The Value Of Rain Page 11

  Manual moved up beside me and smiled at my fleeting contentment. Rose studied him through her laughter and wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her dress as she sobered.

  My laughter stopped when I noted that her eyes were not as quite as humorous as before. It seemed our conversation wasn’t finished.

  “Now, what’s your problem?” She asked me, a shrewd eye inspecting every crevice of my posture.

  “I’m gay.”

  She scanned Manuel for a moment and looked at me again, her gaze somewhat softer this time. “I guess she wouldn’t partake of that too much either,” she said.

  I said nothing, my eyes falling to the front of her porch, littering her steps.

  She watched as I got up and Manuel put his hand on my back to guide me back to the hydroplane.

  “Young ‘un.”

  I turned to look at her.

  “Don’t worry none. Charlotte’s just like her mama. Nobody was ever good enough for her except her. She spent so much time trying to hide who she was, that she never really lived at all. Don’t you make that mistake too.”

  Chapter Eleven

  August 1983

  I escaped New Orleans much, much sooner than I had expected and left my promise to Manuel unsworn. But I didn’t return to Potsham with that secret, not yet. I couldn’t. Manuel had opened me up to too much vulnerability; left me too susceptible to the possibility of abandoning my quest for revenge and living in his fairytale dream.

  Charlotte had to pay. How could I simply walk away from what she’d done and leave her without any punishment at all? I couldn’t. So, trying to rid myself of Manuel’s charms I used the money Henry had left me and fucked my way through the Midwest; hop scotching from one gay community to another until I fully tired of the scenes of debauchery and returned to the tidal marshes of Caufield’s Connecticut house two years later.

  His house was a fine white frame of Puritanism from the 18th century, surrounded by sea grass and cropped in by the dunes that splashed up two hundred feet from the front door. If you wanted an uninterrupted view of the Sound, you had to climb to the uppermost deck of the house and witness it’s majesty from afar, which I did often in the three months I was there.

  When the sky got low and the open space of the ocean got small and grey, I would stand on the widow’s walk with my back pressed to the windows and face the sea, the incoming wall of rain calling out to me as in rushed in to shore.

  I knew I would not stay long. My days were a derelict addiction to my planned vengeance and my nights a rattling spree through the dry leaves of my past, and it drove Caufield crazy. Especially after I told him about New Orleans.

  “I expected you to be touring the world once you retired,” I told him one morning as we walked the tide.

  Caufield stopped to rake a quahog from the mud for our supper. “For what?” he asked me. “There’s no escaping yourself, Charles.” He looked up at me. “Yes, true, there’s all that beauty in the world, but eventually the vacation is over and you have to come home and look at yourself in that dirty old worn out mirror.”

  “Personally,” he said as he looked down to pull the clam loose from the rake, “I’ve seen enough of humanities suffering. It’s my time now.”

  “That sounds kind of selfish,” I told him as we resumed our walk.

  “Does it? Any more than returning after all this time with the same stupid delusions of revenge?”

  “It’s not a delusion Caufield. I want to look at Charlotte across a room full of people and watch her fall when I spill out her heritage. I want to smell her fear when she’s dying. I want to pay her back for everything she’s ever done to me, including my name.”

  He squatted for another quahog but stopped and looked out over the receding waves with a weighted sigh. “You’re not a killer Charles. You never were. If I had even remotely thought that I wouldn’t have helped you out of there.”

  “You would have left me there, despite the fact that what I told you was true?”

  “Yes.”

  I ran a hand through my hair and drew a breath. “What are you saying Caufield?”

  His voice was low and resigned. “Except for Manuel, you wasted your trip to New Orleans, Charles. It wasn’t her racial heredity, I’m sure of that. You wouldn’t be able to convince anyone of that anyway, why would she worry about it? Something else is behind her, Charles.”

  “What?” I was frozen by the thought that he might be right.

  He shrugged and started walking back toward the house. “Only Charlotte would know that.”

  “I don’t believe you!” I called out to his back.

  He shrugged his whole body and kept walking; apparently my opinion was my problem.

  “God damn you too, Caufield. God damn you too!”

  In a rage I flung my quahog rake into the waves and watched it disappear without a bit of satisfaction.

  I was weary of this. Like all else in my life I had made an expectation that Caufield’s knowledge of the causes of my narrow focus would allow us conversation where neither of us had to fight for advantage. I had made an assumption that we could just pluck up our old friendship and make no demands on each other. What I got instead was a return of the confusion and pain I had abandoned when I buried Henry.

  “Fuck.” I screamed aloud. “Fuuuck!”

  He picked up the same theme when we sat down to dinner that night, advising me that I had put myself in a box and let Charlotte seal it shut. He didn’t deny my sexuality but he didn’t believe I had really lived it either, never once stepping into the mires and peaks of a real relationship, as he said.

  “You forget Snow,” I told him.

  He shook his head. “No, Snow was an extension of Robert. A pain you couldn’t heal.”

  “Manuel,” I countered, already feeling defeat fall on my shoulders.

  He looked at me directly. “Nope. You ran away from him just as you’re about to run away from me.”

  Anger and denial slid across my chest, would he never stop this relentless bombardment of my emotions?

  “Tell me about the dream you had last night,” he said as he ripped a piece of bread from the French loaf he had bought earlier in the day. “I heard you thrashing,” he replied to my expression.

  The anger was weakening, that had to be what it was that made me want to beg him to understand my inner rage; to plead with him to drop his façade of contempt and indifference.

  “Why are you doing this to me, Caufield?”

  “Because that’s my goddamn purpose in life!” he stood, banging his fist and upsetting the table.

  I was too shocked to respond.

  “You’ve got your entire life ahead of you still but you do nothing but make asinine plans that you think might somehow change your past. They won’t change shit; no matter what you do you’re still going to be that same broken little boy if you don’t pull your head out of your ass first.”

  He sat back down; seeming surprised at himself, pulled his chair in and softened his features. “I see what Manuel saw. What everyone sees except you. You want to hate but your hate is really pain; pain and the fear that it could all happen again. Wasn’t that the dream you had?” he asked me.

  I nodded, and without looking at him attempted to explain the verge of bubbling insanity my dream entailed; how it was lurid in despondency.

  I failed. The passion could not be recounted in words; the demons that had tormented me had left only the sweat stained contours of my body on the sheets. There was a betrayal, a massive sense of loss, and a cloud of self pity so huge that had I let the tears escape it would have been a flood, but I could not readily express any of it.

  “What was it?” I asked Caufield, awash in that same feeling of utter desolation.

  “Death,” he answered his face open and honest.

  I sat staring at him.

  “The moment of decision has come and gone, Charles. You’ve made it, but you haven’t consciously acknowledged it, in spite of what you’v
e told yourself. I think the dream is you weeping for yourself while you can still pity your own loss.”

  “You think I’m suicidal?”

  “Not at all.” He looked down at his bowl; still half full of uneaten quahogs. “I think the wrong side is winning in the battle that’s going on inside of you. It’s killing all that’s beautiful about you.”

  He looked up at me suddenly and made me realize just how badly he wanted me to free myself from Charlotte’s fetters. “You’re welcome to stay the night but I’d like you to leave in the morning. I can’t watch you do that to yourself.” He shook his head and got up from the table.

  “I’m sorry, Caufield.”

  He nodded reluctantly and left the room, leaving his sad fury behind.

  *****

  Sleep was a long time in coming that night. Caufield was right. I had already made my decision, I just hadn’t figured out how to tell him. In spite of his hospitality, in spite of his open warmth and constant reassurance of other possibilities, I had chosen vengeance.

  I wanted to kill Charlotte slowly, with words, since they were her most potent weapon. The slow blunt trauma of ghost laden dialogue gouging a flyspeck of flesh from her skull; peeling back hair, skin and meat until every nerve was exposed and I could strum across them at my leisure. It was a fair repayment for the humiliation and degradation I had suffered at the hands of her debtors at Sanctuary and the Birch Building.

  And if, as Caufield claimed, the death of all beauty within me had occurred, then that was her fault too. It could only be added on to the enormous tally I held against her.

  I got up from my bed and went out on the walk to look out across the moonlit sea. I saw it clearly. I would watch Charlotte crumble to the ground under the cudgel of my words, her brittle frame melting under the weight and culpability of the deaths she was responsible for. And if, since I had to assume that Caufield was right, that her heritage was not the tragedy of New Orleans, then I would have to sit back and watch her until I found the true reason. No matter how long that took. And that’s just what I planned to do.

  But it didn’t happen that way.

  Chapter Twelve

  February 1991

  I was on the floor when I came to, but I could still feel her throat in my hands. Jarrel was standing over me with his fists clenched tight, his body coiled for another blow. He scowled at me. “What are you, fucking stupid?” he bellowed. “The bitch is dying. Let her die!”

  “Fuck you,” I answered rubbing at the blood on my mouth. “That cunt deserves to …”, but the words froze in my mouth as I stared at the door to her room.

  Charlotte, who was swatting Penny’s hands away, went still as Penny took a step back with a gasp.

  Only Jarrel seemed to know this was coming and he turned, passed all patience, and looked his brother in the eye.

  Charlotte cackled. “Well, look at this. Now the whole troupe of rejects has come back to roost.”

  “Hello, Charlotte,” Breece said from the doorway, taking in the scene with sad resignation.

  Chapter Thirteen

  August 1986

  It was one of my first nights on the streets of Potsham and I was not faring well. All the well thought out plans and schemes I had devised to shame my family had fallen short with the one small detail I had overlooked; my need to eat.

  For some reason, I had assumed that, like any bum, I could simply pop open a trash can and consume what had been laid out for me. It was not quite that easy. Though people didn’t recognize or know me, they did have certain phobia about strange men picking through their trash. Business establishments were no less wary than residents, though they were more concerned about scaring off potential customers and creating a street-wise precedent than they were about the security of their trash.

  And there was a certain system to dumpster diving which made the pickings better on some days at some locations better than on other days at other locations. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that system.

  I needed a teacher. Or maybe a larger city. Potsham wasn’t New York, and it hardly seemed logical that it could support an army of vagrants. I remembered a few derelicts in my childhood but there was no mass of homelessness in Potsham. The town elders wouldn’t have allowed it.

  But then I met Cleat, a wickedly thin black man with weathered hands, a starch-dried face, and an Adam’s apple that would have rivaled a cartoonist version of Ichabod Crane. He was standing in an alley off of River Street, his hands on his hips and a look of irritation scratched into his face. From my short distance it seemed he was a little pissed at the disarray of the alley, as if he had cleaned and ordered it before he left and came back to chaos.

  “The fuck you want, cracker?” he demanded when he saw me watching him.

  “Food.” I answered

  “This is my fucking turf. Go find your own place.”

  “Where?”

  He looked at me. “Where? I don’t give a fuck! Anywhere but here. Now get the fuck lost.”

  I stared at him, suddenly aware of the traffic whirring by on River Street, the babble of the Tonight Show on someone’s TV set, and the absolute isolation of this alley.

  Cleat, reading my silent defiance as a sign of aggression, lit his posture with menace and turned to face me fully. I watched his hands as they slipped to his side, an old survival technique I learned from Sanctuary. The simple fact was that a crazy person’s eyes were not always the true window into the soul. You could easily be beaten to death by someone who has absolute placidity in their eyes. In the nuthouse you watched the hands; were they scarred and violent, thick fingered and clenching with inner rage, or were they thin fingered and languid, a quiet flow of fingers over keys? They said a lot without saying anything at all.

  Cleat’s fingers were strumming his palms; irritated, assessing a potential threat but somewhat dismissive. I decided to leave the alley to him anyway. There was no sense getting myself stabbed over garbage.

  I turned to go, but as I did a baby faced teen stumbled out of the back door of a nearby restaurant with his hands full of trash bags. He didn’t see either of us until Cleat whirled on him and coiled his body for a fight. The boy froze, a scream just barely clenched in the tight muscles of his throat.

  I took one small step forward and the kid flinched. “He won’t hurt you; we’re just looking for something to eat. You got anything good in there?” I asked, my eyes motioning toward the garbage bags.

  “Some, I guess,” he answered; just enough trepidation in his voice to tell me that he would cut and run at the merest hint of hostility.

  “You mind?” I asked, holding my hands out for the bags without moving.

  He shifted his eyes from me to Cleat and back again. He shrugged and put the bags down. “Yeah. Sure. But don’t leave no mess ‘cause Tony gets pissed and I gotta clean it up.”

  “Gotcha, no mess,” I assured him.

  He backed off, took a long look at both of us, and then scrambled off when someone yelled his name, Tony presumably.

  Cleat hadn’t moved during the entire exchange, not one finger. He knew, as I would later learn, that a scream of fear, especially from a child, would bring someone like Tony running with a meat clever in hand. Or worse, the police, and then the incident would have extrapolated itself out to the equivalent of a near massacre in the alley. Goddamn bums.

  I walked over, picked up the bags, deposited them at Cleat’s well worn shoes and stepped back to sit on the steps the kids had just vacated. Cleat glared at me suspiciously and crouched down to paw through the bags, his eyes slowly looking me over as he stuffed his mouth with whatever came into his hands.

  “What you doing here, cracker? You ain’t never been on no street before.”

  I shrugged, pulling out one of my last cigarettes. “No place else to go.”

  “Got another one?” Cleat asked immediately.

  There were three left in the pack which I tossed to him along with my lighter. He quickly pocketed both and looked me ove
r again. “I ain’t no babysitter.”

  “I need a teacher, not a babysitter.”

  He spat out some gob of food that had soured and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Same difference.”

  I shrugged half-heartedly, I couldn’t really argue with him. I needed someone to teach me the ropes, so I guess there was some amount of babysitting involved .

  “Go talk to Breece,” Cleat said after silently stuffing a few more handfuls into his mouth.

  “Who’s Breece?” I asked.

  “White guy.” A sudden half toothed smile burst onto his face. “Dressed like me,” he added with a throaty chuckle. “Stationary store on Main.”

  He turned his full attention back to his meal and fell silent, dismissing me with the pressures of necessity.

  A vagrant at a stationary store, I couldn’t picture it.

  “What’s your name?” I asked

  Cleat looked up sharply. “You writing a fucking book?”

  I cocked my head at him and cinched my eyes, trying to figure out what made him tick. “What keeps you going? What’s the use?”

  That half crooked smile of his crept up again. “Take their space, use their air. Fuck ‘em. They want me gone, let ‘em kill me. Fuck ‘em.”

  I stared at him a moment, not doubting that they had tried at least once. I nodded and turned to go find this bum at the stationary store.

  “Cleat,” I heard him say behind me.

  “Huh?”

  “Name’s Cleat.”

  I nodded again and left without giving him my name. At once understanding that he didn’t care what it was. As far as Cleat was concerned it was just another tag society could lay claim to. One he easily did without.

  Chapter Fourteen