Because the Rain

by Daniel Buckman

  “I didn’t choose a cop, Mike.”

  “It’s like the army but I get to come home at night,” he said.

  “You haven’t been a soldier for a long time,” she said. “This is just another idea you have of yourself.”

  “No,” he said. “The idea was being a writer.”

  Susan looked at his light blue Kevlar vest, the same color as his police shirt, then the .38 again. She became a wraith when they talked about this, terrified and near levitating, but he’d stopped feeling bad about it. Susan already knew the answers to her questions, and he believed she didn’t have to ask them.

  “I can only write about veterans,” he said. “And people don’t think about veterans the way I know them to end up.”

  “You can put veterans and their wives in different places,” she said. “We’ve been to Mexico and France. Barcelona. Women will read that.”

  “I’ll never sit alone in a room again,” he said. “Todd didn’t care about my buddy Dilger and how the lifers ruined him. Todd also has the money to buy books.”

  “I don’t know you,” she said.

  “I won’t keep letting some dream humiliate me,” he said.

  “We’ve killed for your dreams,” she said.

  Mike smiled into his wife’s eyes while he undid the Velcro on his Kevlar vest. He was done trying to explain.

  “Just like soldiers have for ours,” he said.

  Susan’s eyes wilted, then glassed. She looked from his ankle as if her turning had changed his police blues back into Levi 501s. She then closed her eyes and held them shut. Mike sat for five minutes, stitched inside his wall shadow, and watched her feign sleep. Her eyes never reopened so he stood to raise the blinds.

  That night they made love in the hard streetlight, but not to each other. It was what they were doing to forget the problems. They imagined couples from supermarket lines, waitresses in Polish restaurants, women who ran with their dogs. Susan told him things and he told her things, too. They always kept their eyes closed and sometimes he felt her smile while he kissed her. But tonight, among the wind sounds, her lips were straight and coldly wet, and he felt her imagining nothing while he dreamed another man kissing her breasts. Mike tried parting his wife’s lips with his tongue, but they wouldn’t come open, and the man was licking Susan’s stomach when Mike finished. He never let the guy get far.

  She touched his arm after he rolled away and looked at him. Her brown eyes once made him angry they were not one person. Now, he did not know when her eyes became only eyes. The wind lifted the curtains and they fell and covered her face before lifting again. He could smell the cold in the wind.

  “You’re not into it anymore,” he said.

  “I love you,” she said.

  She cried and her eyes shook. She lay upon her stomach hugging a pillow.

  “It was not a baby,” he said.

  “They taught me that,” she said.

  He looked at his dirty uniform on the floor and knew that Susan’s eyes were closed without having to see her.

  In time, they included visuals into their lovemaking. They used the computer after his traffic shifts, the amateur sites with group sex pictures, the free downloads of home swinger video shot in a Naperville, Illinois, basement, and joined adultfriendfinder.com. They browsed profiles and found many couples like themselves, naked men and women with neither hope nor despair. After they clicked the stranger’s thumbnails, they looked a while before smiling and going to bed.

  But they didn’t own a digital camera and felt uncomfortable with posting pictures, so their ad received no hits. She wanted to keep pretending they swung and Mike felt better. He knew this was a game and that they’d return to normal again. After a few days, they stopped using the computer because the different sites used the same pictures and seeing the people again made them sad. They spent the morning dark quietly while Charlie Rose did a whole week interviewing Wharton School of Business professors about the American economy and neo-conservatism.

  One night, Mike and Susan saw an Asian woman in the second-flat window across the street. They’d been watching a Good Times marathon on TV Nation when she stood in the lit glass, shirtless with black panties, her body like a half grown cat’s. When JJ tried selling an offended Florida on the possibility of a black Jesus, the Asian woman stood so close to the window her breasts pushed flat, and Susan clicked off the television.

  “Sit up,” she told Mike.

  He leaned against the headboard while the Asian woman backed away from the glass. She was drying herself with a towel. Susan sat inside his thighs. Things had gone that fast.

  His wife lay back and spread her legs and the streetlight fell across her stomach. She looked out the window at the woman wiping her tiny hips. He kissed Susan’s waist.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said. “Your hands are too rough.”

  Mike and Susan used the woman for a week until the rains came and stripped the leaves from the trees. The lightning slivered without thunder before the thunder clapped alone against the green sky. They touched each other from memories and waited out the storms. Mike imagined the woman kissing his wife, her small hand on Susan’s hip. He never asked Susan what she conjured about her, but his wife’s lips had stopped feeling cold to him.

  When the weather turned east, over Lake Michigan, the woman was leaving at dusk while Susan and Mike read books, separated by the bedroom wall. Every night a different car came for her. There was a black BMW with tinted windows, a blue Jeep Cherokee with clean wheel rims. The cars blocked their view when the woman came from the gangway and drove off quickly. The driver never signaled the turn at the end of the street. They each quietly speculated she was a prostitute.

  Three nights later, Susan sat up, wound in the sheet. They’d tried making love, but got stuck while kissing.

  “Tell me what I haven’t done,” she said.

  “You’ve done everything.”

  “You went to that woman. That is why she left the window.”

  “I only used her with you.”

  Mike stared out the window. The rain came steadier, hard as pellets. Susan got up and went to the bathroom. He saw her nakedness in the window and did not look very long. She came out dressed in a T-shirt and shorts with her cell phone.

  “No,” he said.

  “It’s too much now,” she said.

  Susan went to turn the dead bolt. The hallway light shone in the door seams. He grabbed her shoulders and shook her to make her talk. She spat in his face. He hugged her from behind and she screamed without opening her mouth.

  “I wanted the baby,” he said.

  “I didn’t want the baby. Not with you. This is not about that.”

  She kicked at him and pushed back hard and her heels hit his shins. She dug her nails into his arms. When she left him, down the stairs, through one door, then the second, a squall of rain sent sticks spinning against the window. Within a minute, he couldn’t touch her anymore.

  Mike stayed smug for an hour after his wife disappeared into the city. He sat in the dark and played through Brubeck’s Take Five, the piano like Pacific blowholes, and let the music help him claim happiness about being done with her. A writer, Susan? I’m just one of a million dreamers. He turned the volume until the piano shook the windows, and believed he’d exhaled for the first time in seven years. He saw himself driving coastal roads where rocks broke waves, treeless highways through wheat fields, and wondered why he hadn’t pushed this sooner. You give her half the money, he told himself, then imagine a future without her.

  We all can’t teach retarded kids like you do, he thought.

  When the CD reset, the songs started again, but the cool was all gone. The piano now got him above nothing. He shut down the music and grabbed the phone, dialing her cell without watching himself. He sat against the wall, hemmed by shadow lines, and the ringing became voice mail. He hung up, then called right back.

  Call me so I don’t worry, he said. I won’t pick up. Just let me
see your number in the caller ID.

  Five minutes later, he started leaving the long messages.

  * * *

  Mike Spence sat at the interview table, wondering if it was morning yet. After Detective Ramos had brought him to the station, he put on a dry shirt, but left Mike wet so he could turn up the air conditioner during the interrogation and make him uncomfortable. Mike knew he’d be cleared, but he also knew Susan hadn’t been dead very long, killed by a homicidal head injury behind Bell Street, and her murder wouldn’t become real until he felt relief about not being a suspect. He was afraid he’d later fall down the precinct house stairs and wail.

  The academy taught cops to always sweat the husbands, Mike himself learned, but fat-armed Ramos was freezing him, thinking the increased freon would help Mike realize he’d killed his wife the way Ramos certainly hoped he did. Cops, he knew, loved to bust cops. Mike waited for Ramos to start questioning again, but the detective smoked a Kool and stared at the cinder-block wall.

  Mike had seen Susan dead in the alley while the blue police lights strobed through her wet legs. He tried moving, looking away, but the drops wound him, flooding the puddles while they boiled and joined with other puddles. Her sandals had fallen off. One lay by a gangway, the other a few feet from a garbage can. She had crawled to the fence, through the lot lights hooped on the alley, and the rocks stuck in her elbows. When Mike had called, after the eighth message, the patrol cop answered her cell phone and said Mike better come about three alleys east. Just walk for the lights, he’d said.

  Ramos dropped a Kool butt into an empty Hawaiian Punch can. His hands stank of grilled onions.

  “You are wet, newbie copper,” he said. “The cold will sink in.”

  Mike watched the two cops behind the one-way glass fold their arms alike, then said, “Like I told you. We had a fight and she left. Then the cop answered her phone. You and I got there at the same time. You watched me go down when I saw her dead.”

  Ramos sagged where he sat. His love handle hung over the Glock Nine on his belt.

  “You didn’t follow her out with that baseball bat behind your door?” he said.

  “Test the bat.”

  “They’ve been on your computer, newbie. You direct traffic in the South Loop, then go home and get into some sick shit. Only she isn’t into it like you are.”

  “It never left the computer.”

  “I know you smack the shit out of her,” Ramos said. “It’s your thing. The neighbor heard you arguing about the abortion. You’re a fucking asshole.”

  “No,” Mike said. The puddle mud had dried cold on his legs.

  “The neighbor hears you fighting all the time,” Ramos said. “He told us he warned you.”

  “I’ve never hit her.”

  “We saw where you’ve kicked the walls.”

  “The walls aren’t my wife.”

  “I bet you make her blow your buddy?”

  “Who?”

  “You stand in the room and watch. You whip your skippy in the shadows.”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “You’ve got something you don’t want me to know, newbie.”

  “I told you.”

  “You’re mad because she likes it with your buddy and you beat her. She tells you he’s sweeter and slower. You get off by tearing her up. That’s how you fuck?”

  “No.”

  “Rocks off, right? I bet you bring home hookers and make her watch them give you a blow job.”

  “We had a fight and she left. Then the cop answered her phone.”

  “No, newbie. You accuse her of loving your buddy, right? You smack her with open hands, but get bored, so you close your fist. You make her cheekbones powder. You chase her outside and kill her in the rain. Did your knees get weak before you came?”

  “She was killed and nothing was taken. This is a gang initiation.”

  “Your neighbor says she teaches retarded kids,” Ramos said. “Gangbangers have goofy crack babies. Why would they kill their baby-sitter?”

  “I saw her dead when you did,” Mike said.

  4

  In the darkness, in the rainy wind, Annie lay the yoga book on the hardwood floor. She put chair legs over the page corners to keep them flat, and the tall white model looked up at her, even though her eyes were calmly closed, her hands pulling her feet into the bound lotus.

  She wanted the book ready, set to a new page of postures, before the cop across the street came from his three-flat. He ran this time every night, rigid like a soldier, his crooked elbows swinging no more than nine inches back. She loved watching his hard legs in the loose shorts he wore, his thigh muscles definite in the streetlight. She’d assume the yoga postures when he was running, always for an hour, his pace faster when he ran back along the row of tightly parked cars, a white towel around his neck. He was a tall man, the one left who never walked a golden retriever, or wore a blue Michigan sweatshirt with the gold lettering cracked from the dryer. He’d hate them, like she did, for thinking life was a cruise through Napa Valley. He ran the alleys, his socks dirty from the puddle water, looking at his watch and trying to make a mile in the last six minutes.

  Annie saw the cop in uniform one time. She guessed him a quiet man and he wouldn’t want people to know that he was the police. He’d hate the men he worked with, the red-faced guys who rolled the neighborhoods in squad cars, looking for a place to park and watch DVDs on the portable player.

  At night, she’d stand in the window, holding her bra in her hands. She tried lighting enough candles for him to notice her topless if he was looking out. I’ll stand here for a week, and he’ll come running across the street like a dog after birds. But he never crossed Claremont and his shaded window remained dimlit from television. She did keep standing in the window, hoping he watched her back, but understood that this cop never looked at her window when he walked off his run.

  There’d been a woman in his apartment nights. Annie once saw her white back in their bedroom TV light. Sometimes she caught the woman looking at her through the dropped blinds because the streetlight lit them and silhouetted her body. But Annie never saw her face. The cop ran to hide from his wife and worked afternoons because it kept his time with her down to a nightly hour. They were not lovers, but two people committed to seeing through an old idea. Annie could tell by the way she lived inside their bedroom when he wasn’t home. After Annie stopped working nights, the woman was not there anymore.

  Tonight, the cop did not run. She watched with her face so close to the window she smogged the glass with her breath. There was only the dark three-flat where he lived, the small rain leaning through the streetlight. She sat on the floor, studying the Gomukhasana, the cow-face pose. She assumed the position, like the model, a tall white woman who never looked at the camera. The rain cast rolling shadows over the picture. She sat and crossed her legs and bent her knees, her hands joined behind the back, the one elbow pointed up, the other down. Gomukhasana opens the shoulders and chest to deepen the breath. Emotionally, feelings of melancholy disappear and the blood flow to the heart activates the heart chakra and energy is subtly released. She read the caption four times, her tight leg muscles flaring to numbness. She squinted her eyes in the grainy light, dragging them slowly across the words twice more, then recrossed her legs. She stretched until her hips throbbed, waiting to feel it vanish.

  * * *

  Annie was five when she hid by the bridge outside Vinh Dinh, stooping in the elephant grass, waiting for a boat with her father and three new uncles. The men shared cigarettes in the white sunlight because the heat dissolved the smoke. Their eyes were squinted and they looked over their shoulders for the brown-shirted police who walked the beach and shot at the boats. She never saw these police, but the uncles said they were close, and pointed at the wood from the wrecked boats.

  “We knew each other as boys,” her father said of the men. “But when you meet them, you must pretend you can’t speak.”

  She decided she’d
act like Huong, her retarded cousin, a girl whose mouth hung open.

  Last night, Annie first saw the uncles walking from the pine trees after the rain. Her feet sank coolly into the needles while the moon struck the wet branches. She remembered Huong and made her eyes very wide, letting the smear of the rain take her. She made herself float. But Huong couldn’t see their sunburned tattoos, the eagles of the Saigon army. She’d stare and let the stray drops fall inside her eyes. Huong never blinked.

  “She’s not right,” her father told the uncles. “I grab her, she can’t make noise.”

  He took her arm and shook her. She let her eyes roll up in her head, like Huong did. She kept her lips tight.

  The uncles passed a cigarette. But in the darkness, in the dripping pines, they did it behind cupped hands. Their wet faces flared orange when they smoked.

  “Why did you bring her?” the toothless uncle said.

  Her father took out a length of rope, the one he used for tying his rucksack. He looked hard at the uncle and wound it around her neck.

  “If she makes noise,” he said.

  The men took turns with a cigarette. They held the smoke until none came out.

  “The communists won long ago,” the toothless uncle said.

  “You’ve seen me use the rope.”

  “But not for a long time.”

  The man with the boat never showed yesterday, but her father told the men he’d come today. They watched the sea and the sky, their eyes glowing white from the sun. Her father smiled like these men were his brothers, but the new uncles just passed rice to her father and he gave it to her. One uncle, a tall man without side teeth, rolled the rice into sticky balls. She always could taste his hand.

  The sand here burned her feet. She wanted to tell her father that the blisters from last night were wet, and they made colors in the sand. Like yesterday, she thought of her cats lying around her head, back in Hue, their noses wet against their curled tails. Her mother always grabbed the cats, one by one, and threw them to the floor. Le Thuy, she said. They’ll suck out your breath. If she could tell her father anything, it would be to change that memory.