Cold Rain

by Craig Smith

  With entirely innocent eyes she asked, ‘What do you mean?

  ‘Molly isn’t going to want to let Olga know the two of you are having problems. Absolute best place to confess is with Olga in the next room. Your mother will just smile and say that’s wonderful, Lucy! I hope you’re only smoking good dope. Bad grass can be so irritating to your little throat.’

  Lucy laughed. ‘You think?’

  As she was getting in her Toyota I said to her back,

  ‘You going to tell her about the boyfriend?’

  Lucy froze. It was a just a second, and then she turned. ‘Nothing to tell. Not yet anyway.’

  ‘The weekend’s coming up. You never know.’

  ‘That’s right, Dave. You never know.’

  ‘Be smart, Lucy. You want to get serious, fine, it’s your choice, but don’t assume a guy has been as careful about things as you would be. Some of these guys drink first and think later. Even they don’t know where they’ve put it.’

  I sounded like Tubs and I hated myself. At least I hadn’t mentioned genitalia turning into vegetable matter.

  ‘Talking from experience, are we?’

  ‘Say hi to your grandparents for me, kid.’

  AFTER I FED THE HORSES and fixed my dinner, I settled into the guest bedroom across from the room Molly and I had shared. Then I went up to look at the work Molly had done on Lucy’s apartment. The bathroom and kitchen appliances were in. She had the tile for the floor still in the boxes. I wasn’t doing anything else, so I started tiling the kitchen floor.

  Around midnight I had a good start and went downstairs. As long as I was working, everything was fine.

  Once I stopped the place felt enormous and empty.

  Not really frightening. Fear comes from the unknown.

  I knew who had killed the dogs, and a part of me yearned for him to show up and take his best shot.

  No, it wasn’t frightening. Just empty and lonely and far too grand for a man on his own.

  I spent a couple hours the next morning in my office.

  The latest short story I had been working on was in trouble. At least it had gone stale on me. I could not find the excitement I had felt at the beginning. On the first page a woman had gone off to meditate in silence at a Buddhist monastery for six weeks. Coming home refreshed and revitalized, she discovered her husband was living with another woman. The thing had seemed so rich at the beginning, so full of possibilities, but I had lost the momentum. I no longer had the distance and confidence I needed to write about love and relationships. My sense of humour had died.

  I had eight weeks of paid leave, I told myself. I knew writers who could crank out a novel in that time, and I knew others who could produce a chapter and a full outline. For me a short story would be about right.

  The trouble was I could think of nothing but Buddy Elder, plot nothing but his murder. Pleasant as the fantasy was in the abstract, I did not dare think in practical terms about it. My greatest fear was that I would come up with something that might work.

  So I went upstairs and threw myself into laying tile.

  In January my life at the university would resume or it would end and I would begin something else. If it came to starting over, I would probably get another teaching position. Jinx would get me something. I wasn’t ready to learn another profession. The very idea of it at this late stage made me want to kill myself. I looked around my office and saw my shotguns in the gun case, a twelve-gauge and a four-ten. Definitely the twelve-gauge. Because if you’re going to do a job, do it right.

  Like murder, fantasies of suicide were a narcotic. I knew better than to indulge in them. New job, I thought, as if it were an accomplished fact. New city. Get busy and keep busy. When the time was right, think about meeting someone. That’s what people did when they got divorced. They didn’t kill the people responsible and go to prison or swallow a shotgun while they tried to slip their toes into the trigger guard. They smiled at a pretty face. They kissed strange lips and tried to forget how much they still loved the world they had lost.

  At midnight, as I lay in bed, I began to think about murder again in a purely hypothetical way. A short story. I really couldn’t help myself. It was the only thing that got me past the notion of suicide. Strange to say, but of all the sleepless nights I had spent since I learned of the complaints against me, this was the only one that afforded me some pleasure.

  Chapter 17

  LUCY CALLED THE NEXT AFTERNOON. The rain we had gotten the night before had turned the arena to mud. She asked me to throw some more water on because she wanted to practice running Jezebel.

  ‘Want some competition?’ I asked.

  ‘Anytime you think you’re up to it, old man.’

  Barrel racing is a piece of Americana. It’s simple, quick, and the wildest ride you can have on a horse short of bronco busting. The barrels themselves are set up in an isosceles triangle in one-half of the arena.

  The start and finish line is well below the bottom two barrels of the triangle. A rider runs the race alone, following a cloverleaf pattern around the triangle, turning three-hundred-sixty degrees at each barrel and finishing with a run from the top of the pattern back to the starting line. It is the sort of race that would leave the greatest thoroughbreds in racing history at the back of the pack, since only the American quarter horse has the ability to hit full speed in a single stride.

  Moreover it can stop and turn with the same efficiency. The trick of the race is to turn a tight circle on a reasonably fast horse. It doesn’t have to be the fastest or the most athletic animal. Turn too soon and you take the barrel out, usually with the rider’s shin taking a hit. Turn too late and the circle gets elongated. In a race measured to the tenth of a second a bad turn can cost you two or three full seconds on the clock.

  In his best days Ahab was never the horse to beat.

  As he got older, he got the old warrior’s applause whenever I got the itch to run him, but never the prize money, unless it happened to be raining. If it was raining, if the arena was soaking wet and getting worse instead of better, Ahab was the odds on favourite, assuming as they liked to say, Dave could stay on him to the end of the race.

  When we bought Ahab, we didn’t know about his talent. We thought all his first place victories came from his speed. We had never heard of the term mudder.

  It was Lucy’s belief that with patience any horse could be taught to negotiate adversity. I didn’t try to disillusion her. Time would do that. She could practice all she wanted, Jezebel was Jezebel, and Jezebel only knew one way to run a race: wild-eyed, tail straight up in the air, and blowing exhaust all the way home.

  Lucy praised me for the condition of the arena. It was about six inches deep with mud. I told her to put her helmet on. She sneered but she wore the thing, and she strapped it down tight.

  Since I was presumably smarter than a horse, the first time I ran the barrels I decided I should do the steering. Poor Ahab cracked his shin on the barrel.

  After that, I engaged the autopilot lever attached to all western saddles. It seemed to work fine. Ahab knew where he was going and when to turn. Besides, I soon found out two hands on the saddle horn were hardly enough. At the first turn in a barrel race it feels like the horse is falling down, you get that low to the ground. While you’re still thinking about bailing out, the horse leaps into a full gallop toward the next barrel.

  Two more turns like that and most mortals over the age of eighteen are ready to call it a summer. Anyone lacking a proper sense of human mortality, of course, gets addicted.

  In mud the whole thing gets dicey. We ran eleven races that evening with the floodlights on. Jezebel fell down six times. She won twice, the two times Ahab fell down. In defence of the old guy, Lucy said something about his rider throwing him off balance. I wasn’t buying it though. In a barrel race I was always off balance. Ahab was used to it.

  While we washed the animals down afterwards, I let my stepdaughter contemplate a hard truth: some of us are
at our best in the sunshine, and some of us, like Ahab, only get tough in a . You don’t train for that. It’s in the soul. I didn’t say that of course.

  What I said was, ‘Maybe when you go off to college you might want to take both horses, Lucy.’

  ‘Ahab’s too old for serious competition,’ she snapped testily.

  ‘He looked pretty serious tonight beating your ass.’

  ‘Jezebel can learn to run in mud.’

  ‘You know in Texas nobody is going to know Ahab can win even with a novice on top.’

  Lucy smiled at last. ‘ I’d know.’

  MOLLY CALLED THE FOLLOWING evening. She had gotten into an ice storm on the way down but had arrived safely at her parents’ house. Did we catch any of the storm? Just rain, I told her. Then I said Lucy had come out to race. I got Molly laughing in no time. After that we talked about what I was doing with the apartment. I got off the phone in a good mood, but it didn’t last. In fact I felt like crying. The intimacy between us had returned. The anger had cooled and settled and hardened. For the rest of our lives everything was going to be just like it had been before, without the romance. The romance wasn’t coming back. I knew it now as certainly as anything I had ever known. It was over between us.

  ON SATURDAY I DROVE LUCY to the airport and got a big hug as she left. On the way home it occurred to me that I was going to be alone on Thanksgiving.

  Not especially relishing the prospect I called my former roommate when I got back and suggested he come out to the farm Thursday, but Walt told me he was spending the day with Barbara. ‘Just the two of us,’ he added cheerfully. ‘Roger is going out of town with his new girlfriend.’

  ‘Girlfriend!’ I answered with a bit more surprise than I intended.

  If Walt heard it, he didn’t react. ‘According to Barbara this could be the one.’

  I said that was great, and I meant it, even if I didn’t buy Barbara’s optimism. From there we moved to more pleasant conversation, Walt’s chances for a reconciliation. It came down to this: Barbara had said she was willing to talk about it. That was more than Molly was giving me, but I didn’t happen to mention this.

  Instead, I wished my friend well.

  It was good to hear Walt happy, but I got off the phone in a lousy mood. Having decided to make the effort not to be alone for the holidays, I was now virtually forced to make my next call. My mother was surprised to hear from me. We usually drove to DeKalb for the Fourth of July. But sure, she said, she could set another plate on the table. I could hear the question in her silence and began lying. I told her Molly and Lucy were in Florida. I was invited, naturally, but the last time I had gotten together with the McBrides, things had gotten a bit tense. My mother knew about tense. She had met Doc and Olga once, and didn’t think it was at all unusual I could not get along with Doc. She wrote it off as class warfare. Doc McBride’s only daughter had married the son of a car salesman.

  They could pretend it was fine, but it wasn’t, and no harm as long as Molly and I got along. No problem there! I told her. After that my mother, suspicious woman that she was, always asked about Molly and me. She asked again this time. I laughed as usual and told her after my fashion: ‘If it got any better you’d think we had died and gone to heaven.’

  My mother told me not to blaspheme.

  I MADE ARRANGEMENTS WITH Billy Wade to come across the road and feed the horses while I was gone.

  Wade wanted to know about the dogs. I told him we had packed them off to the pound. He was shocked, and I could tell he thought less of me for it. ‘Hey!’ I said, ‘people drop their mutts off out here! What am I supposed to do, feed them all? Where does it stop?’

  ‘I might’ve taken one if you’d asked me, Dave.’

  ‘Next time,’ I said.

  I gave him twenty bucks so he would remember and said there was another forty in it for him when I got back. Turning to leave him, I stopped as if struck by a thought. Had he seen anyone around the farm lately?

  Since I’d been gone, I added. Wade thought about it before shaking his head.

  ‘An old burgundy Mercury Marquis maybe?’ I prodded.

  Wade smiled. ‘I seen that!’ I pushed for details, but the giant only smiled. ‘Driving by kind of slow like.

  He parked down the road, in that lane.’ Wade pointed toward an old service road out in the cornfields that was hard to spot and pretty much sheltered by weeds and brush. Kids sometimes pulled in there at night, but it wasn’t the best place to go, just handy if you were desperate. On the two nights Lucy had been late getting back from dates I had checked down there first. Lucy’s boyfriends hadn‘t been perfect fools.

  ‘How long was it parked there?’

  Wade scowled as if the process of thinking actually hurt him. ‘He drove in around eleven o’clock, left a few minutes before midnight.’

  Did he remember what night it was? We had another spell of pain. Sure didn’t. Best guess? Wade grinned and told me that back in school he’d never guessed the right answer no matter how many times he tried.

  ‘You see that car out there again and you let me know right away,’ I said, ‘I’ll give you twenty bucks.’

  The giant grinned happily. ‘Every time?’

  ‘Every blessed time,’ I said.

  I left Wade calculating his newfound fortune.

  I HAD A MEETING SCHEDULED with Gail Etheridge before I drove to the airport Wednesday. For the first time since the diary had surfaced, Gail was showing a bit of lawyerly optimism. With my permission, she had brought suit in state court immediately after the hearing. Critical to our case, she thought, was the committee’s refusal to let me finish my verbal defence.

  Additionally, she said that after the vice president adjourned the meeting he proceeded to instruct the committee as to the procedure they should follow.

  ‘Major screw-up, David. First, you had walked out.

  Second, the meeting had been adjourned, meaning his instructions were never actually given. I’ve been sleeping with the university handbook, and the procedure is all spelled out. Any variance and they’ve violated their own policy.’

  Due process was only part of it. According to Gail the state had set limitations on jury awards resulting from violations of due process. Defamation was another issue. There were no limits on defamation. ‘Defamation makes them nervous. Right now, we’re fast tracking the case, which will let me begin deposing key players as early as December. Once I do that, we’re going to catch Dr Blackwell in some pretty embarrassing mistakes, like this thing with your bodacious ta-tas.

  The bad news is things are going to get expensive real fast. Depositions cost money.’

  ‘I need to talk to Molly about the money,’ I said.

  Molly and I had set the bulk of our funds in an account requiring both of our signatures for withdrawal.

  ‘I’ve got them on the run, but without the depositions to prove Blackwell screwed up the witness interviews, we can’t push them as hard as we need to.’

  ‘I can sign over my retirement funds to you, if you can carry me,’ I said.

  Gail seemed uneasy. She needed something. I asked her how deep I was into her. She said she would get a bill worked up. Roughly, I said. Roughly, I needed to get her about five thousand dollars for her to keep going. My truck was worth between three and four at auction, but I knew it would list retail at close to five. ‘How about title to my truck?’

  ‘How about cash? How much can you get me?’

  ‘I’ll get something lined out next week,’ I said.

  ‘I hate to do this to you, but I can’t carry you on this, not with divorce proceedings going forward.’

  Chapter 18

  I SOUNDED LIKE A BOGUE. Bogues can always get you the money next week. I didn’t blame Gail for worrying. We were bailing out of our property. My job was in jeopardy. With a divorce Molly was likely to get most of the cash, and that left the lawyer standing in line with the bankers and credit card companies.

  I decided not to w
orry about it for the time being.

  I had enough worries on my mind just going home.

  Home always made me think about Tubs, because even dead the old bastard wasn’t finished with me.

  My mother hadn’t collected on Chrysler stock, of course. That was just typical David Albo bullshit. The thing I told Buddy happened, though. Up to a point.

  Tubs had predicted a comeback. The salespeople had laughed their asses off, and he had called his broker ordering five thousand shares! The broker talked Tubs out of it.

  Mom had a pension and a big old house in the downtown that wasn’t worth much more than what they paid for it forty years ago. She imagined herself a poor old widow, though she was mostly just afraid to spend her money. She had plenty, actually, but her fears let her miss out on the cruises her friends were taking. She drove an old car she was afraid to trade because Tubs always took care of the cars, and even with four sons, well, they didn’t know cars like Tubs, did they?

  When Mom wasn’t worrying about her own finances, she liked to scold her prodigal sons for the debts we took on so blithely. We all lived in nice houses and drove nice cars, and charged whatever we liked on our nice credit cards, the typical American family.

  Suddenly, I wasn’t in the mood to hear her scolding, because her dire predictions had come true for me. I was in trouble, and beginning to imagine everything I had juggled for years would come crashing down on me. But there was no way out of it once I’d called: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday: the smothering embrace of home.

  It wasn’t quite as bad as I anticipated. A lot of TV, a lot of beer, a couple of late night escapes from the nieces and nephews down to our favourite watering hole, and, on the last night, a heart-to-heart with my oldest brother in which I suggested it was maybe time for me to change careers. If not now, I said, it was never going to happen. What was I looking at? The question hung between us until we both grinned: Anything but cars!