Only the Rain(11)

I turned and went back into the house. Got as far as the hallway, then turned around and went back out onto the porch.

Thinking about that now, me knowing what I should do but not wanting to do it, just standing there sort of paralyzed on the porch, reminds me of the day I left for basic. I was barely eighteen, a month out of high school. Pops and Gee drove me to the bus station. And just before I climbed up onto that bus, after we’d already told each other goodbye a half-dozen times, Gee reaches up and lays both hands on my cheeks and pulls me down close to her. She was just a little woman but so serious sometimes, with this life-or-death look in her eyes that almost made me want to laugh at her. “‘Watch and pray,’” she says, quoting from the Bible, “‘that you do not fall into temptation.’”

That’s from Matthew somewhere. It’s when Jesus comes back from praying and finds the disciples all asleep and bitches out Peter for being careless. “The spirit is willing,” Jesus tells him, “but the flesh is weak.”

He might as well have been saying that to me. I wish he’d shown up and joined me on that porch. Because that was my moment, years and years after Gee warned me. I was weak in both spirit and flesh.

The thing is, I couldn’t get myself to go down off those steps, no matter how much I knew that’s exactly what I needed to do. I couldn’t force myself to go back out into the rain and climb onto the bike and take all my fear and . . . what’s the word for it . . . uselessness back to Cindy. Not when I had another option.

“Fuck your pride,” Jake had said. “You have a family to think about.”

“You just do it,” is what Pops used to say. “You do it and then you live with it.”

And you, Spence . . . the guy who kept me alive all those months, the guy who got me back home vertical, I could hear you too. I swear I could hear you standing there on that porch and whispering in my ear. “It’s all about survival, man. Priority one. Don’t you ever forget that, soldier.”

So I went back inside. I peeked into the bedroom where the girl was, and she was laying there on her back with her eyes closed, waving her hands in the air and singing, which when I think about it was that same Jackson Brown song you and me used to listen to in the afternoons sometimes when it was too frigging hot to move. I honestly don’t know if she was really singing that song or not. Maybe it was only inside my head.

Anyway, I went back to the bathroom. I grabbed one of the taped-up boxes. Then I went out to my bike. I don’t know if the girl was still singing or not. I don’t know if the dog was barking or if the rain was falling or anything else that happened.

The fog of war, they call it. And I took a long ride home through that blinding fog of war.



When I got home that night with the box of money in my saddlebag, I didn’t know what to do. My mind was racing with all kinds of thoughts. Cindy had put my garage door up after she pulled the pickup in, so I drove into my stall and parked the bike half-turned toward the door the way I always do. What little of me had dried out inside the naked girl’s place was soaked again, and I was shivering with cold and a confusing mix of fear and excitement. I regretted what I’d done yet I couldn’t wait to see how much money was in that shoebox.

I shut off the engine and sat there on my bike for thirty seconds or so trying to get my thoughts together. That’s when the door into the kitchen opened and Cindy looked out.

“Thank God,” she said. “I called you twice wondering what had happened to you.”

“Rain happened,” I said. “Lots of it.”

“So I see. You want me to get you a towel and some dry clothes?”

“A towel and my robe, I think. Do I have time for a hot bath?”

“I’ll get it started,” she said. “I’ll feed the girls while you’re soaking.”

“Thanks, baby.”

“I kept praying you hadn’t wrecked somewhere.”

“Must have worked,” I told her. She gave me that smile then that always made me feel better than any I love you could. It was 30 percent mouth and 70 percent eyes, and what that smile said was I need you so so much, Russell. I need you more than I need myself.

I tried to give her the same kind of smile back and said, “Hit the garage door button, will you, baby?”

The door grumbled and clanked down to the concrete, and only then did I start to get some breath back. How could anybody know it was me? I kept asking myself. The girl didn’t know me and I didn’t know her. The dog didn’t know me. The only question was, had somebody come along while I was in the house who recognized my bike? I figured that was the only thing I had to worry about. That and what was going to happen to my soul. I prayed that Gee might be able to pull some strings from her end.

I finally managed to haul myself off the bike and peel off my top shirt. It was a short-sleeve chambray and felt like it weighed five pounds. The T-shirt underneath was plastered to my skin, and every time my icy fingers touched some other part of me I winced. Cindy came out then with a beach towel and the gray fleece robe the girls gave me the previous Christmas. She set those things on my workbench and grabbed the back of the T-shirt and dragged it up over my head and then wrapped the beach towel around my shoulders. “Go sit on the step and I’ll take your boots off,” she said.

“Sweetie, I’ll do it. You don’t need to be out here.”