Hard Rain Falling

by Don Carpenter

  “No,” Jack said. “I’m sick of fooling around. I’m not going on any holdup.”

  Denny was puzzled. “Why not? You got to.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “You don’t own a piece of me, buddy. You ran out of money, that’s your tough shit. I can’t help you.”

  It soaked in. “You’re just like that son of a bitch Tommy,” Denny said. “He run out on me. Now you’re runnin out on me.”

  Jack was half-tempted to say okay and go on the robbery, just to please Denny, who looked so offended and angry. But that was no way to run his life. It was disgusting; Denny was acting as if they had sworn themselves to blood-brotherhood.

  “I’m not runnin out,” Jack said. “I just don’t want to go. I want to think. Something’s wrong.” He got up. “I’m going back to the hotel.”

  He was half-undressed when Denny showed up. He opened the door a crack and Denny pushed his way into the room.

  “Shh,” Jack said. “Mona’s sacked out.”

  Denny was in the middle of the room, in a near-crouch. Jack looked at him curiously.

  “What’s eatin you?” Then he saw the knife in Denny’s hand, saw it just in time to ready himself as Denny’s thrust came. Everything fell away. Jack’s left hand snaked out, not shying from the open blade, and he caught Denny by the wrist and with his right hit Denny sharply on the ear and then jerked him down, letting go as Denny was falling to chop him on the exposed neck, missing the neck but hitting the jawbone below the ear, hearing and feeling the snapping bone under his hand. Denny gave a grunt and a sudden sharp bark of anguish; and as quickly as the murder had filled Jack it drained away, leaving him standing there over the helpless man at his feet, his body beginning to quiver in reaction. Even now he could not help thinking: I’m like a machine, push the button and I act. I could have taken the knife away from him without all this. I don’t even know what’s the matter with him. But he pushed the wrong button and here we are, and I might have killed him. He could not have hurt me, and I could have killed him.

  “What’s going on?” Mona said. She was sitting up in bed. “What happened to him?”

  “Never mind,” Jack said. He kneeled down beside Denny. Blood was pouring out of his mouth and nose, and he looked up at Jack with stiff pain in his eyes. He tried to speak. Nothing came out of his mouth but a bubbling noise. The knife, a six-inch bone-handled Case, lay on the carpet, its well-honed blade face up. The last time Jack had seen the knife had been a few days before, when Denny had been cleaning his fingernails with the smaller blade. He picked it up and folded the blade into the handle and put it into his pocket.

  “Are you all right?” he asked Denny. He knew he had betrayed Denny and Denny had come to knife him for it. He understood this, although he could not understand why, or why he felt bad about it. Denny’s eyes were clear. They looked at each other. Jack had never seen such a look of pure intelligence in Denny’s eyes before. It was as if he knew something now that Jack would never understand. But the look faded into pained puzzlement and Denny moaned, the blood thick and black in his mouth.

  “All right,” Jack said. He got Denny to his feet and took him over and sat him in the chair by the window, on top of a pile of Mona’s clothes. Denny sat there in a stupor, blood spattered all over him and still flowing from his nose and the corners of his mouth. His jaw hung slightly open. Jack started to get dressed again, and Mona jumped out of bed, naked except for underpants, and went into the bathroom. She came back out with a wet washcloth, and bent down over Denny.

  “Hold your head back,” she said to him. She began dabbing at his nose and mouth. The cold touch of the washcloth must have revived him slightly, because he growled deep in his throat, pushed Mona aside, and came at Jack in a crouch. Without thinking, Jack clipped him on the point of the chin, and he went down heavily, his head bumping against Jack’s knees and then down onto the floor.

  “Get dressed,” Jack said to Mona. He got down and went through Denny’s pockets, removing his wallet and money. When Mona finished dressing, they carried Denny back to his own room. Sue was asleep, and they woke her up, got her out of the bed, and put Denny on it. He was still unconscious. Sue started cursing Jack, her eyes burning with hatred. Mona took her out of the room. Jack got on the telephone and called the clerk at the desk and told him that Denny had been mugged on the street and made it to his room and passed out, and to call a doctor. The clerk said he had seen Denny come in and he had looked all right, and Jack told him to wait a minute, and then went down to the lobby and gave the clerk a twenty-dollar bill.

  “You don’t have a mark on you,” the clerk said with a grin. He was a tall, thin man with one drooping eyelid, and when he smiled, his teeth showed long and yellow. He reached for the jack on the switchboard.

  “I tell you, he got rolled. You tell it that way, too. You saw him come in, and then you called the doctor. Right?”

  “Anything you say, hotshot.”

  The next morning Jack told Sue to clear out. She had gone back and slept in her own room after the doctor had Denny taken away, and Jack went there to tell her.

  “He hasn’t got any more money, and he’ll be in the hospital for quite a while,” he told her. “So you better go back where you came from.”

  “You bastard,” she said. “I really hate you. You didn’t have to do that. You’re a boxer.”

  “Well, you can stick around if you want,” he said. “But on your own money.”

  He went back to Mona. She had done a strange thing the night before, after everything was all over and they were in bed. She had kissed him and said, “You’re really a killer, aren’t you.”

  He said nothing. He felt odd. It had been so quick, so thoughtless, and so stupid. He was not paying much attention to Mona, or what she was doing.

  “You’re a real man,” she murmured; “You’re what I want, I always knew it, I love you. I truly love you.” She pulled the covers back and said, “This is what you want me to do, isn’t it?” But it was no use. Even for this, Jack could not rouse himself, and Mona seemed, if anything, pleased. She stopped trying after a while, and lit a cigarette.

  “I’m glad we’re rid of Sue,” she said. “That’s good. They been holding us back. Now we can do stuff. I always thought Denny was a dumb guy anyway, and I’m sick of that Sue. She’s so dumb. She had eyes for you. She told me what you did that night she came in here with you. I was so mad. I could have killed you for it. But I guess that’s when I found out I loved you. She was so mad when you lied to Denny. She hates him. I bet she’s glad you beat him up. He’s so silly sometimes. All he wants to do is drink and lay around. He’s got no ambitions at all. Let’s go to Hollywood or Las Vegas or something. I really want to get out of this dumb town. I always used to think San Francisco was such a groovy place. We came down here once when we were supposed to be in a cabin at Rio Nido and spent two days running around and I never saw anything like it, so when we took off we came here. But it’s so dumb after a while, don’t you think? I want to go to Hollywood. We could get an apartment. Not another crummy hotel room. A nice apartment in one of those big motels where they have a swimming pool and bars and everything, and I can go out and take sun-baths. San Francisco is so cold all the time. We could even buy a car and go racing around and go down to the beach and everything. Maybe we could go to Mexico. Do you want to go to Mexico?”

  She poked him. “Do you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Want to go to Mexico. We could see a bullfight and everything.”

  “Where do we get all this money?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Money. You can get money. You can go out and box some more, can’t you?”

  She snuggled down next to him. “Oh, we can have such a great time.”

  The next morning, after he had told Sue to leave, he settled down in the room with a bottle of whiskey and started drinking. He wanted to think. Mona was fussing around in the room, the radio on to a
rock-and-roll station, and she began to bother him. He couldn’t get any thinking done. Finally he asked her to go out and leave him alone.

  “Are you going to give me any money?”

  He handed her a twenty.

  She looked at it distastefully. “That’s not enough to do anything with.”

  “Go to a movie.”

  “I’m sick of movies. You’re drinking too much. When are we going to leave?”

  “Go on, get the fuck out of here.”

  “Don’t you swear at me.”

  “Get out of here before I knock you on your ass.”

  She stared at him murderously. “Don’t you talk to me like that!”

  He took another drink, and continued to stare out the window.

  “I hate you!” She stamped out and slammed the door. After a moment, Jack got up and turned off the radio, and then went back to staring out the window.

  He drank all morning and all afternoon. The whiskey was not leading him anywhere. He kept drinking it just to keep from going backward. Everything seemed quite clear except the first step. He did not know what to do first. He was buried inside his skin, bones, and nerves, and he would have to get out of there if he was to understand his pain. If it was pain. He knew people suffered agony, and he wondered if what he felt was agony. It did not seem like the descriptions of agony. He wondered if it wasn’t just self-pity again. At the orphanage they had gone to religious services every Sunday morning in the dining room and listened to different preachers tell them that God loved them especially because they were orphans and that they had a hard lot in life, but the hardness of their lot gave them a precious opportunity to be particularly saintly in their conduct, to be obedient, to be moral, without having placed in front of them the temptations toward sin that come to children who have sinful parents around them, tempting them away from the path of goodness by their bad example; how they, the children of the orphanage, were the results of the sins of their fathers, and yet at the same time had this great opportunity to lead blameless uncontaminated lives of purity and virtue; to obey the rules and be the especially beloved of Jesus Christ, who Himself disowned His own Mother and made Himself into an orphan, so to speak; and how they, the children of the orphanage, were actually better off and luckier than the children on the outside, because in the absence of the love of parents and the misguided behavior of parents, they could come directly to the love of Jesus Christ and therefore the love of God Himself under the direction of the orphanage administration. But it did not take much thinking on their part to see that if Jesus Christ and God approved of the administration of the orphanage, in fact preferred it to home and parents, then they were the enemies of the orphanage children because if that hollow cavity in their souls was the love of God then God was the ultimate murderer of love.

  Because the children of the orphanage were taught, all week long every week of their lives, that the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, was purely a question of feeling: if it felt good, it was bad, if it felt bad, it was good. The food at the orphanage did not taste very good, and the children were taught, told, that this food, this unappetizing oatmeal or dish of prunes or boiled-to-death vegetable, was nourishing and good for them and would make them strong and capable of much hard work; and that the candy they got from the ladies who visited was at once a treasure and a sin, because while the candy tasted beautiful, it did them no good and after they ate their candy and thanked the ladies, they had to go in and brush their teeth and get rid of the last traces of flavor, because candy, that delicious rarity, rotted everything it touched. And they were told that presents were not good, because presents were possessions, and possessions were fought over and caused bad feeling, not that the authorities would take their presents away from them, only that the authorities had a way of making the children feel guilty about possessing them. And of course the pleasures of the body—running, jumping, laughing, masturbating—were sins, particularly the last, but all the others were too because they disrupted the routine, were contagious and threw things off schedule, and were not to be permitted except under certain well-defined circumstances. And Jack could remember particularly the feeling of near-rage at being told that for the next hour they could go out into the yard and have fun and jump and run and play, and remembered his desire to stand stock still and refuse to enjoy himself. And then, unable to control himself, running, skylarking a little desperately, a knot of anything but joy in the center of him, under the approving eyes of the authorities. And work, they were taught that work was good, especially hard work, and the harder the work the better it was, their bodies screaming to them that this was a lie, it was all a terrible, God-originated, filthy lie, a monstrous attempt to keep them from screaming out their rage and anguish and murdering the authorities. But they did not, because they knew that nobody, not the ministers, not the ladies who visited, and least of all the authorities themselves, believed it, any of it, because they did not act as if they believed it. They acted as if they believed only one thing: that force and force alone governed. And this the children believed too, in their hearts, and most of them dreamed of the time when the power of force would be in their hands.

  The trouble was, it was intangible. It was not in the hands of anyone. While Jack had been there, most of the boys had blamed the man who was in charge of the orphanage as the center of power; they had believed that all that happened to them and all that did not happen to them originated with this one tall, heavy white-haired man. But then one day, during the middle of Jack’s wing’s play period, they saw the man walking across the yard, his hands behind his back, his head tilted forward—the way he always walked when he was angry and determined—saw him suddenly stop and look straight up in the sky and give a grunt and fall backward, saw him fall with a thump onto the frozen ground and saw him carted away, and learned the next day that what they had seen was the death of this man, taken by a heart attack and dead before they got him indoors and got his clothes off. And that night all the boys in Jack’s wing nourished a secret joy at the man’s death and many of them thought in their hearts that they would be set free now that the center of power was gone, or at the very least that their lives would change in some magnificent way and they would be free at last of the man’s mechanical tyranny; some of them even thought that candy would be passed out to them. But they learned. Very quickly there was another administrative head to the orphanage and he was different in appearance only. So it was an intangible; not a man, a set of rules. It would not even do any good to steal the rules away from the office and burn them, because there wasn’t even a book in which the rules were kept. It was just that the authorities knew the rules. You could kill them all and the rules would remain. This was the great virtue of rules, they were told in somewhat different context.

  But, and this is what puzzled Jack now, once you grow out of this, once you learn that it is all nonsense, that what you thought as a child was nothing more than the excuses of selfpity, what did you replace it with? You had a life, and you were not content with it; where did you aim it?

  The whole idea of a good life was silly. Because there was no such thing as good and bad, or good and evil. Not the orphanage way, with good equaling the dull and painful and stupid, and evil the bright and delicious and explosive; and certainly not the simple reverse of this—it would be all very well to live purely to have fun, but what did you do after you had had all the fun you wanted? It would be like aiming your whole life at getting a sandwich, and then getting it, eating it, and having nothing left. It was just as stupid to spend your whole life avoiding pain, because you could see right away that this would logically mean locking yourself up in a room and letting the authorities take over, bring your food, take away your excrement; even if the authorities provided entertainment for the senses, you would still be a prisoner....

  It seemed so bleak. He swallowed a sip of the warmish whiskey and continued to stare out the window. The quality of the light had been changing and now e
veryone on the street seemed identical. He could see them out there, obsessed not with their destinies but by some simple problem of today: to do a piece of business, to finish shopping, to catch a bus, to bum a cigarette. Nothing important, except to themselves. The only difference is that I am in here, and they are out there. What do we want?

  He searched his mind very carefully, and could find nothing he wanted. It seemed as if he had never wanted anything in his whole life. But that was not true. As a kid he had wanted lots of things. In the orphanage it had been simple. When he had wanted something, he took it. If he got caught, he accepted his punishment. He had always known that what he had wanted most was freedom, escape from the orphanage, and when he was ready, he escaped. That was all. Then he no longer wanted his freedom, because he had it.

  In Portland, before they threw him into reform school, he had wanted things, too. Very simple things, that you could buy with money. Such as whiskey. Or women. A fast car. Well, he had all those things now, except the fast car, and he did not want any of them. No, that was not true. He had them, and he didn’t want to be without them, but they didn’t work. They didn’t make him feel better. They just helped him stay alive.

  For a moment he felt a drifting nausea as his mind helplessly moved toward the idea of suicide. He steadied himself and faced it, as he had known all the time he must: I am going to die. Why not now? He felt cold and sick. Well, why not? What the fuck have I got to live for?

  The whiskey bottle was in his hand, and he lifted it, holding it up before his eyes. Do I want some of this? Do I want another drink? Suddenly it was very important to know. If he did not want a drink, he did not want anything. If he did not want anything, he might as well die. Because he was already dead.

  “Bullshit,” he said aloud. “Bullshit. I’m just in a bad mood.” He tilted the bottle to his mouth and drank, his eyes closed.

  He ran out of whiskey about six in the evening, and started to get up to go after some more. But he could not move. He was on the bed and he could not find the right nerves to activate to swing himself off the bed. He decided to take a nap instead. He kept his grip on the neck of the empty fifth as an anchor, and began to drift off into dizzy dreams, among them a dream in which the girls came into the room and hovered over him, their faces white and cruel, and then vanished before he could sit up. Later on, when he awakened, he remembered that dream and checked his pockets and knew it had been real. He was still groggy and drunk, and it all seemed very funny to him. The girls had gotten away with more than a hundred dollars. But he had more stashed in the closet, the last of the money Castelli had saved for him, and he got it all out and put it in his pocket and went down and bought three fifths of Canadian Club and carried them back to the room. He was not hungry, but he got it into his head somehow that he would like a piece of ass, and he decided to sit there on the edge of the bed and wait for Mona to come back. Very slowly he undid the first bottle and took a drink. He remembered how bad he had felt earlier in the day, and how he had secretly known, all the time he had been thinking those bad silly angry thoughts, that sooner or later he would feel better. He giggled to himself. Every time it happened he got drunk and felt better. Even the hangovers were good, because they made him think clearly but without agony. He wanted Mona. That was a good thing.