Chuck Logan - After the Rain

Dale got out and helped Gordy back up. He could just make out the mass of Lute’s swayback garage, backlit by a trickle of moonlight-all that remained of the old farmstead. They were sitting in the middle of a field, within fifty yards of the border. The Canadian pickup crew would creep down from the north along the same prairie road and load the booze later that night.

Gordy came around from the cab and dropped his tailgate, then suddenly hissed,” Don’t move…freeze.” But Dale was already still, motionless. He saw the headlights knife the dark. But a good two miles away.

“Cops?” Dale said.

“Don’t know.” They waited until the lights went out. Then, ten minutes later, the lights came on again, this time headed back toward town.

“Probably somebody just shopping in Canada,” Gordy said. He opened the garage door.

Dale took a step inside, feeling his way, and knocked into a pile of light cardboard boxes. “Hey, what’s this?”

Gordy flashed a tiny pencil light. “Boxes,” he said.

Unmarked boxes. Dale hefted one. Light. A rattle of cellophane and tinfoil.

“Okay. So it’s cold medicine. Ephedra,” Gordy said. “C’mon, ten measly boxes.”

“This could get us all sent to jail.”

“Get off it. Everybody from here on down through Montana to Idaho is cooking meth. Home brew, private use. A few boxes. C’mon, it’ll just take me a minute to stash it.”

“Where you gonna put it?”

“I thought maybe Irv’s old house.”

Dale grinned. He liked that idea a lot.

They worked quickly, Gordy handing down the whiskey, Dale stacking it. Then Dale passed up the flimsy cardboard boxes. They were light, practically empty, but Dale began to gush sweat. The night smothered him in green humidity rising off the dewy field.

It was nerves made him sweat so bad, so he unbuttoned his shirt, took it off, carefully folded it, set it aside, and worked bare-belly in the dark.

“You all right?” Gordy asked, a little alarmed to see the normally modest Dale throwing around his beefy white gut.

“Fine,” Dale wheezed, using his hand to mop sweat off his face and sodden chest. Swat the bugs.

When they’d tossed the flimsy boxes in the back of the truck, they waited and listened again. Dale put his shirt back on, making sure his Epipen was still secure in the pocket. Then they got back in the truck and drove slowly in the dark till they came to an intersection. Gordy cruised blind for a few minutes, then he pulled up a driveway.

Dale began to smile, and with the smile came a flash of hesitation. He was remembering how, back during the missile time, they played here as kids. He pointed to a thick apple tree in the front yard. “Remember we used to climb that sucker, hide in the upper branches from Irv’s mother?”

“Back when you could still climb, huh, Needle-Dick?” Gordy said, jabbing Dale in the side.

You could always count on Gordy to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. His smart-ass remark wiped away the last quiver of doubt. Dale patted the Epipen in his pocket and stared at Gordy. “I told you, asshole.”

“Yeah, yeah. C’mon, we’ll throw them in the root cellar.”

They each grabbed two of the bulky cartons and walked toward the house. Gordy had a battery-powered light bar hooked over his thumb. He put down his boxes, opened the slanted door to the root cellar, and peered in.

“What?” Dale said.

“Stinks.”

“Probably gonna get worse, too,” Dale said. He reached in his pocket and slid out a pair of Latex surgical gloves, slipped them on.

Gordy went into the musty cellar. Horror-show cobwebs; wiring in the joists dating back to 1910. He poked around and stamped his feet in the sediment. He rested the light bar on a ledge in the uneven stone wall. Then, energetically, he put together a rough platform out of rock debris and old lumber, so the boxes would sit up off the damp floor. Then he waved a hand at Dale.

“Dale?” he wondered aloud. “How come you’re wearing gloves?”

Dale ignored the question and handed one of the boxes to Gordy, then paused and selected a board from a pile of loose lumber stacked on the rickety stairs next to the fieldstone foundation.

“Lookit this old piece of oak. Bet this is a hundred years old.”

“Yeah, yeah, gimme another box.”

Dale turned the board in the pale light. “Got a big-ass spike in here. But it’s bent.” Dale studied the problem then hooked the bent spike on a ledge of rock and grabbed a piece of debris that had fallen from the wall. Holding the rock like a hand hatchet, he banged down on the top of the board.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Straightening out this nail.”

“Very cool, Dale, except that ain’t no nail. That’s a pole-barn spike. How about you hand me the boxes.”

“Coming right up.” Dale whacked the board again and inspected the result: the rusty nine-inch spike was mostly perpendicular to the board. While Gordy shook his head, Dale set the board aside and picked up one of the boxes and passed it down.

“By the way, what’s got Joe all pissed off?” Gordy asked.

Dale smiled. “He’s done with you. Especially after that Sioux City business.”

“Ah shit, I’ll make it up to him,” Gordy said. But he looked glum. “Sioux City was a bummer.”

“Whole trailer packed with crates of full-capacity toilets down from Winnipeg. He runs the border, drives like crazy down to outside Sioux City. And then nobody’s there to unload them. He has to unload them himself and hide them in a barn. Not the ideal job for an eight-fingered Indian. Those toilets are heavy…”

“Yeah, yeah. I owe him.”

“Ah, I don’t know. You were right about Joe being sneaky. I did catch him in a lie once.”

“Fuckin’ Indian, don’t surprise me.”

“Yeah,” Dale said as he turned away and removed the Epipen from his pocket. He twisted the top, felt the needle engage, tucked it in his cupped hand, and turned back around. “Last April, Joe was loading cases in the storeroom at the Missile Park. He didn’t hear me come up on the dock. Thought he was all alone. He’s in a hurry and he tips the dolly and dumps these cases on his foot…”

“Dale, c’mon. ”

“…Starts swearing like I never heard. Whole string of words, only a couple I could remember. One I sounded out: nik-o-mack. Another was zarba .”

“ Nikomak ? Sounds kinda Indian,” Gordy said.

“I thought so too, so, for kicks, I checked around on the Internet, and you know what?”

“What?”

“This was a surprise to me. I couldn’t find anything on Ojibwa, but I did get into a site about a Cree dialect that’s close to Ojibwa, and you know what? They got no cuss words. Got about twenty words for fuckin’ snow. But no profanity.”

Gordy stared at Dale, clearly exasperated.

“Took me all night surfing all these websites about swearing in foreign languages, but I finally found nikomak .” Dale grinned slowly, his whole face lighting up.

“Good for you,” Gordy said, starting up the steps to get the other boxes.

Dale turned, sweeping his hand forward at mid-thigh level and jabbed the injector into Gordy’s thigh. “Fuck your mother,” Dale said contemptuously as he tossed the used injector in the dirt between them.

“Oh shit!” Gordy grabbed at his punctured thigh, shook his head. “What the-?” He stared at the fat yellow dispenser lying at his feet. Anger came fast after surprise, and he swatted at Dale. Tried to grab him.

But Dale fended off Gordy’s hand. “Fuck your mother-that’s what nikomak means. Don’t you wanna know in what language?”

“I about had it with you. What’d you stick me with-some nail?” Gordy, angry now, balled his fists.