk drove off. Zyzmchuk sympathized with cops, but it wasn’t the moment for a long discussion.

  He stayed close to the limousine through the tunnel, onto the expressway, south to the turnpike exit. On the turnpike he slipped four or five cars back, and sometimes, between exits, six or more. It didn’t matter. Even the rawest amateur was incapable of losing a car like that. Zyzmchuk settled back for the ride.

  For a while he watched the scenery go by: brown, bare, in the yawning stage of dormancy. Then he switched on the radio and heard easy listening and hard listening, but no good listening. He tried some coffee from his Thermos. Finally he let himself look down at the odometer. He’d only gone twenty miles.

  Zyzmchuk picked up his phone. A lot of people left the office early on Friday, but not Grace. She didn’t have a family, and she liked her job. He called her number. He had a question for her computer. He also felt like talking to someone.

  Grace answered on the first ring. “Mr. Z.?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “You’re the only one with an engine that needs a tune-up. Mr. K.’s engine purrs, and Mr. D. never uses his car phone.”

  “Why not?”

  “He likes to keep both hands on the wheel.”

  “Natch.”

  “‘Natch,’ Mr. Z.?”

  “Before your time.” The limousine topped the crest of a hill and dipped out of sight. Zyzmchuk pressed the accelerator. “Can you find the owner of Mass. plate JTA 395?”

  “Momentito,” Grace said. Something crunched; it might have been Almond Roca. Keys tapped. “That number’s registered to Morgan College, Morgantown, Mass.”

  “Any human names?”

  “Signed for by, you mean?”

  “That kind of thing.”

  Tap, tap. “Dr. Jameson T. Phinney. That’s pee aitch. College president.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Welcs.”

  Zyzmchuk put down his phone. For a few miles, he tried to imagine what it would be like to live with Grace. He decided theirs resembled a lot of office relationships: the opposite of an iceberg, it was nine-tenths above the surface. That’s why they usually led nowhere. Then he began to think about relationships that led somewhere; that took him, like a car hitting an ice patch, to Leni; and Grace faded away.

  As the road rose into the Berkshires, the towns grew less industrial and more picture-perfect. Above an unmarked frontier, they had no visible means of support at all; except for the dark gray sky, he might have been driving in a postcard.

  Morgantown had the same prosperous appearance, but differed by revealing the reason for it: dormitories, libraries, office and classroom buildings, a museum, an observatory—all made from the best brick and stone, all with the good taste to seem smaller than they were—playing fields, gym, ice arena. Morgantown, Zyzmchuk saw, was in the college business. That meant Spellbound and Vertigo playing at the cinema on Main Street, with Animal House and Animal Farm to follow. It meant a weekend keg special at the package store and clothing store mannequins dressed like Mr. K. and Mr. D. at a cocktail party. It meant young men and young women crossing airy quadrangles, dressed like Mr. K. and Mr. D. on a country weekend. They had determined faces and good haircuts and were on their way to places that were already charted. The college business, upscale division.

  The limousine turned onto a quiet street and stopped in front of a big white house set well back from the road. Mercedes, Jaguars and Volvos lined the long lane. Zyzmchuk drove past and parked at the corner under a big, leafless maple that offered the illusion of cover. In the rearview mirror, he saw the chauffeur help Alice Frame out of the car, remove the tapestry suitcases from the trunk and accompany her to the front door. The door opened when they were halfway up the walk. A man stepped out. He was tall and thin, with a full head of dark hair, graying at the sides in soap opera baron style. He took Alice Frame’s hand in both of his and shook it warmly. Then he led her into the house. The chauffeur followed. Before the door closed, Zyzmchuk glimpsed a long-haired woman with a violin and a man carrying a tray of champagne glasses.

  Zyzmchuk sat. The north wind blew a low ceiling across the sky, gray clouds sagging with moisture. Zyzmchuk poured more coffee; it had grown cold and bitter. He drank it anyway. This was what he liked to do, wasn’t it? Hadn’t he fought with Keith and Dahlin to let him keep doing it? This was supposed to be fun. But sitting in this spruced-up Arcadia waiting for charm-school innocents to finish their champagne wasn’t fun: it was a parody of what he liked to do, and he didn’t want to be a figure in a parody.

  He screwed the top on the Thermos and drove to Main Street. In the Morgantown Book Store he bought the Morgan College Guidebook and went into COL. MORGAN’S BAR AND GRILLE, BASS ALE ON TAP to read it.

  The guide opened with a friendly forward from the president, Jameson Tucker Phinney. Pee aitch. All his names were surnames, Zyzmchuk noticed. In two hundred years, Americans still hadn’t learned to feel comfortable without a titled class. That failure was responsible for their nervous energy, Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, the behavior of headwaiters in Manhattan.

  And names like Jameson Tucker Phinney. A photograph of Mr. Phinney’s smiling face appeared beside his signature: a handsome face that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Gentleman’s Quarterly or a summer-stock production of My Fair Lady. It was also the face of the man who had taken Alice Frame’s hand in both of his and greeted her so warmly.

  Zyzmchuk drank a bottle of beer and a glass of whiskey and returned to the big white house, parking under the maple at the corner. He read the guide from cover to cover, learning that tuition, room and board came to $16,600 a year; three-quarters of the senior class went on to graduate school; and the football team had gone two and nine the year before. He was memorizing a map of the town when the door opened and pink-faced people began coming out, head bobbing, mouths thanking, arms waving. They got into their Mercedes, Jaguars and Volvos and politely yielding the way to each other while laughing at the absurdity of it all—maneuvering automobiles, drinking champagne all afternoon, having their cake and eating it too—soon emptied the lane. A few minutes later, the chauffeur came out. He tossed his cap onto the seat of the limousine and accelerated away.

  Time passed. Evening slid across the sky like a dark filter. Then the garage door opened and an ordinary little car backed out, square, dark, Everyman’s, if Everyman was Japanese. It turned onto the street and drove past the spot where Zyzmchuk was parked. Jameson T. Phinney was driving; Alice Frame sat beside him. Zyzmchuk followed. They didn’t look back.

  The little car drove for only a few hundred yards before stopping in front of a massive stone building with a spotlighted cornice. Zyzmchuk made a U-turn and waited on the other side of the street.

  The cornice was the kind where names were carved to set an example for others: in this case, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart and a few more on the far end, which Zyzmchuk would have needed his glasses to read. Phinney and Alice got out of the car and walked onto the lawn in front of the building.

  A large shape stood on the lawn, twice as high as a man and draped with a heavy tarpaulin. Phinney raised one side, holding it over his head so Alice could step under and look. Zyzmchuk tried to look too, but could see nothing in the dying light.

  Alice stepped back. Phinney lowered the tarpaulin. They spoke for a few moments, but Zyzmchuk was too far away to distinguish the words. Then they got in the car and drove away.

  They didn’t return to the big white house. Instead they headed south, out of town. They passed a prosperous-looking motel, the 1826 House, that advertised a buffet dinner and rooms with fireplaces. Zyzmchuk almost stopped, and might have, had Phinney not turned onto a side road. Zyzmchuk drove after him.

  The road was narrow and soon began to climb—the road to Mount Blac
kstone, Zyzmchuk remembered: unbidden, the map drew itself in his mind. The lights of the little car flashed on. Zyzmchuk kept his off.

  The road twisted up the mountain. The air grew colder, the wind stronger. Phinney, a law-abider, signaled a right turn to nobody that he knew of and entered a gravel lane. Zyzmchuk stopped. The little car disappeared in the woods. Zyzmchuk switched off his engine and rolled down the window. After a minute or two, he heard a car door close. Without turning on the engine, Zyzmchuk shifted into neutral and backed down the hill until he came to a clearing by the road. He steered onto it and parked the car.

  Late evening: the sky would soon be fully dark; no moonlight or starlight could penetrate the thick black-purple cloud Zyzmchuk saw as he got out of the car. The arrival of darkness did something that coffee, beer and whiskey had failed to do—it woke him up. He felt his senses sharpening; listening to the quiet—no birdsong, no rustle of animals, nothing but the wind in the bare trees—he realized it was not merely an absence of sound, but an invitation to it, opening up infinite possibility, like a keyboard to a pianist. That’s what made quiet exciting, especially at night. Zyzmchuk just wished he had something more promising to do.

  Without making a sound, he opened the back of the Blazer. He put a heavy wool sweater on over his sweatshirt and a black waterproof jacket over that. Then, taking his toolbox, he walked up the lane, keeping to the grass verge that bordered the gravel. The only sound was the wind in the trees.

  Zyzmchuk smelled wood smoke. Then he rounded a corner and saw a light glowing in the distance. He stopped behind a tree and gazed in its direction. He saw the dark, square shadow of a cabin, yellow light in its windows, sparks sailing from a chimney into the night. Everything else was indistinct. His vision wasn’t what it had been; there were no push-ups he could do for that. Once he’d been able to tell the color of a man’s eyes at fifty feet.

  Staying in the trees, Zyzmchuk made his way toward the cabin. Open lawns sloped up to it from the front and sides, but at the back, against the mountain, it almost touched the forest. Zyzmchuk circled the cabin. He stopped every minute or two to listen and didn’t hurry. Finally, he reached a squat cedar directly behind the house. Ten feet of open ground lay between him and the nearest window. Leaving his toolbox by the tree, he got down on the ground and crawled.