Chuck Logan - After the Rain

During the time of the missiles.

His eyes fixed on an irregularity in the wheat two hundred yards away. He could barely make out the square of chain link and barbed wire. Once the power lived there, a hundred feet beneath his father’s field. A silo with a Minuteman II. Like his own scary genie.

Sixteen-year-old Ace would say to six-year-old Dale: “Enough power in our field to blow up half of Russia. Just in our field alone.”

There was bad mixed in with the good, like when he would wake up at night convinced he heard the remote controls snapping and hissing under the ground and he just knew the field was going to explode. That fire was going to fall from the sky.

He woke up screaming from the image of the cows and pigs burning up, the rabbits, the geese, the chickens.

Stubby, his cat. Shaggy, his dog.

Never people, though. He never saw people burning. Only animals.

The nightmares changed and he’d just wake up and sneak out and walk across the field and stand at the edge of the mowed grass belt around the wire and hold up his hands, palms out, and try to feel the power radiating out from the silo. Not too close, because they had remote sensors and the air-basers would come by helicopter to check. Little by little he overcame his fear and made friends with it and soon the dreams went away.

All that harnessed energy poised and quiet, down deep in the earth. Dale thought he could actually feel the power in the crops that pushed up out of the earth in the spring. Feel it brood beneath the winter snow. Hear it howl in the blizzard wind.

He’d watch the trucks come in when the air-basers checked the wire and the sensors. In the summer they came and mowed the offset perimeter grass around the wire. Sometimes he’d stand on the road and wave to them.

In the end, Army engineers came with explosives to implode the empty silos. Joe Reed, whom Gordy wanted back working for him, explained how they did it. Joe knew about explosives. He was an Ojibwa from the Turtle Mountain rez and he’d worked in the oil fields up in Alberta. Some folks called him Pinto Joe because of the patchy way his face healed after an oil well blew up on him.

So they blew them in on themselves and filled them with dirt and strung barbed wire around the sites so they looked like little graveyards dotting the wheat. Something about verification, like the empty silos left open for the ABM sites south on State 1, at Nekoma.

He looked up. Little empty graveyards, so the Russian satellites could count them.

Dale drew up his legs and hugged his arms to his chest. Sometimes he felt like a buried atomic bomb they’d missed when they’d pulled out the Minutemen and the Spartans and the Sprints. The missile fields had all gone to seed and fallow. But what if they missed one? What if buried deep under the wheat there was one last cone of latent power?

Poised.

Dale shut his eyes and imagined his gross body swept away in the launch flames. Then they’d see him for who he really was, a moment of beautiful fire and grace exploding into the sky.

The moment passed.

He clambered off the old springs and walked down the stairs, running his finger along the wall like he’d done every day of his childhood. He trudged through the rooms littered with wrappers and plastic bottles and went outside. He looked up at the heavy, roiling clouds, gravid with rain. Far to the west a shiver of lightning.

Dale looked up at the relentless clouds that combined and came apart against each other. The constant gray churn could be the gears of history up there, meshing, grinding out fate.

The future.

He went around back of the house and stood for a long time staring at a pile of meth trash. There were discarded coffee filters gummy with pink and white residue; plastic funnels; a cracked blender; aluminum foil boxes; discolored Pyrex dishes; plastic jugs; and a scorched twenty-pound propane cylinder.

Furious, Dale kicked at the heap of refuse. Then he walked to the Quonset, dug around in the debris, and found an old leaf rake, a regular rake, and a shovel. He returned to the pile. Methodically, he cleared away the drug-cooking garbage until he revealed a square of railroad ties buried in the weeds.

The sand was damp from the rain and it was easy to spade up the thistles and burdock. Then he raked them in a pile and flung them away.

Sweating now, breathing heavy, he spaded over the sand, ran the rake through it until he had excavated several strata of buried refuse: old pop bottle caps, a spoon, one of his sister’s Barbie dolls.

He snatched up the brown plastic figurine and slowly snapped off the arms, then the legs, and finally the head. He hurled the pieces away.

Then he sat down on the ties and removed his boots and mismatched socks and stuck his bare feet in the clean raked sand. He wiggled his toes.

Dad had built the sandbox for him when he was four.

Slowly Dale shaped two squat castle towers in the sand. The damp sand set up well as he carefully smoothed off the tops, making them round and symmetrical. He took a can of Coke from his pack, opened it, and sat hunched forward, staring at the sand castles and sipping the Coke.

When he finished the soda, he threw the empty can toward the pile of crud he’d raked from the sandbox. Then he reached into his pack and took out a small yellow precision-die-cast replica of a John Deere front-loader.

Not like the toys he’d owned as a kid, a collector’s item from Dad’s dealership-the same dealership whose demise he was presiding over. The tiny tractor had sat on a shelf at home.

In the basement, where Dale lived.

He bent over on all fours and ran the small vehicle back and forth in the clean sand. Then, in a sudden burst of rage he slammed the replica into the towers, smashing them.

“Kashuusshhewww!” he shouted, making explosive sounds as he grabbed double handfuls of sand and threw them into the air.

“Ka-boom.”

“Aw, God, what an asshole. You all right?” Nina raised her hand gingerly to Ace’s cheek, which was a little red where Broker had hit him.

“I’m fine. Good thing his hand was hurt. You see the bandage?”

Nina improvised. “Nailgun, slipped on him. He was putting new planks on the deck for Gull’s Retreat. That’s what we call Cabin Six.”

“Lucky me,” Ace said. “Otherwise he would have coldcocked me. I did not see that punch coming.”

“Ah, that one punch was all he had in him, ’cause I put him down pretty quick,” Gordy said triumphantly.

Ace eyed Gordy like he wasn’t real sure about that. He turned to Nina and said, “What was it you said your old man did?”

“ Ex -old man.” Nina arched her back.

“Yeah, yeah, I know, but what does he do ?” Ace said.

“What the fucker did was change on me. He was nice enough when we were getting to know each other, then I got pregnant, and we got married, and…ah, shit.” She waved a hand in disgust.

“No, I got that part. I mean what he does for a living. He don’t look like a guy who hangs in an office,” Ace said.

“That’s for sure. He gets a bad stomach in an office. He likes being outside. So he’s got this landscape gig besides the cabins.” An old reflex of protectiveness crept into her language, distancing, wary.

“What about before that?” Ace said, narrowing his eyes.

“Well…” Her eyes hardened up a bit. “There was some stuff he was into before I knew him. Just stories I heard, because he don’t really talk about it.” It came out tone perfect, sounding rehearsed in a way Ace and Gordy would understand. Couched lines used to answer questions that maybe cops had asked.

They were sitting at the bar. Ace and Gordy were drinking coffee. Nina rotated a tumbler in both hands. It was a seven-and-seven she’d poured herself, but about 95 percent ginger ale.