They spent their days walking Zihuatanejo, near the muddy waterfront, the ocean roily and broken by waves. The gift shops were closed and nobody sold T-shirts near the wharf where fishermen muscled dying marlins from the paintless boats. Susan wore a white linen dress, the train above her ankles, and the wind blew the slack between her knees. All afternoon, she’d been calming him about the poor snorkeling conditions. He knew he was getting too mad, and the hotel had no responsibility to report the water visibility on its Web site, the way he’d told the concierge it did after calling him a “flimflam” man. But Mike couldn’t forget the bilgey water, even if he understood his anger was about Todd not caring about his book, and the only stories he could tell were about how soldiers end up.
He pointed to the ruined bay, the reef hidden by the brown water. Susan smiled while dirty-legged children ran past, their tongues orange from papaya sorbet.
They practice the bait and switch here, he said.
You were never baited.
The water was blue on the Web site.
They push the season, Susan said. That’s how they make money.
The water is brown.
It’s not the season, she said. That’s why we got the price.
He looked at Susan in her white dress, then the palm shadows black on the yucca bushes. His wife was beautiful, her hips soft in the linen. When he found her eyes again, she blew air like it was cigarette smoke. He looked back at the palm shadows.
We don’t need snorkeling, she said of his plan.
It would be better.
I wouldn’t like the fish swimming up against me.
They’re wet like the water, he said. You wouldn’t even know.
I’d see them doing it, she said, and I’d convince myself I felt them.
You sure about that?
You know how I am.
When they rode back to Las Brisas and their bungalow air-conditioned enough to chill brewed coffee, the highway was closed by a toxic spill, anhydrous fertilizer running from a tipped truck, and the bus took a coastal road where the Pacific waves rose and broke on the craggy asphalt. The coach was empty except for the thin man playing a guitar in the open doorway: “La Bamba” on catgut strings, the musician’s pant legs wet from the salt spray. Mike watched Susan hold the seat edge and bounce with the bus, her face red from sun and motion sickness, then closed his eyes against seeing the wrecked ocean, listening to the stranger sing.
* * *
In the precinct lot, Mike Spence stood on the milk crate, his coat open, and hosed down the wagon floor before starting his shift. The cigarette butts shot against the front wall, bounced, then flushed back over the rear bumper. When he’d frisk a wagon mope, the jukebox drinkers, the ex-cons happy they could have a pizza sent to the bar, he took their cigarettes, but some left on benders expecting the flex-cuffs and the wagon, so they hid cigarettes in their shoes. Mike never figured how they smoked Kools with bound hands; no mope ever looked limber enough to hold a squat. He thought about the possible contortions while he hosed, and decided they used their teeth and farmer matches. He sprayed the butts down the grated manhole cover.
When he touched the welt on his cheek, he saw his breath in the dark, and his gloved finger came away wet. He’d broken the scab again and the cold stung his warm, thin blood. For some reason, he kept checking to see if the welt was still there, even after he’d made himself quit.
He figured Annie was a hooker because she believed she needed the cash to leave a world within fifteen minutes. She’d never stopped being a boat person. At night, he watched her come and go in cars, always dressed beyond the neighborhood, black suits and boots. In the late morning, before his shift, he’d watch her skip rope through the windows, and then do handstands. But he felt she was a hooker by the way she kept running her fingers when he’d stood stiff and thought of old trees. Call girls touched with typist hands, but Annie floated you over the rocks and disappeared like a cut-loose kite.
When he stayed the hose gun to hear the water run into the sewer, Kenjuan Mills walked up in the light rain. He decided to stop understanding the killer’s side.
“It’s picture-in-the-paper,” Mills was saying. “The hero on the shit wagon. The Phoenix.”
Before Mike looked at Mills, he’d already imagined the oldest guy in a ghetto club. All week, the sergeant walked the precinct house in his hooded leather jacket, telling guys how wise he was for moving to the West Side and leasing a BMW 5291. All the trim needs to see is the car, he’d say. The K-Town Niggers don’t bother it because my bull sleeps in the garage. Mike kept seeing Mills taking Lakeshore Drive, wearing sunglasses in the dark, and sipping a glass of Heidsieck Brut. He laughed about it for a morning.
“Picture-in-the-paper,” Mills said again.
Mike was silent. The water slowed into the sewer.
“Fuck up and move up,” Mills said. “You’re a combat hero now.”
“It didn’t get me off the wagon.”
“You’ll stay on the wagon even after they offer you tac squad again,” Mills said. “The paddy will take your edge.”
Mills smiled his gold teeth and pulled the hood over his eyes.
Mike Spence eyed the wet wagon floor, watching Mills cut the end from a Cohiba. Now, the only water running down the sewer was the spray from the black cleaning hose. Mike looked at the sergeant’s gold teeth while he flashed his gold Rolex. He got his picture in the paper, and the captain never called him into the office. Mike could set the bomb timer by tipping the Tribune reporter who put him on page one of the Metro section, he thought, then resign from the department by leaving his badge on a urinal mint.
After duty, Mike drank the squad room’s machine instant, his boots wet from the hose. He’d squared his schedule with Olszewski. They were giving him floating days off, Tuesday and Thursday, Saturday and Wednesday, and he’d worked nine shifts without a break. He couldn’t shake the feeling of the paddy’s wheel in his hands, sticky from old donut glaze, and spent the day between his shifts washing them like a dentist. By contract, the cops got two days consecutive, and they couldn’t float on you without overtime. The clause never worked for his schedule. He started thinking the inside was against him, the cops within the cops, like Serpico, but they had no reason. One night, Olszewski called him to apologize. Shit, Spence, he said, I have a hard time remembering you. You’re in-the-walls to me. But Olszewski never fixed it.
He was waiting to spot Ruiz. The detective always took coffee before hitting the Indiana casinos, and he was then walking down the stairs at the end of the hall. Mike needed to know if Ruiz was a drama cop or plain stupid.
Mike blew the steam off the paper cup, wishing the department was burying the pictures for a reason. He imagined the guys pulling their ties loose and rocking back on their heels. They’d made their side pure by treating the prints like Chinese menus dropped in doorways. They’d know they did. This killer is our brother, they’d say. How can we send him to the Sodomites. But Mike figured Ruiz wouldn’t know what the pictures meant. Just some sick bullshit, he’d say. Ruiz was a clerk for the dead who subscribed to MILF porn sites, and with Avers in Belize on academic leave, refusing comment, he had no reason to remember the prints.
In the squad room, Ruiz’s leather collar, wet from neck sweat, held the light. He poked the coffee machine button with a gloved finger, hazelnut and cream. Lately, depending on his jacket, he’d started wearing gray or black leather gloves. I got the idea, he’d brag, reading Latin GQ on the can.
Mike listened to the coffee spout.
“How’s every little thing hanging,” Ruiz said.
He hadn’t turned from the machine. He smelled like White Castles.
“You know how I saw you look at me?” he said. “You noticed I wasn’t watching.”
“I don’t know.”
“I can see sideways,” he said.
Ruiz still wasn’t looking at Mike. He nodded while his coffee brewed.
“This homeboy,” he said, “c
an watch booty pop on both sides of the street.”
“Sure,” Mike said.
Ruiz took a cup before getting the sugar cubes from his pocket.
“You even realize what some shit that is?” he said.
“You got something with it,” Mike said.
Ruiz took red licorice from his pocket. He smiled and chewed, one hand candy, the other coffee. When he finished, he laughed to himself, holding up the cup and a finger. You got a mommie, here, he said. Then another mommie there. I have threesome fantasies running all day. Ruiz nodded, kissing the air. He then pulled the licorice too hard from his pocket. The strands, ribbed to a swirl, fell from the bag, and lay on the tiles like cut wire. He winked at Mike, turning up his hands, then walked from the room. Mike picked up the licorice and understood Ruiz hadn’t even known what the picture meant. If Mike wanted, he could take this one right away from them. The pictures only stood for time away from Ruiz’s threesome fantasies.
22
Today, Goetzler let Annie buy him lunch. She hadn’t lined her eyes with mascara, and her lips were dry. Last appointment, she’d left the envelope on the foyer table, and lipsticked her cell number on the bathroom mirror, showing she got the joke by using quotation marks. He called her and asked her to lunch. I will pay, she’d told him before picking the place: New Saigon on Argyle, a storefront off the curb where Tuan’s wife cooked in the steam from large pots, and the smoking Vietnamese drank iced coffee white from condensed milk. Now, Goetzler couldn’t relax with Annie always looking at him. He’d dreamed this lunch for three days, imagining Annie taking his hand while the snow fell between the branches in Lincoln Park, and later, making love to him for nothing. All I did was remind a few people of what happened in Vietnam, he’d tell her. How can they keep making judgments when they never saw blood? Now, he couldn’t keep his throat wet.
“You look different in a different place,” she said.
He studied his reflection in the window to see. He was subtle and looked sideways at himself.
“I doubt you could notice it,” she said. “It’s just a way you are in the world. Like the difference between a man in a suit and a man in his stained lounging sweats.”
Before he answered, Tuan brought the pho steaming in white porcelain bowls. He came bird-legged, like a hopping egret, Goetzler thought, his stocking feet small in his sandals. He set the noodle soup down, then the plate of limes, bean sprouts, and basil sprigs, trying to save face and not look at Annie first. After Goetzler had ordered, Tuan did his routine about working for the CIA and doing a hard nine in a reeducation camp far north of Hanoi.
“I started fighting the VC at seventeen,” he said again. “I was a Special Forces interpreter in Can Tho. I work for Americans until 1975. The communists had my name on a list with a picture.”
Goetzler pretended Annie was gone, then exhaled.
“They must have wanted you.”
“They came looking for me. They interrogated my mother for three days.”
“You must have been well connected,” Goetzler said.
“My father worked for the French. They kept me in leg chains for one year.”
Tuan was very proud and he turned on a heel. His wife kept a small Buddhist shrine by the cash register, and she’d left two Dunkin’ Donuts glazed for her dead relatives.
Annie opened her eyes wide, then smiled, before laughing at herself, and tarring the basil leaves three times. She wanted all of her actions inside quotation marks. She piled the green pieces in her palm, then sprinkled the flecks into the pho broth, the steam a quarter gone. Goetzler looked away first. He listened to her clean her palms with a napkin she’d dunked into her water glass.
“You don’t use the herbs?” she said.
“No.”
“You should squeeze in lime. Put in bean sprouts, jalapeño pepper.”
He knew Annie wasn’t thinking what she spoke.
“It clouds the broth,” he said.
“You’ve never had pho in Vietnam.”
“Then,” he said, “I liked it clear, too.”
Annie smiled and drank the broth from the spoon. She then scanned the place.
“You did it for this?”
Goetzler pretended she didn’t ask a question. She couldn’t know unless he’d told her.
Tuan brought pho for the woman at the next table. Her cheeks were lighter than her face, and she held the noodles between her chopsticks, looking at Goetzler. She didn’t act like the steam burned her knuckles. Tuan was watching Annie remake her ponytail without removing the band. The woman said to Goetzler, “I am Cambodian. Not Vietnamese.”
“Not the same thing,” Tuan said. “Your girl here knows that, Donald Goetzler.”
He’d noticed the woman liked clear broth. Beside him, Annie sat in an odd nimbus of calm. He figured she’d float away until the people stopped talking.
Tuan was nodding like he’d won something by having remembered Goetzler’s first name.
“Cambodians steal all the time,” he said.
The woman, her eyes black, stared at Goetzler and nodded.
“They steal your sandals when you go walking,” she said.
“They kill you first.” Tuan was laughing.
“I never got killed.”
“They shot Vietnamese soldiers for their sandals,” Tuan said.
“The Khmer Rouge took mine when I carried my six-year-old brother to Thailand. They just ordered them off. I’d hear them in distant villages, the gunfire sounding like a waterfall, but they were never in my way again. My brother is a schoolteacher now. He’s taking classes to be a principal.”
“I escaped Vietnam on a boat,” Tuan said. “Three tries. Once from Nha Trang, Vung Tau, then I went to Can Tho and came out the Mekong River. There were sharks in the ocean. They swam very close to the boat.”
“I spent six years in a refugee camp.”
“I was in Indonesia for two years after communist prison.”
The woman smiled at Goetzler and let the noodles slide off her chopsticks. Her thumb and forefinger were red from squeezing. They started speaking Vietnamese, and Tuan sounded like a mad cat. He put his finger in her face, but the woman’s eyes remained wide.
Goetzler turned to Annie. Her lips were flat. She made her finger a pistol and held it against an imaginary person’s temple. Goetzler watched her laugh her mouth open, then fall silent, before drawing a smile on her face. When she pointed at him, like Tuan did the woman, Goetzler didn’t know what to do with his hands.
23
Annie’s neck and lower back felt slack. Her limberness from morning yoga had lasted past noon. She sat on the restaurant chair and lifted both legs, assuming the lotus, her legs crossed, her stocking toes tucked beneath her knees. She then watched Goetzler look away, out into the cold sunlight and its glints on the gutter ice, and drink his water wedged with lime. His eyes didn’t blink. She wondered when he’d realized why they were meeting in public, then said, “Was the Viet Cong dead in the picture? He could have been dead and not known it yet. Maybe he died in the next frame?”
Goetzler nodded. Tuan wiped tables. Their reflections were stamped in the window glass like that.
“You may have reached a better understanding by now,” she said.
He was quiet.
“You probably did the equation which determined it.”
“The Viet Cong was dead,” he said.
“You can say that now?”
“I could say it then.”
“Either way,” she said. “You and I will work out an arrangement.”
Goetzler drank the water and his lips stayed wet. He refilled the glass, widening his eyes to keep from blinking.
“We’ll set a donation schedule,” Annie said.
He was looking at his hands. He drank again like he’d forgotten his last sip.
“But you and I will be exclusive lunch dates.”
She wrote five thousand on a napkin and pushed it through a pho spill on the table. T
he numbers blurred but remained visible. He pushed back in his chair and sat with his legs stretched, staring between his shoes, his shoulders wilting, his stomach pooched, a water line running down his chin. Tuan walked smiling back to the kitchen.
“Every week,” she said.
“How long?”
“I will be like your wife.”
“I can do this for three years.”
“Then I will divorce you.”
“I understand.”
“What do you understand?” she said.
“Nothing,” Goetzler said. “But I had reasons.”
“Revenge against the people who laughed at you when they were right.”
“No,” he said.
Annie kept quiet and smiled without showing teeth. She could get the money from Goetzler and give him to the cop. They could work out a deal that way. But the cop must know that the pictures were hers to use, not his. He was a voyeur like his country and he must understand that before he could use her stomach to sleep without the dreams. She had first call with the pictures and Goetzler would pay for the cop to understand that.
24
Mike Spence waited for the reporter at the Starbucks on Lincoln and Barry where the tattooed baristas wore combat boots and bomber jackets from the Army-Navy store up the street. He sat in a window seat while a girl with inch holes in her earlobes filled the pastry case with pumpkin bars. He didn’t think much of the reporter, a thirty-something sleeper who believed himself Jimmy Breslin, but the pictures were bigger than Mike giving Avers CPR at a red light.
Because the Rain Page 14