Hard Rain

by Peter Abrahams

  Zyzmchuk turned and paced across the little room. He pulled back the curtains. A wind had risen from the north. It was blowing the rain at a slight angle across the sky.

  “Mr. Z.? Have you done something wrong? Is that why I got fired?”

  He closed the curtains and looked at Grace. She was afraid. He had no reassurance to give her. “What happened when you tried to get Hartley Frame’s record?”

  “I told you. It was classified. We needed A.D. or higher to get into it. I asked you and you—”

  “I tried to get into it today, Grace.”

  “By yourself?”

  “No. There’s a new … GR-3.”

  “Already,” she said softly.

  “Yes,” Zyzmchuk said. Grace’s lip was trembling again. He waited for it to stop. Then he said, “He couldn’t find any file for Hartley Frame.”

  “He must have made a mistake.”

  “Not that I saw. He got an Error 57 message.”

  Grace said nothing. He could see she had chosen silence over repeating that her replacement had made a mistake.

  “What came up when you tried?” Zyzmchuk asked.

  Grace looked surprised. “I told you, Mr. Z. It was classified.”

  “But what came on the screen? Exactly.”

  “Word for word?”

  “Yes.”

  Grace screwed up her eyes like a child. “First came the classification code. It was an NP-6; that’s the A.D. level. Then the entry, Frame, Hartley E. Then his unit, and that was all.”

  “His unit?”

  “Yes. It was the 173rd Airborne Brigade.”

  “Will they have their own records?”

  “Separate from army records, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  Grace thought. Her eyes had an inward look, as though she were gazing back on twenty-five years of directing paper traffic in Washington. “They do,” she said.

  “Let’s go,” Zyzmchuk said.

  “Like this?” Grace spread her arms.

  “Why not? Just throw on a coat.”

  Grace threw on a coat. They hurried out to her car. Her pink slippers flapped on the sidewalk, a foot of quilted housecoat hung down past the bottom of her coat, but there was a spring in her stride.

  “Do you want to drive?” she said, digging the keys out of her purse.

  “You drive,” Zyzmchuk said.

  Grace drove. She drove fast and well. She parked in Zyzmchuk’s space, but could have parked anywhere; it was after six and the lot was empty. They rode the elevator, walked quickly down the hall to her old office. Grace sat at the terminal. Her fingers tapped the keys, then froze in midstroke.

  “I can’t sign in,” she said. “The machine won’t accept my code.”

  “Use mine. I’ve got it written down in my desk.” He turned to go.

  “Don’t bother,” Grace said. “I know it. I know all the codes.”

  “Dahlin’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Use it.”

  Grace smiled. “You’re funny, Mr. Z.”

  Her plump fingers dove down to the keyboard. Letters and numbers appeared and disappeared on the screen. They meant nothing to Zyzmchuk. He watched Grace’s fingers instead, how they hesitated, hovered, tapped—sometimes a single key, sometimes a flurry. Then the screen went black except for the cursor, pulsing in the top left-hand corner.

  “We’re in,” Grace said.

  “And there’s nothing?”

  “No. I haven’t entered him yet.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Grace’s fingers flicked across the keys. “Frame, Hartley E.” lit the screen. A few moments passed; nothing moved but the pulsing cursor. Then words began running across the screen, line after line.

  “Bingo,” Grace said. Her fingers were still. Zyzmchuk leaned over her shoulder; his eyes strained to take it all in at once.

  FRAME, Hartley Edmund

  HT.: 5’11”

  WT.: 170

  EYES: Blue

  HAIR: Blond

  BUILD: Medium

  DISTINGUISHING MARKS: None

  IQ: 132

  EDUCATION: College, three years

  DRAFT STATUS: 1A, as of Jan. 1, 1969

  PHYSICAL: Sept. 1, 1969. Fort Dix. Passed for active service.

  INDUCTION: Oct. 3, 1969. Fort Dix.

  BASIC TRAINING: Oct. 3, 1969–Dec. 1, 1969. Fort Dix. Assigned 173rd Airborne Dec. 3, 1969. Rank: Private

  MOVE ORDER: Dec. 22, 1969.

  EMBARKATION: Jan. 10, 1970. U.S.S. Oriskany. San Diego.

  DISEMBARKATION: Jan. 28, 1970. Cam Ranh Bay.

  PROMOTION: Feb. 6, 1970. Pfc.

  MIA: March 10, 1970. Pleiku area. See note 1.

  DECEASED: Between March 1970 and December 1970. Exact date unknown. See note 2. Declared dead Jan. 5, 1971. See note 3.

  DECORATIONS: Combat service ribbon. Purple heart. Bronze star. All posthumous.

  NOTE 1: (From report of S. Sgt. Millard Flemming, March 11, 1970.) Pfc. Frame was point on a six-man sweep north of Pleiku March 9–March 10, 1970. Our bivouac was surrounded by 30 to 40 N.V. regulars at about 22:30 March 10. A firefight of about ten minutes followed. Enemy withdrew. Our casualties were two wounded, one seriously, and Pfc. Frame who was not seen after the fighting.

  NOTE 2: (From report of M. Gilles Ricord of International Red Cross, Dec. 3, 1970.) I send under separate cover dog tags (number 237–32495, name Hartley E. Frame) and fingerprints furnished by the Government of North Viet Nam. Bodily remains apparently lost in a fire which destroyed buildings in D-1 camp.

  NOTE 3: Prints match those taken at Fort Dix, Sept. 1, 1969, from Hartley E. Frame—J. M. Morris, MD, Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii.

  “Is that all?” Zyzmchuk said.

  Grace tapped a key. The words scrolled out of sight. “Yup,” she said. “Does it help?”

  Zyzmchuk stared at the empty screen. “It raises some question,” he said.

  “Like?”

  Like how could Hartley Frame have written a check to Mojo Guitars Limited in Reno, Nevada, on January 14, 1969, if he’d sailed for Viet Nam on January 10?

  “You don’t know or you just don’t want to tell me?” Grace asked.

  But Zyzmchuk was silent, lost in a maze of thought that changed shape with every mental move he made. Outside darkness had fallen, dark as the blank screen. Rain beat on the windows.

  At last he spoke, but it wasn’t to answer her question. “I’ve got to get to the airport, Grace.”

  “I’ll take you,” she said.

  39

  Rain cut down from the sky in slanting lines, like strokes painted with the edge of a palette knife. Jessie drove out of the Berkshires, into New York and across the Hudson. The rain and wind were busy knocking the last leaves off the trees. That made the trees whip their bare branches around like flagellants in a fury of mortification.

  Jessie held the wheel tight in both hands and drove as fast as she dared; but the little rental car didn’t handle as well as it had before the battering outside the campus residence, and when she turned on the headlights, Jessie found that only one was working. After almost an hour she tried the radio. It wasn’t working well either. The only clear station had an oldies format and an announcer with the voice of a B-movie seductress.

  “All your favorite ear candy from the fifties, sixties and early seventies,” breathed the woman.

  “Ball and Chain” by Janis Joplin. “She Said She Said” by the Beatles. “Rip This Joint” by the Stones. Then the Levi’s commercial came on. Jessie snapped it off before the ringing guitar part. She just drove. Her mind became a box, enclosing one word. The word was “please.”

  Jessie entered Woodstock a few minutes after four. It would have been a beautiful town in any other weather. But now the lawns were muddy brown and the tidy, freshly painted shops on the main street looked like a movie set after the lighting men have gone home.

  Jessie parked outside a store with a pumpkin in the window and
went inside. A bell tinkled as the door closed behind her. It was a cheese shop. A woman in a black cashmere sweater and designer jeans had a white display card in her hands. She was writing the wrong accent over the e in chèvre. “May I help you?” she said. “We’ve got some lovely Camembert just in.”

  “Not today,” Jessie replied. “I’m looking for the site of the festival.”

  “Festival?”

  “The Woodstock festival.”

  “Oh, that. I wouldn’t know. We just opened last month. We’re from Manhattan, but we couldn’t take it anymore. Try one of the locals.” From the way the woman said “locals,” Jessie suspected her migration might not be permanent.

  She drove to a gas station and filled the tank. “I’m looking for the site of the Woodstock festival,” she told the attendant.

  He stuck his head in the window. Perhaps he was a local. He needed a shave, deodorant, a dentist, eyedrops. “On a day like this?” he said. “You people.” He laughed. Jessie didn’t. “I’ll tell you what I tell them all. The famous Woodstock festival didn’t take place within spitting distance of Woodstock.” His voice grew a little sibilant, as if he was tempted to do some spitting himself. “We wouldn’t have none of it. Not then. Not now.” He laughed again. Rain ran down the bill of his Red Sox cap and dripped on Jessie’s shoulder.

  “Where was the site?” Jessie said.

  “Why down in Bethel,” he said. “I can never understand how come none of you pilgrims ever knows that, if you’re so gung ho about that whole business.”

  Jessie leaned away, out of the drip. “Where is Bethel?”

  “Well, first you got to loop around the reservoir,” the attendant began, and he launched on a discourse full of town and route names that didn’t stick in Jessie’s mind.

  “But how far is it from here?” she interrupted, expecting an answer like five or six miles.

  “Fifty miles,” he said, with the smug sureness of a joker delivering a tried-and-true punchline. “Take you an hour to get there in this weather. At least.”

  Jessie drove southwest, into cloud-covered hills. The rain was falling harder, and the air growing cold. Jessie turned on the heat. The roads were narrow and winding, passing through many small towns. There wasn’t much traffic, but it was after five by the time Jessie drove into Bethel, and almost dark.

  Bethel showed no signs of being a magnet for burned-out New Yorkers. It looked like a simple country town. Jessie went into a simple country store.

  “Just closing,” said an old man in a smock.

  “I’m looking for the site of the Woodstock festival.”

  He sighed. “Straight on through to Hurd Road. Take a right and keep going till you come to four corners. That’s it.” He dropped a handful of steel bolts into a paper bag. They exploded softly on landing.

  Jessie drove out of Bethel. Rain drummed on the roof and flowed down the cracked windshield into the track of the wipers. On the far side of the clouds the sun must have been going down: for a few minutes everything turned a faint shade of purple. She found Hurd Road and turned right.

  Rolling empty farmland stretched into the wooded distance. Nothing moved across it—not a tractor, not an animal, not a man. There was no sign of the black van, Kate, Pat or Hartley Frame. Jessie approached a crossroads and slowed down. She saw a small, gray shape in the brown emptiness, not far from the roadside, and pulled over.

  Jessie got out of the car, stepped over a shallow ditch and walked into the field. Cold rain fell on her; mud sucked at her shoes. The gray shape, she now saw, was a stone marker. Under a bas-relief of a guitar neck bearing a dove, a plaque read: “This is the original site of the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair.”

  Jessie looked around. She was alone. She gazed at the inscription, her mind a blank. Rain, finding its way into her collar and trickling down her back, broke her trance.

  Had Hartley Frame lied to her? Why? If he was going to lie, why telephone her in the first place? Jessie didn’t have the answer. All she could think of was trying Mrs. Rodney again.

  Move, she told herself. But she didn’t want to move, didn’t want to get in the car, didn’t want to see the decaying house in North Adams again. She stood in the rain, looking at the stone marker in the empty field, once filled with half a million strong. The Joni Mitchell song started playing in her mind. It had also played, she recalled; in Pat’s cassette machine, when she’d pressed the button in his music room.

  What had happened that Friday night in Venice? It must have been Friday night—they’d driven across the country by Monday.

  Hartley Frame had knocked on the door, perhaps only minutes after she’d dropped Kate off. How had he found out where Pat lived? From Blue Rodney. She tried to warn her brother, but the warning had come too late.

  Who had opened the door? Pat? Kate? Had Pat even recognized Hartley at first? They had let him in. Or he’d forced his way in. And then? All she knew were two facts: They’d played the Joni Mitchell song. They’d driven away in the blue BMW. Perhaps they’d stopped at Pat’s bank: Buddy Boucher had been paid in cash.

  Had it turned ugly somewhere along the way? Or had it been ugly from the start?

  Jessie remembered something else. Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. The Stratocaster that hung on the music room wall. The one Pat had said he bought at an auction, but Disco said had been given to Hartley by Jimi Hendrix at the festival. It had been missing too. So, fact three: they’d taken the guitar with them. Adding it all up, she was no further ahead. That left only Mrs. Rodney.

  Jessie looked up from the marker. The rain fell harder now, blowing into her face from across the field. Only the weakest tinge of purple remained in the clouds; the sky was growing dark. Jessie was just about to turn toward the car when she noticed something moving at the edge of the woods. It was no more than a blur, a dark blur. She closed her eyes, opened them. The dark blur was still there, but it had stopped moving.

  Jessie took a few slow steps across the field. The light was fading quickly now, but the blur began to assume a rectangular shape. And, at the very limit of her vision, she saw a tiny flash of red. Jessie started running across the field as fast as she could.

  The blurry rectangle hardened its outline and became the black van. The tiny flash of red blossomed into the painted flames along its side. Soon Jessie could even distinguish silvery dents on the corner of the back door and a bend in the rear bumper.

  She ran. There was no sound but the rain, the sucking mud and her own breathing. Be smart, said a voice inside her. But what was the smart thing to do? She didn’t know. She ran right up to the van.

  The van was parked under a big bare tree at the edge of the woods. No sound came from inside. Jessie was so close she could reach out and touch the van. She reached out and touched it. Cold and wet. She wiped water off the windshield and looked through. No one was in the front seat. The plastic curtain was drawn behind it.

  Jessie walked around the van. She tried the two front doors, the side door, the back door. All locked. She put her forehead against the opaque windows, but could see nothing inside. She tried the side door again, harder this time, jerking the handle up and down. The door remained locked.

  But something stirred inside. And someone—no, not someone, but Kate—said, “Who’s there?”

  “Katie! Katie! It’s me!”

  “Mom?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes. Are you all right, darling?” Emotion surged through Jessie; she felt as though her whole body would dissolve in it. She struggled to control her voice. “Can you open the door?”

  “I’m tied up. Hurry, Mom.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll get you out.” Jessie bent down and picked up a rock. She smashed the window on the passenger side door. Her hand was through the hole and on the lock when a man shot out from under the van and bounced to his feet. He wore a filthy summer suit and a big smile. His teeth were brown and rotten.

  “Welcome to Woodstock, Jessie,” the man said, spreading his arms. His head had been
shaved, but new hair was growing back in a dark stubble. Rain ran through it and dripped down his hollow face.

  “Hartley,” Jessie began; but the word faltered on her lips when she noticed the color of his eyes. “I want my daughter back.”

  The smile faded. “That’s not my name,” he said. “My name is Bao Dai.”

  Oh God, Jessie thought. She had no idea what to say, how to deal with him, how to get Kate out of that van.

  “Bao Dai,” he repeated. “It’s an emperor’s name. Emperor of the V.C. Emperor of the mud.”

  “I know. You wrote ‘Toi giet la toi’ on Pat’s blackboard.” It was the first thought that came to Jessie’s mind.

  His eyes narrowed. “That’s not how you pronounce it.” He came a step closer. She stepped back. “You’re afraid of me, Jessie.”

  “That’s obvious.”

  He showed his rotten teeth again. “You don’t need to be. I like you. Come.” He held out his hand.

  Jessie didn’t move. “Come where?” she said.

  “Just for a little talk.”

  “Let’s talk here. My daughter’s in the van. I want to be with her. I want to see her.”

  “She’s fine. She’s kind of my daughter too, you know. By right.” He thrust out his bony jaw, as though waiting for an argument. Jessie said nothing. “Come,” he repeated, holding out his hand again.

  Jessie didn’t move. He reached into his belt and took out a knife. Jessie recognized it—Pat’s carving knife with the scrimshaw handle.

  “You made me show you this,” he said, almost sounding insulted. “I didn’t want to. But you couldn’t just come nicely.” He lunged forward and grabbed her hand. He was very quick and very strong. His hand felt hard and rough. Jessie tried to pull away. He tightened his grip and drew her toward the trees.

  “You said I could have my daughter. You said you weren’t going to hurt anybody.”

  “And I meant every word. But I wasn’t stoned then. I’m a bit stoned now.”

  “Mom?” called Kate from the van.

  He jerked Jessie into the woods before she could answer and pulled her, half-running, half-stumbling, about twenty or thirty yards through the trees. Then suddenly he stopped. Another man stood against a tree. He was bound to it with nylon rope. He was drenched, dirty and shivering, long fair hair matted to his skull. It was Pat.