Midnight Rain

by Newman,James

  Nor would I ever forget the way Mom stared down at me as I lay in bed that night, her eyes all red and swollen and ugly as she tried her best to explain to me about death and Heaven and all the things a mother does not completely understand herself though she tries her best to help her children comprehend it all so they might sleep at night. She had tried. I had to give her that. She had tried.

  I thought the Rourke funeral would never end. More than once as Pastor Brady droned on and on I thought we might stay out there amidst the multitude of leaning tombstones and the cloying scent of mown grass and cowshit from that distant pasture until the end of time. Or at least until—as Brady spoke of more than once—the glorious day when the “Prince of Peace” returned “to take us home with Miss Cassie.”

  I wanted to go home. I wished I had never come. All I could think about was my father, and I wished I had just stayed away…

  When Cassie Rourke’s funeral was over I don’t think there was a dry eye out there on that hill behind Trinity First Baptist, beneath the blinding sun. Everywhere I looked trembling hands dabbed at leaking tear ducts, shoulders hitched with sobs, and an occasional anguished wail broke out from the dead girl’s immediate family to echo about the meadow like utmost grief made tangible.

  Once I thought I even glimpsed a tear trickling down Sheriff Burt Baker’s pitted cheek, as he stood there on the edge of the crowd with his hands in his pockets and his fat brown head tilted toward the heavens. His tie clip, I noticed, was a pin in the shape of a miniature gold badge. At some point he had donned sunglasses to shield his eyes from the sun. They were orange-tinted, aviator-style, and the fact that his murderous eyes were hidden made him seem ten times more devious than before.

  “Let us pray,” said Pastor Brady.

  By the time the reverend had whispered his solemn “Amen” I felt mentally drained. My knees were weak, and I was no longer sure I would have the energy to walk all the way home. The distance to my house on Old Fort Road seemed ten times farther than from there to Tallahassee, Florida.

  My head swam. I felt dizzy.

  I especially thought I might pass out atop the grave of some poor soul who had left this Earth long before I was born…as I made my way down the hillside with the rest of the departing mourners…and I suddenly realized that Sheriff Burt Baker was walking right behind me.

  I did not dare to turn around.

  “You do what you gotta do, Sheriff, that’s all I’m sayin’,” I heard a gruff voice demand. It took me a few seconds, but I realized it could only belong to Clinton Rourke. The dead girl’s father. He sounded as if he had something caught in his throat.

  I swallowed, bit my lip. Felt so conspicuous. I wished I could hide behind that large angel monument I passed on my left, but it was too late.

  I kept walking.

  “You make that nigger pay for what he did to my little girl. You hear me? Don’t you dare let them say he’s unfit to stand trial. ’Cause you know that’s bullshit.”

  “I know what you’re going through.” Sheriff Baker’s tone was soft, consoling, and I imagined his hand on Clinton Rourke’s back as they walked. “This has gotta be real hard for you. But you know Calvin Mooney’s fate is not up to me, Mr. Rourke. I’ve done my part. I’ve arrested the man who hurt your daughter. Now the Polk County Justice System’s gotta do the rest.”

  “He’s gonna walk,” said Clinton Rourke. “He killed my little girl, and he’s gonna walk.”

  “You don’t know that,” Baker said.

  “Some Slick Willy goddamn lawyer has his say, they’ll let that black bastard off just ’cause he’s retarded. You wait and see. That’s the way the courts work.”

  “Look, Mr. Rourke—”

  “Meanwhile, my little girl will still be six feet underground.”

  A loud sob. One of the men cleared his throat. I kept walking, not wanting them to know I was intentionally hanging back just to overhear their conversation. As I made my way down the hill I quickly stepped to one side, around an infant’s tiny, lamb-topped tombstone, and fell into line behind a very old, stooped black man in a wrinkled brown suit whose trek down to the parking lot appeared as if might take forever. I strained to hear every word behind me, and as I did so I stared at the horizon, toward the Blue Ridge Mountains west of town. I could see the bruise-colored threat of another storm looming in the distance.

  “Mr. Rourke—” the sheriff started again.

  A sound like a pained growl. The men were right beside me now, inches from my left shoulder. “Where’s the justice for my little girl, huh? He killed her. He raped her. He’s gotta pay for that. We’ve gotta make him pay for that.”

  I kept walking, putting some distance between us. But not too much.

  “You know Bonnie hasn’t slept since that morning you came to the house and told us what happened?” said Clinton Rourke. “She sees that nigger in her dreams, she says. Sees him raping our little girl over and over and over. She sees him hitting her. I don’t know if she’s gonna make it, Sheriff. She says she doesn’t wanna live anymore. I tell her she has to make it through this, ’cause we’ve still got our little boy, but she doesn’t hear me. She doesn’t even seem to know I’m there. She just stares off into nothing, and then she’ll start shaking all over and makin’ this terrible sound like…like something dyin’. Doc Rehm started her on Valium yesterday, but they might as well be aspirin. So far they haven’t done a damn bit of good.”

  Neither man said anything for a long awkward minute or two. I almost thought they had taken another path through the cemetery and were no longer behind me, but I could see Sheriff Baker’s patrol car ahead, in the far right corner of the church parking lot. I knew they must still be headed my way, if they hadn’t stopped walking altogether.

  “That son-of-a-bitch ought to die for what he did to my daughter,” Clinton Rourke said. “God knows I’d do it myself, slow, if I could get him alone for just five min—“

  “With all due respect, Mr. Rourke,” Baker interjected. “I don’t think we should talk about this anymore. I’m not sure you want me to hear where this conversation is leading.”

  “I don’t care!” Rourke wept. “You just do what you gotta do, Sheriff, you hear me?! You make him pay. ’Cause by God, if you let him get away with what he did to my little girl, her blood’s on your hands!”

  “Now listen, sir—” Sheriff Baker replied, but then I could hear no more of their conversation. Both men’s voices were drowned out by an awful chorus of female sobbing as I rounded the church and left the cemetery behind me.

  I dared not stop or even slow down.

  Urgently, I headed back toward town, passing Sheriff Baker’s beige patrol car in the far corner of the church’s parking lot as I went. It reminded me of some predatory beast sitting in wait for a two-legged snack to venture too close to its grille. Its undercarriage and tires were spattered with chunky red mud, and something about that made the vehicle appear all the more ominous…tarnished, like its owner, where both should have been shiny and pristine.

  I gave it a wide berth.

  I wondered if Burner was in the trunk even now, waiting for me to come rescue him. If he lay where Cassie Rourke’s cold, stiff body had lain days before, all beaten and bloody and bruised.

  Several times as I made my way back home I wiped tears from the corners of my eyes with my best Sunday shirt, but I did not turn around even once. I kept walking at a steady pace, not quite running but certainly wasting no time at all, as I imagined him following close behind me in his patrol car, a big black shape behind the wheel of a silent rolling death machine.

  Finally I sprinted up the steps of our patio, found the key Mom always kept for me under our WELCOME mat. I unlocked the door with trembling hands, slammed it behind me the second I was through. Locked it and threw the chain. Stood there with my back against the door until my breathing gradually returned to normal.

  I had never been so happy to be home.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

&n
bsp; That evening, Mom called to me from the den as I sat in the middle of my bedroom floor. My door had been shut all day, and I hadn’t even come out for dinner (“Just remember how I slaved over a hot stove so you wouldn’t go hungry, Kyle, and that’s after I worked my ass off all day at the plant,” she said, but I paid her no mind). I felt safe in my own little world, and I had decided at some point that I would be perfectly happy staying there forever. Perhaps Mom could just slide me sandwiches and saucers full of water under the door when I got hungry. I could expel my wastes out the window, into her once-precious rosebushes.

  I was bored out of my skull, hated the sight of rain more than ever. It had started pouring again just a few short hours after the funeral, as if the morning’s sunny weather had been a figment of every Midnight citizen’s wild imagination. The storm seemed like a curious whisper at my window. I had chosen to pass the time by putting together a model of a ‘67 Firebird Dan bought for me on my last birthday, but I just couldn’t find the enthusiasm to continue. My hands kept shaking, and I ended up with less glue on my miniature Pontiac than on the newspaper I had spread out on my bedroom carpet so I wouldn’t make a mess.

  I abandoned that project after about an hour. I returned the unfinished model to its box then slid the box into the back of my closet, on the top shelf behind my baseball mitt and a broken pellet gun that had belonged to Dan when he was my age. I sighed, wadded up the sticky newspapers in the middle of my bedroom floor before shoving them into the Spider-Man wastebasket beside my night table.

  I’m not sure what ever happened to that model, though I do suspect that if it had not been a present from Dan I might have found obscene pleasure in throwing the Firebird against the wall and watching it shatter into a thousand pieces, judging from my mood that day.

  I collapsed upon my bed, and wondered what the hell to do next to pass the miserable time away.

  I had been lying there like that for a couple minutes—staring at my Star Wars poster on the wall as if it held all the answers, watching the way the shadows of the raindrops at the window made Darth Vader’s shiny black helmet appear all blotched and dirty—when Mom called out to me from across the other side of our house.

  “Kyle? Could you please come here for a minute, please?”

  At first I pretended I didn’t hear her. I rolled over on my back, stared at the ceiling.

  “Kyle!”

  God, how I wanted to be light years away from Midnight, North Carolina. If I crossed my eyes, the white of my ceiling almost resembled some infinite, snowy wasteland. It seemed to stretch out into forever, past the roof and the dark, cloud-choked sky above, and I envisioned myself floating upward, drowning within the soft white up there before coming out the other side safe and sound with all of my worries gone forever. Perhaps a better place lay beyond that vast, swirling expanse of nothingness, I imagined…a place where big brothers never went away and mothers loved their sons more than the bottle and fathers never died in far-away lands with funny-scary names like Dông Hà and Da Nang and law-enforcement officers served-and-protected and honored their badges and would never think of taking another human life…

  And then I uncrossed my eyes. Blinked several times fast.

  It was just my ceiling again. My problems remained.

  The rain droned on and on.

  “Kyle!” Mom called again a few seconds later, from the living room. “Come here, son!”

  “What is it now?” I said under my breath, rubbing at my eyes. I really did not want to be bothered, and I wished Mom would just pass the evening at hand by drinking herself into oblivion.

  I groaned when she called me again.

  “What do you want?” I shouted back at her in my most annoyed tone.

  “Come here for a minute, son!” she said. “In the living room! Now!”

  I groaned again, stood.

  “Kyle!”

  That was followed by a giggle.

  I froze, thought I had imagined it at first. But then it came again.

  Mom was laughing in there. A high-pitched, girlish giggle. I didn’t know what to think. I hadn’t heard my mother’s laughter in years. Not like that. Not so real.

  It sounded almost…musical.

  But then I heard another voice in the living room, saying something to my mother I couldn’t quite make out.

  I frowned. Who…

  A deep, masculine chuckle came next. Basso and unclear, more a buzzing vibration through my bedroom walls than the distinct sound of laughter, but there was no denying I heard it.

  I felt weird all over. Almost the same way I had felt that night Mom came into my room and her robe fell open, though I did not understand why.

  Who was Mom talking to, I wondered? We never got visitors anymore. My mother’s ugly temperament had long ago alienated any family friends we had when Dad was alive. Traveling salesmen knocked on our front door every now and then, but Mom always ran those folks off within a second or two.

  For a fleeting moment I perked up at the possibility that Dan may have come home early.

  My heart fluttered.

  But then I forced myself to abandon such wishful thinking.

  I didn’t want to go in the living room. At all. I hated meeting new people, particularly adults. I hated the way they stared down at you and made you feel so insignificant while you shifted your weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other, kept your hands in your pockets and prayed that their grown-up conversation would veer toward things other than you so you could sneak away below their line of sight.

  God, how I wanted to crawl under my bed and never come out. For a second or two I pondered my only possible route of escape, through the window into the storm outside, but I knew that was silly. I had to do this.

  “Kyle!” Mom called again.

  Alas, I had no choice. She wouldn’t give up easy, I knew. As I left my bedroom and headed down the hallway, I dragged my feet, walked with my shoulders slumped. I stared at the floor and gave several exaggerated sighs like I used to do when I was much younger and would put on a good show of pouting because I didn’t get my way.

  I heard the music before I was out of the hallway. It was turned so low at first I couldn’t place its origin. But then I saw Mom had carried her little GE transistor radio—the one she always listened to when she washed dishes or cleaned the house—into the living room from the kitchen. It sat atop our television behind her, and from its single dusty speaker Crystal Gayle asked, “Don’t it make my brown eyes blue?”

  “I’m busy,” I lied once I entered the living room, and though she could hear me just fine above the music, I raised my voice more than was necessary to advertise my sour mood. “What is it?”

  Mom stood in the center of the room. She smiled at me, beckoned for me to come closer. “Oh, quit being so grumpy, hon. It’s not like you’re doing anything important in there.”

  I blinked several times fast, unable to believe my eyes, when she stepped toward me.

  My mother was beautiful. I hadn’t seen her in such formal clothing since…hell, I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen Mom dressed like that. She looked like she was getting ready to go to church. Or maybe to a fancy ball. She wore a long green dress, more make-up than I had seen on her face in a long time. But not too much. She still looked very classy. Golden hoop earrings dangled from her ears. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail save for two long, curly locks framing either side of her face. The lilac smell of her perfume filled the room, and though she had splashed on the stuff a tad too liberally, it was not at all an unpleasant scent.

  Before me, I was sure, stood the woman my mother could have been had she never started drinking. It was almost surreal. Like stepping backward in time. Or into an alternate universe.

  “Mom?” I said. My voice came out hoarse, hardly more than a whine. I cleared my throat, started over. “Mom? W-wow. Wow. You’re…you look really nice.”

  She reached out to me. “Oh, Kyle. You’re so sweet. Come here.�
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  “Why are you dressed like that?” I asked. “Are you going somewhere?”

  She didn’t seem to hear me. Her eyes darted toward a spot in the room behind me.

  For the first time, I realized someone sat at the back of the room, just outside of my peripheral vision.

  “Oh—” I said with a start, turning. “Hey—”

  “There’s someone I’d like you to meet, Kyle. You know Sheriff Baker, right?”

  My mouth hung open. The air in my lungs seemed to turn to concrete. My surroundings seemed to shrink in on me, and all I could see was…him, in my tunnel vision.

  Larger than life.

  Right there in front of me.

  Smiling at me.

  In my home.

  He sat hunched forward, as if awaiting his cue to stand. His khaki uniform was slightly wrinkled, but his badge seemed to glow. His shoes had been recently polished. A hint of curly chest hair was visible where he had unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, and I wondered with a pang of nausea somewhere in my gut if my mother liked that.

  The murderer’s eyes were a bright, bright blue. The same color as Burner. They were almost mesmerizing.

  In one huge brown hand he held a glass of scotch on the rocks. The ice jingled musically against the sides of the glass as he rose from his chair. From Dad’s armchair, the one he used to sit in when he watched reruns of Hogan’s Heroes or read the Midnight Sun.

  This was sacrilege. A slap in my father’s face.

  His gun belt squeaked as he moved toward me, like something alive and in terrible pain.

  I tried to breathe. I couldn’t.

  “Huh,” I said. “Huh…”

  He glanced at Mom, and she licked her lips, returning his troubled frown.

  I said, “You—”

  Sheriff Burt Baker grinned as he took my hand in his. I didn’t offer it. He just grabbed it. His grip was gentle, yet I could not stop thinking about how those same hands had committed murder. How they had snapped Cassandra Belle Rourke’s neck like a pencil.

  He smelled like sweat and motor oil masked with cheap cologne.