Chuck Logan - After the Rain

“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.

She reached down and firmly took hold of the elastic on her panties. With a little shift from foot to foot she peeled them down below her navel.

Ace said, “There is a scar.”

“What?”

He pointed at the faint cesarean incision peeking from the reddish hair just above the rolled waistband of her panties. “I figured you had a C-section. The narrow hips…” Then he said, in a different tone, “ Wait. ”

A drop of nervous sweat streaked down the puckered flesh on her belly. A squirm of nerves, gooseflesh.

“What happened there?” he said.

He was pointing at the deep-purple dent on her left hip. The entry. His hand moved around her hip, smooth across her ass, and felt the bumpy slick whorl of scar tissue where the Republican Guard’s Kalashnikov round blew a chip of pelvis out through her glutes.

“That’s a gunshot wound,” he said.

“I can explain,” she said.

The self-deprecating joke came stronger into his eyes. He raised a hand to quiet her. “It’s okay. I just had to find out how far you’d go. You would have gone all the way, right?”

“I don’t get it. What are we talking about? This? I told you, I can…” Indignant, she pointed at the bullet hole.