Only the Rain(56)

So I came back to the sink, rinsed out the cloth, wrung it dry, and draped it over the basin divider. I could feel her eyes on me the entire time. So finally I forced myself to turn around and face her and smile.

She said, “I never asked you how Pops was that night.”

“Good,” I said. “He was good. He was restless for a while. Needed somebody to distract him from his thoughts.”

“What time was it when you got back?”

“It wasn’t that late. Eleven thirty maybe?”

“You must’ve been awfully quiet getting into bed.”

“You woke up for a minute,” I told her. “You asked how Pops was doing.”

“Did I? I don’t remember that at all.”

“You were barely awake,” I said.

She nodded. “So that was it then? You went to his place for a couple hours, sat and talked, watched TV?”

“That’s about it. Oh, I did drive him down to the convenience store before I came home. He usually walks but it was still raining pretty good. Turns out he can’t make it through a night without his hot chocolate and a Slim Jim.”

She wrinkled up her nose. “Those meat sticks are nasty.”

I put my hand on the side of her face. “So is the interrogation over?”

“Why would you call it an interrogation?”

“That’s what it felt like.”

“Talking to your wife feels like an interrogation to you?”

“Baby,” I said. But there wasn’t anything more to say. Nothing halfway smart anyway. So I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.

She surprised me by wrapping her arms around my waist and holding me there.

“The important thing,” she said, “is that we’re all okay now.”

“Better than okay,” I said.

“And the next time you see a naked girl?”

“It’s going to be you.”

“And the time after that?”

“You, you, and only you forever. No, wait. Newborn babies don’t count, do they?”

“This one’s going to be a boy,” she said.

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“If it’s not, I’m sending it back.”

“Like heck you will.”

And after that we held each other for a while. And that’s the last we’ve ever talked about it.



I don’t remember if I ever told you about my time in boot with this guy named Regis. Big mean tatted-up black guy who claimed he’d spent two years in prison for beating his brother to a pulp over a slice of pie or some such thing. Everybody in the barracks was scared to death of him. During the day he was all “Yes, Drill Sergeant! No, Drill Sergeant!” Always crushing every exercise and physical test, even marksmanship. So he was the platoon’s golden boy, you know? From Day One the DIs were all but drooling over him. So of course they made him Squad Leader.

But he was different in the barracks at night. With no NCOs watching us every second, he was like some kind of marauding beast. I saw him put guys in a headlock until their eyes rolled up in their heads. The man was a terror, just like every clichéd character in every boot camp movie ever made. I guess his kind became a cliché because it’s the truth. There’s always one of them when you throw a bunch of guys together. I mean I’ve seen it before, though never to the extent of Regis. It was like living with a psycho in our midst. You never knew what he was going to do or who he’d do it to. You only prayed it wouldn’t be you. That first week he probably knocked every one of us on our asses at least once, and always for something trivial, just because he felt like it.

The worst of it was what he did to a guy named Stewart. And Stewart wasn’t a little guy either. He was a solid six feet tall, but kind of an egghead, I guess, sort of awkward and stiff, with a confused look in his eyes behind those ugly birth-control glasses the Army gives out. He was always talking about Harry Potter and stuff like that, things like alchemy and the philosopher’s stone and subjects most of us didn’t understand and didn’t care to. Personally I never minded listening to him, because I was always ready to learn things I didn’t know anything about, but sometimes even I had to call information overload and put him on hold awhile.

What Stewart was doing in the Army, I have no idea. All we could figure is he was such a social misfit that his old man must have sent him away to get toughened up. Thing is, I doubt his old man ever envisioned somebody like Regis as a bunkmate.

The abuse started maybe the third, fourth night of Red Phase. Not all of us heard it happening, but enough that that next day a bunch of us were comparing notes first chance we got. Not long after lights out Regis climbed into Stewart’s bunk with him. What woke me was the crack of a slap. Stewart’s bunk was only two away from mine, so that slap yanked me out of a deep sleep and had me sitting up and listening, trying to figure out what was going on. There was a lot of whispering and whimpering then, Regis’ deep voice and Stewart’s higher, terrified one.

What happened after that was pretty clear, what with Stewart gagging and whimpering and Regis’ muttered threats.

The rest of us kept telling each other we needed to do something about it. I mean there were eighteen of us and only one Regis. But all we did was talk and whisper like a bunch of schoolgirls. Nobody wanted Regis turning on him instead.