The Ancient Rain

by Domenic Stansberry

  The room filled with noise now, as if someone had opened the window. She slammed it shut.

  “Where are you staying?”

  “At your place.”

  But she knew that he wasn’t there, not really. Dante was never anywhere, even when he was by your side. He was like a reflection fissioning in the glass, everywhere and nowhere all at once. “We have to leave,” she said.

  “We will.”

  “Right away?”

  “Right away.”

  “We have to get on the plane and go to Europe.”

  He didn’t say anything, but she knew his logic. She needed to heal first. Visiting hours were almost over. There was a case to finish. But she couldn’t wait for all that.

  “Let’s go now.”

  “All right.”

  She touched his nose. She reached out into the darkness and touched his nose and ran her finger over the hump in the middle.

  “Go close the door.”

  “It’s already closed.”

  “Go close it again.”

  He did as she told him. Humoring her, maybe. The pain had receded. Maybe the nurse had come and gone, administering the drugs. Or maybe the pain reliever was in her IV. But it was also true that the drugs only worked intermittently.

  “I want you to fuck me.”

  “This is a hospital.”

  “I don’t care where we are.”

  “You have burns all over your body.”

  “I want you to fuck me.”

  She thought he might laugh, or go away, but instead he leaned over and kissed her with those dry lips of his. She was in her hospital gown, no panties, and she guided his hand between her burned thighs, and in a little while he put his lips to her ears.

  “I want you,” she said.

  He was a shadow in the dark corner of the room. He was not here. She thought of Cadaqués. The sound of motor scooters in foreign streets in a movie she did not quite remember, people pushing one another to get a look at something on the street. Technicolor water splashing against the sea walls, and the Arabs pushing to get a better look. The smell of intrigue, salt spray in the air. She reached out and touched Dante’s shadow and felt the gun underneath his jacket.

  “Your nose,” she said.

  He had his finger in her vagina.

  “No, not your finger.”

  He moved away but that was not what she meant. She pulled him from the dark corner of the room and took his head between her hands.

  “Your nose,” she said again.

  He understood then. She pushed his head down toward her midsection and ran her fingers through his hair while he hovered over her, on his knees, facedown between her thighs. His nose was inside her now, expanding, wet like a tongue.

  His nose like the Italian peninsula. His noise like the hull of a ship. She was arching her back and tugging at the hospital bedsheets, clawing, and he was up inside of her, and she itched all over.

  He ran his fingers over her body and her skin sloughed off in handfuls, and she heard herself moan in a way that maybe resembled pleasure.

  But then it was over. The moment was gone. She was in some kind of haze lying on the bed while out in the hall there was the murmur of the hospital, the nurses at their station, footsteps down the hall. The sedation took her under.

  When she awoke, the bandages were sticky, and there was a clamminess between her legs.

  “Dante,” she said.

  But there was no answer. She slept for a while and then was awake again. Wide awake. The medication had worn off, and the door had broken down, and the window was flaring open, shattering—and she was in pain again, on fire, crying out his name.

  NINETEEN

  Over the next several days, Dante spent an inordinate amount of time tracking Guy Sorrentino. It was what Jensen wanted. There were other things on his mind: Marilyn, for one, and also the rumors, coming out of Oakland, saying the investigation into the bombing had gone flat. Meanwhile Jensen had him nosing through the discovery material, the endless list of witnesses the prosecution had put forward, but mostly, he had him tagging Sorrentino, trying to see if he could find a lead on Cynthia Nakamura: Owens’s alibi.

  Sorrentino lived on the side of the hill, in San Bruno, overlooking the freeway, so Dante found himself parked across the way, waiting and watching. The complex itself was nothing to look at: short and squat—a series of fourplexes, really—two-story affairs built in the fifties: white siding and aluminum frame windows and outside stairs. The stairs were concrete, with iron handrails that led up to open balconies where no one ever sat.

  At the moment, Sorrentino was inside.

  Dante knew this because he’d been around back and seen the man’s car, a Ford Torino, parked under the carport in the space marked 2C. Apartment 2C was nothing fancy—a one-bedroom that held a green sofa and mottled carpet and a kitchen sink full of take-out cartons. Dante knew this because he had surreptiously entered Sorrentino’s apartment the day before, but that visit had been cut short.

  So today, Dante would have to try again. He would go back up the stairs, and back through the sliding window.

  Right now he had his eyes on the postal truck at the bottom of the hill. The complex was at the top of a cul-de-sac, and Dante could see the truck working its way uphill. In a little while, the driver would pull into Sorrentino’s complex, toward a bank of mailboxes near the carport. The boxes had keys, but they were cheap locks and opened with a fingernail file.

  Dante knew because he had rifled Sorrentino’s box as well.

  Fact was, Dante knew more about Sorrentino then he cared to know. He’d seen unwashed laundry on the closet floor. He’d staked out the apartment and knew the man was up at all hours. Inside 2C, the flickering light of the television played against curtains until well past midnight, and Sorrentino would appear every hour or so on the balcony to smoke a cigarette. Then in midmorning he would reappear on the concrete stairs—in his polo shirt, his gray slacks, a shapeless sports jacket—and then drive his Torino down to the Lamplighter Café on the El Camino. Not until after the postman came, though. Sorrentino always waited for the mail.

  The afternoons were another matter. Sorrentino was not predictable. Sometimes he returned immediately after lunch. Other times he was gone for the duration.

  Now the postal truck crept into the lot. The driver sorted the mail into the line of boxes. The truck crept out.

  Dante waited.

  Sorrentino did not appear.

  Dante sat in his car behind the hedge in the lot across the way and listened to the birds in the trees and the sound of the freeway below. More time passed. A fly skittered across the windshield, and Dante sank lower in his seat. Then Sorrentino emerged. He had on his hat and his sports jacket and was also carrying a briefcase.

  This was a new touch, the case. Dante didn’t like it. Sorrentino was not the type to be carrying a case.

  Yesterday, he’d gotten in without much trouble. He’d found Sorrentino’s files easily enough as well, in a cabinet inside the bedroom closet. Jensen wanted information on Cynthia Nakamura and her whereabouts, and whatever else might be there. Dante’s mistake had been to scan the files instead of simply lifting them all. Or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered either way. Because no sooner had he begun than he heard the keys at the door.

  Sorrentino, he thought.

  It turned out to be the cleaning lady. It didn’t matter. Dante had slid the file drawer shut. Then he stepped onto the bedroom balcony—and dropped over the side.

  * * *

  Now Dante watched Sorrentino walk across the lot with the briefcase in his hand. He waited until the green Torino disappeared down the hill, past all the flat-roofed apartments, turning onto the four lanes below, and then he went back up the concrete stairs.

  This time, Dante decided, he would not dally. But he was too late.

  When he went to the file cabinet, it was all but empty. The yellow pads, the files, the folders—they were all gone.

 
Dante searched the apartment. A handful of papers lay scattered on the kitchen counter—old mail, circulars, a statement from the bank. That statement did not suggest that Sorrentino was getting rich on the case.

  Other than this, nothing.

  Dante headed down the hill. Apparently Sorrentino had cleared out his files and taken them with him in his case. The timing seemed suspicious, as if the man had known Dante had been after them. It didn’t seem likely. Regardless, Jensen wouldn’t be happy about it, and Dante needed to see Marilyn. She was feverish one day, better the next, then feverish again, and the doctors kept changing their minds about whether to send her home. Dante had been down earlier but they’d sent him away.

  Meantime, he still hadn’t located Cynthia Nakamura, and the path back to her, to whatever had happened that day of the robbery, seemed to go through this dead poet. He could not see why else Sorrentino would be searching the man out.

  He would go to North Beach, he decided, and pick up the trail there.

  * * *

  Bob Kaufman had been a figure on the streets, once upon a time, up and down Columbus Avenue. Dante himself had some vague memory of the man—thin, shadowlike, skin dark as an old saddle, muttering and gesticulating on the sidewalk in front of the Co-Existence Bagel Shop—though it was hard to know if the memory was genuine or something reconstructed from photos he’d seen in cafés and the stories people had told.

  Bob Kaufman was part of the local lore, one of thousands who’d come to San Francisco after the war, when the shipyards were booming. Jewish father. Black mother. Youngest of fourteen children. He wrote his poems on paper bags. On toilet paper and advertising circulars. On scraps of dissolving tissue that fell from his fingers as he read. Stumbling around in stinking rags, holding forth inside bars full of Italians who did not want to listen.

  The American Rimbaud, the French called him. Genius.

  But the French were far away and did not have to deal with him sleeping in their doorways, or pissing all over their cars.

  Kike. Nigger. Schizoid pain in the ass.

  The locals had their own opinions. During the Vietnam War he had taken a Buddhist vow of silence. Truth was, people would tell you, he’d kept talking the whole time, muttering up and down the street, wailing in the park. He’d done a couple of stretches out at the local laughing farm, wrapped in a white jacket.

  Sorrentino had been all over the Beach, Dante knew, with the picture of Kaufman and Cynthia Nakamura. Stella from the Serafina Café had pointed Dante here, to the Sleepy Wheel, and now the bartender directed him toward the couple at the end of the bar. The woman looked to be in her midfifties, and the man somewhat older—though it may have been that their faces had aged with drink and smoke. Dante ordered a beer.

  “Bob Kaufman,” Dante asked, “he used to hang around here?”

  The woman jostled the man next to her. Her face was bloated and her eyes were blue.

  “Hey, it’s another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “You a tourist? The tourists come in here all the time. Looking for Bob. And Ginsberg. Jack Kerouac. Hey, I tell them—those guys are dead.”

  “Give the guy a break,” said the man.

  “I’m just saying, he looks familiar.”

  The woman looked familiar to Dante, too. Not in a particular way but more generally, with her print skirt and the graying hair tied back in a ponytail. The man wore a vest and wire-rim glasses and a wide-collar shirt that had been fashionable once upon a time. The shirt was frayed, and the couple had a vague odor, as if it were not just the style that had gone unchanged.

  “No,” said Dante. “I’m not a tourist.”

  “I knew Kaufman,” the man said. “I’m a poet myself.” He put his chin out as he spoke, watching Dante, judging his reaction. “I can’t say I knew Bob really well—nobody really did—but he was around here, just like I was around. Like everyone was around.”

  The man introduced himself then. His name was Jack. The woman smirked sadly into her glass.

  “I slept with Bob Kaufman,” the woman said. “Up on Montgomery Street. We fucked all night long.”

  Jack grunted, as if he’d heard this before, and the woman went on smirking. The bar was tucked into a side alley and a hard patch of light fell through the open door but did not penetrate to the interior. On the walls hung San Francisco memorabilia: Hack Escalante, Joe DiMaggio, a 1940s scare photo of a Jap plane circling the city.

  “You a cop?” the woman asked. “The other one who was in here, he was some kind of cop.”

  Jack shot him a glance as well, and Dante felt their suspicion. On the other side of the room, a handful of locals engaged in conversation about politics, about an election that had been rigged, conspiracy theories. Tubes of nuclear fuel smuggled out of Russia via Korea, into Baghdad, as an excuse to go to war.

  “I fucked Bob Kaufman,” she said. “Jack doesn’t believe me, but I did.”

  Jack acted as if he didn’t hear. He had a story he wanted to tell Dante, about the old days. About all the poets who’d been here once upon a time—Ginsberg and Corso and the rest, Ferlinghetti, DiPrima—of all of them, Kaufman was the only one who mattered, Jack said. For Jack, Kaufman’s fingers bled ink, tissue paper still hung from his pockets, he recited not from memory or craft but read from the inside of his eyeballs. All the rest of them, they were pretenders as far as Jack was concerned. In their Nehru jackets, with their flowing robes, their whale poems, you could see them trying to figure out a way to steal it, to copy Kaufman’s jazz rhythms.

  “I fucked Bob Kaufman,” the woman insisted. “Allen Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, I fucked them all.”

  Jack turned to her. “Ginsberg was gay.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying he liked boys. Skinny boys.”

  “You saying I’m fat?”

  “No.”

  “You’re just jealous. That’s always been your problem. But I was skinnier then, I admit. Rail thin. Ginsberg liked them skinny.”

  Of all the boho poets, Ginsberg was the big banana, even Dante knew that. Jack shook his head.

  “Allen liked boys.”

  “My hair was just like it is now. Very blond. And I had big eyes.” Her eyes were still big, and but the blond part, that was an act of imagination. “The poets couldn’t resist me.”

  “You don’t have a dick.”

  “Why should that be a matter of prejudice?”

  “You have tits, but no dick—that would be a problem for Allen.”

  “Allen had tits himself—old-man tits that sagged down. Anyway, it was dark and he fucked me in the ass.”

  “You don’t have a dick,” he repeated.

  “Bob Kaufman did,” she said. “Bob had a big dick.”

  The woman slapped her glass down on the table and the place fell into silence. You could hear the toilet running in the back. After a while the bartender went back to jiggle the handle, but it didn’t do any good, and the men at the other table resumed their talk. Something about the current government and the end of times. About the collusion between the CIA and the Israeli government. How the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center had been piloted by computer drones controlled by the Pentagon. Same way they killed Kennedy.

  “The other man—who was in here the other day?” Dante asked at last. “The one who asked about Kaufman?”

  Jack raised his eyebrows. The woman scowled.

  “I told you,” the woman said. “This one’s a cop, too. Another goddamn cop.”

  “No,” said Dante. “I’m a private investigator.”

  The man hesitated. “He wanted to know about Kaufman, same as you. He wanted to know if I had ever heard him talk about Leland Sanford.”

  The way the man stood, Dante got the impression he knew who Leland Sanford was. Apocryphal founder of the SLA … friend of the Panthers … declared dead in the ruins of the Los Angeles firefight, then resurrected, now vanished … maybe dead, maybe not … Rumors were
that he’d had some kind of correspondence with Kaufman.

  “The woman in the photo, the Japanese woman,” Dante said, “did the man who was here, Sorrentino, did he ask about her?”

  “She wasn’t part of the conversation. Us girls, we were never part of the conversation.”

  “Did you know her?”

  The woman shook her head.

  “Bob wrote a poem about Sanford once,” said Jack. That’s all I know.”

  “Where can I find that poem?”

  “He read it—some reading. But it’s one of those scrap-of-paper things. Those papers that he just let flutter.”

  Jack smiled, as if he knew something he was not telling, though it was hard to tell if the look was purely for effect. Regardless, Dante bought the couple another round. Jack leaned over the bar. That particular reading, it had been at the library, he thought. Or maybe it had been down the coast. There was a guy with an eight-millimeter camera. Maybe he’d captured something. There was a Kaufman collection, down at the local library.

  The woman sighed all of a sudden, a big, weary sigh. “Ginsberg had it wrong. The center of the universe is the vagina,” said the woman. “Not the anus.”

  “That’s not what the Buddhists say.”

  “What do the Buddhists say?”

  Jack shrugged his shoulders. “Buddhists don’t talk. Real Buddhists, they don’t say a damn thing. But Ginsberg, you know, he couldn’t shut up.”

  They were silent for a long moment.

  “Kaufman, he didn’t say anything. We just fucked.”

  “How did you know it was Kaufman?” asked Jack.

  “Haven’t you been paying attention? Kaufman. Not Kaufman. It’s all inside our heads. We create all this shit ourselves.”

  TWENTY

  It was true: Before leaving the apartment that morning, Sorrentino had taken a little more care with himself than usual. Upon rising, he took out a clean polo and newly pressed slacks. He hung his sports jacket on the towel rack as he showered, steaming out the wrinkles, then sat on the edge of his bed and punched out the dents in his felt hat. Instead of going out to breakfast, as he often did, he scrambled himself some eggs and ate in his undershirt, so as not to take the chance of spilling anything on himself. He polished his shoes, then washed the polish from his fingers. He dressed carefully, but when he was done and he examined himself in the mirror—slump shouldered, holding the briefcase by his side—he couldn’t help but feel disconsolate.