Chuck Logan - After the Rain

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.”