Only the Rain Read online

  Up until that realization sort of poleaxed me, I’d been trying to figure out how to get in touch with you. I felt like I was stumbling around blindly, like I had my goggles on but they were caked with sand and the wind was blasting so hard against me that I was losing ground moving backward. I needed somebody to talk to and you were the only likely candidate. I wasn’t ready to bring either Pops or Cindy into this mess, and you were the only other levelheaded guy I’d ever been close to. You always had an answer, Spence, even if it was only something like, stand still, nimrod, and think! Which way were you headed? Which direction is the wind blowing? One plus one equals the way back to camp. So stand here a minute and use the brain God gave you.

  Still, it had been almost six years since I’d seen you, and those couple of e-mails we exchanged after I was back home was the last I knew of your whereabouts. The last one from you said you were headed to SFAS at Mackall and that you’d be hard to reach for a couple of months. Then a good while later I had one from Rainey telling me about the hell you guys went through in Korengal, and how he was back home now and had lost touch with you too. I thought I could probably track you down though, and even if all we talked about was the weather, maybe that would be enough to quiet the sandstorm raging in my head.

  But then there was that SUV all of a sudden, so shiny black in the morning light. Up until then I’d never noticed how quiet and clear the air could be when the crushers and separator are shut down. Everything was absolutely motionless all of a sudden, except that I was so furious I wanted to take a sledgehammer to that vehicle. I wanted to break out every inch of glass and beat that black metal into the ground.

  Silly, I know. Absolutely useless.

  I go into the office and there’s Jake sitting at his desk and staring out the window same as always. I don’t even bother to sit down. “Any reason I need to be here today?” I ask him. “What I really need to be doing is looking for a job.”

  It takes him fifteen seconds or so to turn his head my way. “I was thinking of leaving myself,” he says. “It’s eating me up to see this finally happening.”

  “So let’s both leave,” I tell him, and now I’m thinking maybe I can talk about the girl and the money with him, maybe he’ll have an idea or two I can use.

  “One of us has to hang around in case they have any questions,” he says. “You know the operation as well as I do.”

  “I’ve been here half a year, Jake. You’ve got forty years in. You built this place.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” he tells me. “You can look for jobs on the computer, can’t you? Make phone calls. All I’m asking is that you hang out here until they leave.”

  I blow out a breath. “You’re still the boss,” I say.

  He stands up, pats his pockets, finds his key ring in the letter tray. “Do me a favor and don’t answer the phone if it rings,” he says. “The newspaper called first thing this morning.”

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “I hung up. That’s why they keep calling back.”

  “You got to talk to them sometime, don’t you?”

  “I don’t owe them anything. Let them talk to the Chinese if they want a story so bad. Damned if I’ll volunteer to be their whipping boy.”

  Three minutes later, I’m standing there alone.

  It’s probably another hour before I actually see them. Four guys in what look like gray lab coats and white hard hats. My stomach’s churning, and there’s hot, sour bile rising up in my throat. They’re out at the edge of the property line, standing beside a surveyor’s stake and looking in toward the building, talking and nodding to one another. I grab my own hard hat off the top of the filing cabinet and go on out to where they are.

  They stand there smiling while I walk up to them and tell them good morning. One guy is holding a camera, another has a clipboard. They give me four little head bows, and I don’t know whether to bow in return or not. I really don’t know what to do or exactly why I walked out to them.

  I tell them my name and that I’m the foreman, or used to be anyway, and I ask if they have any questions, if there’s anything I can tell them about the operation. One of the two who isn’t carrying anything translates for the other ones. He speaks better English than I do except for what sounds to me like a British accent. Then a guy with short gray hair visible under his hard hat says maybe five words in Chinese. Then the one who speaks English thanks me and says they have everything under control. The demolition will begin in two weeks, he says. Then all new equipment will arrive, dust control, noise suppression, everything state of the art. He says they’ll be filling orders again before Day of Thanksgiving in America. That’s what he calls it, Day of Thanksgiving in America. They’re all beaming at me like happy babies and I’m trying to smile but my mouth feels stiff and crooked and I am 90 percent certain I am going to throw up.

  “So what are the chances,” I finally say, “of you gentlemen keeping me on in some capacity? I don’t have to be foreman or anything. I understand all the equipment. I can even drive a truck if you need somebody for that.”

  This time the translator doesn’t even bother to translate. Doesn’t even bother to answer me. I get a nod and a smile. Four smiles all in a row. I wonder if I’m expected to bow or something, but I can’t make myself do it, and so finally I turn around and walk away. I go back to the office and pull the blinds down and put in my eight hours and then leave.

  Instead of going home, though, I ride out to Pops’ storage unit and sit in the darkness with the door pulled down. All day long I’ve been feeling like my brain is swollen inside my skull, like the pressure in there is going to split my head wide open. I felt that same thing during the last weeks of my rotation in Iraq, but there was no quiet place there where a guy could spend some time alone, so I dealt with it by pushing myself through all the drills and exercises. Coming back to the FOB after a patrol was the worst time of all. You’d think a guy would feel grateful to make it back to his cot in one piece, but as every soldier knows, you lay there with your body depleted and your brain so wired you have no choice but to replay every move that day, every doorway that might be hiding somebody in its shadows, every bit of trash that might have an IED hidden under it. You keep going over and over and over it all again until some part of your brain finally gets the message that it’s okay to let go for a while, and that you had better let go and catch some zzz’s because you’re going to be outside the wire again in a few hours.

  Even after I was discharged I wasn’t able to let go completely. People congratulating me and saying how lucky I was to come home without a scratch, and me with a wife and two little girls and not enough smarts to even know how to spell résumé, let alone write one. There wasn’t much call back home here for a guy who could field strip an M4 in the dark and make it through day after day of hundred-degree heat in full battle rattle. The Army gave me just enough training to realize how useless I was back home.

  That first year in college, Spence, was rougher than Basic. I’d sit there in a classroom surrounded by kids who thought life was a reality TV show and they were all auditioning for the lead role. I hated every one of them. And I’m not saying it was their fault I hated them, it was mine. I was jealous because their Nike shoes and Hollister hoodies and Calvin Klein jeans cost more than I took home working campus security sixty hours a month. But the real reason I hated them was because I had something they didn’t and never would, which was a head full of little bits of days and nights when I was sure I was going to die.

  I made it through college too, though. I had no choice but to get the job done. I never told Cindy about the nightmares that would wake me up at night, never told her I would slip out of bed at two or three in the morning to go sit in the living room with the TV on without any sound. She knew, though. And sometimes she’d just look at me afterward like I was something pathetic, like a dog dying by the side of the road after it’s been hit by a car.

  I never told her how much I wanted a f
ew days off without any kind of obligation to fulfill, a couple days to myself in a cabin in the woods, or even a tent pitched beside a stream somewhere. Some quiet place to detox all on my own, you know? A place to bleed it all out if I could.

  Having Jake take me on was pretty close to being the best day of my life. Holding Dani and Emma for the first time, those were the very best, but knowing I’d learned a little something in college and had a job and could take care of my family, that put the nightmares to rest for a while.

  I always half expected I was going to fuck up in a major way in Iraq and get myself or lots of other people killed. Then I expected to make an ass of myself in college somehow, and I guess I avoided that by keeping my mouth shut most of the time. What I never once expected was that helping some girl too doped up to keep her clothes on was going to be what did me in.

  A lot of people probably wouldn’t understand why I was so messed up about stealing money from a drug dealer. I mean I know all their arguments, I make them to myself a few times every day. Stealing from a drug dealer isn’t stealing, they would say. Take it and enjoy it. Put it to good use. Be happy you got away with it.

  Thing is, I didn’t feel like I had gotten away with anything. First off, Pops and Gee didn’t raise me to be the kind of person who would steal from anybody. They raised me to be responsible, and to always do what was right. I always did my best to give them what they wanted. Then I gave the Army what it wanted. Then I gave my professors what they wanted. And all along the way I gave Cindy and the girls what they wanted from me.

  I made little mistakes, sure. A few too many beers when I was underage, a bit of weed here and there. But if I did anything wrong, I only did it to myself. Stealing that money, though, involved my entire family in one way or another. Secrets and lies always do that, always have a way of snowballing. And now, seeing that girl at the convenience store that morning, it hit me hard, knowing that she was getting knocked around because of something I did.

  And there’s another reason too, Spence, that I felt so bad after seeing her again. You don’t know how close I came to doing what she wanted to do that day. Truth is, I probably would have let her blow me if I hadn’t seen those boxes in the shower stall. She was messed up but she was beautiful. Plus I was soaking wet and cold and I’d lost my job and felt like a worthless piece of shit. I could have used a little favor. I felt rotten knowing I was probably going to let her do it, but I wanted it, I really did. And then I saw the money.

  So when I add up all the ways I’d become less than the man I wanted to be, all the ways I’d brought trouble into the lives of other people . . .

  Spence, I sat there in the darkness of Pops’ storage unit with his revolver in my hand and a small fortune at my back. And I thought of how ashamed of me you would be if I did what I was thinking of doing. I thought about you and the rest of the company up on top of that naked hill overlooking the Korengal, taking fire from three directions for most of seventy-two hours because the idiots in charge had issued metal detectors that never made a beep over the plastic mines. I thought about Rainey with his leg blown off, and how he’d always thought he could man-muscle his way through a stone wall if he had to. I thought about you guys hunkered down there in the holes you dug, same as me hunkered down in Pops’ storage unit, and I could picture you, Spence, running around like a crazy mother hen during those long hours, checking on all your chicks, calling out their names again and again and again while you waited for the sound of choppers or missiles or anything else the gods out in the sandbox decided to send.

  And I thought about Cindy and me growing up without fathers, and I knew what that would be like for my own girls. I didn’t want that for them. I wanted them to have all the opportunities and all the nice things Cindy and me never got.

  And the only way I could accomplish that was to get hard again. I had to stop beating myself up over things I couldn’t change. I had to man up and do whatever ugly things I might be called upon to do.

  I wish like hell I could stop thinking about that naked girl. I keep imagining her sucking my dick, and about fucking her on that bare mattress in the meth house. And it’s hard, angry fucking. There’s nothing sweet about it. I even jerk off thinking about her. Then afterward I feel like whale shit, the lowest of the low.

  For a while back there in the sandbox I used to jerk off to that other girl, the one you kept Perry from raping. What I never told you about that incident, what I was always too ashamed to tell you, was that before you came into that room and stopped him, I’d been there from the very beginning. I was there when he grabbed her and dragged her into the room, I was there when he ripped off her clothes and pushed her down onto the floor. I was standing there staring at her breasts and her bush and doing nothing to help her. Not so much as a word to tell him to stop.

  Then all of a sudden there you are pushing past me and grabbing him and yanking him around just as he’s about to let his pants fall to the floor. You’re screaming, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, soldier!” and he’s whipping out his Beretta and bringing it up toward your face and that’s when I finally came unfrozen and smacked the M4’s butt into his chest.

  Afterward I told you I’d stepped into the room only a nanosecond before you did. I was pretty sure you knew I was lying, but you never once challenged me on it. And I hated myself for that. Both for lying to you and for thinking what I’d been thinking before you showed up.

  What makes us act like such animals sometimes, Spence? I don’t want to be an animal. I want to be a man. I want to be a good husband and father and somebody who doesn’t flinch when he looks at himself in the mirror.

  Jesus, Spence. What am I supposed to do with all this crazy shit?

  That night after talking to the Chinese, and then hunkering down for a while in Pops’ storage unit, and finding my balls, I guess you’d say, I swung by the mall on the way and returned home carrying an armload of books. Why I chose books, I’m not really sure. But I’d been thinking about the times I loved best in all my life, and they were always the quiet times, you know? With the girls, it was when I read to them at night, the three of us crowded onto Dani’s bed, Emma with her head in my lap and me reaching over her to hold Dani’s hand while I held the book in my other hand, and the way the girls smelled after their baths, and Emma’s little mouth when she fell asleep making that shhh, shhh sound against my pant leg.

  And with Cindy it was those weekend afternoons when she was pregnant with Dani. She was supposed to stay in bed as much as possible, so I wore out my shoes going back and forth to the library for her. And I remembered how her eyes would light up when I’d come home and dump a load of books down beside her, and then she’d grab one and start reading out loud, and most times I’d fall asleep there lying up against her, the same way the girls do with me, and I’d be thinking as I drifted off how peaceful and sweet our lives together had become.

  Anyway, I went home that night with books for everybody. Picture books for Emma and Easy Readers for Dani and a couple of Lemony Snicket books for me to read to them. For Cindy I got a boxed set of paperbacks. We had watched all of those movies about the girl who loves a vampire and a werewolf, and after every one we had the same friendly argument, with me saying how stupid it was to choose a white-skinned soulless dude over a hunky werewolf, and Cindy saying that the pale guy was so tragic and damned that of course the girl would love him better.

  Dani and Emma squealed and hugged me when they saw the books, and at first Cindy’s eyes lit up like they used to but then they went dark again and she stood there looking at me until the girls went running off to the living room with their presents.

  I said, “You can exchange them if you want to. I know we already saw the movies, so you know how everything ends. I didn’t know what else you might like.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “Today was your last day of work. We don’t have any idea how we’re going to pay our bills, and you spend what, a hundred dollars or more on books?”r />
  “Baby, a hundred dollars isn’t going to make any difference one way or the other.”

  “A hundred dollars is four bags of groceries,” she said.

  “I wanted to do something to cheer you up is all.”

  “It’s not that I don’t appreciate it,” she said.

  “But it doesn’t cheer you up, does it?”

  “We can’t eat books, Russell. We can’t pay a doctor’s bill with books.”

  I never intended to show her the rest I’d brought home, but at the time it seemed like I should. “I forgot something,” I said, and then I went back to the garage and then back to her carrying a wad of twenties and fifties in my hand. I laid it on the table beside her empty plate. She just stood there staring at it, and then after a while she looked up and stared at me.

  “That’s my termination bonus,” I told her. “It was a thousand dollars until I bought the books.”

  “Really?” she said, and then the tears came into her eyes and she started crying and I stepped up and put my arms around her and held her tight against me.

  “I’m sorry I’m so afraid,” she said, and she was shivering in my arms. “I know you’ll do anything to take care of us. I know you will.”

  I stroked her hair and held her, and when she was ready she pulled away and scooped up the money and stuffed it into the rooster cookie jar with the money she had been saving for Dani’s school lunches and such. Then she went to the oven and looked in at the tuna noodle casserole she’d made.

  “Can you tell the girls to go wash their hands?” she said. Then, a second later, “Wait. Did you know you were getting that bonus?”

  “Didn’t have a clue,” I told her.

  That night I read for a half hour to the girls, and when I went into our bedroom Cindy was sitting there in bed reading the first book from her set. I showered and brushed and then slid in beside her. She reached out and squeezed my hand but kept right on reading.