Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [2]
Billy confesses that he has fallen in love with Jack, and asks Jack for reciprocal words. Jack can’t bring himself to say them or to give his friend one kiss. What happens next will chill the reader to the bone and has such a spritual impact on Jack that it puts him on a new road.
The next section of the novel takes place from 1956 to 1960 and details Jack’s improbable but wholly believable transformation. Because Carpenter is a realist, he knows that the damage done to Jack at his very core can never truly be healed. So we leave Jack Levitt broken but not defeated, drinking a wealthy man’s fine whiskey. It is an oddly optimistic ending, a gift from a writer who saw the beauty in the here and now. Jack has the day and a future. It is all any of us can hope for.
Hard Rain Falling tells a ripping good story, but it is above all else a novel of ideas. It falls squarely in the tradition of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Norman Mailer’s An American can Dream, books that prefigured the counterculture movement in their challenge to conformity and the system. As in all good literature, it attempts to answer the question of why we’re here and does so in a provocative way. It’s the kind of novel that can and should be read many times over. It sent me back to my desk, jacked up on ambition.
Writers write for various reasons: money, fame, pleasure, posterity. Don Carpenter did not receive international acclaim or a great deal of wealth in his lifetime. Maybe he wanted it; it’s not for me to say. I like to think that he was in the posterity camp. Certainly his work bears that out.
“I’m an atheist,” said Carpenter, in a 1975 interview. “I don’t see any moral superstructure to the universe at all. I consider my work optimistic in that the people, during the period I’m writing about them, are experiencing intense emotion. It is my belief that this is all there is to it. There is nothing beyond this.”
And yet, he found a piece of immortality with this book.
—GEORGE PELECANOS
Hard Rain Falling
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY WIFE
AND TO BOB MILLER
“They can kill you, but they can’t eat you.”—FOLK BELIEF
PROLOGUE
Incidents in Eastern Oregon
1929–1936
Three Indians were standing out in front of the post office that hot summer morning when the motorcycle blazed down Walnut Street and caused Mel Weatherwax to back his pickup truck over the cowboy who was loading sacks of lime. The man and woman on the motorcycle probably didn’t even see the accident they had caused, they went by so fast. Both of them were wearing heavy-rimmed goggles, and all Mel saw was the red motorcycle, the goggles, and two heads of hair, black for him and blond for her. But everybody forgot about them; the cowboy was badly hurt, lying there in the reddish dust cursing, his face gone white from pain. The Indians stayed up on the board sidewalk and watched while Mel Weatherwax and one of his hands carried the hurt cowboy into the shade of the alley beside the store.
The doctor got there after a while and then he started cursing, too, as he sat on his knees and probed the cowboy’s body with his fingers. Quite a few people were standing around, now, watching the doctor, and some women among them, but that didn’t stop his cursing. It turned out there were some broken ribs, and moving the cowboy had probably rammed the broken ends through his lungs. He died less than an hour later, still lying in the alley, and by this time the sun had moved enough so he was out exposed to the heat again. One of the town women was standing over him with a parasol trying to shade him, but she was so busy talking to a friend that the parasol got waved around, and didn’t do the cowboy much good. He had already died some time before the woman noticed it, and then she gave a little scream and jumped back and went off down the street looking mortified.
There was still a crowd around Mel Weatherwax after the body was hauled off and he was telling again what