by Joe Hill
RAIN
WHEN THE RAIN FELL, most everyone was caught outside in it.
You wonder, maybe, why so many people died in that initial downpour. People who weren’t there say, Don’t folks in Boulder know to come in out of the rain? Well, let me tell you. This was the last Friday in August, you remember, and it was H-O-T, hot. At eleven in the morning? There wasn’t a cloud to be seen. The sky was so blue it hurt to look at it for too long, and a body just couldn’t stand to be inside. It was about as glorious as the first day in Eden.
Seemed like everyone found something to do out of doors. Mr. Waldman, who was the first to die, was up on his roof, banging a hammer on new shingles. He had his shirt off, and his skinny old-man’s back was baked as red as a boiled crab, but he didn’t seem to mind. Martina, the Russian stripper who lived in the apartment below mine, was out in our dusty scrap of yard, sunning herself in a black bikini so tiny it felt like you ought to have to feed a machine quarters to keep looking at her. The windows were all open in the big, decaying Colonial next door, where the comet cult people lived: Elder Bent and his “family” of broken wackadoodles. Three of their women were outside in the silver gowns they all wore, ceremonial hubcaps on their heads. One of them, an obese gal with a sad, vacant grapefruit of a face, was turning sausages on the grill, and the blue smoke carried down the street, making folks hungry. The other two were at the wooden lawn table working on a fruit salad, one of them chopping pineapple and the other picking red seeds out of pomegranates.
Me, I was killing time with Little Dracula and waiting on the person I loved most in the world. Yolanda was driving up from Denver with her mother. Yolanda was moving in with me.
“Little Dracula” was a boy named Templeton Blake, who lived across the street from me, next door to Mr. Waldman. Yolanda and I both looked after the kid sometimes for his mother, Ursula, who was on her own after her husband had died the year before. Ursula tried to pay us sometimes, but usually we could convince her to settle up with some other form of compensation: a few slices of pizza or fresh vegetables from her garden. I felt sorry for them. Ursula was a slender, small, gracious dame who suffered from mild haphephobia. She couldn’t bear to be touched, which made you wonder how she’d ever had a kid. Her nine-year-old had the vocabulary of a forty-year-old sociologist and almost never left the house; he was always sick with one thing or another, on a raft of antibiotics or antihistamines. The day the first rain fell, he was being treated for recurring strep and couldn’t go outside because his medicine had made him hypersensitive to sunlight. A lot of healthy, vigorous children died in Boulder that day—parents all over town booted their kids outside to whoop it up on one of the last, most brilliant days of summer—whereas Templeton survived because he was too ill to have fun. Think about that.
Because he had been told he’d fry if the sun so much as touched him, he was going through a vampire phase, walking around in a black silk cape and a pair of plastic fangs. His mom was home, but I was keeping him occupied in the dark shadows of their garage out of sheer fidgety nerves—the good kind. Yolanda was on the way. She had called just as she and her mother had set out to make the one-hour drive from Denver.
We’d been together for eighteen months, and Yolanda had spent plenty of lazy afternoons in my apartment on Jackdaw Street, but she had only come out to her parents a year before and had wanted to give them some time to adjust to the idea before she officially moved in with me. She was right, they did need some time to adjust: about five minutes, maybe ten. I don’t know how in life she ever imagined her parents could do anything but love her. The shock was how quickly they decided they were going to love me, too.
Dr. and Mrs. Rusted were from the British Virgin Islands; Dr. Rusted, Yolanda’s father, was an Episcopal minister and a Ph.D. in psychology. Her mother owned an art gallery in Denver. All you had to see was the bumper sticker on their Prius—VOTING IS LIKE DRIVING: R GOES BACKWARD, D GOES FORWARD—to know we were going to be all right. The day after his daughter came out to them, Dr. Rusted took down the flag of the British Virgin Islands that hung from the pole on their porch and replaced it with a rainbow-colored pennant. Mrs. Rusted got a new bumper sticker for the hybrid, a pink triangle with the words LOVE IS LOVE superimposed over it. I think they were secretly proud when someone egged their house, although they pretended to be steamed by the bigotry of their neighbors.
“I cannot understand how they coo’ be so intolerant,” Dr. Rusted announced in his big, booming voice. “Yolanda babysit halve the children on the street! Change their diapers, sing them to sleep. And then they stick an anonymous note onder the windshield wiper to say our child is a deviant and we should pay back oll the parents of children she babysit.” He shook his head as if disgusted, but his eyes glittered with amusement. All good preachers have a little of the devil in them.
Yolanda and her parents had spent the summer in the BVI visiting the extended family and leaving me on my lonesome: Honeysuckle Speck, the only twenty-three-year-old Joe Strummer lesbian look-alike on my whole block, student of law at the University of Colorado Boulder, fiscal conservative, lover of horses, and reformed user of dipping tobacco (the girlfriend made me quit). I hadn’t had her in my arms in six weeks, and I was so caffeinated waiting for her and her mother to turn up this morning that I had the jitters.
It was lucky for me I had the little vampire to fool with. There was a steel rack in the rear of the garage, a place to hang bicycles, and Templeton liked me to lift him up and turn him upside down so he could dangle from it by his knees like a bat. He said he went flying as a bat every night, looking for fresh victims. He could get down—I had positioned a mattress under the rack, and when he was ready, he would drop with an uncharacteristically athletic flip, landing on his feet. But he couldn’t get back up without someone to lift him. By the time I heard the first crash of thunder, my arms were rubber from scooping him up and hanging him so many times.
That first bang of thunder caught me off guard. I thought a couple cars had collided out in the road, and I hurried to the open garage door, my nervous imagination already sketching a picture of Yolanda and her mother in a head-on. It is odd how much we want to be in love when you think about how much anxiety comes with it, like a tax on money you won in the lottery.
But there weren’t any wrecks in the road, and the sky was just as brilliant and blue as ever, at least from my vantage point. The wind was gusting strong, though. Across the street, over where the comet-cult people lived, the breeze snatched at a stack of paper plates and scattered them across the grass and into the road. I could smell rain in that wind—or something like rain anyway. It was the fragrance of a quarry, the odor of pulverized rock. When I leaned my head out and looked at the peaks, I saw it, a great black thunderhead the size of an aircraft carrier, coming up fast over the Flatirons like they sometimes did. It was so black it startled me—black with bruised highlights of pink in it, a soft, dreamy pink like a color you’d see at sunset.
I didn’t stare at it long, because at that very moment Yolanda and her mother turned onto Jackdaw Street in their bright yellow Prius, a velvet easy chair strapped to the top. They pulled up across the street in front of my house, and I started to walk over. Yolanda leapt from the passenger seat with a big scream: a gangly black girl with hips so round they were almost a parody of female sexuality, stacked on top of storklike, skinny legs. Yolanda was prone to screaming when things made her happy and also doing this funny stomping dance around and around a person when she was glad to see them. She did it around me a couple times before I grabbed her wrist and pulled her to me and . . . well, and patted her back in an awkward sort of hug. How I would regret that later: that I didn’t snatch her around the waist and squeeze her against me and put my mouth on hers. But I was raised country. Anyone who so much as glanced at me would know me for what I was. One look at the strappy white muscle shirt and the trucker haircut and you’d spot me for a bull dyke. On a public stage, though, I lost all my don’t-give-a-fuc
k spirit, was embarrassed to touch or to kiss, not wanting to draw stares or to offend. The sight of her made my heart swell so full my chest hurt, but I hugged her mother more firmly than I squeezed my beloved. No last embrace. No final kiss. I’ll live with that shame the rest of my life.
We small-talked for a minute about the flight back from the British Virgin Islands, and I teased the girl about how much she’d packed for the big move. “You sure you remembered everything? I hope you didn’t forget the trampoline. What about the canoe? You get that jammed in there somewhere?”
But we didn’t talk long. There was another reverberating boom of thunder, and Yolanda jumped and screamed again. That girl did love a good thunderstorm.
“Yo-lan-da!” Martina called from her lawn chair. Martina was the Russian stripper who lived downstairs with Andropov. She had a teasing, flirty relationship with Yolanda that I didn’t much appreciate, not because I was jealous but because I thought she liked to play friendly with the lesbians upstairs to rile her boyfriend. Andropov was sulky and overweight, a former chemist who’d been reduced to scrambling for driving gigs on Uber. “Yo-lan-da, your lovely thing is going to get wet.”
“What’d you say, Martina?” Yolanda asked, just as blithe and innocent as a child listening to a teacher.
“Yeah, you want to try that one again?” I said.
Martina gave me a sly look and said, “Your chair, it get rained on. Big cloud make it all wet. Better hurry. You want to have nice place to put your fanny.” And she winked at me and picked her cell phone out of the grass. A moment later she was chattering at someone in light, laughing Russian.
It nettled me, listening to her lewd talk and putting on an act like she didn’t know what she was saying because English was her second language. But I didn’t have time to stew over it. The next instant someone was tugging at my sleeve, and when I looked around, I saw that Little Dracula had joined us in the street. Templeton had his cape flapped up over his head to protect his face from the sun, and he peered out at me from beneath its sleek black folds. He liked Yolanda, too, and didn’t want to be left out of our unpacking party.
“Hey, Temp,” I said. “Your mom sees you outside, you won’t have to pretend you sleep in a coffin.”
Right on cue his mother shouted, “TEMPLETON BLAKE!” She had materialized on the front step of their pleasant, butter-colored ranch. “INSIDE! NOW! HONEYSUCKLE!” This last directed at me, like it was my fault he’d gone wandering. She was just about quivering—she did not take her son’s health lightly—and as it was, her concern for his well-being saved my life, too.
“I got him,” I said.
“We’ll get the chair inside,” Yolanda’s mother told me.
“Leave it. I’ll be right back,” I told them—the last thing I ever said to either of them.
I walked Templeton across the street. You could see that no one knew whether to go in or not. The thundercloud was a lone Everest of darkness in the immensity of the sky. Anyone could tell that it was going to pour hard for six minutes and then be clear and hot and nice again. But the next time the thunder boomed, a blue flashbulb of lightning popped off inside the cloud, and that got folks moving, sort of. Mr. Waldman, who had been reshingling, hung his hammer on his belt and started making his way down the pitch of his roof, toward his ladder. Martina was off the phone and on the porch with her folded lawn chair, peering with a mix of curiosity and excitement at the darkening sky. That’s where she was when Andropov slued in, driving his black Chrysler too fast, shrilling the brakes, and then jumping out and slamming the door behind him. She smirked at him while he came steaming across the little scrap of yard. He was so red in the face that it looked like someone had shown him a photograph of his mother having sex with a clown.
I nodded amiably to Ursula, who shook her head with a certain weary disapproval—it always distressed her whenever Templeton forgot to act like an invalid—and disappeared back inside. I led Templeton to the garage, scooped him up, and sat him on the stool at his father’s workbench. The father was gone—had died when he got himself drunk and drove off the road and into Sunshine Canyon—but he’d left behind a manual typewriter missing the h and the e, and Templeton was writing his vampire story on it. He had six pages so far and had already drained the blood out of most every wench in Transylvania. I told him to write me something good and bloody, tousled his hair, and started back toward Yolanda and her mother. I never got to them.
Yolanda was up on the rear bumper of the Prius, wrestling with one bungee cord. Her mother stood in the road with her hands on her hips, offering her well-meant emotional support. One of the comet-cult biddies was in the street, picking up paper plates. The fat girl working the grill squinted up at the thunderhead with a sour look of resignation. Mr. Waldman perched on the top rung of his ladder. Andropov grabbed Martina by the wrist, gave it a twist, and dragged her into their apartment. That’s what they were all up to when the storm hit.
I took one step into the driveway, and something stung my arm. It was like that shock of pain and then the achy numbness you get after the nurse sticks a syringe in you. My first thought was that I’d been bitten by a horsefly. Then I looked at my bare shoulder and saw a bright red drop of blood and something sticking out of the skin: a thorn of gold. I sucked in a sharp breath and wiggled it free and stood there staring at it. It was about two inches long and looked like a pin made out of needle-sharp amber glass. It was pretty, like jewelry, especially all bright and red with my blood. I couldn’t think where it had come from. It was hard, too, hard as quartz. I turned it this way and that, and it caught the weird pink stormlight and flashed.
Mr. Waldman yelled, and I glanced around in time to see him slap at something on the back of his neck, as if the same horsefly that bit me had just bitten him.
By then I could hear the rain coming, a furious rattling, building in volume. It was loud, a roar like a thousand thumbtacks being poured into a steel bucket. A car alarm went off, the horn going blat-blat-blat, somewhere up the hill. It seemed to me that the very ground under my feet began to shudder.
It’s one thing to be scared, but what came over me then was bigger than that. I had a sudden premonition of disaster, a sick flop in the stomach. I shouted Yolanda’s name, but I’m not sure she heard me over the gathering rackety-tackety of the rain. She was still up on the rear bumper. She lifted her chin, looked into the sky.
Templeton called to me, and the anxiety in his voice made him sound like the very small boy he was. I turned and found he had approached as far as the entrance of the garage, drawn by the roar of the oncoming rain. I put my hand on his chest and pushed him back into the garage, which is why he lived, and why I lived, too.
I looked back just as the rain broke over the street. It crackled where it hit the blacktop and pinged when it hit cars, and some part of me thought it was hail and some part of me knew it wasn’t.
The comet-cult gal who was picking paper plates out of the road arched her back, very suddenly, and went all wide-eyed, as if someone had pinched her rear end. I could see pins hitting the road and spraying this way and that by then: needles of silver and gold.
Up on his ladder, old Mr. Waldman went ramrod stiff. He already had one hand on the nape of his neck. The other flew to the small of his back. He began to do an unconscious jig on the top of the ladder as he was stung and stung again. His right foot dropped for the next rung, missed it, and he plunged, striking the ladder and flipping over on his way to the ground.
Then the rain was coming down hard. The chubby woman at the grill still had her face to the sky—she was the only one who didn’t run—and I watched as she was torn apart in a downpour of steely nails. Her crinkly silver gown was jerked this way and that on her body, as if invisible dogs were fighting over it. She lifted her hands, a woman surrendering to an advancing army, and I saw that her palms and forearms were stuck with hundreds of needles, so she looked like a pale pink cactus.
Mrs. Rusted turned in a circle, keeping her
head down, took two steps from the car, then changed her mind and went back. She fumbled blindly and found the latch. Her arms were prickled all over with needles. Her shoulders. Her neck. She struggled with the driver’s-side door, got it open, and began to crawl in. But she had made it only halfway behind the wheel when the windshield exploded in on her. She collapsed and didn’t move again, her legs still hanging out into the street. The backs of her round, full thighs were a dense thicket of needles.
Yolanda leapt off the rear bumper and turned toward me. She made a run for the garage. I heard her scream my name. I took two steps toward her, but Templeton had me by the wrist and wouldn’t let go. I couldn’t make him let go, and I couldn’t go out there with him attached to me. When I looked back, my girl had been driven to her knees, and Yolanda . . . Yolanda . . .
Yolanda.
THE RAIN DIDN’T FALL FOR LONG. Maybe eight, nine minutes before it started to taper off. By then everything was covered in a blanket of glassy splinters, glittering and flashing as the sun came back out. Windows all along the street had been smashed in. Mrs. Rusted’s Prius looked like it had been hit in a thousand places by little hammers. Yolanda was on her knees, forehead touching the road, arms over her head. Kneeling there in a hazy pink mist. My love looked like a pile of bloody laundry.
A final drizzle fell with a crackle and some pretty ringing sounds, like someone playing a glass harmonica. As the clattering faded away, other noises rose in its place. Someone was screaming. A police siren wailed. Car alarms throbbed.
At some point Templeton had let go of my wrist, and when I looked around, I saw that his mother was standing with us in the garage, an arm around him. Her slender, intelligent face was stiff with shock, her eyes wide behind her spectacles. I left them without a word, wandering out into the driveway. First thing I did was step on some needles and shout in pain. I lifted one foot and found pins sticking from the sole of my sneaker. I pulled them out and paused to inspect one. It wasn’t steel but some kind of crystal; when I looked close, I could see that it had tiny facets, like a gem, although where it narrowed to points, it was as thin as a hair. I tried to snap it in two and couldn’t.