Hard Rain (2 page)

A woman sat down on the next stool. The bartender gave her a drink without being asked. Jerry felt her hip pressing against his. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. She was dressed like the bartender, looked like her too; they might have been sisters.

The woman smiled. “You like me?” she said. She had long fingernails, painted bright red.

Jerry laughed. “Sure,” he said.

The woman reached over and laid her hand in his lap. Jerry looked down at the bright red fingernails. He was shocked; but not because he was a prude: he'd expected a longer preliminary, that's all. And in the end, he'd probably have refused: Jerry Brenner didn't pay for it, and in any case he tried to be faithful to his wife—he'd only had two little flings in the past ten years. But the woman's one touch was more exciting than the total of all Ginny's touches since their first date, and besides, what the hell, tonight was a special night. And he was far from home.

Jerry Brenner stood up. The room slipped its moorings and swung like a barge at the end of a long anchor line. Son of a bitch, Jer. Cognac wasn't his drink. Beer was his drink. But tonight was a special night. You don't drink beer on special nights. The woman laughed and took his hand. She led him up some wobbly stairs, down a long hall and into a little white room that was as neat and clean as a Buddhist shrine.

There, on a bed that smelled of Lysol, she pleasured him. There was no other way to put it. She made him cry out, again and again, like a woman in orgasm. It scared him.

On the way out, he had a few beers, just to put things in perspective. The bartender gave him the bill, which included everything—the cognac, the beer, the woman. It was very reasonable. Jerry put it on his MasterCard. His hand shook slightly as he signed his name, but the little piece of plastic, like a pilgrim's amulet containing a pinch of native soil, was reassuring; he began to get hold of himself. He even smiled a little as he stuck the card in his wallet. It was his business entertainment card: a tax-deductible fuck.

Jerry went outside. Night. Son of a bitch. Had it been night when he'd entered the bar? He couldn't remember. Jerry started walking. It was cold—maybe that's why no one was about. He smelled water, rotting fish, sewage. Nausea bubbled up in his stomach—beer on top of cognac, a bad idea.

He stopped and looked around. Only one street lamp shone, a few blocks away: a smear of yellow, seen through a liquor-coated lens. Jerry walked toward it, all the while fighting a nagging feeling that the hotel was in the other direction. Maybe there'd be a cab parked under the light, he thought. He felt tired.

He kept walking. The distance was greater than it looked. Once Jerry thought he heard footsteps behind him, but when he turned no one was there.

And no one was parked under the light. The street ended a few yards beyond it, at a low wall. On the other side flowed a canal; he heard it slurping at the concrete. The smell of sewage and rotting fish was suddenly overpowering. The nausea bubble inflated and rose through his chest. Jerry stumbled into the shadow of a building and vomited.

He vomited the beer, the cognac, the satays he'd had for lunch, the shrimp in peanut sauce. He vomited on his brogues and on his Brooks Brothers tropical suit. But when he finished, he felt much better. “Son of a bitch, Jer,” he said. “You're not as young as you used to be.” He stood up, straightened his tie, and turned.

A man was standing in the shadows, watching. Jerry jumped. “Christ, buddy,” he said. “You scared me.”

The man didn't speak. He kept watching Jerry. He had strange eyes—blue for one thing, hard blue like glaze fired in an oven.

The man raised his fist. There was something in it, something that gleamed for a moment with reflected light from the street lamp: a gun. A burst of adrenaline swept through Jerry, sobering him at once. “Hey,” said Jerry, “don't do anything foolish, I'll give you what you want.” He reached for his wallet.

There was an explosion, not very loud. Then Jerry was lying on his back. The man was going through his pockets. “I'm hurt,” Jerry tried to say, but no sound came. The man found his passport, opened it, looked inside. Then he stripped off all of Jerry's clothing—the brogues, the executive-length socks, the tan suit, the tie with the sailboat figures, the 100-percent-cotton shirt, the boxer shorts.

Jerry was very cold.

The man dragged him over rough concrete. He was humming a song. Jerry recognized it. “When the Music's Over.” The tune rose high, higher, out of hearing.

“Oh God, help me,” Jerry tried to say. But no sound came. He fell through air and splashed down in water. It felt cold on top, but much warmer below.

3

From the moment Bao Dai stepped on his native soil, he had problems with the glare. It bent the shape of everything he saw. He looked up at the sky, to see why home should be so bright, and saw that the sun wasn't even shining; it was a cloudy day. He rubbed his eyes, hard, as if dislodging distortion lenses that had been implanted without his knowledge, maybe in his sleep or when he'd been in fever land, but when he stopped rubbing the glare remained. It twisted the edges of things: the cars, the buildings, the hollow-faced mannequins in the clothing-store window.

Bao Dai went inside.

A tall black woman, hollow-faced as the mannequins, came through the glare and said, “May I help you, sir?” She didn't talk like a black person, not like any of the black people he'd known over there; she didn't talk like any white people he'd known over there either: too fancy. Her eyes gave him a quick once-over, taking in the suit, the button-down shirt, the tie, the leather shoes with all the little round holes in the toe.

“Jeans,” said Bao Dai.

“Pardon?”

He wondered if he'd pronounced it right. Had he said something like “jinns”? He repeated the word, taking care to stretch it out.

“You're looking for jeans, sir? That will be the Country Weekend Boutique.” She led him toward the back of the store. “Do you have any designer preference? Calvin Klein? Jordache? Ralph Lauren?”

“Bell-bottoms,” said Bao Dai.

“Pardon?”

He said it again, pronouncing it with special care.

The woman blinked, very rapidly, five or six times. In the glare, her long flickering eyelashes were like movements under a strobe light. “Do you mean bell-bottom jeans?” asked the woman.

Bao Dai grunted.

The woman gave him another quick once-over, this time taking in his face as well as his clothing. “There's a revival store near Coolidge Corner. You could try that.”

Later he was on a bus, rolling along a highway, a paved highway, paved the whole way. A sign above the driver's head said: T
OILET AT
R
EAR
. He went to it. He unzipped the suit pants and pissed in a metal toilet that made a sucking sound when he flushed. He thought of the black woman in the store. Then he looked up and forgot about her immediately. He saw a face in the mirror. It was his face, of course; he knew that. What he hadn't known was how much older it looked than the face of the black woman. He would have said they were about the same age. But it wasn't true. He returned to his seat, glancing at the other passengers as he moved along the aisle, trying to tell who was older, who was younger, who was the same age. He walked up and down the aisle several times until he noticed eyes peeking at him and the driver's eyes darting up in the rearview mirror. He went back to the toilet, locked the door, took off all his clothes and stared at the figure in the mirror until he realized the bus was no longer moving.

Bao Dai walked along a country road.

What was that song, he wondered as he walked. “Changes”? “Sit by my side, come as close as …” As what? He didn't remember. He remembered the chord progression though—C, D, G, E minor. His left hand made barring motions in the air.

It was a country road he knew well, glare or no glare. Rain was falling now, and he kept his head down, not because he felt the wet or the cold, but because he didn't like the hazy glare around every raindrop. He didn't need to see where he was going; he knew the road like the back of his hand. Bao Dai looked at the backs of his hands.

They were strange hands.

He didn't know them at all.

He kept walking, glancing down at his hands from time to time to see if they were beginning to look familiar. They never did, but at least he knew the road.

Bao Dai came to a mailbox: a normal rural mailbox, except it had been painted. He knew that; he remembered the smell of the wet paint, remembered how hard it had been to get the blue flowers just right and how he had copied the black symbol—a circle with an airplane shape inside—from somebody's button. It might have been yesterday. But it wasn't, because the paint had faded away, almost completely. He had to look very closely to make out the forms of one or two flowers, the outline of the symbol.

Bao Dai turned onto a dirt road. He saw the farm. He heard voices, laughter, guitars. His heart raced. He began to run, a clumsy, sliding run along the muddy road, in the tropical suit and the brogues, two sizes too big. He ran, but no one was there—no talkers, no laughers, no players.

There was only a middle-aged woman, scattering birdseed in the yard. She looked up. The glare was very bad. It took him a long time to recognize her, a very long time.

She didn't recognize him at all.

He had to tell her who he was.

And then what should have happened? What had he expected? What had he dreamed? He didn't know. All he knew was that his arms were lifting from his sides, all on their own. But she didn't step forward; she was still staring at his face. He didn't like the way she stared, didn't like the wrinkles on her skin.

He lowered his arms, stepped back.

At that moment, she opened her arms to him in a hesitant sort of way. He took another step back. She lowered her arms, bit her lip.

Their timing was off.

They went inside. She made him a meal. Fried chicken. Yellow wax beans. Banana bread.

It was sickening.

Night fell but the glare didn't go away. She made a fire in the fireplace, rolled a cigarette, lit it, sucked in smoke, held it out.

“No,” he said.

“No?” She was surprised. “It's Colombian.”

“No.” The smoke scared him.

She turned on the radio. Music played. Rock music, he supposed, but he hated it. It was boring. Boring rock music was hateful. She was tapping her foot. He noticed that his hands were fists. He straightened them out.

A man rolled up in a wheelchair. “Company?” he said. The man in the wheelchair couldn't see.

“Business,” said the woman. “No one you know.”

The man rolled away. There was something familiar about him. Bao Dai was about to ask her when another question occurred to him, a far more important question.

She wouldn't answer. At first. He had to ask a few more times, and get up, and cross the room, and stand in front of her. It was then that they finally touched—when he took her hand and pulled her up and twisted her arm behind her back and twisted some more.

Then she told him.

Bao Dai left the next morning. He wore the tropical suit, the button-down shirt, the brogues, but he kept the tie in his pocket, together with the traveling money she'd given him—at least, she hadn't tried to stop him when he took it from her bag.

In the airport and on the plane, Bao Dai began to notice that people had things. All kinds of things. He didn't even know the names of some of them. He had a tropical suit, a tie with sailboats on it, a button-down shirt, boxer shorts, long socks that needed washing, and shoes—with little holes in the toe—two sizes too big. They gave him blisters. He'd seen the blisters when he'd gone to bed the night before, but he couldn't feel them.

“Cocktail, sir, before your meal?”

Bao Dai looked up, into the slanted eyes of a yellow woman. “Cocktail?” she repeated.

He shrank in his seat.

“Or would you prefer a nonalcoholic beverage?”

Bao Dai grunted. She went away. He kept an eye on her for the rest of the trip.

He got off the plane in a city where the air made his eyes water. He found the house he wanted, near the beach. It was a white Spanish house with a red tile roof. It made him think of Zorro. He remembered how Zorro spun the 7-Up bottle with the tip of his sword.
Zip zip zip
—the mark of Zorro. Every Saturday afternoon. Four-thirty.

Bao Dai walked past the house three or four times before he went up and knocked. No one answered. He went to the garage and tried the door. It opened. He stepped inside, pulled the door closed and stood by the window so he could watch the street.

A car turned into the driveway and stopped. A nice blue car. The windows were down so Bao Dai could hear music playing inside, just before the ignition was switched off. Music, full and clear, as if the band had all its equipment right there in the back seat.

A young-looking fair-haired man got out of the car, opened the front door with a key and entered the house.

So fucking young-looking
.

Bao Dai's hands were fists again. He straightened them, reached for the handle of the garage door. At that moment, another car drove up. A woman got out.

A beautiful woman.

She had healthy, glowing skin and a strong body—he could see it was strong from the way it moved under her skirt. He liked the way it moved. It gave him feelings he barely remembered feeling before, almost as though it were the first time. Almost. Three female faces flipped through his mind—black from the clothing store, yellow from the plane, and now white a few yards away. And suddenly he wanted sex, not just sex, but rough sex. That must have been the yellow part. He hadn't thought of sex for a long time, hadn't had an erection for years. He didn't know if he could have one.

Bao Dai slipped his hand into the waistband of the suit pants and touched himself. Nothing happened. He kept his hand there anyway, while he watched the woman walking toward the house. There was a little girl with her. They had the same kind of hair. He wondered how hair like that would feel against his penis and felt a faint stirring. He glanced down. The feeling vanished. Maybe he had imagined it. He heard a low, angry growl. A few moments passed before he realized it was coming from his own throat. When he looked up again, the woman and the girl were disappearing into the house.