Four Kinds of Rain (20 page)

Bob felt the heat of the saw on his flesh.

“No,” Bob said, “wait … wait … I’ll tell you.”

He looked past Emile and saw Jesse on her knees. The sound of the saw was a blessing. Emile couldn’t hear her ripping the tape just a few feet behind his back.

“Now, Bob!” Emile said.

“Wait, wait,” Bob gasped.

Bob trembled, acted as though he couldn’t get his breath. Behind him, Jesse was moving toward Emile. She’d picked up a hammer from the tool table.

“Now, asshole,” Emile said. “Where’s my money?”

To emphasize his point, he placed the saw blade on Bob’s thigh just above his right knee. Then he pressed down. Bob screamed as blood gushed from the wound, a scream that dovetailed with Emile’s groan as Jesse’s hammer slammed down on the back of his head. Bob watched as Emile turned around, his face open in surprise and shock.

“Bitch!” he screamed.

He revved up the saw and thrust it out at Jesse, who jumped back, the blade narrowly missing her face. Emile tried to rise to his feet, but Bob kicked him forward and he fell awkwardly on his left side, directly on the saw blade. The teeth dug into Emile’s left arm, wiggling crazily, like a live animal.

Blood spouted from Emile’s half-severed arm. He got up to his knees, but Bob kicked him in the back again and he fell over. When he tried to get to his feet, Jesse was on him, ripping the mask from his face and bashing his head with the hammer. Bob watched her as she struck him time and time again.

Finally, after what seemed like an endless series of blows, Emile fell back gasping and died.

Jesse turned off the bloody saw and freed Bob from his bonds. She glanced at the bleeding wound on his thigh.

“Does it hurt bad?” she said.

“No,” Bob said. “Maybe I’m in shock, but I can barely feel it.”

Then they fell into each other’s arms on the couch, Jesse sobbing and Bob stroking her head.

“Baby,” he said. “Baby, you saved my life.”

She nodded and cried, then looked up at him in disbelief.

“Bobby,” she said, “the things he accused you of, were they the truth?”

Bob felt his hands shake and his stomach rumble.

“Yes,” he said. “I was afraid. Afraid to get old with no money. Afraid you’d leave me.”

“Jesus,” she said. “Oh God.”

He reached out toward her, but she jumped back as if he were a rattlesnake.

“Don’t say I made you do a thing like that,” she said. “Never say it.”

“I won’t,” Bob said. “I love you, Jess.”

She looked up at him and the disappointment and pain in her face made him, for a second, wish that Emile had finished the job.

“We’ve got to get him out of here,” Jesse said.

She turned and pointed to a large packing barrel.

“That ought to do,” she said. “So let’s get to it, Bob. You take his arms. I don’t want to look at his head.”

Bob limped from the couch and did as she said.

The hero, he thought, saved by his girl.

Cleaning up the mess in Emile’s warehouse took only an hour, and crating him up in a barrel and driving him down to the shore took only forty more minutes, but finding the right spot to dump the body was much harder. In movies, Bob thought, the cool killer always just drives to a place and tosses the body in the river or lake. But neither of them had any idea where to go, and they found themselves driving down dirt roads to various possible dump sites, only to find a family of Muslims picnicking at Drake’s Inlet and five elderly birdwatchers at a spot not far from Gibson Island. Birdwatchers who might have seen them, and who, if questioned, could possibly recognize them. And what was he to do then? Hunt them down and kill them all?

They finally settled on a marshy area on a remote corner of the Chesapeake, a place called Bogert’s Cove, which Bob recalled from his own childhood. Though he hated to spoil that pristine, youthful memory by dumping Emile there, he felt it was the best place available on such short notice. Besides, the old cove wasn’t quite as nice as he remembered it. Nobody came there anymore. The lovely marshland, the blue water, the cranes, turtles, and black snakes were long gone. The cove was now used as a runoff for nearby chemical companies, polluters who’d ruined most of the bay. The only live things in the rust-brown water were mutant five-eyed fish and three-headed geek crabs. One more little monster would scarcely make any difference.

Bob parked the car on a muddy road and they struggled with the barrel, carried it through marsh grass and scum water that burbled and bubbled its orange-brown foam over their shoes.

After twenty minutes of hard labor, during which time they twice dropped the barrel, they reached the windy point. Making a mighty effort, they lifted Emile in his round coffin and threw him in. He quickly sank and Bob smiled at Jesse, who couldn’t meet his gaze. She walked away, to the east a bit, where the sand met the mushy tide. Bob watched her and tried to tamp down his rising panic. Now that she knew, what would she do? Turn him in? Walk away … or maybe kill him in his sleep and take the money? He realized the last idea was extreme, but after seeing her kill Emile, the ferocity and barbarity of her attack, he realized that this was one West Virginia mountain girl who wasn’t going to lose a lot of sleep over wasting a bad guy.

Bob watched her walk back from the tip of the land. She looked at him and said: “Time to go, Bobby” in a voice that was impossible to read.

Limping, Bob followed her back to the car.

Bob drove down the Annapolis road, under a canopy of highway oaks. Like two people coming back to the city from a little trip down the Chesapeake Bay. Bob looked at a sunburned couple with two kids in a Chevy and remembered when he had been like them, part of the human race.

His leg had stopped bleeding, but the pain radiated up to his crotch. Yet that was nothing compared to what he felt inside.

Finally, as though she were in tune with him, Jesse spoke:

“You know, Bob, I didn’t have to save you.”

“I know.”

“I was so angry, Bobby. You endangered my life. I had this thought, that what I should do is kill you both. Make it look like you’d done in each other. Then go home and find the money.”

Bob found himself laughing.

“But you don’t know where the money is,” he said. “You’d never find it without me. So you had to save me.”

She reached over and smacked him hard in the face. Bob’s eyes watered.

“You idiot. Is that what you think? I saved you because I love you. I was just angry, angry that you had betrayed what we had. For money.”

Bob said nothing. He wanted to remind her how right at the beginning she had told him she couldn’t bear being with another poor man. He wanted to dump it all on her, but it occurred to him that if she hadn’t come along he might have done it anyway. Out of bitterness, and a sense of defeat, or maybe because he still had to buy his clothes at Ross Dress for Less, and because he feared having to line up with the other old people in powder blue dress shirts at the early bird dinner at Denny’s, where he would eat swill and drink bad coffee for the rest of his loser’s life….

They drove on in silence until the city lay before them, and they floated by Camden Yards. Bob remembered going to Oriole games as a kid, not here, but at old Memorial Stadium. He had loved baseball back then. He had loved the players, and the fans, and the hot dogs, and Jimmy, his father. He had loved, God help him, everything. Until he had fallen more in love with ideas. With ideas of how the world should be, and then, then nothing ever measured up.

He wanted to tell Jesse about all that … how other people had the same ideas, but when the ideas wore out or proved false or simply not useful anymore, normal people forgot them and went on to live their lives. But he had found that impossible. He had stayed there, in Ideaville, blaming the world for not measuring up. And the waiting, waiting … this was the funny part really … waiting for the world, the whole goddamn world, to admit that they were wrong. He waited until the day they would come to him, all his old friends like Rudy and oddly enough even Meredith, and they would bow down at his doorstep—his simple peasant doorstep—and they would say, “We were wrong to move to the burbs, Bob. We were wrong to have two-point-two children and to buy gas-guzzling SUVs and get golfing memberships, and to pretend we were still ‘spiritual’ by going to suburban yoga classes. And we were wrong to play tennis and join shitty Republican country clubs, and to go to sixties parties that turned all of our youthful revolutionary fervor into cornball, shitty Dick Clark nostalgia. And we were wrong to occasionally smoke a joint and turn our mystical visions into one more consumer item, and we were wrong to think that Coke was the real thing, and we were wrong to turn on the poor, and blight the environment, and face it … we were fucking wrong and you were dead right about everything. And we fall upon our knees to you, Bob, and beg you, the saint, for forgiveness. We were weak, so very weak. We let the world down, Bob, but worse, we let
you
down.”

Yes, Bob wanted to tell Jesse all this … but what would she think of such a man? That he had been a fool, that all his kindness and goodness had been mere hubris. (And had it? Had it? That was what tortured him. Was kindness and goodness only a strategy against oblivion?)

No, in the end, he could say none of this. It sickened him to even admit it.

He stayed silent, as the sun came up, and thought of the
Today
show and how only hours ago the world had actually done the very thing he had longed for. They’d beaten a path to his door and told him he was right.

Though for all the wrong reasons.

As they turned down Pratt Street, Bob looked over at Jesse. The light played off her features and her skin seemed to be shining like gold.

“I love you,” he said. “I want to marry you.”

She turned and tears rolled down her face.

“And we’ll live with the stolen money?”

“Yes,” he said. “But we can do good with it. We’ll move away from here and we’ll live well, but we’ll also give some of it … maybe a lot of it away.”

“And what about the mask?” she said.

“We’ll keep it for a long time, then sell it. No one has to know anything about it.”

She looked at him and shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It sounds too easy. Living with a lie like that. Can anything good come of it?”

Bob pulled over to the corner of Broadway and Thames and looked at her.

“You said it yourself, Jess. Nothing good can come from being poor. So if we do good with the money, maybe we can make good out of evil.”

“I don’t even know how much money … you … we have.”

“Five million dollars,” Bob said.

“Good God,” Jesse said.

“Five million new chances,” Bob said. “Not to mention we now own the mask.”

“But I don’t want it,” Jesse said. “Just thinking about it sitting back there in the trunk makes me nervous.”

“But Jess,” Bob said, “it’s worth maybe twenty million. If we could find the right buyer …”

“And if we can’t,” Jesse said. “If we find the wrong guy just like you did, then what? We walk around on stumps for the rest of our lives?”

Bob felt nervous, crazy. He didn’t really want the damn thing, either. Five million was more than enough for an old hippie. But what could he do, simply throw the thing away?

“I have an idea,” Bob said. “We’ll keep it around until we can figure out which museum it belongs in and then we’ll give it back to them.”

Jesse smiled at him.

“That’s good, honey,” she said. “You really mean it?”

“I do,” Bob said. “Five million is fine. We don’t need any more.”

“Right,” Jesse said.

She leaned over and kissed him.

“One more thing,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Will you marry me?”

He reached over to her, and she turned breathlessly and he wiped away her tears.

“Yes,” she said. “I love you, Bobby. Okay? Whatever happens, we’re in this together.”

He took her into his arms and kissed her. And thought that somehow they had made it. The two of them. The crazy, old ideologue with his dreams of innocence and the blonde blues singer from West Virginia.

And Bob felt happy and solid and he thought that, in time, he would teach her to trust him and he would in turn finally learn to trust the real world.

The
Today
show aired two days after Bob and Jesse had dumped his former patient’s body into the fouled waters at Bogert’s Cove. Bob and Jesse sat in bed, pillows propped up behind them, and held each other’s hand as they watched Bob lionized on national television.

The results were immediate and sensational. Bob received calls from
Dateline, Time
magazine,
Esquire,
and
60 Minutes.
Newspapers from around the world, including the
New Delhi Times,
e-mailed him, begging him for interviews. Four publishers from New York City contacted him, and Pavilion Press offered to put him up for three days just to “kick around ideas” for any book he’d care to write. Three television producers called him, convinced that his life would make the “ultimate reality series.” But perhaps the most satisfying call of all came from his old rival, the very man who had stolen his wife away, Rudy Runyon, who congratulated him, then invoked their old friendship at Hopkins in an attempt to get Bob to appear on his radio show. Bob listened to Rudy’s pathetic ass kissing, then turned him down.

“I’d love to, Rude, but I’m afraid the days you’ve suggested I’ll be flying out to the coast to talk to some guy from Universal Studios. But good luck, buddy, and give my best to Meredith.”

At five o’clock the same day, Bob and Jesse received three calls from New York clubs inviting the Rockaholics to come up and perform.

“Bobby,” Jesse said, “it’s like a dream.”

Bob smiled and tried to remember how low, how terrible he’d felt only forty-eight hours earlier, but the entire episode with Emile seemed like nothing more than a blip on his consciousness.