Hard Rain

by Peter Abrahams

  There was no one in the front; beyond lay darkness. Jessie switched on the flashlight and shone it through the windshield. The back of the van was closed off by a plastic curtain. The cheap material gleamed in the light of her beam. Litter lay scattered on the front seat, piled on the floor—McDonald’s cartons, Coke cans, cassette tapes: Fresh Cream, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Strange Days.

  Jessie moved onto the sidewalk and knocked softly on the van’s side door. No sound came from within. No one sat up in a moment of panic, no one stirred in her sleep. Jessie knocked again, harder, hard enough for the sound to echo off the brick wall of the residence and rebound over the broad lawn.

  She leaned closer to the door, so her mouth almost touched the cold metal, and called, “Kate. Kate?” And heard her own voice as it really sounded, high and scared. She lowered it, gave it more force, and said, “Pat. Are you in there?” She heard nothing but the voice of someone pretending not to be scared.

  What is wrong with you? Act. Move. Jessie reached out, took the handle and turned it. The door was locked. She walked around the van, trying all the doors—all locked.

  Jessie stood uncertain on the sidewalk. She scanned the residence. Only the lights in the stairwells were on. She shone the flash into the van’s front seat and saw what she had already seen.

  Jessie returned to her car. She opened the glove compartment and took out Buddy Boucher’s Polaroid: same van, same license plate. She took a deep breath, trying to make herself patient. Unless Pat had abandoned the van, he’d be back. All she had to do was wait. She had him.

  Jessie waited. She forced her body to be still, but she couldn’t control what was happening inside it. Her heart raced lightly, pounded, raced again. Waves of fatigue swept through her, waves of panic swept them back. Much stranger, her breasts began to feel heavy, as though they were filling with milk. She hadn’t had that feeling in nine years. Reaching under her sweater, Jessie felt her nipple. It was wet. But that was a biological impossibility. Her mind told her that.

  But her body was telling her that Kate was very near. She got out of the car.

  It was then Jessie noticed something she had seen from the beginning, but hadn’t appreciated. Across the sidewalk from the van, on the edge of the grass, was a square hatch cover, painted gray. It was the right size to protect a steam vent, perhaps; or maybe it had something to do with the sprinkler system. The hatch cover had a hasp on one side so it could be locked down. But now the hasp was thrown back on its hinge. Going closer, Jessie found the lock in the grass. The bolt had been cut in two.

  Jessie bent down and raised the cover. She switched on the flashlight. Its beam didn’t shine on sprinklers or a steam vent, but into a deep round hole, lined with brick. A steel ladder, bolted to the wall, led down.

  We used to drop acid and jam in the tunnels. The sound was incredible. We had a little room at the end. With a little mattress.

  Jessie crouched over the hole, playing her light into it. The beam glinted on the steel ladder, found the floor below, a dirt floor, leading off into shadow. What had she heard when she first stepped out of her car behind the black van?

  A dog barking.

  And a guitar, very faint, as though the sound came from far away. Or from underground.

  Leaving the hatch cover open, Jessie rose. She examined the van. The driver, with the empty space behind him, had parked close to the car in front, no more than a foot away. Jessie got into her car and inched it forward until the bumper pressed against the rear of the van. She engaged the emergency brake, got out, locked the car. Then she lowered herself into the hole and climbed a few rungs down the ladder.

  Warm, moist air rose up from below. Jessie stepped down to the tunnel floor, felt its slick dampness under her feet. She took the flashlight out of her pocket and turned it on.

  There was just enough room in the tunnel for Jessie to stand up without bumping the pipes overhead. She saw a naked bulb in the ceiling, another one farther on and a switch on the wall. Jessie reached for it, then stopped. She had no way of knowing whether the switch controlled only the bulbs nearby or the lighting system of the entire tunnel. So, although craving strong light, she left the switch alone and moved forward with only the dim glow of the unsteady flashlight beam to guide her.

  The tunnel was a narrow world of its own, with its own sights: cables, wires, pipes; its own smells: wet earth, urine, decay; its own sounds: dripping water, the quick scratching of running rodent paws, the occasional flushing through an overhead pipe or clicking in a transformer box. And there were Jessie’s sounds too: her quiet footsteps, her breathing, shallow and rapid.

  That was the totality of the tunnel world. Jessie had almost grown used to it when someone started talking.

  A man. Or a boy. Jessie stopped. She switched off the flashlight. Blackness.

  The talking came from above, clear but slightly distant, like a voice from the next room. The man, or boy, said, “I know it’s the middle of the night. I’m sorry.” Silence. Then he spoke again: “I said I was sorry. But Mom? I hate it here. I want to come home.” Another pause. “But I don’t want to call you at the office. I want to talk about it now. Can’t you … shit.” Plastic clicked on plastic. Heavy footsteps creaked above Jessie’s head. She must be under the residence; she thought she’d gone farther than that. She turned on the flash and shone it in the direction she’d come from. All she saw was a cone of light, edged in shadows, ending in darkness. Perhaps she had gone farther; perhaps it was another residence above her. She fought off an urge to go back and moved on.

  Jessie hadn’t taken many more steps before the tunnel divided: two dark corridors, parting at a forty-five-degree angle. She halted, shining her light along one, then the other. They looked identical. Kneeling, she examined the dirt floor, searching for footprints. There were many: a few deep corrugated impressions that might have been left by work boots; some smoother, flatter prints; one made by a waffle sole. The problem was the prints appeared with similar frequency in the entrances of both halves of the tunnel. And none appeared small enough to be size four.

  Jessie stood up. Be smart. Go back. Wait by the van. But she didn’t go back. She stayed where she was. She heard water dripping, heard her own breathing, rapid and shallow. And then, out of the right-hand tunnel, floated the sound, very faint, of a guitar. Was there a voice too, a singing voice, high and wobbly? Jessie held her breath, listening as hard as she could. She wasn’t sure. Suddenly she felt very cold. She started to shiver and couldn’t stop. She stepped into the right-hand tunnel and kept going.

  If there had been a singing voice, it was now quiet, but the sound of the guitar seemed to grow louder. Then it faded again, until Jessie could no longer hear it at all. She stopped. Had the sound filtered down from another residence? Could she be under the music building? Or had it come from somewhere in the tunnels?

  Jessie turned back. After a little while, she heard the guitar music again, not so much in the tunnel, she now realized, as drifting behind the wall. The left-hand wall. She shone her light along it as she walked: cables, wires, damp brick. And then she saw a padlocked door set in the wall, with a sign on it saying, DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE!

  The door was low, no higher than Jessie’s waist. She squatted before it, checking the padlock. It was a heavy brass padlock with a thick bolt, securely fastened to another bolt in the door frame. Jessie put her ear to the door. She heard the guitar music, clearer now. Chords. She almost recognized the song—the title wavered on the edge of her consciousness, then sank away.

  She tugged at the padlock on the chance that someone hadn’t bothered to snap it into place. No chance. Then, for no particular purpose, she grasped the doorknob, rattled it around and pulled. The door opened. The padlock was fastened to the doorframe, all right, but the frame was fastened to nothing. It came open with the door. Looking closely, Jessie saw that the frame had been pried off and the nails flattened on the other side.

  Jessie aimed her beam into the doorway. The yell
ow cone illuminated a tunnel quite different from the one she was in. The ceiling was much lower. Cobwebs hung from it in thick, overlapping mats. A hairy-legged spider scrambled from one to another like a high-wire artist in a spotlight. The guitar playing was even clearer now, although Jessie had the strange sensation that it came from somewhere below. She got on her hands and knees and crawled into the tunnel. The guitar playing stopped.

  Jessie stopped too. It was very quiet in the low tunnel, the air dusty and stale. Jessie felt something moving in her hair. She reached back and batted away some feathery thing with a hard core, barely stifling a cry of disgust. Then she crawled forward.

  The earthen floor was dry and covered with animal feces; they cast little shadows—round, oblong, cylindrical—but down the center of the tunnel most of them were flattened. Jessie paused from time to time to brush away cobwebs; then she would listen again for the guitar, fruitlessly, and keep going.

  She sensed rather than saw the opening in the tunnel. The impression came on a cool draught against her face, a change in the sound of her knees sliding in the dust. A minute or two later, the yellow beam spread across a small, round cavern. Jessie crawled into it and stood up; her hair brushed against the roughly finished ceiling.

  She looked around. The cavern had two openings: the low one she had just come through, and a higher one leading the other way. The walls seemed to have been blasted out of the rock. They were covered in faded paintings, psychedelic paintings, she saw as she went closer, executed in cheap poster paints. Naked lovers wrapped in robes of their mingled hair; giant eyes with fish leaping out of the pupils; penises ejaculating mushrooms: cave art by cavemen under the influence of Aubrey Beardsley and fantasy comics. Over the entrance to the higher tunnel were words, painted in rainbow colors, now barely legible: “I Kill Therefore I Am.”

  And in a little alcove on the far side, Jessie saw a narrow bed: a mattress, the ticking stained and dirty, resting on a rusty frame.

  La Bohème.

  Jessie entered the alcove. She saw more words lettered over the bed, white paint in wobbly lines on the rock: “Woodstock Nation.” She touched the W. It was sticky.

  The mattress, though soiled, was free of dust. Jessie raised one corner. Something fell to the floor. She felt under the bed and picked it up: a U.S. passport. Her index finger had just slipped under the front cover, but she hadn’t opened it, when the scream came.

  It was a wild scream, a man’s or a woman’s, Jessie didn’t know: maybe not even human. It lifted her right off the ground. She banged her head on the rough ceiling, lost her balance, fell crouching, her heart beating crazily, the shaking flashlight aimed at the opening of the high tunnel, from where the sound had come.

  For a moment, there was silence. Then Jessie heard a child crying.

  A girl-child.

  Jessie ran. She ran with all her strength into the high tunnel, following the jerking beam of light. Cobwebs and animal feces, distance and time—all went unnoticed. Jessie ran. The girl cried, not far away now. Not far away but … but what? Somewhere below. That realization was just striking her when her lead foot came down on emptiness, and she fell spinning through air. Her light stabbed out flashing views of brickwork and a glinting steel ladder. Then she hit the floor. The flashlight spun away, crashed on bricks, went out.

  Jessie lay in utter blackness, the wind knocked out of her chest. She felt no pain, but couldn’t move.

  Silence.

  Then footsteps.

  A candle shone. Partly blinded by its light, Jessie could make out nothing more than a gleam on a bald head.

  “Pat?” she said.

  “Smarty pants,” said a man. It wasn’t Pat. It was the singer with the high, wobbly voice.

  He came closer. He looked down. A smile appeared in the darkness, a surprised smile, Jessie thought, surprised and pleased. She tried to get up. She was still trying when something swished through the air. Then she felt pain, rocketing through her head and exploding into nothingness.

  27

  Zorro didn’t look quite so young anymore.

  The observation pleased Bao Dai. But maybe it was just the dim light. He interrupted the blues riff he was playing on the guitar—it wasn’t plugged in, so he alone knew how hot the music was—and picked up the candle. He held the candle close to Zorro’s face. Zorro flinched away from the flame, but not before Bao Dai saw it was true: he looked older.

  “Look,” Zorro said, “I think we should try to work something out.” He spoke in a whisper, because the little girl was sleeping.

  Bao Dai plugged in the guitar and turned the volume up to 5. “Like what?” he said, picking up the blues riff where he’d left off, or maybe it was another one.

  “Don’t do that,” Zorro said. “She’s sleeping.”

  “I’m playing a lullaby.” He moved into “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” sang a few lines until he forgot the words, ran off a little solo. He saw that Zorro was listening, saw he didn’t think it was very good. Had he missed a note? Or two? Maybe his technique wasn’t the best. It was the style that counted. Couldn’t people see that?

  Bao Dai stopped playing. “You think you’re such a star.”

  “I don’t.”

  “A bigshot professional guitar player.”

  “There are hundreds of guys like me.”

  “There’s no one like me.”

  The girl writhed in her sleep. Maybe the nylon ropes were bothering her. Bao Dai had removed the copper wire for sleeping, but he couldn’t risk the ropes.

  “Couldn’t we work this out?”

  “You mean make a deal?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “Like the last deal we made?”

  Bao Dai held the candle close to Zorro’s face. Zorro flinched. “I’ll do everything I can to make it up to you,” he said.

  Bao Dai didn’t speak. He just held the candle close to Zorro’s face.

  “Just tell me what you want.”

  “Everything,” Bao Dai said.

  “Everything?”

  “Everything you took. Your house. Your Zorro house.”

  “I didn’t take the house from you.”

  “No? Whose name is it in?”

  Zorro had no answer.

  “The house,” Bao Dai repeated.

  “All right.”

  “The guitar.”

  “What guitar?”

  “This one. It’s mine anyway, by right.”

  “But—” Zorro started to say Bao Dai’s name.

  “Don’t you ever call me that. My name is Bao Dai.”

  “Okay, but you know the guitar is mine.”

  “Just because he gave it to you? It’s mine, by right. You stole my style.”

  “That’s not true either. Can’t we handle this in a reasonable way, before something … irrevocable happens?”

  Before something irrevocable happens? The remark outraged Bao Dai. A raw red tide spilled through his mind, washing away all thought, all capacity for thought. He shoved the burning candle into Zorro’s nose.

  Zorro screamed.

  The girl sat up. She screamed too.

  Bao Dai pulled the candle out. Up until that moment he hadn’t laid a finger on Zorro. He was sorry. “I’m sorry,” he said. The raw red tide receded.

  But it left him feeling good. He hadn’t felt so good since he’d done what he did to Corporal Trinh. He felt the same sense of release, of freedom, of justice.

  Bao Dai relit the candle. Zorro and the little girl were watching him. There was a change in their expressions. He was God in a three-cornered world.

  They were still watching him a few moments later when the little world suddenly changed. From nearby came a heavy thud. The thud was followed by a tinkling sound, like a rolling hubcap.

  Bao Dai was on his feet, the candle in one hand, the wire cutters in the other. “Not a sound.” Bao Dai mouthed the words, rather than spoke them, then quickly moved away through the shadows.

  A body l
ay on the floor. A woman’s body. It moved. A face peered up into the candlelight.

  “Pat?” said the woman.

  Bao Dai recognized her.

  Wifey.

  Or ex-wifey. The one with the nice tits.

  “Smarty pants,” he said and brought the wire cutters down on her head, not too hard. Kind of gently, in fact.

  Bao Dai opened the door near the stairs and dragged the woman inside. Then he went back and bound the little girl in copper wire. He hadn’t removed Zorro’s wire in the first place. Now he added more.

  Bao Dai returned to the woman. Her chest rose and fell with her breathing. She was fine, just fine. Bao Dai bent over and raised her sweater. Her tits—nice tits—stiffened in the cold air. Bao Dai watched them stiffen. After a while, they stopped stiffening and relaxed a little. Bao Dai wanted to see them stiffen some more. He reached out and touched one. It was smooth and soft and springy. Did he feel a little stirring in his groin? Or had he imagined it? He put the candle on the floor to free his other hand, then reached for her again.

  Bright lights went on all around him.

  Part Three

  28

  Ivan Zyzmchuk’s eyes snapped open.

  How long had he been asleep? He checked his watch. 2:18 A.M. No more than half an hour. He lay still on the too-soft mattress, listening. It was quiet. He no longer heard the dark-haired woman moving on the other side of the dividing wall, no longer heard the voice of the TV preacher. The only sound was the diminishing whine of a car, fading away to the north. Nothing abnormal; he closed his eyes.

  But he didn’t sink back down into sleep. Although his body was tired, his eyelids now wanted to stay open. After a while he stopped fighting them and got out of bed. He looked out the window. Light leaked through the curtains of the room next door, pooling in the dark-haired woman’s parking space.

  It was empty.

  Wearing his bathrobe, Zyzmchuk opened the door and went outside. The whining car had passed out of hearing range. He peered into the window of number 19. Through the finger-breadth gap in the curtain he could see a tapering expanse of beige carpet, the leather suitcase he had lifted off the carousel, now open, with a red sweater on top, and a corner of the still-made bed.