Bullets of Rain (7 page)

    "Sounds like you did a little serious drinking, after."

    "Heroic. I once drank an entire fifth of Jack Daniel's in three hours and shit myself. I did most of a quart of pepper vodka and woke up eighteen hours later, facedown in the sand, outside, in the middle of the night. Blitz licking my face finally woke me up, and I puked on him." Art flung the fatty bit of steak and Blitz intercepted it in midair, chomp, gulp, and gone. "I backed off to beer, rationing it out. For a while there I was extremely popular at the
Toot 'N Moo
, because I'd just load up my Jeep. Gimme eight cates oft beer and a pack oh mints. That was my idea of provisions."

    "And some beef jerky."

    "Right. You've been through the rest."

    "You mean when you realize hugging the toilet and choking back your small intestine should not be part of your daily regimen? Yep. On the other hand, I don't think I could ever fully trust someone who never spent at least some time humbling himself before the throne.''

    "Jesus, how masculine is that? Tough guy poets, that's us. Complete romantics. Urrrrrppp." Art mimed vomiting.

    "Seductive, ain't it?" Derek swigged his beer.

    "If Lorelle were here she'd reality-check us on how full of shit we are."

    "Point. She was a lovely lady, and I miss her." Derek held out his bottle and Art clinked it. "You start getting morose on me and I'll give you a head noogie."

    Art knew his purpose was not to hold a wake, not tonight. "I'm stuffed full of meat and fat and alcohol and all this blood and protein is shoving a fist up my brain's ass." He chortled. "Ignore me, please. We've still got dessert-chocolate ice cream with cookie dough and stuff in it."

    "Uh, maybe later," Derek said, patting his stomach. "We could take the beer and make floats. Let's repair to the War Room for cigars and brandy… if your delicate sensibilities can take it."

    "How about more beer and a monster movie instead?"

    "Good answer." Derek gave a thumbs-up. "But first I need to tell you what the beginning of the twenty-first century wreaked on my sorry tail."

    "Yeah, what happened to you, man?"

    "I was in prison in Hawaii," Derek said, fully knowing what he was starting. "I was doing time for murder."

    "I met this Chinese guy named Ang, who was doing a nickel tour for smuggling. His real name was too goddamn long to keep track of and nobody could ever get it in the right order. We got into some half-assed discussion of comparative religion, and he said something that always stuck with me: 'It doesn't really matter what people believe in, although it causes some of them to do strange things in the names of gods,' he told me. 'What matters is whether I believe in people.' Well, Arthur old chap, I believe in you. You're a friend, and I owe you the story, and I'll tell it once if you comp me another beer."

    "Get it yourself," said Art, grinning.

    Derek's gait was loose and cowboy-ish, although it seemed to Art that cell time had pulled his friend's shoulders inward a bit. He returned with two fresh-cracked Dixie Double Hexes.

    "That aluminum thing in there is the biggest goddamn refrigerator I've ever seen for a single person," he said.

    "The kitchen was all Lorelle's doing." It was mostly true; she had specified the dark granite countertops, the area-specific fluorescents that delivered optically pure whites, and the stainless steel jazz that always impressed as a kind of operating theater for food. All the cutting boards were bleached-blond wood and the breakfast bar stools were some Swede's idea of ergonomic perfection in rolled, enameled metal and black leather. Sitting on them would not fatigue the back, so went the hard sell. One look at Art's kitchen would immediately leave the impression that it was a place where germs feared to tread.

    "Here's to it," said Derek, and they clinked bottles again.

    "Okay. How does Derek wind up in the Gray Bar Hotel?"

    "I shot a guy in the lung." Derek tossed off a little eyebrow shrug that suggested he, too, still thought of it as minor and ridiculous. "You'll want to know what kind of gun. A brand-spankin'-new Sig Sauer.357 chambered for forty-caliber slugs, loaded with hardball rounds. No serial number. That got me in more shit, too, later."

    "Self-defense?"

    "He was banging my lady. Which the court is less interested in once they hear 'unregistered handgun' and 'concealed loaded weapon' and 'no serial number.' It'd be a felony even if the fucker hadn't've died."

    Lorelle's voice drifted back to haunt Art:
Have you ever actually shot anybody?
In some ways he wished he could be more like Derek-a doer, instead of a talker.

    "So, murder. The M-word."

    "I didn't shoot to kill him, Art. I could have. You know. I had a fifteen-round magazine and I know how to aim a gun. I fired exactly once. They didn't care. He bled to death in the hospital, and I dearly hope he died in excruciating pain, or at least was conscious for some of the fall. See, when Erica and I-"

    "Erica was the woman you originally took off for Hawaii with?"

    Art knew, but felt like checking.

    "The same. Brown hair, brown agate eyes, body like a panther- you know, the type you always teased me about."

    "Sorry." Art grinned anyway. Sarcasm as a trait of male bonding.

    "We got a place on Kaunakakai, away from a lot of the tourist bullshit. A lot like this place''-his arm indicated the sweep and scope of Art's overdone house-"but with, you know, no money involved. We were together for a year until one morning she rolled over and said, 'I think we need to see other people.' Point-blank, like that, while I'm still thinking about not waking up. She hung around most of the day, but it was clear all she wanted to do was run. We saved the first real argument for when she got back, and I swear I could already smell the new guy on her. Now picture me: I'm burned out from Lockheed, all that corporate crap, all that political. crap, and she's the only one who understands or gives a damn, and we'd even mentioned getting married once or twice, and now she's out the door like I have the plague."

    "You talked about getting married?" Art let his disbelief register on his face, mostly to prompt an explanation. "You weren't on speedballs or anything?"

    "Afraid not, amigo. I know-alert the media." He killed half the beer in a swig, just tipped it down his throat without swallowing, the way Blitz would do it if he had a taste. "I'd come around to thinking about human relationships, the patterns people stick to. You've seen most of my girlfriends."

    "They tend to blend at the edges. I remember Brady, that vice-president of something or other from the company in the Trans-America Tower."

    "She worked in publishing-that outfit that did the series of books on how normal people were supposed to figure out what were then called 'home computers.' Why do you remember her?"

    "Because she had fabulous legs, knew how to walk in heels, looked like Gene Tierney in mint condition, I thought her glasses were cute, and she came right over and talked to me without looking toward you for permission, which is something a lot of the others did, like puppies waiting for a command they don't understand anyway. We had this very memorable conversation about modern hard-boiled novelists, and it turns out we held a lot of the same tastes. After Crumley, Westlake, and Willeford… forget it, everybody else was just a pretender or a recycler. I'll admit I got most of that line from Lorelle, but Brady liked it."

    "She did read a lot of books. Fiction books."

    "She was slightly older than you, too, as I recall."

    "One of the few. Erica was a decade younger, and that was no strain until she decided it was high time she had a midlife crisis, mostly to find out what it was like. Her whole life had been smash-and-grab, chase-and-run, trade on her looks, slip through the cracks, and as soon as she stabilized and got a tiny bit of security, of permanence, I think it scared the shit out of her."

    "She was thinking, Great. I'm old. I'm over already?"

    "Or words to that effect. So, how do you countermand this feeling? You run as fast as you can back to what you knew worked when you were in your twenties."

    "A lot of people do that. Chase it, hoping to recapture it."

    "Meanwhile, I'm sitting around with this not-bad life, thinking that most people do the same thing, which is why the range of human relationships runs on a scale from one to ten-one is the initial attraction, and ten is growing older together, and I knew far too many people who had concentrated on becoming world-class experts on one through three. As soon as 'four' threatened-let's call 'four' a longer-term relationship than normal-they freak out, self-destruct the current relationship, and reset to one. It's not living, but it's a life, if you know what I mean. You get the allure of unwrapping a fresh body as opposed to the normalcy of sleeping with the same person for a year. Get out of the house before the home makes you feel stagnant, and you accumulate too many mementos. Stay below the tax radar, move at will, and pick who you want to fuck on a disposable basis. All that's left is paying the bills."

    "It's easier to get into new relationships than it is to get out of old ones," said Art. Blitz crawled into his hideout, the space between the supports for the big oval coffee table, and sprawled on one side. He seemed to think he was safe in there, despite the fact he could plainly be seen right through the glass tabletop.

    "Erica's 'new relationship' was a dipshit named Tommi, with an
i
at the end. Big Italian fucker, a club rocker edging up on forty and still trying to cut some lame demo with his lame band. A ladykiller with a motorcycle and a microphone case and very few strings attached. Kind of guy who dyes out the gray in his hair so he can still pretend to be twenty-five in the clubs, and shaves clean so he doesn't get salt and pepper on his muzzle."

    "A free spirit," said Art, meaning an irresponsible buttwipe locked into the box of his own teenage past. "I bet he moved from girlfriend's apartment to girlfriend's apartment.''

    "Yeah, Tommi was a dog with no papers, all right. He had a bungalow to himself near the beach-everything in Kaunakakai is 'near the beach'-all to himself because his previous chick just moved out on him, emptied the closets and vanished. Which left him with six weeks free rent and free cable, but without a fuck bunny for the weekend, which is where Erica comes in."

    "And Erica, who has a level head up until this moment, gets swept off her feet?"

    "No, she got swept onto her back," said Derek. The sting of memory still held residual venom, and the power to hurt him. "You ever read that fairy tale,
The Girl Who Loved the Wind
?"

    "Is it a classic?"

    "No, it's a modern one, written in the Seventies. I checked it out. A girl has this overprotective father who keeps her inside this fabulous garden, to shield her from the wickedness of the world. It's a gilded cage that also protects her from anything real, and finally the Wind, which whispers of the world's promise and endless possibilities, blows over the wall and woos her away. It's a loss-of-innocence parable; you can read it as anything from gaining maturity to loss of virginity."

    "And you're the evil, imprisoning father figure."

    "Sort of. Erica saw our relationship as a box, and I thought it was a safe house; I mean, everyone's got to deal with the world. Instead of us progressing to four or five on the relationship scale, which is scary and intimidating, she decided to go 'back to one,' as the movie people say."

    "With some rock'n'roll dood with no attachments, no obligations, and no worries."

    "Yeah, he was the Wind, and he blew her." Derek snickered at his own crassness. "You know what it feels like to lose to a loser like that? Anything I could say was too reasoned, too rational, not spontaneous, and all just a trick to get her back in the box. She just lock-stock-and-barreled out the door to something less predictable and more familiar to the rest of her life. How do you argue with that? You don't. It's a choice, and you eat the fallout, which is why people advise other people never to fall in love."

    "It couldn't last, though," said Art. "It's not designed to."

    "But once it tarnishes, see, she's recaptured the mind-set and can just breeze onto the next thing, like a skipping stone."

    "What yuppies call grazing instead of cocooning."

    "And never get in too deep on anything you can't bail from at a moment's notice, because there's always another branch to light on. So, she's making no immediate noises that she's anything but deliriously happy and free and sampling life's rich cornucopia… with Tommi-with-an-
i
, who is a world-class meatball. This causes Derek-that's me-to brood a lot, because I wanted to invest my life in this person, and it's like she's saying that's swell and all, but has no value. He's the Wind, and I'm the Cinderblock. She gains the world and I feel like I've lost everything, and I start to ask myself, gee, does she have to figure some things out, or is she really that shallow?"

    "Scared, maybe." Art thought it was sad. Did two people ever run in parallel, or was it all just lies partners imposed on each other, a shadow play of life as it was supposed to be, not how it was?

    "I couldn't do anything useful, so I gradually worked my way around to the idea of scaring Tommi off. Maybe, I thought, she left me so easily because I didn't light for her."

    "Mmm." Art rolled his eyes and stuck out his lower jaw into a ridiculous gorilla expression. "Ug do battle for woman. Crush enemies."

    Derek leaned forward, elbows on knees. They'd started an actual, real blaze of actual, real wood in the fireplace, and burning cedar had filled the room with a rich, smoky tang. An occasional knot fizzed and exploded against the spark grate. They were savanna hunter-gatherers, swapping sagas by firelight.