Chuck Logan - After the Rain

They passed by old houses double shaded by trees and the solid clouds. The late-afternoon breeze heaved, thick with humidity, slow tidal air pressing in. Holding Kit’s hand, sensitive to the gentle pressure of the pulse in her moist palm, Broker was nudged by eddies of foreboding.

He accepted clinical depression as a condition for other people, but not for himself. He had never been incapacitated by his dark thoughts. But he had never been free of them, either. They ran non-stop in the back of his mind like a cable TV package of channels from Hell.

Knowing they were there didn’t mean he had to watch them.

He was watching them now.

So he tried his tricks. Broker was adept at walling off his life into compartments, only allowing enough fear and doubt to percolate to the surface to add a streak of afterburner to his adrenaline. Everything else he kept strictly locked up.

Repressed? You bet.

They came to the elementary school and Kit dashed through the gate for the playground equipment. Broker hung back, dug in the hip pocket of his jeans for a Backwoods Sweet cigar. He took out one of the rough wraps, put it in his mouth, and flicked his plastic lighter.

Smoking was another trick, a method of fear management.

He walked down the block, not wanting the smoke to drift into the playground, and came to the corner of the school.

Down the street the Spartan missile stood against the gray sky like a stark black-and-white exclamation point.

He glanced back at the playground, where Kit and a boy her age were monkey-walking up the slide, holding on to the sides. They were still intact, he realized: forty years of Cold War reflexes. Clenched guts, every day, as whole populations went to work, loved, hated, propagated, and always they carried in their hearts the same blank fear when they looked up at the threat suspended in the sky.

Is this the day our children will burn up in fire?

Did we really think we’d drawn a pass because one government collapsed? Because a wall had come down?

A lot of that shit was still out there.

Some of it came in suitcases.

Kit and her playmate were at the swings now, yelling, exhorting each other to pump higher. Their seven-year-old minds incapable of imagining the images and feelings churning in his-

“Dad! Da-dee. Do an underdog. DA-DEE… ”

Broker shredded his cigar, tossed it, joined Kit at the swings, and pushed her with his strong right hand, straight arm over his head as he ran under her. Kit swung higher.

“Again,” she squealed.

Again.

As he pushed her on the swing he felt the dizzy spin of Nina’s, Holly’s, and Jane’s frantic intensity. And all his compartments came to nothing, and all his daddy fears washed through him.

How much time-what kind of time-would his daughter have in this new century?

After he was gone.

Who would protect her?

Broker watched Kit arc up toward the gray clouds, and the persistent shadows moved right into his chest. He had the fleeting thought-

What if I never see the sun again?

Joe Reed came down from Winnipeg just before dawn, drove through Mulberry Crossing with his headlights switched off, continued on into Langdon, and pulled into the lot in front of Shuster’s equipment just as the sun came up. He unlocked the door, unfolded the surplus cot Dale kept behind the desk, lay down, and was asleep in minutes.

An hour later, Dale Shuster had his usual breakfast of a double stack of blueberry pancakes at Gracie’s Cafe. Coming back to the shed, he saw Joe’s beat-up, brown Chevy van parked in front. Dale opened the door and found Joe napping in his underwear on the cot next to the desk. A fan wobbled back and forth on the floor, stirring the dampness. The second the door eased open Joe rolled up, his good hand coming up from under his pillow with the Browning nine automatic.

“Just me,” Dale said. Once you knew Joe for a while you expected him to go armed and you didn’t ask him how many times he’d used it. That big pistol was the main reason Gordy Riker wanted Joe back in his employ, to help increase market share with the rough-cut biker gangs up north.

Joe grunted, slipped his pistol into a leather gym bag under the cot, and sat up. He rubbed at his patchy brush cut with his right hand. People rarely tried to make conversation with him. For starters, it just wasn’t easy to look at Joe straight on.

Joe’s face looked like a Klingon special-effects mask-in-progress from Star Trek . Ridges of grafted skin had healed unevenly and there was a suggestion of fine belly hair on his cheek and forehead where they’d taken the grafts from his abdomen. The stitch marks looked like wrinkles stretched the wrong way.

And then there was his voice. He’d swallowed fire and the sound that came from his throat was somewhere between a grunt and a hoarse whisper. He’d scarred his vocal cords.

The little finger was totally missing from his left hand, along with the first joint of his ring finger. Snakeskin ridges mapped his arms and his neck. His black hair grew in streaks between furrows of scar tissue. He limped.

But he was something to watch. He’d been handsome once. Athletic. Now he was like a photo of his former self that had been ripped longways and sideways and then pasted back together. None of his edges quite lined up. Yet the injuries had the effect of making him heal stronger. Joe could come up on people real quiet.

Joe showed up one night last winter to pick up a load of whiskey at the Missile Park. He was driving an old border runner, a muddy, rusted-out truck without license plates. And that’s how Dale came to meet him, when Gordy Riker put him to work hauling contraband: whiskey and tobacco going north into Canada, meth precursor coming south.

Joe was the ideal driver. A Turtle Mountain Ojibwa, his treaty card gave him privileges crossing the border. Once he was known to local customs, they usually just waved him through. Dale understood vaguely this had to do with the Jay Treaty of 1794, which excused Indians crossing the border from paying duties on “their own proper goods and effects of whatever nature.”

But Joe didn’t fool much with formal ports of entry. He knew all the prairie roads in four counties.

And locally, people who were put off by Dale and Joe as solitary misfits approved of them as a pair. Maybe it was just that now that they had each other to talk to, it cut down the talking load on normal people. People said that Joe and Dale sort of found each other.

They found each other, all right. Meeting Joe turned out to be the most significant event in Dale Shuster’s life.

Next thing, Dale had stolen Joe away from Gordy to work for him. Gordy was still pissed about that. And now Joe and Dale had become something of a team.

Joe gestured vaguely with his good hand, cleared his throat, spit, and said in his feathery voice, “So how’d it go?”

“The rental haulers arrived on time. Irv took possession yesterday afternoon,” Dale said.

“In the fucking rain,” Joe said.

“In the fucking rain,” Dale repeated.

Joe shook his head. “He give you a check?”

“Sent partial payment. Called me and said one of the loaders ran a little stiff. He’s using that as an excuse to hold back on the balance.”

“Uh-huh. Just like we figured. And you told him what?” Joe asked.

“That I’d be happy to make a special trip to check it out. Him being such a good buddy and all,” Dale said.

“Good.” Joe inclined his head and carefully studied Dale’s bland face. “Okay. I got all your stuff. And the Minnesota plates. Some cash.” He reached under the cot and pulled out a briefcase. “There’s more coming later.” Joe gave a twisted smile and looked up almost deferentially at Dale. Then he pushed the briefcase forward across the concrete.