Hard Rain Falling

by Don Carpenter

  He knew she would be back; the room was still littered with her things. When she came back he was going to fuck hell out of her and throw her out. He felt cruel and mean. He would not let her take her stuff. He was going to tell her it was his stuff, since he had paid for most of it, and he was going to keep it for the next two-bit whore he shacked up with. That was a laugh. Mona was so prudish. To call her a whore was so accurate; the burr would hit the nerve and she would screech and hit him. He wouldn’t mind. He would laugh at her and rip off her clothes and screw her once again, and then throw her out in the hall naked. That would be a good lesson for her. And maybe she would finally be a good lay if he could just get her mad enough to thrash around.

  But it palled; everything finally got old if you dreamed about it to much; everything but drinking, and with drinking you could always throw up and start over. Eventually, he passed out.

  He awakened in the middle of the morning. Mona was not there, but her junk was still littered all over the place. He took a drink of whiskey and just made it into the bathroom in time to throw up. He felt light and empty, but there was only one thing to do; get another shot of whiskey into himself and keep it down. He finally made it, sitting very still to keep the nausea from bulging up into his throat, and in a few minutes he knew he would be all right. He stayed on the bed all day, drinking. His mind was utterly empty. Mona unlocked the door once and stuck her head in, and when she saw him on the bed the head disappeared. Jack did not even bother to wave.

  A long time later, Jack told Billy Lancing all about what finally happened:

  “I had been drinking for so long and not eating that everything was hollow and weird; I felt like some kind of crazy mystic who keeps seeing visions that his eyes can’t remember; I wasn’t really drunk any more after the third day, I was just living on alcohol and pissing pure sugar, and the whole world was sharp and blurred at the same time. I remember one of Mona’s comic books was on the floor by the bed and I sat there looking down at the cover. It had a picture of Batman and Robin on it, grappling with some dirty thugs on a city street at night, the most weirdly beautiful city I’d ever seen in my life. Batman was saying, `This looks like The Joker’s handiwork!’ and one of the thugs was saying, `What the!’ and Robin was saying, `Somebody wants us out of the way!’ and I was sitting there trying to figure out why all these beautiful people were arguing, even though everything they said made perfect sense to me. The comic book was upside down and so I was looking at the picture backwards, but that made it even more real, and I’d heard somewhere that we really see things upside down and then our mind turns them right side up, and I think I was trying to right everything in my mind when they knocked at the door. It was a terrible effort, and burned up a lot of my whiskey.

  “I got up and stood in the middle of the room, trying to swing the door around so it would be upside down and she would come in walking on the ceiling with her skirt around her ears, and said something like, `Come on the fuck in,’ and waited a second and then the door exploded, just blew up in front of my eyes, and two guys came running in waving guns. I thought for one second that Mona had hired a couple of redhots to come and take the rest of my money and get her stuff, so I grinned at the guys and said, `Hi, fellas.’ They saw me standing there naked and put their guns back. When I saw the belt holsters I knew they were cops and so I headed out the door, but one of them got me by the ankle and I went down, out in the hall. A man and woman were coming down the corridor, and I looked up at them and they looked down at me, and I said as clearly as I could, `Excuse me,’ but it must have come out wrong and the woman screamed and the man did a funny thing; he was a mousy-lookin little guy with a mustache, I figure he must have brought the woman there to the hotel for a little side action, anyway, he wrinkled his little mouse nose at me, and stuck out his foot and kicked me on the shoulder. Then they both turned and went fast down the hall, and the cops dragged me back to my room, made me get dressed, handcuffed me, and took me down to the Hall of Justice. Just as we were coming out of my room, the bigger of the cops put his hand on my shoulder and asked me if I wanted another drink, and I said yes, and he went back and got one of my bottles and I took a long one, and then he took one, put the bottle back, and said to me, `Boy, we’re going to kill you.’

  “I felt glad. I really liked that cop. He told me the truth, that cop did, and I really liked him for it. I wanted to reach out and kiss him, or at least shake his hand. He was a good cop.”

  Nine

  They took Jack down to the old Hall of Justice on Kearny Street and put him into one of the cells in the city prison. When they booked him down at the desk several hours later he was still sleepy and half-drunk, and beginning to feel the early tremors of a long illness. But even so, he heard the list of charges and began to understand that something had actually happened and he was not having a dream. He was not sure what the specific charges were but he knew there were a lot of them, all bearing different numbers from the penal code. What made it real for him was the way everyone was so distant and polite. He felt a gush of warmth for the detectives, the desk man, the deputies. When they took him back to his cell he fell asleep thinking about how nice everyone was.

  The next morning in Municipal Court he found out what the charges were. By this time he was really sick; hung over, his arms and legs hollow, his belly a hard knot, his face burning with fever. The assistant district attorney, a large man in a brown suit, with reddish hair and a peaked, sunburned face, read out the charges in a droning yet somehow angry voice, standing at his table, holding the sheet of lined onionskin paper up before his eyes, telling Jack and the rest of the court that Jack was charged with statutory rape, resisting arrest, drunk and disorderly, and theft. In the same bored angry monotone he said, “We have a foreign warrant on him, too, your Honor.”

  “Well, let’s hear it, let’s hear it.”

  “This just came in this morning, your Honor; it’s a warrant for kidnap, Balboa County. If it hadn’t come in on time I was going to ask you to hold him on the local charges or bind him over to Superior Court.”

  Jack and the judge looked at each other for a moment, and then the judge shook his head slowly. “Hold for Balboa County,” he said, writing on his disposition sheet. Jack had never been in Balboa County in his life; but he did not think it was unusual. The way he felt, nothing was mysterious. Everything seemed rational. If they had taken him out and hanged him in public he would not have been surprised, and if they had just let him go, he still would not have been surprised. They took him back to his cell and he went back to sleep. He woke up several times during the day with attacks of diarrhea, and although he was nauseated he could not manage to vomit. He felt lucky to be able to sleep.

  Late that afternoon two detectives came and got him and drove him up to Balboa County. The two detectives sat in the front of the big black-and-white station wagon and Jack sat in the back. They had welded steel eyelets to the floor in back, and Jack wore leg chains that were fastened to the eyelets. Back of his head there was a grill of steel mesh, and each of his hands was outstretched and handcuffed to this grill. The two detectives were very nice to Jack, spoke to him, and let him smoke. The one who was not driving had to hold Jack’s cigarette for him, turned halfway around in the seat, but he said he didn’t mind. Both detectives said they were sorry about having to truss him up like that but it was regulations. “Some of your felonies,” the one who was not driving said, “we just use the cuffs; but on your capital crimes we got to use the leg chains, too.”

  “You know, though,” the driver said, “it cuts both ways. I mean, you’re pretty safe all locked up like that. A couple of our guys were haulin a prisoner just like you are, I think the guy cut up his wife and killed her or somethin, and the guy drivin was goin like a bat out of hell and this dumb fuckin farmer comes puttin out of a side road, blind, and whacks right into the side of the vehicle and knocked it ass-endways, it goes off the highway, turns over a couple of times and ends up on its top. T
he guy drivin held on to the steerin wheel and he was okay but the guy sittin next to him got throwed out and spilled his brains all over the street; caved in his head like a punkin; but the prisoner, why, he was just sittin there as pretty as you please, upside down, all chained in, protected, not a scratch on him, yellin his head off to get him out of there before the fuggin thing blew up. You never saw anything like it.”

  The other one grinned back at Jack. “So we got these safety belts now”—he held up the end of a seat belt and waggled it at Jack—”but piss on em.”

  “I got mine on,” the driver said. “You never know.”

  The other one said, “How the hell can I administer to the prisoner’s needs if I’m strapped in? I’d have to strap in and then unstrap every ten minutes.”

  “It’s your ass,” the driver said. “You’re the one in the ninety-percent seat.”

  “Seventy-percent seat,” the other corrected.

  At the county jail, someone noticed Jack’s fever and called a doctor, and Jack was taken to the county hospital. They had no prison ward at the hospital, so he was placed in a private room with wire mesh over the windows. The door was locked and a policeman was stationed outside the room. Jack was sick for almost two weeks, in a near-delirium, but he did not speak once during that entire time, not even to the doctors. His case was diagnosed as a bad attack of influenza.

  When he had been drunk, everything had seemed rational; now nothing did. He did not know why he had been arrested. He could not understand why he had been charged with kidnaping and brought to this place. He could not understand why he was sick. At one point he was certain he was going to die. His body temperature kept dropping, and got as low as 97, and he felt cold inside, as if the life was deserting his cells and soon there would be nothing left of him but meat. In his delirium he thought that if he died they would prop his corpse up at the table in the courtroom and still go through the motions of the trial, calling witnesses Jack had never seen in his life to testify to things he had never done, and in the end the jury would bring in a verdict of guilty and his corpse would be taken to the gas chamber and gassed, and then it would be taken out and buried; and through all this he would be floating above it, watching, listening, trying to understand what was happening to his meat and bones, to the body he used to inhabit; and the corpse would just sit there, dead, in its chair, rotting, beginning to stink, everyone else in the courtroom pretending that the corpse did not stink, and he even saw his eyes shrivel, and finally drop out of their dead sockets and roll down onto the floor, and saw an attendant come over and pick them up and put them into his pocket, and the eyeless corpse just sat there, getting smaller and yellower as the trial droned on, and finally, when they carted it off to the gas chamber, it was so small and so light that one man carried it under his arm like a doll, and how tiny it looked in that big chair, eyeless, toothless, the nose half eaten away with decay, as the tiny octagonal room filled with the mists of cyanide gas and the corpse got soggy with it and began to fall to pieces so that several men had to pull it away from the chair in fragments and dump the fragments into a bag, and it all kept coming apart in their fingers, but they did not mind, they were even telling jokes to each other and laughing as the bits of soggy flesh and rotting bone stuck to their fingers and they had to wipe their hands off continually, stuffing the bag full and joking about the odor; while he, Jack, his spirit, hovered over them and watched and refused to speak. It was obscene, he knew this, but it did not move him.

  He even dreamed that Denny accused him and he was being tried for his betrayal of Denny, and Denny was saying to him, yes, you betrayed me, you are my friend and you refused it, but Jack said, no, you don’t have any right to move into my body and take part of me as yours, but Denny said, yes, of course, I have every right to do that, you are my friend, I have a right to your body and your mind, to all of you, because I love you and need you, and everyone has this right, to take love away from each other and inhabit one another’s souls, but Jack said, no, no, I am my own body and soul and you are not part of me, you have no right, but Denny said, you don’t understand, we all have this right to each other, and no man is entitled to privacy because your privacy is my murder, don’t you see that yet, don’t you understand that just by being alive you are open to me, and I to you? Don’t you understand now? And Jack said no, he kept saying no, not to Denny because Denny was gone by this time, taken off to the hospital himself, and Jack was alone, not suffering, free of Denny; convicted but free. He knew that he could not afford to hate Denny, because that would be the same, that would be giving himself up to him. But he was gone, and with an incredible sense of sadness, Jack realized he would never see Denny again, and he felt something shred away and dissipate, something important; not Denny, something important, some part of himself, vanishing.

  But eventually he got better, and they took him back to the county jail, and the day after that he was brought in for a conference with the District Attorney.

  His name was Forbes and he was a very fat man, large, big-boned, without any of the weaknesses of self-indulgent fat, but with the strength of pure bigness, a powerful barrel of a man, whose heavy florid face was pleasant rather than jolly, his mouth sensual but not cruel, and his eyes hard and alive and humorous. When Jack sat down across the desk from Forbes he knew right away that there was going to be no phony stuff; in other circumstances, Jack probably would have liked him.

  Forbes had a Manila folder in front of him, and he flipped it open and read silently for a moment. “I don’t believe a word of this,” he said to Jack. “But don’t think I won’t try you on it. If I have to, I will. Are you going to cooperate?”

  “No,” Jack said. He wanted a look at the papers in the folder, but he refused the idea of asking.

  “I didn’t think you would. You look like a tough boy. I don’t have to tell you not to get tough around here. We have your record from Oregon, so we know you know how things go. You’re no cherry. Will you make a statement?”

  “No,” Jack said, but the big man had already heaved himself up out of his chair and gone over to the door behind Jack, opened it, and called out, “Myra, would you come in here, please?” When he got back to his desk and settled, he said to Jack, “Talk loud, she’s kind of deef.” The woman, about fifty, with brightly dyed red hair and a petrified face, came into the room and sat in a chair by the window. She had a notebook and a pencil ready, and she twitched a smile at Jack and said loudly, “All right, dearie.”

  District Attorney Forbes began asking questions, and the woman began writing; after each question, both of them would pause and wait for Jack to answer, and when he did not, the District Attorney would say, “Refuses to answer,” and go on to the next question. They were ridiculous; they had nothing to do with Jack. From the import of the questions, Jack understood that he was supposed to have been in Balboa County about six weeks before, in a car, to have picked up Mona and Sue in front of the Ritz Theater at gunpoint—forced them into the car with a threat of bodily harm if they did not comply—driven the pair of them to San Francisco, and installed them in the hotel. He was supposed to have threatened them by saying he would have them arrested as prostitutes if they did not stay, and he was supposed to have forced them to perform acts of a sexual nature, and to have lived with Mona in a state of unlawful carnal cohabitation. Further, a wallet was found in his possession, belonging to someone named Dennis Mellon; and Jack was asked to explain this, and to explain the fact that Mr. Mellon was at present in the University of California hospital in San Francisco, suffering from multiple fractures of the jaw. Jack was also asked to explain why he assaulted two police officers who had come to his room to question him. He answered no questions, and explained nothing. He also refused to sign a statement denying everything. The woman went out of the room, and District Attorney Forbes sighed.

  “I talked to San Francisco a couple of times,” he said. “What probably happened is these two girls got braced by the vice squad, and the
boys had nothing better to do, so they made up a story for the girls to cop out to. They probably told the girls they’d have to waste away in the juvenile home for the next four or five years if they didn’t lay the blame on somebody else. Hell, there was a missing persons report on both the girls laying around the SF police station for about a month. Trick is, to find out how much of Mona’s statement is bullshit, how much true. Did you pick em up at the theater?”

  Jack said nothing. He wanted to ask several questions, but he did not.