Only the Rain Page 17

  But it’s been pounding me a lot lately, and at the oddest of times. I’ll be watching TV in the living room with Cindy and the girls, all of us snuggled up together so close we’re half on top of each other, and out of nowhere it will hit me like a shock wave, how all alone I really am. It will be all I can do at those times to keep the tears out of my eyes. At times like those, all I want to do is crawl off into some dark corner and hide.

  Does that make any sense at all, feeling so miserable for being alone that I want to hide from everybody? It makes no sense to me.

  Back in Iraq when the loneliness got to me, there were always my brothers to turn to, you most of all, but even the ones I didn’t particularly like. Even they were my brothers. We ate together, slept together, shit together, whined and moaned and bitched and sometimes even cried together. We were a fucking unit, you know?

  I’m in another unit now but it’s different. I’m the one the girls all look to. The one who’s supposed to provide everything they need and keep them safe from all insurgent forces. I have to keep secrets from them. I have to hide my emotions sometimes. I have to sugarcoat all the ugliest crap going on outside our FOB. And I’ve got nobody but you to unload on.

  Truth is, it’s not a very satisfying communication when it only goes one way.

  Which makes me realize how you must’ve felt back there. You didn’t sugarcoat anything but you were the point we all turned around. You were the source of our faith and our strength. You held us together and kept us going. But who held you together?

  I’m sorry, brother, if that responsibility ever made you feel as alone as I do now.

  I wouldn’t wish this feeling on anybody.

  Is it possible to hate something you did, and to hate yourself for doing it, yet still be glad you did it?

  Iradat Allah. I bet you remember that phrase, don’t you? How many hundreds of times did we hear that? Iradat Allah. The will of God. Then they’d sit down in the dirt beside the bloody bodies and commence into wailing and tearing at their clothes.

  It always seemed like some kind of contradiction to me. First acceptance, then grief. I don’t know, maybe it’s not a contradiction at all. Maybe it’s the natural order of things.

  What made me bring it up now is a dream I had just a few minutes ago. I’m still fucking shaking from it. Thing is, I can’t remember if it really happened or not. I mean that guy on the bicycle, he was real, I know that much. I know you ordered him to stop and he didn’t, and you told me to take him out, so I did. I know that happened. But a minute or two later, after we’d checked him over and found he wasn’t carrying anything, just my bullet in his chest now. Was there really a little girl who came up to me then and took my hand and told me, “Iradat Allah”?

  That part’s not real, is it, Spence? How could that have happened?

  It just seemed so fucking real is all. I mean I can still feel her hand slipping into mine. I can still see her eyes staring into mine.

  And even if it is just a dream, aren’t dreams supposed to mean something? On one hand she’s sort of forgiving me by telling me what I did was God’s will, right? But on the other hand, what does that say about God? How’s that make Him any different from the assholes who sent us over there in the first place?

  I want to go back to that night now, the night after that hour or so up at the plant with Pops. Cindy got a call from her mother. It must have been around three something. Of course when the phone rang I jumped like a cockroach hitting a hot skillet. Luckily Cindy’s phone was on the table on her side of the bed, so she rolled over and grabbed it, and that’s how she found out her father was dead. Janice wanted Cindy to come down to a funeral home where the bodies had been taken. All I heard though was, “Where is he?” Then, “All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  She climbed out of bed, then said to me, “Cover up your eyes. I need to turn on the light.”

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  She went to her closet and started pulling out clothes. “I’m not sure anything is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Donnie was in an accident. In a truck with that woman Shelley. They’re both dead.”

  I sat up. “What?”

  “I need to go be with Mom. She’s barely coherent.”

  “Why would Donnie be in a truck with Shelley?”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past him,” she said.

  After she had on her jeans and a shirt, she sat on the bed to put her shoes on.

  “Where’d you leave the keys?” she said.

  “On the hook. Where they always are.”

  “I’m probably going to have to stay with her all night.”

  “As long as it takes,” I said.

  Before she left she asked me, “So what do you think that was all about?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Him and her together in that truck?”

  I tried to look as surprised as she was. “Whatever it was, I guess neither one of them can cause any more trouble for anybody.”

  “No but those other two can.”

  No they can’t, I thought. But I didn’t say anything out loud. I tried to think of something to say, but then I remembered something else more important.

  “You might want to take a towel with you to dry off the seat in the truck,” I said. “It might still be wet.”

  “Wet from what?” she said.

  “I tripped outside after leaving Pops’ place,” I told her. “Was more or less soaked by the time I got back to the truck.”

  “Tripped over what? Did you get hurt?”

  “My own stupid feet. Naw, I landed in the grass. Just glad it was too dark for anybody to have seen me.”

  I guess that answer satisfied her, because she gave me a nod, then a peck on the cheek, and she headed out and switched off the light.

  That next day, the only thing in the paper was a story about the pickup overturned along the side of the road. Skid marks indicated the truck had been speeding when the driver lost control.

  Cindy spent all that day with Janice. Called me a few times to say hello, and probably to get a breather from her mother’s grief. Cindy, for her part, only wanted to know why I thought Donnie was in the truck with Shelley that night. Wanted to know what was going to happen next, what the McClaine brothers might be doing or thinking right now. Janice had told the police that Shelley had lived with the McClaines, so now the police were trying to locate Phil and Bubby, but so far they were still whereabouts unknown.

  It wasn’t until middle of the morning on Monday that Cindy started breathing easier. She called me from work to tell me everybody was talking about the McClaines being found up at the crushing plant. “Both dead,” she whispered into the phone. “Shot to death. Can you believe that?”

  “I suppose anything’s possible,” I said.

  Apparently the Chinese had showed up Monday morning to do whatever they were doing up there, found the bodies, called the police. Back at the plant Pops had said Phil and Bubby were the Chinese’s problem now, so I knew we were both hoping the Chinese would clean up the mess themselves, but apparently they intended to be good citizens about it.

  By the end of the day customers were coming into the bank talking about the revolver found under Donnie’s body at the wreck. The police hadn’t mentioned it when the first news report came out, but now that Phil and Bubby had turned up, the township police turned everything over to the state boys, and they sent the revolver and recovered bullets off to be tested. According to Cindy, who had been hearing about it all day long from her customers and other tellers, a lot of people in town felt pretty good about the whole thing. Apparently we weren’t the only people the McClaines and Donnie rubbed the wrong way.

  “I think Mom’s the only one feeling bad,” Cindy told me.

  “How about you?” I asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “Even so . . .”

  “Even so what?”

  “He’s your father,
that’s all.”

  “That’s only a word, Russell. Kind of an honorary title. Some men live up to it, other men don’t.”

  Me, I kept holding my breath for the next couple days.

  On Friday I started breathing again too. That was the day the ballistics report came out in the paper. All the evidence pointed to some kind of disagreement between the McClaine brothers and Donnie and Shelley. Most people figured drugs were involved. Others believed that Donnie was banging Shelley, and the McClaine boys found out about it. Somehow Donnie had gotten the upper hand in the crushing plant, and put an end to the disagreement with an unregistered .22 revolver. When Donnie and Shelley were fleeing the scene, driving too fast for conditions, poetic justice stepped in and had its say.

  Of course there were other people who wanted to lay the blame on the Chinese somehow, like maybe they’d bought the crushing plant as a front for importing opium and heroin, or for setting up a mega-meth lab with Phil and Bubby handling the distribution.

  I didn’t care what crazy theories people came up with. The more, the better. As long as the police never looked in my direction or Pops’. I knew I’d be on pins and needles for a while until the case was officially closed, but nervousness was a small price to pay for all the trouble I’d caused.

  Later that same afternoon I talked to Pops for the first time all week. I guess he’d read the paper too, and felt like it was time to get in touch again.

  He called and said, “You doing okay?”

  “Better now,” I told him. “You?”

  “Grateful for every breath I take,” he said. “How are those little darlin’s of mine?”

  That same night when Cindy came home, she was looking at me kind of differently, I thought. All through dinner it was like she was sneaking glances at me. Usually when she and I do the dishes together, the girls will sit at the table, coloring or drawing or something. This time Cindy let them watch TV in the living room.

  So I’m scraping the dishes over the disposal, then I hand them to Cindy and she rinses them clean and puts them in the dishwasher. She looks over her shoulder to make sure one of the girls isn’t standing in the doorway, and then she says, “What do you think about what the police are saying?”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “That Donnie and Shelley did it.”

  “The McClaines, you mean?”

  “I can’t see it,” she says. “I don’t know what she was like, but I know Donnie, and I know he was never anything but a lying sneak and coward.”

  “Thing is, the bullets match the gun found underneath him.”

  She stared out the kitchen window and shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense. Why would the four of them get together up at that empty plant?”

  “Maybe they were meeting somebody there. Most likely some kind of drug deal.”

  “There’d be evidence of that, wouldn’t there?”

  “It rained pretty hard all that night.”

  “Not inside it didn’t.”

  “I only know what you told me and what I read in the papers.”

  She put the last of the silverware into the dishwasher, put in the gel, and set the dishwasher to running. I used a wet cloth to wipe down the table and counters.

  “The real mystery,” she says, “is why that girl would be with Donnie in the first place. Let’s say it was them against the McClaines for some reason. Why? Why would she side with that piece of crap about anything?”

  “Babe, there’s no telling why people do what they do.”

  “There’s absolutely no good reason for her to be with him.”

  “I didn’t say it had to be a good reason. I mean, look at your mother. She took him back in a minute.”

  She didn’t say anything more for a while. Then it was, “You’ve already wiped that table clean three times, Russell.”

  So I came back to the sink, rinsed out the cloth, wrung it dry, and draped it over the basin divider. I could feel her eyes on me the entire time. So finally I forced myself to turn around and face her and smile.

  She said, “I never asked you how Pops was that night.”

  “Good,” I said. “He was good. He was restless for a while. Needed somebody to distract him from his thoughts.”

  “What time was it when you got back?”

  “It wasn’t that late. Eleven thirty maybe?”

  “You must’ve been awfully quiet getting into bed.”

  “You woke up for a minute,” I told her. “You asked how Pops was doing.”

  “Did I? I don’t remember that at all.”

  “You were barely awake,” I said.

  She nodded. “So that was it then? You went to his place for a couple hours, sat and talked, watched TV?”

  “That’s about it. Oh, I did drive him down to the convenience store before I came home. He usually walks but it was still raining pretty good. Turns out he can’t make it through a night without his hot chocolate and a Slim Jim.”

  She wrinkled up her nose. “Those meat sticks are nasty.”

  I put my hand on the side of her face. “So is the interrogation over?”

  “Why would you call it an interrogation?”

  “That’s what it felt like.”

  “Talking to your wife feels like an interrogation to you?”

  “Baby,” I said. But there wasn’t anything more to say. Nothing halfway smart anyway. So I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.

  She surprised me by wrapping her arms around my waist and holding me there.

  “The important thing,” she said, “is that we’re all okay now.”

  “Better than okay,” I said.

  “And the next time you see a naked girl?”

  “It’s going to be you.”

  “And the time after that?”

  “You, you, and only you forever. No, wait. Newborn babies don’t count, do they?”

  “This one’s going to be a boy,” she said.

  “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “If it’s not, I’m sending it back.”

  “Like heck you will.”

  And after that we held each other for a while. And that’s the last we’ve ever talked about it.

  I don’t remember if I ever told you about my time in boot with this guy named Regis. Big mean tatted-up black guy who claimed he’d spent two years in prison for beating his brother to a pulp over a slice of pie or some such thing. Everybody in the barracks was scared to death of him. During the day he was all “Yes, Drill Sergeant! No, Drill Sergeant!” Always crushing every exercise and physical test, even marksmanship. So he was the platoon’s golden boy, you know? From Day One the DIs were all but drooling over him. So of course they made him Squad Leader.

  But he was different in the barracks at night. With no NCOs watching us every second, he was like some kind of marauding beast. I saw him put guys in a headlock until their eyes rolled up in their heads. The man was a terror, just like every clichéd character in every boot camp movie ever made. I guess his kind became a cliché because it’s the truth. There’s always one of them when you throw a bunch of guys together. I mean I’ve seen it before, though never to the extent of Regis. It was like living with a psycho in our midst. You never knew what he was going to do or who he’d do it to. You only prayed it wouldn’t be you. That first week he probably knocked every one of us on our asses at least once, and always for something trivial, just because he felt like it.

  The worst of it was what he did to a guy named Stewart. And Stewart wasn’t a little guy either. He was a solid six feet tall, but kind of an egghead, I guess, sort of awkward and stiff, with a confused look in his eyes behind those ugly birth-control glasses the Army gives out. He was always talking about Harry Potter and stuff like that, things like alchemy and the philosopher’s stone and subjects most of us didn’t understand and didn’t care to. Personally I never minded listening to him, because I was always ready to learn things I didn’t know anything about, but sometimes even I had to
call information overload and put him on hold awhile.

  What Stewart was doing in the Army, I have no idea. All we could figure is he was such a social misfit that his old man must have sent him away to get toughened up. Thing is, I doubt his old man ever envisioned somebody like Regis as a bunkmate.

  The abuse started maybe the third, fourth night of Red Phase. Not all of us heard it happening, but enough that that next day a bunch of us were comparing notes first chance we got. Not long after lights out Regis climbed into Stewart’s bunk with him. What woke me was the crack of a slap. Stewart’s bunk was only two away from mine, so that slap yanked me out of a deep sleep and had me sitting up and listening, trying to figure out what was going on. There was a lot of whispering and whimpering then, Regis’ deep voice and Stewart’s higher, terrified one.

  What happened after that was pretty clear, what with Stewart gagging and whimpering and Regis’ muttered threats.

  The rest of us kept telling each other we needed to do something about it. I mean there were eighteen of us and only one Regis. But all we did was talk and whisper like a bunch of schoolgirls. Nobody wanted Regis turning on him instead.

  This went on two or three nights a week. Regis must have memorized the Fire Guards’ routine, because he was fast and slick and was always back in his own bunk when necessary. We all started avoiding both of them as much as possible, Stewart as well as Regis. That’s something I could never figure out. It was almost like we blamed Stewart too, or were terrified of catching his bad luck. Or maybe we were just too afraid to be kind to him. I think about it now and I just want to throw up, that’s how disgusted with myself I still am.

  The only thing the rest of us did was agree to give Regis the lowest rating on evals. And we put the reason for the rating in the comment section. I don’t know exactly how many of us actually did it, but enough that the DI and platoon sergeant interviewed both Regis and Stewart the next day. Neither of them even came back to clean out their lockers, not until the rest of us were out on the firing range.

  After that the DI was tougher than ever on us. Like we were responsible for it happening in the first place, which I guess maybe we were. By graduation the rumor was going around that Regis had been transferred to another platoon, but Stewart got sent home on a medical discharge, though we all knew that was BS. I guess the Army wasn’t willing to get rid of a killing machine with as much potential as Regis. Figured they’d just redirect his energies to more effective mayhem. The guy’s probably an LT by now.