Pray for Rain
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When Dave retired last year, he looked forward to sleeping in, lying in bed as the room inched out of darkness. It seemed like he earned it. But when Barb rises at six to dress for work, he’s up too, and well into the night he sits propped against the headboard watching the weather channel muted under the hum of his wife’s little snores.
He urges her to leave early this morning. The radar shows a beast of a storm on its way — intense green boiling-over in orange and yellow and white.
“Once the streets get wet, it will be madness out there,” he tells her. “No one knows how to drive anymore.”
So she heads out in the dark and he eats his oatmeal alone, drinks decaf, watches the sky fade-in through the rain-spotted window. At the sink, he washes each dish with his hands, soaping them and then scrubbing them like pieces of fruit. He lets the water drip off his fingers into the basin, wonders how long it takes for those droplets to work their way out into the water cycle and return to him in the rain.
He sits at the kitchen table waiting for the newspaper. At ten to seven, he hears the station wagon that brings it every morning and heads out the side-door, water pooled in places where his driveway has frozen and thawed. Sloshing down to the street, he looks up to the clouds and wills lightning that doesn’t come. This might be the last storm of the summer. Eight months or more until the sky booms and crackles again.
Grabbing the paper, he always looks down the sidewalk to the nearest corner for some change in pattern that might hint at news about the subdivision. A car that’s usually gone to work by now, new schemes in landscaping that might nudge property values. Next door, in front of Bryan’s house, something is laying in the strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk. A small pile of trash left out three days before the garbage trucks, covered by a tarp that plonks with raindrops. He thinks maybe the old boy has finally started to clear out his cluttered basement or junkyard garage, but just a few steps closer and Dave sees that the tarp is a windbreaker and the junk is Bryan’s son passed out on his back — pants around his ankles, blue lips wrenched in discomfort.
“Kyle?” he says, bending down to him. “Jesus, Kyle, you okay?”
Dave’s knowledge of heroin is vague, anecdotal, but he’s seen Kyle stumble home high and he’s commiserated over the fence while Bryan swilled beer. He shakes the boy, but Kyle just groans with his eyes closed and the rain running into his mouth. Dave shifts Kyle’s arms over his chest and then pulls him up wobbly onto his feet. He crouches under, lets the boy fall over his shoulders, and lifts him off the ground. Forty years past, Dave could have jogged hills with the boy slung across his back, but now it seems he can hardly stand.
He staggers up the muddy front yard and strains to push the doorbell. Bryan moved here, freshly divorced and tortured by it, when Kyle was just ten years old — younger than Dave’s second boy by a half-decade. In those first few years, Kyle would sometimes spot Dave working out in the yard and come over to lend an awkward hand. They’d sweep up grass clippings together, or Kyle would hold the ladder while Dave cleared dead leaves from the gutters. Bryan never asked about it and Kyle always said his old man was taking a nap.
Dave does know what it means to drink, but he’s never gone as far as his neighbor. Never raged about his house punching holes and screaming, never fell out of his car drunk coming home from his first day at a new job. He imagines Bryan balled-up in that wifeless bedroom strewn with his dirty whites and legal notices, beer cans used for ashtrays.
There’s no answer. Dave adjusts the boy on his shoulder and pushes on to his own house, struggling through the side-door before lowering Kyle to the kitchen floor and sliding down the wall next to him — breathing hard, shivering in his soaked clothes.
+ + +
His earliest memories are of the cold. Winter used to mean something. Deep in the slackened muscle of sleep Dave’s father comes in and rouses him with two simple words: “it’s time”. The kindest words he would say until after dinner. He wakes shivering.
The coldest day in his twelve years. The air a block of ice and the space he moves in a channel chipped through it. Breakfast in the warm vent of the woodstove, watching his mother’s back, the steep angle at her nape from stooping like she is now to fix food. Sisters all tucked still, another hour of rest for them. Bacon from their own pigs, and eggs their chickens, and milk their cow. Orange juice from the can watered down and flecked with ice.
Dave breaks the rim of ice in the toilet bowl with the bottom of his boot and then pees on it. Steaming up in a stink of himself. He wraps a blanket around his torso linty and hay-smelling and warm from laying in a bunch before the stove like something that’s been buried alive. The jacket goes on top of that. Gloves and a hat and another hat.
In the barn — a coffin of cold and steam rising from the bodies of animals Dave has secretly name — his father hands a pick-ax and points through the walls to the grain silo. Shivering and damp with sweat from the bulk of his clothes. Inside the silo he climbs to the top of the mountain of corn-meal, the pick-ax as long as he is from the bottom of his feet to the middle of his chest. It is so cold the grain has frozen to a beard of ice along the outer walls two feet thick. He walks in grain sinking and sliding as sand and raises the pick-ax, lets it fall. The ice does not relent. The vibration jolts through him electric and he feels it in his back, down in his calves, in the thin lineaments of his fingers. Again. And one more time until something crrracks and he is not sure, in the dark and the slipping and the bone, whether it is the ice or the pick-ax handle or the scaffolding deep under his skin.
His father’s voice booms in the dark:
“How’s it coming there?” it says.
“It’s hard as rock,” he says.
“Well, there’s stomachs a’growling . . .”
And Dave swears then, or prays, or just forces himself to believe that if children he ever has, they will not have to flay their bones to rope for a handful of grain.
+ + +
Dave calls 911 and tucks the phone between his ear and shoulder. Kyle’s lips have gone dead-gray and the water from his clothes pools under him on the linoleum. While it rings, Dave kneels to tilt the boy’s head and Kyle spasms, tries to breathe. He eases him onto his side and a fake blue vomit drools out onto the floor.
“What’s your emergency?”
“I’ve got a young man with me. The neighbor’s boy. I think he’s overdosed,” Dave says. Calm sounding, rational, only the slightest tremble in his hands as he pulls Kyle’s pants back to his waist.
The dispatcher clears her throat and takes his address. She says, as though reading from a brochure, that there are thirteen cases around town right now. That Kyle was probably sold Fentanyl in lieu of heroin, a powerful drug for burn victims and bone cancer patients. What Dave should do is stand the kid up and pace him around the room. He should yell and try to rouse him: expletives, gibberish, anything that comes to mind.
+ + +
Odd things happen to time now. Over the years, a routine had been etched by hard work: toiling in fields as a youth, the trudge through jungles and swamps in Vietnam, coming home to piece together cars in the discord of those factories sauna-hot. Then marrying Barb and buying this house. Their two boys. The limbo between work and sleep a campaign of lawn care and vehicle maintenance, soccer practice and snapshot vacations. Building a garage and a patio, power-washing, laying carpet, painting the hallway, waxing things, scrubbing, replacing spark plugs and water heaters, shuffling furniture to the basement and back up. Most days seemed hardly able to fit all there was to do. Now they slug along, minutes and weeks lost in magazines articles, his dwindling exercise regime, a rote walk around the subdivision. He tries to stay busy, but the inertia is faltering now and when it finally peters out, Dave assumes that is when he will die.
Yesterday was Easter, and so the annual task for the afternoon is to rake the thawed lawn of grass that has died in the winter, to be followed tomorrow with a sprinkling of fresh seed and then a regimen of fertilizers and grub-killers. When the boys were still home, he’d get them out of bed to mow and weed-whack and drag the hose-tailed sprinklers from one corner to the other. By early July, he’d have a flawless plane of inscrutable green, and in August he could sit out here and listen to the crisp blades sizzle dry in the heat.
After an hour or two on the rake, Dave’s cellphone rings and he takes off his leather gloves to answer, the tiny screen a blur without his reading glasses.
“Hi, Dad,” the other end says. It takes a moment to recognize the voice as Bobby and not Tom — the four years between them watered-down now and both living time-zones away. Bobby, the younger, always sounds hung-over or smoke-parched or huddled in his room while a party is going on.
“Hi, Bobby.”
“How’s it going there?”
“Good. Fine. We’ve got a beautiful day.”
“Well, that’s good.”
And they try to talk. Bobby sitting on his balcony in California, as far from home as possible, and Dave leaning on the rake, thinking back through the week for things worth mentioning: a doctor’s visit, a spot of rain, taking Barb to the kids’ favorite restaurant and to see a movie.
“That’s good,” Bobby says. Though he probably already knows all this. He calls his mother every Monday on her lunch-break, and sometimes she nudges him to call Dave. Things she deems important.
“How is it there? How’s work?”
Dave sets aside the rake and eases down onto the edge of the patio. Bobby’s job isn’t something to buy a house over, or get married, but he finished college and drove out there and found it by himself. Writing newspaper articles about bands and events that Dave has never heard of. A creaking noise comes through the phone, as though Bobby is closing a door.
“Well. . . I had to quit.”
“You quit? You have something else lined up?”
“I’ve been putting together some freelance stuff. Me and Lulu, we got an opportunity to travel to Niger. Up in the desert there are these . . .”
“Lulu?”
“The girl I’ve been seeing, Dad. The photog. I’ve mentioned her before.”
“Oh, right. You’re going to where now?”
“Niger. West Africa. In the desert there are these rock and roll nomads and we’re going to do a feature on them. Interviews, photos, maybe field recordings. We’re really excited . . .”
Dave thinks of sleeping on packed earth, sounds beyond the lantern-light that could be breeze rustling ferns or assault rifles encroaching the perimeter.
“Why would you want to go there?”
Bobby tells him that there will be adventure, a soulful and mysterious culture Americans know nothing about. Plus, he’s sick of rehashing the same article about the same twenty bands and the same dozen bars. Dave hauls himself to his feet — a lightheaded flash he gets all the time now, pinpricks in his rest-stiffened limbs.
“I don’t know if I’d do that,” he says. “It doesn’t sound very safe.”
A pause, something creaking again on Bobby’s end.
“Well, it is and it isn’t.”
Dave slips off his shoes and goes into the house, opens the refrigerator for the pitcher of iced tea while Bobby tells him about the civil war in nearby Ivory Coast, the fateless wandering of these musicians through an interminable drought. Dave pours a glass and takes a long drink. The kid has done this his whole life, so he shouldn’t be surprised. He’s always wriggled free from the head-lock of common sense, risked himself in dares and stunts, always trying his best, it seems, to be scathed no matter what Dave or Barb did to protect him.
“I thought you were starting to settle in out there,” Dave says. He absently squares a place-mat to the table’s edge.
“Yeah, well . . .I just thought I’d let you know.”
+ + +
When he hoists Kyle from the floor, unwieldy as a bag of sand, Dave’s arthritis sings his hands and his back and the kid murmurs something from his overdose dream. He cannot stand so Dave gets under his arms, drags and pushes him saying “Kyle. C’mon now, buddy. C’mon, Kyle,” from the narrow space between the counter and table to the edge of the family room and back. Through the kitchen where he realizes the kid has never been. Never once invited in for lemonade or to thank him for his help while Barb made them sandwiches. Where, actually, Dave often waited until Kyle had gone in the house so he could wrench on his car in peace. Outside, the rain picks up. Falling so angry now the patter is a roar and a hush.
+ + +
There isn’t any glory in it, and he has to wonder how there ever could be. The life expectancy of an infantryman in league with mayflies, orgasms, the rolling of one cigarette but not the smoking of it — yet he’s made it this far: listened through the jungle as the platoon ahead of them died screaming, watched as officers huddled exposed caught a mortar round that mingled their body parts, nudged a peasant woman who’d been cindered by napalm and saw her body fall apart in black pieces.
Today is his twentieth birthday, confirmed and official on both dog-tags, just two lines above where they’re stamped ‘Catholic’ to ensure proper respects if he’s recovered after a fire-fight or detonation. To celebrate, he’s on foot in some town, kicking in the doors of shabby little houses, listening for small-arms fire in the distance or the gritty crackle of gravel under some ambusher’s foot. No one is home, some of the houses stripped bare.
Gordy, this wracked-nerve kid from Ohio, has become his friend. On the ground just three weeks to Dave’s four months, Gordy sucks at him for some wisdom about this thing. Dave tells him, again, that as long as he keeps his ears open and his head down, he’ll live to see his hunting dogs. Get to go home to that girl who can tie a knot in a cherry stem with her tongue.
A mortar sends Keith from Alabama cartwheeling into the air, and then the unit is ducking into a building and kneeling to shoot through the doors and windows. And then the roof above them is potsherds and charcoal and they’re running back into the street with smoking bits of masonry dropping from the sky like some horrible weather event.
It’s brrrrrtbrrrrt and guttural shouting and men Dave’s drunk and trudged with dropping sack-like to the strewn ground. Mortar exploding in the fabric of things, as though this place were wired and some door was the switch. He trips over Gordy, who’s dropped his M16 and cries hunched-over in the dust. Dave drags him into some shithole and lays him on the floor, shoving off other guys from their unit who’ve scrambled in for cover. He follows the blood and lifts Gordy’s arm. Looking straight into the kid’s chest cavity, a hole the size of a fist, his ribs like teeth jutting through the tender flesh of some charred-black mouth.
He strips off his vest, Gordy’s lolling head in his lap, and peels off his sweat-sealed T-shirt to press on the wound. Rounds ping and shatter the walls around them and Dave prays two unvain syllables over and over again. The drab cotton goes red with blood and slips through the gape in Gordy’s body like a premature baby being forced back into the womb.
+ + +
Dave calls 911 again, weak-kneed from walking Kyle around the kitchen, their feet tracking through the vomit and the water. He pleads with the patient automaton for something a hapless layman can do, Kyle muttering and drooping to the floor as Dave’s arthritis finally triumphs. She explains that there will be an ambulance within minutes, tasks him with keeping Kyle breathing and moving until then. The EMTs will flood his heart with adrenaline and he’ll gasp and hyperventilate and live.
+ + +
A flak-vested chaplain once told Dave that God does not wield evil over His Creation. The suffering of the world, this guy said, is not an indictment of the Lord’s work but merely one outcome of His dominion. So, God’s intent cannot be judged without laying each instance of pain against the infinity of His Grace — in times before Dave was born, and long after his grandchildren have passed on.
Dave took these words into his pocket like foreign coins. When a fresh round was racked in the chamber, they were counted out one at a time, and when a man he knew was killed, he would rub them together with his free hand, and when they sent Dave home a few months early to polish tanks he jostled them the entire sleepless flight.
Stateside, though, the value of these worn-smooth words seemed to change. If God was immune to judgment, Dave needed to know whether his own sins would be balanced some way — held against his good will and the things he’d endured. But in all these years of Sunday Mass, Holy Days of Obligation, the protracted and stuffy Christmas spectacle, no priest has ever addressed this. Every sermon, Dave has listened anxiously for an answer that he never hears.
It’s the first Sunday of Lent. Dave’s been retired some six months, and the days are starting to get scrambled. His sister Julia and her husband Mort have come down to attend mass with them. Mort just survived skin cancer and pneumonia and made promises to the ceiling of his hospital room that he would start going to church. So he picked up his wife’s dormant Catholicism and here he is, right next to Dave, trying his best to follow the hymnal and kneeling when Dave kneels. Taking up hands during the Our Father, closing his eyes and ruminating through Father Pat’s memoir of pub-brawls and Naval excess, his exhortation that the parishioners approach God like children who regret their mischief.
Afterward, the four of them go to breakfast. Dave watches Mort shovel hash browns into his maw and Julia wipe the greasy daub of ketchup from his chin. He’s a large man — a jolly fat man when he was forty or fifty — but now in his seventies Mort’s weight is charmless corpulence. His blue veins stretched as dry rope, his arms rolls of raw dough.
“The sermon was great,” he says. A mouthful of coffee, a leer around the restaurant. “Your man here, he’s really seen some things.”
“Yeah, he’s good,” Dave says.
“When I went under the knife, I couldn’t help but think of the life I’d led. You know what I mean, Dave? There were a lot of those years, I was just running wild. No consideration for others . . .hell, barely any for myself.”
“Yeah, that’s tough,” Dave says.
“But I asked God. Hadn’t ever talked to God, really, unless you count taking His name in vain. I asked God to forgive me.”
“Mhmm.”
“And I think He did. I think He saw me down here and said ‘let that man live a little longer.’”
The eggs and bacon seem suddenly bland. Dave tosses a wad of napkin on the table and excuses himself to the bathroom. Washes his hands and waits there in the clean-smelling quiet, holding off his return until Mort has sopped the last glob of runny yolk from his plate. He would never take on forgiveness the way his brother-in-law has — like a treatment for disease. Dave has never even asked for absolution. Part of the doctrine or not, it seems too easy to plead for forgiveness when you knew damn well. It seems selfish and small to do whatever you want and then whine for reprieve in your last moments.
Coming out of the bathroom, his cellphone vibrates and Dave steps into the parking lot. It’s a little cold without his jacket, his breath steams.
“Hey, good morning,” Tom says. His oldest boy, who now designs highways out in the Arizona desert.
“Hey, Tom,” Dave says. Through the window of the diner, he can see Barb grinning and bearing, Mort gesturing at the bill and chuckling about something. Dave fills Tom in on their morning. Though Bobby begged off before he even finished high school, Tom still goes to church. And he’s bought a house out there in the scrub-brush and the stillness with his wife — a woman so quiet Dave thought she was deaf-mute the first time they met. It’s not that Bobby was the rebel and Tom the devoted son, but his oldest always looked for approval. He reminded Dave of guys in the service who’d jump to be lackeys for the officers but could never become one no matter their diligence.
“How’s Eleanor doing? We got the ultrasound pictures, your mother put them on the refrigerator.”
Tom doesn’t say anything for a moment, and Dave thinks it’s the signal on his phone.
“You still there?” he asks.
“Yeah. It’s just that . . . part of why I called, Dad. Eleanor . . . she . . . they’re not sure why, but she lost the baby.”
“Oh, no. She . . .oh, god.”
Dave looks through the window again and shows Barb that he’s on the phone. The baby was going to be a girl and Barb had already spent three or four Saturdays buying small pink clothes and rattly toys.
“We’ve been so lucky about everything,” Tom says. “But this . . . I don’t know how to handle this.”
It’s as though a thumb-screw somewhere in his body has been given a quarter-turn. A ghostly ulcer of guilt. Dave puts a thumbnail between his teeth.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Anything you need, we’re here. I’m going to go talk to your mother. We’ll, uh . . . we’ll call you back in a little while.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Tom says. “I don’t know if I could tell her.”
Dave flips the phone closed and reattaches it to his hip. He stands staring a moment, not looking at anything. The parking lot goes a shade dark and he turns up to see the morning sun now burning white behind a mountainous cloud. The sky slowly filling with a regiment of these in a thick, plodding curtain drawing overhead. Whole rivers and lakes suspended up there in a glacial-pace shuffling of the world.
+ + +
Siren-light pulses through the kitchen window and Dave lets his knees buckle. Sweating and coughing down to the linoleum with Kyle on top of him. The boy has used nearly all Dave’s strength clawing up to some muttering rim of consciousness.
Two motion-blurred EMTs hustle through the side-door and splash across the linoleum. They wrestle Kyle up onto a gurney and then Dave is in the driveway with them, watching the deft insertion of the IV like plugging in a drained machine — already Kyle trying to sit up and take measure with his terrified eyes. Dave breathes deep and stretches his head back to catch some rain on his sweating face. It feels cold as ice, and clean, and some runs down his neck into his shirt were it seems to slow his frantic heart.
Bryan comes banging out his front door in yesterday’s coveralls, disheveled and sleep-creased from a nap, his hands up to the side of his grey-curled head.
“What’s happened? What’s going on?”
He climbs into the ambulance, slippers caked with mud, and Dave can’t hear it but the EMT is telling Bryan something that makes him go sober all at once. He hunches over Kyle with a hand on his arm so uncertain how to comfort, mouthing words to the boy he’s said a thousand times or always meant to. The doors close, the ambulance lumbers down the drive and out into the street. Dave watches it to the corner, listens for the shriek of the siren through the last few drops of rain.