His plan might go off like a pop song. Mexico in the morning dark could forever change the image the time of day brought to his mind: gentle, solitary gray light without the slaggy air left by late-night traffic, or the crows that scavenge the cold gutter leaves before dawn. He’d see the wind in palm leaves, not bare hickory branches, and the sun rising behind the ocean would never get lost in the black clouds blown down from Wisconsin. After running in the Pacific morning dark for two weeks, the beach appearing from the receding tide beneath his Teva sandals, he’d forget what Chicago looked like in the moments before dawn.
Mike wheeled the suitcases out the front door. It was colder than three hours ago when he came back from the real estate agency. Every other streetlight was dark, and the rain slanting through the lit lamps was on the verge of becoming snow. The Lincoln idled in the street and the trunk was open, but the driver stood inside his open door. Mike pulled his luggage to the sidewalk and saw that the driver was gray and Balkan. He laughed before he looked back at Mike.
“There’s a nutball here,” he said. “Look at him.”
Mike pitched his luggage inside the trunk. His eighteen months as a cop taught him to ignore anybody who drove professionally. Ambulance drivers and cabbies would talk like channels flipping on a Sony thirty-six-inch television, and this driver rambled with the same visual bytes. Mike wanted to leave Claremont Avenue like he’d snuff out a candle, then walk down the airplane steps into the Mexican white light and ocean-smelling wind. There was pain to bury with his kayak paddle into the blue Pacific waves. There were steno pads to fill and pencils to sharpen.
When he closed the trunk, the driver was pointing at a thin, gray man standing in the mud. His legs were splitting while his arms raised at the elbows. He reached out with small fingers, straining as if leashed, his eyes dead-set. He wanted to lay his small hands on something. The driver looked at Mike and nodded while he smiled around his rodent nose.
“This mad bastard won’t move,” he said. “You can tell him that his mother has balls and he won’t say a word. Why don’t you try?”
The driver grinned and pointed at the man. He waited for Mike to speak, nodding with great enthusiasm.
“Go on,” the driver said, “say his mother dances in the nursing home for pop-machine money.”
Mike realized that Annie was giving up her john. If this guy got a flat tire, people would drive by without noticing. The driver was laughing in the rain, and pointing harder for Mike to talk. This was nothing to see.
“You can’t give this up,” he said. “You can say anything to this goofy bastard. Tell him that his father likes boys.”
Mike tried to get into the john’s eyes, but the man was looking permanently away. He was beyond the three-flat roofs, even the sky made starless by the city lights. He didn’t even have a face. But Mike didn’t connect him to the killer until he recognized his stance from Larry Burrows’s picture “Reaching Out,” the famous shot of a post-battle marine rifle squad in the hills outside Khe Sanh. This john was the tall black marine stiff like a stunned boxer while they kept him from his wounded buddy. He was exact about holding himself back.
This hooker was sadistic. She wanted the john to understand that his options had vanished by using a Vietnam War picture against him.
Feel powerlessness, round-eye, the hooker said. You cannot touch what you think needs your help.
Mike walked and kept the car between himself and this mime-like john. The man saw him, but wouldn’t meet his eyes. The driver was pointing and laughing.
“Let’s go to the airport,” Mike said. “My New York Times is getting wet.”
The driver looked at Mike with unbelieving eyes.
“Why don’t you want to tell this zapped asshole to fuck off and die?” he said. “He won’t even move. You can let the crazy prick have it.”
Mike got inside the warm Lincoln. He opened his paper on his knees, but hadn’t looked at it. He took the Fiji water from his coat pocket. The only thing missing was a moving car.
“What could I say,” Mike said. “You took all the best words.”
The driver sat down and closed his door. He seemed calmer.
“I do pick good combinations of curse words,” the driver said. “I am hard to beat.”
Mike watched the john stand in the new snow and reach out while the car passed the street. The driver was green in the dash light and Mike noticed candle flames illuming the hooker’s windows. He let himself believe the sun hadn’t muddied the coral reefs outside Zihuatanejo. When he met eyes with the driver in the rearview mirror, the man seemed unnerved by Mike’s silence.
“I drove a cab in four countries,” he said, “but Lincolns in America. I can curse in four languages better than any whore. I also read three newspapers a day. I am in the streets, but I am not of them.”
Mike Spence held his laughter when he noticed the driver was playing Lite FM. Neil Young sang slowly, his voice like sunlit regret, but Mike couldn’t hear enough to know the exact song.
“I bet you always know right what to say,” he said to the driver.
ALSO BY DANIEL BUCKMAN
Morning Dark
The Names of Rivers
Waters in Darkness
Daniel Buckman served as a paratrooper with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. Because the Rain is his fourth novel.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
BECAUSE THE RAIN. Copyright © 2007 by Daniel Buckman. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by St. Martin’s Press under license from Pan Books Limited.
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E-mail: [email protected]
The first chapter of this novel previously appeared in different form in Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack and published by Akashic Books in 2005.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Buckman, Daniel, 1967–
Because the rain / Daniel Buckman.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42763-4
ISBN-10: 0-312-42763-8
1. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. 2. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Veterans—Fiction. 3. Vietnamese—Illinois—Chicago—Fiction. 4. Prostitutes—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.U27B43 2007
813'.6—dc22
2006051180
First published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press
First Picador Edition: February 2008
eISBN 9781466854086
First eBook edition: August 2013
Because the Rain Page 17