Because the Rain

by Daniel Buckman

  They came together. They ran from each other. They crossed paths like this for ten years, the stakes getting higher. One day, after the book sold, they got married at City Hall between Cuban and Sri Lankan couples, and spent two nights at the Hilton and Towers having the best sex of their lives. Susan missed her period the next month.

  But Mike Spence believed himself a tough guy until his thirty-fifth birthday. He’d walked into the blurry waste of the Mojave Desert, pack mule fashion, one dreamy grunt among many. Before meeting Susan, he soldiered in Honduras and Panama; he ran triathlons, competed in power lifting, boxed at The Windy City Gym, covered dope at federal court, and backpacked through the Balkans after the war. But it did nothing against the sadness of seeing Susan thirteen years after the yellow leaves, the abortion having broken her in her weak places because he wrote a novel about soldiers who got sad after watching their buddies burn in the sky. We saw ourselves on fire, he’d tell her. My father beat me when Chicago lost to Green Bay, she told him, and I was getting potato chip crumbs on the couch.

  Whenever he forgot Susan and let himself remember running the Sacré Coeur steps with Dilger, he wished he could time the lapses. It would help him gauge his progress in forgetting her. But Parisian leave with Dilger and the French girls who feigned repulsion to their dog tags was something he couldn’t let himself remember either. He guessed Dilger wasn’t Dilger anymore, the handsome son of the dirty-crude oil fields, but something kept him from calling his mother in Burkburnett, Texas, and checking to see if he’d recovered from the night the MP sticked him. If Dilger had, Mike would only feel weaker.

  Mike ran across Irving Park and passed Orange Garden Chop Suey, the last of the neon-lit takeaways. He drew the cold air without coughing, and became all body, his stride longer, more deliberate.

  He turned down the alley and the pole lamps were bright in the puddles. When he found himself sliding on his knees, he couldn’t remember going down. The asphalt barked his shins and he stopped himself with his hands. He breathed and spat before turning to see legs stuck before a rat-proof garbage can.

  The woman was small and Asian. She lay on her back with closed eyes, her tiny shoulders lost in a trench coat. He crawled over and pushed her hair from her eyes, the thin wet strands, but they never opened. He touched her dripping throat. He put his ear to her chest, pulling away when it rose and touched him.

  Looking at her, he thought of cut flowers. He stood while the puddle water diluted his knee blood.

  “Hey,” he said.

  The rain hit her forehead where she lay quiet, her head on blue-bagged newspapers.

  He bent down again and touched her shoulder, then shook it, but her head rolled left. He looked at her neck, head, the stomach of her trench coat. There was no blood. He put his nose to her mouth, smelling for liquor, but she was clean. When he stood with her, he thought he held a cat. He’d decided to sprint for Ravenswood Hospital when she said, “You’d remember me without my trench coat.”

  Her eyes opened and they held the alley light. She looked at him without blinking.

  Mike knew it was the woman from across the street. She left the windows when Susan died and he forgot imagining the tautness of her body. She was strong, small, and smelled like scented candles.

  “You keep your head,” she said. “I like that. You are a good soldier.”

  “How do you know I was a soldier?” he said.

  “It is the way you run,” she said. “Your upper body never moves. I always wonder if you run with a quarter between your teeth.”

  He didn’t know how to answer the woman, but it felt good holding her. He was walking now and the rain had started small and warm. He hoped she wouldn’t ask to be let down.

  “Soldiers are quiet,” she said. “Cops are loud. That is another way I know.”

  “That’s not always true.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Soldiers are younger and lack confidence. You all stay confused and that keeps you from speaking quickly.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “You are confused enough to keep carrying me,” she said.

  “You haven’t told me you are not hurt,” he said. “I will carry you until then.”

  “I think you’ve wanted to carry me for a long time.”

  Mike stopped and let the rain disappear into them.

  “Let me down,” she said.

  He watched the woman walk between two garages, lay on the wet leaves fallen from the black trees, then open her trench coat. Her knees raised and her feet turned flat. She wore a white T-shirt and it was quickly wet.

  “You know me now,” she said.

  Mike did, but he kept quiet. The night was warm for the time of year.

  He guessed the woman a hooker. She looked at him with eyes that gave orders. He’d dreamed them softer, maybe a girl looking for a way back to the village, but not such a porno dream. After he lay with her, she rubbed her lips with her finger and nodded in the direction of what she wanted pleasured, then smiled and licked her teeth when he complied.

  They lay on the leaves a long time. For a while, he didn’t even hear the barking dogs. He kept looking for the village in her eyes, but they only mirrored his own.

  * * *

  Mike idled the paddy wagon outside the precinct house on Addison. The morning light had come windy, but not cold. He was watching the street dry and waiting for his partner-of-the-day.

  Last night, he hadn’t gotten the woman’s name, but he touched her and kissed her hips. The rain washed her from him between the times they made love, and she kept moving like she knew it. You sprint now, she said. Your legs stretch and I want you to carry me.

  The woman made him swim and he’d never felt he expended any effort to please her. Lying with her, he forgot Susan. She gave him a lapse from all of it, but he decided to take her only when she came. He couldn’t get used to the quiet mind she gave him. There were still many things to remember.

  This morning, he was hoping for a partner-of-the-day he could like, the way he did every morning, just a guy who might use running shoes and read something about the Civil War, enough Shelby Foote to debate whether Stonewall Jackson was fragged at Chancellorsville, or shot by nervous sentries. They’d drive and weigh the variables. Jackson had marched his men barefoot through the Shenandoah, in icy mud and spring snow, making thirty miles a day and surprising federal cavalry so often that General Hooker couldn’t believe the Stonewall brigade didn’t ride horses. The men might have hated Jackson enough to shoot him off his horse where he sucked lemons against his constant nausea. He did execute deserters, and refused his men whiskey, but he tried teaching them to read. Mike would argue either side. The debate could make the day a minute.

  Sometimes, Mike wished he drove the streets with Dilger and they both felt the way they did at nineteen. Dog soldiers, amateur drunks, and free to blow off home and spend leave in Paris. In Mike’s dream, he never watched Dilger get sticked by the MPs, but they were older and somehow better read. He thought them warrior poets in the classical sense, like Dennis Hopper said in the movie. They’d seen the boys fall ablaze, but Dilger was never made goofy by a beating.

  The women were walking for the El at Sheffield, the working rush that died after 8:20, a hundred young ones in Donna Karan from T.J.Maxx, all heading toward bank jobs on LaSalle Street and the bottle-eyed Board of Trade guys who drank beer with lunch. They held their skirts down against the wind while the cops got out of the double-parked squads with handled thermoses, changing shifts, the midnight guys having warmed the seats through the long morning dark. Blow wind, Mike knew they were thinking. Let those skirts fly up to their necks.

  He was trying to imagine white see-throughs when Petersen got into the wagon. He was the partner-of-the-day, a pretend lifer who sold stereos until he was thirty-one, then became a cop when he lost sixty-five grand day trading in the week after 9/11. He wore blue uniform pants, the creases like cleavers, and Mike could see the wet marks on his fly from uri
ne afterdrip.

  “The navy taught me how not to piss on my hands,” Petersen said.

  He took off his hat. Mike waited to pull into traffic. Women drove by in Caravans and Navigators with baby-on-board stickers in the back windows.

  “You know why?” Petersen said.

  “No,” Mike said. “Why couldn’t you piss on your hands?”

  “So I wouldn’t have to waste time washing them.”

  He smiled at Mike like he’d told the punch line that made the spots seem routine.

  “The navy’s pretty ingenious,” he said.

  “They taught you something good.”

  “If you don’t wash your hands,” he said, “you can save a full minute on any head call. It was losing the navy money.”

  This guy was a slider, Mike thought, a little hamburger that comes boxed and speckled with rehydrated onions. He’d tell you how he got blabby drunk at summer day games, drilling Wrigley Field Budweiser in paper cups, while the Irish tricolor tattooed on his ankle got red from a sunburn. He trolled the bleachers, the people talking on cell phones between Sosa at-bats, and looked for two girls sitting alone, blondes with brunettes. Petersen always played to the dark hair: maybe she’d been bulimic because she was more Joyce Dewitt than Suzanne Somers and the crumbs weren’t crumbs to her. I’m a cop, he’d say. The women always paid attention until they understood there was no trouble.

  Mike drove the wagon down Addison while Petersen used a napkin from Starbucks to dry the wet spots near his fly. It left flecks of white on the blue wool, but he kept rubbing harder.

  “You know,” Petersen said, “this wagon detail isn’t being a cop.”

  “That’s true.”

  “You just cart bodies and wet drunks.”

  “Seven hours’ worth.”

  “You don’t get to help people on the wagon.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I bet no woman asks you for directions in this thing.”

  “One time, but she was in a hurry.”

  “Mills isn’t loved. You could get off this.”

  “I know what I have to do here,” Mike said.

  He wanted to tell Petersen that the job had a rhythm, a mind-away-from-the-body buzz, but he’d wait to use this explanation on a cop he might like. The guy would laugh, maybe tease him about being a new age goof. You’re just left of magical, he’d say. He and this cop would know each other by smell, like dogs from the same litter. They’d become good friends.

  Mike cruised the lakefront and waited for a call to make a morgue delivery. The coroner’s guys claimed they were too busy to bag and haul a body. They’d show up and declare the citizen dead. Mike spent his days tailing them, this dumpy Pakistani from Devon Avenue, and a South Side Irish with blue dog eyes. They were always getting called onward, northwest for a Jordanian custodian who hung himself with a heavy-duty extension cord, up to Argyle Street for a rainy-eyed Cambodian that got stabbed in the neck. They’d make the death pronouncement, then leave, joking about waking up sick from yesterday’s tandoori chicken. It’s that buffet on Devon, the Irish guy would say. Why do you take me there?

  Petersen opened a four-pack of apple bran muffins from a grocery store bakery. He ate fast and the crumbs fell on his lap. He was thin, but he wouldn’t be in a year.

  “You really have to kick squirrels off an old woman,” Petersen said. “The guys talk about it. The old squirrel girl, they say.”

  “There was a call about some screaming,” Mike said. “The neighbor showed me the two-flat, and the door was unlocked. I went up the stairs, and inside, all the windows were open. There were leaves and sticks on the floor and squirrels sitting on the sofa like house cats. The old woman had fallen and broken her hip and the squirrels were just lying on her chest, keeping her warm.”

  “They bite her?”

  “No. I told you. She fell and broke her hip.”

  “They were wild squirrels.”

  “The kind that live in trees,” Mike said.

  “I wouldn’t have touched it. That’s for animal control.”

  Pretty soon, Mike would ask Petersen about his softball team, then ignore him while he talked about how their bar sponsor got condemned over one rat. I could see if they found five or six, Petersen would say, but not just one. He’d talk loud, wanting Mike to hear him, vaguely knowing he was like an infomercial you glanced while changing television channels.

  They were two blocks away from the first morgue call. It was a corner graystone on Webster with stained-glass windows. The trees between the sidewalk and the curb had lost limbs during the first autumn storm.

  Petersen stumbled getting out of the wagon. The guys, used to the squad cars, expected the ground to be closer. Mike stopped laying odds on who was smart enough to remember the drop. The fat cops, the chow-hounds, had a junkie’s intelligence that he kept overlooking.

  “Mike the Kike lives here,” Petersen said.

  “What?”

  “Mike Rosen. He’s a defense lawyer. He takes mopers’ money and accepts plea bargains. They know they’re getting time, and they pay him to get less. He never steps into a courtroom.”

  Mike Spence breathed up some rain.

  “The guy collects lamps. Real fancy ones. You see them on at night.”

  “Let’s go,” Mike said.

  In the house, he moved ahead of Petersen, the hallway wet with dirty footprints. Cops loved to walk through puddles and track up oak floors. There were mirrors of different sizes, the frames all painted oak, and in them he saw the detectives lighting their Kools off one Zippo. The mirrored shapes sectioned their bodies into parts while they shared the flame. The Mexican detective had just finished telling a joke. He smiled and nodded like a salesman. Mike listened and came closer, holding his radio.

  “Kiss my ass, Ruiz,” the black detective said. He wore an olive suit and his head was shaved.

  “No,” Ruiz said. “The right kind of black guy, a palomino horse, and you got Leroy Rogers.”

  “I can’t see it.”

  “Roy Rogers as a black guy would be Leroy Rogers. You must accept that for the joke to be funny.”

  The black detective let out his Kool smoke and blew Ruiz a kiss. He showed him some tongue and the red was foamy in the hall light.

  “You and your fag shit,” Ruiz said.

  Mike walked between the detectives into the room. The tape outlined where Rosen had fallen dead. The body was moved away from the stencil, the feet on their sides, the toes slack. It was dressed like the Viet Cong in the picture lying on the desk, the black shorts, the plaid shirt, and there was a bullet hole through the temple. Mike watched Petersen look between the print and the body, then understand he didn’t know what he was seeing. His eyes soon lightened. Petersen had probably resumed thinking about cashing his CDs and day trading small.

  Mike started bagging the body alone. His partners never knew his rhythm, and it was easier to leave them looking out the window like Eddie Petersen. The job of getting the bodies inside was like changing a hospital patient’s bed with him in it. He also knew the detectives had been waiting for him to take the body to Harrison by the way Ruiz kept looking at his silver Rolex.

  “You guys stop for blow jobs?” Ruiz said.

  The detective had only been a face from crime scenes until the black detective spoke his name, some squat, loud guy. Petersen was looking out the window like he could see a girl.

  “They sweep for prints?” Mike said.

  “Why would I let you in here if they hadn’t swept for prints,” Ruiz said.

  “They left the picture,” Mike said. He pointed at the dying Viet Cong, and wondered if the guy was already dead when Eddie Adams snapped the camera.

  The black detective looked off down the hallway, chewing on a toothpick. Ruiz packed his Kool against his Zippo. He was like an arrogant track coach, his eyes full-wire.

  “You see smoke coming out of the picture?” Ruiz said.

  Mike saw the body, the bare feet, befor
e the print. “No,” he said.

  “Then the picture didn’t kill him.”

  Mike looked at the blood on the ceiling near where the bullet hit. It was like fresh paint.

  “The body’s dressed like the Viet Cong getting shot,” Mike said.

  Ruiz walked over and put the picture in his pocket.

  “Rosen brought home sixteen-year-old black girls from Cabrini Green,” Ruiz said to his partner. “He’d sodomize them, then buy ribs and champagne.”

  “I bet it was a parolee who shot him,” the partner said. “One pissed-off spic just off ten years fed time.”

  “Rosen robs these kids. They’d get the same sentence with a public defender.”

  “I bet it was a pissed-off spic.”

  “One of those girls did this,” Ruiz said.

  “No. She’d want to keep the deal. Your nephew Javier shot him.”

  “You wouldn’t give a Mexican your old toothbrush.”

  “Javier would just scratch it against the curb until he had a knife.”

  “No,” Ruiz said. “He’d thank you from deep. Not all of us chicken flickers are killers.”

  Mike zipped the bag shut and watched Petersen step closer to the window as if the glass was an open door. Then he saw that Rosen had changed before he died. His clothes, tan Angel Flight’s and a blue silk shirt, lay in the corner, not even boxed off by the tape.