Dennis Lehane - Prayers For Rain

It’s this way,” my son says, and takes my hand, tugs at me as we walk out of the city. Clarence trots beside us, chugging, panting softly. It’s just before sunrise, and the city is a deep, metallic blue. We step off a curb, my son’s hand in mine, and the world turns red and fills with mist.

We are in the cranberry bog, and for a moment-aware that I’m dreaming-I know that it’s impossible to step off a curb downtown and end up in Plymouth, but then I think, It’s a dream, and these things happen in dreams. You don’t have a son, yet he’s here, tugging your hand, and Clarence is dead, yet he’s not.

So I go with it. The morning fog is dense and white, and Clarence barks from somewhere ahead of us, lost to the fog as my son and I step off the soft embankment and onto the wooden cross. Our footsteps echo off the planks as we walk through the thick white, and I can see the outline of the equipment shed gradually take on definition as each step leads us toward it.

Clarence barks again, but we’ve lost him in the fog.

My son says, “It should be loud.”

“ What?”

“It’s big,” he says. “Four plus two plus eight equals fourteen.”

“ It does.”

Our steps should be bringing us closer to the equipment shed, but they don’t. It sits twenty yards away in the mist, and we walk quickly, yet it remains in the distance.

“Fourteen is heavy,” my son says. “It’s loud. You’d hear it. Especially out here.”

“ Yeah.”

“You’d hear it. So why didn’t you?”

“ I don’t know.”

My son hands me a map book. It’s open to this place, a dot of a cranberry bog surrounded by forest on all sides except the one I’d driven up through.

I drop the map into the fog. I understand something, but then I forget immediately what it is.

My son says, “I like dental floss. I like the feel of it when you slide it between your teeth.”

“That’s good,” I tell him as I feel a rumble on the planks ahead of us. It’s moving fast through the fog, approaching. “You’ll have fine teeth.”

“He can’t talk with his tongue cut out,” he says.

“No,” I agree. “That would be hard.”

The rumbling grows louder. The shed is swallowed by the white fog. I can’t see the planks under my feet. I can’t see my feet.

“ She said ‘they.’”

“ Who?”

He shakes his head at me. “Not ‘him,’ but ‘they.’”

“ Right. Sure.”

“Mom’s not in the shed, is she?”

“No. Mom’s too smart for that.”

I squint at the fog as it engulfs us. I want to see what’s rumbling.

“Fourteen,” my son says, and when I look back down at him, Scott Pearse’s head sits atop his small body. He leers up at me in the mist. “Fourteen should be awfully loud, you dumb shit.”

The rumble is close now, almost upon me, and I squint into the fog and see a dark shape as it vaults airborne, arms outstretched, streaking through the cotton-candy fog toward me.

“I’m smarter than you,” the Scott Pearse/my son thing says.

And a snarling face bursts through the fog at a hundred miles an hour-snarling and smiling and gasping, teeth bared.

It’s Karen Nichols’s face, and then it’s Angie’s attached to Vanessa Moore’s naked body, and then it’s Siobhan with dead skin and dead eyes, and finally it’s Clarence, and he hits me in the chest with all four paws and knocks me onto my back, and I should land on the planks of wood, but they’re gone, and I fall into the fog, start to suffocate in it.

I sat up in bed.

“Go back to sleep,” Angie mumbled, her face pressed into the pillow.

“Pearse didn’t drive to the cranberry bog,” I said.

“He didn’t drive,” she said into the pillow. “’Kay.”

“He walked,” I said. “From his house.”

“Still dreaming,” she said.

“No. I’m up now.”

She raised her head slightly off the pillow, looked up at me through blurry eyes. “Can it wait till morning?”

“Sure.”

She plopped back to the pillow, closed her eyes.

“He has a house,” I said softly to the night, “in Plymouth.”

“We’re driving to Plymouth,” Angie said as we turned onto Route 3 at the Braintree split, “because your son spoke to you in a dream?”

“Well, he’s not my son. I mean, in the dream he is, but in the dream Clarence is alive, and we both know Clarence is dead, and besides, you can’t step off a curb downtown and end up in Plymouth, and even if you could-”

“Enough.” She held up a hand. “I get it. So this kid who’s your son but not your son, he babbled on about four plus two plus eight equaling fourteen and-”

“He didn’t babble ,” I said.

“-this told you what again?”

“Four-two-eight,” I said. “The Shelby engine.”

“Oh, dear Jesus!” she shrieked. “We’re back to the friggin’ car? It’s a car , Patrick. Do you get that part? It can’t kiss you, cook for you, tuck you in, or hold your hand.”

“Yes, Sister Angela the Grounded. I understand that. A four-two-eight engine was the most powerful engine of its time. It could blow anything else off the road, and-”

“I don’t see what-”

“- and it makes one hell of a lot of noise when you turn it over. You think this Porsche rumbles? The four-two-eight sounds like a bomb by comparison.”

She banged the heels of her palms off my dashboard. “So?”

“So,” I said, “did you hear anything in the cranberry bog that night that sounded like an engine? A really goddamned big engine? Come on. I looked at the map before we followed Lovell. There was one way in-ours. The nearest access road on Pearse’s side was two full miles through woods.”

“So he walked it.”

“In the dark?”

“Sure.”

“Why?” I said. “He couldn’t have guessed we’d be tailing Lovell at that point. Why not just be parked in the clearing where we were? And even if he was suspicious, there was an access road four hundred feet to the east. So why’d he go north?”

“Because he liked the walk? I don’t know.”

“Because he lives there.”

She propped her bare feet up on the dash, slapped a palm over her forehead and eyes. “This is the dumbest hunch you’ve ever had.”

“Sure,” I said. “Bitch. That helps.”

“And you’ve had some monumentally dumb hunches.”

“Would you prefer wine or beer with your crow?”

She buried her head between her knees. “If you’re wrong, screw the crow, you’ll be eating shit till the millennium.”

“Thank God it’s approaching fast,” I said.

A map took up most of the east wall in the Plymouth Tax Assessor’s Office. The clerk behind the counter, far from being the dweeby, bespectacled, balding type one would expect to meet in a tax assessor’s office, was tall, well built, blond, and judging by Angie’s furtive glances at him, something of a male babe.

Himbos, I swear. There ought to be a law that keeps them from ever leaving the beach.

It took me a few minutes to zero in on the bog we’d followed Lovell to. Plymouth is absolutely rotten with cranberry bogs. Bad news if for some reason you don’t dig the smell of cranberries. Good news if you cultivate them.

By the time I found the correct bog, I’d counted four separate times I’d caught Himbo the Tax Stud checking out the places where the frays of Angie’s cutoff jeans exposed more than merely the backs of her upper thighs.

“Prick,” I said under my breath.

“What?” Angie said.

“I said, ‘Look.’” I pointed at the map. Due north of the center of the bog, about a quarter of a mile, I estimated, sat something marked PARCEL #865.