Prayers For Rain

3

It would be six months before I gave any serious thought to Karen Nichols again.

A week after we dealt with Cody Falk, I received a check in the mail from her, a smiley face drawn within the “o” in her name, yellow ducklings embossed along the borders of the check, a card enclosed that said, “Thanks! You’re the absolute best!”

Given what would happen, I’d like to say I never heard from her again until that morning six months later when I heard the news on the radio, but the truth is she called once several weeks after I’d received her check.

She reached my answering machine. I came in an hour later to grab a pair of sunglasses, heard the message. The office was closed that week because I was taking off to Bermuda with Vanessa Moore, a defense attorney who had no more interest in a serious relationship than I did. She liked beaches, though, and she liked daiquiris and sloe gin fizzes and nooners followed by late afternoon massages. She looked mouthwatering in a business suit, coronary-inducing in a bikini, and she was the only person I knew at the time who was at least as shallow as I was. So, for a month or two, we were a good match.

I found my sunglasses in a lower desk drawer as Karen Nichols’s voice played through a tinny speaker. It took me a minute to recognize it, not because I’d forgotten how she sounded, but because this didn’t sound like her voice. It sounded hoarse and weary and ragged.

“Hey, Mr. Kenzie. This is Karen. You, ahm, helped me out a month ago, maybe six weeks? Yeah, so, ahm, look, give me a call. I, ah, I’d like to run something by you.” There was a pause. “Okay, so, yeah, just give me a call.” And she left her number.

Vanessa beeped the horn out on the avenue.

Our plane left in an hour, and traffic would be a bitch, and Vanessa could do this thing with her hips and calf muscles that was probably outlawed in most of Western civilization.

I reached for the replay button and Vanessa beeped again, louder and longer, and my finger jumped and hit the erase button instead. I know what Freud would have made of the mistake, and he’d probably be right. But I had Karen Nichols’s number somewhere, and I’d be back in a week, and I’d remember to call her. Clients had to understand that I had a life, too.

So I went to my life, let Karen Nichols go to hers, and, of course, forgot to call her back.

Months later, when I heard about her on the radio, I was driving back from Maine with Tony Traverna, a bail jumper who was usually considered by those who knew him as both the best safecracker in Boston and the dumbest man in the universe.

Tony T, the jokes went, couldn’t outwit a can of soup. Put Tony T in a room full of horse shit and twenty-four hours later he’d still be looking for the horse. Tony T thought manual labor was the president of Mexico, and had once wondered aloud what night they broadcast Saturday Night Live.

Whenever Tony had jumped bail before, he’d gone to Maine. He’d driven, even though he didn’t have driver’s license. Tony’d never had a license because he’d failed the written part of the exam. Nine times. He could drive, though, and the savant part of him ensured that man had yet to invent a lock he couldn’t crack. So he’d boost a car and drive three hours to his late father’s fishing cabin in Maine. Along the way, he’d pick up a few cases of Heineken and several bottles of Bacardi, because in addition to having the world’s smallest brain, Tony T seemed determined to have the world’s hardest liver, and then he’d hunker down in the cabin and watch cartoons on Nickelodeon until someone came to get him.

Tony Traverna had made some serious cash over the years, and even when you took into consideration all the money he’d burned on the booze and the hookers he paid to dress up like Indian squaws and call him “Trigger,” you had to figure he had plenty stashed away somewhere. Enough, anyway, for a plane ticket. But instead of jumping bail and flying off to Florida or Alaska or someplace he’d be harder to find, Tony always drove to Maine. Maybe, as someone once said, he was afraid to fly. Or maybe, as someone else suggested, he didn’t know what planes were.

Tony T’s bond was held by Mo Bags, an ex-cop and practicing hard-ass who would have gone after Tony himself with Mace and stun guns, brass knuckles and nunchucks, if it weren’t for a recent flare-up of gout that bit into Mo’s right hip like fire ants every time he drove a car for more than twenty miles. Besides, Tony and I had a history. Mo knew I’d find him, no problem, and Tony wouldn’t bolt on me. This time Tony’s bail had been put up by his girlfriend, Jill Dermott. Jill was the latest in a long line of women who looked at Tony and felt swept off their feet by a need to mother the man. It had been this way most of Tony’s life, or at least the portion I was familiar with. Tony walked into a bar (and he was always walking into a bar) and took a seat and started talking to the bartender or the person on the seat beside him, and half an hour later, most of the unmarried women in the bar (and a few of the married ones) were huddled on the seats around Tony, buying him drinks, listening to the slow, light cadence of his voice and deciding that all this boy needed to fix him up was nurture, love, and maybe some night classes.

Tony had a soft voice and one of those small but open faces that induce trust. Mournful almond eyes loomed above a crooked nose and an even more crooked smile, a permanent turn of the lips that seemed to say Tony had been there, too, my friend, and, really, what could you do about it except buy a round and share your story with new and old friends alike?

With that face, if Tony had chosen to be a con man, he’d have done all right. But Tony, ultimately, wasn’t smart enough to run a con, and maybe he was just too nice. Tony liked people. They seemed to confuse him the way just about everything did, but he genuinely liked them, too. Unfortunately, he also liked safes. Liked them a lot. Maybe just a hair more than people. He had an ear that could hear a feather settle on the surface of the moon and fingers so nimble he could solve a Rubik’s Cube one-handed without glancing at it. In his twenty-eight years on the planet, Tony had cracked so many safes that anytime an all-night burn job left a gutted shell in place of a bank vault, cops drove over to Tony’s Southie apartment even before they stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts, and judges cut search-and-seizure warrants in the time it takes most of us to write a check.

Tony’s real problem, though, at least in the legal sense, wasn’t the safes, and it wasn’t the stupidity (though it didn’t help); it was the drink. All but two of Tony’s jail terms had come from DUIs, and his latest was no different-driving north in the southbound lane of Northern Avenue at three in the morning, resisting arrest (he’d kept driving), malicious destruction of property (he’d crashed), and fleeing the scene of an accident (he’d climbed a telephone pole because he had a theory the cops might not notice him twenty feet above the wrecked car on a dark night).

When I entered the fishing cabin, Tony looked up from the living room floor with a face that said, What took you so long? He sighed and used the remote to flick off Rugrats, then stood unsteadily and slapped his thighs to get the blood flowing through them again.

“Hey, Patrick. Mo send you?”

I nodded.

Tony looked around for his shoes, found them under a throw pillow on the floor. “Beer?”

I looked around the cabin. In the day and a half he’d been here, Tony had managed to fill every windowsill with empty Heineken bottles. The green glass captured the sun glinting off the lake and then refracted it into the room in tiny beams so that the entire cabin glowed the emerald of a tavern on St. Patrick’s Day.

“No, thanks, Tony. I’m trying to cut back on beer for breakfast.”

“Religious thing?”

“Something like that.”

He crossed one leg over the other and pulled the ankle up to his waist, hopped around on the other foot as he tried to get a shoe on. “You gonna cuff me?”

“You going to bolt?”

He got the shoe on somehow, then stumbled as he dropped the foot to the floor. “Nah, man. You know that.”

I nodded. “So no cuffs, then.”

He gave me a grateful smile, then raised the other foot off the floor and started hopping around again as he tried to put on the second shoe. Tony got the shoe over his foot, then stumbled back into the couch and fell on his ass, short of breath from all that hopping. Tony’s shoes didn’t have laces, just Velcro flaps. Word was that-oh, never mind. You can guess. Tony strapped the Velcro flaps together and stood.

I let him gather up a change of clothes, his Game Boy, and some comic books for the ride. At the door, he stopped and looked hopefully at the fridge.

“Mind if I grab a roadie?”

I couldn’t see what harm a beer on the ride could do to a guy heading off to jail. “Sure.”

Tony opened the fridge and pulled out an entire twelve-pack.

“You know,” he said as we left the cabin, “in case we hit traffic or something.”

We did hit some traffic, as it turned out-small squalls of it outside Lewiston, then Portland, the beach communities of Kennebunkport and Ogunquit. The soft summer morning was turning into a white sear of a day, the trees and roads and other cars glinting pale, hard, and angry under a high sun.

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 Hampshire. 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 Hampshire leg of our trip, Tony’s Game Boy stopped blipping and beeping, and I looked in the rearview to see that he’d passed out back there, snoring softly, his lips flapping gently as one foot wagged back and forth like a dog’s tail.

We’d just passed into Massachusetts and I’d pressed the seek button 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 button 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 shit, 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, shit, man. I’m sorry. Fucking 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, but I go out on a boat. We get stuck in this storm, swear to God, and the boat’s, like, tipping all the way to the left, then all the way to the right, the fucking waves look like big-ass roads curling up at us on all sides. And, okay, I’m scared shitless, ’cause I fall in, I’m done. But I’m also, I dunno how to say it, I feel kinda 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.

“What is?”

“Why I went on the boat, I guess. The not knowing-all the not knowing in this fucking life, you know? It gets to you. Makes you crazy. You just want to know.”

“Even if you can’t fly?”

Tony smiled. “Because you can’t fly.”

He patted the gate between us with his palm. He burped again, then excused himself. He curled up on the floor and sang the theme song to The Flintstones very softly.

By the time we reached Boston, he was snoring again.