Fire and Rain

“You’ve found it.” The man nodded to the row of post office boxes behind him.

  “Oh,” she said, surprised. “Well, I’m trying to find a man who has a P.O. box here. Kent Reed.”

  The woman and man exchanged looks.

  “He lives up in the hills,” the woman said.

  “I thought this was the hills.”

  The woman smiled. She was in her mid-fifties and very pretty, her gray hair pulled back in a bun. “It gets hillier than this, honey.” Then she cocked her head at Carmen. “You’re not an old friend of his or something, are you?”

  “No. I’ve never met him before.”

  The man chuckled, a puff of smoke escaping his lips. “That explains it,” he said. “Only someone who never met Kent Reed before would want to meet him in the first place.”

  The woman joined him in the laughter, and since their mirth didn’t seem to be at her expense, Carmen smiled herself. She liked their accents and wondered what they made of hers.

  The woman moved behind the counter to stand next to the man, and Carmen decided they must be husband and wife. Both wore gold wedding bands.

  “Why on earth would you want to see Kent Reed?” the woman asked bluntly.

  Carmen slipped off her suit jacket and folded it over her arm. Her back felt sticky with perspiration. “I’m a reporter,” she said, “and I need to ask him a few questions for a story I’m doing about an old colleague of his.”

  “Well, good luck.” The man stubbed out his cigarette in a metal ashtray.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He won’t talk to you, honey,” the woman answered. “He never talks to anybody.”

  “No one?”

  The man folded his arms across his chest and leaned his back against the post office boxes. “He’s lived here a couple of years, and he comes into the store once a month or so to pick up his mail and get groceries and—”

  “He buys everything in cans,” the woman interrupted him. “It’s a wonder he doesn’t have scurvy.”

  “He’ll come in a little more often than that if he’s ordered parts from somewhere for one of his inventions,” the man continued.

  Carmen’s mind suddenly kicked into high gear. Could Jeff and Kent be running from the same thing? They’d split up their partnership and taken off in opposite directions, trying to cover their trails.

  “Do you think he’s running away from something?” she asked.

  “Civilization, I’d say.” The man ran a hand over his chin. “He likes machines. He doesn’t like people, and he’d be the first to tell you that. Kent Reed is your typical mad scientist, miss. That about sums him up.”

  She felt disconcerted by the word “mad.”

  “Am I in any danger going to see him?” she asked.

  “Nah.” The woman shook her head. “He’s got a nasty bark, but I don’t think there’s much bite behind it.”

  “Well.” Carmen swept a stray hair off her cheek, “I guess all that explains why his phone is unlisted.”

  “He doesn’t have a phone,” the woman said. “Or a television. Or a radio. He could be living in the year 2050 or 1962 for all he keeps up with things. I bet he doesn’t even know who’s president right now.”

  Carmen bought an ice-cold can of diet Coke and drank it as the man and woman gave her a lengthy set of directions to Kent Reed’s house. She was surprised when the shopkeepers suggested she borrow their four-wheel drive truck. She declined the offer, but as her car chugged up the dirt road that cut through the wooded hillside, she began to regret that decision.

  Nearly thirty minutes after leaving the store, she rounded a bend to find herself at the end of the road. She stopped the car and studied the woods in front of her. There was a foot path, they had told her. Leaving the tape recorder in the car—she wouldn’t risk asking Kent Reed if she might tape their conversation—she got out and located the overgrown path. After taking a few cautious steps into the thick woods, she was relieved to see a house come into view behind the trees..

  The house was, as the general store owners had described it, an old log cabin. It was fairly large, but as she neared it, she could see that the rear of the building was a recent addition, the logs there a warm brown in comparison to the age-darkened logs in the rest of the house.

  She knocked on the door. Sounds came from inside the house. Metal sounds. Clanking sounds. But it wasn’t until she’d knocked for the sixth time that the door flew open.

  Carmen took an involuntary step backwards as Kent Reed appeared in the doorway. He was tall and extraordinarily thin, as though some disease had eaten away his flesh. His hair was dark and unwashed and hung limply around the crew neck of his graying white T-shirt. He wore loose-fitting jeans and brown moccasins, and his beard was long and streaked with gray. From inside the house drifted the unmistakable scent of tuna fish.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  Carmen felt as if she’d stepped into a low-budget movie. “My name is Carmen Perez, Mr. Reed. I’m from television station KTVA.” She held her identification card in front of her, but he didn’t even glance at it.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’d like to talk with you about Robert Blackwell.”

  He jerked as if she’d struck him. “Why?”

  Carmen had planned to be evasive, as usual, but there was nothing usual about this situation, and she made a quick decision to put caution aside. She had to find out how much this man knew.

  “Do you know where he is and what he’s doing?” She tested the question.

  “No, I don’t. Nor do I give a flying fuck.” Kent Reed started to close the door, and Carmen surprised herself by reaching out to hold it open.

  “Please,” she said. “Just two more minutes of your time.”

  He sighed, looking down at her with a mixture of impatience and contempt. She tried to peer around him, curious to see the inside of his house. Against the wall to his left, chrome-colored shelves covered with equipment of one sort or another ran from floor to ceiling. The equipment looked exceptionally clean and orderly, which seemed almost bizarre given the disheveled state of the man in front of her. To his right, she could see a straight-back chair next to a TV tray. On top of the tray was a large can of tuna fish, a fork sticking upright from its contents.

  “I thought you and Mr. Blackwell worked together,” she said.

  He sneered. “I don’t work with people who are afraid of themselves.”

  “And Mr. Blackwell fell into that category?”

  “Rob Blackwell had a gift,” Kent snapped. “But what did he want to do with that gift? He made toys for his asshole kids, that’s what. And he remodeled the house for his precious wife.” Kent waved his right hand around as he spoke, and for the first time, Carmen noticed the deformity he had lived with since junior high school. His index and middle finger were missing, the skin shiny over the remaining bony knuckles.

  “He and I were a team.” His voice frightened Carmen with its surly, simpering, caustic tone. This wasn’t a sane man. “From the time we were kids, we had dozens of projects on the burner, and before he got… distracted, we would work on them twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Rob would even try to program his dreams so he could come up with solutions during the night. Not waste a minute of time.” A faint smile crossed Kent’s face, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “I thought he was God back in those days. Then he met the leech, and—”

  “The leech?” Carmen asked.

  “Leslie. His parasite of a wife. She ruined him. He started spending more and more time with her and less on our work. And once the kids were born, he was pathetic. ‘Nights and weekends are reserved for my family,’ he’d say, or he’d have to go see his old junkie stepfather in the joint.”

  “Is his father still living?” Carmen asked, sidetracked for a moment by the thought that Jefferson Watts might still be alive, but Kent didn’t like the intrusion into his own train of thought.

  “How the hell should I know?”
he snapped at her, and she felt a quickening in her chest. Despite what the woman in the store had said about Kent Reed having no bite to back up his bark, she was afraid. Yet she knew it was his anger that fueled his desire to talk with her. If anything, she would have to nurture it.

  “Where was Jefferson Watts incarcerated?” she asked.

  He glowered at her. “Why don’t you go peddle your papers to the Jersey state prison, if you’re so interested in old junkies? That’s where they all go to die.”

  She thought he was going to try to slam the door on her again, so she hurried on, reminding herself he had no TV, no radio. He didn’t keep up with the news in any way.

  “Mr. Reed,” she said, “Robert Blackwell has told some people who live in an area suffering from a long-standing drought that he can make it rain.”

  Kent stared at her, and for the first time she could read no anger, no emotion whatsoever in his face. Then he closed his eyes and ran a hand down his beard.

  “Fucking bastard,” he said, that weird smile on his lips again. “That fucking, shit-headed prick.” He opened his eyes, shaking his head.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That was our pet project. We were working on it when we closed down the business.” He seemed to be talking to himself, but then looked her in the eye. “So,” he said, “did anyone get suckered into believing he could do it?”

  “Well, actually, he did produce rain for a short period of time over a grove of trees.”

  “Sure,” he scoffed. “That’s not much harder than making it happen in the laboratory. A nice, controlled environment. Forget it. If I were with him, he’d stand a chance. Knowing Blackwell, he might give you a few bolts of lightning, but he’ll never be able to make it rain.” He raised his hand toward her suddenly, and she took a step away from him. “See this hand?” he asked. “A bomb did this. It was supposed to be a precision device. That was my first lesson in Blackwell’s need to be checked and double-checked. Once you’ve had a lesson like this”—he stabbed the air with his stubby knuckles—”you don’t forget it. Rob can’t do shit without me. He never could. He has no mind for details. All ideas. Ideas pop into his head as many times a day as you blink your eyes, but his work sucks.”

  Between her anxiety and the thick air and the smell of the tuna fish, Carmen could barely breathe. She forced herself to concentrate on keeping this man talking, feeding his narcissism. “You mean, Rob was the idea man and you were the one to put the idea into reality?” she asked.

  “You could say that.” He seemed to like the description. “Don’t get me wrong. I had some ideas of my own, and he had the latent ability to give an idea life, but he lacked the discipline. He never wanted to put time into working out the details.”

  “Is that why you quit your partnership with him?”

  Kent narrowed his dark eyes at her. “Did he tell you that? That I quit?”

  “No,” she said hurriedly. “I just assumed—”

  “Our business was thriving,” he said. “We knew how to work together. We’d done it since we were kids. Our reputation was good. People thought we were innovative. Then the bloodsucker—oh excuse me, Leslie to you—gets a job offer in Baltimore, and that’s the end of that.”

  “You mean, Rob left the business to move to Baltimore?”

  “Yes, because”—he raised his voice once more to that whiny, mocking pitch, obviously mimicking Jeff—”’Leslie comes first,’” he said. “’She’s stuck with me through everything, and now it’s her turn.’ I finally said, all right, I’ll relocate and we can start over down there, but the prick said he didn’t want a partner any longer. He thought he could do it alone. Start his own business.”

  “And did he? In Baltimore?”

  “How the hell do I know? I said, screw him, let him see how far he gets without me, and I came out here.” A look of pure peace suddenly fell over his face. “This is real science here,” he said. “No distractions. Cost of living’s zip. I’m not working for anyone except myself. I can work any hours I want to, on any projects I damn well feel like working on. And,” he craned his long neck toward her, “I can talk or not talk to whomever I choose. And right now, I’m through talking with you.” He shut the door on her so suddenly that she had no chance to try to stop him.

  She knocked again. “Mr. Reed? Have you been in touch with Rob since he left New Jersey?” She pressed her ear against the door but could hear nothing, not even the strange metal clanking she’d heard earlier, and after a few quiet minutes, she returned to the car. Maybe Jeff was simply running away from Kent Reed, she thought as she turned the car around on the dirt road. That would be completely understandable.

  BACK IN VIRGINIA, SHE checked into a hotel near the airport, then called Chris in his cottage at Sugarbush.

  “I thought I should pass some information on to you,” she said. It was the first time she had offered to share her discoveries about Jeff with him, and she sensed his surprise.

  “What about?” he asked.

  “Well, a few people I’ve spoken with have commented on the fact that Jeff was sloppy in his work. Sloppy about attending to details.”

  There was silence from Chris’s end of the phone. “And?” he asked finally.

  “And I thought you should know that. Maybe his work needs to be double-checked.”

  Chris laughed. “And who do you suggest I have double-check it?”

  Carmen smiled. He was right. There was no one, with the possible exception of Kent Reed, who would be able to make any sense of what Jeff was doing. “Well,” she said, feeling foolish, “I just thought you should know.”

  “Thanks.” He hesitated a moment, and she wondered if he wanted to stay on the phone as much as she wanted him to. “You doing okay, Car?”

  She pictured him sitting in his small living room with his windows open, the early evening sounds and smells of Sugarbush filling his cottage. She could see his blue eyes, amused and concerned as he held the phone, and the sudden longing she felt, for home, for him, took her by surprise.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m doing fine.”

  39

  THE RAIN BEGAN ON the last Friday in July. It started slowly at first, so slowly that Mia took no notice of the graying sky outside the office, or the few drops of water on the window next to her desk. She was immersed in her work at the typewriter when Chris walked into the room, and it wasn’t until his shadow fell across the desk that she looked up at him. He pointed toward the window.

  The rain was light, but steady. A faint wash of California sunlight still tinged the air, reflecting off the streaks of rain, making them shine like tinsel.

  “My God.” She stood up.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Chris said. “Is it God, or is it Jeff?” Mia looked out the rear window to see that it was raining to the south as well. She remembered Jeff’s restlessness the night before, his disinterest in making love, his preoccupation with his papers and his calculator. He had left the cottage very early this morning, long before sunrise.

  “Jeff,” she said. “It’s definitely Jeff.”

  She and Chris stepped outside. The street was dotted with people; the real estate agents from next door, patients from the dentist’s office across the street, customers and waitresses from the Catfish House. They stood with incredulous faces tilted to the sky, holding their arms out at their sides, letting the rain wash over them. There was a lot of laughter, a few shrieks. Two young children chased each other around the mailbox on the corner.

  In the distance, in all directions for as far as the buildings and eucalyptus trees would let them see, a line of clear yellow air—sunlight—clung to the horizon. It made Mia shiver. This rain was unnatural; the low gray clouds above them hung only over Valle Rosa.

  Chris followed her gaze to the north. “Eerie,” he said.

  “Hey, Garrett!” One of the beer-bellied Catfish House customers called from across the street. “You did good, man! This is quite a show.”

  Mia co
mbed the wet hair from her face with her fingers. She tipped her head back, opened her mouth. The rain was warm. She didn’t mind it running off her chin, down her neck, beneath her blouse. She tried to laugh like the other people on the street. She tried to ignore the cold sorrow that was working its way into her heart. How much longer would he stay?

  Chris touched her back. “Let’s go see the magician,” he said.

  They drove to the warehouse in her car. She skidded once on the rain-slicked road as she turned a corner, and Chris grabbed the dashboard before breaking into a laugh.

  “I haven’t felt a car skid on wet pavement in years,” he said. “What a rush!”

  Jeff and Rick were on the warehouse roof. Mia could see them from a block away, but once she pulled close to the building, they were hidden from her view, just as they were hidden from the swarm of reporters and other people clamoring on the street.

  “Christ, what a mob,” Chris said, unbuckling his seat belt. Rick walked out of the warehouse as Chris and Mia were getting out of the car, and he was immediately surrounded by the crowd. At first, Mia was afraid for him. There were so many people, and everyone was so boisterous. She was relieved to see Rick lifted onto the shoulders of a couple of men, and she watched as he was paraded, laughing, into the street.

  “Chris Garrett!” someone called, and the crowd seemed to turn all at once and move toward Chris. Before he could protest, he too was raised high above the throng. He was grinning broadly, his hair hanging straight and wet over his forehead.

  Reporters shouted unintelligible questions at both Rick and Chris, while cameras rolled and people cheered. Suddenly, Carmen appeared near the men holding Chris aloft. She carried a green umbrella above her head, and she tipped it back as she reached up to shake Chris’s hand. He grabbed her hand, but instead of shaking it, bent low to plant a kiss on her fingers.

  Mia smiled, watching them. Then she leaned back against the car and looked up at the roof, but she could see nothing except the edge of one of the satellite dish-like structures. Around her, the crowd began to chant, the sound soft at first, then growing, building: