Only the Rain(16)

First place I stopped was the little hardware store down from the Dollar General, where I made myself a copy of the key to Pops’ storage unit. Then I drove out of town to the storage place. I got the big LED flashlight from my toolbox, plus a utility knife, a roll of duct tape, and the shoebox full of cash. Then I unlocked the unit, went inside and pulled down the door.

By this time I knew where I should put the money. Even if Pops came into the unit for some reason, and I had the feeling that maybe sometimes he did, probably to sit by himself awhile and be with those old things and all the memories in them. I mean I had no proof he ever did that, but I saw Pops and me as alike in many ways, and I knew if I was him, on his own now for the first time in fifty-some years, living surrounded by sickness and idleness and slow-moving people on the fast track to death, I would need a place like this to get away to every now and then, a place where it’s easier to remember what you used to have. Hell, I’d probably move my bed and mini fridge in. In a way it would be a lot like dying the way those old pharaohs did, surrounded by all the things you would drag up into Heaven with you.

But the one thing in here I figured he would leave alone was his MISCELLANEOUS box. You don’t use half a roll of duct tape sealing up a box if you plan to open it frequently.

But first I counted the money. All this time I’d been trying to keep numbers out of my head, but of course I’d been a miserable failure at it. And for some reason, fifty thousand was the number that kept flashing like a neon sign in my brain. Then I’d think, naw, maybe ten, fifteen at the most, but that neon sign had its own power source and the light had been impossible to extinguish.

The cash was in bundles held together by rubber bands. The bundles were of various thicknesses, depending on the mix of denominations. Tens were rare, but twenties weren’t. There was no shortage of fifties or hundreds either. I only had to count through four bundles to realize that every bundle held five thousand dollars. And there were three layers of bundles in the shoebox. With four bundles in each layer. Plus six more bundles stuffed around the edges to make the layers snug.

I am well aware that for lots of people in this world, ninety thousand dollars is no big deal. Some people make more than that in a year. Some actors and athletes make that much for an hour or two of work. But I’m not one of those people.

For me, ninety thousand dollars represents two years of dust-sucking work. Three years if you factor in the taxes.

It took a while for the dizziness to pass. I had meant to get all this done quickly, cause I still had the girls to pick up. But for several minutes at least, I couldn’t move except to shiver and rock back and forth with my hands squeezing my knees.



No matter how well a person plans, there’s always something you don’t plan for. I’m talking now about my plan for hiding the cash I’d stolen in Pops’ MISCELLANEOUS box. It had never occurred to me there wouldn’t be enough room in the box for all that money. I sliced through the sealing tape, one neat cut at each end and another down the middle seam on top, and there was all this stuff I’d never expected.

Some of it looked like junk to me at first, though I’m sure Pops thought there was some value to it, or else he wouldn’t have packed it away for me. Two old Kodak cameras that must’ve been from the thirties or forties. Three tiny glass deer, a buck and a doe and a fawn all glued to the same glass base, which I had given Mom on her last Mother’s Day. Pops had given me the five dollars to buy it when we were at Woolworth’s one time, but I’d insisted on holding it in my hands on the ride home, and the thing was so delicate I accidentally broke the buck right off the stand. I could barely breathe I was crying so hard, but Pops glued it back in place when we got home, and as far as I know, Mom never once suspected it had ever been broken.

Then there was a pair of bronzed baby shoes, which I assumed had once been worn by my mother, or maybe by me. Then the heavy-handled knife with a thick ten-inch blade I found in Pops’ closet when I was fourteen, and carried around with me for a week, shoved down into my waistband, until a teacher caught me showing it to a girl and called Pops about it.

Standing on its side in a corner of the cardboard box was Pops’ black fireproof box with the key in the lock, and inside was his will and gold watch, his discharge papers and Purple Cross, three silver dollars and a wallet holding four silver certificates, three two-dollar bills, and six bills all marked with the words NGAN-HANG QUOC-GIA VIET-NAM. The twenties had a picture of a big, impressive building on them, and the 500s had a tiger, and the 1000s had skinny little men riding elephants. I thought it was sort of funny in a touching kind of way to find that Vietnamese money, because when I came home from the desert I handed Pops a little wad of the old, worthless dinar with Saddam’s picture on it, and I told him what he’d always told me when he handed me a dollar when I was little, “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

There was also his change jar, a half-gallon Mason jar, and it was filled to the lid with coins of every denomination. The box holding his Harrington & Richardson .22 revolver in his USMC holster was propped up on its side against the jar. Pops taught me to shoot with that gun. We practiced on bottles and cans and rats at the dump until he was convinced I knew how to handle a gun properly. After each trip to the dump he’d watch while I cleaned out the barrel, then the revolver would go back into the holster and under his pillow. Sometimes when he wasn’t around I’d sit on his bed and just hold it. It felt so heavy and solid and, I don’t know, reassuring in my hands. Like I was holding his hand, in a way, which we stopped doing when I hit thirteen or so.