Because the Rain

by Daniel Buckman

  He walked and pushed the picture down into his pocket, feeling it wrinkle, and swore Dilger was lying about the Jiffy Lubes. He was on Lexapro or something. This killer was saying that humiliation never goes away, and if he will trouble himself to prove it with the old pictures that turned people against his war, it would be nothing for Dilger to lie about the Jiffy Lubes.

  Mike took a breath before approaching the man, as if to keep Annie’s rain smell in his nose.

  19

  The agency never called back about Annie. Four days now. Goetzler couldn’t get Nick on the phone.

  He sat in his Grand Cherokee, parked between twin Explorers, watching the cop buy a chicken sandwich from the Greek’s. The Tribune was folded on the seat beside him, and he put his finger on the guy’s picture in the Metro section: Mike Spence, dark-eyed in a police hat, his mouth tight like a closed tobacco pouch.

  Goetzler knew this was the cop who beat the yuppie; he remembered the eyeballs that didn’t move when he threw punches. That night, in the headlights, this cop had hit a man because he used hair gel the rain couldn’t melt, and Goetzler loved him for it. He’d swung hard, as if he was fighting to remain himself and stay in uniform. Honor and pride gets you detailed on the paddy wagon every time.

  He’d read about the cop saving Will Avers’s life while he ate two scones and pushed the crumbs into the newspaper seam. The cop used a tourniquet above Avers’s knee and saved his leg. He performed CPR on a car hood, beating Avers back to life with a fist against his heart. He took him to Grant Hospital himself, and again administered CPR outside the emergency room. Goetzler left the bookstore and drove Lincoln Park looking for the cop’s wagon in the headlit dark—the article said he was the paddy driver, though never explained how he’d messed up to draw the detail. But he found the cop in three hours, double-parking in front of the Athenian Room (chicken on pita with fries: six bucks). From his picture, he thought the guy was a good shot, but a bad listener, the kind of man who only needed his own ideas.

  Ecco Homo, Goetzler thought. Here is the man.

  He bet the cop hadn’t slipped on the sidewalk carrying Avers. It snowed that afternoon, then warmed, so the pavement was half sleet. He hoped Avers kept his hands spread like he’d been told, and his likeness to the girl in the picture made the cop laugh. The old hippie had a slouch from sleeping afternoons while hiding thirteen years from the FBI, and he ran in the way of people who don’t run.

  Goetzler had hid in Avers’s garage for five hours, wearing a Henry Kissinger mask, the eyes cut larger for his glasses. He pulled the .38 while Avers stepped from his green Passat with two Whole Foods bags full of shiitake mushrooms and lemongrass. When Avers saw the pistol, his eyes went like wind, and he did what he was told: strip down and stand there. Goetzler taped the picture to his chest, using duct tape against the gray hair. Avers let him do his work. Goetzler then pointed to the girl in the picture, her open mouth, her tight face, and said, “None of us liked doing these things. They’d always send away the guys who did.”

  Avers kept quiet and lifted his foot off the cold cement.

  “You need to know that. Men are there and things always go the wrong way. In Vietnam, nobody ever meant to do anything.”

  The man wasn’t talking.

  “Look down at the picture,” Goetzler said.

  Avers’s eyes were like wiggling fingers. He’d been scared thoughtless.

  “Your movement used this girl to make the world hate us, and we had no choice but to be in Vietnam. We were not lucky enough to stay behind.”

  Goetzler pointed the gun at the girl in the picture while Avers panted with calmed eyes.

  “Do you understand your crime?”

  Avers nodded. Goetzler knew the man could not speak.

  “There are men with me,” Goetzler lied. “They will have rifles trained on the route you must run while you mimic this picture. There are many of us who seek revenge, and we will always watch you. If you don’t mime the little girl exactly, you’ll also be shot.”

  When Goetzler opened the garage door, Avers started his route by sprinting, his arms dangling while his bare feet slapped the alley. This was a good night.

  In the old days, he knew Uncle Kerm would comb his hair at the Drake and laugh big laughs over this gag. He’d want to hear the story a few times. No shit, he’d say. You made him run bare-ass naked.

  Goetzler could never meet the cop, but he wondered what the picture of the running girl meant to him. This cop, he knew, hated the men he protected, and seeing Avers probably made him laugh. Goetzler imagined him keeping the picture and showing it to his cop buddies over Harp pints at Simpson’s on Western Avenue. The guys would all want to buy Goetzler double Jamesons and shake his hand for giving them something to laugh about.

  Later, when the cop left the Greek’s, walking slow for the paddy wagon, Goetzler sat up, then cut NPR’s local pledge drive off the radio. The cop held the sandwich in a white bag and stopped by the wagon door. He was tall and Spartan lean, and stared over the hood at the street. Goetzler rolled down the window, looking with the cop to see. The asphalt was wet enough to show the brake lights, and the alley went black and white for a mile.

  20

  Annie’s last date was an Arab electronics salesman who wore Brut 33 and talked about doing big business in the new Iraq. CD burners, iPods, Discmans. Inside two years, he told Annie, every Iraqi would have something Sony in their ears. Hip-hop will be big, he said. When you break it down, Baghdad is no different than the Bronx. He lingered inside the doorway, asking for her cell number with swimming eyes.

  “Mr. Di Franzo doesn’t like us to do that,” she said.

  The Arab, like most men aware of Joey Di Franzo and his mad-rabbit face made famous by the Sun-Times, always disappeared when understanding Annie’s agency kicked up to an Outfit guy. For the suburban johns, The Sopranos filled in their lapsed street experience, and mentioning an Italian name was enough to create colon spasms.

  She didn’t know if Nick kicked up to anybody, but Joey Di Franzo was the only Chicago mob name she’d heard. She paged through many newspapers doing day in-calls, and the reporters were forever claiming he ran the Outfit.

  After the Arab left, Annie showered with Ivory soap and hot hotel water for fifteen minutes before the Arab’s cologne washed off. She sat on the Holiday Inn bed, drying herself, officially between clients. On the chair the guy’s Tribune reeked of Brut 33, but the Metro section insert lay on top, and she saw the cop’s picture.

  The towel fell away from her breasts when she reached for the paper. Annie fanned the cologne off the newsprint while reading about the cop saving a john’s life by taking him to Grant Hospital in the front seat of his paddy wagon. The cop even gave the john CPR at the last red light before the emergency room cul-de-sac.

  Annie let her eyes bounce over the two words of his name like she was glancing at the license plate number on a parked car.

  In the photo, the cop was again the runner from the window, not the sad man who needed her smell to sleep. Tonight, she decided he’d come to her because they were not together last night, and she’d watched him leave and return from a second run. She saw his TV light in the glass until dawn. The cop was a man who could only sedate his anger by exhaustion. But lying together, he was a thoughtless person, a man sleeping between her shows.

  She dressed and walked out of the hotel room, ditching her next appointment. She was done washing their Walgreen’s cologne off her breasts and stomach. She’d create an exclusive arrangement with Goetzler, though delay clarifying for him his confusion about Vietnam, and keep the sleepy cop for sex. If needed, she could always find another Nick.

  * * *

  The cop dripped in Annie’s doorway, his leather jacket soaked to a glow, and the water spots dried black on the oak floor. His pistol was snapped into a holster and his radio drowned low. He looked like the cop in the Tribune picture, his cheekbones more definite, his lips thin. Annie suddenly felt cold. He didn’t
care about forgetting with her stomach.

  Off the street, his eyes were still coplike, that look gotten from having let other men freeze his dreams about true love, and the more Annie searched them for softness, looking for a crack between the eye corner and the ball, she only noticed how his shirt pockets bore the ruin of a starch crease. She knew he liked starting his afternoon shift without wrinkles, hoping vaguely that he might move through the hours as a full participant without breaking starch.

  Neither of us can admit we are of this world, she thought.

  After the cop closed the door, the hall light disappeared from his wet leather jacket.

  Annie turned off her cell and Nick’s calling number left the screen. The cop was looking for a light switch, wall by wall, his eyes drawn like he was aiming. When he found it, the night turned on, and he took two pictures from his coat, holding up the prints left and right. Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting the Viet Cong. Kim Luc Phu escaping fire from the sky. For the first time, she felt him disgusted over her being a hooker. He had the look of a transformed john who’d pay for the hour to try talking her from the life.

  “You know these?” he said.

  “I have four memories of Vietnam,” Annie said. “Neither of those pictures are among them.”

  “This lawyer, Mike Rosen, was just murdered,” he said. “The killer dressed him up like the VC. Then I saw a naked guy running an alley with this picture taped to his chest. Both of them were actively against the Vietnam War. The detectives won’t do the work.”

  You did this for me, Goetzler? Annie thought. I bet you wish you could believe that.

  “You looking for police rank?” she asked the cop. “Are you a lifer?”

  “The killer’s anger is toxic because many men will love him,” he said. “I know his hate.”

  Annie smiled at the cop but her smile was lost upon him. She walked closer until he lowered the pictures. This cop, she decided, responded only to the questions he wished he were asked.

  “These pictures started appearing after I met you,” the cop said. “It must stop. I can’t think about this killer’s anger anymore.”

  “I allow you to sleep,” she said. “That is all.”

  “Why did you start calling me soldier the first night?”

  “Because you run like the soldiers on recruiting commercials.”

  “I want you to be more specific.”

  Annie smiled at his cop talk, the poetry of declarative sentences. Maybe he would go quiet and become the runner again.

  “Only my face is Vietnamese,” she finally said to him.

  “You came to me in a white silk dress. I read that schoolgirls only wear the white ao dai. I think you are acting something out. You understand something about this killer.”

  Annie smiled and walked closer to Mike, but he was stiff like a room key. She let down her hair by pulling one pin. He didn’t put away the pictures.

  “Why did you keep calling me soldier?” he said again.

  “An American Vietnamese would never do this. We can make too much money here. Why should we care about our bad memories?”

  The cop moved the pictures closer to her by locking his elbows. Annie couldn’t exhale easily, and she inched the air through her nose. From the paper weight, she knew the cop cut the prints from the same photographic history of the Vietnam War that Goetzler kept on an end table. If Goetzler did this, Annie knew he took amphetamines to prolong his will; men like Donald Goetzler didn’t have very good legs, and displays of courage were artificially fueled. She then pointed to Kim Luc Phu in the print and wondered, like always, what she was screaming.

  “This picture means something to me,” she said.

  The cop dropped his hands and let his eyes soften.

  “Yes,” she said. “Every night I thank God I wasn’t that girl. Who would want to be known forever as a nightmare?”

  “Is that why you don’t like being Vietnamese?”

  “No,” she said. “I just decided not to be a bad memory.”

  When she went to touch him, he recoiled, then stopped himself. Her hands slid beneath his leather jacket and the leather made his shirt warm enough for the starch to gum her palms. His ribs felt like tool handles. She looked at his wet chin and he stared at the wall.

  “I’ll only do this once,” she said.

  She then raised her nails along his back, but he still didn’t move.

  “You know something about this?”

  “Yes,” she said, “that you think too much about getting double yolks in one egg.”

  He pushed away from her and turned on a heel, starting down the stairs without closing her door. Annie thought she heard dogs. She stood watching the cop, the way his shoulders receded to the darkness, and disciplined herself not to think beyond her own opinions.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes into a two-hour call, Annie sat on the couch, Goetzler in the chair. He turned the brandy snifter in his hand, making full circles, and looked at himself in the window. He’d lit a Cubano and let it burn and talked to her about flow theory, using a pen and a legal pad to demonstrate, but instead of looking at her, he followed the smoke up from the ashtray. Now, he was quiet and rocking the snifter without watching himself. Annie noticed the smoke slow before the cigar went out. She pointed to the ashtray.

  “You do that because you can afford it?” she said.

  He kept watching himself, his eyes like sky in wet windows. He’d started making small waves with the brandy. She waited, but he never asked her about the missed week.

  “I like the smell of good cigars,” Goetzler said, “not the smoke in my lungs.” He hadn’t wanted to talk.

  Annie glanced again at the coffee tables, this time with one eye. Art books, Degas, Pissarro, Cezanne. Matthew Brady’s Civil War pictures. But the photographic history of the Vietnam War was gone. She looked another time, her eyes wet from the old smoke. The book wasn’t beneath the long lamp that he never lit.

  “You should use that lamp,” she said. It was copper and green-shaded, a library light.

  Goetzler didn’t look at her. He sank into the chair, one palm on the leather.

  “It hits my eyes sideways,” he said.

  “Then move it.”

  “I bought the lamp for that table and this is my chair.”

  “It’s a waste,” she said.

  They sat and looked together, trying to see the lake in the darkness. When Annie knew the book was gone, she uncrossed her legs and let herself become comfortable. In the glass, she watched herself smile before watching Goetzler set down the brandy. Tonight, he couldn’t keep the act going: he quit the physics lesson too soon, and never told a war story. Annie then took off her boots and brought up her legs, marveling at what they’ll do for a dream of themselves. For gratitude, she’d forget the envelope if Goetzler kept quiet and didn’t touch her. But if he started with the stories, the offer didn’t stand.

  21

  Mike went down into an alley puddle after the shadowed man hit him. He landed hard on his knees, and his heart punched from having just run six miles. Mike saw the legs of the others in the headlights before the man patted his face and pushed him back flat. He watched their ankles while they laughed like kenneled dogs. When the white flashlight hit his eyes, he felt his running shoes being taken off, then heard them hit the open Escalade doors. He thought himself the dived fighter in a boxing movie.

  “The gook isn’t your butterfly, copper,” the man said. “The gook is someone’s investment. Meaning, you don’t let her fuck you for free. Do I need to keep talking?”

  Mike listened for the other men, but they were quiet. He could not see their pants and shoes, only their ankles and shod feet.

  “Just shake your fucking head and I’ll go away forever.”

  Mike looked into the white light, hoping it would still his eyes.

  “Fucking difficult prick,” the man said.

  Mike heard a click, then a flame pinched his wet-stockinged foot.

&n
bsp; “This is just the Zippo,” the man said. “Next time, I’m pouring on the fucking gas.”

  There were footsteps and closing doors before the headlights receded backward and the alley went dark. He lay alone, hemmed by streetlight, and believed every word they said. These men hoped they could avoid blood, too. Like cops, they were lifers at heart.

  Annie was dead to him. It wasn’t even a decision. Like most things in his life, she was a fantasy taken too far.

  Come spring, Mike would leave these sad men for Mexico when the airfares dropped. Selling the condo would give him sixty grand after taxes. He’d forget the skyline, the pictures, and his reasons for writing the novel when he first took the 727 seat. He’d fly to Zihuatanejo in late May to see the mangoes and fresh-caught snappers hauled in cyclos, the wet-lipped women built like flour sacks and drinking Coke, then rent an Audi A-4 and drive the seaside road to Guatemala where the brown Pacific waves hit rocks and sprayed the asphalt. He’d use the windshield wipers and pretend it was an autumnal storm blown across Lake Michigan so the wave force wouldn’t scare him. He knew this water got violent enough to slam a Ford Festiva against the kopje rock faces lining the shore, and he’d spend the extra money for the Audi.

  But now, beaten in the puddle, he wasn’t sure if he could leave and breathe easy and understand that most of your points were never truly made. This killer might follow him down to the sunshine. When Mike returned to Mexico with pencils, steno pads, and a lone sharpener, he didn’t want to have any doubts about thinking he could incite any man to care about another’s pain.

  Mike and Susan went to Ixtapa in the off-season, $800 for air and eight nights at the Las Brisas, burnt-orange bungalows with hammocks on the patios, but the water around the reefs was too muddy for snorkeling. In Chicago, he’d bought them fins, masks, and snorkels, not even considering the sea change of late June. He’d seen the price online and booked the trip. Susan had looked over his shoulder at the screen, and it didn’t even bother him. In Mexico, he’d swim her into the schools of fish and they’d make love in the shallow water while the sailboats evaporated in the hard sunlight. Her wet hair would be dark like her eyes, and he’d taste the salt on her tongue. Most things between them, he believed, could get washed away. But the hot current hits Pacific Mexico from Tahiti, the concierge told him, and the water stays brown from May through the summer.