Because the Rain

by Daniel Buckman

  There were creases in the picture where the killer held it and just stared. Mike imagined his eyes stinging from not blinking while his thumb dented the print. This guy was beyond writing novels. He understood that reading was too much effort for a city that frequented bookstore cafés. He wanted the innocent to know what some men must do so that others can sleep well, and if the sleepers keep ordering more protection, they should understand what happens in the dark. Dressing a defense attorney who never went to Vietnam like the pistol-shot Viet Cong, then staging the execution exactly, showed a killer who wanted the sleepers to feel what orders meant. They must experience being trapped in a lethal violence they cannot escape.

  Mike stood nodding. He thought about the man staring at the picture, and wondered if he realized the detectives were throwing away his work like bored insurance secretaries do auto claims. He tried not to smile.

  13

  Goetzler walked Webster, from the pole lamps outside DePaul’s rectory to slanting Clybourn Street where the buses headed northwest into the lake wind, filled with the babushkas who clean these condos, the Mexicans who bag the gutter leaves.

  He held an umbrella and a cell phone so he’d see the green screen blink BLOCKED when Nick called back about Annie. Goetzler had rung three times since noon, and the same electronic man spoke on the voice mail, indicating to only leave numeric messages. He’ll call, Goetzler told himself, these people always need money.

  Last night, Mike Rosen undid his belt and his fly before he walked into the office. In the dark, Goetzler saw the rain smears on his own glasses. Rosen looked at the floor and made sure not to step on the white rugs. He hit a switch and ten Tiffany lamps lit. Goetzler never noticed the light switch, and guessed the lamps were there for the Polksa in black stockings to dust on Wednesday nights while Rosen watched from behind this desk.

  Goetzler saw spots. He blinked his eyes hard. Rosen was a dark shape moving quickly.

  He never considered a light switch. The thing was ruined.

  When the dots became smears, Goetzler fired the silenced pistol, still blinking his eyes when the body fell. It sounded like a fat man stepping from bed. He couldn’t see and forgot he held the .38 for a long minute.

  He never meant to kill him. He’d only wanted Rosen to change clothes, then show him the picture, asking him if he got the joke. Do you see the connection, he’d say. But Goetzler wore a William Westmoreland mask, the eyeholes cut big. Rosen wouldn’t remember him anyway, but he would know the picture, and he might recall the photographer’s name. He could have an opinion about how it ended the American Century; some University of Illinois poly-sci reel about how Vietnam was the direct result of … Goetzler would explain the your side, my side irony of the picture, the cops versus the not-cops, and then ask him why he didn’t understand more quickly. You made three million by getting cops mad in court, he’d say while Rosen looked for an answer. You should know what this is about. In the picture, you are on the dead guy’s side.

  It took Goetzler ten minutes to dress the body. But he felt giddy, even pleased with himself. Kerm would see Goetzler as Kerm, and if Annie could know he shot Rosen, the odds were short that she’d see him for nothing.

  * * *

  The light at Barnes and Noble was white as paper. Goetzler held a book, The Autobiography of U. S. Grant, open to the Shiloh pages, and imagined the general bourbon drunk and tied to his horse. He was a failure at thirty-four. Goetzler loved a second-chance story, and Grant was the phoenix.

  He watched the blond girls in the café cram for the GMAT. He stared until they blurred with their books, their fingers wound in ponytails, and imagined himself in a restaurant bar filled with Weber Industrial Supply management, a trattoria on the Gold Coast, some subtle place on a loud street. Goetzler would force the general president into conversation by paying with fifties. He’d count the money out, an inch of bills folded in half. Grant was a sot, Goetzler would say, pointing at the thick-faced portrait, but the man never got lost. He killed to keep hold—Indians, Mexicans, the whole of the Confederate Army—because he remembered being a failure who counted cow hides for his little brother. He made himself indispensable to more powerful men. He even wrote his autobiography when he was dying of throat cancer, all to keep his family in money. The MBAs would become quiet and look at Goetzler without half watching ESPN on the television. They’d want to know more about Grant’s story, and never once look back at Sports Center while Goetzler talked. You really got a handle on where to find leadership lessons, they’d say. Can you jockey that into a team building exercise?

  He stood among the books and dreamed of giving the management seminar on Grant. The suits would be sitting along three tables in the blue room of white noise, and he’d be explaining Shiloh. He wouldn’t talk about how the dead were white with peach blossoms knocked from the trees by the rifle fire. The guys would write that down and ask him during the break what the flower petals had to do with anything. They’d be interested in the way Grant got water and gunpowder to the lines and all the steps in that process. In the end, he also knew they wouldn’t care about the formations of the battle, or how Grant was lucky enough to have his greatest Confederate adversary, General Albert Sidney Johnson, get killed on Shiloh’s first day. They’d want to know how Grant approached the subject of evaluation with his senior staff officers.

  He put the book down and walked to the chairs before the podium. People were sitting and waiting for ex-Rainman Will Avers to give his Tribune advertised reading—aging men with ponytails and liver-spotted baldness, gray women wearing the residue from too many bead fairs. Like Goetzler, they wanted to see the sixties radical with earrings in both ears and a real neat goatee smeared black by Just for Men. He was ten minutes late. Goetzler quit looking at his watch when he noticed nobody else was doing it.

  Avers had written a book about being a fugitive from the federal government for thirteen years. Goetzler read it in this store, beneath this hard light. Avers claimed Manson knew shit from shinola. You got to kill the pigs, he joked about once saying. He made bombs, taught black kids on the West Side how to sing and hold hands, met with the Viet Cong in Canada, got implicated in a conspiracy after blowing up two ROTC offices, Madison and Iowa City, then went underground and swapped women like baseball cards until his father’s lawyer cut a deal with the FBI. He took a Ph.D. in history. He got an NEH fellowship to study the effects of Reaganomics on urban school reform, but instead wrote a memoir of his time on the lam. His publisher advanced him. He bought a three-bedroom condo in Lincoln Park, the lake and the maple trees beyond bay windows, granite countertops, a hot tub with jets that could dent car doors. He had parties for his graduate students. He was heavy into yoga and went to a place in Ravenswood and cruised divorced schoolteachers. He gave interviews on local NPR, plug for the book, and they treated him like the Left’s Audie Murphy. If I had the stuff, I’d be you, they almost said.

  In person, he was a skinny guy who smiled like a game show host. A girl in vegan shoes introduced him, reading a pull quote from a review, “Avers thoughtfully resists the pitfalls of nostalgia.” He scratched the die off his goatee, watching the flecks fall upon his book pages like crumbs. He spoke without using a microphone, telling about the night he waited by a highway-side pay phone for a call that didn’t come, and how it took three days before he knew the caller was blown up making a bomb. The people were smiling and nodding as if they’d waited for the same kind of call. Avers paused often for water, and his hands just fit around the bottle, his fingers small for his height. When the Evian emptied, he looked unstrung until he found another bottle, then did a perfect imitation of Johnny Cash.

  “I thought I was going to have to drink the runoff from Luther’s boots.”

  The people laughed, even the ones who didn’t know what he was talking about. Avers owned the imitation. He’d thought to swallow his words like Cash did, because at Folsom Prison, Cash played nine songs before asking for a drink, but the water was slow in coming,
and Cash thought his bass player’s sweaty boots might do. Goetzler knew all about this record because his first sergeant in Germany, a black guy from Toledo, loved Johnny Cash, and eyeballed people who thought it was funny.

  Avers took off his glasses. He’d gotten bright in the eyes.

  “You learn these things after hiding in people’s basements for thirteen years,” he said. “You should hear my Liza Minnelli. But Cash’s song ‘The Man in Black’ kept me going through it all. Like Johnny said, ‘I couldn’t put a rainbow on my back and pretend that everything’s just fine.’”

  There were second acts, but the men who stayed believers were the ones who never lost everything. Neither Goetzler nor Avers were such men. Goetzler figured Avers’s time underground in the white noise of basement bedrooms, having running-without-moving dreams set in penitentiary mess halls, taught him that believers got paid the same as shirkers. He decided that if he could ever walk as himself, he’d write his Ph.D. and get a pension. He’d turn their kids. The academic left, once those string-haired grad students in black berets and leather jackets, figured it owed Avers, and he did, too. After the police department, Goetzler tried doing the same thing at Weber. He fought for capitalism and now the corporations must make a place.

  Will Avers would be the little girl running from napalm. Kim Luc Phu, the girl in the picture, her arms forever dangling while her burning village boiled paddy water. Goetzler wanted to make Avers understand that he was protecting the little girls from both the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese soldiers, not napalming them. He entertained notions of getting a camcorder and sending the tape to Fox News Chicago. He could even burn CDs and put Avers running naked through an alley on the Internet. But, first, he’d blindfold him with duct tape and then tape a lamented picture of Kim Luc Phu around his neck. He’d send Avers into the traffic on Halsted Street and get the whole thing on camcorder. Yahoo might even file the story under news of the weird because Avers’s backside was sure to be among the whitest ever spotted.

  14

  Annie stood in the Motel 6 room and looked at the parked cars on Ohio Street, waiting for the date’s knock. She wore a robe over black lingerie for hotel day calls, and wondered why these men spent five hundred dollars for an hour of kissless sex with her. Catholic brunettes from Hoffman Estates got naked for carry-out sushi and St. Elmo’s Fire on DVD, and they kissed with their tongues.

  But these johns couldn’t score with women who only wanted a date for Christmas Day at their parents’ house.

  She believed they were all low-hanging fruit. They came on the hour, some tubby and apologetic, some health-club sleek and lying about themselves. The cop was a better class of john, though maybe a john the same. She’d watch him before deciding, but the rest were mostly from the bottom of the world.

  When the knock came, she opened the door, and her date was a crew-cut Italian mix. He’d wrestled in high school, but didn’t have the guts for the Marine Corps, so the haircut remained part of the old fantasy. They were always dreamers.

  He looked at Annie and chewed with an open mouth. After he came inside, she pressed his eyes. They were like painted glass.

  “I can taste you already,” he said.

  Annie’s eyes watered from his Aramis.

  He took Velcro restraints from his leather coat and held them out for her with one hand.

  “I don’t do that,” she said.

  The guy smiled, tossed her restraints, which she let fall, and then threw his patrolman’s star on the bed. She went cold like the windows. He was a tactical cop, a uniform who gets to wear blue jeans and a bulletproof vest and put kids over cruiser hoods for selling joints. He was small, but still a problem. She bent over and picked up the restraints.

  “Leave the lingerie on,” he said, “then lay on your stomach.”

  She took off her robe and turned for the bed. The spread lay on the floor from the Loyola kid at noon.

  “I’ll give you the tip later,” the cop said. “I’ll be sure to tell you to work hard and save your money.”

  When she lay down, she put the restraints beside her, then buried her face between the pillows while the Velcro tore. He soon started on her ankles.

  * * *

  The next day, Annie stayed in the apartment. She tried yoga twice, but shook and lost balance doing the plank. She sat in panties and a T-shirt, hallucinating the cotton weighed heavy, and calmed herself by looking at the cop’s blinded window. He wasn’t home.

  The agency had been calling all afternoon. She held the phone and watched the BLOCKED light, wondering how far she could push Goetzler. Yesterday, she hadn’t seen a cop in that john, and she was getting scared. She liked the tidy arrangement with Goetzler since he wanted absolution for Vietnam and not sex. For love, there was the cop across the street. She’d keep giving Goetzler silence and he’d busy himself by taking it as a challenge.

  But she might answer her cell next time. Nick would offer her another five percent, maybe ten for anything over two hours. After it got dark, the cop went running so she turned her phone off. Nick went to pieces if he slept on things. He’d give her fifteen percent by noon tomorrow.

  Annie turned from the window, looking for a cat, but they were hiding. When her hands started running across the floorboards, she decided to wear an ao dai, and meet the cop after his run. She got dressed inside two minutes, smiling about the white silk on her back, and watched herself in the mirror. She acted shy and nodded, touching her hips with curled fingers.

  She went downstairs and stood in the side-street wind and let her cheeks get wet. She’d even turned and checked herself in the door glass, the silk train blowing up and twisting. The cop’s apartment was lit, one lamp by the chair. The rain hit the bell she’d ring.

  In Chicago, in this sideways rain, Annie made the wind warm and put herself in Hue’s pine air near the Perfume River where it passed beneath the Thoung Tu Bridge. Her uncle had been killed there in 1968, and every day her father pointed out the stretch of pavement. A nice boy, her father said of him. He liked pears and taught himself French. That woman of his, he told Annie. It was her pussy that turned him into a VC. No hair, he’d say to me. Like a girl’s. Sometimes, Annie would stand alone where her uncle died, shot by U.S. Marines, and try imagining a pear while the cyclos hauled live catfish in barrels off to where Le Loi Street turned into trees.

  She’d seen no pictures of pears, but she guessed they looked like mangoes. Sometimes, she’d be eating this pear, but knowing it was a mango, when the schoolgirls started home from the university, their white ao dais like all ao dais, covering everything and hiding nothing. She forgot the fruit and her dead uncle and decided the white silk allowed those girls to fly like egrets or nightingales, and if she wore it, she’d learn to fly by next week. She was still too young for the ao dai, and had even left Vietnam in black cotton pajamas. Her mother always threatened not to make one for her. Keep sleeping with those cats, she’d say. The time will come for your ao dai and you’ll still be dressed like a little girl.

  Tonight, in this wind-dreamed-warm, Annie wasn’t happy she’d learned the difference between Bosc and Anjou pears. She also hated knowing that an ao dai cost only fifty dollars on Argyle Street.

  She walked between the cars and crossed the street to the cop’s. The puddles were sleeved by wet leaves. That night, she’d sat with her back to the window, and knew he’d returned from his run when his desk lamp lit in her television screen. She couldn’t look to see if he was home. When she did, even glancing away quickly, she’d see him move across the window. She’d try making him vague, then a shadow against the curb, but her lips had tasted the salt of him, and he’d smelled like he did in her dreams, alkaline and hard soap.

  When Annie saw herself in his door glass, her arm was long, and the rain flecked her ao dai. The wet silk turned dark, like wiped ashes. She tried drying a mark with her finger, rubbing until the dark color diluted. She touched the bell, using her free hand. The spot wouldn’t fade. She was o
nly pushing the darkness through the fibers.

  15

  Mike’s first quarters went through the squad-room coffee machine. Then, trying again, the coins stuck, and he hit the return lever. He pushed down hard while Detective Manny “Rim-Job” Ruiz was making Lieutenant Rossi believe that a moper killed Rosen. They stood in the cold light thronged through the squad-room windows, two detectives in altered suits from T.J.Maxx, the dirt from the panes shadowed upon their faces. For Ruiz, the story went like this:

  A Willie went away for ten years after getting caught with two kilos, but paid Rosen his last thirty grand to get the sentence reduced to three. Rosen could have pled for five, but took it to trial. They offer half, Willie had said, you know they don’t got any big shit. Willie spent the 1990s talking jailhouse smack about how he would eat Mike the Kike’s fingers like rib tips. But Willie got into a fight with a guard his third week and broke the man’s jaw with a wood-shop hammer. His twenty-fourth day inside had already determined he would not make parole (a hope he carried like Allah through two hearings after becoming Muhammad Kareem Said in a late night conversion). He wound up at a halfway house on the West Side and sat through mandatory Narcotics Anonymous meetings because heroin had softened his incarceration after he burned the Koran in his cell toilet. He got clean and then broke in and shot Rosen in the head.

  “You know how Rosen operated,” Ruiz said.

  Rossi nodded like a tollbooth worker. Some days, depending on the suit, he looked more thin than fat.

  “Your report has a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he said. “I like that.”

  “I keep my stuff tight,” Ruiz said.

  “Sure, Manny,” Rossi said. “You’re tighter than a bus at rush hour.”

  “I pride myself, LT.”

  “Sure you do.”