Because the Rain

by Daniel Buckman

  Before he’d first kissed her, he parted her lips with his finger. He then took her top lip between his own and she saw herself twinned in his green-black eyes. She became the love beneath him, and he touched his face many times with her wet hair. She looked at him while he’d separate the strands and lay them splayed in his hand before bringing them to his mouth. He never turned away from her.

  Now, when Annie got into bed, she couldn’t tell if he was sleeping. She listened for air in his nose, but the night was too loud, and she then lay touching the parts of him that made her jealous: the tight skin over his hip bones, the muscle in his shoulders, the eyes that could look away. Then, she discovered that his lids were open.

  She thought the cop would speak, but he didn’t. He was beyond the window, again. She’d made love to his wishes, but not to him. She drew a line down his back, her finger riding the notches in his spine.

  “Your wife watched me first through the window,” she said.

  He was still as sticks. Annie knew the quiet ones had the brains to destroy themselves.

  “Then she left you,” she said.

  “My wife was killed.”

  “How?”

  She touched his wet neck with her lips. He tasted of the city grass and her own mouth.

  “Last summer,” he said. “She was the woman killed in the alley.”

  Annie didn’t know there was a woman murdered across the street. She’d been working afternoons and nights during the summer, doing out-calls to Glencoe.

  “You wanted to tell me something else,” she said.

  “She’s just dead,” he said. “Nobody knows anything more. I think it was a gang initiation. They never took a thing.”

  “They never found a fingerprint?” she said.

  “They looked hard,” he said. “It took them a week. I was directing traffic downtown during rush hour.”

  He lay on his side. The streetlight cast their shadow against the wall, her hand lost in his shoulder, and she wondered what about it he saw. The fingers from the hand that hung from the bed, or the way the streetlight fogged the night.

  “You are loyal to your old wishes about your marriage,” she said.

  “I was just with you,” he said.

  “Now,” she said, “you are with her.”

  “This is her bed.”

  “Do you want to meet like this?” she said. “Then go back to the windows.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Why don’t you look at me?”

  “I can’t see you and think,” he said.

  The cop went quiet, but he didn’t ask her to leave. With a woman, he was like a car that slid into a ditch over a trick turn. He probably couldn’t say how he ended up kissing their stomachs five minutes after thinking they were bored and wanting to go home. He had his own reality, but merely reacted in this world. She put her ear to his back. Men like him took air the way they attempted canyon turns.

  * * *

  In college, Annie worked for the Hilton and Towers on South Michigan Avenue. She kept track of the safety deposit room where old men locked five Rolexes into a box, then walked out like penguins. She answered the phones in the call center and connected throaty women to the rooms of conventioning oncologists. She worked the checkout desk, smiled in her blue Hilton skirt and blazer, but the people complained that they couldn’t understand her, even though the bill always totaled. They’d tell the manager how her voice was muted by the lobby’s acoustics. There’s too much open air. Within a day, she was assisting the concierge, a gay man named Ron, and telling grayed couples that the Berghoff was the best restaurant south of Lake Street. The spaetzle is something to have, she’d say, working on speaking louder. The couples waited for this advice in short lines while Ron cleaned his black horn-rim glasses.

  “They herd like the elk on the Discovery Channel,” he’d say of the couples. “Just disgusting.”

  Ron wore a string tie with his Hilton blazer. They left him alone about it because he’d helped a Mexican lady, a towel folder in the fitness center, file a sexual harassment complaint at federal court. The day Annie first met him, the sky looked warm, blue traced with yellow, but it was not. He pointed at his tie, then the glasses.

  “People really take me for Elvis Costello,” he said.

  Annie didn’t know what he was talking about. Ron put himself farther into her eyes. She felt stuck beside him on a long flight, jammed between his soft legs and the window. There were ten pounds around his waist that he couldn’t lose by jogging.

  “I can’t have a drink south of Houston without getting hassled,” he said. “Last time, this woman wouldn’t leave it alone. She was a bridge and tunnel person.”

  He stopped and looked sideways at Annie.

  “You don’t know what the hell I’m talking about,” he said.

  Annie shook her head. In a minute, she would not hear him. His mouth could move, but there’d be no volume. She first needed the sky a certain way—bare and blue for ten seconds. She looked out the glass doors, but traffic was stopped.

  “I’m talking about New York,” Ron said. “The bridge and tunnel people live in New Jersey—they come over to ruin the air. Elvis Costello is a famous singer.”

  Annie couldn’t see across the street. The Channel Two news team was splattered with mud on the side of a bus. The people walking the sidewalk reminded her of snapshots spilled from a box.

  “Are you from New York?” she said.

  “No,” Ron said. “But my soul is.”

  “You’ve never lived there?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve just spent a lot of time.”

  There was a young Galway bar back named Jack working the phony Irish pub across the lobby. There were harpists on Wednesday nights, heavyset guys who only smiled when they played. Annie and Ron watched him dry pint glasses. He’d create resistance with the towel, making his forearms strain. All afternoon he did things like that—pressing his hands into the bar, or standing straight and squaring his shoulders. He had red hair, short over his ears, and Annie imagined he’d look younger while he slept. The first time he looked at her, she thought of keys being thrown across the room.

  His eyes are like rocks beneath water, Ron said.

  The concierge started winking and waving at Jack. He’d go to the bar and tilt his head, smiling, before slowing his voice to ask for a glass of water with lime. Jack put his hands in his pockets and looked at his shoes. Maybe he’s trying to go away, she thought, and he can’t see outside.

  Ron grinned at Annie whenever Jack went to the men’s room. He’d walk from behind the concierge desk and pass the gold elevators. Annie imagined them standing at the sinks: Jack trying to not see Ron in the mirror while Ron kept looking for his eyes. Jack left without buttoning his shirt cuffs. He put on his watch behind the bar. Ron smelled like cigarettes when he came back to the desk.

  “Why should you get off and not me?” he’d say.

  She stared out the window. Today, the sky was blue enough to take her, even if it was cold white above the lake, but the street never cleared of traffic. She needed a straight gaze without pigeons and people, then ten seconds alone with the sky. She waited for the stoplight and hoped the flocks in Grant Park had already sprung.

  One night, Jack kept sending glasses of water to Ron. The lime twists were already squeezed. Ron waved at Jack, then drank the water quickly, sending the glass back with the waitress. His face was too tight for his lips to bend, but he still smiled and looked sideways at Jack. The bartender waved like men do for drinks at busy nightclubs. When Ron went to the men’s room, bloated with cold water, Jack ran across the lobby. His haircut was recent.

  “I had to get rid of the wanker to ask you something,” he said.

  She felt herself blinking. He smelled of snuck Marlboros. Annie saw the red box through his shirt pocket.

  “Would you like to go dancing?” he said.

  She watched a cigarette smolder in the ashtray between the elevators. Jack looke
d right at her and talked.

  “There’s some good clubs if you aren’t afraid of the blacks,” he said. “But they’re fine with me.”

  Annie never answered about the dancing. She watched him wonder if she even spoke English. She infuriated men this way, turning them into fools for missing the signs. The women just smiled and touched her shoulder. But the bar back was cussing himself for making her feel uncomfortable.

  “You fucking arsehole,” he said.

  He became a DJ and pretended to scratch records backward. When he started dancing, his arms straight along his legs, she didn’t believe it for a long second. He kept on. She closed her teeth to keep from laughing, but he saw her smile. He got close and showed his watch, pointing to the time. He then revolved his finger until ten o’clock before dancing a long second.

  “We’ll go then,” he said. “After work.”

  He talked like he’d spent a minute deciding that she could understand some words, but not every one. He went back to wiping down the clean bar. Annie might go and talk to him in a corner, but she wouldn’t dance. She’d want to know if he understood women because of the way some men looked at him. She then watched Ron come slow from the men’s room door. Whenever his hair was combed wet, she knew, he’d smell like nicotine and Vitalis. He passed the elevators, then looked at Jack filling pretzel bowls. He shook his finger.

  “I’ll catch you next time,” he said.

  Ron made Jack’s eyes go dark. Annie could not imagine him dancing in a club where men might look at him. His eyes, right then, didn’t work with the spinning lights. They’d refuse the music like they’d ignore a river. But she pictured him talking on sidewalks, hating the concierge and pointing with a cigarette between his fingers. He’d vent for both of them, and she’d listen on the way to the train. He would be good for that.

  After supper breaks, Annie and Ron waited for Jack to use the men’s room, but he stayed behind the bar. He’d drunk three cappuccinos since dinner, and they knew he had to go, but he was cleaning the tap spouts to take his mind off it. He used Windex on the ashtrays.

  “It’s not long,” Ron said to Annie. “He can’t last.”

  Annie watched a new bellhop try bringing a luggage cart through the revolving door.

  “You know,” Ron said. “That bartender’s got ten minutes.”

  The concierge took Annie’s spot behind the desk because it was three steps nearer the men’s room. He tapped his black Doc Martens. I’ve got shoe trees more expensive than these shoes, he’d say, but these are comfortable. They waited twenty more minutes for the bartender to break—when Jack walked off, he went fast and didn’t move his arms. Ron was ten seconds behind him, and Annie saw the pocket-sized Vitalis in the breast of his Hilton blazer. She knew the time exactly from the big clock above the reception desk. It was ten minutes to ten.

  * * *

  The cop never asked Annie to stay, but he slept through the morning and breathed against her stomach.

  She stroked his neck, using her knuckles, not her nails, and looked out his bedroom door. His apartment was white and without decoration. The floors were shiny and bare. She wondered if this sleeping cop thought himself a pedigreed dog kept in a private kennel. His space was for sleeping, eating, and pacing.

  Annie looked at the cop’s cheek and stroked her knuckles close to his throat. His breath was warm against her stomach before turning cold like the room. He’ll like her orders, she thought, the subtle ones he doesn’t know he is following, and after a time, he’ll feel lost without them.

  They lay together through the gray afternoon and the darkness that came very early. Annie loved his hand upon her hip, and the way he emptied his mind by breathing on her stomach. The cop was forgetting himself by using her scent. His wife was gone, his dream-thoughts random and even fleeting. She stroked his hair and watched him breathe doglike through his nose.

  She might turn him into her jester, or the keeper of her cats, and he’d never know she had transformed him. Annie offered oblivion, and the cop had a loud silence. By tomorrow night, he’ll understand he needed her scent to clear his head and imagine a future. Now, he saw everything through his wife’s death, and his silence was frustration over not being able to outrun this dead woman. Without her, the cop will become junkie sick.

  18

  The wet snow fell two days before New Year’s and melted before it hit the ground. The couples in matching fleeces walked among lit shop windows, still optimistic about one more holiday wine night with the few couples who’d stopped being as much fun. Mike turned the paddy wagon off Armitage, away from the white lights wound in the old trees, and mumbled the couples’ names to himself—Michelle and David, Lisa and Patrick, Noah and Sarai. They’d all bought loft condos for the fast turnover, he thought, but none were flipping, even with the low mortgage rates, and the women had already started doing Google searches about fertility treatments. They were having big fantasies about space and privacy fences, now that proximity to shoe boutiques and bistro sea bass wasn’t important. Mike imagined them telling their husbands that the property taxes weren’t worth the city schools. The women wouldn’t be able to let it go.

  Today, he started the afternoon shift for a week, the four to midnight, where come eight PM the late-working investment bankers raced their Land Rovers down side streets. The cops called it the Viagra 5K because anytime they made reckless driving stops, they found the individually wrapped blue pills in their pockets. Some of these guys aren’t even thirty-five, Sergeant Olszewski said. It’s a shame worse than letting your buddy jump your sister.

  After eight, the night became a great movement of eighty-thousand-dollar vehicles the men bought to drive between the parking structures downtown and the garages included in the price of their condos. Overpriced metal, living rooms on wheels, the feeling of command. They took their moving violations like movie tickets, treating Mike with the same sarcastic politeness they used on the West Africans who valeted their cars. But there would never be a partner-of-the-day on afternoons. If the calls were slack, Mike could get away without smelling anybody for a straight four hours. When he turned on Lincoln, the streetlight was dry like the pavement.

  He drove the wagon and looked at the black trees. Annie had needed the illusion of stealth to leave his apartment, and he didn’t understand why. She’d known he was awake—her ear had been trained on his breath as if trying to translate a code—but she’d taken her chest off his back by degrees. He looked away, but his eyes never closed. She dressed in her wet silk without standing up. He then heard her bare feet on the oak floor. When she was gone, he felt the change immediately and Susan returned upon two legs.

  Annie might tell him a sad story about herself, but she’d never let him use it to know her. Take her only when she comes, he reminded himself.

  Mike went two blocks, past sports bar guys spilled onto sidewalks with crooked cigarettes, a Starbucks going into an old hot dog stand, then hit his blue lights so he could make a U-turn and head back northwest. In the end, he thought, a cop drove and looked around a lot. For him, the color of night was never different.

  He suddenly stopped the wagon in traffic and put on the blue lights. The Audis and the BMWs passed him like basketball players who threw elbows when the referee turned away.

  The man came running bearded and bald from the alley. He was naked and his legs were all white. He had a picture duct-taped to his chest, a large black and white print. When he ran across the sidewalk, his skin a blur in the light from the shop windows, he dangled his arms as if he’d been told to keep them a certain way. Mike thought he was going to run straight into the traffic and die naked. He’d expire with his arms spread affectedly, killed by the grill of a Lexus R620 with cattle guards and floodlights. But the guy stopped inside the line of parked cars, and checked to see if his arms were hanging the right way. Mike would have bet he was going toward the street.

  He radioed and got out, then walked along the rowed cars. The guy stood checking his
arms. He ran in place. His top teeth hit his lower ones. He kept dangling his arms.

  “Go easy,” Mike said. “You can slow it down to a stand.”

  “I got to run the road,” he said. “My arms like this. I was told.”

  Mike figured he’d been reduced to this in less than a minute.

  “Who told you?” he said.

  “American planes didn’t napalm this village in the picture. He told me that. He said, ‘We can’t have this girl anymore.’”

  “The village?” Mike said.

  “In the picture.”

  The print taped to his chest was Kim Luc Phu running from the napalm and the humid wind that spread the flames from the village to the paddy docks. Her arms held a perfect seven and five o’clock, and so did the man’s. The print was laminated enough to turn the rain. From memory, Mike knew the Vietnamese girl was naked, but he couldn’t tell in the darkness. Suddenly he smelled Annie’s rain scent and wondered if she ever ran from a burning village.

  “We used these pictures wrongly,” the guy said. “I know that now. We pissed all over what our brothers had died for.”

  “Go slower.”

  “I’ve got miles left to run. He told me to make like Paul Revere and tell the city what I know.”

  The guy had spat while he talked. His lips were blue. Mike watched his eyes and never saw him blink, then ripped the picture from his chest.

  “Who taped this picture?”

  “There are men watching. He told me I must run until everybody knows what he told me.”

  The man took off and ran headlong into traffic, past the twirling wagon lights, the tree shadows left by the streetlamps. He got hit fast: a restored Jeep Wagoneer with the original wood took him out at the knees, and he flew left, landing on an Audi hood. The guy had gone up with his arms down. The Jeep had stopped, the driver still a dark shape, but the traffic kept moving. Mike waved for the cars to slow, then stared past their headlights, trying to see if the guy was a mess. When he started into the street, he watched the man lying on the car hood, and tried to remember if Grant Hospital was closer than Illinois Masonic.