Late Rain (11 page)

After Jack made the street, he turned left.

The sky was pale, the wind dry. Jack walked past a woman planting flowers. Next to her were two flats of orange marigolds. Small puffs of dust appeared each time she jabbed the hand trowel into the earth.

Jack’s shoes were rubbing on his heels, and he stopped to retie the laces. He heard a dog barking in the distance.

The kitchen calendar had said March, but nothing around him resembled it.

He started walking again. The wind in the trees sounded like teeth chattering.

He walked some more, and then he stopped. He hadn’t been paying attention and must have gotten turned around. He was standing across from a Burger King, and he could smell meat frying.

Jack took out a bandana and wiped his forehead and wished he’d remembered to put on his cap.

He wondered why he’d decided to walk to Burger King. He didn’t even like Burger King. He wasn’t hungry either.

He started walking again. After a while, he ran into a large green and white sign that read:
Thank you for visiting Magnolia Beach. Come back soon.

The sign made no sense. He lived in Myrtle Beach, not Magnolia Beach, with his wife Carol. They were expecting their first child in two months.

She was a good woman, Carol was.

He loved her more than breath.

He didn’t want her to worry, but he knew they were in trouble.

A tight spot, for sure. A child on the way and the Myrtle Beach he’d grown up in disappearing right in front of him. It was no longer the small sleepy tourist town full of family-owned and run businesses, a place where someone like Jack Carson could start his own construction company and count on his reputation for doing quality work to bring in the jobs. It had been like that when he first started Carson Construction, but there was a new ethos at work now, housing developments springing up all over, national hotel, restaurant, and shopping chains moving in, the promise of money everywhere, and Jack was finding it harder and harder to compete with the big construction outfits. They used cheaper materials, bought them in larger quantities and for bigger discounts from wholesalers, paid more and had better benefit packages for the crews, and met deadlines more quickly than Carson Construction. The owners and managers of the large outfits had also quickly figured out whom they needed to buy off to expedite processing and approving permits and inspections.

The air smelled like car exhaust, and the feeling arose again that something was tugging at him. Jack looked at the sign once more and then turned around and started walking.

He was a little dizzy. The joints in his knees felt like they were packed with sand.

The sky was white, as if it had been bleached.

He heard a dog barking and then a lawnmower start up.

He walked by a large wooden house in need of paint. There were mold streaks along the eaves and around the windows.

A while later, when he walked past the house again, he pushed down the panic opening like a hand inside him and tried to walk faster.

He’d just remembered his wife Carol had died giving birth to their daughter Anne.

He wiped his face with a bandana. He had trouble getting the bandana back in his pocket.

The air felt baked.

Then suddenly he was surrounded by four boys on bicycles. Jack wasn’t sure where they’d come from. They circled him like lazy bees.

The boys looked to be around eight or nine, and they all had buzz cuts, and they were all wearing green T-shirts with X-Men on the fronts, and Jack wasn’t sure which one of them said, “You got any change, Mister? We’re really thirsty.”

Jack was thirsty too. He’d just realized that.

One of the boys said, “Forget it, Brian. That’s Paige’s grandpa. She said he’s a head case.”

Another said, “Paige Carson is a bitch.”

“He walks funny,” another one said.

“My dad says he’s the one who got lost driving a bus with all the kids still in it.”

“Ask him what day it is,” one said. “I’ll bet you a quarter he can’t tell you.”

The boys kept circling on their bikes and firing questions, and a lot of the questions were simple, and when Jack answered them, he couldn’t understand why the boys laughed, and then he was getting angry and was going to tell them to stop, but before he could, they were gone as suddenly as they’d appeared.

And then Jack was very tired and a little afraid because he’d begun to suspect that a lot of what he’d set out to do this afternoon had already happened.

He suddenly knew, for example, that he didn’t live in Myrtle Beach anymore and hadn’t for over ten years.

He wanted to get home, but he was afraid of getting confused again, so he told himself to watch the telephone wires and follow them. The telephone wires were like lines on a blueprint, and he’d always been good at reading blueprints.

He told himself to hurry.

He tried to remember if his shadow had been falling in front of or behind him.

He was very thirsty.

He needed to get home.

The light looked different. There was less of it than he remembered.

He decided to take a shortcut and left the street and started following the shoreline of the inlet in North Shore.

Off to his right, three gray and white pelicans skimmed, circled, and dropped straight down into the inlet, breaking the water like divers. Farther out, five small boats trolled, running in wide figure-eights. Beyond them was the east shore of the inlet, and beyond that the Atlantic.

Just ahead, atop a long sloping backyard was a large two-anda-half-story house planked in weathered pine.

Jack recognized it. It was Stanley Tedros’s place. Jack had done work on the house. They were neighbors. Jack lived less than a half-mile away.

Stanley would give him a glass of water, and then Jack would walk home. Everything was all right.

The ground rose at a steep angle from where it met the water, and the lot next to Stanley’s backyard was wild and overgrown. Jack slowly picked his way up the slope. He was conscious of the light leaving the afternoon.

There was the sound of a boat approaching, its outboard throttling back to a low rumble.

There was wisteria growing everywhere, matting the ground, grabbing his shoes, wrapping around the trunks of the live oaks and magnolias and pines. It was like a huge spiderweb.

The motor on the outboard trailed off and died.

He cut left, then right, then left again, slowly working his way through the overgrowth across the lot toward Stanley’s house. His calves and lungs burned.

Below and to his right were a small dock and boathouse. Stanley Tedros tied up his boat and began unloading his fishing gear.

Jack ran into a wall of holly. When he tried to push through, the leaves sliced at his hands and forearms. The pain was sharp and surprising, like paper cuts. Jack backed off and moved to his right.

He stumbled, then stopped next to some crepe myrtles to catch his breath.

There were long shadows on Stanley’s lawn.

Stanley Tedros began walking up from the dock.

Jack told himself to move, but he couldn’t. His legs were trembling.

Someone called out Stanley’s name, and Jack was pretty sure it wasn’t him.

Stanley stopped in the middle of the yard and lifted his hand to shield his eyes. He looked toward the back of the house.

A glass of water.

Jack would feel better after that.

His breath was still high and fast in his chest, so he stood very still at the edge of the overgrown lot and waited for his legs to return, and he watched a short man with short gray hair walk down the lawn toward Stanley.

CROY WENDALL WAS LATE, and it seemed like everything in the universe was trying to remind him of that. The dashboard clock in the car. The sign flashing the time and temperature at Nation’s Bank. His wristwatch. His pulse. The afternoon sun, itself, in the slant of its light.

Nothing in his day so far though had gone right. First off, at breakfast, Missy had finished the box of Lucky Charms, and Croy had to settle for Shredded Wheat. Then Jamie had wanted to go talk to Mr. Balen about doing some more crimes to Mr. Sonny Gramm. Jamie had already spent his share of the money they got for smashing up the Mustang, and he needed some more. Croy had to put Jamie off on account of he was already doing a job for Mr. Balen and Miss Corrine by killing the old man, but Croy couldn’t tell Jamie that because he promised Mr. Balen he wouldn’t. Mr. Balen didn’t want Jamie helping on the killing because Jamie had never killed anyone. Mr. Balen said in matters like this, experience counted.

When Croy had said he couldn’t go with Jamie to see Mr. Balen, Jamie had wanted to know what Croy was going to do instead, and Croy wouldn’t tell him, and that made Jamie even more insistent about finding out about Croy’s plans, and Croy had to keep coming up with things to change the subject. After a while, Jamie drank some beer for lunch and went and watched some HBO in the living room.

Throughout it all, Croy hadn’t been paying attention to the time. He’d gone back to his own room, and as periodically happened, he wondered if it had been such a good idea to move in with Jamie and Missy in the first place. He paid his share of the rent, which Jamie had worked out one time based on the square feet in Croy’s room and of the number of square feet Croy generally took up in the other rooms of the house when he was in them.

Croy had met Jamie when they were both working temporary and off-the-books for a landscaping service, and he hadn’t minded getting to be friends and doing some crimes together, but he’d never been fully comfortable with the living arrangements. The house was small, and Missy, who was Jamie’s common-law wife, was always around and wore these little nighties instead of normal clothes, and she would often come into Croy’s room without knocking until he finally had to put in a new lock.

After Croy had gotten away from Jamie and all his questions, he sat in his room and went over in his head what Miss Corrine had told him about killing Stanley Tedros. He did that five times. Then he checked his watch. It had been almost noon. Croy wasn’t hungry, so he took a chair and moved it to the window and looked at the sky and imagined it looking back at him. Then he looked at the backyard and watched one of the neighborhood cats stalk a robin.

The problem was, when Croy got around to checking his watch again, he discovered it had stopped and that it was still almost noon.

So Croy got in his car and drove as fast as he dared. Whenever he was in situations that left him uneasy or agitated, he’d do the numbers or a rhyme in his head. Sometimes he’d find a way to do both.

This afternoon he tried thinking about how
time
rhymed with
crime,
which was what he was driving to do, and then he thought about
ides,
which was what the calendar said the day was, and then Croy thought about
four,
which was the number of the letters in
ides
.
Four
also had four letters, which made them like the skin of the number, and
skin
had four letters, and so did
Croy
, and then he started thinking about
ides
again and the word
dies
that lived inside it.

He got to North Shore and parked the car in the spot Miss Corrine told him to, and then he walked around to the back of Stanley Tedros’s house and broke in.

The place was dark and high-ceilinged and had an old people’s smell to it. Croy circled the living room a couple times, then veered off to the kitchen where he discovered the remnants of Stanley’s lunch on the counter, and remembering what Miss Corrine had said about Stanley’s routine, Croy climbed the stairs and hunted down the master bedroom. The digital alarm clock flashed the message that he was over two hours late for killing Stanley during his nap.

He went back downstairs again and looked for something to steal. That’s what he was supposed to do, make the whole thing look like a burglary that got messed up, but Croy didn’t see anything. Everything in the place had the feel of being handled past the point of any fence’s or pawnshop’s interest.

Croy had seen the billboards for Julep and the cut-out placards of Stanley at convenience stores, and he’d figured a man like Stanley Tedros would be living like a king and had even come to think of him that way, as King Stanley, and Croy didn’t know what to think about the old house and its dark, worn furniture. He thought there would be swords and tapestries on the walls and a banquet hall and dungeon.

Every time he came across a clock, Croy changed it to a number he was thinking of.

He spent a while looking for hidden panels that led to secret rooms full of untold treasure.

Then he went out to the kitchen and made a sandwich.

Eating with latex gloves on gave the bread a funny taste even though Croy was careful to keep his fingers away from his lips. He poured a glass of milk and finished it in two swallows. Then he washed everything up in the sink.

He sat in an old chair next to a record player on a table.

Croy suddenly remembered he’d left his gun in the glove compartment. He looked at his dead watch. He wondered if he could run back and get the gun in time to shoot Stanley Tedros.

He heard the sound of an outboard motor.

Croy moved to the back door.

An old man in a boat edged up to the dock.

Croy stood at the door and went over in his head what Miss Corrine had told him to do until he could see it happening, except he’d forgotten the gun in the car, and that changed some things, and then Croy was getting jumpy because what he could see happening in his head couldn’t happen now because it was supposed to be happening when Miss Corrine had told him to do it, and Croy’s hands got very wet inside the gloves while he tried to make the two times fit what he was seeing in his head, but everything was mixed together now, and finally Croy quit trying to unmix them and just opened the back door and started down the lawn.

As he walked, Croy called out Stanley’s name and pulled out a gray tube sock he’d tied to one of the belt loops on his pants.