After the Rain

going to make out in twenty, thirty years, when all the crook-necked cell-phone casualties came walking into their offices bent over funny.

He took a long, slow swallow and felt the whiskey burn down his throat and rush out to the tiny capillaries in his fingers and toes. He watched the humid prairie breeze catch the summer dress and wash it up around her thighs and hips. A ripple of maroon and green. Alive against her body like a flutter of moths. Or a flag, maybe. A flag just for a woman. It wasn’t that she had smallish hips, just tidy and tight, like everything else about her-efficient, traveling light, no padding. And her shoulders were broad.

Those legs and that back. I bet she swam butterfly in school, he thought.

Probably had her kid by C-section, with those hips.

If so, there’d be a halfmoon scar under her belly button.

Just over her bush.

So am I gonna get to see that scar, or what?

Gordy came up beside him. “One way or another she’s going to fuck us up.”

Ace kept his eyes on her and thought, Aw shit, Gordy is probably right. So much for believing life could move like a soft, easy dance. Course, she was far from soft and easy. He was tired of slow dancing. It was time to make a call. “Don’t doubt it for a second,” he said. “Like you said, she don’t add up.” He cuffed Gordy on the shoulder. “She’ll be gone before dark.”

“ ’Bout time.”

“Yeah. Now, look, something’s going on. I don’t know what you all were doing downstairs but I just saw her husband meeting with Jimmy Yeager across the road.” He reached out, clamped his hand on Gordy’s shoulder, and pulled him in closer. “Tonight, you work your jigsaw extra special to see if you got a tail. I’ll do the same. If we got company we’ll run ’em through an old-fashioned snipe hunt.” Ace winked. “Let’s have some fun out on the gravel.”

“Awright, boss-awright!” Gordy smiled.

Finally.

“It’s me, I want to talk,” Nina said.

“So talk,” Broker said. He had been pacing in the motel room, watching the Weather Channel, mulling over his drive with Yeager and his missing pistol. Hearing her voice, he admitted to himself he had been waiting for the cell to ring, and now it had.

“Face-to-face,” she said.

“You had lunch?”

“No.”

“There’s a restaurant a block from the motel. Gracie’s. It’s right on the highway.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Did Kit get off home?”

“Lyle Torgeson and Doc Harris flew in and picked her up this morning. She’ll be with my folks later today. You should give her a call.”

“Not a good idea right now.”

“Right, I forgot. Mission over men.”

His remark killed conversation for several seconds. He imagined her mind maneuvering in the silence.

“Fifteen minutes,” she said finally in her clipped, hard voice.

Broker found himself sitting up, leaning forward, hovering over the tiny phone. “You need a ride?” But the connection had ended.

Broker heaved up off the bed, stripped off his clothes, peeled the bandage from his hand, walked into the bathroom, and ran the shower to revive himself after the long, hot ride along the border. All the shower did was concentrate the humidity into liquid jets. He stood under the needles of water, eyes shut. Then he held his injured hand up to the shower and let the spray irrigate the ragged flesh.

Jane’s salve worked. The swelling and redness were going down.

He got stuck, went blank, and then realized he was staring at a Barbie Doll, naked flesh-colored plastic, awkward jointed hips and arms, sitting on the soap tray like a crumb left behind by his daughter, part of a trail leading into the forest of his marriage. He picked up the toy and observed that Kit had cut the doll’s red hair short.

So it looked like Nina, or perhaps Jane. He put the doll with his toilet articles so he wouldn’t forget it.

One towel. Two. Trying to get dry. Then, gingerly, he tested the smaller, but still red, fan of infection radiating from the wound. Still tender. He applied the Bag Balm and taped on a clean dressing. As he took two of the Vicodin, it occurred to him that ten years earlier he’d have ignored the wound; it wouldn’t have slowed him down. He felt every one of his forty-eight years as a specific weight dragging on his body.

He shook his head and swore softly as he pulled on a pair of jeans, cross trainers, a T-shirt. The idea of finally sitting down with Nina brought on a snap of resentment-at finding himself caught up in another of her projects.

They had not planned on getting married. But, then, they had not planned on getting pregnant. Maybe she thought, given her chosen line of work, it would be the only shot she’d have at a child. Maybe he thought that having a kid would nudge her out of the Army. No, not maybe.

She thought he wanted her to get pregnant, his assigned role in the male plot to boot her out of the service.

No, Nina, I just think Mama, Papa, and baby belong under one roof.

So, you can come to Europe.

Or, you can come home.

So you can stick me in the kitchen with a kid and an apron.

Broker shook his head. Ten minutes after he’d met her he told her straight out she had a chip on her shoulder. And she fired right back:

That’s no chip. Those are captain’s bars, mister.

The fact was, she was a disaster in the kitchen.

He looked one last time at the Weather Channel, how the green mass of precipitation was finally moving out of the upper Midwest. The local report said scattered showers. He eyed his rain parka and decided to leave it. Then he clicked off the TV and left the room.

He grabbed a Styrofoam cup of motel coffee in the lobby and went outside, lounged against the hood of Milt Dane’s Explorer, and lit a another cigar. He assumed she’d come walking into town from that bar. Or maybe Shuster would give her a lift.

Ace.

Carefully he mulled the all-too-ready image of Nina waking up in bed with…

He dragged on the cigar a little too hard and got some smoke down his throat and coughed.

Shit. So here he was dead in the water, waiting for her to come down the highway. The Missile Park was about a mile west down Highway 5.

Broker remembered back to the beginning. He should have picked up on the clues when he visited her apartment in Ann Arbor-when he met her she was on academic leave from the Army, finishing up her master’s in business administration at the University of Michigan.

Her place looked like somewhere Dracula slept between night shifts. Spare and functional. TV dinners and beefed-up vitamin shakes in the refrigerator.

No houseplants. No cat. No paintings on the wall. The only personal item sat on her desk. A trophy from the national military competition pistol shoot at Camp Perry. Second place in the fifty-yard offhand with a.45.

Make a note. Never marry a woman who can outshoot you with a handgun.

When Nina barged into his life he had been dating a woman named Linda who worked at a nursery north of Stillwater, Minnesota. Linda had long black hair she pinned up with a turquoise clasp and always managed to look like she’d just stepped out of a grove sacred to Demeter. Always had her hands plunged in potting soil and wood chips. Good old Linda. Always listening to Minnesota Public Radio. Ripe as a D. H. Lawrence love scene.

C’mon, Broker, tell the truth. Linda would have bored you stiff after a while.

Never bored with Nina. Never once.

Broker spotted her. A stride of color coming at a brisk step down the gravel shoulder. He got up. Check it out. See. It was impossible to be bored and mad at the same time.