It's Raining. No, it's Pouring

The pressure change was hell on his back. For several weeks he had convinced himself that taking it easy, drinking lots of fluids, and sleeping on a new Postur-medic mattress had cured him. When the tropical storm came through he could hardly walk, and he figured maybe it was finally time to see a doctor. He would need a new prescription of pain killers, anyway, but he dreaded the inevitable ring around the referrals. He would probably end up at a spine specialist who would like nothing more than to make another Porsche payment by sticking metals poles in his back, or worse, telling him that he was getting older.

The tropical storm, a real named one, was a welcome relief compared to the hurricanes the news folks loved to doom and gloom about. He had never seen a person so happy to be standing in the middle of hundred mile an hour winds telling distressed viewers why it was so stupid to go outside.

Plus they needed the rain. The north of the state had caught fire and filled each morning with a thick haze, smelling faintly like pine wood forests, and causing everyone to drive like an idiot. They also said that there was a risk of the aquifer drying up if the drought kept on too much longer.

He liked the rain, despite the problems with his back, and he liked to sit by the window and listen to the soft pattering of droplets against the roof. When he was having trouble sleeping, the hippy girl next door recommended a nature CD with sounds of rain and thunder. It was garbage. He listened to it for several minutes before throwing it out. It was too synthetic, with birds chirping, the same clip of thunder every few minutes and other crap.

It was really coming down. He felt guilty about ordering pizza and making the driver deal with the downpour, so he tipped him an extra two bucks. He seemed like a nice kid, probably working his way through school and planning on becoming a meteorologist. He should get used to it, then.

When it got late he used both of his arms to lift himself out of the chair by the window. Sitting wasn't so bad, nor was standing, but the transition was a killer. He took two aspirin and got dressed for bed.

With some effort he turned off the light in his room and sat on the side of the bed, planning his move. As he sat there in the dark he listened to the rain and thought about the tin roof when he stayed at his grandparents' house in North Carolina as a boy. During the summer months it would rain every day for half an hour and he would sit and watch the puddles fill up, and hear the cars swish down the road. When the shower was over he'd run outside and take in the clean, fresh, cold smell before the humidity set in, and he would walk along the rows of grape vines in the garden.

Finally he tried lying down in bed, slowly, trying to take the aspirin-dulled pain piecemeal. When he reached the point where he was lying down more than sitting up, a stab of pain shot up his back, and he was down on his back, but not before hitting his head on the headboard. "Damnit," he said, and then he fell asleep, feeling pretty silly.

He snored like a great freight train, which would have earned him a stiff elbow in his side at one point in his life, but tonight he was allowed to dream. He dreamed of canoeing down Crystal River before it turned green, then of fishing, and then of being back at work at the plant and something had gone terribly wrong and he could hardly move, like the air was a thick soup. He would forget all these dreams. He slept soundly until daybreak.

Diagonal shafts of light penetrating the wooden blinds on his window shortly after sunrise, and woke him up. The older he got the earlier he rose. He hadn't slept past ten for probably fifteen years. The rain was still coming in waves, heavy then light and he could hear the morning birds calling out to each other. His head and his back still hurt like hell. All he wanted to do was lie still, close his eyes, and listen to the rain.

The Idealists

Several of the soldiers were sitting, legs outstretched, enjoying the quiet, sunny afternoon when the white Hudson Coupe lumbered up the dirt road and stopped in front of the barn. Two guards stood at the door with machine pistols and watched as the driver, a sergeant, and his passenger, a serious looking older man in a black suit, got out of the great automobile and approached them. No words were exchanged as the older man held up his passport, causing the two door guards to snap to attention. The man in the black suit passed into the open door, leaving his enlisted man behind.

It took several moments for the serious man's eyes to adjust to the dim light inside the barn. He stood, taking in the smell of hay, manure, and livestock, but not fresh. When he could see, on either side of him were a modest number of stalls, and ahead of him, a large room where they were all gathered. The faint flickering light of oil lanterns spilled from the doorway, and he could hear quiet voices.

The room was much larger than he had remembered, with a rough wooden table in the middle. The grinding stone and all of the metal tools had long been stolen, he figured. This has been the workshop, at one time, before the revolution, but he had no memory of being inside of it without the great bay doors opened on either side, it was like a different place.

The firing squad and its captain stood quietly facing the five prisoners across the room, behind them, the general. He turned toward the newcomer and gave a short, friendly smile.

"An uneventful trip, Colonel?" The colonel nodded. "Good. We were just getting everything in order. Go ahead," he said to one of the prisoners. "I have things to attend to."

Two of the prisoners came up to the table, where there was paper and a pencil.

"I'm allowing them to write some last words to their families," the general explained. "I am not an unreasonable man. Even anarchists have mothers, and here is their chance to apologize to them for becoming criminals."

The two men at the table ignored the comment. The larger man whispered a dictation into the ear of the other man, who wrote out the letter. The larger man was a thug, and illiterate, known for his cruelty; the other man, the idealist, had been a scholar at one point. The idealist had been first amongst equals of the rebellion, proud, charismatic, fiery, and wrote the first pamphlets that ignited the countryside into open warfare. His death would leave the farmers and factory workers without an ideology and without a hero.

"I hope you are being true to the author," the general said to the idealist. "It would be a shame to piss this man's last words by filling his letter with empty rhetoric. Your time is over, it would be best to die with some dignity, no?"

When the letter was finished the idealist folded the paper and set it with the other two. He stood straight and looked past the general at the colonel. "Let's get this over with," he said.

"No last words from you? No parting regrets to your family?" the general asked.

"My family is all dead. You remember that, colonel?" The colonel met the stare of the idealist, feeling the deep stab of hatred and returning it ten fold. I have no tears for traitors, he thought. It could have ended differently.

The two prisoners returned to the wall with the other two. They faced the firing squad with nobility. There would be no last shouts of freedom, no last hurrahs for the cause. Their seeds were already planted and their only hope was in martyrdom.

The general took the letters from the table and handed them to the colonel. "Make sure these don't contain any kind of hidden cipher. This movement dies today." Finally he said to the captain, "Go ahead."

"Mark!" yelled the captain, causing the ten rifles of the firing squad to level onto the prisoners. The idealist's eye never left the colonel, the image of his face would be the last things to pass through his retinas.

Seconds passed before the captain gave the final command, unleashing eleven deafening cracks. The four prisoners collapsed, three dead. The idealist was shot through the lungs and couldn't breath, his eyes fought to stay open, but he was still alive. The captain gave a second command, and the rifles ended his struggle. The captain issued a cease command and walked to check each prisoner for life. They were dead.

When he turned to the general, he was collapsed on the floor. His eyes were open, but he was dead. The colonel was gone.

When the colonel passed back through the stalls and toward the door he slid the small revolver back into his pocket, and moved casually but quickly. The two guards at the door saluted as he and his driver got back into the car, and sped off.

"Drive faster," the colonel said to the driver. As they passed over the rough country roads, through the hills and trees of his boyhood home, he came to realize that he had never before taken a life with his own hand. He only hoped that it might have all been for something better.

The Beat Poets

The little coffee shop nestled itself between a health food store and K-Mart. It was dead during the day but at night it picked up run-off from the movie theatre and the casual dining restaurants from further down the strip. I don't know if I'd ever had good Chai but apparently it was good there and I thought it'd make me seem more cultured if I took her there on our date. Some nights they'd have a frizzy haired girl with an acoustic guitar playing covers. Sometimes she'd belt out a top forty bubblegum pop song with an ironic smile and the coffee shop would go wild, excited to be in on the joke. When we showed up they were having an open mic poetry night and Sonny was up on stage with his bass, badumba-ing a beat and nodding along with feeling.

I looked around for a spot to sit, the place was packed. On the overlarge, overstuffed couches sat groups of black-clad friends, nodding along with feeling, shaking their heads at the terrible truth-of-it-all, smiling at the images that invoked childhood memories, or talking politics, religion, music, art, life, death and ignoring the drama playing out ten feet from their eyes. A kid with a notebook sitting at one of the tiny tables got up and left, leaving half a tepid glass of brown liquid and a five-spot on the table. We sat down and my date smiled at me, I gave her a look like, "This alright?" and she nodded. The waitress came up and with a single move swiped up the cash and the cup and looked at us. I said, "How about some Chai?" and my date nodded. The waitress was off as quickly as she came, weaving through the crowd of people, ignoring the passing requests of the other customers as she retreated behind the counter.

We tried talking by leaning over the tiny table, faces only a foot from eachother, not wanting to shout but pretty much unable to hear otherwise. Someone had cranked up the speakers to get over the voices of the crowd, and the crowd adjusted for the speakers, and the badumba-dumba of the bass could always be heard coming from those low tones, drowning everything else out.

The waitress came back carrying two ceramic bowls with handles, hot and aromatic, the tops covered with whipped cream and cinnamon. People clapped for the girl on stage when she was done and they'd take a little break. Sonny came over to us a kneeled beside the table.

"Hey, folks," he said. He held out his hand. "Hi, I'm Sonny."

"Sam," she said, sliding her hand from beneath the table and gently into his.

"What do you guys think of this?" he asked.

"It's fun," she said. "You play here often?"

"Sometimes. It's not a bad way to make fifty bucks."

"No, I guess not," she said.

"Or maybe I should say, 'sometimes it's not a bad way to make fifty bucks.' It gets a little stuffy in here some nights."

"Yeah it seems pretty busy."

"No, I mean the poetry," he said, giving his might-be-a-joke look. "You hear that last one? Sheesh. It'll get better, tonight. That I promise."

"Sounds great," Sam said, detecting more meaning from what he said but not quite sure what.

"I'll talk you you guys later, this next hep-cat is going to make me work for it."

The next poet was a tall, lanky kid with messy dyed black hair. He faced toward the wall, showing everyone his back, and started reciting as Sonny plucked away at his bass. He mumbled in a monotone voice, occasionally shouting a word or two as his back tensed up, and relaxing back into the mumble.

A few minutes into it Sam leaned across the table. "Did he just say, 'My testicles'?"

"Yeah. I think so," I told her over the din.

She leaned back and crumpled her forehead, and nodded.

I was looking for an out and was trying to think of other places we could escape to when the place went quiet, except for the bass and the lanky kid. Every eye went to the door where Tommy Loeder and his gang stood, surveying the room.

"Who's that?" Sam asked.

"That's Tommy Loeder and his droogs," I told her. "The Beat Poets."

"Oh, are they famous?"

"Yeah."

"Are they going to perform?"

"They always do, but not poetry. For them, beat is a verb. Maybe we should get out of here."

Tommy was smoking a cigarette. He took a long drag and blew it disdainfully into the air. He walked slowly through the room, looking at every person, causing everyone to flinch. The other three in his gang stood at the door, blocking the only means of escape.

When he came by our table, Sam, who wasn't impressed, couldn't help herself. "You can't smoke in here," she said. "I have a right to clean air."

He looked at her, and then he looked at me, like, "You have anything to do with this, buddy?" I turned from his ice cold pale blue gaze, letting him know, "Man, I barely even know her." He took the cigarette from his lips, screwed up his nose, and sucked loudly from the back of his sinuses before slowly spitting a long, stretching teardrop of phlegm into the rest of her drink. That shut her up.

Lank up on stage was still going at it, oblivious to the circus taking place behind him. Sonny watched and played without misstep as Tommy got closer to the fated artist. He stood within arms length of Lank and listened to that dull monotone, the imagery empty, structureless, cliche.

"The cat is out of the bag!" Lank punctuated right before Tommy had him by the neck. He slammed the poet to the stage and several people screamed. Stop him! Oh my God! Call the Police!

Sonny kept playing, giving rhythm to the blows, watching it all as it unfolded right in front of him. With one hand Tommy held the kid down, with the other he punished him. He worked over Lank's face to the badumba-dumba-dumba and hit him on the stomach to the bumba-dum-bum. Lank tried fighting off the hold but he was no match to Tommy. Lank's legs curled up, trying to protect his lower part, and Tommy just pushed them away to keep working away at him. No one knew what to do. People kept screaming and yelling, some tried to run out but were stopped by the rest of the Beat Poets at the door. The whole thing took maybe forty-five seconds before Tommy stopped, leaving Lank gasping for air, his nose bloody, and groaning. Tommy whispered something into Lank's ear and he quieted down. Then Tommy got up, straightened his jacket, and walked out, cool and uncaring as ever.

The cops came and got details from everyone, but Lank, barely able to stand, begged them not to press charges. He said he wouldn't testify. He told the cops he was going home, and that they can leave him alone. Fine, the chief cop said, and we were all free to go.

When I took Sam home we stood awkwardly at her front door. There would be no kiss because she hated me. We didn't even pretend to make plans to call each other, and I left. She wasn't really my type, anyway.

Why?

I'm going to try the story-a-day thing for a while. This'll be an out for a lot of ideas that don't really stand on their own. This isn't "serious" work so I'm going to let it go free and sloppy, no editing. We'll see how it goes.