Because the Rain Read Online Free

job, he said. The second week, Goetzler bought an idiot strap at the PX, but the lenses still fogged and he saw Saigon as if through a wet window. He spent his whole tour trying to see correctly, discern the true distances, though it didn’t matter because Goetzler and the war became instant friends.
    Camille Pajak couldn’t get inside his head over here. He loved Vietnam for that alone. There would be no more walks along Belmont Harbor after lectures at DePaul, the lake waves white from the sun, himself tortured by her silence. He didn’t care about her great admiration for Emily Dickinson. He was done thinking about her eyes, gray like pond ice, her slender hips, her 36Cs tight inside a sweater, the way her brown hair unraveled in the lake wind when she told him they were the very best of friends. He burned the letters she’d written him in Officer Candidate School about the sparrows in Lincoln Park on the first day of autumn. He’d read them after a day’s training, hiding in the dark latrine while the fifty men snored from metal bunks. She sprayed the stationery with Chanel and sent two a week. The cadre sergeants thought it was his cousin being nice. What could you do with a woman, Goetzler? But he sat upon the toilet stool and held the paper to his face, knowing her hand touched them. He imagined Paris wet and long nights of lovemaking above rue Cardinal Lemoine where they joined like erotic sculptures while the rain smeared streetlight across the apartment windows. The letters were signed “Always, C,” instead of Camille, and he pretended it was a gesture when he knew it was only an opportunity for her to be literary because after graduation she took a job as a legal secretary for Brady, Lunt, and O’Connor.
    He was an MP officer now. They said nothing about his small fingers, thick glasses, or how his body would look better on a woman. It was illegal. He bought a nickel-plated Colt .45 with a tricked trigger, the pull lighter than flicking a Zippo. He wore a green cravat under his starched fatigues and smoked a Dunhill pipe filled with Burnham tobacco from Hong Kong. He sported a gold Rolex date timer. For five dollars a week, a lispy Vietnamese kid spit-shined his boots, buffed his MP helmet liner with paste wax, and bleached his white gloves in a bucket. Colonels slapped his back and told him he was the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
    Stay squared away, they said, and you own the glory road.
    Already, he’d collared a major for beating up a bar girl on Le Loi Street, a square-jawed colonel on Westmoreland’s staff who welted her small cheeks with his West Point ring. He pinched a fat lieutenant colonel for selling Johnnie Walker Red from the officers clubs to the bar manager at the Rex Hotel. He escorted the men to Long Binh Jail, cuffed and wide-eyed, their rank meaning nothing.
    Mostly, he wanted Camille Pajak to see the girls flock him. Knock him down where he stood. The wispy daughters of South Vietnamese army majors, even the mouthy hookers who claimed their man was a master sergeant in supply, the biggest shot in I Corps, and he was returning next week to take them back to Topeka. New shoes every month and a PX card of their very own. They got naked for a mess hall apple and never pretended to cry about the fate of Virginia Woolf. She put stones in her pockets to drown herself, Camille once said. Stones in her pockets.
    *   *   *
    That night, after the retirement buffet, Goetzler watched Annie do her lipstick without a mirror. She sat in his chair, her small knees joined and tilted, looking out the high-rise window across Lincoln Park and the gray lake. The money envelope stuck from her Coach bag, six hundred dollars for two hours. He drank his scotch, Laphroaig twelve-year-old, and the whiskey bit over the ice. He could afford this once a week until he was seventy.
    Goetzler first saw her on the Web site www.chicagoasian.com. Annie’s scanned photo was fuzzy, taken by a hotel room door.