Chuck Logan - After the Rain

Broker glared at him, all the while muttering deep inside how, granted, his left hand was under the weather and how maybe he should get up and introduce this hayseed to his right hand. Instead, he reflected that the ability to defer satisfaction was a sign of maturity; so he played his assigned role and remained on his butt.

Shuster joined Nina and Gordy and they went back up the steps into the saloon. Broker dropped his eyes and stared at a tiny procession of black ants picking their way through the pebbles.

Maybe you could stick around.

Yes, dear.

Broker grimaced and felt a puffy bruise swelling up below his left eye. He looked up and down the deserted highway. Just the green fields, the low gray clouds. Across the road he saw a rusting Bobcat sitting in weeds in what had once been a parking lot. A fading John Deere logo painted up on the front of a large washed-out yellow pole barn. Weather-beaten letters spelled SHUSTER AND SONS EQUIPMENT. Thought he saw the shadow of someone standing in the doorway, watching. When he looked again, the guy was gone.

“You’re asking a lot,” he said under his breath as he slowly got to his feet.

Dale Shuster stood in the doorway of Shuster and Sons Equipment and watched the commotion across the road in front of the Missile Park, thinking it had been a long time since anybody’d got in a fight in that parking lot. And it didn’t turn out to be much of a fight, anyway, so eventually he turned away. The woman had showed up on Saturday. By the next afternoon, she had guys fighting over her. He shook his head. With his brother Ace it was always women. And not just the kind of women who went with booze. Women liked him.

’Cause he’s good-looking, lean, and has that smile.

The opposite of me.

Dale got a pretty good look at her, and she seemed to be a short-haired redhead, kind of trashy and skinny.

Whatever.

He paced the interior of the pole barn and heard his boot soles echo faintly on the crumbling concrete slab. Empty like a cavern in here. Dale had this habit that, if he didn’t concentrate, he saw things the way they looked when he was a child. Like this place. He remembered it full of big iron-bright-yellow backhoes, crawler dozers, loaders, and graders. Back in the missile time, when Dad was in the money; always chewing a cigar, talking on the phone in the front office, his brother Ace jockeying the big machines around the lot.

Before they got the house in town.

When they still had the farm.

Dale blinked. He was staring up at a dull speckle of light. Holes sprayed in the corrugated sheet metal where Ace, age sixteen, had become exasperated with the pigeons and grabbed the shotgun and pumped off a few shells of birdshot. That was Ace, impulsive. Dale would have been six…

Unlike his brother, Dale was methodical. That’s why their dad left him in charge of shutting down the equipment accounts and selling off the last of the inventory.

A task that was near completion. All he had left on the premises was the one Deere front-loader out back. And the backhoe attachment, which he’d already sold.

He returned to his desk at the front of the building. Shuster and Sons never had much of an office, just the desk, a small refrigerator, a computer, phone, fax, and a TV set mounted on the wall. Off to the right of the desk, walled off behind a partition, were a toilet and sink.

Dale sat down on the ancient swivel chair and stared at the clock. Some things he couldn’t tidy up by being methodical. Like the weather. He picked up the remote and thumbed on the TV. He’d been tuned in to the Weather Channel exclusively for the last week.

Rain was bad for the equipment business.

He waited through a commercial and then watched Heather Tesch stand in front of a map of the United States. Behind her, a straggling green amoeba of precipitation crept across North Dakota, Minnesota, and into Wisconsin. Low pressure squatted on the Midwest, fed by a warm front coming from the Gulf.

The Gulf air drove the jet stream into a coil up and into the North, disrupting the normal pattern. Where the hot Gulf air and cool stuff from Canada collided it was raining like hell. In the wake of the storms, the fields were green sponges.

At least the thunderstorms had moved on through Minnesota and Wisconsin and were petering out along Lake Michigan. It caused delays. Even the biggest crawlers were stymied by mud.

But he’d used up all his waiting sitting behind this desk, sifting through these files. When he started working for his dad he’d had an electric typewriter and a rotary phone. Dad never really trusted him on the big iron; that was Ace’s job, running the machines. Dad put Dale in the office. When he started he’d filled legal pads with his crisp penmanship-Palmer Method-drilled into him at Langdon Elementary in the second grade by flat-chested Miss Heidi Klunder, with skin like oatmeal and skinny blond hair.

Not like Ginny Weller.

That was ten years ago and he could still hear Ginny’s voice like it was right now, like in an echo chamber; still feel the tease of her lips, her moist warm breath against his ear. “C’mon Dale baby, we’re all alone, just you and me. Just be a minute and I’ll give you a feel…”

He dropped his eyes to the computer screen, clicked through the invoices. He tried to avoid looking at the clock on the wall. But in the right-hand corner of the blue bar at the bottom of the screen the digital time stared at him.

Once he had endured time like everybody else. Now he felt it gushing like a Niagara of digital code through his chest. He tried to get his mind around numbers; tried to imagine a million people going about their lives, all of them taking time for granted. None of them knowing for sure how many days, minutes, hours, seconds…

He laughed. Christ, there weren’t a million people in all of North Dakota.

Then, vividly, he pictured the tape hidden in the kitchen pantry, in a box of Fruit Loops. He moved the tape every day to a different hidey-hole.

Thinking about the tape stopped his breath. He almost gasped. The tumescent squirm of anticipation was like the petals of a flower opening deep inside. Gave him shivers.

For years, down in his basement apartment, alone, he’d fanta-sized the image of Ginny Weller down on her knees, begging him not to punish her for what she’d-

The bell on the front door jingled and Gordy Riker strolled in looking very pleased with himself. The image of Ginny vanished. Gordy had an elbow raised and was conspicuously sucking on the knuckles of his right hand.

“Hey, Needle-Dick, we gotta talk.” Gordy bouncy, full of himself, jerked his thick neck back across the road.

“Don’t call me that,” Dale said calmly.

Gordy mugged surprise at Dale’s controlled response. It only slowed him for a few beats. “Okay, sure, I’m sorry. Don’t mean to offend. But the thing is, you gotta talk to Ace.”

“I heard about the woman, and I just saw you hit that guy.”

“You see me put him on his ass with one punch? He’s bigger’n me, too.”

“Who is he?” Dale said.

“Bitch’s husband, she says.” Gordy furrowed his brow.

“What do you mean, ‘she says’?” Dale said.

“Kinda coincidental, don’t you think? She shows up in a bar hardly nobody goes to, on a highway hardly nobody who ain’t local uses,” Gordy said.

“So?”

“And she’s traveling with the only lesbian ever seen north of Grand Forks.”

Dale perked up, went to the window, and stared across the highway at the bar. “A lesbian? Here? No shit.” Now that would be something.

“What I’m saying is, it’s too coincidental. Nobody comes to Langdon except…”