Midnight Rain

by Newman,James

  It didn’t work. The car sat there like a sleek tan shark in the vast sea of night outside my house. Going nowhere.

  I bit my lip, and this time I growled through bared teeth, “Leave me alone, you bastard…”

  The passenger door of the patrol car yawned open then.

  Baker laughed. It was a deep, basso chuckle that cut the night like a sword slicing through silk, and it did not seem to come from twenty or thirty feet away from me but from right there in my bedroom with me. I shuddered. I could hear the radio inside his patrol car as well. He had it turned up so loud I wondered if he might be trying to disturb everyone on my block in the wee hours of the morning.

  “Drums keep pounding a rhythm to the brain,” Cher crooned from inside the car. “And the beat goes on.”

  I watched, listened, waited. Squinted through the darkness, trying to make out who…

  When I recognized her, I shook my head. I could barely stop myself from slamming one of my fists through my window.

  My mother. Of course. I scowled at her through the window as she got out of the car, staggering slightly. Her dress looked as if she had taken it out of the washer earlier that night and thrown it on without a second thought toward ironing it or trying to make it look halfway presentable.

  There was a run in one of her stockings, I saw when she came closer. I could see her petticoat winking out at me from one side of her skirt.

  My mother grew blurry as she approached the front door. Tears filled my eyes as I watched her pass through the crimson glow of the sheriff’s brake lights like something crossing out of one dimension and into another.

  She had only begun to scrounge through the depths of her bulky brown purse when Baker honked his horn twice fast.

  Mom giggled. Turned. Blew the killer a kiss.

  I heard her let out a little belch.

  At last, the sheriff drove away. The sound of his patrol car’s engine rose and fell like that of an oddly-shaped starship as he took off down the street faster than was really necessary.

  A few seconds later I could hear Mom trying to get the key in the lock.

  “Frigging thing,” I heard her say. “Don’t give me a hard time…”

  From where I sat, so still by the window, it sounded as if she were just scratching at the wood around the lock in hopes that it magically allow her to enter if she kept doing that long enough.

  Finally, the door opened.

  By the time I heard my mother stumbling down the hallway, toward her bedroom, I had already sneaked back into bed. I closed my eyes, pretending to be fast asleep.

  Please don’t come in here, I prayed.

  I heard her belch again.

  A few minutes later she started aping Cher in the other room, though she sounded like a retarded Elvis impersonator on Prozac more than anything else.

  I rolled over, groaned, covered my head with my pillow, and tried to drown out the awful sound of it.

  But that only helped a little.

  AUGUST 19

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The next evening Mom sent me to the grocery store across town for a gallon of milk and a carton of eggs. Seems she planned on playing the perfect mother, for some reason—perhaps to make up for her wild night out on the town with Midnight’s own Jack the Ripper—and a batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies awaited me after dinner long as I didn’t mind helping out with that one chore.

  Much to my chagrin, however, she also informed me just before I headed out the door that we “might have a guest for dinner.”

  Him.

  It was as if she had intentionally waited to tell me that after I agreed to go for her.

  Truth be told, I didn’t really mind running to the grocery store for Mom. The fact that he might pay us a visit before the night was over notwithstanding, Burner and I had a lot of catching up to do. I was delighted to have my old friend back—to say the least—and at last my trip to the grocery store would allow us time to enjoy one another’s company, to do all the things boyhood companions are supposed to do when they are released from domestic captivity and allowed to roam free like wild animals.

  I couldn’t get out the door and onto Burner’s soft silver seat fast enough.

  “Be careful, Kyle!” Mom called after me from the kitchen, but Burner and I had already taken off like a bullet when she said it. The door slammed shut behind me, and the sound of it was like a harsh punctuation mark upon her attempt at concern.

  “I will!” I shouted back at her, my voice bursting out of me in a staccato machine-gun effect as I bounced down the steps of our front porch atop my bicycle. “Don’t worry! I’ll be back in a few!”

  Gravel sprayed into the air behind us like hard gray flames from the ass-end of a rocket as Burner and I zipped out of our driveway and into the street. A cold drizzle struck my face and hands like tiny shards of ice as we headed toward town, but I did not mind. I stuck out my tongue, tasting the rain, loving it, and despite the evening’s damp chill I felt warm all over, shrouded in that euphoric feeling of ultimate freedom I always experienced each time Burner and I attempted to shatter the sound barrier.

  Once we reached the town common, I purposefully took the long route around Midnight’s business district to the Big Pig Grocery on Brady Boulevard. The alternative would have been to venture down Main Street, and despite my mood as Burner and I flew down Midnight’s damp back alleys and muddy side roads, I shuddered at the thought of passing by the Sheriff’s Department.

  The sun had begun to dip beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains by the time I reached the grocery store, and the drizzle had died away at least for a little while. Only a cold, misty fog coated Midnight’s slick wet streets, brushing against my ankles like something sinister lying in wait as I pulled into the Big Pig parking lot.

  I screeched to a halt in front of the store and hopped off of Burner, propping him up on the sidewalk beside a squat black newspaper machine selling copies of the Midnight Sun for fifteen cents.

  I hurried inside then, and wasted no time in picking up that gallon of milk and carton of eggs Mom needed.

  I fell into line behind two old men who waited to pay for their own groceries, and after a couple minutes I sighed impatiently, started tapping my foot. Apparently the pretty blond teenager running the cash register (DIANE, read her name-tag, above a cartoon image of a smiling, bow-tied sow, “THANKS FOR SHOPPING AT BIG PIG!”) could not be bothered to speed things up a bit. She smacked her gum loudly as she worked at her own leisurely pace, and I was quite sure the End of the World would dawn before she finished ringing up the single loaf of bread and six-pack of toilet paper being purchased by the large round red-headed woman at the front of the line. Meanwhile, I watched more than a few lines around me—lines not designated “Express Lane,” as it were—clear out in what seemed like record time, the shoppers handing over their cash one after the other like twitchy, smiling actors in a chaotic loop of film footage sped up for comic effect.

  I sighed again, rolled my eyes.

  “Oh, come on,” I whispered. “This is ridiculous…”

  But then my mood suddenly changed. My childish impatience turned to hot, burning fear as I caught gruff-voiced snippets of the conversation taking place between the two old men in front of me. Rarely did anyone over the age of fourteen or fifteen have anything to say that interested a kid like me in the least, so at first their geezerly gossip had been little more than faint white noise to me as we waited there in line.

  Then I heard one of them mention a single name, a word that made my breath catch in my throat, and I had to know what they were talking about…

  “Calvin Mooney,” said the first guy in line.

  And I suddenly went tense.

  “That’s what Dirk Stuber told me, anyway.” The speaker had a long face covered in wrinkles, wore an ugly green button-up shirt and a cap that said KISS MY ASS I’M RETIRED. In his little red shopping basket he carried a jar of olive oil, a can of beets, and two packs of hamburger buns. “S
topped me on the way into the store, said his son, Davey, was the one drove the ambulance. Guy was dead before they got there, though.”

  “Well, it’s about damn time,” said another senior citizen standing directly in front of me. He was the tallest person I had ever seen. He wore a pinkish golf hat with a bright yellow ball on top, baggy slacks the color of babyshit. In the crook of one liver-spotted arm he carried a fat brown bottle of cooking sherry. “Henrietta and I were starting to wonder just what the county’s been payin’ Burt Baker for all this time.”

  “My sentiments exactly. Gonna have to be some changes ’fore he gets my vote again.”

  Finally, the line moved forward. The old man in the KISS MY ASS cap laid his groceries upon the counter and lowered his voice a bit but not too much as he turned back to his friend and posited, “I know it ain’t the popular opinion these days, Carl, but I’ve said it all along…they let these black bastards run wild, like a buncha fuckin’ monkeys, sooner or later it all comes to a head. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place. This Mooney character shoulda been in some sorta institution a long time ago, you ask me, ’stead of out walkin’ the streets.”

  The tall guy in the golf hat shook his hat. “Damn shame is what it is.”

  I flinched when a third guy broke into the conversation from behind me then.

  “Come on now, Sam, that’s not fair,” said the new man. His was the first voice I’d heard since stepping into the Big Pig that did not seep with a thick Southern accent. It was a kind voice. A younger voice. “Personally, I gotta wonder whatever happened to a fellow being innocent till he’s proven guilty…”

  I nodded as I glanced back at him. He was a chubby middle-aged man with a belly that barely allowed him to squeeze into the checkout line with us. In one arm he held a bag of potato chips and a can of Spam. In the other he carried a case of Budweiser.

  The two older gentlemen stared at him as if he were a giant turd that had grown legs and the ability to talk.

  “Didn’t Calvin Mooney deserve a fair trial just like anybody else? That’s all I’m sayin’.”

  I had to know what was going on. I swallowed, took a second to find my voice, and quietly asked, “What happened?”

  The senior citizens at the front of the line turned around, looked down at me as if I were an insect they had nearly stepped upon.

  “T-tell me,” I said. “Please. What h-happened?”

  “They got Calvin Mooney,” said the tall man in the golf attire. “Finally.”

  “What?”

  “Shot him dead, kid,” said Mr. KISS MY ASS. He pulled a five-dollar bill from a wallet bulging with green and handed it to the cashier. “Out on Forty-fourth Street. Caught him lookin’ in some white girl’s window.”

  “No,” I said. I covered my mouth with one hand. I felt light-headed. The cool air in the grocery store tasted bitter, and seemed to grow thick as dog fur clogging up my lungs. “No…th-that can’t be right…”

  The first man in line grabbed his bag of groceries then, thanked the cashier by pinching the bill of his KISS MY ASS hat as if in some crude display of redneck chivalry, and said to his fellow senior citizen before heading off, “Now let’s just pray he burns in Hell…”

  I felt weak. Dizzy. I could hardly breathe. The store seemed to swirl around me as if reality itself had become a sloshing liquid thing…

  I couldn’t stop shaking my head. Back and forth. Back and forth.

  “No,” I moaned. “What have they done…”

  Milk and eggs for Mom’s cookies were the farthest things from my mind now. Feeling numb, I let my groceries tumble out of my arms and onto the counter behind the tall man in the golf hat.

  I squeezed past him then, and I fled for the exit at the front of the store, my heart pounding at what felt like a hundred thousand beats per minute…

  “Hey!” I heard someone say behind me, or maybe I imagined it. I don’t know, because I did not turn around.

  I burst from the grocery store, and left Burner propped up against the building for now. In a matter of seconds I had crossed the Big Pig’s vast parking lot. I dashed madly across the street, forgetting to look both ways, not knowing where I was going nor caring at all about the mess I made all over my jeans as I splashed through a dozen puddles on my way.

  I did not stop running until I burst through the doors of the new Sears & Roebuck store at the end of the block.

  “Help you?” said the man behind the counter. He was a balding middle-aged gent with wire-rimmed glasses that looked too small for his wide, round face. On the side of his neck perched a thick brown mole the size of a small nation. “I gotta close up shop in a few, son.”

  He gave me an expression that seemed to indicate he had better things to do than bother with stupid kids, but I paid him no mind.

  I turned from the man with the mole to the six small televisions for sale against the wall to my right.

  They were all turned to the same station. To Channel 5, and the WHLP Evening News.

  All my questions were answered.

  It was true.

  Oh, God, it was true.

  I fell to my knees, right there on the floor in the middle of the Sears & Roebuck, as I watched. And I listened. And I learned.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mr. Friendly staring at me with his mouth hanging open. Vigorously he scratched at his stubbled chin, apparently wondering what the hell was wrong with this weird-ass kid in the middle of his store.

  Must be retarded or something, I could almost hear him thinking…

  “Indeed, ladies and gentlemen,” said the blonde anchorman on the six identical Zenith television sets before me. He seemed to speak directly to me, his voice sounding oddly choral as he explained, “Earlier this evening, Calvin Mooney, the man who was arrested ten days ago for the murder of Cassandra Belle Rourke, was shot and killed by an unknown assailant. Mooney had escaped from the custody of the Polk County Sheriff’s Department this past Friday. Though further details are scarce at this time, the WHLP News Team will bring you further information as soon as it becomes available. This has been a Channel 5 News Flash. We now we return you to your regularly scheduled program.”

  And that was that. It was over, as if Calvin Mooney and his life had never been worth more than one very brief mention to begin with.

  Rooster did not matter. He never had.

  He was black. He was mentally handicapped.

  He was a murderer, as far as my town was concerned.

  He had been dead long before Burt Baker ever opened that jail cell and allowed his little scapegoat to temporarily walk free.

  The bastard’s plan had worked. To say the least.

  I could not stop staring at the television, dumbfounded by everything I had learned during those last few minutes, even after the anchorman’s grim expression was abruptly replaced with an episode of M*A*S*H. I knelt there, shaking my head back and forth, not wanting to believe any of it though I knew I had no choice, while an ecstatic Radar informed Hawk-Eye and B.J. that he’d been accepted into the “Famous Las Vegas Writers School.”

  I made a gagging sound, covered my mouth with one hand.

  “Hey,” said the man at the counter. “You sick or somethin’, kid?”

  I just kept shaking my head, as if I might keep doing that for the rest of my life. The laugh track on the TV pierced through my skull, seemed to gnaw at my brain like a plague of hungry ants.

  “Hey,” the man barked at me again. “You okay?”

  “N-no,” I croaked. “No…”

  Finally, I stood. I wobbled there for a minute before staggering out of the store and onto the sidewalk. The door slammed shut behind me, and I could already see Mr. Friendly turning the COME IN! WE’RE OPEN sign over to CLOSED, PLEASE CALL AGAIN in my peripheral vision. I doubled over, feeling as if I might vomit, but I hadn’t eaten dinner yet so nothing came out but a single hoarse dry-heave.

  Jesus…

  It was all too much too f
ast.

  They had killed him. Calvin Mooney had paid for Burt Baker’s crime, and now the whole terrible ordeal was over as far as Polk County was concerned.

  Cassie Belle Rourke’s death had been avenged.

  “You…bastard,” I cried, gnashing my teeth and balling my fists. “I hope you fucking die…”

  My stomach kept churning, my bowels lurching like something parasitic nesting inside me, as I crossed the street, ready to retrieve Burner and head back home at last. A passing brown sedan (BAKER FOR SHERIFF IN ‘75! read the bumper sticker on its dented rear end) splashed me with muddy water, but in my stunned daze I barely seemed to notice. Though my clothes and hair were dripping wet, my pants soaked with mud as if I’d just gone running through a pig-pen, I could only focus on Burner, propped up against the front of the grocery store on the opposite side of the massive parking lot before me.

  I couldn’t get to my bicycle fast enough.

  In those last few seconds before the game took a whole new turn, I seriously considered mounting my old friend right then and there, just riding away to some place far, far away. To a town where no one had ever heard of Midnight, North Carolina or Cassie Belle Rourke or Calvin Mooney or a foul creature by the name of Burt Baker.

  The thought of it sure was tempting…

  But then I chose to hang around. At least for a while.

  Because that’s when I saw the sheriff’s son, young Henry Baker, come strolling out of Betty’s Flower Shop, next to the Big Pig Grocery.

  I froze where I stood. All thoughts of deserting my hometown suddenly vanished, as I watched him cross the parking lot.

  He was headed right for me…

  His hair was wet, slicked back, and it appeared to have been trimmed a bit since the last time I saw him. He had shaved his Vinnie Barbarino sideburns. His moustache was still a thin, wispy thing that looked more a stain on his upper lip from drinking chocolate milk than facial hair. As he came out of the store he held a small bouquet of pink carnations in the crook of his left arm. His other hand was busy stuffing his wallet into the back pocket of his tight black jeans.