Hard Rain (44 page)

Jessie, listening, was thinking,
Pat, you fool
, even before Bao Dai yelled, “Shut up.” There was a cry of pain. Then Bao Dai said, “It was right here. You said, ‘Do you want to try something far-out?' That's what you said: ‘something far-out.' Isn't that the most … the most …” Bao Dai gave up his search for the phrase. “And I was just a dumb fucking townie, and I said, ‘What?' And you said, ‘I'll make it worth your while.'”

“And I still will, if you let me.”

“Oh yeah?” Bao Dai laughed the laugh Jessie didn't like, but this time it went on and on. “With another car? Another sporty car for sporty me?”

“If you want. But much more than that. I promise you'll never have to work again.”

“I've never worked yet.” Bao Dai was laughing again, high, higher, out of hearing.

“And you'll never have to. I'll give you everything you want.”

“I don't want money.”

“Then what do you want?”

“All those years.”

“But I can't give you that.” Pat started to cry.

“Sure you can. I'll take the girl, for starters.”

“You know that's impossible. But you can visit sometimes, and—”

“You son of a bitch.” Jessie heard Bao Dai's voice rise to the limit of control and then beyond. “Visits. You're giving me permission to visit my own life. Can't you see that? Can't you? Can't you? Well, let me tell you something. Do you know what's in my kitchen?”

“Your kitchen?”

“This.”

“Oh no. Oh God, no.”

“Oh God, yes.”

Then there was a hammering sound. And Pat screamed a horrible scream. And another. Bao Dai shouted over his screams. “It's not even enough. You stole my life, Hartley Frame, and you have to pay.” His voice sank suddenly, almost to a whisper. “That's rule number one.”

“Please Pat, don't do this to me.”

“It's done.”

“Please, please.” Jessie heard the cries of her ex-husband. They faded to moans and soon to silence.

Then she heard footsteps, soft footsteps coming closer. The man who called himself Bao Dai stood over her. His eyes were mad. “It's time to pay the price.” He stripped off his filthy tan suit and the button-down shirt. He wore nothing underneath. He had a thin, hard body; his arms and legs were thin and hard too, criss-crossed with scars: arms and legs that glistened in the rain like something other than flesh and blood. He didn't seem to notice the rain at all.

Bao Dai squatted beside her, unbuttoned her jacket and raised her sweater.

“I've done nothing to you,” Jessie said.

He rubbed her breasts with both hands. They were hard hands and rough.

“You've got no reason to hate me,” Jessie said. But he wasn't looking at her, wasn't listening. He was looking down between his own legs at his penis. It was soft and limp.

“Do you know how long it's been since I had a hard-on?”

He pinched her nipples, then gave them a twist.

Don't show pain
. Somehow Jessie knew that. It was all she knew at that moment.

He twisted her nipples harder. His penis began to swell. Jessie wanted to bite her lip to keep from crying out, but she couldn't risk that either. She just didn't cry out.

One rough hand kept twisting her nipple. The other hand raked down her stomach slowly and began fiddling with the snaps of her jeans. They frustrated him. He got the knife and started cutting the material. The point pricked her skin. Blood seeped out of it. He smiled at the sight, and his penis swelled a little more.

Jessie saw her future. It was short and brutal. There was only one possible way out. It all depended on how well she understood him; it also meant going against every grain of her being. But she didn't calculate the cost of doing that: there wasn't much reason to think she would live to pay it.

“Look at me,” Jessie said, trying to imitate the B-movie seductress voice from the radio. “Look at my face.”

He looked, reluctantly. Jessie stared right into his deadly eyes as though they were the eyes of a lover, a demon lover who had her completely under his spell, and she softly said, “You don't have to do that, honey. Just untie me and I'll cooperate.”

Both his hands stopped moving. There was a silence. It seemed to Jessie to last forever. Then he said, “Shit.” He looked down between his legs. His penis was shrinking. “Why'd you have to go and do that?” He brought one of his hands to it, but it was no use. “You've ruined everything,” he said. He was angry now, but that was all. He grabbed her breast and squeezed it like a rubber ball. This time Jessie had to bite her lip, bite it until she tasted blood, but she didn't make a sound. She understood him. His penis stayed limp. “You've ruined it.”

He rose, reached for his clothes in the mud. By the time he was half-dressed, Jessie could tell his mind was already on something else. He didn't even see her. And then he was gone. Footsteps went away. An engine started. Its sound, too, faded away.

Jessie lay in the mud. She wanted to cry and never stop. But there was no time for that.
Don't think of what a coward you are. Think of Kate
. She began to struggle with her bonds. The rain helped her, softening the earth around the tent pegs. After a while she worked one arm free. A few moments later she was on her feet.

She followed the moaning sounds. She didn't have to go far. After only twenty or thirty yards, she came to a shallow pit surrounded by newly turned earth. A few spadefuls had been tossed back into the pit, not nearly enough to cover the man lying inside. Clods of dirt lay on his face and soiled his long, fair hair. His eyes were closed. He moaned: the father of her child, the only man she'd really loved.

He was lying on something. At first the image didn't focus in Jessie's mind. Then she took it in. He'd been crucified on Jimi Hendrix's guitar.

She saw the big nails, driven through his upper arms—one into the body of the guitar, the other into the neck. His right arm had bled very little, but the left one, nailed to the fingerboard, had bled a lot, soaking his shirt and the mud below, and was still bleeding.

Jessie ran forward, dropped to her knees, laid her hand on his forehead. He opened his eyes. They saw her, recognized her. “Jessie.” His voice was quiet as a whisper, but he wasn't whispering. “I should have told you a long time ago.”

She hadn't really known until that moment. Now she did.

“Oh …” Jessie didn't say his name. She had no name for him now. She brushed the dirt off his face and out of his long, fair hair.

He closed his eyes. “Jessie,” he said. She could hardly hear him. “I wish we could have made it. It was all my fault.”

“That's not true.”

His eyes opened. They filled with alarm. “You've got to go,” he said. “Hurry. He said he's taking her to Grandpa's.”

“Grandpa's?”

“The cabin. He's going to do something. He thinks my father—” His face twisted in pain, as though someone had jerked on invisible wires.

“First I'm getting you to the hospital.”

“No. Leave me.”

Jessie tore strips off her shirt, wrapped them tightly around his arms, above the nails.

“Leave me.”

“You're going to be all right. You've lost a little blood, that's all.” She knelt behind his head, took his shoulders, tried to sit him up. He moaned. She pushed. The neck of the guitar jammed under a stone. He cried out. She couldn't free him. The head of the nail rose a fraction of an inch from the surface of his arm. He screamed. Jessie grasped the head of the nail and pulled it out.

He sat up, half free of the guitar. He stopped screaming. His lips turned up in a weak smile. Then Jessie saw the blood. The nail had ripped a huge hole in his arm. Blood was spurting out of it, soaking the tourniquet, soaking her.

“Oh God,” she said, frantically pressing her bare hand on the wound. Blood poured out through her fingers. “Oh God.” His eyes closed. He sank back into the bottom of the pit. Jessie kept her hand on the wound, praying for the blood to stop.

Finally it did. But his breathing stopped too. Jessie put her mouth to his, blew her breath into him. His chest rose. Her breath came out. His chest fell. Her breath went in. Her breath went out. It was no good, but she stayed there by the pit for a long time, trying to breathe life into him.

At last she gave up. It was night now—starless, moonless darkness, full of icy rain. Jessie got him out of the pit, half-dragged, half-carried him out of the woods. It was a long way to the car. There was no time. But she couldn't leave him there.

She dragged him across the field. It took forever. The guitar came loose. She left it in the mud. Rain turned to snow, colder than the rain and almost as hard. The wind blew it wildly over Yasgur's farm.

40

The plane swung to the right. It swung to the left. It bounced up a few hundred feet. Then down. All seat belts were buckled. They'd been buckled the whole flight. No food, no drink, no last minute money-making with calculators and lap-top computers. Outside the oval windows lay a black night full of white swirls. The plane circled an invisible airport, wobbled down, hit the runway, hit it again, and again, and once more. Then it rolled to a stop in front of the terminal, and everyone got out, sick smiles on their faces. They closed the airport five minutes later.

The Blazer waited in the parking building where he'd left it. Ivan Zyzmchuk circled down the ramp and stopped at the tollbooth. “It's chaos out there,” said the attendant happily, taking Zyzmchuk's money. “Thanksgiving's the busiest time there is. Couldn't be wilder.”

Zyzmchuk drove out into the night. A gale was blowing from the north, driving snow through a roaring sky. Cars were stuck on every hill, wheels spinning; they skidded sideways through intersections, sat abandoned by the side of the road. Zyzmchuk stopped. He didn't have snow tires, but in the back were chains he'd owned for twenty years. He put them on, shifted into four-wheel drive and wove through maddened traffic to the turnpike.

A barrel with a flashing light on top blocked the entrance ramp. A state trooper stood beside it, bundled in a heavy coat. Zyzmchuk drove up to him, rolled down the window. “Closed, pal,” shouted the trooper. “Go home.”

“How much is shut down?”

“The whole goddamn pike. Here to the end of the state.”

“I've got to get on it.”

“Think again. It's closed. Get it? They're not sanding. They're not even plowing—that's how bad it is.”

“I'll take the chance.”

The trooper laid a hand on the butt of his gun. “Are you going to make trouble, pal?”

“No. I've got special authorization. I'm going to reach into my pocket and show you.”

The trooper drew his gun. Zyzmchuk took out his ID. The trooper put his gun away, took the ID and shone his torch on it. He frowned. “I've never seen one of these before.”

“Now you have.”

The trooper turned it over and gazed at the blank side. “I'll have to call someone in.”

“There's no time for that.”

“Why not? How far do you think you'd get anyways? There's drifts out there tall as a man.”

“I haven't got time for speculation,” Zyzmchuk said.

“What?”

Zyzmchuk threw the Blazer in gear and floored it. The bumper swept the lighted barrel off the road. In the rearview mirror, Zyzmchuk caught a glimpse of the trooper fumbling with the ID, the torch, the gun; then he was out of sight.

Zyzmchuk ran up through the gears and stamped on the pedal.
Drive like a bugger, you old fool. Drive like a bugger
.

He drove. There were no other cars, not moving ones. All he saw was white, white with a yellow hole in the center.
Just stay in the yellow hole, that's all you've got to do
. He didn't call himself an old fool again. It was true, but what was the point?

Zyzmchuk stayed in the yellow hole for four hours. The old chains bit into the snow, the rusty bumper crashed through the drifts. Zyzmchuk saw white and yellow, and red, when the warning light flashed that the engine was overheating.

Don't you fucking overheat on me
. He had a crazy vision of himself ripping the Blazer apart if it let him down. The vision passed. He drove on, pedal to the floor.

Snowdrifts were piled four feet high in the parking lot of the 1826 House. Zyzmchuk left the Blazer on the highway, lights flashing, and fought his way through the drifts. Snow rose halfway up the doors of rooms 19 and 20. There were no tracks.

Zyzmchuk knocked on room 20. No answer. He tried 19. The same. He had no key. He looked at the windows of the office. No lights shone inside. He put his shoulder to the door of number 20 and broke it down.

Number 20 was empty.

He broke into number 19. Number 19 wasn't empty. It was a shambles.

Bela lay in the middle of it. There were scratches on his face and bruises on his forehead. Zyzmchuk knelt and felt for a pulse. There was none and his skin felt cold. His right hand was curled in a fist. Gently, Zyzmchuk opened it. Bela held a handful of platinum hair, torn out by the roots.

Zyzmchuk got up. He saw Bela's Verdi book lying open on the floor beside the overturned easy chair. At first he thought it was the only object that hadn't been disturbed. Then he picked it up and found the other one underneath: Bela's gun.

Zyzmchuk examined it: fully loaded, unfired. He pictured Bela reading, getting sleepy, putting the gun on the floor, laying the book on top, closing his eyes. Sometime later Major Tsarenko came in; the old man woke up slowly, fuddled, couldn't find the gun right away.

Then Zyzmchuk had a thought that made him charge into the bathroom, flick on the light and look around wildly. But the bathroom was empty. No more bodies.

Not here.

Zyzmchuk stuck Bela's gun in his pocket and left room 19 with murder in his heart.