Wind and Rain by John Henry Fleming (highly recommended books .txt) 📖

Wind and Rain

First let me tell you about the rain, Louis.
Last night it started to rain when I walked home from the hospital. I didn’t even notice it for awhile because it was thin and slow. Then the mist thickened and began to roll over me. A few drops ran down my cheek. By the time I came out of the package store, the rain was full and steady and the whole world looked shut down and closed up.
When it rains like that I think about the cop and what the cop said in his report. He said maybe it was the rain that made him believe he saw a gun in there. You remember what was in there? I do. When I went and claimed your car from the police, the first thing I did was search through the glove compartment. There was an owner’s manual for the wrong model--for a Monte Carlo instead of Grand Prix. There were a few notes from Lila. I read them, hope you don’t mind. Baby, Meet you here at 3, Love, Baby. None worth keeping; you probably just put them there to put them somewhere. There were a couple of paper clips in there. A broken pencil. A mileage log from the previous owner. Gum. Tic-tacs. A plastic bag with cookie crumbs. Your driver’s license.
How could he mistake any of that for a gun? Can the rain change things that way?
Last night I sat on my bed and watched the rain. At the package store I’d gotten beer and Old Crow. I poured some of the Old Crow into my flask to take to work today. Then I took a nice big swig and felt it warm me. Mother doesn’t like me drinking in the house, but she works cleaning offices now, doesn’t get back until two a.m. I leaned back against the wall and looked at the rain. It was hard and steady, just the kind of rain the cop was looking through. I tried to test my eyes, to see things the way that cop did. I looked across the street and I could see the big cracks in Mr. Cullen’s driveway, the water streaming through those cracks and over the lumpy places where he’d tried to repair them. I could see the car under the carport and could tell it was a Dodge Diplomat even though I couldn’t make out the badge on the trunk. I could tell it was in pretty good shape for a car that old. I could see the striped awning over Cullen’s living room window. There are eighteen stripes, and the water ran off each one. I could see through the living room, too, where the curtains weren’t pulled together. Cullen was in his chair, watching TV. I couldn’t tell what show, but there was lots of action and quick scene changes. An adventure show, maybe, or a kung fu movie. Next to Cullen was a lamp on a table, and on the table was something I couldn’t see so well. I thought maybe it was an ashtray. I stared at it for a minute and tried to imagine it was a gun. I squinted my eyes a little. I focused on different parts of it and tried to reshape it in my mind. It was no gun. Even if I could make it look like one, I knew Cullen would not have a gun there. And anyone who knows you knows that you would not keep a gun in your car. Not now, but not then either.
I don’t ever imagine things in the rain. It’s under the bright lights here that I sometimes have problems. Sometimes when I’m here I think I see things that later I know I didn’t. I think I see your fingers move. I think I see your eyes start to open, or your lips start to say something. I’ll see it out of the corner of my eye and then I’ll put down my magazine and move my face right up next to your plastic mask and I’ll try to see it again. And sometimes I think I do. Then I’m not sure. I remind myself that the doctors say there’s no way.
There’s all that junk I put inside me, Louis. The beer and the Old Crow. That kind of rain can cloud up your eyes from the inside.
Maybe the cop really thought he saw something and that’s why he fired his gun. Later, when he got back to work after his suspension, he’d have to know he was wrong. But maybe the cop doesn’t think about it.
It was raining, and I saw everything clearly. I still do. And I think you do too. Your eyes aren’t open, but you’re not dead, so you must see something. Do you still see the rain that night, streaking the windshield and dulling the glow of the streetlights? Maybe you’re still looking into the glove compartment, watching your hand grab the license, your frozen picture coming into view. I hope that’s all you see. I hope you don’t see that cop out of the corner of your eye, raising the gun toward your head. I hope you don’t see the flash.
I told you once you ought to keep your real license in your wallet. What if a cop comes up on the street? But you said a cop can’t ask you for your license if you’re not in a car. You kept the fake license in your wallet just so you could go to bars with me, your big brother. And then you put the real license in your glove compartment. It’s still there. I see it.
I see the cop following us after we leave the bar. I’m looking over the seat and I’m seeing his lights right behind you. It’s raining pretty hard and maybe you should be driving slower, but that cop shouldn’t be on your tail like that. He’s trying to scare you, Louis. I see that now. I see the cop’s headlights, and I see his grille, the grille of a Caprice Classic. I see the big, wide hood. The wipers going. You know what else? I see his face, too. Maybe there was a little light coming from his radio or something. But there it is. His big wire-rims. His pocked cheeks. I see him twenty years ago, too, a high school kid who doesn’t fit in. Too much acne. Never got used to the way his own voice sounded after it changed. I see him reaching up to give a little siren blast. He likes the siren a lot better than his voice, though he’s never gotten used to that, either.
I see you walking back to him in the rain. He shines his spotlight on you. You lean over trying to hear him in the rain, and your shirt clings to your skin. The water drips off your hair, your nose, your chin. You reach for your back pocket. Then you remember.
What’s up? I ask when you climb back in the car.
I forgot my damn license.
I told you.
The cop has followed you back. He’s shining his flashlight around inside. On your eyes, on me, on the back seat, then back to your eyes.
You lose something? you ask him.
That was a dumb thing to say, Louis. I know you can see all right, but you aren’t thinking clearly.
The cop has on a hooded slicker. The rain is loud as it bounces off his hood. There are a few drops of rain on his glasses. Maybe those drops are right in front of his eyes. There are drops on the face of his flashlight, too, and maybe that changes the way things look to him. It’s raining harder, now. Everything is splashing and making noise. The street and the roof of the car and the cop’s slicker and the cop’s flashlight. Like a machine grinding to a stop. In this kind of rain, most people sit in their houses and wait for it to end. They don’t think anything that happens out in the rain can make any difference. They wait it out. Then they start their lives again. Maybe the cop thinks that, too. Nothing that happens now is going to count. When the rain stops and the water flows down into the street drains, anything that happens out here is going to flow with it.
We know better. The rain stays with us, and everything that happened in the rain happens again and again.
He said he saw something. Can a license ever look like a gun? Even with rain on your glasses and on the face of your flashlight?
Let me see your license.
You almost say something. Then I see your hand in front of my knees. The glove compartment is open. The flashlight beam is there. You feel around for just a second. You touch the notes from Lila. The owner’s manual for the wrong model. The broken pencil. You feel your license.
Then everything stops. The rain falls over the car and stops everything inside it. The hand touching the license. The gun rising and flashing. Your head falling to my knee. My hand jerking up against the window. A dark streak on the window, not washing away in the rain. I’m thinking, What is that? What is it? The same thought the cop might have asked himself a second earlier. You could have answered it for him, Louis.
All of these things are now one moment, and that moment is stuck inside the rain that falls in us both. Everything’s clear in there. I wonder if the cop ever sees it, too. Or does the cop still see the gun that isn’t there? Does he wonder what it’s like to be you, Louis, stuck inside one rainstorm and always living just that one moment, not remembering anything before or after, nothing ever changing?
I know you know all this, Louis. You don’t need me to tell you what you see. But in