Hard Rain (17 page)

“I'm not—”

“How much?”

“Fifty.”

“Twenty.”

“I can't—”

“Open up.” DeMarco stuffed a bill into Hubble's shirt pocket.

Hubble unhooked a key chain from his belt and opened the gate. “Leave the dog,” DeMarco said. Hubble shut Sonny in the car. They walked up the drive to the house, stopping in front of the door. The house was silent; the sea made noise on the other side.

DeMarco pressed the button by the door. A three-toned bell sounded inside. He knocked. He rang the bell again. “Got a light?” he said.

Hubble handed him the flash. DeMarco shone it through a window. Pink marble glowed in the beam. “That's it,” Jessie said.

DeMarco put his fingers on the bell and kept it there. The three-toned bell rang and rang. DeMarco turned to Hubble. “Okay, pal.”

“Oh, no, that could mean my—”

DeMarco jabbed his finger at Hubble's shirt pocket. “Too late now—you've already lost your cherry. Don't make me broadcast it.”

“Broadcast?”

“Yeah. To your boss.”

“You bastid.”

“Everyone says so. Open up.”

“It's worth more.”

“But you called me names. Open.”

Hubble unlocked the door. Then he went toward the car. Jessie followed DeMarco into the house. He turned on the lights. Their footsteps echoed on pink marble. The house was empty. Mr. Mickey was gone, the bag lady was gone, Pat's blackboard was gone, the Picasso was gone, even the fire—not just out, but gone: not an ash remained. Jessie felt the granite hearth: slightly warm. “Feel,” she said.

DeMarco felt. “So?”

They went out to the balcony. He shone the light on the water. No boat. No mooring. “It was right there,” Jessie said.

“Yeah. What kind of boat?”

“A cabin cruiser. At least forty feet.”

“Did you get the name?”

“That was the funny thing.”

“What?”

“There was no name.”

“That's a funny thing, all right.”

“You don't believe me.”

“Oh, I believe that you were in the house, that there might have been a fire in the fireplace, that you probably went in the water, that drugs were involved. It's the rest of it that seems a little shaky.”

Jessie rounded on him. “What is wrong with you? Why would I make this up?” Hot tears flooded her eyes; she couldn't stop them. “Don't you see there's something terrible happening?”

“What?”

“Some terrible …” She searched for a word. “Conspiracy.”

It was a bad choice. “Sure,” DeMarco said. “Everything's a conspiracy. And Paul's dead, if you play the song backward.”

“God—” Jessie stopped. She'd seen something floating on the water. “What's that?”

DeMarco steadied the light. “A leg.”

Jessie ran out of the house, around the side, down narrow stairs cut in the bluff. DeMarco followed her. She dropped the blanket and waded in. Something floated on the water: one leg, two. She reached out and pulled in her own jeans.

“Do you see?” she said to DeMarco.

“See what? I said I believed you'd been in the water. It's the rest of it.”

Jessie felt in the pockets, took out the sheet of soggy paper. The sea had washed the ink away. “My Mom” was gone. She pulled on the jeans and wrapped the blanket tightly around her.

They returned to the car. Hubble and Sonny were gone. DeMarco drove Jessie to Santa Monica. She was trying to decide whether to tell him about Buddy Boucher when he said, “You're not handling this very well. Maybe you should see a shrink.”

“What for?”

“Because. You're going a little crazy. Barbara used to get that way a bit too, under pressure. You need some trancs.”

“Barbara never took trancs.”

“You're not Barbara.”

“That keeps me from making some of her mistakes.”

“Are you referring to me?”

Jessie didn't answer. The rest of the drive was silent.

DeMarco dropped her on the side street near the pier, beside her car. Her keys were still in the pocket of her jeans. So was her wallet.

“You owe me twenty,” DeMarco said.

“Are you joking?”

“No.”

She gave him a wet twenty-dollar bill. For some reason she felt better the moment it left her hands. He drove off.

Jessie went home. She took her suitcase out of the trunk and went inside. Everything looked normal: door locked, drawers all neatly closed, furniture in place; nothing missing but Pat's blackboard. And Kate.

All normal, but her teeth were chattering. She had to think. Jessie went into the kitchen, brewed tea, swallowed it strong and steaming. That stopped the chattering, but did nothing for the thinking. She could make no sense of what had happened that night. Was DeMarco right? Had she imagined some of it? But what? She tried to reconstruct the events, detail by detail. That only started her teeth chattering again.

Do something
, said an inner voice, her own voice, and angry. Nothing that had or had not happened in the past few hours changed the fact of Buddy Boucher. Wasn't that true? Jessie tried to find a counterargument and couldn't. Perhaps someone else could come up with a counterargument, or even another idea. But there was no one else.

Jessie rose and went to the phone. All at once, her movements were slow and heavy, as though the earth had suddenly swollen and doubled its gravity. Her voice was slow, too, and thick. She called the airline.

“I was booked on the midnight flight to Boston, but I missed it. Is my ticket good for the next one?”

“Speak up—I can hardly hear you.”

Jessie raised her voice. The effort was huge. Her body was demanding to fold up and stay that way.

“Your flight has not departed yet. We've been closed by the fog.”

“Can I still make it?”

“You've got forty-five minutes.”

Jessie made it.

16

Bao Dai was an expert at binding people so they couldn't move. He'd learned the hard way, from Corporal Trinh. Thin nylon rope was good; copper wire was the best. Bao Dai got both at the hardware.

Bao Dai bound the guests. He didn't want to think of them as prisoners. Corporal Trinh had prisoners. Bao Dai had guests—the little girl, at least, was a guest. He wanted to get to know them, all about them. Then he'd know what to do with them. And if something happened to the fox, so cunning and free, then maybe he'd have to bring up the girl himself. After all, he could have had a little girl just like that if … if he'd said no instead of yes on the last day of Peace and Love.

Not too late. Plenty of time, as long as he didn't make any mistakes. Bao Dai sat in the bus station, wondering if he'd already made any. He thought of one.

That night he took a bus. It wasn't a long ride. There were only a few people on the bus. One was a man with long hair—the first longhair Bao Dai had seen. He smiled at the man. The man sat down beside him.

“Smoke?” said the man.

“I don't smoke.”

The man laughed. “I meant you looking to cop some.”

“Cop some?”

“Yeah,” said the long-haired man, pulling out a pack of cards and opening it. Inside were hand-rolled cigarettes packed tight with dark green leaf.

“Joints?” asked Bao Dai.

“You got it. Two bucks a stick.”

Bao Dai bought five.

“You're the first head I've seen,” he said.
Was that another mistake?
Bao Dai felt across the front of his wrinkled tan jacket, where he had the whalebone knife tucked away.

“Head?” said the man.

“Hippie,” explained Bao Dai, looking at the man again and wondering whether he might be a younger man, possibly more than a few years younger. “You know.”

The man laughed. “No hippies anymore, amigo. Not here or anywhere else. I'm a salesman, pure and simple.”

Bao Dai relaxed. “What do you sell?”

The man laughed again. “I just sold you some. I got pills too.” He pulled out a vial, filled with blue tablets and red capsules. “The reds are ludes; the blues are acid.”

“Acid?”

“Yeah. Five bucks each.”

Bao Dai bought five blues and five reds. The long-haired man took out the pack of joints and lit one. He inhaled, passed it to Bao Dai.

Bao Dai shook his head. He was afraid. He would wait until he wasn't afraid.

The man looked puzzled for a moment, then took another drag and said, “You work around here?”

Bao Dai didn't answer.

“Or just passing through?”

“Yeah.”

The man finished the joint. “I used to be in wood stoves. For the condos, right? Then they put in the new pollution laws and priced them out of the market. Can't even burn fucking wood anymore.” He stamped out the roach and got off at the next town.

Bao Dai got off at the town after that. It was quiet. Everyone had gone to bed. Bao Dai found the mistake, just where they'd left it. He unlocked the door, drove away.

The sound was thrilling. He turned it up as loud as it would go: “… to hear the scream of the butterfly.” And Bao Dai heard it, as never before.

He forgot his fear of the smoke. Just one little puff, he thought. He lit a joint, had one puff, then another. All at once he found himself up at the top of the right-hand speaker, where the cymbals splashed and the high notes squealed. Squealed like a pig.

Then he was remembering the Year of the Pig: pus in his eyes, worms wriggling in the rice bowl, shitting liquid green, a face with no skin, the things Corporal Trinh made him do. Corporal Trinh, his black gun, his homemade lash, his little yellow cock: all in the Year of the Pig.

Pa had had a lash too. Also homemade—a knotted rope, hanging near the crucifix in the kitchen. It was a painted crucifix. Bai Dao could see it in his mind: the blood where the nails stuck in, the strange look on the face of Jesus, not the look of a man in pain, not like Corporal Trinh's face, when Bao Dai did what he did. But crucifixion must have hurt, must have hurt a lot.

Bao Dai turned off the sound, but the image of the crucifix didn't go away. He couldn't push it out of his mind. He stopped the car. He took deep breaths. Then he had a funny feeling, almost like he was going to cry. But he didn't cry. The image of the crucifix went away. He forgot Pa's lash and the Year of the Pig.

After that, it was easy. He didn't have to think. That was because he knew the country like the back of his hands. Bao Dai looked at the back of his hands. They had scars, marks, lines all over them, could have been the hands of some old geezer. He remembered that he didn't know his fucking hand backs at all. Someone had to pay for that.

He didn't know his hand backs, but he knew the country. It was easy: past the old wall, down the lumber track, through the trees to the big rock.

Bao Dai got out of the car. He got everything lined up, then gave a little push. The splash was tremendous, like a thousand cymbals warring in a thousand right-hand speakers.

Then silence. He was safe.

Part Two

17

One by one, the conveyor belt dumped the bags onto the spinning carousel. A good animator could have given them funny faces and made a singing-dancing movie about the class system. Louis Vuitton, fake Louis Vuitton, imitation Louis Vuitton, Samsonite, backpacks, duffel bags, cardboard boxes, battered luggage tied with string—all came bumping down to the carousel. Hands reached for them; people took their places in society. All except Jessie. Her bag—worn leather with solid brass fittings, picked up at a garage sale in Menlo Park in 1970: how would the animator classify her?—didn't appear.

After a while, the carousel was empty, her fellow fliers gone. Letters and numbers flickered on the sign above her head, changing from L.A.
UA
418 to
WASH EA
102. The conveyor belt stopped. New, fresher-looking people appeared in the concourse, moved toward the carousel. Jessie was about to go looking for the lost luggage office when the conveyor belt shuddered and spat out her suitcase. She reached for it and pulled, only then realizing how tired she was—the suitcase banged the rubber guardrail, slipping from her grip. It would have fallen, had not a man standing nearby caught the handle and lowered it gently to the floor.

“Thanks,” Jessie said. He nodded; a broad man in a plain gray sweatsuit.

She carried the suitcase to a corner and looked inside. Everything accounted for: the Reeboks,
Jane Eyre
, Buddy Boucher's letters. Jessie closed the suitcase and went to the car rental counter.

Not long after, furnished with a subcompact car and a map, Jessie drove away from the airport. As soon as she got on the turnpike, she felt the north wind: it buffeted the little car, trying to blow it into the next lane; overhead it slapped the trees around, tearing off their few remaining leaves. Jessie rolled the window all the way up and turned on the heat. She still felt cold. A cup of coffee might have warmed her, but she didn't want to stop. She turned the radio on instead; no warmth there: the Levi's commercial was almost the first thing she heard. It was one nation, all right, conceived in liberty and dedicated to making a sale. Jessie drove on in silence, through a stripped-down, naked world that seemed to be waiting for the covering of the first snowfall. It reminded her of another long, brown drive, all the way to the tip of Baja, with Kate sleeping in her lap. For a moment, she almost felt the weight of Kate's head; but her lap was empty, cold and empty, and she was empty inside, too.

Bare hills rose on Jessie's right. She took the next exit and followed a narrower highway up into them. The wind blew harder; the sky grew grayer. Now, off the turnpike, Jessie had her first close look at New England countryside: rocky meadows, a piebald herd of holstein cows in the lee of a spruce grove, a big Rockwell-red barn with a roof that read: A
NTIQUES BOUGHT AND SOLD
. F
LEA MARKET EVERY
S
ATURDAY
. M
AJOR CARDS
.”