Prayers For Rain Part 7

Tony sat in the back of the black '91 Cherokee I'd picked up when the engine of my Crown Victoria seized up that spring. The Cherokee was great for the rare bounty hunt because it had come with a steel gate between the seats and the stow bed in back. Tony sat on the other side of the gate, his back against the vinyl seat cover over the spare tire. He stretched out his legs like a cat settling into a sun-baked windowsill and cracked open his third beer of the early afternoon, then burped up the vapor of the second.

"Excuse yourself, man."

Tony caught my eyes in the rearview. "Excuse me. Didn't realize you were such a stickler for, ahm-"

"Common courtesy?"

"That, yeah."

"I let you think it's okay to burp in my ride, Tony, then you'll think it's okay to take a leak."

"Nah, man. Wish I'd brought a big cup or something, though."

"We'll stop at the next exit."

"You're all right, Patrick."

"Oh, yeah, I'm swell."

We actually made several stops in Maine and one in New Hamps.h.i.+re. This will happen when you allow an alcoholic bail jumper into your car with a twelve-pack, but, in truth, I didn't mind all that much. I enjoyed Tony's company in the same way you'd enjoy an afternoon with a twelve-year-old nephew who was a little slow on the uptake but irrevocably good-natured.

Somewhere during the New Hamps.h.i.+re leg of our trip, Tony's Game Boy stopped blipping and beeping, and I looked in the rearview to see that he'd pa.s.sed out back there, snoring softly, his lips flapping gently as one foot wagged back and forth like a dog's tail.

We'd just pa.s.sed into Ma.s.sachusetts and I'd pressed the seek b.u.t.ton on my car radio and tried to get lucky and pick up WFNX while I was still a good distance from their weak antenna when Karen Nichols's name floated out of a tangle of static and air hiss. The digital call numbers raced by on the radio's LED screen, paused for just a moment on a thin signal at 99.6:

"...now identified as Karen Nichols of Newton, apparently jumped from-"

The tuner left the station and jumped to 100.7.

I swerved the car slightly as I reached for the manual tune b.u.t.ton and brought it back to 99.6.

Tony woke up in the back and said, "What?"

"Sssh." I held up a finger.

"...police department sources say. How Miss Nichols gained entrance to the observation deck of the Custom House is not yet known. Turning to weather, meteorologist Gil Hutton says to expect more heat..."

Tony rubbed his eyes. "Crazy s.h.i.+t, huh?"

"You know about this?"

He yawned. "Saw it on the news this morning. Chick took a buck-naked header off the Custom House, forgot that gravity kills, man. You know? Gravity kills."

"Shut up, Tony."

He recoiled as if I'd swatted him, turned away from me, and scrounged through the twelve-pack for another beer.

There could be another Karen Nichols in Newton. Probably several. It was a mundane, pedestrian American name. As boring and common as Mike Smith or Ann Adams.

But something cold and spreading through my stomach told me that the Karen Nichols who'd jumped from the Custom House observation deck was the same one I'd met six months ago. The one who ironed her socks and had a stuffed animal collection.

That Karen Nichols didn't seem like a woman who'd jump nude from a building. But, still, I knew. I knew.

"Tony?"

He looked up at me with the injured eyes of a hamster in the rain. "Yeah?"

"Sorry I snapped at you."

"Yeah, okay." He took a sip from his beer, continued to watch me warily.

"The woman who jumped," I said, not even sure why I was explaining myself to a guy like Tony, "I may have known her."

"Oh, s.h.i.+t, man. I'm sorry. f.u.c.king people sometimes, you know?"

I looked at the highway, tinted a metallic blue under the harsh sun. Even with the air-conditioning running at max, I could feel the heat needle the skin at the nape of my neck.

Tony's eyes were wet and the smile that rolled up his cheeks was too big, too wide. "It calls to you sometimes, man. You know?"

"The booze?"

He shook his head. "Like with your friend who jumped?" He got up on his knees, pressed his nose to the grate between us. "It's, like, I went out on this guy's boat once, right? I can't swim swim, but I go out on a boat boat. We get stuck in this storm, swear to G.o.d, and the boat's, like, tipping all the way to the left, then all the way to the right, the f.u.c.king waves look like big-a.s.s roads curling up at us on all sides. And, okay, I'm scared s.h.i.+tless, 'cause I fall in, I'm done. But I'm also, I dunno how to say it, I feel kinda content content, okay? I feel like, 'Good. My questions'll be answered. No more wondering how and when and why I'm gonna die. I am gonna die. Right now. And that's kinda a relief.' You ever feel that way?"

I glanced over my shoulder at his face pressed against the small squares of steel, the flesh of his cheeks spilling over to my side of the gate and filling the squares like soft, white chestnuts.

"Once," I said.

"Yeah?" His eyes widened and he leaned back from the gate a bit. "When?"

"Guy had a shotgun pointed at my face. I was pretty sure he was going to pull the trigger."

"And for just a second"-Tony held his thumb and forefinger a hairsbreadth apart-"just one second, you thought, This could be cool. Right?"

I smiled at him in the rearview. "Maybe, something like that. I don't know anymore."

He sat back on his haunches. "That's how I felt on that boat. Maybe your friend, maybe she felt that way last night. Like, 'Wow, I've never flown. Let's give this a try.' You know what I'm trying to say?"

"Not really, no." I looked in the rearview. "Tony, why did you go on that boat?"

He rubbed his chin. "Cause I couldn't swim." He shrugged.

Close to the end of our trip, and the road seemed endless before me, the weight of the final thirty miles hanging behind my eyes like a steel pendulum.

"Come on," I said. "Really."

Tony tilted his chin up, and his face grew pinched with thought.

"It's the not knowing," he said. And then he burped.