Only the Rain Read online

Gee used to say that everything happens for a reason. In her mind, it was God’s reason, of course, and that didn’t always mean we were going to like it. Sometimes He put temptation in our path to see how we would handle it. In which case I’d failed an important test.

  On the other hand, God’s always been a contradiction to me. I’d say to Gee, “Doesn’t God know all there is to know?”

  “Of course He does. He knows every hair on your head.”

  “Then why doesn’t He know when somebody is going to give in to a temptation? Why doesn’t He stop it before it happens?”

  That was the one thing she never could abide from me, questioning God’s almighty wisdom. And it was the one thing I never could keep myself from doing.

  Anyway, I sat in front of the TV that night, sweating in the lightest jacket I could find in the closet, until I was reasonably certain Cindy wasn’t going to come downstairs to ask how I was doing. Then I shed the jacket and tried to fall asleep on the couch. But then I started thinking about that naked girl, and damn if I didn’t get hard thinking about how she looked all muddy and wet in her yard.

  I was so horny all of a sudden I almost got up and went back to Cindy. But then I thought what an asshole I’d be, using my wife like that. So instead I went to the little side room that was supposed to be a dining room but where the computer is set up and where most of the girls’ toys always end up on the floor.

  I had a good idea about what I’d seen at the house that afternoon but I wanted to be even more certain. I mean the black poster paper over all the windows, the cat piss stink of the place, the buckets full of rags in the tub. I’d never been in a meth house but I’d seen enough TV shows to have a pretty good idea. So in the Internet search box I typed What does a meth lab look like? Sixty seconds later I was as certain as I needed to be.

  At first I felt a surge of satisfaction, as if I’d proven something important to myself. I guess you could say I was looking for a kind of justification, as if stealing from dopers is different than stealing from your neighbor the schoolteacher or the guy across town who sells antiques. For the life of me I couldn’t even make up my mind about what Gee would say in a situation like this. Would she say, Sin is sin, baby boy, no matter who you do it to or with? Or maybe, If you can turn evil to good, that’s when you know you’re doing God’s will. Or would she say, It’s what’s in your heart that matters. God only cares about what’s in your heart?

  If I ever had such a thing as a moral compass in my life, it had been Gee. Still is, I guess, considering how much time I spent sitting there trying to figure out what she might say to me about this.

  After a while, though, it was sort of like you stepped into my head, Spence, and very politely pushed Gee aside. Soldiers, I could hear you saying. That was always the way you’d get things started when you had a little speech to make. And I liked hearing that word, no denial here. When you grow up not only an only child but half an orphan, and somebody you admire throws his arms around you in brotherhood, it’s a powerful feeling. That word always warmed me up in an instant and made me want to do whatever you were about to suggest.

  Soldiers, I could hear you saying, ’tis done what ’tis done. You can’t wish it away, you can’t undo it, you can’t paint it over or pretend it isn’t there. It’s the elephant in the room—you understand what I’m saying? For the time being it might be a sleeping elephant, but elephants don’t sleep forever. It’s going to wake up someday and see you trying to tiptoe around it, and it’s going to be pissed. It’s going to reach out with its trunk and haul you in and rape the living shit out of you. And the only thing for you to do, assuming the thought of being raped by an elephant does not appeal to you, is to get busy while it’s still sleeping and figure out how to get it out of your house without waking it up. Are you gonna bail and move out, let the elephant have your house? Are you gonna cut out a big circle in your floor, then hire a crane to pick up your house and move it? What’s your best option here? That’s what you have to figure out and figure out quick. You don’t sleep, you don’t eat, you don’t even visit the fucking latrine until you have a plan of action. And then you execute. Maybe it’s only an 80 percent solution, but a well-executed 80 percent solution is better than a 100 percent solution that comes too late. So you pull on your pants, you lace up your boots, you get the job fucking done. Period.

  The last time I looked at the blue numbers on the cable box that night, they said 4:17. Two and a half hours later I woke up to Cindy’s hand on my forehead. When I looked up at her she said, “You don’t seem to have a temperature anymore. You feeling okay?”

  “Better,” I said, and sat up. “Yeah, I’m good now.”

  “I’ll call Jake if you want me to.”

  “I’m good,” I said. “You mind if I take the truck today?”

  That day, the day after the incident with the girl, Jake seemed to be avoiding me most of the day, which was fine with me, seeing as how it was all I could do to keep from falling into a piece of equipment, not only from lack of sleep but because my mind was working elsewhere. And I found every excuse I could to stay out of the office. We couldn’t even look each other in the eye. He was ashamed of having made the best decision he could, and I was ashamed for making the worst.

  My most immediate problem was what to do with the money. For the time being it was locked in the toolbox in the bed of my truck, but I wasn’t comfortable keeping it there. What if Cindy or I had an accident and the truck had to be towed? What if the truck got stolen?

  I mean, maybe those dopers had so much money that they never even counted it. Maybe they never pulled back that shower curtain except to dump more bundles of cash into a box. Yeah, and maybe the earth really is flat and we don’t know it yet.

  I was betting those dopers knew to a dollar how much they had. I mean why else does a person go into that line of work except for the money? They probably even knew to a dollar how much was missing, which was more than I could say for myself. I hadn’t even been able to bring myself to count it yet.

  Anyway, by midafternoon I’d run through every possible scenario I could come up with. The way I figured, I had two things to accomplish. One was to get that money where it wasn’t going to be found until I could decide what to do with it. The other was to distract the dopers, maybe for a good long time, from launching an investigation into the whereabouts of their money.

  The reason I’d told Cindy I needed the truck that day was so I could go check on Pops after work. And she said, “You’ll see him Sunday. Can’t it wait till then?” Which caused me to have to make up another lie. I told her I’d had a bad dream about him and I couldn’t get it out of my head. So she made plans during the day for another teller who lived not far from us to give her a ride home in the evening. Meantime she called the daycare and let them know I’d be a half hour or so late picking up the girls.

  So after work I went to the dollar store in town, then straight to the Brookside seniors’ home. Pops was in the dining room when I got there, halfway through his meatloaf. I sneaked up behind him and slipped the bag of chocolate-covered peanuts onto the table while he was talking to the old guy sitting beside him. Pops didn’t notice the peanuts till he went for another forkful of meatloaf. He looked at the bag for a few seconds, then he laid down his fork. “Screw this mystery meat,” he said. “I been blessed with some manna from Heaven.”

  I never could surprise Pops, no matter how many times I tried. So I gave his shoulder a squeeze, then slid around to an empty chair. He never even looked at me till he had the bag open and a pile of chocolate-covered peanuts dumped out onto a saucer. Then he popped a piece of candy in his mouth and looked up at me and grinned. “Christmas came early this year,” he said.

  I said, “You think maybe you should finish your dinner first, Pops?”

  “I think maybe you should finish it,” he said. “Then you’ll see why I don’t plan to.”

  The two other guys at his table both laughed, and neither one of them said no th
anks when Pops passed the bag around. He asked about Cindy and the girls and how everything was going, and I asked the same, and then he smiled at me and waited.

  So I said, “Would you mind if I stored the bike out in your unit this winter?”

  “Why would I mind?” he said. “You get another car already?”

  “Thinking about it,” I said. “I got caught in that cloudburst yesterday. Nearly laid the bike down. It got me thinking that maybe it’s time I stopped riding it so much.”

  “Long past time, if you ask me.” By then he was already fumbling with the key chain on his belt loop. It still had eight or nine keys attached to it. It took him a while to get the right chain off the metal loop and hand it to me.

  “You’re going to have to move some things around in there,” he said.

  “That’s what I want to do tomorrow. I’m not quite ready to put the bike away yet.”

  “I’d let you have the Lumina, but Art got us hooked up with a couple of nurse’s aides for tomorrow night. We’re taking them to the drive-in.”

  I looked across the table at Art. He has the baggiest old hound-dog eyes I’ve ever seen on a man. He shook his head no.

  Pops said, “They claim the smell of Bengay turns them on. I plan to find out if that’s true or not.”

  I said, “You better hope Gee isn’t watching.”

  “I already took care of that,” he said. “I lined the Lumina’s ceiling with tinfoil.”

  Everybody else laughed a long time at that one, and I smiled too, but my stomach felt like I’d swallowed a brick. Since waking up I’d already lied to two of the four people I loved most in the world.

  I stayed with Pops a few minutes longer, but made my goodbyes as soon as I could. When I stood up, he crimped shut the top of his candy bag and handed it to me. “Stick these in my fridge on your way out. I don’t like the way Art and T.A. are eyeballing them.”

  The dining room is at the rear of the building, so I had to walk past a dozen or so rooms to get to the front door again. All of the rooms are alike, maybe 15 × 12, a bed, a couple of chairs, a dresser and TV and a bathroom. For obvious reasons, the residents aren’t allowed to cook in their rooms, but lots of them, like Pops, keep a little refrigerator filled with whatever they like.

  It was only after I put the candy away and noticed the telephone on top of Pops’ fridge that I thought of what to do next. I wasn’t going to use Pops’ phone, that was too dangerous, but there are lots of other phones in the building too, one in nearly every room, in fact. And as far as I could tell, every resident in that wing, plus all the attendants, were in the dining room.

  I picked the library because it’s down a side hallway away from the front desk. The front desk was empty at the moment but there was no telling how long that would last. Plus the public restrooms are across from the library, so if anybody looked up from the front desk to see me approaching, she’d probably think I’d been in the men’s room.

  I was in and out of the library in less than two minutes. Dialed 911, told the operator there was a meth lab out on Route 218 about six miles north of town, little white cottage on the east side of the road, pit bull chained to a tree in the front yard. I didn’t even give her a chance to ask my name or anything else.

  Then I was back behind the wheel and driving. I thought about stopping long enough to throw up, but then I swallowed it down. I still had things to do.

  First place I stopped was the little hardware store down from the Dollar General, where I made myself a copy of the key to Pops’ storage unit. Then I drove out of town to the storage place. I got the big LED flashlight from my toolbox, plus a utility knife, a roll of duct tape, and the shoebox full of cash. Then I unlocked the unit, went inside and pulled down the door.

  By this time I knew where I should put the money. Even if Pops came into the unit for some reason, and I had the feeling that maybe sometimes he did, probably to sit by himself awhile and be with those old things and all the memories in them. I mean I had no proof he ever did that, but I saw Pops and me as alike in many ways, and I knew if I was him, on his own now for the first time in fifty-some years, living surrounded by sickness and idleness and slow-moving people on the fast track to death, I would need a place like this to get away to every now and then, a place where it’s easier to remember what you used to have. Hell, I’d probably move my bed and mini fridge in. In a way it would be a lot like dying the way those old pharaohs did, surrounded by all the things you would drag up into Heaven with you.

  But the one thing in here I figured he would leave alone was his MISCELLANEOUS box. You don’t use half a roll of duct tape sealing up a box if you plan to open it frequently.

  But first I counted the money. All this time I’d been trying to keep numbers out of my head, but of course I’d been a miserable failure at it. And for some reason, fifty thousand was the number that kept flashing like a neon sign in my brain. Then I’d think, naw, maybe ten, fifteen at the most, but that neon sign had its own power source and the light had been impossible to extinguish.

  The cash was in bundles held together by rubber bands. The bundles were of various thicknesses, depending on the mix of denominations. Tens were rare, but twenties weren’t. There was no shortage of fifties or hundreds either. I only had to count through four bundles to realize that every bundle held five thousand dollars. And there were three layers of bundles in the shoebox. With four bundles in each layer. Plus six more bundles stuffed around the edges to make the layers snug.

  I am well aware that for lots of people in this world, ninety thousand dollars is no big deal. Some people make more than that in a year. Some actors and athletes make that much for an hour or two of work. But I’m not one of those people.

  For me, ninety thousand dollars represents two years of dust-sucking work. Three years if you factor in the taxes.

  It took a while for the dizziness to pass. I had meant to get all this done quickly, cause I still had the girls to pick up. But for several minutes at least, I couldn’t move except to shiver and rock back and forth with my hands squeezing my knees.

  No matter how well a person plans, there’s always something you don’t plan for. I’m talking now about my plan for hiding the cash I’d stolen in Pops’ MISCELLANEOUS box. It had never occurred to me there wouldn’t be enough room in the box for all that money. I sliced through the sealing tape, one neat cut at each end and another down the middle seam on top, and there was all this stuff I’d never expected.

  Some of it looked like junk to me at first, though I’m sure Pops thought there was some value to it, or else he wouldn’t have packed it away for me. Two old Kodak cameras that must’ve been from the thirties or forties. Three tiny glass deer, a buck and a doe and a fawn all glued to the same glass base, which I had given Mom on her last Mother’s Day. Pops had given me the five dollars to buy it when we were at Woolworth’s one time, but I’d insisted on holding it in my hands on the ride home, and the thing was so delicate I accidentally broke the buck right off the stand. I could barely breathe I was crying so hard, but Pops glued it back in place when we got home, and as far as I know, Mom never once suspected it had ever been broken.

  Then there was a pair of bronzed baby shoes, which I assumed had once been worn by my mother, or maybe by me. Then the heavy-handled knife with a thick ten-inch blade I found in Pops’ closet when I was fourteen, and carried around with me for a week, shoved down into my waistband, until a teacher caught me showing it to a girl and called Pops about it.

  Standing on its side in a corner of the cardboard box was Pops’ black fireproof box with the key in the lock, and inside was his will and gold watch, his discharge papers and Purple Cross, three silver dollars and a wallet holding four silver certificates, three two-dollar bills, and six bills all marked with the words NGAN-HANG QUOC-GIA VIET-NAM. The twenties had a picture of a big, impressive building on them, and the 500s had a tiger, and the 1000s had skinny little men riding elephants. I thought it was sort of funny in a touchin
g kind of way to find that Vietnamese money, because when I came home from the desert I handed Pops a little wad of the old, worthless dinar with Saddam’s picture on it, and I told him what he’d always told me when he handed me a dollar when I was little, “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

  There was also his change jar, a half-gallon Mason jar, and it was filled to the lid with coins of every denomination. The box holding his Harrington & Richardson .22 revolver in his USMC holster was propped up on its side against the jar. Pops taught me to shoot with that gun. We practiced on bottles and cans and rats at the dump until he was convinced I knew how to handle a gun properly. After each trip to the dump he’d watch while I cleaned out the barrel, then the revolver would go back into the holster and under his pillow. Sometimes when he wasn’t around I’d sit on his bed and just hold it. It felt so heavy and solid and, I don’t know, reassuring in my hands. Like I was holding his hand, in a way, which we stopped doing when I hit thirteen or so.

  In that same box was his favorite Craftsman wrench set, six heavy wrenches, still gleaming and without a scratch. A small, heavy purse of Gee’s I used to play with all the time, because I liked the feel of it so much. It was made out of tiny metal overlapping plates that shimmered like fish scales. Gee said it had belonged to her own mother, and came from the Roaring Twenties.

  Three framed 5 × 7s, one of Pops, one of Gee, and one of my mother, each of them holding me as a baby, all taken on the same day, I guess, seeing as how I was wrapped up in the same blue blanket and had the same goofy smile on my face each time.

  Another 5 × 7 that, even as a kid, used to break my heart when I looked at it, and it was impossible not to look at it every day, seeing as how it always sat on top of the television set. It was a picture of Gee when she was only nineteen years old, and on her lap was a chubby little baby boy who looked a lot like a cherub out of a religious painting. This was a photo Gee had taken while Pops was in Asia. It would have been the first look he had of his son. And not long after that it became the only look he’d ever have of him, because the little boy, David Jr., died of pneumonia a few months after the photo was taken.