OTHER TITLES BY RANDALL SILVIS
The Luckiest Man in the World
Excelsior
An Occasional Hell
Under the Rainbow
Mysticus
Dead Man Falling
On Night’s Shore
Disquiet Heart (also published as Doubly Dead)
Heart So Hungry (also published as North of Unknown)
Hangtime, A Confession
In a Town Called Mundomuerto
The Boy Who Shoots Crows
Flying Fish
Blood & Ink
Two Days Gone
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Randall Silvis
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542049948 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1542049946 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781542045742 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1542045746 (paperback)
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
First Edition
This book is for my sons, Bret and Nathan, heart of my soul, soul of my heart.
CONTENTS
START READING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hey Spence.
It’s been a long time, brother. Not that I haven’t thought about you since leaving you back there in the sandbox with the camel spiders and sand vipers. A couple days ago I read an article that said Iraq is the most dangerous place in the world, and not just because of its animals. I guess we can attest to that, huh?
Those days are never far from my thoughts, which means you aren’t either. Doing what we did over there, living the way we lived, it’s always going to be a part of me, like it or not.
More and more lately, as a matter of fact. For a long time now I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, seems like it’s always between 0200 and 0300, and I’ll go sit at the kitchen table or on the couch in front of the TV, and I’ll be telling myself I ought to sit down at the computer and send you an e-mail like I used to. Stupid, huh? An exercise in futility, as you used to say.
Thing is, there’s just too much I have to tell somebody, and nobody else I can tell it to. So here I am at the computer tonight instead of staring at the TV or the back of my eyelids. 0249. I’m finally doing it. Cindy and the girls are sleeping like the angels they are, the house is quiet as a tomb, and it feels good to think we’re maybe connecting up again.
Question is, where to start. Cause it’s hard jumping right into the story, you know? Just coming right out with it, saying I met this woman and I did this, I did that, and it was maybe the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, and now I’m terrified about what’s going to happen next.
Back in the sandbox I would have walked up to you and said, “Can I talk to you a minute, Spence?” and gotten straight to the point. But we were together every day back then, living the same life. Never knew if we’d see another morning or not. I think I’m still pretty much the same guy I was over there, but the details are different. Different routines, different obligations, different people to answer to. Context, you know? That’s what you always used to say. Context is everything.
For one thing, I was just a kid over there. Over here I have a pregnant wife and two of the sweetest little girls anybody could imagine. The third one’s still an unknown, so new to us that Cindy’s old jeans still fit, though she has to keep the top unsnapped now, and only wears them when she goes into town for something other than work. Around the house she mostly wears sweatpants with an elastic top. Even so, another baby on the way has to be factored into all of our plans. I’m the guy responsible for everybody.
Anyway, I guess I’ll start by telling you about tonight’s dream. I’ve had it a couple times before, and I wish like hell it would stop. I have this thing that happened to me here, and not very long ago. But somehow in my head it’s getting all messed up now with that night we got grabbed out of the rack and had to collect those three bodies in an alleyway, you remember? Three guys laying there in pieces with their rifles stacked in a corner. The one guy was in so many pieces it was hard to tell which parts were his and which belonged to that girl he’d been on top of. And how we were told to leave her where she was, not to bother with her, like we weren’t even supposed to see her or know what had been going on there before they all bought the farm.
When I dream about that, I dream it’s me on top of her when the IED goes off. In the dream I hear the bag or whatever it was being thrown into the alley and hitting the dirt, and then the boom and all the air gets sucked out of me, and right away I know what it is and that I’m dead as shit, and I have these few moments before waking up when I’m pissed as hell at the people who would do something like that. I mean killing us soldiers is one thing, but what kind of people wouldn’t come to help a girl being raped but would sacrifice her like that just to kill some Americans? And I wake up feeling so helpless and guilty and I don’t know what all.
Jesus, it was fucked over there, wasn’t it?
Anyway, the girl in the dream. It isn’t that haji girl I see with me on top of her, both of us about to be blown to pieces, but this other girl I met over here a little while back. To say met isn’t quite right though, because I didn’t even get her name until a week or more later, and by then I wanted to forget all about her and the stupid thing I did. You’re probably thinking sex, right? But no, it was way more stupid than that. And way more dangerous.
Thing is, that’s all still playing out. It’s like I’m waiting for the other shoe to fall. It might be a slipper, or it might be an IED. Worst part is, I can’t tell Cindy or the girls or anybody else about it, which is why I’m sitting here at the computer at three in the morning. I asked myself who can I tell and still keep the whole thing a secret, and it was either you or God. I figure God already knows, and that’s probably why I can’t shake this need to try to get myself clean again.
I just don’t know how to get into it without taking you back to what all led up to it. But then I think, am I just trying to rationalize what I did? Blame the circumstances instead of taking the blame like a man? I often wonder about those three soldiers. If they had been caught and arrested and not scooped up into body bags, would they have tried to weasel out of it somehow, or would they have manned up and said, “I did it. I’m guilty as hell”?
Because I feel like I need to say that, Spence. I did it. I’m guilty as hell. And now I can’t seem to get over this feeling that I—
Gotta go, Spence. Emma’s crying, having a bad dream, I guess, just like her old man. Next time.
You remember those times I talked about Pops and Gee, the grandparents who raised me after my mother died? Well, Gee passed a little over a year ago. Pops shuffled around on his own for several months after that, but sank lower and lower, it seemed to me, until one day I took him to check out this independent living place called Brookside Country Manor about six miles from Cindy’s and my new house. It took another four months before he surprised me by admitting he’d been visiting it from time to time ever since.
“I booked myself a room in that no-tell motel you took me to,” he said.
“W
hat do you mean you booked yourself a room?”
“Plus I lined up a real estate agent to sell the house for me. And one of those storage units for all this junk we accumulated over the years. I could use some help moving it out there one of these days.”
So the day before we checked him into his new apartment, I loaded four cardboard boxes of his stuff, all that was left of his life, into the back of my pickup truck, and we drove them out to the edge of town to one of those storage unit places where you can rent a big metal box for fifty dollars a month, one with a concrete floor, and pack away all the things you can’t bear to let go of but will probably never hold or look at ever again. We also took a load of old furniture Gee had inherited from her mother, a piece called a secretary and a rolltop desk and a vanity with an hourglass-shaped mirror. Plus a set of four wooden chairs, three of which weren’t safe to sit on anymore.
“She must’ve made me promise at least a dozen times not to sell any of it after she was gone,” he said. “I think she thought I was going to make a fortune from it and run off with some showgirl.”
“In other words, I have to hold onto it forever?”
“Keep it till after I’m in the ground. She’ll know by then I couldn’t find any showgirls to take me on.” And then he grinned those still beautiful white teeth of his. “’Course, I’m not dead yet, so I’m still looking.”
I’m sure I must have told you that Pops had been a boxer and a career Marine, retired as an E-7 not long after Hamburger Hill, so one whole box of stuff was left over from those days, maybe thirty pounds of photos and awards, his dress blues with the gold-on-red chevrons on the sleeves, the old brown leather shoes he used to wear in the ring, Gee’s big old leather-bound Bible with the family tree she had sketched in on a blank flyleaf, a half-filled scrapbook with shots of him and his buddies, an empty Whitman’s Sampler box, the little one that only holds four pieces, and inside it a braid Gee made of her and Pops’ hair when they were both young, his jet-black then and hers chestnut brown.
He also had two gun bags, one holding the .30-06 he’d bought for me when I was twelve, and another for his own .30-30. Thing is, I came back from Iraq with absolutely no appetite for hunting again. I told him I’d still go out walking in the woods with him anytime he wanted, but I didn’t feel much like killing anything anymore. To my surprise Pops was fine with that. He said the only reason he’d kept it up was cause I seemed to like it.
He said, “I’m guessing you won’t be raising those little girls to be hunters either.”
“The third one might be a boy though.”
“Then hang onto them for a while. Pack them away with everything else. But boy or no boy, my feelings won’t be hurt if you’d rather get rid of them. Go ahead and sell them if you can get a good price.”
Another box held what Pops called his miscellaneous. He already had it packed and taped shut when I got to his place, and as I was sliding it onto the dolly to wheel it out to my pickup he told me, “This is the one you’ll want to open first when I’m gone. It’s got all the legal stuff in it. Birth certificates, my will, that cheap gold watch they gave me from the plant, plus a bag of wheatie pennies and old dimes and silver dollars.”
“Feels like a lot more than that in here,” I told him.
“There’s more,” he said. “It’s stuff I want you to have. I’ll keep the key to the storage unit on my keychain, so that’s the first thing you’ll want to grab.”
Ever since he’d made his plans to move to Brookside he’d been talking like he was at death’s door. Fact is he was still making up to twenty circuits around the high school track every morning, walking faster than most of the other people there could jog, but he’d had his annual checkup a few months earlier and the quack doctor watched him walk across the room and announced that Pops had Parkinson’s disease. I asked how that diagnosis had been reached and Pops said, “It was the way I had my elbows cocked. Classic sign, he said.”
I asked, “How the hell are you supposed to walk? With your hands shoved down in your pockets?”
Personally I think Pops was looking for a reason to give up. As likely as he was to still crack a joke, most of the starch went out of him when Gee started to fade. Three strokes in a little over four months, bam, bam, and then bang, the lid slammed shut. I think a big part of Pops got buried with her. I tried to get him to move in with Cindy and me and the girls but he wouldn’t do it. He said, “There’s not enough room in that place of yours for a man to fart comfortably. A man my age needs his own bathroom.”
He didn’t want to be a burden to anybody, that’s all. He’d rather die alone than let anybody have to take care of him. I didn’t understand that kind of reasoning at the time, but I understand it all too well now.
Anyway, the last box we carted off to the storage unit was filled with what he always referred to as “your mother’s stuff,” meaning the scrapbooks and photos she collected over the years, her few pieces of inexpensive jewelry and a shoebox full of the valentines and drawings and poems I made for her up until I was maybe eleven or twelve and started to believe only sissies do that kind of stuff, plus a couple of quilts she’d made and three afghans she knitted after her back injury left her more or less unable to walk on her own. Pops said I could take those quilts and afghans if I wanted them, put them to good use, he said, the way I did with his and Gee’s bedroom suite. He kept two afghans for himself, put the one Gee made on his bed at Brookside and the one from my mom on his recliner, and I think he was a little offended when I didn’t take the rest of them.
So as not to hurt his feelings I told him I’d get that box of blankets someday, maybe in the fall when the weather turned cold. Truth is, Cindy didn’t want them; she prefers the thick, fluffy comforters and fleece blankets from the department store, said those old quilts and afghans make her think of the Amish, or like something you’d find in an old folks’ home or a flea market. It was hard enough to get her to take the bedroom suite, but we were going to need Emma’s twin bed for the new baby in a year or so, and we were watching every penny.
I know this makes Cindy sound like a not very nice person, but in fact the opposite is true. We’d got our own place a few months earlier, a three-bedroom ranch in a little development a couple miles out of town, which we were able to buy thanks to the money Pops gave us for the down payment, and Cindy wanted it to be exactly that, our place, not like the HUD double-wide she grew up in, stuffed with hand-me-downs and pillows and knickknacks her mother bought at the Goodwill store.
“Nothing was ever my own,” is how Cindy described it. “Clothes, shoes, toys, whatever. They were always somebody else’s first. The only reason I ended up with anything was because the other person didn’t want it anymore.”
That was something Cindy and me shared, I guess, the feeling that we were sort of like somebody else’s castoffs. I never had a father other than Pops, and though Cindy had a father she often wished she didn’t. Her mother always came over for Christmas and Thanksgiving, even when all we had was that cramped little one-bedroom and only a card table in the kitchen. And Cindy always took her out to get her hair done on her mother’s birthday, but as far as I know Cindy never once invited her father anywhere or even asked how he was doing. Up till the trouble started I’d only ever seen him twice myself, and that was enough for me too, I guess. I wish it had stayed that way.
Anyway, none of this really has anything to do with the rest of the story. Or maybe it has everything to do with it, depending on which theory of life you subscribe to. Personally, I’ve come to believe that theories are of small value when it comes to actually living your life, to making all the hard decisions you have to make and then dealing with the consequences of those decisions.
And there are always consequences, that’s the one truth I know for sure. That’s something you kept telling us, Spence, remember? And reminding us that sometimes the good consequences are as hard to swallow as the bad.
“You just do it,” is how Pops would put
it. “You do it and then you live with it.”
Okay, that’s enough for tonight. I got to work in the morning, same as always. Better catch a little shut-eye if I can. Talk to you again soon. I promise to get to the point next time.
The thing I remember about that day all the trouble started was looking out the kitchen window and wondering if I was going to get wet riding my motorcycle to work that morning. Cindy was always good at knowing what I was thinking, and she said, “You want me to get the girls up?”
It wasn’t quite 6:30 yet, which meant dragging the girls out of bed a good hour earlier than usual so she could give me a ride to work. Then she’d have to rush back home, get Dani and Emma fed and dressed for daycare and get herself ready for her teller job at the bank. We’d done it before but I always felt bad asking her to do it. Back when I finally got my job at the rock-crushing plant and we were able to get this house, our plan had been to pick up a secondhand compact for Cindy as soon as we could put a few dollars aside. But then Pops got another ticket for driving too slow, and he said we could probably have his Lumina next June because that was when his license came up for renewal and the odds were ten to one against it being renewed. So that was when Cindy decided that instead of buying a car she wanted us to try for a boy one more time, and after that I would get a vasectomy. It was important to both of us that all our kids were planned and in every way intentional. We both agreed there are already too many people on the planet, and though we understand the math behind zero population growth, it also seemed that since we were both only children, with three grandparents and one mother already gone, and two fathers more or less missing in action, then we maybe deserved a little wiggle room for a third child.
So Cindy read a book about the various tricks we could try in order to increase the chances of having a boy, things like using lemon juice to change the pH of Cindy’s body and so forth. The thing that made the most sense to us was when she read that the boy sperms are faster swimmers than the girl sperms, but the boys die off sooner. The girls are slower swimmers but they have more stamina. So the thing to do was to get the boys as close to their target as possible before they all tired out and died.
Only the Rain Page 1
