RAIN DID not recognize him as she strode briskly past on the narrow sidewalk. How strange that was, that she might pass within an arm’s length and still not sense his nearness. Of course, his appearance had changed, his long hair and beard docked, but his shape and presence must have remained essential. How could she have let go of him so thoroughly as to mistake him for someone irrelevant? He turned and watched her step into the small truck. A tall man in jeans and a leather jacket appeared from a back-alley staircase, called her name and cursed. She ignored him and knocked the engine to life, then roared up the main street without regard for the stop sign or competing traffic.
He shrugged within his hooded sweatshirt and stepped into the alcove of a closed barber shop to escape the wind, watched the man who stood looking after her with his hands on his hips and furious words in his mouth. Within a minute or less the cold proved too much and the man headed back up the stairs, slammed the door.
He checked the mailbox at the base of the stairs to impress the memory of where the man lived, then went on toward the edge of town. Twilight came and deepened swiftly into a dark hour beyond that. The mountains went to sleep in that gloom and still he was alone as he footed along the side of the road with little stellar light to guide him. It seemed as though all destinations, save his, had been reached by those who had desired them.
When finally he came into the parking lot for Wiley’s Lounge the way was nearly blocked by cars lined along the shoulder and double parked in front of the building itself. A curled script of blinking red lights loosed itself along the roof trim, with the accidental abbreviation HPPY NW YER lit on either side of the burnt vowel lights. The front door was crowded with bodies. Under the front light, their faces were scalded by drink and the cold.
He pushed through toward the bar and ordered a beer from the backup bartender, turned so that the owner, the man who’d served him before, wouldn’t recognize him. He watched the rolls of holiday cash amass in the drawer of the register as he gently sipped. On the television the New York faces talked about all the deaths and movies and political mischief of the past year and what mutations of the same the American public could expect in the months ahead.
He waited after the crowd had counted down to the new morning and the bar lights had flickered before he quietly paid his tab and left by the front door. Around the back he found a squat gathering of rhododendron where he could conceal himself with a good view of the lounge. The revelers began to shuffle out within a few minutes, last beer swallows on their breaths and in their blurred voices, their drugged and drunken legs taking them out in floating patterns. Cars hummed and bucked and made soft but not catastrophic impacts as they jockeyed free of the parking lot glut. Screams of joy and farewell glanced off the glass fragile night.
Cold now once again. The hug of indoor heat had dissipated and he began to shiver as he watched the silhouettes of the bartender and owner cross the window as they cleaned the bar debris. He had little to distract him from the creeping minutes, and this lack amplified every second into a lapsing of time far beyond any static measurement until he thought he would have to move along the riverside for the sake of jarring his blood. Just then the interior lights cut and the two men exited, went to their separate vehicles and diverged into some distant emptiness.
He went up the rear stairs where the river laughed beneath, the key in the palm of his hand—cold, immaculate, silver. It entered the lock, and like a spell cast, the door submitted. He stepped across the threshold and shut the door behind, stood for a while in the darkened hall to confirm his solitude, then went on to the bar to pour himself a drink since there would be no need to hurry now.
He drank the best whiskey he could find and soon any thought of the cold was gone. He slipped the framing hammer from where he’d kept it hidden in the waistband of his jeans and jammed the claw into the opening of the cash register drawer. Simple leverage broke the spring and the drawer rolled open.
Unlike the scruffy upkeep of the bar, the cash was neatly organized and stowed in the bill slots. He set everything out on the bar surface and began to count. He had been right to wait for this night. In the drawer alone was more than fifteen hundred. Under the sink in a black cabinet he found an envelope to serve as temporary wallet. He stuffed the cash inside, tucked it into his waistline, and went back to the office.
The pistol was still in its place. There was a little more cash as well, which he added to the envelope without counting. He tucked the whiskey bottle under his arm and then set out on foot for the motel a quarter of a mile up the highway. As he left, he did not bother to shut the door. He did, however, leave the key on top of the bar, and beside it a single penny.
HIS MOTEL room was small, with carpet that held a peculiar funk and a mattress more topographic than was strictly comfortable. But the heat from the wall unit was steady and curative. He placed his hands over the vents until his frozen fingers loosened and pain returned. Afterward, he took a steaming shower. Because his clothes were filthy and the room warm, he didn’t dress but sat in the single chair wrapped in a towel.
As he sipped the whiskey he rolled through the different cable channels but found nothing that wasn’t an advertisement for some version of a life he despised. He shut it off so that he wouldn’t slam the bedside lamp through the screen. Sleep would have been the solution then and he tried to force it by bottoming the whiskey, but it wouldn’t be bought even as he lay in the bed and stared at the dark ceiling. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and snapped the light back on, pulled the Gideon Bible from its drawer.
He found the verses he’d memorized with David those devotional mornings. Once he found them he carefully removed each page from the volume so that no shredded edge remained bound, as if the sections had been extracted rather than roughly torn. He lay each of the pages out on the bed and placed the Bible back in the drawer. He pulled the empty wastebasket closer, removed its plastic bag. Standing on the bed, he pried the smoke detector open, unfixed the battery from its wires. Then he struck a match and touched the spitting flame to the first leaf of the pages, letting it burn, blacken, and wither until dropping the remnants in the metal bin. He struck a second match and repeated the gesture. Each new sheet was a clean and meditative disposal of what had been expected of him. The disintegration was as pleasant a spectacle as anything he could remember.
The next morning found him waking later than he’d expected, nearly nine. He rolled out of the bed and went through the pasteboard furniture looking for a copy of the Yellow Pages, but the drawers were empty. He called down to the office to see if they could give him the information, but the voice told him it was a motel not a directory, that if he wanted to look something up he was in possession of two legs and could follow the neon sign spelling O-F-F-I-C-E. The line cut.
He put the phone down and dressed.
A woman with iron-colored hair and wearing a pair of bright glasses sat with a shih tzu on her lap behind the office front desk. She drank a cup of black coffee and smoked a long cigarette while she watched the Today show on a small television stuck into a nook in the wall. The shih tzu yapped when he came in the door and the cattle bell clonked. She popped it once with the flat of her hand and it hushed. She looked up at him through those glasses that looked more like a toy or some hastily donned prop than serviceable eyewear.
He said that he was.
“Here, here’s the book,” she said, hauled out a directory from behind the counter. When he turned the pages they threatened to come apart.
“You know a used car lot here in town?”
She didn’t turn her head from watching the morning show when she answered him.
“Yeah, there’s a couple. Lemons mostly, though I guess that goes with the territory. There’s a place called Hooper’s out on the other side of the interstate. Too far to walk, if that’s what you’ve got in mind.”
He dialed a cab and dropped the key in the deposit box, decided to wait outside in the cold rather than share another minute with the present company. A quarter of an hour later a hungover cabbie driving a minivan pulled up and wordlessly took him on to the car lot. He paid the fare with a twenty, which was ten too much. When he asked for his change the cabbie patted his pockets vainly and told him he had nothing on him at the moment. He was sure that the cabbie was lying but told him that it was fine, that he should drive on.
He walked around for a few minutes, looked at a couple of old sedans with prices marked in white grease pencil. Several, though, were without a price. He would have to talk to someone to see what he could afford. The car lot office was up in a singlewide that lacked an underpinning. He could see lights on inside but no one came to the door when he knocked. He knocked again, much harder, until he heard booming footsteps.
A fat man in a burgundy blazer swung the door open, invited him in, showed his fondest Rotary Club smile.
“Sorry about that,” the man told him. “Dozed off for a bit. Didn’t expect anyone in this early of the morning. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
He accepted the offer for the promise of warmth alone. He took the small Styrofoam cup in both of his hands and drank, felt that desired warmth, though little more. Dark water, strained and heated.
“So, do you have an idea of what you’re looking for?”
He unfolded and counted out a thousand dollars in cash on the desk.
“Something that falls in a fixed budget,” he said.
The car salesman’s face darkened with the briefest fog of conscience before he overcame it with a shiteating grin.
“I’ve got a couple of things that might interest you. It’s not much, of course, but it being the holidays and cash being already on the barrel, I imagine we can find something that suits you.”
The selection, however, was no more satisfactory than the coffee. A two-tone Cutlass with a peeling vinyl roof, a decrepit LeBaron, two cheerless Fiestas. They walked and he listened to the salesman talk, a babble that was as empty of content as the gusting wind. He was beginning to think the effort useless before he saw a black Crown Victoria parked at the back.
“What about that one?” he asked, pointed.
The salesman wrung his hands a bit, made a big show of turning over the possibility that he actually wanted to let him consider that particular car. The whole theatrical playbill of an experienced huckster. Then he told them that yes, he could see it, that he’d get the key even though he’d be losing money on the deal, he’d still go ahead and let him take a look, because it was the holidays and every man deserved the modern independence an automobile could afford.
The car was about ten years old and had a bad dent on the driver’s side so that you couldn’t enter there but had to get in on the passenger’s side and slide across. But it had a remarkable engine. It was a retired police interceptor, so it had power coiled there that the appearance belied. He test-drove it down to the Gatlinburg interstate exit at ninety, wheeled around at the defunct gas station there, and had already decided he would take it by the time they got back.
After he’d signed the few tax and tag papers back at the office, he coasted back to Newport looking for a place to pick up a few necessities, but most everything was closed for the holiday except for the Dollar General. He went in and filled a buggy with a couple of polyester blankets, some assorted cans of food, a big bottle of Coke. When he paid he had a little over fifty dollars left in his pocket. Enough to get him through what he intended.
He drove back to the street where he’d seen Rain and the man who had sworn at her. There was an open space at the corner where he could see the entrance to his building, so he parked and sat, nursed the Coke down while he waited in the cold car for as long as he could stand until he cranked the engine for the benefit of the heater. A bit of snow began to drift and stick. By nightfall he knew he would have to move on and he did, driving the quiet streets back out of town.
He had expected the place by the river to be empty and it was. He pulled in behind a screen of freeze-tightened rhododendron where it would have been hard to see him from the road. There was scant deadfall in the immediate area, but he gathered what he could and built a poor campfire that did little more than knock out the ambient chill in the pork and beans he heated on the edge of the foundation log and ate straight from the can.
He could see stars still. A miraculous thing with the snow coming as thick as it was, growing around him with its weight of silence. His grandfather had told him once that no matter how long and terrible the night might seem, it would always justify suffering by the scattered sight of distant worlds overhead, as stark and trim as this one. Even sitting here marooned on the banks of a strange river, he felt he glimpsed something of great meaning in that black sky and what lay behind it. He spoke to his grandfather then, as he hadn’t in many years. They shared a conversation in the dark that opened a portal across many lost days. When they had finished, he remained for a long time in silence and decision, the vestiges of firelight on his face like a chain of floating runes.
He slept in the car under both blankets, waking when it had become so cold that he couldn’t endure it, when he would crank the engine and let the heat run until he began to sweat. At daybreak he left, drove back to town.
More faces in the cold the next morning. A few proprietors appeared at the sidewalks to shovel the fronts of their businesses, motions as stiff and eager as starlings. Nothing from the building where the man lived. Not for many hours.
He appeared only when noon sun had made the thaw into something you could hear running in the streets and down the gutters. All motion and caught light and then him, stepping suddenly from the alley entrance, his face wrinkled up at the sun as he struck a match and lit a cigarette. A proud and oblivious act. An act that made him want to open the man’s chest with his teeth.
The man walked half a block to an old pickup truck and got in. As the man merged into traffic headed the opposite direction, he wheeled around and followed, giving several car lengths’ interval.
They drove across the interstate overpass and out into the snow-dappled country, passed a few scratch motels and franchised eateries, then got away from the familiar and contrived as they turned down another rural road with the mountains in front of them. So large and imminent. He realized then where the man was going, where Rain had made her home since leaving him.
“The bitch. The goddamn whoring bitch.”
He stopped at the end of the road beside a cluster of scrub oak and watched as the man turned up the winding drive to the old farmhouse. The man, the boy really, seemed to be at ease. He walked in and the door closed behind, enclosed him there as naturally as if he were a piece of the house’s furniture.
He got out of the car but remained concealed in the cage-like shadow of the oak. Some men had doors and others trees and thickets. The recesses that matched their own best prospects. Rain had once understood this, about him and herself as well. That was why they had revealed themselves to one another, true and at peace in the woodlands. Or he thought they had. He had pledged marriage under the unmatched sky because she had claimed the open world as her passion, and that was why he had given her the name Rain. She had the power to move across the face of the earth, to make it feel the impact of her difference.
But he had a name too. A name that drove deep into the center of his mind. A name that had the power to break rocks and bleed flesh. To exact obedience and loyalty, to remind others of what had been promised.
He got back in the car and pulled the pistol from the glove box, set it in his lap, waited there a while before he steered the Crown Vic back toward town, tires popping and scrubbing dust as they met the hardtop.