Firefly Rain

by Richard Dansky

  And lest I forget, there was the little matter of a stolen car to deal with.

  I looked at the clock over the sink. It read seven thirty. Damn. Too early to call the insurance company. With a frown for the phone, I grabbed a spatula and moved the sausage around in theskillet, then cracked a couple of eggs and let them fry up proper. The bread, of course, was right next to the stove, so I undid the tie and pulled out a piece. It was wheat bread, Mother’s favorite back in the day. Father bought white bread and usually got scolded for it.

  Once again I thought about Carl and whatever odd feelings he might have had for Mother. It was unhealthy, I decided. Unhealthy was the right word for it. He was holding tighter to the torch of her memory than I was, and I was her own flesh and blood. Next time I saw him, I’d have to talk with him about that.

  That was, of course, assuming that I didn’t just haul off and belt him instead.

  I stopped thinking about that long enough to drop the bread into the pan, where it immediately started absorbing the grease and turning itself a nice shade of golden brown. I watched it for a minute, then flipped the bread and slapped the eggs on top of it. The sausage kept sizzling off to the side, which was just fine as far as I was concerned.

  Leaning over the skillet, I told the sausage that you can’t do right by a busy day without a good breakfast. It gave no sign of believing me, but it did keep crisping up nicely, which I took as a good sign. And it was going to be a busy day. That much I’d already decided. I’d call the insurance folks and the police department. I’d explore the house a bit further—maybe go up to the attic to see what the footprints in the dust up there might tell me. And I’d make a call back to Boston to see if I could maybe get myself some reinforcements. Maybe I was letting myself get spooked too easily, but I was starting to get the sense that I’d need someone else lined up on my side.

  The smell of breakfast hit my nostrils just then, along with the scent of the coffee, and they drove any other thoughts out of my mind. I slopped the skillet contents onto a plate and killed the heat, then poured myself a cup of coffee. It came out as black as my mood had been last night, which was about all I could hope for at this hour of the morning. Setting the plate and mug down on the table, I got myself a fork and sat myself down to eat.

  It was a fine little meal, and for a moment I almost forgot about everything else that was going on. The egg yolk dripped down into the toast and mixed with the grease from the sausage to give it a taste that was just short of heaven, and the coffee was strong enough to kick down a door. In short, it was just what I needed, and I ate like a condemned man who knows the rope’s waiting for him in an hour or so.

  A harsh rattle broke my concentration, and I looked up. The wind was whipping raindrops hard against the glass of the kitchen windows. Both the glass panes on the porch side and the windows along the side facing the road were taking some kind of pounding. The rain hit hard, then slid down the glass in thick sheets. Looking through those windows was like looking into a fun-house mirror. Everything you saw was distorted by the water as it found its way down, and old, familiar sights were suddenly new and strange.

  The more I thought about that, the less I liked it, so I pulled the shade down on the door and went back to my breakfast. The house was silent, except for the sound of my knife and fork on the plate and the beating of the rain trying to get in. No voices, no music, no babble. It was something a man could get used to, if he didn’t have other things to do with his life.

  I sighed, thinking of the cell phone I’d never bothered to find in the tall grass. Finding it now wouldn’t do me any damn good, unless I needed an odd-shaped pie weight one of these days. That, I figured, was highly unlikely, so I wrote it off as another of the week’s losses. They’d certainly added up. No more, though. I’d had enough.

  When I finished, I put the dishes in the sink. There’d be plenty of time to do them later, since going out wasn’t looking like much of an option. Instead, I turned back to the table and gently laid the soldiers, one by one, back in their boxes. “Apologies for doing this to you, gents,” I told them when the last one was securely packed away. “But I’d rather get you out of harm’s way. Or at least, out of the kitchen.” Then I took the box, and, cradling it in my arms like it might either explode or start crying, I took it back to my bedroom. There I tucked it into a dresser drawer, safe and sound and hidden under old clothes that no one would ever need to disturb again.

  “There we go,” I announced. “Nobody’s going to be pulling you fellas out of there.” At this point, it occurred to me that most of the conversations I’d had recently had been either with inanimate objects or with myself, and that wasn’t a good sign. It was time to maybe talk to someone else, hopefully someone a little friendlier than Hanratty or Carl.

  When the kitchen clock showed a quarter after nine, I figured I could make my phone call without being considered rude. Now I found myself wishing for the cell phone after all. It had all my numbers in it, and once those numbers had been punched into the cell’s phone book, they’d fled my brain like spooked horses. After a few false starts, I worked the number I wanted out of my memories, or at least a near approximation of it. A little worried that I’d be calling some angry housewife in Dorchester, I pulled the phone off the wall and dialed the digits in.

  It rang twice, or beeped, or whatever people call the noise that cell phones make while the owner’s deciding whether or not you’re worth talking to. Then, suddenly, a familiar voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Jenna?” I said, and I made a silent prayer to whoever watched over fools who lose their telephone books. “This is Logan. How are you?”

  “Mr. Logan, I do declare! It has been an awfully long time since y’all called me.” Her attempt at a Carolina accent was plain awful, and she knew it. So she chuckled, and I grinned to hear the sound.

  Jenna had been with my firm briefly, before judging (correctly) that the heart had gone out of both the business and the owner. She’d jumped ship to a consulting agency in Cambridge a few years back, but she’d stayed in touch. We’d become friends, not lovers—not that folks hadn’t leaped to all sorts of conclusions anyway. I’d been indignant on her behalf. Jenna had just laughed and said that one of us should take it as a compliment, though she wouldn’t say which one.

  That was her great gift to me, you see. It wasn’t that she was whip smart and good looking to boot; she could always make me laugh. Come to think of it, it was a good thing she’d left my firm. A few more weeks of her working on me at the office and I might have regained interest. Lord knows what that might have produced.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” I reminded her when the laughter died down. “Believe it or not, I am interested.”

  “I thought you might be,” she said, and paused. “I’m fine, really. Same old, same old. However, I’m guessing the reason you called is that you’re not so fine. What’s the matter? Miss the big bad city already?”

  “A trifle,” I admitted. “But not enough to give it another shot right now. I think I’m going to be staying here for a while.”

  “A while,” she said, and there was doubt in her voice. “Define ‘a while’ for me.”

  “Well,” I said, stretching the sound out. “At least until I find out what happened to my car.”

  Her voice rose to a near screech. “Your car? Someone stole your car? I didn’t think they were allowed to do that in Winston-Durham, or wherever you are.”

  “Maryfield,” I corrected her, a little more sharply than I’d thought I was going to. “Northwest of Winston-Salem. And yes, they steal cars here, too. That’s not why I’m calling, though.”

  “Well, good. There’s not much I can do about it from here.”

  I grinned again despite myself. “I trust you to work miracles, Jenna. Speaking of which, I’m going to try for one here. How would you feel about taking some time off to experience the simple life? Country breakfasts, nature at its finest, and lousy cell phone rec
eption—what more could you ask for?”

  She hmmed. “An explanation, for one thing. You wanted to get away from everything up here, remember? So why invite me down?”

  “Because I miss your sparkling conversation, and your one-hundred-percent-accurate bullshit detector. How’s that?”

  “Closer,” she admitted, “but still not quite good enough. My time’s valuable, Logan. Out with it.”

  I shrugged, though I knew she couldn’t see me do so. “I need someone,” I said. “I need someone down here whom I can trust, and who will tell me if I’ve been sniffing too much fresh air and seeing things as a result. I’m spooked, Jenna, spooked bad, and I need someone to watch my back until I get my head screwed back on straight.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. For a moment, I was afraid she’d hung up. Then, softer, I heard her voice, all the wisecrack drained out of it. “You’re talking like a native again. That’s spooking me, Logan. What the hell is going on?”

  So I told her. I told her about Carl and the missing car and my run-in with Maryfield’s finest. She sputtered like a half-opened fire hydrant when I told her that bit, and threatened to send a good lawyer down to me instead.

  She stopped sputtering when I told her about the fireflies and the soldiers. But Mother and Father’s bed? I didn’t tell her about that. There’d be a time and a place for that, if it came to it, but the secrets of my parents’ marriage bed weren’t for sharing. At least, not yet.

  “So,” she said when I finally finished. “Either you’ve gone completely off your rocker or spooked is an understatement.”

  “I won’t venture a guess,” I replied. “All I know is that only a fool doesn’t ask for help when he sees a problem too big for him, and right now this is looking too big for me. I’m alone, I’m isolated, and I don’t know the lay of the land anymore. And that’s leaving out all the spooky stuff. Hell, I’ll take on a million fireflies acting weird and lock the tin soldiers in the attic and be just fine if I can get the human side of this straightened out.”

  “That’s not it,” Jenna said decisively.

  “It’s not?” I blinked with surprise.

  “Nope. You just want me down there to deal with that lady cop. She scares the hell out of you, doesn’t she?”

  “She’s one impressive woman,” I confessed. “But honestly, I think if push came to shove, I could probably handle Officer Hanratty on my own. Slip a Mickey Finn in her Krispy Kremes or something. I’m clever that way.”

  Now it was Jenna’s turn to laugh. “Attaboy, Logan. Keep thinking like that, and you’ll have those local yokels wrapped around your finger in no time.”

  I felt a sudden lurch of worry at her words. “Does that mean you’re not coming?”

  “Easy, Logan. Let me look at my schedule, see what’s coming up, and maybe you’ll get a visitor.” I started to tell her how great that was, but she hushed me. “No promises, mind you. Five minutes from now I may decide you’re on a moonshine bender and forget the whole thing.”

  “You’re not the forgetting type,” I said, and I was deadly serious. “Call me when you know what you’re doing.”

  “I will,” she promised. “Find that cell phone, though. I don’t want to think about you being at the mercy of country phone wiring.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, and I threw her a salute across the miles.

  “Miss,” she said, and she hung up on me.

  “Missed indeed,” I told the phone, and I hung up myself.

  nine

  I drank another cup of coffee, then I dialed up my auto insurance company. Ten minutes of punching in my policy number and the pound sign followed, until I finally managed to convince the computer on the other end that I needed to talk to a human being of one sort or another.

  “Good morning, how can I help you?” said the voice of the chipper young thing I finally got connected to. I told her she could help me by processing my claim for a stolen car, but all that inspired was the tap-tap-tapping of some computer keys.

  “Hmm,” she said after a while. “It says here, Mr. Logan, that we haven’t received the police report on the theft.”

  “I asked them to send it,” I said, thinking that I probably had done so at some point. “You mean to tell me they didn’t?”

  The voice sounded a bit less perky now, and a little irritated. I could only imagine what she was thinking: Nine thirty in the morning and already I got myself a crazy. But she tried to keep it out of her voice. “They were supposed to give you a copy of the report, Mr. Logan, and you were supposed to send it to us. Have you done so?”

  “No,” I admitted, even as I started pacing in slow circles around the kitchen. “And that would be because they didn’t give me a copy of the report.”

  “Then technically,” she said, and there was just a hint of righteous indignation seasoning her words, “the car isn’t legally considered stolen, and there’s not much we can do about it.”

  “But—,” I started, but she interrupted me.

  “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do anything without a police report.” No doubt about it now; her voice was shot through with smug. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “You have no idea,” I told her, and I hung up. “If that’s what my premiums were going for,” I said out loud, “I’ve been wasting my money for years.” No one chuckled to approve of my witticism, but no one booed, either, and that was as good as a man could hope for.

  I turned to pour myself another cup of coffee, but I never made it that far. Outside, I could hear the sound of an approaching car splashing up the road, and I went to the window to see who was fool enough to try to drive in the torrent that was coming down.

  The first thing Father taught me when I was learning to drive was the difference between gas and brake. The second was not to try to drive our road in the rain. In theory, the gravel was supposed to hold the road surface together, even when rain came down in solid sheets like a river falling from heaven. In truth, it didn’t do the job quite so much. The gravel would just sink into the mud or get itself spit up by tires, and the end result was that the rain turned the road into a rutted swamp in no time flat. A downpour like this was liable to turn the road into quicksand, and I’d seen more than one truck bogged down in what its driver swore had been solid roadbed a minute before.

  Smart people stayed home when it rained in Maryfield, at least those of us who lived out past where the pavement ended. Smart people sure as hell didn’t drive out this way when the rain was coming down in black sheets and the wind was howling like even it wanted to come inside and hide. Even the bravest usually gave up after a while, pulling over and waiting for the storm to blow itself out. Not this fool, though, or so it seemed.

  I lifted up the shade and peered out into the morning. It was dark, so dark a man could be forgiven for thinking the sun hadn’t properly come up yet. I wanted to see who was foolish enough to be out on a morning like this; who was unfortunate enough to need to be on the road while I was safe and snug inside.

  The car’s headlights cut through the dark as it came up the road toward the house. The rain was so thick that it looked like fog, the beams of the headlights showing up distinctly against the storm. Whoever it was, they were moving fast, and into the teeth of the storm.

  The car crested the slight hill that marked the end of Tolliver property and moved into view. For a second I couldn’t see its outline or its shape because of the rain. Then, suddenly, the patter of the drops on the roof slowed and it was almost clear, like God had wiped clean the glass of the world so for a moment all His creatures could see plainly. I squinted out at the road, looking to see if I could make out the car, maybe get a look at the unlucky bastard who was driving.

  It was silver; that much I could see. And the shape, well, the shape reminded me of something.

  Ten seconds later, as it roared past the driveway on its closest approach, my brain put two and two together and got an answer it didn’t like.
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  Unless there was another silver Audi loose in the hinterlands of Cackalacky, that was my car out there, kicking up gouts of water as it charged through the puddles on the road. That was my car doing an ungodly rate of speed down a poor excuse for a dirt road and through a thunderstorm that promised tornadoes or worse.

  “Motherfucker!” was the first word out of my mouth, and then my jaw just hung open. I thought for a second about calling the police to tell them, but I could already hear the words coming down the other end of the line. “Well, sir, are you sure it’s your car? Lots of cars look alike in the rain, after all.” And then in the background I’d hear Hanratty’s laugh, like something out of a Disney cartoon, and a click as the line went dead.

  Besides, even in a best-case scenario, the car would be long gone by the time anyone from town got here, sirens flashing or no.

  Outside, the timbre of the engine’s growl changed. I peeked through the blinds. The car had slowed to a crawl right in front of the house. It was barely moving as it sat there taunting me.

  I saw red. I’m not proud of it, but that’s what happened. Everything in my brain above caveman level just locked itself in a box and hid, and all that was left was an angry monkey saying, “Son of a bitch, that thing’s mine!”

  I grabbed my house key, yanked the door open, and pelted out into the rain. The sound the door made slamming shut behind me was lost in the storm as I pounded down those steps and up the drive.

  Whoever was in the car saw me. The car, mud splashed up dark on its silver sides, rolled forward at a slow pace, just faster than a man could walk.

  I ran. Got within ten feet of the bumper. Reached out like I was going to fling myself onto the trunk.

  The car sped up. With a snort, it jumped forward and put maybe another fifty feet between me and the license plate. Then, it slowed. Sat there. Waited.