Hard Rain Falling (New York Review Books Classics)

by Don Carpenter

They probably thought he was some kind of hero. Well, fuck them, too. Maybe in the cells they would learn the truth as he had, and know that nothing existed but a single spark of energy, and that spark could die for no reason, and existed for no reason.

Maybe his wife would be out under the late sun, gardening. He would speak to her. She would straighten up, turn, smile. The glare would make it hard for him to see her smile, but he would know, and a little of it would slip away. It would take part of him with it, but it was worth it.

He was still trying to absorb the sights and sounds of the prison; it was his new home, and he expected it to be, almost wanted it to be, his home for the rest of his life. Because to think any other way was to hope, and he hoped he had given up hope.

Fifteen or twenty minutes on a forgotten bed between two probable strangers had given him twenty-four years of misery, pain, and suffering, and promised, unless he were to die soon, to go on giving him misery for another forty or fifty years, locked up in one small room or another without hope of freedom, love, life, truth, or understanding. A penis squirts, and I am doomed to a life of death. It has got to be insanity; there has got to be a God, because only an insane God could have created such a universe.

“Night or day it’s all one in those damn 24-hour joints,” Billy said one slow evening a few days before he was killed. “That’s the hell of it, man; they’re air-conditioned, open all night, soft music playin, an you don’t know what day it is after a while, or if it’s winter or summer. Time dies in a place like that, you feel pulled loose from it, like dreaming, dig, you don’t even know if you’re hungry. Like comin out of a movie, dig, and it’s bright sunlight out and you’re blinkin away and people are walkin around on business and you wonder what the hell world you fell into.

The same for me on a pool table. I can feel it. So it’s there. I sight the shot, bend down, and there’s somethin goin on between me and the cue ball and the object ball and the pocket, and I feel it build up, shoot, and that’s it. You waited for that all your life. The connection is made. The thing is complete. It’s inside you now. “But, if you miss the shot, the ball hangs up in the pocket or you miscue or somethin, that connection is broken and some of you dies. I’ve felt that, too. I know it’s the truth. Somethin busted and gone, not a run of a hundred balls is gonna bring it back. When you lose you lose forever, an when you win it only lasts a second or two. That’s life. I aint lyin. I aint comin on. Why should I?

“Everythin in the whole fuckin world is connected, I think; and the connection turns you on, an the broken connections burn you out. Suppose like you see this woman, see? You send out a hot line of connecting stuff to her if she’s your action, and if you’re hers, wham, you connect; you don’t have to say a word, it’s there and you both know it. But you know what we really do; we think about other things, or come on or get smart or worry about ourselves, and fuck up the connection. Then do we know it’s gone? No, man, we keep tryin an it just gets worse and worse.

“You and me, now,” he said. “We’re connected. That’s good. And when the connection breaks, it’s over, that’s too bad, but it’s finished and a man would be a fool to try to make it go on when it’s all over. You dig? We got it, you don’t even have to admit it, but when we think of each other, we feel good, and that’s it. But when it busts, it’s busted, and that’s the end. Nothin happens twice.”

When he left his room he was angry, and determined to make trouble, but by the time he got down to Market he felt just fine and sauntered along with the early evening crowd, savoring the pure freedom of it, the way people all dressed differently, the way the women looked and smelled, the way the streetcars sounded, the glitter of the lights, the strange, exciting music from the hot-dog joints, the corniness of it all, the cheapness, the vulgarity which is vulgar only if you haven’t been away for such a long time and in a place so dull as prison; there was a lot of stuff in the newspapers about “cleaning up” Market Street, and Jack wondered why they wanted to do it. Didn’t they know how beautiful it was? Didn’t they understand that for some people the opera, the drama, the ballet, were only boring, and yet a peepshow on Market Street was art? They want to make everything gray and tasteful. Don’t they understand how awful good taste seems to people who don’t have it? Ha, what do they care about people with bad taste! Nothing! But I do. I love them. They wear cheap perfume and carry transistor radios. They buy plastic dog-turds and painted turtles and pennants and signs that say, “I don’t swim in your toilet, so please don’t pee in my pool!” and they buy smelly popcorn and eat it on the street and go to bad movies and stand here in doorways sneaking nips of whiskey just like I’m doing, and they’re all so nice.

She wore her hair up to show her slender neck to its best advantage, and as she turned around for him to follow her into the apartment, Jack automatically looked down at her ankles. They, too, were slender. Jack fell in love with her. He was not sure exactly when he fell in love, but he always remembered thinking, as he glanced down at her ankles, “I’m in love. With her.” He felt ridiculous.

“I get it. You’re embarrassed. I guess I know what you do. I guess you have to. God, I wish I had a penis!” Jack had been angry and exasperated, but now he did not know what to think. “Huh?” She laughed. “None of that Freudian crap. I just wish I could be a man for a while, or me with a man’s penis. I’d love to do it to a woman or to another man. I love it so much I’d like to fuck the whole world, one, two, three at a time. The whole world! Don’t you feel that way sometimes?” “Hell no. You must be a nympho or something.” “Are you kidding? Do you know what a nympho is? It’s a skinny nervous woman who fucks to keep from going crazy. That’s not my problem at all. I’m not frigid; I’m just not tender and shy, like a textbook All-American feminine, that’s all.” “What is your problem, then?” “I just told you. I want everything sometimes. And I’m not going to get everything. Ever.” There was something terribly wistful about her face, and Jack leaned over and kissed her gently, knowing of no other way of telling her he understood. He was about to whisper that he loved her when she broke away from him, tossing her head impatiently. “Don’t. I don’t like to kiss while I’m thinking.” “Then stop thinking.” She laughed and then hiccupped. “Oops.