Rain
The bleakness of a persistent rainfall is situated as imagery with ominous undertones foreshadowing something very dark on the horizon. The rain imagery begins slowly in Chapter Forty-Five and proceeds to relentlessly build as the tension is dialed up to ten by the time the chapter ends with the foreshadowing coming to realization:
“I looked out the window to the left of my desk and noticed for the first time that it was raining…I hung the phone up, knowing I had just crossed one of those lines you hope to never see...Outside, the rain was now coming down hard off the roof. I had no gutter in the back and it was coming down in a translucent sheet that blurred the lights out there. Nothing but rain this year, I thought. Nothing but rain...I opened the door. Mary Windsor was standing there, her hair wet from the rain…She raised her hand. I looked down to see the metal glint of the gun in it just as she fired.”
Dialing Up to Eleven
Chapter Forty-Six picks up right where the previous chapter leaves off. The volume of the tension is dialed to a point where it can’t be increased any more. It is still wet and dark outside, but just inside the doorway, all is brightness and solidity:
“The sound was loud and the flash as bright as a camera’s. The impact of the bullet tearing into me was like what I imagine a kick from a horse would feel like. In a split second I went from standing still to moving backwards. I hit the wood floor hard and was propelled into the wall next to the living room fireplace. I tried to reach both hands to the hole in my gut but my right hand was hung up in the pocket of my jacket.”
Women Behind Bars
Well before the narrator describes the rain which washes a girl with a gun to his doorway, he reveals a perhaps surprising soft spot for the plight of women behind bars. Will his experience with Mary Windsor harden this soft spot? No spoilers here, but it would represent a huge leap:
“There was something pitiful about a woman in jail. I had found that almost all of the time, their crimes could be traced back to men. Men who took advantage of them, abused them, deserted them, hurt them. This is not to say they were not responsible for their actions...There were predators among the female ranks that easily rivaled those among the males. But, even still, the women I saw in jail seemed so different from the men in the other tower. The men still lived by wiles and strength. The women had nothing left by the time they locked the door on them.”
The Law
It is not just the misogynistic dimension of crime that the narrator pontificates upon. He is also willing to share a disdain for the system which provides his livelihood. Nothing new to what is asserted, but it is refreshing to hear it admitted to by a member of the legal brotherhood for a change:
“There was nothing about the law that I cherished anymore. The law school notions about the virtue of the adversarial system, of the system’s checks and balances, of the search for truth, had long since eroded like the faces of statues from other civilizations. The law was not about truth. It was about negotiation, amelioration, manipulation. I didn’t deal in guilt and innocence, because everybody was guilty.”
