The Rainy Season

by James P. Blaylock

  THE FIRST RAIN started to fall when she was ten miles out of Shiprock, and as she climbed into higher elevations, the rain turned to sleet, so that the wipers pushed aside little heaps of slush. Mesa Verde would be out of the question. Her desire to see it again was mostly nostalgia anyway. She and Al had visited the park on their last road trip, but he’d had a hard time with the elevation, with getting enough air into his lungs, and they had only made an overnight stay. Ignorance had been bliss, though: they hadn’t any idea back then that there was anything really wrong with Al except for his smoking.

  He had died of lung cancer in ’88, the same year that Marianne moved into the house in Austin, and Mrs. Darwin would admit that it was Marianne who had kept her afloat in those hard months. Later, when Marianne’s husband died, it was Mrs. Darwin who was a comfort to her. There had been a give and take, a true bonding during that time, although it was a shame that Marianne had fallen into an extended period of depression. The depression had changed her. Richard, Marianne’s husband, had died in a helicopter crash off South Padre Island in 1989. It wasn’t until after his death that Marianne had found out about Richard’s second family, about the woman in Brownsville whom he had been living with off and on. He’d had two children by this other woman: military travel had been good cover for a double life. Betsy was too young to have known him well, thank God, too young to miss him, and baby Betsy had stayed with Mrs. Darwin when Marianne had driven down to Corpus Christi for Richard’s funeral.

  Marianne, bless her soul anyway, had been an incompetent mother from then on because of the chronic depression. Incompetent—that was the only way to put it. The newspapers are full of terrible stories of mothers who kill or abandon their babies, and Mrs. Darwin lived in fear of that tragedy for months on end, during the worst of Marianne’s depression. Even when the depression cycled out of its downturn and Marianne could smile again and go back to work, there was always the knowledge that the sickness lurked like a shadow behind some door in her mind, waiting to step out into the open again and reclaim her, turn her life into a living hell. People who weren’t familiar with the ravages of depression didn’t understand it in the slightest. They couldn’t imagine the darkness that it brought. It was quite literally better to be dead. Mrs. Darwin could even remember writing down a Dr. Kevorkian hotline number from a late-night radio talk show. Depression could be a terminal illness prolonged through the years. It was death in life, much worse than no life at all.

  Worse yet, it was a crime against children if a child’s parents were afflicted. If there were two parents, and one of them was sane, then the child could be carried through the worst times. Mrs. Darwin had functioned as the sane parent. She had done the carrying. From the first, she had been dedicated to Betsy because Marianne was broken and Betsy was not. You didn’t let the unbroken thing drop to the floor because you were trying to juggle the pieces of the thing that was already broken.

  She slowed down coming into Shiprock and pulled off the highway at the Chumash Motor Hotel, parking in front of the office under an overhang. The air outside the car struck her like a blizzard, and she hurried into the office, pulling her coat tight around her. There were plenty of rooms—not many travelers at this time of the year—but they wouldn’t give her the seniors’ discount and the Triple A discount, which would have saved her 25 percent. No amount of reasoning with the clerk would make him see that she was right in asking for the double discount. Nowhere in their literature did they say that a guest couldn’t ask for both discounts. When she walked back out to the car she was fuming: the clerk’s ignorance had come close to ruining the evening for her, and she was determined to write a letter to the hotel management to complain. She drove across to the lot and parked in front of her room, then climbed out of the car and opened the trunk.

  The sleet had let up, and she stood for a moment looking at the little shrine she had put together in the trunk of the Honda: Betsy memorabilia. She hadn’t wanted to leave it at home, because she had no real idea what lay ahead of her, when or how she would go home again, if ever. Everyone who had ever really mattered to her had been taken away from her, and there was nothing left for her in Austin. She didn’t harbor any more ill feeling for Phil Ainsworth than she did for the cancer that had taken Al. There wasn’t a lot of difference between the two; both Phil and the cancer had done their best to destroy her life. One thing was true, though: unlike Al, Betsy wasn’t dead. And unlike cancer, Phil Ainsworth didn’t pack enough wallop to deliver a mortal blow.

  The inside of the trunk was virtually covered with photographs, school papers, artwork, and certificates, including the odds and ends that she had offered to Phil and that he hadn’t wanted. Making him that offering had hurt, but it had been a necessary test. She had thought that he would relish these few elements of Betsy’s past, but the man had been indifferent to them. His loss was Mrs. Darwin’s gain, although she was afraid that it would prove to be Betsy’s loss, too, in the long run, because a man who didn’t care about a child’s past didn’t care about her future either.

  Most of the photographs in the trunk were among the things that she had taken out of Marianne’s effects in the now-abandoned house. She had found a box of photos and papers in the closet that Betsy probably hadn’t known about and that Phil hadn’t bothered to look for. There was always a box of photos—ready to go in case of fire. She had boxed up Betsy’s things, just as she had promised Phil, but she had put them temporarily into storage. And then, in order to speed things up, she had contracted with an elderly couple who did estate sales to sell the car and the rest of Marianne’s things. They paid her an advance, took twenty percent of the sale, and would leave a cashier’s check for the rest in her post-office box.

  So Austin was finished. Everything that had been of value to her had moved west. She shut the trunk and went inside, taking her overnight bag, the Fig Newtons, and a framed photo of Betsy with her. Sitting on the bed, she studied the hotel phone instructions, then picked up the receiver and pressed the number for an outside line, following it with Phil’s number in California. She wondered what she would do if Betsy herself answered—but that would be unlikely; Betsy wouldn’t be comfortable enough in Phil’s home to answer the telephone. She waited through four rings, her heart fluttering, before Phil picked up the receiver on the other end.

  When he said “hello,” she remained silent, her hand pressed over the mouthpiece to deaden all sound, listening to the empty air that occupied the long miles between them. He didn’t say anything more, but listened every bit as carefully as she. After a moment she hung up. And then, half an hour later, her hair wet from the shower, she called again. This time he hung up quicker, which meant he was already growing irritated by the calls. Good for him. He deserved a share of the grief.

  She opened her overnight bag and took out a tin box with a velvet bag inside. She upended the bag, letting a plaster of paris angel slide out into her hand. It was badly glazed—painted, rather—a dime-store gimcrack. Idly, staring at the turned-off television screen, she snapped one of the wings off the figure, then snapped off the other one. Then she slid the pieces back into the bag along with the wingless angel.

  When she called his house the third time she kept her hand off the receiver so that he could hear her breathing, and when he hung up, she called straight back. This time she got a busy signal, and the same thing twenty minutes later. She laughed softly to herself: he had taken the phone off the hook to discourage her! That wouldn’t last forever.

  34

  PHIL WAS BOTH relieved and slightly disappointed to find that it wasn’t Elizabeth standing on the porch after all. It was an old man, heavyset, in overalls and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had a worn-out painter’s cap on his head, flecked with paint. There was a truck in the driveway, an old blue Chevy with a camper shell that had seen a lot of hard use in its prime, and it wasn’t in its prime anymore. Whoever the man was, he wasn’t a salesman.

  “What can I do for you
?” Phil asked him.

  “You wanted a dowser.”

  He had phrased it as a statement rather than a question. The phrase “dowsing for bones” leaped into Phil’s mind. His late-night conversation with the priest seemed almost like a dream to him now. One way or another, he hadn’t expected anything to happen this quickly.

  “Did someone call you?” Phil asked

  “My wife took the call. This is the address she wrote down.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is,” Phil said. “I’m Phil Ainsworth, by the way.”

  “Dudley Lewis. Pleased to meet you. People call me Uncle Dudley. I’m a member of the American Society of Dowsers.” He handed Phil a business card, which reiterated what he’d just said and which had a picture of a forked stick lying across an open hand.

  Phil stepped out onto the front porch and shut the door behind him. “I know this sounds crazy,” he said, “but a friend of mine suggested that I should get a dowser. It wasn’t really my idea. I guess this friend of mine must have called.”

  “That’s happened before in cases like this. Most of the time it’s the church, a priest usually, although every once in a while I get a call from the police. One way or another, I charge just like the plumber, fifty dollars an hour plus an hour travel time, minimum, out here and back. So there’s a fifty-dollar charge already whether I take out my instrument or leave it in the truck.”

  “I guess I’m paying?” Phil asked. This was a surprise.

  “I think you can collect at the other end,” the man told him. “Do I take out the instrument?”

  “Let’s take out the instrument,” Phil said, following him down the porch stairs and out the driveway to the pickup truck. His “instrument” turned out to be the predictable forked stick, eighteen inches long or so, wrapped in a canvas flour bag and laid into a fishing tackle box.

  “I like fruitwood for a dowser,” Dudley told him, showing him the stick. “Hard fruitwood. It’s got to dry out right. You don’t want it to crack or check when it’s dry. What I do is dip the cut ends in wax, then bury the stick in manure for two years. Dries out slow and even that way, with a lot of combustion heat. I dry a dozen at a time, and maybe I get one or two good wands out of the dozen. I see you’ve got a grove of avocado here. That’s not dense enough to make a wand. Walnut’s no good, either. Too pulpy. Hold out your index finger, palm up.”

  Phil held his hand out, standing by the open door of the truck. Dudley laid the fork of the wand across Phil’s knuckle, and the wand balanced there.

  “That kind of balance is hard to find. You think you’ve got it when you cut a green piece, but then when it’s dry, everything’s changed. You get to where you can feel it, though, even when the wood’s green. You sense it, if you follow me. If the wand doesn’t have balance, you can’t trust it. Some dowsers use green wood and then throw it away, but I like a dry wand. I’ve used this one for years.”

  Phil wondered whether he shouldn’t call Betsy out here, introduce her to Uncle Dudley. She’d get a kick out of all this dowsing talk. He decided against it, though, simply because he didn’t know what this would turn into.

  “Lead the way,” Dudley told him, taking the wand, and Phil walked up past the carriage house, then between the house and the tower toward the well.

  “I bet you run into people with all kinds of ideas about dowsing,” Phil said. “Lots of unbelievers?”

  “People don’t know what they believe,” Dudley said. “Even the skeptics are willing to take a look. I can tell you that when they see it work, they mostly always believe it. Then there’s those who believe in all kinds of nonsense about it. You still read in magazines about how people dowse for treasure, for instance.”

  “People ask you to do that?”

  “Sure they do. I’m happy to help. Only I don’t bring a dowsing wand, I bring a metal detector.” He stopped talking and looked up at the water tower, then across at the well. “Let’s see what happens here,” he said, and he held the two forked sticks loosely in his hands for a moment, looking at nothing, as if he were listening for something. “There you go. You see that? The way the stick wants to fall?”

  The straight end of the stick, quivering like a fishing bobber, seemed to be straining toward the earth, although Dudley apparently wasn’t moving his hands or wrists. “This is all river bottom, so it’s odds-on that there’s water under here. You could dig a well pretty nearly anywhere and hit water, probably a couple of feet lower than the elevation of the creek.”

  Phil heard the sound of piano music suddenly, and it took him a moment to realize that it was Betsy playing. The piano hadn’t been played in years, not since Marianne had played it when they were high school students. Probably it was out of tune, although Phil couldn’t tell one way or another, since his own ear for music was perpetually out of tune itself. Marianne could play “Heart and Soul” from end to end, and “Down at Papa Joe’s,” but what Betsy was playing was something else. He recognized the melody from an old pop song. “What is that?”

  “Piano, I think.”

  “No, I mean the song. I can’t think of the name of the song.”

  “That’s Bach. My wife plays. Used to give lessons.”

  “That’s my niece playing. The piano’s probably out of tune after all these years.”

  Dudley shrugged. “Like most things,” he said. “But if you’re far enough away, you can’t tell. Sounds good to me. You want to give it a try?” Dudley asked him, holding out the wand.

  Phil took it from him and held it in his hands as if he were holding the reins of a horse. “You hold it loose like this?”

  “I do, because I can tell more from it. If you grip it too hard, you lose sensitivity. It doesn’t really matter, though, in a place like this, where there’s obviously groundwater. You could hold the wand with a pair of vice grips, and if there was enough attraction it would twist the bark right off the stick. I’ve done it.”

  “I can feel it dipping,” Phil said. The wand seemed to be declining, as if the end were weighted.

  “That’s the stick working. When you have enough experience with it, you can tell a lot from it. Some people can’t dowse at all. Most of them don’t believe in it, of course, which is a big part of the reason they can’t dowse. You’ve got to be open to it. Dowsing’s got a history that goes back to China over four thousand years ago. Most of the science was worked out by Jesuit priests, though, in the fourteen or fifteen hundreds, mainly in France.”

  “Well this is really weird,” Phil said. He held on more tightly now, purposefully working against the wand, which was compelled downward anyway, as if by focused gravity.

  “Do you believe in ghosts, Mr. Ainsworth?”

  The question took him by surprise, and he had to think about it for a moment. “What do you mean, believe?” The straining of the wand felt suddenly unsettling to him, and he handed it back to Dudley.

  “I don’t mean do you know what they are; I mean do you think something’s going on there? Or do you think everyone who says so is just a crackpot?”

  “I think something’s going on, I guess.”

  “Well, one of the interesting things,” Dudley told him, wandering out toward the well with the dowsing wand in his hand, “is that there’s some kind of connection between water and ghosts. I guess I mean to say between dowsing and ghosts. You see, that’s what the church is interested in. The mission out at Capistrano’s been dowsing these foothills for years, and you’d be surprised where some of the bodies at the cemetery out there came from. There’s plenty of times when a dowser has found a body buried alongside underground water. It’s hard to tell whether you’ve got water or a dead man when the wand gets sensitive, but after you’ve found a few corpses, you start to get the feel for it, right through the bark. I’m not always right about it, but I’ve been right often enough so that if you’ve got a spade around here, you might as well fetch it out. A corpse is never buried deep, not below six feet or so.”

  35

&nb
sp; TIRED OF PLAYING the piano, Betsy stood in the shadows near the back window of the side porch, watching Uncle Phil and the old man out by the well. Phil was digging a hole, and the old man was watching him. She took a small flashlight out of her book bag and switched it on, shining the light down into a dark corner to see if it was bright enough. The tower windows were hazed with dust; inside it would probably be dark. …

  She stepped out through the screen door now, easing it shut behind her, and walked straight out onto the lawn, watching for any sign of the two men, who were entirely out of sight behind the tower now. She counted her steps—thirteen to the tower door—and without hesitation she turned the rusty knob and swung the door open, and in an instant she was inside, easing the door shut behind her. She stood still, listening to the scrape of the shoveling behind the wall, and she heard one of the two of them say something and the other one laugh, although she couldn’t distinguish between their muffled voices.

  There was a little open shed outside the window, and the roof of that shed shaded the window itself, although there was enough hazy sunlight shining through so that she didn’t need the flashlight. Standing just inside the door, she was still safely out of sight, but she would have to be careful when moving around the room. She looked around now, taking in the junk that lay on the floor. Along one wall there was a sort of bench made of slats of wood and with flowerpots lying on it, mostly broken. The floor beneath the bench was dirty with spilled potting soil, and there were some old trowels hanging from nails driven into the wooden beams that framed the wall, and there was the smell of musty dirt and old wood.

  But there was something more than that on the still air of the tower, something curiously familiar—the sense that she stood at the very edge of someone else’s mind, exactly what she felt at the moment that her hand enclosed the inkwell. She watched dust motes drifting just inside the windowpanes, waiting for something more, recalling the time she had gone to an old cemetery at home and felt this same kind of presence on the evening wind.