DOWN CAME THE RAIN
Mark Budman

The driver’s seat with a hole in the shape of Massachusetts sloped the wrong way, and Len’s 205-pound body kept sliding toward the door with the broken lock. This was the third rented U-Schlep he’d tried. The first one leaked oil and he couldn’t shift the second one’s transmission into reverse. This truck had bald tires, but the forecast didn’t call for rain. So Len took it because it was getting late and he had six hours of driving ahead of him.

Swan Lake from the boom box failed to mask the grunts of the rapidly aging truck, the automotive equivalent of a middle-aged arthritis sufferer. His oldest daughter’s furniture, inexpertly loaded by her current boyfriend, rattled in the back. A spider the size of a penny was weaving its web at the edge of the windshield. Len shifted his bottom back, adjusted his bow-tie over a T-shirt that said, “Engineers do it with precision” and sighed.

Alice drove Len’s brand new Toyota Avalon in front of the U-Schlep, her speakers undoubtedly blasting away while she was screaming along, her face locked in concentration. Occasionally she zoomed ahead, forgetting about her dad, and he had to shout for her attention into a walkie-talkie.

When she was little, they had sung together, “The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout,” and she would cry at “and washed the spider out.” He hadn’t seen her cry for years, except when the previous boyfriend had squashed daddy-long-legs with his fist a year before.

Last week, Len found Alice an apartment to share with two other female students from Boston University Law School. At $733, her monthly share was more than he had counted on, that besides tuition.

“The movers are seven hundred bucks more,” he had told Alice. “I can’t afford them.”

“Baloney, Dad. You’re rich,” she had replied.

“You, little shit... Only lawyers are rich. I should’ve stopped supporting you after your bachelor’s. Why wouldn’t you take a summer job?”

“And what would you do with your money? Spend it yourself? You call this parental love? I call this child abuse. I’ll complain to mommy and you’ll be grounded.”

“What makes you think I am afraid of her?”

She laughed. “A good one, Dad.”

Now, Len watched the spider’s progress out of the corner of his eye. The sunlight caught by the emerging web bled all the colors of the rainbow.

“You’re trespassing, buddy,” Len said to the spider. “I’ll make a citizen’s arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Just look at me! I’m silent. Why couldn’t she choose a respectable profession?” he continued. “What’s wrong with engineering? She could have spent all day in the office checking CNN news on the Net and married a future VP. No, she wants to have a drag race with an ambulance like the rest of the lawyers... Do you have kids, pal?”

A few thousand trees and two ponds later, he said, “Hey, do you know what I call Alice now? I call her Alice Sue. Sue! Got it? And you know what she says? ‘You can laugh all the way to the bank!’”

A dark cloud covered the sun. It looked like rain, maybe even a thunderstorm.

Len saw the Avalon zooming again, tried to pick up the walkie-talkie, but it fell on the floor. He sighed. The Avalon was getting away. Len read somewhere that in primitive societies they used to leave elders behind when the tribe moved on. Thank God, the United States was a civilized country. No parents were ever left behind in a roadside ditch.

Len stepped on the worn gas pedal. The U-Schlep jolted, but spurted ahead. Us truckers, he thought. We rule. We can kick any frigging lawyer’s ass!

The dark cloud grew bigger, awash in lightning.

“Kids,” Len said, wiping sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his T-shirt. “Nothing but trouble.”

The first drops of rain hit the windshield.

© Mark Budman 2005

Mark Budman (writer@stny.rr.com) is the publisher of the acclaimed flash (short-shorts) fiction magazine Vestal Review which can be found at http://www.vestalreview.net. His fiction and poetry have appeared or are scheduled to appear in Mississippi Review, Virginia Quarterly, Iowa Review, Turnrow, Exquisite Corpse, Web Del Sol, McSweeney's, Conversely and elsewhere. Exquisite Corpse nominated him for the XXVI Pushcart Prize.

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