Prayers For Rain Part 36

D. Bourne

"What's that?" Warren wanted to know.

"It's the session notes of Karen's psychiatrist."

"Well, what the h.e.l.l was she doing with it?"

I glanced down at his confused face. "That's the question of the hour, isn't it?"

With Warren's blessing, I kept the session notes and pictures of David Wetterau with the other woman, then I gathered the other photos, the clothes, the broken watch and pa.s.sport and wedding invitations, and placed them back into the box. I looked in at what served as evidence of Karen Nichols's existence, and I pinched the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger and closed my eyes for a second.

"People can be tiring, can't they?" Warren said.

"Yeah, they can." I stood and walked to the door.

"Man, you must be tired all the time."

As he locked the barn back up outside, I said, "These two guys you said were around Karen."

"Yeah."

"Were they together?"

"Sometimes. Sometimes not."

"Anything else you can tell me about them?"

"The redheaded guy, like I said, was a snot. A weasel. Kinda guy thinks he's smarter'n everyone else. He peeled off a stack of hundreds when he checked her in like they were ones. You know? Karen's all sagging into him, and he's looking at her like she's meat, winking at me and Holly. A real piece of s.h.i.t."

"Height, weight, that sort of stuff?"

"I'd say he was about five-ten, maybe five-nine. Freckles all over his face, dweeby haircut. Weighed maybe one-fifty, one-sixty. Dressed artsy-silk shirts, black jeans, shiny Docs on his feet."

"And the other guy?"

"Slick. Drove a black '68 Shelby Mustang GT-500 convertible. Like, what, four hundred of them produced?"

"Around there, yeah."

"Dressed rich-boy shabby-jeans with little rips in 'em, V-neck sweaters over white T-shirts. Two-hundred-dollar shades. Never came in the office, never heard him speak, but I got the feeling he was in charge."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "Something about him. The geek and Karen always walked behind him, moved real fast when he spoke. I dunno. I maybe saw the guy five times, always from a distance, and he made me feel nervous, somehow. Like I wasn't worthy to look upon him or something."

He wheeled his way back through the black fields, and I followed. The day grew deader and more humid around us. Instead of pointing toward the ramp at the back of the office, he led me to a picnic table, its surface covered in small splinters peeking up out of the wood like hair. Warren stopped by the table, and I sat up on top, pretty sure my jeans would protect me from the splinters.

He wouldn't look at me. He kept his head down, eyes on the divots ripped in the gnarled wood.

"I gave in once," he said.

"Gave in?"

"To Karen. She kept on talking about dark G.o.ds and dark rides and places she could take you and..." He looked back over his shoulder at the motel office, and the silhouette of his wife moved past a curtain. "I don't...I mean, what makes a man who has the best woman the world can offer-what makes him...?"

"f.u.c.k around?" I said.

He met my eyes and his were small, now, shamed. "Yeah."

"I don't know," I said gently. "You tell me."

He drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair, looked off past me at the wasteland of broken trees and black earth. "It's the darkness, you know? The chance to disappear into, I mean, really bad places while you're doing something that feels really d.a.m.n good. Sometimes, you don't want to be on top of a woman who looks at you with all this love in her eyes. You want to be on top of a woman who looks into your face and knows knows you. Knows the bad you, the nasty you." He looked at me. "And likes that you. Wants that you." you. Knows the bad you, the nasty you." He looked at me. "And likes that you. Wants that you."

"So, you and Karen..."

"f.u.c.ked all night, man. Like animals. And it was good. She was crazy. No inhibitions."

"And afterward?"

He looked away again, took a deep breath, and let it out slow. "Afterward, she said, 'See?'"

"See."

He nodded. "'See? No one loves.'"

We stayed out there by the picnic table for a while, neither of us speaking. Cicadas hummed through the scrawny treetops and racc.o.o.ns clawed through the brambles on the far side of the clearing. The barn seemed to sag another inch, and Karen Nichols's voice whispered through the rural blight:

See? No one loves.

No one loves.

15.

I had taken my work to a bar when Angie found me later that night. The bar was Bubba's, a place called Live Bootleg on the Dorchester-Southie line, and even though Bubba was out of the country-off to Northern Ireland, the rumor was, to pick up the arms they'd allegedly laid down over there-my drinks were still on the house.

This would have been great if I'd been in a drinking mood, but I wasn't. I nursed the same beer for an hour, and it was still half full when Shakes Dooley, the owner of record, replaced it with a fresh one.

"It's a crime," Shakes said as he drained the old beer into the sink, "to see a fine, healthy man such as yourself wasting a perfectly honest lager."

I said, "Mmm-hmm," and went back to my notes.

Sometimes I find it easier to concentrate in a small crowd. Alone, in my apartment or office, I can feel the night ticking past me, another day gone down for the count. In a bar, though, on a late Sunday afternoon, when I can hear the hollow, distant crack of bats from a Red Sox game on the TV, the solid drop of pool b.a.l.l.s falling into pockets from the back room, the idle chatter of men and women playing keno and scratch cards as they do their best to ward off Monday and its horn honks and barking bosses and drudging responsibilities-I find the noises mingle together into a soft, constant buzzing, and my mind clears of all else but the notes laid before me between a coaster and a bowl of peanuts.

From the mora.s.s of things I'd learned about Karen Nichols, I had compiled a bare chronological outline on a fresh sheet of yellow legal paper. Once that was done, I doodled in random notes beside hard facts. Sometime during all this, the Red Sox had lost, and the crowd had thinned slightly, though it had never been much of a crowd in the first place. Tom Waits played on the jukebox, and two voices were getting heated and raw back in the poolroom.

K. Nichols (b. 11/16/70; d. 8/4/99)