The City When It Rains

by Thomas H. Cook

  For a few seconds, Corman merely circled the body, looking for the best shot. Finally, he stopped just to the left of the woman’s face and bent down to bring the top of her body into the frame. As he snapped the picture, the bright light of his flash swept over her like the tail of a comet, throwing her shadow across the slick gray pavement.

  “You’re wasting your time, Corman,” Santana said dryly as he passed by, heading for his car. “Even the locals’ll pass on this.”

  “Maybe.”

  Santana nodded toward the blue blanket. “That’s the only angle. And you ask me, it’s not much.”

  Corman glanced up at him. “Do they have any witnesses?”

  Santana nodded in the opposite direction. “The Incorruptible Detective Lang dug one up,” he said facetiously. “He’s still at him.”

  Corman turned slowly to see the witness, a tall man in a New York Mets sweatshirt, as he talked to Lang just inside the doorway of a neighboring building.

  Santana tapped Corman’s shoulder. “Listen, could you spare me a sawbuck for a couple days?”

  Corman stared him dead in the eye. “No.”

  For an instant Santana looked offended, then his face relaxed into a light chuckle. “Well, at least you didn’t give me some bullshit song and dance.” He laughed again, waved his hand. “Catch you later,” he said as he walked away.

  Corrnan turned his attention to the bottom edge of the blue blanket. He knew that his second picture had caught the tip of it in the frame. It would be a distraction in the final print, drawing the viewer’s eyes away from the woman, its real subject. It would confuse the composition, throw the frame off balance. He squatted close to the ground, edging the camera up just enough to take it out. The narrow wedge of blue sank beneath the bottom line of the frame like a small boat.

  From that angle, he took several more pictures, drawing the camera down slightly, then to the right, up the woman’s arm. A line of needle marks ran from the upper arm to the elbow, where they gathered in a cluster of pitted purple dots. Several tan scars, raised and pointed, crisscrossed the same area like tiny mountain ranges. He moved the camera on down along the nearly smooth lower arm until he reached her fingers. Her nails had once been painted bright green, but most of the polish had chipped away. He shot one of her hands, centering the frame around a single jaggedly outstretched finger.

  It was pointing toward the blue blanket and the small doll that lay wrapped inside it. For a few seconds, Corman concentrated on the doll’s face, the glittering plastic eyes that stared up at the overhanging building, the dirty white stain gathered in its mouth.

  Inside the blanket, the doll was naked, with rounded arms and large, bulging stomach. The head was scrunched down into the fleshy folds of its neck so that from a certain angle, it looked like a miniature sumo wrestler.

  But that wasn’t the angle Corman liked. He circled the body slowly, as he had the woman’s, staring at it through the lens, trying to find an appropriate frame. Every picture has a heart, Lazar had once told him, it’s the shooter’s job to find it.

  Corman finally decided to shoot the doll from the left side, with most of the body covered by the blanket, then straight down, with the face just enough off center to pick up the glistening pavement.

  After he’d taken several shots, he straightened himself, let his eyes drift back and forth from the woman to the doll, as if following a length of rope which stretched from one to the other.

  “Some fucking night,” Lang said as he stepped up beside him.“Raining like hell, and I get a jumper.”

  Corman nodded.

  “You get all the pictures you need?”

  “I guess.”

  “Good,” Lang said. He headed toward the tenement.

  “If you’re going in, I’d like to take a look,” Corman said.

  Lang studied him for a moment. “Okay,” he said finally.

  Corman walked a few paces behind him, watching Lang’s back. He thought about snapping a quick picture, concentrating on the dripping hat, the fall of his shoulders, the way the tenement walls drew in around him so that he looked like a man walking into a dark concrete trap. But it was a picture he’d seen a thousand times. No matter what the angle, it always came out on the side of hopelessness. Give up the fight was its advice.

  A narrow alley led along the southern wall of the building. Lang trudged down it listlessly, his feet scraping through the usual debris, cans, bottles, bits of paper, until he got to a rectangular flap of unpainted plywood that leaned against the side of the building. Then he jerked it down and let it crash into the alley.

  The hole behind it was barely large enough to crawl through. Lang took a flashlight from his raincoat, stooped down with a low groan, and crawled on his hands and knees through the opening.

  Corman came in behind him, feeling the ground carefully for nails, broken glass, old hypodermic needles. Inside, it was dark, the windows completely covered over, and as he rose to his feet, Corman could see nothing but the single yellow beam from Lang’s flashlight as it glided smoothly along the floor of the building. The walls were wet, peeling, the ceiling pulled down, its plumbing stripped away. The floor was bare, swept clean, except for the far left corner, where the light grew more faded and diffused, and settled finally on a small pile of empty cans.

  Corman walked over to the cans and stared down at them. “Similac,” he said. He looked at Lang. “Baby formula.” He fingered the strap of his camera bag as he thought of the stain on the doll’s mouth. “She was feeding it.”

  “Yeah,” Lang said without interest, peering about. “There must be a set of stairs around here.” He walked to the middle of the room, his feet scraping through the broken pieces of plaster and sheetrock which covered it. Then he stopped, pointed the flashlight toward the far rear corner. Metal stairs led upward to the second floor. “There we are,” he said idly as he headed for them.

  Corman followed him up the stairs until they reached the top floor of the building.

  “The witness said the jumper had been living here for quite a while,” Lang said as he made his way to the window. “He said she threw the doll out first. Like trash, he said. Then she jumped herself.” He glanced quickly out the window, then turned back toward the dark room and headed for the stairs.

  Corman stepped up to the window and peered out. Two ambulance attendants were moving toward the body. One of them had a zippered plastic body bag slung over his shoulder like a slick black pelt.

  Corman lifted the camera to his eye and moved it slowly over the scene below, concentrating on the two bodies, his lens cruising smoothly from the plump plastic one wrapped in a blue blanket to the emaciated legs of the woman in the white dress. In the faintly silver street light, her skin took on a slick, scaly sheen. It was the high gloss of starvation, and he’d seen it only in pictures before. He stepped away from the window, quickly grasped a shattered edge of jutting brick, and held on for a moment while he put it together in his mind. Then he snapped the lens cap back on his camera and headed for the stairs, finally catching up with Lang in the alleyway.

  “She was starving,” he told him.

  Lang kept up his pace. “It happens.”

  “But she bought all that Similac.”

  “So?”

  “For a doll.”

  Lang continued on until he reached his car. Then he opened the door, slid in, glanced back at Corman through the half-open window. “Keep an eye to your back,” he warned. “It’s always more dangerous than you think.”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  ON THE WAY BACK to his apartment, Corman stopped off at Smith’s Bar on Eighth Avenue. The usual customers had already assumed their usual places, and from his own seat at the end of the bar he could follow the action as closely as he liked. For a time, he’d thought of doing some sort of photographic study of the burned-out cases who hung around late at night, retired cops, street hustlers, drifters, vagrants, barflies, the usual spillover from the slum hotel
s. They had hard, weathered faces, but in pictures that only made them look like characters from central casting, actors in some docudrama about the wretched of the earth. Through the generations, they’d been gone over by the best of them. The illustrators of the old city had done them in woodcuts, charcoal, and after the illustrators, legions of shooters had poured into the slums, shantytowns and ghettos. He’d gone over hundreds of their pictures for his book, everything from the groggeries of the Five Points to the murderous alleyways of the Old Brewery. He’d seen children buried waist-high in garbage heaps, piles of women sleeping in open wagons, swollen bodies left for days in unlit corridors and abandoned airshafts.

  “What’ll you have, Corman?” Mike asked as he wiped the bar and put down the little paper mat. “The usual?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mike smiled, poured the shot of J&B. “How you been?”

  “Okay.”

  “Long night?”

  “A jumper,” Corman said. He downed the shot, glanced to the left. A nearly bald, middle-aged man was whispering vehemently to himself, his hand pressed against his face.

  “Been like that all night,” Mike said, “Somebody must have opened up one of those fruit bins upstate, let ’em loose.”

  Corman took out a cigarette and lit it. “They used to put them on a boat,” he said idly. “Then they just sent them drifting down the river. You know, the ship of fools.”

  Mike chuckled. “Put them on a boat, huh? Where was this, Poughkeepsie?”

  Suddenly, the bald man peeped out from behind his own hand. “Animal cages have been recommended,” he blurted loudly in a high, staccato voice. Then he fled back behind his tightly closed fingers and began giggling wildly.

  Mike shook his head, picked up a glass and began polishing it. “You remember that redhead in here couple nights ago?”

  Corman didn’t.

  “Flaming red hair,” Mike added. “Big hooters.”

  Corman saw her now, the long red hair dangling from her shoulders, the way she plucked at her lower lip while Mike did his best number on her, the one about his days as a big band singer.

  Mike winked. “One of Mike’s Girls now,” he said. “Number one sixty-two.” He laughed. “I told her so. After, I mean. While we were both having a smoke. About the count. She thought it was funny.” He shrugged. “Least it didn’t bother her.”

  Corman glanced at the empty glass. “One more.”

  Mike was still pouring it when the bald man shot his face out from behind his hand again.

  “Elephant-size capacity,” he said loudly, then swiftly retreated behind his hand.

  “He means cages, I guess,” Mike said. “The ones they recommended.” He filled Corman’s glass, chuckled to himself. “Yeah, she laughed when I told her, the redhead. A real good sport, you know?” He shook his head. “If it weren’t for the ladies, what would life be, huh?” He was probably in his early fifties, but well kept, With slick black hair and an aging matinee idol face. His eyes were light blue, and Corman could easily imagine them as two small cold lights in the afterglow of passion, distant, calculating, already looking for the next hit.

  “She was a real dish, I’ll say that for her,” Mike said. “Definitely worth the strokes.”

  Corman’s mind shifted to the jumper, her wet, glistening skin. “Did you ever see a woman around here?” he asked. “Skinny, carrying a doll in a blanket?”

  Mike took up another glass and began polishing it while the younger bartender worked the other half of the bar. “Don’t sound like one of Mike’s Girls,” he said.

  “The jumper only lived a few blocks from here,” Corman said. “I thought you might have seen her pass the window.”

  Mike shook his head. “Just sounds like another escapee from Looneyville, you ask me.”

  “Maybe,” Corman said. He thought of the empty cans of Similac, the white stains around the doll’s mouth, and regretted he hadn’t gotten closer to them, concentrated on the way the rain had frothed them out from the rubbery pink lips.

  Back at the apartment, Corman pulled out the sleeper sofa and prepared to bed down, as he always did, in the middle of the living room. It was an old sofa, dark green and rather soiled. It was the first thing he and Lexie had bought after getting married, and each time he pulled it out, something of those vanished days swept over him in a soft invisible tide.

  Someone knocked at the door just as he was about to undress. He walked to the door and opened it.

  Mrs. Donaldson stood in the doorway, erect as her aging bones could keep her. She was a large woman with an almost perfectly round head. Her white hair shone like an aura around her pink face. I It gave her a strangely unreal look, as if she were someone’s fairy godmother and could change things with a wand.

  “I was wondering if you were home yet,” she said. There was a faintly accusatory edge in her voice, which made Corman uncomfortable. It was in her eyes too, and it made him see himself as he thought she saw him, aloof, roguish, a man who could ditch his children whenever the mood struck him.

  “I came home earlier,” he told her. “But then I had to go out again. I had a shoot.”

  “Lucy was here alone,” Mrs. Donaldson said.

  “She has to be, sometimes.”

  Mrs. Donaldson eyed him pointedly. “There’ve been a few break-ins, you know,” she said.

  “There’re always a few break-ins.”

  “On the third floor,” Mrs. Donaldson added significantly. “Just under us. Mr. Baxter’s apartment. They got everything. Even his humidifier. He has asthma. He needs his humidifier.”

  Corman said nothing. The edginess was creeping up his back like a line of tiny insects.

  Mrs. Donaldson frowned slightly. “And what if Lucy was alone at a time like that? You know, they might … abuse her.”

  “I don’t have a choice,” Corman said. His voice sounded lame, weak, as if he should have arranged his life to have the very choices that were beyond him now. He hardened it a little. “I do the best I can.”

  Mrs. Donaldson looked slightly offended, as if she’d been rudely dealt with. “It’s just with all the break-ins, I …”

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” Corman asked, trying to make amends.

  “No, thank you,” Mrs. Donaldson said. She smiled thinly. “Say hello to Lucy for me.”

  “I will,” Corman said. “Good night.” He forced the smile again as he closed the door. It felt like a wet string clinging to his lips.

  For the next few hours Corman tossed about, then decided to get up and do some of his work. It was useless for him to try to make his body sleep when his mind wasn’t in the mood.

  He walked to the small closet near the bathroom he’d converted to a darkroom five years before. It was a tiny space, barely large enough for his trays and chemicals, but it was adequate nonetheless, and its feeling of highly concentrated space gave a physical sense of intensity that went well with the scores of pictures he’d strung on lines or thumb-tacked to the sheet of cork he’d nailed to the left wall of the room.

  Once the door was tightly closed, he took out the rolls of film he’d shot during the day, then went through the routine of developing the long strips of negatives onto contact paper. Meticulously, he mixed the chemicals, pouring the various liquids into their separate trays. Then he looked at each individual shot, trying to decide which to keep, which to throw away. He’d hoped to sell a few of them to one of the city-wide dailies. Failing that, he’d have to concentrate on the weeklies scattered around the outer boroughs. The rest of the pictures had no value as news shots. They were for himself, photographs of street life he vaguely thought of as evidence he was slowly accumulating for some great trial that was yet to come. They were always black-and-white, always centered around people. He stayed away from things that had lost their human scale: towering buildings, bridges, monuments. He thought of them as accidents of science or engineering, impermanent, tentative creations. It was part of what he’d truly learned from Laza
r, never to shoot higher than a human face. And so he shot people in alleys, subways, taxis; people eating, rushing away; people together or apart, connected or adrift; people who rescued children from cars, rivers, fires, or threw them out of windows, as the witness had told Lang, “like trash.”

  From the contact sheets, he selected a few pictures worth printing, dipped them in the bath and watched as the images rose from the blank white of the paper in that odd, ghostly way that still struck him as miraculous.

  When the first print was complete, he lifted it from the liquid, strung it on the line, then stared at it silently. It was one of the pictures he’d taken of the doll, a close-up of the face, its hooded eyes lifted upward, the long black eyelashes beaten back against the half-closed lids by the falling rain. There was no doubt about it, as a photograph it had tremendous symbol potential. The painted eyes glistened brightly in the street light. Huge droplets gathered in their corners like swollen tears. Tragic ironies spilled over both sides of the wet, rubber face and gathered in pools along the pitted street. It was a picture he’d seen a thousand times, a doll lying among the ruins of a still smoldering house or circling slowly in the flood waters that had engulfed the town. He knew Pike would drool over it, perhaps pay as much as fifty dollars.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  LUCY WAS ALREADY completely dressed and staring down at him when Corman’s eyes opened the next morning. He’d finally nodded off in the chair by the window, his head slumped forward, hands curled together in his lap.

  “Your mouth was open,” Lucy said. “It looked funny.”

  Corman stood up, stretched, rolled his shoulders. “Did you eat yet?”

  “Corn flakes,” Lucy said. “The milk had that taste. You know, sour. So I had water.”

  “With corn flakes?”

  “Yes.”

  Corman groaned.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lucy told him. She glanced at the photo-graph which still remained in Corman’s hand. “What’s that?”