Only the Rain Read online

“I’ll mention that to him.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and chuckled a little. “Tell him I like the color red.”

  So Cindy is sleeping finally, though I say finally only because every minute seems like an hour to me. She’s always been able to say, “Goodnight, babe,” and then roll over and go right out. Me, on the other hand, I’ve never been able to quiet my mind down that quickly, not even as a boy. Always had to play the entire day over in my head a few times, think about what I’d done wrong or should’ve done better. Up until I was fourteen or so the wrong things were usually stuff like letting a hard grounder sizzle past me, or bouncing a three-pointer off the rim. Though in high school it was all about girls, like how do I get her to notice me, did I say the right thing, should I put my hand on her breast or not. Then I enlisted and my worries were all about measuring up, not being the one who got chewed out in front of everybody. Once that fear passed I had a lot of other things to worry about, things that, when I was a kid, I’d never even imagined. Everything from camel spiders to IEDs to freezing up and getting myself or somebody else killed.

  You ever dream about those spiders, Spence? I sometimes dream those scary fuckers are chasing me. Man, could they run!

  But anyway, I’m back home now. And none of the really bad shit I feared over there happened to me. So when it came to this thing I’d gotten myself into with the naked girl and the money, I figured if I kept at it and worked out all the angles, I could get myself out of that mess too. Only difference now is, I’m not in this mess alone. I’m a husband and a father. This is my squad and I’m responsible for their safety.

  “Visualize your desired outcome,” you always said. “Know your desired resolution for Plan A, Plan B. Know where the friendlies are. Know your exit strategy. Then pull up your panties, take a deep breath, and execute, motherfucker. Execute.”

  My situation is this: No police tape wrapped around the house on Route 218. No windows blacked out. No sign of a police raid. So, how to account for that? Two possibilities: Either the dispatcher who took my call is a friend of the druggies and gave them a heads-up, or, and this is the option that makes the most sense to me, the local police acted on my tip and visited the house, but found nothing to justify a search warrant. Which meant that the druggies cleaned everything up before the police arrived. And what would prompt them to do that? They came home, found muddy footprints all through their house, saw that a lot of their money was missing, and did a quick cleanup in anticipation of a possible visit from the po-po. Maybe the girl remembered me and maybe she didn’t. Maybe somebody saw my bike and maybe not. In either case, the end result is the same: they know they’ve been ripped off.

  Thing is, Spence, we knew some guys like that, didn’t we? They were small-time, sure, what with the military eyeballing everything a soldier does. But, correct me if I’m wrong here, seems to me that every single one of them was a sneaky, hateful bastard pissed off at most of the world. So imagine if somebody made off with ninety thousand of their trust fund. What would they do to get it back? What wouldn’t they do?

  My Plan A, but only because it was the first plan to come to mind, was to return the money. Creep into the yard in the middle of the night, and as soon as that pit bull started barking, throw the shoebox onto the porch and run like hell. But have a vehicle parked not far down the road in case they turned the dog loose on me.

  It sounded simple enough—undo the one thing I’d done wrong. But simple is never as simple as it looks. Would the druggies say, “Hey, isn’t that nice? We got all our money back. Let’s all go back to bed now.”

  Not likely. I pictured them being a good bit less forgiving than that. This is only a problem if they know who stole their money. And the only way they could know is if somebody recognized my bike.

  Plan B is to do nothing. Don’t spend any money, don’t call attention to myself. Get busy looking for another job. Be the kind of man I want to be. Be the kind of husband and father Pops has always been.

  That last part comes with obligations of its own. Should I tell Cindy about losing my job? Or should I save her the worry and wait until I have another job lined up?

  I suspect I wouldn’t have even been asking myself these questions if I didn’t have all that money squirreled away. I’d probably have come home that day and told her all about my conversation with Jake, and both of us would have ranted awhile about the damn Chinese and how rotten a deal I was getting, and we’d both have been worried but not the way I am now. Because the truth of it is, a part of me wants to keep that money. A big part. Now that I have it, I want to keep it. Because now I really need it.

  Man, all I ever wanted or expected out of life was to have a decent job for thirty years or so, stay reasonably healthy, raise good kids and put them on their own paths to success, and then enjoy my last twenty years or so playing with my grandkids. Don’t want to be famous for anything, don’t expect to be a millionaire. The only reality show people I envy are the ones on The Amazing Race, but only because I think it would be so much fun for Cindy and me to go racing around the world together, seeing all the places and doing all the crazy things we’re otherwise never going to experience.

  More than once Cindy has said how she envies me getting to travel to the other side of the world. A lot more than once. Our little three-day honeymoon was the first time she’d ever even been out of the state. And the only time so far.

  So lately I’ve been thinking something dangerous. This is Plan C; sort of my fantasy plan. What if I do have the money to take her someplace really special? What if I have the money to take the whole family there? Where would I take them?

  There’s this one guy I see on TV now and then when I’m channel surfing, and for some reason I always lay the remote down when I see him and listen for a while. He’s not a preacher but he sounds like one, though without all the fake healing and hallelujahs. And the gist of his sermon is always the same thing: God wants us to be prosperous. He keeps putting opportunities for prosperity in front of us, but it’s up to us to seize those opportunities. And I don’t know, but I sit there and listen to him sometimes and I wonder, when am I going to get that opportunity?

  And then there was this kid who worked washing dishes in the DFAC in Mahmudiya, an Egyptian boy named Musa something or other, you remember him? We all called him Moose. He was what, maybe fourteen or so, and he was always making deals everywhere he could, trading bootleg movies for porn DVDs, then trading the porn for a case of cheap Swadeshi whiskey that cost five bucks a bottle in Dahuk, then selling the whiskey to soldiers in Bagdad for five or six times as much. One of our own Bible thumpers would ask him, “What would Allah say about you cheating our new guys like that, Moose?” And Moose had two verses from the Koran he’d come back with: “Wealth and children are the ornament of this life.” Or else this one: “Whatever the Apostle gives you, accept it; and whatever he forbids you, abstain from it.”

  So that night in bed with Cindy, while she’s sleeping and I’m lying there awake trying to choose between Plans A, B and C, I have three advisors chattering in my head. I have that TV prosperity guy, I have Moose quoting the Koran, and I have Gee reminding me it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of Heaven.

  And the only voice I try to argue with is Gee’s.

  The past few days have weighed on me like a sixty-pound rucksack, I swear. At night I can’t sleep because of every little noise, and during the day at home I keep seeing shadows go past a window, which makes me jump up and start peeking outside, and of course there’s nobody there. If a car follows me too long I pull over and let it go past and I check out the driver to see if he’s going to pull over or, I don’t know, do whatever a pissed-off druggie who’s been robbed would do. I’m just paranoid as hell. Can’t even stop to get gas without getting all twitchy if somebody looks my way.

  Doesn’t help being at work either. All we have to do at the plant is fill a couple of last orders, then start b
oxing up all the records and other documents. By Wednesday all the trucks were going out, with nothing coming in for processing. Jake spends a lot of time sitting at his desk and staring out the window at the piles of unprocessed rock.

  I keep scanning the newspapers online and adding my name to any new job search engine I can find. I already posted my résumé online, so it gets shot off to any job I’m remotely qualified for. Financial Analyst I, Supply Chain Specialist, Accounts Receivable Processor, Purchasing Manager, Quality Control . . .

  And, just like the week before, nobody calls me for an interview. Either my business administration degree from a nowhere college is worthless, or I’m putting out so much negative energy that my résumé reeks of failure.

  And after feeling like a worthless human being all day, I have to walk back into my house with a phony smile on my face.

  Thursday night, Dani complained that her throat hurt. Cindy checked her temperature, 101.6. We gave her a dose of Children’s Tylenol and put her to bed. In our own bedroom a few minutes later, Cindy said, “If she’s not better in the morning, I’m going to take her to the doctor. Her tonsils look inflamed to me. It’s probably time she had them taken out.”

  I didn’t answer because I couldn’t. My heart was beating like a wild duck in that moment it explodes off the water, trying like crazy to get airborne. Because all I could think about was that our medical coverage will end in a few days. After that, the first time Cindy hands our medical card to a pharmacist or the doctor’s secretary, she’s going to find out how I let the family down. She’ll see me in all my naked deception and failure. I don’t think I have any option but to tell her about my job. Not that telling her will change anything. The only thing it might accomplish is to preserve my integrity. That little bit of it I still have left.

  Anyway, come morning, Dani’s forehead was hotter than ever, and when she swallowed some more of the medicine she moaned and screwed up her mouth. I saw that look in Cindy’s face that told me she was going to start worrying at double speed now, going to let every little worry bang through her like a train going off its tracks.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “You get ready for work. I’ll get the girls dressed and after we drop you at the bank we’ll drive over to the Med Express. If the doctor won’t clear Dani for daycare, and he probably won’t, I’ll bring the girls back home and play dolls with them all day.”

  “Jake will let you do that?” she asked.

  I thought about telling her then. But I couldn’t. I don’t know why; I just couldn’t.

  “We’re between orders,” I told her. “Days when that happens, we sit around and look at each other. I’ll go in for a while tomorrow to do the end-of-week reports.”

  Two hours later I’m building a tent with blankets in the living room. I let the girls get back into their pj’s so they can spend the day in the tent, watching cartoons out through the front flap. I stay in there with them for an hour or so, but I keep catching myself looking at Dani every couple of minutes and thinking, get better fast, please get better fast. Dr. Sherry at the Med Express said she was going to call the hospital and see when they could schedule Dani for a tonsillectomy, and she’d let us know but to expect mid-September sometime. I said, “Can’t she have them taken out now? Like, today?” But she had to do a ten-day treatment of antibiotics first. My insurance would run out before the meds did. So all morning long my body’s feeling like it’s on fire inside, because my own train of worries has not only run off its tracks but careened over a mountainside and is crashing, car over car, toward the bottom.

  It’s funny how when bad things start happening in a series, it almost seems as if they’re all related somehow, as if each one is causing the next. I remember you talking about that one time, about what you called your Domino Catastrophe Theory. You said the universe is filled to the brim with bad things waiting to happen, not only the universe of everything but also each one of our own personal universes too. “There’s a 50–50 chance that one fuckup, no matter how small, is going to trigger another one,” you said. “And if that happens, there’s a 70–30 chance that the second one will trigger a total clusterfuck.”

  Remember Hetrick? He always struck me as a fairly pleasant guy except that he wouldn’t believe anything he hadn’t personally experienced. If you told him the sky is blue, he’d look up and check it out before he’d tell you, “I guess it is.”

  I remember him saying, after you told us about your Catastrophe Theory, “Well, if that’s true, then by now life would be nothing but one continuous Charlie Foxtrot.”

  “Which it is, to an extent,” you told him. “But bear in mind that every individual fuckup requires energy, negative energy. And every once in a while the energy dissipates to the point that there’s a nice little lull in the action. Plus,” you said, “there’s always a degree of uncertainty about how energy and time will react with one another. Then throw into that uncertainty the person or persons involved in the fuckup, and the degree of unpredictability escalates beyond any degree of certainty whatsoever.”

  Hey, I can almost hear you laughing right now. Can hear you asking me, “You actually remember all that bullshit?” It’s funny but I do. I think I’ve always known I’m not one of the sharpest tools in the shed, which is why I always pay special attention when somebody smarter than me has something to say. And you—I always idolized you in a way. One tour under your belt already, those three stripes on your sleeve. Plus that way you had of never getting rattled, that was the most amazing thing of all to me.

  Anyway, back to your Catastrophe Theory. Most of us were laughing our asses off, because if there was any sense to what you were saying, it was sailing away about six feet over our heads. Only Hetrick was taking it seriously. “There’s a name for that kind of thinking,” he said. “It’s called total bullshit.”

  “Actually,” you told him, never even cracking a smile, “it’s called quantum physics. If you spent a little more time reading, and a lot less time pounding your pud over that cheerleader back in Hickory who has probably sucked off the entire football team by now, you might actually learn a little something about how reality works. There’s a lot more to it than an illiterate hillbilly who is only good at converting oxygen to carbon dioxide can even imagine.”

  I remember feeling a little bit sorry for Hetrick after that, because he did seem to have a fairly limited outlook on life. Personally, I was always interested in your ideas, even when I didn’t understand them. I mean I listened hard to everything you told us, not only because you were my Squad Leader and had a lot more experience than the rest of us, but also because, let’s face it, you were obviously a lot smarter than all of us put together. The first time I heard you talk, I thought to myself, pay attention to this guy, and maybe you can learn a thing or two.

  And son of a gun if most of the things you said back then haven’t begun to make more sense to me. Your Catastrophe Theory, for example. I know that logically it makes no sense to think that the Chinese buying out the plant and making my job evaporate had anything to do with me stopping to help that girl, but actually it does. I wouldn’t even have seen that girl if I hadn’t been so upset that I jumped on my bike without putting on my rain gear first, and if I had put on my rain gear I wouldn’t have been so impatient to get out of the rain, and I wouldn’t have taken the back way home. And that led to me taking the money. And who’s to say that my worry and negative energy over taking it didn’t somehow cause Dani’s strep throat and even attract Cindy’s father, Mr. Negative Energy Himself, back into her life?

  If I wanted to I could even take the string of causes back even further, and tie in all the little things that did or didn’t happen before I carried that naked girl into her house. If my memory was good enough, I could probably take it all the way back through my mother’s tumble down the basement stairs and before that to the man who shot his seed into her and then was never heard from again.

  Gee would probably say you could take it all the way back
to that apple in the Garden of Eden if you wanted to. And you would probably have said, Why stop there? Why not take it back to the darkness and the void, back to Genesis verse 1. That’s the place to look for answers, you would say. That’s the place to stand there in the nothingness and scream at the top of your lungs, What the hell were you thinking?

  Spending the morning alone with my girls, something I seldom get a chance to do, it was tough to keep my mind off the money. Truth is, it was impossible to keep my mind off the money. I’d watch little Emma in there in our blanket tent pretending to see polar bears and Indians out in the living room, or I’d listen to Dani pretending we were on the Survivorman TV show and having to roast lizards and bats over the fire for dinner, and how could I not think to myself how great it would be if I had the money to take them on a real camping trip somewhere? Take them out West, for example, and let them gawk at the Grand Canyon and bug out their little eyes at the sight of a real mountain or an elk or a herd of wild horses?

  And then I would think, you do have the money, stupid. You have the money to take them anywhere you want.

  And then I’d push that thought aside for a while. But sooner or later, it always came slinking back, whispering its poison.

  I was half-asleep on the couch, and the girls were asleep in the tent, when I heard what sounded like a thump at the back door. The only people who use the back door are a couple of neighbors. Cindy and the girls and me do the same thing when we go to their houses, I’m not sure why. It seems less formal, I guess, than to knock at their front doors the way a stranger would.

  So there’s this loud knock on the back door, and I sit up with a jerk, and of course, as paranoid as I am, my first thought is that it’s the druggies coming to get their money back. I don’t even know who they are, what they look like, how many of them there are, nothing. But I freeze, man. I just sit there like a deer in the headlights.