Late Rain

by Lynn Kostoff

  “You could say that about a lot of the things around here.” Ben nodded toward the buzzing ATVs, the kennel and enclosed runway along the property line, the wired workshop, and elaborate swing set and two-story wooden fort tucked into the southeast corner of the yard.

  “I like nice things,” Carl Adkin said.

  “Last time I heard,” Ben said, “nice things cost money.” He paused and scanned the backyard again. The red-haired woman juggled the baby and lifted the lid of the cooler and pulled out a beer. The baby moved from crying to wailing.

  “It stands to reason,” Ben said, “a lot of nice things must cost a lot of money.”

  “I’m waiting to hear why any of that is your goddamn business.” Adkin went from burger to burger, cutting into each with the edge of the spatula. The insides were pink and wet.

  A moment later, a line of pit bulls appeared in the enclosed wire runway of the kennel and began barking and throwing themselves against the fence.

  “Meat in the air,” Carl Adkin said. “You’re hungry, you can’t help but smell it.”

  “I want you to lose the paper on Leon Douglas,” Ben said.

  “I don’t think so,” Adkin said. “We go back, Leon and me. A little history there. He’s got an attitude.”

  “Eye and Ear,” Ben said. “He’s helping me.”

  “Your problem, right there,” Adkin said. “Trusting that little coon to bring you anything that holds water.”

  There was movement behind the sliding glass doors. A small girl walked into the living room with a juice box and climbed up on the couch. From where he stood, Ben could hear faint strains of cartoon mayhem.

  “I need you to lose the paper,” he repeated.

  Adkin put the face of the spatula on the burgers and pressed them against the grill top. The meat popped and sizzled. “Give me one good reason for why I should lose the paper on our friend Leon.”

  “Because I’ll scare up a couple of Leon’s friends and get them to testify they were on the scene and witnessed you using unnecessary force in the arrest.” Ben paused and took a step closer to Adkin. “They’ll perjure themselves from here to Sunday, and with the newspaper and television play, the chief and mayor will push for an investigation, and we’ll see how that resisting charge you slapped on Leon holds up.”

  Adkin pointed the spatula at Ben. “You’re making a mistake here.”

  “The paper,” Ben said. “It’s gone. You can go in or call it in. I don’t care as long as it’s today.”

  In the backyard, the red-haired woman handed the crying infant to the blonde and then rummaged in the cooler. The boys on the ATVs chased down a cat that had wandered in from next door. Adkin nodded, but didn’t look at Ben. He kept his gaze on his property line and on the wide evening sky simmering in the remains of the day’s heat.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  NEAR DUSK, and Croy Wendall crouched along the Two Bridge River and watched what was left of the sun sheet the surface of the water in a thin pale yellow. He waited for a wrinkle in the light that signaled movement or looked for the small knob of a head breaking the surface. The rain had gone missing for a long time, and the waterline was low, and Croy could smell mud slowly drying out in layers.

  His hand shot out. He added the frog to the others in the burlap bag he’d set on the bank. Then he dipped the bag in the water, and when he pulled it out again, its bottom portion was all jump and squirm.

  Croy thought about nerves firing along a spine. He’d seen a television show about that once. A cut-away of a human’s insides with small fiery red dots pulsing where the nerves were.

  Croy’s hand shot out again. He kept adding frogs to the bag until the light had melted into the water, and then he took the bag and climbed the bank and walked back to the cabin.

  The cabin was above the river on a small flat-topped rise, and it was ringed on three sides by live oaks. On the other side of the trees the ground ran into an immense swampy field bordered on the west by woods, which was where Croy had hidden his car.

  Croy filled the portable generator with gas and started it up and watched the lights flicker on inside the windows. He put the sack of frogs in an old galvanized washtub that held the other bag of frogs he’d caught yesterday.

  He stood at the door for a moment and looked at the tree directly behind the cabin. The tree had worked its way into his dreams. At some point it had been struck by lightning, and its trunk carried a long jagged break. The limbs on the north side were bare, but the other side was still green with new leaves the size of fingers.

  Croy went into the cabin and made supper. He chewed on the right side of his mouth because the left side hurt from a missing filling in a back molar. The gumline around the tooth was swollen and tender, and a sweet taste leaked from the tooth and mixed with the taste of the food.

  After supper, Croy put three aspirin directly on the molar and chewed them to paste.

  Then he checked his belt to make sure the cell phone was clipped to it and charged. Mr. Balen had told Croy to carry the cell phone with him everywhere, and Croy did.

  At first, Croy had been afraid Mr. Balen was going to be mad at him for shooting Jamie and Missy and for running away after burning down the house and then almost getting caught by that policewoman and having to throw her through the restaurant window, but Croy had explained about Jamie having stolen all of Croy’s savings and about Jamie getting ready to turn Croy in for killing Stanley Tedros and getting the reward.

  Mr. Balen didn’t yell at Croy though. He was very nice. He talked to Croy in a voice that sounded like it was on a commercial for things that people would find handy to use around the house, and then he drove Croy to the cabin, and together they took apart the gun Croy had taken from the policewoman and threw the pieces in the river, and Mr. Balen gave him a new gun. Later he brought Croy all the supplies and snacks he needed to stay there.

  Croy had promised to stay close to the cabin and not go anywhere else.

  After he’d moved into the cabin, Croy had some bad dreams, but he didn’t watch them long. Even asleep, he could stop one dream and start another. It was like changing channels on television. He’d been able to do that ever since he was five years old.

  Sometimes at night, he listened to the frogs.

  Sometimes, he said rhymes or numbers in his head.

  He found a picture in one of the magazines left in the cabin that he liked, and he carefully tore it out and put it on the wall next to his cot. It was an advertisement for juice, and there was no writing on it at all, just a perfectly round orange set in the center of the page against a bright white background. Looking at it made him feel the same way as listening to the frogs did. Croy also liked the word itself. Orange. It was everyday and mysterious at the same time, the name of the thing indistinguishable from the color describing it, a perfect seamless fit.

  Croy didn’t exactly remember when he started dreaming about the tree.

  He was pretty sure it was right after he tried to fix Stanley Tedros’s pocketwatch.

  No matter how many times Croy wound it, the watch kept losing time. Only a couple minutes at first, but then the hours started piling up, and Croy got very nervous in his stomach, and he finally pried the face of the watch off with a kitchen knife, but that made him even more nervous because the sight of the watch’s insides, all those tiny gears and wheels and how they fit and worked somehow got mixed up in his head with the times Jamie and Missy had sexed each other while Croy was in the house and the walls would hold all the noises they made, and Croy couldn’t make the nerves firing inside him slow down until he took the watch and buried it outside and then went down to the river to catch some frogs for a while.

  After that, Croy felt fine.

  Tonight, after finishing the dishes, Croy took a spool of nylon fishing line and his pocketknife, chewed two more aspirin, and went back outside. He crouched next to the galvanized washtub holding the two bags of frogs.

  There was no wind.

  Whe
n he looked up through the bare branches of the live oak, Croy saw a pale slice of moon directly above. The moon looked like a coin that had been inserted in a slot that had not been jammed home yet.

  He began cutting the fishing line, varying the length, one piece approximately a foot and a half, the other slightly less than a foot, and put them in two piles.

  Bats showed up. They skimmed the sky above the roof. While Croy cut the line, he thought of words that rhymed with bat. There were a lot of them.

  Bat spelled backwards was tab. Bat and tab didn’t rhyme, but Croy liked them anyway because they reminded him of amphibians, one thing that was like two things because they could live on land or in the water, and it didn’t matter to them which.

  Croy kept cutting the fishing line. His molar ached. He tasted blood and something sour when he pressed his tongue against the gumline around it, so he quit doing that.

  His eyes and skin felt hot.

  Everything was very quiet except for the thin whine of mosquitoes that had come up from the river.

  Croy went back and forth between the two piles of fishing line he’d cut, taking a long piece and tying it to a short one.

  Then he got up and took out one of the screens from the cabin windows.

  He returned to the washtub and emptied the two sacks of frogs. He grabbed a frog and then set the screen over the tub.

  The frog felt like a handful of cold Jello wrapped in cellophane.

  Croy tied the frog to one end of the fishing line by its leg, and then he caught another frog and tied it to the other end by the leg.

  He draped the fishing line over the back of his neck and started over, repeating the process.

  It took a long time, and it was very hard work, but after a while Croy fell into a rhythm of catching and tying the frogs that was like the rhythm of digging and planting flowers he found when Jamie and he had worked for Mr. Sharpe and his landscaping business.

  Every time Croy tied frogs to each end of a line, he draped it over his neck. The frogs dangled and jumped against his chest like someone knocking on an old door.

  After a while, the pieces of fishing line started to cut into the back of his neck, so Croy figured he had enough for now, and he stood up and walked to the base of the live oak and grabbed the lowest branch and pulled himself into the dead side of the tree.

  He crawled out onto the branch, listening to it creak beneath his weight, and then lifted one of the strings of frogs from his neck and draped it over the limb. He moved back a few feet and put another one on the limb.

  Croy moved up the tree, hanging the pieces of fishing line with the frogs on them, until there wasn’t any more left on his neck.

  Then he climbed down and went back to tying more frogs.

  He could smell the river, and on the next trip up, he was high enough over the roof of the cabin that he could see it too and the pale streak of moonlight running down the middle of the dark water.

  Two limbs broke under his weight, and each time Croy had to scramble back closer to the trunk. He strung one set of frogs on them anyway.

  In the northeastern corner of the sky were some clouds that looked like torn pieces of cloth. The rest of the sky was just stars and the moon.

  Every so often Croy thought about the picture of the orange he’d taken from the magazine and put up on the wall of the cabin next to his cot.

  Croy made four more trips up the tree before he ran out of frogs.

  He was sweating a lot, but it was a fever sweat, not the other kind. The molar smoldered in the back of his mouth.

  Croy stepped back to take in his work. It was like he had invented wind. The frogs hanging from the limbs jumped and twisted, sometimes showing their green side, sometimes their white underside.

  The other half of the tree was very still.

  Against the night sky, the pieces of fishing line were invisible. Croy watched the frogs for a long time. He was standing on the spot where he’d buried Stanley Tedros’s pocketwatch.

  Above him, the frogs flopped and squirmed.

  The cell phone chirped. At first, Croy thought the sound came from something live. He took the phone off his belt.

  Mr. Balen asked how he was doing and then explained the crime he needed Croy to do.

  Croy said ok to both.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  SUNSET HAD BROKEN the lower portions of the horizon and stacked it with color, thin slats of orange, pink, and purple that the wind left undisturbed, when Corrine Tedros pulled into short-term parking at the Magnolia Beach Regional Airport.

  Inside the terminal, she checked the arrivals board. Southeast Air and Star Aviation were the only two commuter lines based at Magnolia Beach and were primarily used for regional travel or for connecting flights at larger airports in Atlanta, Jacksonville, Raleigh, Columbia, and Charlotte. Puddle Jumpers were what the local businesspeople called them. That, or the Grim Reaper Express, since neither airline was particularly noted for its safety or maintenance records. Two of the pilots Corrine saw standing at the checkin counter for Southeast and chatting up the attendant looked as if they were barely out of high school and would be more at home checking your oil than piloting turboprops.

  Buddy’s flight was already in, and Corrine found him at the baggage claim. He spotted her and waved. His smile, as well as his black suit, was badly rumpled. He found his bags, and they walked back to the car.

  “You drive, ok?” he said. “I’m bushed.”

  Corrine took Old Market Boulevard north. It was a full ten minutes before Buddy spoke again.

  “It was a wash,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.” Corrine almost meant it. Right then, Buddy looked old and tired.

  “I don’t understand,” Buddy said. “First Atlanta and now Charlotte. The same thing each time.” He rubbed his forehead. “A day and a half of meetings. I was ready with the figures and projections. The Charlotte people kept picking them apart. I couldn’t get them to see the restructuring for what it was.” Buddy paused and shook his head. “Quick returns, that’s all they were interested in. We never found common ground.”

  “Maybe,” Corrine said and let it hang.

  Buddy looked at her, then away. He took out his cell phone and punched a number.

  “Hello, Anne? It’s Buddy Tedros.”

  Corrine listened to the hope wilt in his voice after Buddy asked if Jack Carson had remembered anything about Stanley’s murder and he got the answer that Corrine had paid for.

  “Nothing at all?” Buddy said and lowered his head. “You never know, maybe Jack will come through yet.” Buddy added a moment later, “You too, Anne. Tell Paige hello.”

  Buddy sat with the cell phone cradled in his palm and looked out the window. “There’s still Birmingham,” he said after a while. Corrine listened to him try to resuscitate his optimism and confidence in the distribution plans that James Restan, with a couple calls to Birmingham, would doom in advance.

  Fifteen minutes later, Corrine pulled into the entrance of White Pine Manor. The sunset had softened, and the swallows were out, cutting and darting through the gathering dusk.

  “I made a nice meal,” Corrine said. “It was supposed to celebrate you closing in Charlotte. Let’s call it a welcome home meal instead.” She leaned over and kissed Buddy lightly on the cheek.

  Buddy went upstairs to change and shower, and Corrine checked on supper, set the table, and hunted down a bottle of good red wine.

  She told herself not to rush things.

  Buddy was slowly on his way to again becoming the man she married. He was discovering what everyone did sooner or later. He could not sustain his grief, and his grief could not sustain him.

  A little more time to forget, that’s all he needed. In the act of forgetting, you found absolution. Memory and memories were overrated. Dead weight. You forgot, and you were clean again.

  Tonight, they would have a nice meal. Corrine would not bring up James Restan’s buy-out offer. After supper, they’d open another b
ottle of wine. Perhaps she’d steer the conversation toward starting a family. A kid would be a hedge, some insurance, against any trouble Wayne LaVell might make. Then she and Buddy would have sex.

  Corrine was sure of one thing. The body had no use for memory or grief. It took care of itself.

  FORTY-NINE

  THE CENTER OF GRAVITY for the house was the kitchen, and Ben Decovic and Anne Carson sat across from each other at the kitchen table, glasses of wine at their elbows, the lights low and the radio even lower, the radio seemingly tuned perpetually to an oldies station, an easygoing synchronicity at work this evening as Wilson Pickett sang “In the Midnight Hour,” and Ben glanced over at the wall clock and saw that its hands were about to overlap and eclipse the twelve.

  “You’re off tomorrow, right?” Ben said.

  Anne nodded.

  “Maybe you can sleep in a little then.”

  Anne shook her head. “Doctor’s appointment at eight-thirty. Dad’s always a little better in the mornings. I need to talk to the doctor about getting dad’s medication adjusted. Things aren’t right.” She and Ben went on to talk about Jack’s new tendency to break into tears at unexpected moments. Anything, it seemed, could set him off. Ben had noticed it too.

  “Growing up, I never saw him cry once,” Anne said. “Not once. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Earlier this afternoon, he broke down and cried for twenty minutes over a commercial for aluminum foil.”

  Ben reached across the table and rubbed the back of Anne’s right hand.

  “I don’t know what’s next,” she said.

  Ben tried to locate a smile that might pass for reassuring. Anne slowly slipped her hand out from under his and picked up her glass of wine.

  Over Ben’s shoulder, the radio played doomed rock and rollers, starting with Buddy Holly, then segueing into Richie Valens.

  “Well,” he said, pointing to the end of the kitchen table, “Paige must be happy. I see she got her laptop. I thought it was still in layaway for a while.”