After the Rain (21 page)

Nina needed the walk
back to the bar to get herself back under control and stop swearing. Goddamn marriage like a goddamn broken jukebox—get every goddamn song in the box at once.

All of them variations on him always trying to lord it over me.

At moments like this she had to take the time to center herself back in her job. She always used the same image: a room full of Kits—Kit at two, at three, at four, and five. A couple dozen Kits. That’s what that day-care center in New Jersey was like the night of 9/11. She wasn’t positive the story was for real, but it had gone around the teams so regularly it had acquired the force of truth. According to the story the staff became so distracted with shock that nobody really told the kids why most of their parents wouldn’t be coming home from the Towers.

She saw those kids waiting, caged in the seconds and minutes and hours, until slowly they started to cry. Maybe one of those kids would have taken it upon herself to go beyond her own fear and doubt to stand up, go over and help the other ones, comfort them.

That kid would be the dummy, the one saddled with the front-line preselection factor, the one who felt the need to take care of the
others. There were always a few dummies who felt the duty to go up front. Like that day at the Towers, tens of thousands coming out, hundreds going in.

Dummies like her.

And, goddammit, like Broker.

The thing gnawed at her. It was the knot cinched tight at the center of her marriage: Did two people like her and Broker belong together? They each knew all about going in first, and nothing at all about backing off.

And what a wonderful mom I’ve turned out to be—taking my kid on her first op at seven.

She kicked at the gravel along the side of the road. Ouch. Not a good idea in sandals.

God, where the hell did they get so much sky?
The clouds grew right up out of the earth. Piles and piles of gray clouds stacked in the fields and going up and arching overhead like a Sistine Chapel of clouds forever.

Then it started to rain and she ran the last hundred yards and came back in the bar with mud spattered up her calves. Ace was not reading the newspaper. He stood behind the bar twirling his finger around the rim of a tumbler half full of whiskey. “So how’d it go?” he asked. She noted that the passive repose had departed his manner. Now his eyes were moody, hot, sulking; they measured her in a certain way, undressing her.

“Fuck him.” Nina sank into a chair at the table.

“You already did that,” Ace said over his raised glass. “Maybe you should try fucking someone else who appreciates you.”

Uh-oh.
First there was Dr. Phil. Now comes the direct approach.

She made a face, stood up, and went into the bathroom and washed the mud from her legs. Twenty-four hours ago she would have been willing to go to bed with him, if there was no other way of getting the fix on a target. Now they had a fix.

When she came out of the john, the rain shower had stopped.
Ace came around the bar, antsier than he’d been, but still attractive. The way a guy in a beer commercial is attractive.

She gave him an honest, tired, thirty-five-year-old-woman look: On top of everything else, do I have to put out—
now
?

But she was still mad at Broker, no faking that. And Ace picked up on it. The natural rebounder, he would catch her in midair, coming off her fight with Broker.

And she saw how it could happen. A revenge fuck.

In the line of duty.

Ace grinned at her quandary, put his empty glass on the bar, and said, “C’mon, let’s go for a drive.”

Nina slumped in the passenger seat while Ace pushed the Tahoe down South 1. He listened to a crop report, turned off the radio, flung his hand at the fields. “Right at the saturation point, three days of water’s about all the grain can stand. Don’t start drying soon, it’s all gonna turn to green mush.”

They passed a deserted crossroads: empty store, gas station, the remnants of a miniature golf course, and this phone booth sitting out all alone. Nina leaned forward in her seat. In the distance, across the highway, a huge concrete pyramid started to rise out of the ground, four, five stories high, with a circular facing on it, like a bull’s-eye.

“What the hell?” she said.

“Our local ruins. Nekoma. That’s the radar for the old ABM system, the Spartans, like that picture I showed you. Never was used. They negotiated Salt II and they shut ’er down.” He winked at her. “In high school, senior year, I knew this girl named Sally Solce. We used to come here to make out.”

“I was beginning to think you weren’t interested in sex. Just family counseling.”

Ace grinned, pulled to the side of the road, turned off the engine, and said, “Sally was a great believer in pyramids. Said they gathered energy…”

Nina eyed him sidelong across the suddenly charged distance between them. She felt the color creep up her throat. She squirmed on the seat and the rustle of her tight thighs against light cotton on the leather upholstery generated a zip of static electricity.

“…And not just any old kind of energy,” he said, smoothly turning, getting closer.

Okay. Here it comes.

But their lips just bumped. His opening move came to grief on bucket seats. They were separated by the shift console, a storage compartment, a travel cup in its plastic socket.

Nina realized her hand had come up to her throat. What was this coy act? Was she starved for attention?
How long since I’ve been kissed seriously?
She didn’t even know how to backtrack into the subject. Was she even the kind of woman who gets kissed seriously anymore?

Ace grinned and laughed. “Thing about high school and Sally was, I had this old Chevy, three on the tree. The seat was more, ah…”

“Friendly toward gathering energy,” Nina said tartly. “That was then. This is now. I’m too old to fool around in cars, or fields.”

Ace mouthed a silent laugh. “You’re right. That’s for kids.” Abruptly he cranked the key, put the car in gear, and started to drive.

The uses of silence. In the quiet refuge of her thoughts, she concocted sexual scenarios. Starts, stalled middles, and no finish. Just couldn’t make it work.

But the flush clung to her cheeks. Her freckles must look like copper rivets. But she could only allow herself so much indulgence. The lapse ran its course.

Now they passed through the town’s one flashing red light and were going the opposite direction, north. Not casual. He was very deliberate today. Like he was working through stations.

More forever fields to go with the forever sky. Add desolate deserted houses. They pulled into an overgrown driveway. Now what?

Ace got out, fingered a cigarette from his chest pocket, carefully not revealing the pack. Broker had told her about that one. Old yardbird reflex—hide your smokes from the other cons. He lit it with a plastic Bic, then stood smoking and staring at the gray wood siding and broken windows and the weeds. The collapsing barn. A rusted Quonset.

He marched forward and she followed him until they stood on the cracked concrete next to the side entrance to a mud porch.

Ace pointed at a rusted twenty-pound propane tank that lay on its side on the steps. The kind used in gas grills. It was surrounded by other trash—Pyrex two-quart measuring cups, Mason jars, rectangular Corning dishes, worn-out plastic funnels, discarded rubber gloves.

“Tell me what you see,” he said.

Nina shrugged. “Lots of junk. Somebody’s old grill tank.”

He studied her face. “Why’s it stained blue all around the brass valve?”

“What is this, twenty questions?”

“Only two so far,” Ace said. He turned and walked to the back of the house.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“I grew up here. Tried farming here. Place has been abandoned for years.”

“Somebody’s been here. Look.” She pointed to the carefully raked sand in a frame of weathered railroad ties. “The sandbox is clean.”

Ace squatted on his haunches and trailed his fingers through the rain-pocked sand. He reached over and picked up a tiny yellow tractor with a shovel on the front. The detail on it was too exact for a toy. It was the kind of replica some men keep on their desks. He put it back down where it had been, next to two half-destroyed sand-castle towers. More ruins, eroded by the rain.

“Dale, probably. He comes out here. Sometime he brings a sleeping
bag and stays up there. In our old room.” He pointed to the broken window on the second story.

“That’s pretty sad.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Dale’s smart enough. He functions fine. He’s just socially…”—Ace scrunched his eyebrows looking for a word—“remote. Like, he got to this threshold and decided not to come out and play. I don’t think it’s a limitation. I think it’s a choice he made.”

“How about friends?” Nina made it sound like a logical question. Just talking along.

“Not really, except for Joe Reed. They been hanging out together the last couple of months.”

Her voice speeded up. “The guy with the burns and the bad hand?”

Ace nodded. “Pinto Joe. Got burned up in the Alberta oil fields. Well got away on him. Caught fire.”

“Where’s he from?”

“Don’t know for sure. He don’t say. Turtle Mountain, I guess.” Ace said. His hand floated up and touched her lightly on the cheekbone, under her eye. “You got to work on your eyes, Nina. When something catches your attention it’s like shark fins turning on a dime in there.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Means, you want to know about Joe, you better go ask Joe.” He walked past her, toward the Tahoe.

Driving again. Back to town. Mile by mile, she felt the tension building. She almost had to laugh at the extra freight the female soldier was obligated to carry. If captured, she could expect to be raped. And, like they drummed into you, her whole body was a weapon—to include, apparently, what nature put between her legs.
If war was an extension of diplomacy by other means, was sex, too, an extension of war?

She did laugh.

“What?” Ace asked.

“Nothing,” she said. She had been through Airborne and Ranger school. She had been to Escape and Evasion. She had shot pistol on the Marksmanship Unit. Eleven years ago she gunned down two Iraqi Republican Guards close enough to see their eyes react to her bullets. That was hot-blooded killing. Now she was looking straight at cold-blooded sex in the line of duty.

She made practical calculations. Six days since her period. Probably should insist on a condom. Get some health history.
And get a hold of yourself. Stop acting like a piece of driftwood coming in with the tide.

Do your job, goddammit.
Afterwards he might open up and talk. That was the idea, wasn’t it?

They spoke hardly at all on the drive back to the Missile Park. Some of it had to do with a shift in the air; here and there patches of sun collapsed the cloud chapel, dappling the fields with light.

He parked in back of the bar, got out, and opened the back door. She followed him inside, through the storeroom into the main bar. The lights were out. Gordy was nowhere in sight.

Ace walked to the bar, sat on a stool, and stared at his reflection in the mirror. She sat on the stool next to him.

“So what are you going to do?” he said staring straight ahead, talking to her reflection.

“What do you think I should do?” she said to his reflection. She thought about how mirrors work. They throw back reversed images, right? Like little lies.

“Okay, then.” He heaved off the stool, walked to the stairway, and went up to the apartment.

Nina stood up, squared her shoulders, and climbed the darkened stairs.

He was waiting in the small living room. There was a bottle of Seagrams on the kitchen table. He got two glasses from the draining board and poured two short drinks. He handed her a glass. She sipped the whiskey then set it on the desk. He tossed down his drink, put the glass back on the counter.

Then he stood, hands at his sides. Not gloating or even expecting much. More like, just very much present, as if he knew the few things he was good at. He was a player who knew how to make a play. He knew how to touch a woman.

And as if borne by a swell, she drifted up to him. He put his arms around her and kissed her. She let herself go, melting into him.

Ace was obviously a good time. But, holding him, she could feel the hollowness. Could almost smell the doubt filter through the whiskey on his breath, taste it pump in and out of his lungs. She knew that a strong enough wind would blow him and his party-time erection away.

But she managed a reasonably wanton kiss, part nostalgia for things missed, part exploration, but with not too much tongue. Just enough to jolt his circuits. Then she drew back and looked at him. “So what is it you think you know?”

His blue eyes were half wary, half joking. But honest. “The only thing I know for sure is when some other man’s wife wants something she ain’t getting at home.”

“Like now?”

“We’ll see.” His practiced hand moved up her butt and followed the seam of the zipper at the back of the flimsy, outrageously expensive dress Janey had picked out for her. Like a bead of cool mercury, the zipper ran down her back. Then Ace stepped back to watch.

Nina kicked off the sandals. Then she wiggled her shoulders in an instinctual move. As the cotton slipped over her shoulders and down her arms, she watched his melancholy eyes as they studied the ripple of light and shadow play down the front of her body.
Not desire so much as curiosity. And this sense of waiting for something.

And then she realized she was doing it wrong. The thing she always did wrong with men. There was something they always expected from her at times like this. Something she wouldn’t give them. Since junior high she had been training herself to never show fear. Or anything remotely like it. Broker was the only man she’d ever met who seemed to understand. Barefoot naked or with a fifty-pound ruck on her back and muddy boots, she always looked the same:

Ready.

“This isn’t a strip show,” she said defensively as the top of the dress fell past her breasts. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her breasts were nothing special—tidy and functional, with a faint webbing of stretch marks.