Because the Rain

by Daniel Buckman

  Later, Annie sat on the Metro, the number ten to Place d’Italie, watching the people bounce in the next car. Only the windows truly moved, twisting and raising, but the people bounced the same.

  * * *

  In Vietnamese, Annie’s name was Vu Le Thuy, tornado teardrop, the family name written first. Her father believed the hard wind came before all. Huong meant perfume and a river the emperors once watched. Annie was wet on cheeks.

  The woman from the Lutheran church, her foster mother, held up a card with her name written on it. Le Thuy in thick black letters. It was the cue for Annie to pronounce her name slowly. She practiced for the women that came for coffee, gray ladies with hard hair and plastic flower arrangements on their kitchen tables. She made Annie understand about going slow by moving her fingers like they walked. Le Thuy, Annie mumbled. She breathed twice between the two words of her name.

  It is poetry, the ladies said. Pure poetry.

  The woman never called her Annie, but she kept a special Annie room with posters from the musical. There were small dolls still in boxes. Three stuffed dogs. She’d sit in the room, her blue housecoat losing velour, and play an eight-track of the original score. She only sang certain lines, then hummed and stared at Andrea McArdle’s autographed headshot, smiling as if the actress’s mother. Her husband yelled for her to close the door. She heard nothing but the music and hugged a stuffed dog.

  “I love you, tomorrow,” she sang.

  He put cotton in his ears and turned up the TV. He liked shows about wild animals—the power of a mongoose’s jaw, the way badgers mate—and he sat up in his La-Z-Boy when lions got a zebra, wolves an elk. He’d smile and point at the screen with his cigarette. There it is, he’d say. All you need to know about anything.

  The man was a master sergeant when he retired from the air force. Just a master sergeant, he told people, not a chief. In 1966, he helped build the airstrip at Phu Bai and hauled dirt in a dump truck through Hue City ten years before Annie was born. That was why she lived in Watega, Illinois, eating homemade beef stew with the man and his wife, and watching the sunlight streak the field mud outside the kitchen window. He bet he drove dirt right past this girl’s house. He got to know Hue City like a frequented diner. The woman’s face was round, her hair stiff, and she nodded while her husband spoke. She played the organ at Good Shepherd Lutheran where the pastor was hoping to sponsor a boat person. He asked for volunteers on a cold Easter Sunday in March.

  “Christians know Christians by their circumcised hearts,” he said. “It is our mark.”

  That’s what Debbie needs, the man thought of his wife. She sat in the room, singing all night with an afghan across her legs. It was time to find her something else.

  After breakfast, the man left for diner coffee and the woman brought down the eight-track deck. She played the songs in the kitchen while she wiped off the unused toaster. “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” was Annie’s signal to come downstairs in costume, a red dress, white tights, and black patent leather shoes. She’d slept in curlers, rolled tightly because the curl hadn’t been taking. She then danced so her shoes tapped the white floor. The woman smiled and folded her hands together.

  “You’ve never seen the show,” she said, “but you know the dance exactly. Bless your heart.”

  Annie went until the woman finished wiping the counter and turned off the tape. Her legs felt like fell sticks. She watched the woman bend over and clean the scuff marks with a green pad. Her housecoat went to her knees.

  “It just baffles me how you can know,” the woman said.

  When the phone started after The Price Is Right, the woman sat on the couch, taking the calls like short orders. The cushions were covered in plastic and held the window light. They are boat people, she’d tell them, making the syllables with her fingers. Boat people.

  Annie sat on the steps, watching herself in her shoe toes. The woman’s cat had six kittens and they were colored the same white as her kitchen floor. They slept in a large box by the back door. If you touch those babies, the woman translated from a book, you’ll kill one. She’d scribbled the Vietnamese words on lined paper. Annie looked up from her shoes where the mother cat lay outside the box, licking her teats. She wanted to put her face in the box, letting the kittens climb up her neck, then slide back down. She would smile with her face in the blanket. But she sat upon her hands, listening to the woman’s fast voice, and imagined the kittens’ unopened eyes while they walked over themselves. They will die, the woman had written out. Tuan Li. She underlined the phrase.

  * * *

  Goetzler cooked Annie dinner but she never ate with him. She waited in her heels while he sliced shallots, using his knife precisely. He basted pork loin with balsamic vinegar, and zested lemon into a saucepan. She looked at the screen of her cell phone while he flamed scallops in a sauté pan. He’d been making fun of men who won medals and wore them. She found he loved doing it more than anything.

  “I have a Silver Star,” he said. “But I never once wore the commemorative tie tack.”

  All of them had won something, Annie thought.

  “I worked with people who would have laughed in my face if I wore it,” he said. “They don’t understand what happened back then like we do. South Vietnam was a democracy and they wouldn’t let us save it.”

  “I was born after the war,” she said.

  “But you knew South Vietnamese army veterans?”

  “I knew men who would kill, but not fight. That is why the North won.”

  “Did your father fight for the South?”

  “My father kept stacks of old Playboy magazines left by the Americans. He kept them wrapped in rice paper to protect them from the humidity. The Viet Cong were reading Ho Chi Minh’s poems and the Saigon soldiers looked at Playboy. I think my father was a man who would kill, but never fight.”

  Goetzler looked at her in the window glass, and sipped pinot noir from Oregon. The windows wrapped around the room, the lake and the sky half the walls. She moved so that she was by herself in a panel while he thought to speak. If she stared long enough, he’d be quiet until she talked.

  After dinner, they sat on the leather couch and Goetzler’s bourbon and Rolex caught the lamplight. He looked at his bookshelf, French poets and histories of the Civil War. He then turned on the CD player with a remote. It was piano jazz, the usual theme music for divorced retired men, but without the scotch-on-the-rocks melancholy. Annie thought Monk, then not, knowing that Monk made her darkness go light, but he never walked her across a still lake. This was Bill Evans, the song “Gloria’s Step,” and she loved how the bass man made her the raindrops.

  “Remembering music,” he said. “Bill Evans has a way of keeping you in your head without getting you lonely. On our first date, you told me that.”

  I never thought I’d see you again, Annie thought. She said, “You have a nice place.”

  “I’m pretty poetic for a professional soldier, wouldn’t you think?”

  “I don’t think you like jazz,” she said.

  Annie watched him rattle his ice cubes off the glass like he didn’t hear her. Goetzler was getting ready to narrate his life like a retired mercenary, always a man who knew men, and his illusions about seeing them had been stripped away long ago. Cynicism has a few pillows, he’d say. Cuban cigars. Hine Cognac. Call girls.

  He talked of grabbing Stazi agents in West Berlin, then giving them fruit and coffee, and refusing toilet breaks unless they talked. Men broke after shitting themselves in front of women agents, he said. Goetzler, according to himself, once ran the night in 1970s Berlin, using ex-Gestapo to light the Reds on fire. Last time, he told Annie that the ultimate revenge was living well: this was it, flesh for gold, but you beat them by eating in better restaurants. Some men saved six months to have an hour with her, but Goetzler paid every week, telling her how this act was biology for him, and that cost. But, he’d say, there’s poetry in the way cells move.

  She knew Goetzler read more tha
n he ever saw, and that women didn’t like him. It was the pout behind his smile.

  He picked up a pipe from the glass end table. The stem was dented from his teeth. Annie bet he smoked nights and watched himself in the windows.

  “I bought this in Hong Kong on Carmel Road,” he said. “The British officers went there for blended tobacco. My platoon sergeant, this old guy named Olszewski, gave me the money for it. He bet me General Loan wouldn’t shoot that Viet Cong. We were sitting in our jeep, eating pho ga from our steel pots, then he shot him like he was turning off his office light. I saw the most famous picture of the war being taken.”

  Annie watched Goetzler tap tobacco down into the bowl. All her dates had seen something: Michael Jordan spottings on Rush Street, Oprah running the treadmill at the East Bank Club.

  “You know the picture?” Goetzler said.

  She nodded.

  “Doesn’t the war mean anything to you?”

  Annie looked in his eyes without seeing him.

  “I forgot my Vietnamese for a reason,” she said.

  Goetzler bit the pipe and showed her the picture in a book. General Nguyen Ngoc Loan held the chrome-plated .38 after shooting the Viet Cong. The man’s face was contorting, his head tilted from the force of the round. The plaid shirt. The black shorts. Saigon in white light and dust.

  “General Loan was no brute. He was an air force officer and acted French with his cigarettes. We’d have dinner with his staff at the Rex Hotel.”

  She looked away so he’d wait for her to speak. She never heard him set down the book. The older men used whatever they’d just read to instruct her: hardcover histories, the sports page, George Will syndicated in the Sun-Times.

  In college, a political science professor named Balbus put Eddie Adams’s picture on the overhead. He used a pencil, showing where you could see the bullet passing out of the Viet Cong’s temple. With this picture, he said, we brought the Military Industrial Complex down. Balbus permed his gray hair, wore turquoise rings, and thought the problem was the patriarchy. Annie let him touch her for grades, but only through her panties, and ran up his American Express for room service sea bass and crème brûlée. He’d stroke her hip with his finger, his eyes like tops. You are a poetic people, he’d say.

  Goetzler lit the tobacco. He drew the pipe hard and his face went orange.

  “That VC General Loan shot was like Osama Bin Laden,” he said. “The VC had killed the wives and children of his staff officers right that morning. The guy who took the picture was sorry he ruined General Loan’s life with it.”

  Annie looked at her phone. It was programmed to play hearts, free cell, mine sweeper.

  “General Loan tried to run a pizza place in Virginia,” he said. “They shut him down. These are the same people who sold out your country. They all got law degrees. That should scare people.”

  She smiled and got up and walked to the bathroom. He looked at her like a watch.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  What did this matter. She was from Watega, Illinois, where the luckiest men got to drink at the Elks Lodge. For her, Vietnam was four memories. Goetzler tapped the weight into his pipe bowl.

  His toilet was white and public-looking but pine-oil clean. He had a yellow pad full of geometry problems by the stool, towels the same color as the sink, a CD player with classical music, Chopin and Brahms. She sat on the floor and played a full game of hearts against her cell phone. She took ten minutes and knew he wouldn’t say a word.

  9

  Mike Spence drove the paddy wagon along Racine and rolled up his window ahead of the rain. Denny Collins still looked at the cell phone, wanting his medical profile extended, his face fat making his red eyes slits. He gave it a test ring by thumbing a button. The rain came sideways through the window and spotted the Sun-Times on his lap before he rolled it up without watching himself. He looked hit by a wrinkle bomb, one fat slouch with a Starbucks fetish. He dropped a daily twenty on key lime squares, wild berry scones, crumble berry cake, then spent twenty more for double mocha lattes. He checked his voice mail and nothing came up.

  “It’s the job that gave me the heart attacks,” he said. “The doctor told the department. What good am I out here?”

  Mike turned down Altgeld where the cars were parked tightly along the curbs. The parking tickets they wrote that morning were soaked beneath the wiper blades. Mike went slow and checked for zone stickers.

  Collins opened the Sun-Times and studied the television listings like the Dow results. Mike turned up Racine and then left on Belmont, passing the punk rock holdouts drinking coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, their tattooed necks against the wet windows.

  “This heart medicine makes me piss all the time,” Collins said.

  Mike watched the rain slant into the gangways between the rehabbed graystones. Collins was eligible for disability at forty, eighty percent of seventy grand a year for life. He wanted it like some men wanted detective. He called people he knew. He walked the paperwork between desks downtown. You want to mess with Collins? Nowacki once said to Mike. You tell him he’s being promoted.

  “Now they got me on the wagon,” he said. “I didn’t hit a lawyer like you did. How can I carry bodies down stairs?”

  Mike watched the clouds press the rooftops.

  “The doctor says I could be having little heart attacks right now. I wouldn’t even know.”

  “He said that?”

  “They come that fast.”

  “You stay in the car,” Mike said.

  “I could get you killed in a real situation. How could I back you up?”

  He dipped a cinnamon scone into his mocha latte and took a bite. The crumbs stuck to his mouth corners.

  “These things don’t get soft enough,” he said.

  “Leave it in there longer,” Mike said.

  “Then it breaks apart. You got blueberries floating around in your coffee like little eyeballs.”

  Collins talked to his reflection in the window. His jowls were pocked and cleated. The scone dripped and the wet crumbs plopped on the newspaper and blotched the ink.

  “I tried a muffin,” he said. “You dunk them once and it’s a mess.”

  Mike drove and watched the power lines snap in the wind. The wagon was his assignment for smacking Todd in the alley. Kenjuan Mills got him three years of carrying bodies out of three-flats and flex-cuffing drunks after street festivals. There would be different guys where Collins sat, some so fat they lived to un-Velcro their body armor, and a few with acid reflux disease and a bad habit of not covering their mouths, but Mike would be driving the wagon for a long time.

  10

  The night before Uncle Kerm left the nursing home, the nurses shined his alligator suitcases with paste wax and packed his clothes. Goetzler looked at the old TWA stickers from Tahiti and Rio de Janeiro while his uncle lay watching Jennifer Moore and The Wall Street Minute on Fox Newschannel. Outside the lake was furious and the waves came over the seawalls at Belmont and Lake Shore Drive.

  “She’s got great fister tits,” Kerm said of the commentator. “You know that?”

  Goetzler vaguely looked at the television. He let himself be slow in answering Kerm. The lagged response, he knew, branded him either homosexual or autistic in Kerm’s eyes. But Goetzler loved Kerm because he was facing the end better than his brother had. Al Goetzler died in a hospital, crying beside an expressionless wife.

  “Jesus, Donny,” his uncle said. “And you wonder why some guys think you are gay.”

  Goetzler laughed.

  “She’s got great tits,” Kerm said.

  “Just like fists.”

  “Sure.”

  In the morning, a chartered medical jet was flying Kerm to Naples, Florida, from Meigs Field. He’d rented space in a nursing home by the ocean on the money from selling eight Lincoln Park three-flats in 1995. The police department gave him a desk and a phone so he bought real estate all through the seventies.

  “You’ll come back in the
summer,” Goetzler said.

  “Right to this room.”

  “What if there’s a dying guy in it.”

  “My lawyer says they’ll have to move him.”

  Uncle Kerm wasn’t serious, but he used his money to entertain himself. Alaska cruises for heart patients, beachside nursing homes, and getting his way in restaurants. The yuppies buying his three-flats had made him a very wealthy man.

  “I saw Mike Rosen today,” Goetzler said. “We’ve been at the same gym for thirty years, but were coming at different times.”

  Kerm had Investor’s Business Daily spread across his lap. He was underlining the symbols for his stocks with a ballpoint. Jennifer Moore had finished The Wall Street Minute.

  “Do like Chuck Murphy, Donny,” he said. “Sell that fancy condo and go soak it up somewhere. A hooker will take care of Rosen. Cocaine made the guy a two-stroke.”

  “Rosen doesn’t recognize me,” Goetzler said. “This is a good opportunity to make him understand what he opened.”

  Without looking from his paper, Kerm waved Goetzler away with his hand.

  “What he opened? Now Murphy’s a guy who should have a fight with Rosen. All those years Chuck defended the same mopes, but Rosen just got the ones who could pay cash. You were offered a generous deal and you turned it down to make money. Chucky fought hard to help the shitbirds. And he really liked helping them. It was an honor to have that marine sweat you in court.”