Gutters chugged the clown wash of rainbows toward the bottomless heart of the suburbs as black rain pelted down. Inside one cookie-cutter home, Paladin was huffing. Shattered splinters of the bed he’d hoped to find his wife in lay before his gnarled, sweating hands. But Paladin could still see the stickers that had graced its backside as if they were tattooed behind his lids in neon.

EVERY TIME YOU KISS YOUR WIFE, YER SUCKING MY DICK.

And there, under the buzzing sign in his skull, was Diana, spread wide for any homeside trucker making the dirty-rounds while Paladin was knuckle fighting just to bring home a little extra coin. The mangled bed stared at him with a dead monster’s countenance, jagged teeth still grinning as if its death had not changed a goddamn thing.

He left. Outside, black rain hissed against his sweat, taking the green from his denim shirt and blue from worn jeans, straight into the liquid streets. He marched against the rainbow-splash at his feet until the penny engine of a pale cab came into earshot. It stopped before him.  

Paladin took the backseat. Shivering, he noticed the gut above his beltline, the result of two tired months of long hauls through hellacious spaghetti-junctions with the delicate cargo of butterfly mojo fluttering in the hold. Normally, he’d lose weight in lot fights, but his rep preceded him now. Few were willing to test their knuckles and jaws except for newbies and drunks. Neither of them workout enough to lose the burgers, pies, and oatmeal he’d devoured. Maybe that was why Diana strayed. He wasn’t the same specimen.

“Howdy, boss,” said the hack as they pulled out. “Destination?” A mild accent lilted the hack’s words.

The familiar distortion and clarity of black rain on a windshield wiped by mantis blades soothed Paladin some. “Anywhere but the goddamn suburbs.”

The hack laughed. “Ok, boss, you got it.”

They weren’t moving. Not like his truck cab. Here, the world rushed by, warping at the sides, everything running away from him. Soon, gauzy downtown lights twinkled like dying stars lining the street. He blinked and a neon sticker dropped with his eyeskin.

IF YOU RIDE MY ASS, YOU BETTER BE PULLING MY HAIR.

“Not from around here, are you?” said the hack, husky voice worse than the worst CB Nic Fitters. French.

Paladin tore at his thumbnail and focused on the hazy stars running each side of the cab. “Not anymore.”

“Better let you in on a secret, boss. This city changes when it rains.”

“Really?” Paladin folded his hands and prepared to be regaled with the history of his hometown from a hack philosopher. “You mean like… magic?”  

The hack chuckled. “Pretty romantic term for black rain.” He pulled a hard right and crossed the steel road of the Kraken North Bridge, heading downtown. “Some things are so dirty they only come out in storms.” He let the thought hang Paladin in suspense. “Man can get up to anything in nights like this. Black rain washes it all away. Catch my drift?”

Paladin nodded. Fucking hacks. Cruise one gutter their whole life and they think they have the secret code of the streets. Paladin had rolled through a dozen urban nightmares in black rain and red skies. Fought his way through Mexican wrestler territories and kept his hands to himself across shade districts infested with Pavement Princesses, all the while a teardrop sun burned blood orange on the horizon, pointing home to Diana.

He swallowed the guck between his teeth. Home? That’s how he thought of her. A safe place to crash where the vileness he drove through could not touch. A sanctuary.

“Gallery Row,” said the hack, whose ID said Welch D’arton. “See something you like and I’ll stop.”

Scattered under awnings, white umbrellas and invisible slickers, were different creatures than the Lot Lizards hovering over hours-old coffee at the stops, those worn-out moms looking to ruin someone else’s marriage just because they were bored of drinking themselves to sleep after their soaps. Gallery Row was different. Some were all lips and ass. Others built like needles. Others were a day late for the grave. None built like Diana.

Phantom pain of splintering wood filled his ragged hands. The gallery drifted by, but he made no sound. “So, these aren’t your type,” said Welch. “This street meat coming up, though, is special. Do whatever you want with them. Fuck ‘em, bite ‘em, strangle, slap, beat. Snuffing costs extra, though.”

Shut up, he thought to himself, and then blinked:

MY OTHER RIDE IS YOUR GIRLFRIEND

He opened his eyes on the last woman. She was a deep shadow with a bone-white knee below a plain beige business skirt, pink blouse stained with rain all the way down to her purple pumps. Arms folded under small, pert breasts, back against the luminescent window of an Electric Bug outlet, her face unseen. Rain ran over her like everything else, but her dull colours remained. Normal. She looked normal.

“Here.” He handed Welch his fare. “Keep the change.”

“Thanks, boss,” Welch said through jaundiced teeth. “Don’t forget, black rain cleans everything. Enjoy her until she drips.”

Welch’s smile demanded to be drilled, but Paladin stayed frosty and stepped out, drenched clothes stuck like gum against his hairy skin. The cab hissed past a rainbow gutter. “Good evening.”

 “If you like black rain. Or white clothes.” Her face emerged from the dark. Grey eyes, thin red lips below chubby cheeks, and a button nose.

Paladin rubbed his bristled head. “About the only time white clothes don’t look dirty is in black rain.”

A gentle smile. “A ‘glass half-full’ man? Neat. So, what brings you down to the sharp end of the gallery?”

He chewed a nail. “I can’t go home.” Not to that house. Paladin caressed his palm with his serrated nails. “I’m sorry. Not sure what else to do.” 

Warmth lit his cheek as she pressed her small, white palm against his face, skin like gentle steam. “As long as it’s raining,” she said, “I could keep you company. Take you to my place. And you could take me apart.”

“You a raingel, then? Once the rain stops, you dissolve like dew under sunrise?” Raingels were whores who’d come under the spell of a pimp with some serious mojo. Transmuted into phantom pleasure dolls that only surfaced when it rained. No one knows where they went when the sky was blue, and they never told. Some of the rough riders spoke of them as punching bags bliss, slaves to savage pleasures.

Her hand slid off his cheek. “Maybe you better start with the glamour tricks down the row.”        

“Why did you do it?”

“No one asks to become a raingel, Pal.”

“I mean a… lady of the night.”

She gave him a sarcastically condescending face. “Quiz show’s over. The nice lady of the night needs to work.”

He pulled out a stack of dry green, stray drops stealing their colour. “Just got paid. How about dinner and we keep playing, Miss… sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

“Nor will you,” she said, snatching three twenties before they could turn snow white. She ran her hair over her ears. “But you can call me Epiphany.”

***

He’d planted elbows in worse greasy spoons.

The Rose Moon Café’s clientele had hidden their colour from the rain, so Paladin witnessed a cavalcade of loud pink kimonos on transsexual card players, the swirly green and orange suits of pretend gangsters, and the usual ring-arounds of brown jackets/red noses that kept these places from ever closing. Grease caked the windows and the air swam with the briny cadence of a thousand tuna melts, oceans of burnt coffee, and crinkles of asses sliding across worn, pink vinyl seats.

Paladin sipped black coffee while she devoured her steak and eggs, one eye always on the rain. “Nice ring,” Epiphany said. “She doesn’t like rough trade?”

He picked at his jagged thumbnail. “I’m not looking for that.”

“Scars on your knuckle say otherwise.”

“I’ve never hit a woman. Ever.”

“Of course not, Pal,” she said, forking another piece of meat into her small mouth. “So what do you want to know? What it feels like when they’re choking me? When do I scream? Stuff like that?”

“What makes them cheat?”

Worried eyes squinted. “My boys don’t make with much chit chat.”

He tore off more nail and sticker guck. “You must have an idea why they seek you out. Why they don’t stay faithful. Not just the sickos. But before, when you were just, you know…”

Epiphany sighed. “So. She cheated on you. Or you think she did.”

He used the jagged and torn off nail to clean the guck from his canines. “I know.”

“Caught her red handed?”

He flicked the nail against the window where it stuck like a scar. “Found a dirty notch.”

“Caught her doing anal?”

He shut his eyes.

WINE ME, DINE ME, 69 ME!

“No,” he said. “Trucker lingo. Some operators take advantage when their brothers are hauling. Make a point to stop by the old homestead, visit the wife, friend from out of town, in for one night only.”

“Ah,” she said, puncturing her yoke with a home fry.

“When they’re done, they slap a bumper sticker behind the headboard. Another dirty notch on their belt.” He chewed off more gucky nail, tasting flesh. “Takes an act of God to get them off.”

“How many notches did she have?”

He flexed out all five fingers on both hands.

“Golly.”

“I was gone two months.” He held the coffee, but the warmth was gone, his breath rippling the black water. “Pretty sure it was me who caused it. Gone so long, bent out of shape from places like this.” He patted his gut. “She used to be normal, stable.”

“Who says?” Epiphany shot him the look of a school teacher challenging a student’s bad answer. “Sorry to burst your bubble, but she probably always did it. You just found out now.”

He polished off the coffee. “First time I ever found the dirty notches.”        

“Pal, some men leave no stickers.” A blister popped in his gut. When he brought the cup down she held his hand with her steam touch. The bill came and he paid it, the rain hard and heavy, the ground slick with colour. “So,” she said, caressing his sore hand, “still interested in some rumble tumble?”

“No,” he said, pulling his hand free.

She licked ketchup from her dull, white teeth. “Look, Pal. She crossed the line. So can you. All is fair in love and war and she fired the first shot. Come on, isn’t that why you really stopped that cab when you saw me?”

He stared at the grounds in his otherwise empty cup. “I can walk you home.” He did not want to go back.

Epiphany sighed. “The last of the true gentlemen. What a treat.” They left and she gave him her arm, rain running through her like massaging hands, making every curve darkly visible. The silence was awkward and it got his mind tangled with where he’d be going soon. “Why did you become an escort?”

She patted his arm. “Better, Pal. But we prefer whores.”

“Were you bored of stability, too?”

She looked up. “Clouds are thinning. I’ll be gone soon.”

“No they aren’t.”

She smiled brightly. “Fine. I was a good girl a long, long time. Shy and mousey. But I was too practical to be a slut. Thought I’d make some green while being bad. And the more green I got, the badder I was. The math is really simple with me.”

“Was dying part of the equation?” He’d heard bar room rumour about how a gal working the streets could become a raingel. A pimp gets some serious mojo, kills her when it rains, and takes her name from her. Basically a slave until the pimp says her name again. And if he died without saying it, well, Paladin was positive he’d seen those sad phantasms of worn-out beauty roaming the rainy highways and byways until whatever day of reckoning awaited in the future.

She walked faster, heels puncturing the wet ground like shots from a Derringer. “My place is just down here,” she said as they approached a dark, dirty-white stairwell.

 “Sorry,” he said as she led him down. “I hope you get your name back.” He turned, but her arm tugged him.

“Come inside.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.” Her hand ran up his cheek and tangled in his hair. “You’re free, Pal. Free of noble illusions. Now taste that freedom.” She kissed him rich, wet and deep, a sweet blend of ketchup and gristle and he wanted seconds, thirds. She pulled away. He descended one step.

Lightening surged through his body. Muscles flared and the ground ran up to smack his skull. A familiar rasp from the dark.

“Make a peep, boss, and you get another thousand volts.” Sparks spit off the curly wires in Paladin’s wet chest leading to the hissing taser in Welch’s right hand. He was dragged. The sky gave way to a stucco ceiling. Something dug in his pocket, then the thick green was in Welch’s right hand.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, you should have seen this coming, they think you’re a hick moron trucker, easy prey, a gullible shit, and you are—

Epiphany’s voice cut him. “Don’t forget the ring.”

Welch grabbed his left hand and Paladin griped Welch’s throat with the right, squeezing jagged nails into his flesh. Lightening without thunder hissed through him. Blue flames crackled against the dark. Diana, legs spread, sucked the diamond on her finger as faceless operators slapped stickers on her ass, her breasts, her face, her body a mummified Dirty Notch,

BEEN THERE, FUCKED THAT; A MAN IS AS OLD AS HIS WOMAN FEELS; ALL YOU NEED IS A SICK MIND AND A HEALTHY BODY; WHORE AIN’T NOTHING BUT WIFE MISPELLED—

White light flashed across his eyes as he stood, but the searing pain was gone, his right hand still locked deep on Welch’s neck. Paladin drilled him with an awkward haymaker. Welch and the taser hit an orange couch at mach speed. Paladin wiped sweat from his eyes, gasped—

Volts blistered through him again. Diana’s sticker body caught fire in his head as his knees met concrete. Then, he was staring sideways at Epiphany’s purple pumps. The wire from the darts in his chest led to the taser in her hand. “Sorry, Pal.” Every muscle twitched in agony. For the second time he’d walked right into an illusion. “Don’t make me—”

“Do it.” he said, coughing. “Do it!”

Pain thrummed through each cell and he saw her burn, smouldering in a dirty notch pyre, flames licking the walls of his perfect hollow house, his perfect hollow wife, white flames forked and consumed every white day dream and illusion housed in a place that had never been a home in blood red smoke. He shook on the floor in acrid darkness, tongue tasting like sizzling copper.

A kick shoved him on his back. “Be good.” Hot nails dug into his fisted ring hand, trying to unlock it. “Christ, your fingers made of iron?” The world behind his lid collapsed into smoke and ash.  Eyes sore, he let his hand open slightly. She dove in with both hands. The taser dropped and he yanked out the darts. “Shit!” Epiphany said and reached for the taser while Paladin got on rubber legs. She tore off the front guard and current ran between two sizzling prongs. “Don’t move.”

He raised his shaking hands. “Wait. I’ll give it to you.” He stumbled over to Welch, whose shiner was already turning yellow.

“Wait, don’t! He—”

Paladin yanked Welch up by his worn leather jacket. Under his collar he saw a chain necklace. Pulling it out, a red-eyed talisman lay across Welch’s chest. Paladin slapped him once. Epiphany stood still as tears welled in her pimp’s waking eyes. He stared daggers at her as his mouth moved, but Paladin gripped the chain and it sunk an inch into Welch’s bleeding neck. “Not so fast. You get one chance to save your life. Say Epiphany’s real name, free her.”

“Pal,” she said, raising the taser, “the rain—”

Outside, the patter thinned.

Welch choke-chuckled, snot running over Paladin’s swollen hands and over the talisman’s eye but stopped as he was yanked face to face with Paladin’s growling face. “I’ve torn harder men apart for less, hack. Say her name. Get funny and say the kill word, you swallow your jaw. Got it, boss?”

Welch’s face bunched up in impotent rage until Paladin dropped him, fist still locked on the chain. Welch coughed yellow and red, gasping as the patter of rain became taps on the sidewalk. His red lip parted. “Jane Green.”

Bullet-quick, Paladin’s right cross snapped Welch’s jaw. The chain snapped and the pimp hit the floor and crumpled. The talisman swung under Paladin’s hand as the shimmer of rain stopped. The moon sparkled across the skin of the wet white streets as colour returned to the world.

 “Pal.” The soft whisper caressed his neck. She was hazy as a dessert sunset. “Thank you.” She handed him the ring.

Paladin shook his head. “Keep it. And thank you. Jane Green.” The talisman warmed and her eyes screamed before she dissipated. “See you next rainfall.” Paladin threw Welch out on the street, talisman in his left hand, and headed back to the rig yard as colour rushed back into the street. Now, at least, he knew who she was fucking.

END