The Rain Job

The rain in Los Angeles doesn't wash anything clean. It just makes the grime slicker.

Jack Kowalski sat in his apartment on East First Street and watched the rain hit the fire escape. It was 1947, and the rain was the same rain that had been falling on the docks for three days. The docks were where he'd worked for twelve years, until the union dissolved and the men signed individual contracts and Jack signed nothing.

Danny Donnelly had signed. Danny was thirty-four, Irish-American, the union's local leader. He'd spent twenty years building that union from a handful of longshoremen into something that could make the shipping companies blink. But the companies had blinked back. They'd made deals with the city, with the governor, with men whose names Jack had only heard on the radio. And now Danny was sitting in a lawyer's office in Century City, signing papers that would dissolve everything Danny had built.

The settlement agreement sat on Jack's kitchen table. Danny had left it there the night before—Danny, who had come to Jack's apartment at midnight, who had poured two fingers of whiskey and sat in the dark and said, "I'm sorry, Jack. I don't have a choice."

Jack read the agreement at 3 AM. He read it twice. Then he stood up, walked to the kitchen sink, filled a whiskey bottle halfway, and poured the agreement into it. The paper dissolved into pulp, into ink and fiber and the ghost of a contract.

He picked up a wrench from the counter—the same wrench he used to fix the radiator in winter—and went to Danny's office the next morning. He found the original agreement on Danny's desk, the one with the city seal, and he smashed the wrench into the wax impression until it was unrecognizable.

Then he turned to Danny, who had appeared in the doorway, and said, "You forgot why we stood here."

Danny's face went through three expressions in three seconds: anger, fear, and something that might have been shame. "Jack, I—"

"Don't," Jack said. "Just don't."

He was fired that afternoon. Not fired—terminated. Terminated with prejudice, which meant he'd never work the docks again. Jack packed a bag that night and left Los Angeles. He drove north in his Ford, through the Central Valley, through fog that felt like the rain, through towns with names he couldn't pronounce.

Three years passed.

Danny stayed in Los Angeles. He married a woman his lawyer's wife introduced him to. They lived in a house in Pacifica with a view of the ocean that Danny never looked at. He kept Jack's wrench on his desk. He never used it for anything.

On a Tuesday in November 1950, Danny read a small item in the Los Angeles Times. A dock accident in Long Beach. A worker killed by a falling container. The worker's name was Jack Kowalski. He had been working at a small terminal on the east side, the kind of place that didn't have safety railings or proper lighting. He had driven north from somewhere, found work, and died doing it.

Danny walked to his office window. He looked out at Los Angeles in the rain. He lit a cigarette. The smoke rose like a question mark against the glass.