The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  “You know it’s crazy not to bring the umbrellas,” Lana told him as they started off down the sidewalk.

  “I hope so.”

  “I don’t mind carrying one. The sky’s really getting dark.”

  “Not half dark enough to suit me,” Harper said. “Look, our shadows are still visible.” A moment later, their shadows disappeared as if the sky were fixing to prove him wrong. A small breeze lifted a scattering of leaves and blew them down the street. They were nearing the corner now, and in another minute the house would be out of sight behind them. As soon as it was, Lana’s obsession with umbrellas would fade. “Waffles sound good,” he said, distracting her with food talk. “Waffles and a cup of coffee.”

  “Decaf?” she asked, looking sideways at him.

  “Sure,” he said grudgingly. He used to be able to drink coffee all day between naps, but nowadays things were different, and he hated lying awake at night, although as often as not he lay awake anyway.

  “Here it comes,” she said.

  “What?” He looked down the street, but it was empty of cars.

  “The rain. I just felt a drop.”

  “It’s just a teaser to work up your anticipation. Then it’ll back off and let you down again.” They walked under the foliage of a big, leafy camphor tree. “Dry as a bone,” he said, but he saw drops of rain on the exposed sidewalk ahead.

  “It’s going to pour,” she said. “Let’s hurry.”

  They picked up the pace, but he was damned if he was going to run. Hosmer’s was two blocks away, at the edge of the downtown—no way they’d drown between here and there even if the alleged storm got serious, which wasn’t likely. The drops were large, but were widely spaced. He looked up and a big drop hit him in the eye. “Go ahead,” he muttered.

  “What?” Lana asked.

  “I said that we should go ahead and walk between the drops. That’s how the Zen masters stay dry.”

  “You walk between them. I’ll go get us a table.” Lana started jogging on ahead, pulling up the hood on her sweatshirt. When she was fifteen feet away, she turned around and looked back at him, slightly incredulous now. “Are you coming?”

  “I’ll be there,” he said, the rain picking up. “Get that table!” She turned around again and jogged off without another word. “Out on the patio!” he shouted after her, laughing out loud. He forced himself to walk at a comfortable pace, and by the time he got to the restaurant his shirt was soaked through and his hair was plastered to his head. Lana sat at a table in the window, watching him come up. She looked doubtful, so he smiled at her to show that he had a sense of humor about it all. He brushed his hair back with his fingers and picked up the menu just as the waiter appeared carrying two cups of decaf.

  Hosmer’s was full, and there was a pleasant clamor of noise and the smell of bacon and coffee. For a couple of minutes they watched it rain, drinking the hot coffee and waiting for their waffles. It wasn’t a downpour by any means, but it might be the beginning of something. Harper realized again how much he loved the rain, especially when he was inside watching it fall. He winked at his reflection in the glass. “Chalk one up for me,” he said, half to himself.

  “You’re such a skeptic,” Lana said. “It’s part of that thing you have for instant gratification.”

  “I’ll be gratified if the rain keeps it up for an hour. You see how it’s still dry under the tree out there on the curb? According to the Farmers Almanac it’s not measurable rain until it gets down past the foliage. Same with the cars parked on the street. The rainwater’s got to get the street wet enough so that it flows under the cars—no dry spots. Otherwise it means nothing.”

  The waffles arrived and they started in on them. Several minutes passed before Harper looked out at the street again, but by this time the rain had stopped. The sidewalk under the curb tree was dry and getting drier. They paid the check and set out for home. Already it was warming up, enough so that Lana took off her sweatshirt and tied it around her waist. The breeze had fallen off, and the clouds were breaking up like a retreating army, easily provoked and easily defeated. Despite Harper’s elevated mood in the café, he couldn’t find much satisfaction in his small victory.

  Inside the house again he felt restless, as if the morning were waiting for him to act, and yet he didn’t have the energy to do anything but sit in a chair. In the old days he would have been out in the garage early, accomplishing things, but he had lost most of his jazz in that regard, and anyway he couldn’t think of anything that wanted doing. Lana had started up with the photos again, and she glanced up at him and smiled. He could pitch in and give her a hand, of course, if only for the sake of his image, but the very idea of it made him impatient. He would look through the album later, after Lana had sorted out the good photos.

  He left her to her work and went out to cultivate the tomatoes, grabbing a little pointy-tipped hoe out of the garden shed. He cut out the scattered weeds and dragged the loose soil into dams around the plants, which had set on plenty of blooms. Because of the morning’s rain, the ground appeared to be wet, but right below the surface it was dry. The clouds were returning—unenthusiastically, it seemed to Harper. Lightning flickered out over the mountains, too far away for him to hear any thunder, a dumb show of an impotent storm. He went to the spigot, turned on the water, and dragged the garden hose back over to the vines, flooding the well around each plant, picturing in his mind the droplets soaking in around the roots, drawn upward through the stems and out into the leaves, the blossoms swelling, the plants noisy with growth.

  He made a circuit of the back yard then, watering the flowerbeds heavily, washing the dust off the garage siding and squirting down the walkway. He took a couple of big gulps of hose water, tasting the vinyl in it, and thought about trying to catch raindrops in his mouth when he was a kid. He gave the sky an appraising look, recalling bits from the Farmers Almanac—how it had been in the old days when the weather was real weather, when rain fell at the rate of three inches a day and the drops were the size of fifty cent pieces. He returned to the tomatoes to flood the wells again, and then he trained the hose at the sky, so that the water fell back down in big drops, a share of them blowing back in the breeze, showering his face and shoulders, soaking his shoes.

  Lana came out onto the back porch, where she stood watching him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that she was smiling, as if she were watching a child playing in the sprinklers. So what? he thought. This wasn’t her fight; she couldn’t be expected to understand it. He quit spraying the sky, though, and was surprised to find that the shower hadn’t stopped. It was raining again, as if he had drawn the rain out of the clouds with the hose water.

  “I was thinking of making some popcorn,” Lana said to him.

  He went over to the spigot to crank off the water and then ducked up under the porch roof. “I was making sure the tomatoes got their fair share,” he said. “If they get short-changed now, the blooms won’t stick.”

  She nodded. “What about the popcorn? Road to Singapore starts in about ten minutes. Maybe you could call some sort of truce with Mother Nature for a couple of hours.”

  “Actually, I just called her bluff,” he said, looking out at the rain. “But I’ll give her some time to play her hand.”

  “I’ll get out the Whirley-Pop,” she said. “You’re in charge of the Dr Pepper.”

  When Lana came out of the kitchen with the bowl of popcorn, he was standing at the window, dressed in a dry shirt, looking out at a mere drizzle.

  “So it was a bluff?” she asked, turning on the television.

  “An inept bluff. I was more convincing with the damned hose.” He smiled at her to show that it was all in good fun, and then helped himself to the popcorn.

  * * *

  Later they ate enchiladas in front of the television, watching the weatherman yammer away, the doppler radar illuminating green patches on the map, out against the foothills. Supposedly there were clouds coming in off the ocean and a high s
urf advisory. Waterspouts had appeared off the coast and given everyone a thrill before they spun themselves apart. A film clip started up now, showing a cloudburst out in the desert, a real gullywasher. A family camping along the Mojave River had been forced to run for high ground when their gear was swept away. The husband had chased after the Styrofoam ice chest, though, wading out into the flood, where he had lost his footing and gone under. If it weren’t for the ice chest, which had kept him afloat, he’d be swimming with the fishes now. His wife and three children stood by, the kids mugging for the camera, the wife looking peeved. “No way it was going to get my beer,” the man said.

  “Good man,” Harper said to the screen.

  “Low IQ,” Lana said. “Maybe his wife looks angry because he didn’t drown.”

  The weatherman promised more rain for tonight and tomorrow, virtually certain. “More?” Harper said. “More than what? What he means is more of the same.” Lana glanced at him doubtfully, as if he might get worked up and throw his fork at the screen. “I’ll pull up the drawbridge,” he said tiredly, getting up and heading toward the front door. He flipped on the porch light as he did every evening, and then stepped outside and picked up the rain gauge from the seat of the chair. He held it up so that the sky could get a good look at its pitifully empty condition, and then tossed it onto the chair again. That was it for the rain gauge. He’d had it with the mockery. He went back into the house, shut and locked the door, and closed the blinds.

  * * *

  As usual, Harper awoke in the early morning twilight, listening for something—wind or rain, whatever had disturbed his sleep, but the room was ghostly quiet. After a moment he heard the lonesome wail of a train whistle in the west, the sound falling away and then resuming again until it dwindled in the distance, heading for parts unknown. He found that he was already wide-awake, his mind revolving around matters of unfinished business.

  He climbed out of bed quietly, went around and pulled the blanket up over Lana’s shoulder, and picked up his pants from the chair. After a moment’s thought he dropped them again and stepped across to the dresser where he pulled out his swimsuit and a t-shirt. In the kitchen he took the canister of decaf out of the cupboard, stood looking at it for a moment, and then put it back. He rooted around in the freezer for authentic coffee, which these days they kept mainly for company. He spooned plenty of it into the cone filter and watched the boiling water sink through it, the aroma filling the room. It looked heavy, like used crankcase oil. “That’s the stuff,” he said, carrying the mug through the living room and out onto the porch. It was too cool outside for swim trunks and a t-shirt, but he didn’t give a damn.

  The morning sky was a clutter of unmoving clouds. Apparently they were waiting for him. He raised his coffee cup in a salute, feeling the wind through his shirt and the cold concrete on the soles of his feet. He set the mug down and walked along the carport to the garage, where he hauled out a bucket, carwash soap, a sponge, and a couple of terrycloth towels. The problem with pretend rain, among other things, was that it merely splashed the dirt around on a car’s finish, magnifying the grime. That’s what yesterday’s contemptible sprinkles had amounted to—dirt splashers.

  Out front again, he turned on the hose and filled the bucket with suds, then played the water over the grill and bumper, softening up the dead bugs and road grime before going on to spray the wheels and the paint. While the car soaked, he drank his coffee and watered the patches of lawn that the sprinklers didn’t quite reach. Then he went after the car again, really making a job of it. He had the whole day in front of him. There was no reason he couldn’t wash and polish both the cars and still be finished by lunchtime.

  When it started to rain, he didn’t look up, but simply kept working, soaping down the finish with the sponge now. The rain was like an irritating fly: if you couldn’t swat it, then it was better to ignore it. Sooner or later it would get bored and go away. He rinsed the hood and squirted the whole shebang down again, then grabbed the soapy sponge, opened the car door, and stepped up onto the floorboard in order to reach far enough over the top of the car to get the roof. It was a real stretch, but on tiptoe he could just make it halfway.

  Raindrops bounced into his face, and he squinted his eyes, working away with the sponge. There was a bright flash of lightning, close enough to be reflected in the paint, and then the crack of thunder—loud, but he was expecting it, and he didn’t give the storm the satisfaction of reacting to it. “Flash in the pan,” he muttered, reaching far out with the sponge now, stabbing at a distant spot of dirt that lay on the other side of the imaginary equator. In that moment, while he was off balance and leaning forward on one wet foot, a deluge of water fell from the sky and struck him square in the middle of the back. His foot slipped downward, he cracked his chin on the edge of the car roof, and quicker than seemed possible he found himself on his back on the lawn, lying in a puddle of soapy water that had spilled out of the bucket. The church bells down the street began to chime, as if counting him out, and he hurriedly climbed to his feet, shrugging his shoulders and neck to make sure that he hadn’t crushed any vertebrae. His thigh hurt like hell where he had sat down hard on the edge of the bucket, but other than that he was okay.

  “That was it?” he said to the clouds. Already the rain seemed to be letting up.

  “Are you all right?” Lana asked from behind him. She stood on the porch in her bathrobe.

  He waved the sponge at her. “No harm, no foul,” he said, wondering how long she had been standing there. “Did you see what hit me?”

  “It looked like a big crystal ball. It just fell out of the sky.”

  “One big drop?”

  “As big as your head. Maybe you should give this up and come inside, Harper. It’s no joke, with the lighting and all.”

  “The best time to wash a car is in the rain,” he told her. “It loosens up the dirt and helps rinse away the hard water deposits.”

  She nodded, as if this made perfect sense. “They usually close down the carwash on rainy days, too,” she said, “so you’ve got no choice, I guess. You’ve got to do it yourself or it won’t get done.”

  “That’s a hell of a good point,” he told her, going after the trunk with the sponge. He wondered what she was up to. Irony?

  “Maybe you should wear your old wetsuit,” she said. “You’d be warmer.”

  For a moment he actually considered the wetsuit. Probably Lana was kidding, but it made perfect sense, really, except that it would take him an hour to find it. It was part of the mothballed fleet of old stuff hidden away in the garage—his youth, really, packed into a couple of cardboard cartons. He hadn’t looked at it in fifteen years, since the last time he had gotten the wild idea of going to the beach. The wild idea, he thought, picking up the hose, and there came into his mind a picture of the man on last night’s news, leaping into the river to save an ice chest full of beer.

  Lana went back inside and shut the door, probably having given up on him. As if on cue, Sharon came out after the Times, hurrying along down her driveway. Doc stood on the side porch in his pajamas. He spotted Harper out on the lawn, barefoot in his swim trunks and soaked t-shirt. He noted the hose and the carwash debris, and waved heartily, his face lighting up. Harper waved back with the hose, swinging it like a lariat, ducking away when a loop of water splashed across him. The boy laughed out loud and ran out into the rain, dancing a jig on the driveway, his face turned toward the sky, his mouth open. Sharon hustled him back onto the porch, giving Harper an angry look, as if he were some kind of rain-drunk pied piper. The boy knew the score, though. Harper had seen it in his eyes.

  Lana came outside again, wearing a bathing suit and flip-flops, her hair pinned up. She waved cheerfully at Sharon, who gaped at her, decided to say nothing, and hauled Doc into the house before he was infected with their madness. Harper gaped at Lana, too.

  “Now it’s my car’s turn,” she said, picking up the bucket and squirting fresh soap into it. “Don’t
just stand there.” She grabbed the hose and started to fill the bucket. The rain came down harder now, getting serious. Lana’s car was parked under the carport, so Harper backed his own car out and parked on the street and then backed hers into the open.

  The sky had grown evenly dark, a low, iron-gray ceiling. The wind sprang up from the direction of the ocean. It was cold, but Harper didn’t give a damn, and apparently Lana didn’t either. He squirted her Toyota with the hose, but it wasn’t really necessary. The rain was doing the work for him now. Probably it would want a tip when they were through. Harper laughed, trying to think of a way to convey the idea to Lana, but he gave it up and turned off the hose, then dipped a towel into the soapy water and helped Lana with the hood.

  “You’re right about the rain loosening up the dirt,” she said. “You sounded like a crazy person, though.”

  “But I’m not, am I?”

  “The jury’s still out on that one.” She kissed him. “You’re soapy.” She wiped her mouth with her arm. “You get that side and I’ll get this one.”

  She bent over and disappeared from view, working on the rims. Harper did the same. He discovered that he was whistling the theme song from “Steamboat Willy,” but he couldn’t remember having started it up. He was right in tune, though, and so he raised the volume a little, stood back, and snapped the towel at a smudge of grit, cleaning it off in one blow like whichever Jack it was who had killed the flies.

  Abruptly the rain got heavier, redoubling its strength in an instant, and he staggered just a little as the wind caught him. He recovered, steadied himself, and went on to the door panels now, soaping the hell out of them and then standing back a couple of feet again. “Go ahead and rinse it,” he shouted at the sky.

  “What?” Lana said. She looked at him across the trunk, shielding her face with her hand.

  “I was talking to the rain,” Harper shouted at her.