Because the Rain

by Daniel Buckman

  Goetzler ate it and smiled at Kerm, amazed the man could underline stock symbols without glasses. In fact, his vision remained 20-20, and if his heart was strong, Goetzler believed he could barrel roll his old Mustang fighter plane. Though, he couldn’t do it with the Camel between his teeth anymore. But ten years ago, Uncle Kerm could still dogfight with some Luftwaffe veteran who’d become a West Berlin cop after the war. They’d duel one last time over the Tuscan olive groves and Renaissance villas, where Machiavelli learned to survive, and Goetzler would like to watch through binoculars when the German forced Kerm to parachute.

  * * *

  Goetzler shadowed Mike Rosen through Lincoln Park with the picture of Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting the Viet Cong in his pocket. He tailed him down Armitage where he headed for the restaurant bars, the Caribbean bistros, and Mongolian barbecues. Rosen couldn’t stand straight, but he never lost his grin. Goetzler figured he’d study the old lawyer and think of how to work the picture into any revenge dream.

  He followed him into a retroactive piano lounge where the player was on break. Rosen sat down at the bar and started chatting the blondes, their hair wound in comb clamps. Goetzler knew they were ten grand high on Visa cards for shoes, sushi, and useless weekends at the Soho Grand in New York. They lived in studio apartments off Surf Street and sold commercial mortgages out in Oak Brook and hoped to hook the guy who would get them pregnant, then hire a nineteen-year-old Croatian girl to push the stroller. Night after night, Goetzler watched Rosen think he was delicious behind his Bombay martini, his silk shirt open two buttons, never hearing the women mouth disco king.

  Goetzler saw Rosen every day in the locker room, then later in the bars where quartered women chittered in new shoes. He was a stacked towel to Rosen, an ashtray on a table. He drank his water and lime while Rosen sipped his martini through tight lips. When they met eyes, nothing jarred loose. Goetzler had one of those faces, arid he knew it, his eyes like clean windows that people looked through.

  One night, Rosen got scorched.

  Five minutes were left for the Sex and the City night drink specials when the blonde swung her elbows along the bar. She pushed through the women lined two deep, waving a Visa card. Goetzler watched Rosen lean against the bar and catch eyefuls. She led with her fake D-cups and they steadied their chocolate martinis and sneered. He watched the blonde’s chest, his hair made brown again by Just for Men. The women eyed her breasts and then sized their own in the mirror behind the bar. The bartender shook the vodka and poured and knew that the women were past his goatee and tattoos. The air purifier hanging from the ceiling sucked the smoke from their thin cigarettes.

  Rosen and the blonde made eye contact before she looked away. She wore diamond earrings but had no ring.

  “Put the card away,” he said. “I got this.”

  The blonde wrote a number on a cocktail napkin. She pushed it over without watching herself.

  “My landlady usually sits home nights,” she said.

  The phone number had his prefix. Rosen didn’t know what to do with his hands.

  “Wait until the doctor you marry leaves you for another broad,” he said.

  She smiled chilly.

  “We’ll see what you know then,” he said.

  The blonde held up her little finger. A cell phone rang in her purse.

  She turned away from him and took the call, closing her ear with a fingernail.

  Goetzler ordered Glenlivet neat. He lit a Cubano, watching Rosen grin like he had a good segue. Goetzler then walked over and sat next to him. The old lawyer didn’t look over. He put the picture of Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting the Viet Cong beside the ashtray.

  “Sir,” Goetzler said. “I’ll buy you another if you answer a question.”

  “I drink Bombay Sapphire,” Rosen said.

  Goetzler drew his cigar and nodded at the ponytailed bartender.

  While Rosen was looking at Goetzler, he noticed the print.

  “We really shoved it up their asses with that picture,” Goetzler lied. “We stopped Nixon cold. We were the fascists and Eddie Adams proved it forever.”

  Rosen was still looking at the picture. He squinted like this was ordinary, and didn’t say a word until the bartender set down his Bombay martini.

  “We told ourselves that to feel better,” he said. “We stayed in Vietnam four years after the picture rocked the world. I was more afraid of going to Vietnam than I cared about stopping the war.”

  Goetzler raised his Glenlivet twelve-year-old while Rosen just nodded and drank.

  “I’m thinking of licensing this picture and putting it on T-shirts and coffee mugs,” Goetzler said. “As a retired marketing executive, I think the punk rock teenagers will co-opt this image and that could mean T-shirts.”

  “Do you want money?”

  “No,” Goetzler said. “Just tell me what the picture means to you.”

  “I could see it as a CD cover,” Rosen said. “Some kid band might think they’re smart for doing it, too. If they sold, I could see the T-shirts. But the kids wouldn’t know what it meant even if it did hit.”

  “But what does it mean to you?”

  “Nothing now. You see worse in the courts.”

  Looking at Rosen, Goetzler thought, You lucky son of a bitch.

  * * *

  Later, Goetzler followed Rosen home, in the dark, back to his town house where he lived on three floors among Persian rugs, Tiffany lamps, and Vivaldi on surround sound. Goetzler watched from across the street, beneath an umbrella, the rain hitting him under the nylon.

  Rosen kicked the puddle if he got his shoes wet, or if he dropped his keys by the stoop steps. Inside, he stripped off his silk shirt in the window, cursing the rain for streaking it. He threw his shoes at the door for getting wet in the puddles. Then, he called for an escort, and if the agency was slow ringing back, he’d throw his cell phone into the sofa pillows.

  Goetzler watched Rosen’s face contorting. He threw his hand a second time, but the phone was already gone.

  Rosen liked ordering sex when the rain leaned past his stained-glass windows. Something about wet girls, Goetzler thought. He left them shivering by the door after they rang the bell, their hair ruined by the weather, the drops leaving dents in their made-up faces. He knew they saw him, shirtless and freckled from Naples, Florida, pacing his ten-thousand-dollar rugs and talking to nobody on his second cell phone. He wanted the girls to see him for a full two minutes while the lake wind drove the rain sideways. Even though Rosen loved to call hookers, he believed he was better than them. And there’d be an issue about the price. Goetzler was sure the agency warned him about this. The prices were fixed, all-inclusive, and he could reach his goal multiple times. That was all they ever said on the phone. But there were always new women, skinny blondes in business suits, black girls in platform shoes. He made them dance braless in the window like he wanted people to see.

  The next night, Goetzler waited in the Jeep Cherokee after Rosen walked the block to the restaurant bars. He did not hear the rain. He was listening to the Nick Adams Stories on tape. Hemingway had taught him how to stop the room from spinning when he was drunk, the proper way for holding a newspaper at a café table, even how a man should look at hills and trees. But Hemingway didn’t work in Vietnam, even though Goetzler tried. The martinis tasted funny in Southeast Asia because the Vietnamese bartenders never got the vermouth right. After the story “The Battler,” Goetzler stepped from the Jeep and crossed the street with his hands in the pockets of his leather coat, thinking himself Nick Adams when he first noticed his hurt knee from the brakeman slugging him off the train.

  There were red stickers on Rosen’s windows from Windy City Security Systems on Kedzie. Goetzler went around the back and pitched alley stones at the glass, then waited. No flashing lights or alarm sirens. He pushed against the back door, and waited again. There was nothing.

  He returned two nights later, after learning Rosen’s routine. He came with a glass-cutter and took
out the window in the back door, then reached through and let himself inside. It was the kitchen, a big white room with an eight-burner stove, a rotisserie spit built into its own enclave, and black marble countertops. He worked a Maglite against the floor, looking for dog food bowls.

  He carried in the backpack only what he needed: one rolled picture of Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting the Viet Cong, Scotch tape, a pair of black shorts, a plaid madras shirt, and military police handcuffs. He forgot sandals, but he wasn’t sure the Viet Cong even wore them. The .38 was between his belt and his coat, a pearl-handled revolver like Loan’s. Back in 1968, he’d been in Saigon the day the Tet Offensive hit and Eddie Adams got the famous picture. Goetzler was one street over, on Tu Ten Loc, looking for his glasses on the floor of the Jeep. His nose had been sweaty and Sergeant Olszewski braked too fast. He didn’t know about the picture until the next day, but he told guys how he watched the general raise the pistol, and that he even bummed a cigarette from a one-eyed staff officer after the VC fell backward.

  In the Maglite beam, he saw Tiffany lamps, ten to a room, vases from Ming dynasties, a Matisse pastel above the fireplace. The windows were framed in stained glass, and the white rugs lay over hardwood floors. Rosen had cabinets of Hummels, the little German girls in dresses, the small boys with watering cans.

  Goetzler followed the beam back to Rosen’s office. Last week, the lawyer bought a desk that Grover Cleveland used in his law practice after his presidency. He told the locker room. Goetzler figured Rosen hid his cash retainers like this. The money was all in things.

  He emptied the backpack over the desk and put it back on. He lay the picture beside the desk lamp, leaving the shorts and the shirt upon stacked paper, then turned on the small light before reclining in Rosen’s swivel chair. He put his feet up, waiting a minute before removing the pistol from his holster. He lit the desk lamp.

  Uncle Kerm would laugh about this stunt. Goetzler saw himself getting points with the old man.

  You made him dress up like the VC in that picture, he’d say. You even wore a William Westmoreland mask? I bet Rosen’s colon hasn’t stopped since you left him shaking. I’ll bet he won’t speak a word about it. The cops aren’t his friends.

  Kerm would beat the table with his fist, and howl like he did telling Goetzler how his father got kicked out of the navy for messing himself. He messed them standing in the chow line at Great Lakes, he said, and he messed them nightly in his rack while he dreamed of his guitar and his Bill Monroe seventy-eights and the few times the rodeo came to Lake County. You should have seen him around our mother. Your old man held the yarn while she balled it.

  11

  The work made Annie nervy when she couldn’t stop imagining the date that might kill her: a cell phone salesman from Libertyville in the city on his day off, or an old man with five divorces. Her last sight may be Days Inn wallpaper, or the granite countertops in a Wicker Park loft. She started believing all her dates would strangle her. But playing Goetzler eased her fear, and made her so arrogant she believed herself beyond the edge of things.

  Some nights, she even alleged she wasn’t afraid to die, and that made her free beyond the world’s understanding.

  But tonight, she had a new client, a young, unmarried futures trader on Randolph Street, and she got scared thinking that a man without a reason to see a hooker might be the snuff john. All afternoon, she walked her apartment and imagined him piling hundred-dollar bills on the table while she explained how she won’t be bound. She’d threaten to leave, but he’d keep dropping them like the cards of a winning poker hand, his face Viagra red.

  The anxiety was making her hands shake. The cats ran away when she tried petting them. Since lunch, she jumped at distant sirens, crow caws, and the windy raindrops against her window. She even called Nick three times, the fat guy whose real name was Larry. If she canceled, he’d pitch Goetzler the other Vietnamese girl who called herself Charlize. Annie then tried sweeping the floor, but kept dropping the broom, and decided it was time to stop being a cat. She phoned Nick telling him she’d take her chances with Goetzler.

  “That’s your call,” he said, “but these older guys don’t mind the variety.”

  Annie didn’t care. She knew things about Goetzler that Nick would spend seven lifetimes trying to figure out. Goetzler wanted to believe he fought for something in Vietnam, and Annie was the gatekeeper to that wish. He needed her thank you, or the men who burned their draft cards would always be right. Vietnam might finally pay. Annie then turned off her cell phone and took a nap with her cats and dreamed that the world was an ice rink.

  She woke and took the yoga book from the shelf. It slipped away. She followed the book with her hands until it lay open on the floor. Immediately, the blond, white woman was holding the dying warrior position, her chin upon her shin. Annie envied her calm and cried because yoga failed to ever quiet her mind. Her fingers always felt like the running legs of different people. But she calmed her hands by reminding herself that she wasn’t a cat anymore, scared of stray noise, and then decided this North Dakotan in Manhattan had never entertained a thought louder than a popping champagne cork.

  She tried sleeping, but couldn’t keep her hands still for longer than an hour. They ground the feathers in her pillow before knocking her water glass off the nightstand. When she couldn’t hold a blanket corner, she got up, went to the front room, and tried staying her fingers by splaying them on the window glass.

  Posing for the cop, like the summer nights, might calm her hands, but his window was rainy dark, and he was off on a long run. His woman was gone because the candles never lit the windows, and men never thought of those details unless a hooker was coming over. But watching the cop run was better than posing, and made her forget she had hands. She imagined him a dog, a German shepherd, who could be ordered into emotions.

  Sometimes, the cop went south first, and ran calmly, but if he started north into the city, he came back like a boxer, throwing restrained punches at the darkness: the one-two, but never a third jab. She didn’t want love from him. She knew closeness with an open heart would make him too real, and he’d cease calming her hands on the nights she must work. He must stay beyond the window.

  12

  Mike ran down Cornelia, beneath the Ravenswood Metro tracks, and watched blond men wind Christmas lights around their town house fences. They laced the cords with garlands. The night was also good for running, humid cool between the rains. The men weren’t smiling, and they strung the lights like soldiers did concertina wire while wives watched from windows, so he turned back toward the lake, relieved he could add three more miles without having to explain the extra time later. He started to look back, but stopped himself, knowing the men would remind him how he didn’t miss the riddle-life he and Susan led after the abortion.

  But Mike never let himself think this very long. His pace would slow and he’d not sleep later because his body felt cheated and awake. He’d start missing her toes against his ankle, and soon he’d remember that he lay beside her many nights wishing her a random lover. In the beginning, he’d tell himself, he was sure neither one of them did that. Now, there were places he was learning not to go.

  The wind quit off the lake and he was sweating in a long-sleeved T-shirt. He ran in the street, but stayed close to the parked cars. There were more men stringing Christmas lights and garlands, disgusted men, and they all worked like their neighbors. He cut down the first alley, hoping to keep his mind on the streetlit puddles, not the decorators, but it was too late. He’d already started remembering the last year of his marriage.

  The medical examiner told Mike that Susan hadn’t felt a thing. The killer swung the baseball bat and she just died. It was painless for her, he said.

  She was gone six months now. No cops asked Mike if he missed her. They looked at him in the precinct’s locker room like they would a guy at the YMCA. There was little to gain by knowing the wagon driver.

  He kept quiet and spent his days driving do
mestic batterers and car thieves to bond court, letting the silence of her death drone with the arrestee’s heel knocks against the wagon walls. He’d sometimes forget by looking at blond women in Volvo wagons, and imagining himself feeling as convinced about things as them, but Susan always returned behind his eyes.

  Mike hated knowing she died when they were straining to see love in each other, and his mother-in-law reminded him with a Christmas card. Thinking of Suzy, she wrote. He smelled her Benson and Hedges on the envelope and remembered how mother and daughter sat at the kitchen table and imagined the ways they’d die. Susan went in a motorcycle accident on a warm country night, but her mother saw herself all alone in a room. He also hated knowing his wife blinked her eyes in a rainy alley and never opened them. Her last sight may have been a car lot fence, he thought.

  At University of Illinois, where Mike studied on the GI Bill, he first saw Susan walking through yellow leaves, Ophelia in a black skirt, her eyes brown like Illinois rivers. She sat on bar stools beside him and listened to his Fort Bragg stories, drinking Glenlivet, while he told her about how in 1988 a C-130 full of paratroopers exploded on a demonstration jump for their families, and how he and Dilger manned a drop zone water point and watched the bodies fall on fire with the wives and the little sisters. Later, Dilger and he never talked about it; they just got drunk off-post and found hookers in a tobacco field house trailer; and neither Dilger nor he could look at each other right forever after. They’d seen themselves on fire.

  Mike wanted to make the rich pay. Somehow, their young never fall and burn.

  Susan understood. Back in her Illinois town, her father, a short sheet-metal worker with a squirrel head, beat her when he was laid off longer than a week. He fought in Korea with the USMC, freezing in the Chosin Reservoir with Chesty Puller, and never got over having survived a forgotten war. He claimed nobody knew how to listen. Susan got drunk and gave the reasons for her beatings, but never the details. The morning she wouldn’t eat pancakes, the time she wore makeup at twelve. Her mother could remember none of it. But Mike loved her because they both had eyes that were as curious as they were afraid of life, and she never turned away his stories. She felt his slurred words, but ran home conflicted after last call. On the bar, she’d leave her poems about clotheslines, airport roads, and dry cleaners that press the stains in farther. She wasn’t comfortable explaining herself.