After the Rain

The Mole hated leaving anything to chance. He had followed the weapon and had seen it delivered with his own eyes. Four hundred crucial yards now separated the weapon and its target.

After all the planning and work, there was one last ancient and durable obstacle to overcome. Like Napoleon at Waterloo, they had to delay their attack, confronted by a sea of mud.

They were waiting on the weather.

Chapter Three

Ace Shuster woke up feeling lucky.

And he’d be the first to tell you, it was a feeling that slanted uphill against the odds.

So he kept his eyes clamped shut and tried to hold on to the feeling, which was a challenge considering the ache that wrapped his body. But after a few moments he ascertained that the pain was all surface, the fatigue of a hangover, not a specific injury. And that was a good sign.

For five long minutes he explored the velvet throb on the back of his eyelids. He’d wait a while, get real prepared before he opened his eyes. This was a habit from the old days when guaranteed trouble would be perched on his bedpost, waiting to pounce.

First he moved his tongue around in his mouth and found all his teeth were still where they should be. Then he moved his fingers and toes; then his neck, his arms, and his legs. Nothing hurt, so he was pretty sure he had come through the previous night reasonably unscathed. Tentatively, he snaked out his hand and prodded around in the bed and determined he was the sole occupant. He thought on it and assumed he’d been mostly drinking beer last night. He allowed that he’d made a few passes at the hard stuff around midnight.

Yesterday, his younger brother, Dale, had given him this rock-bottom nugget of wisdom about drinking: Don’t put it in your mouth, dummy.

Check it out. Reduced to sitting still for advice from his concerned but severely limited nerd kid brother.

It wasn’t out of the question to wonder where he was, so he braced himself and finally opened his eyes. A curling baseball poster was Scotch-taped to the wall. Slowly Ace raised a slightly shaky hand and saluted Roger Maris. Same poster had hung over his bed back on the farm when he was in high school.

So far, so good. He recognized the room. He’d managed to make it home. Then, as his senses unclogged, he heard the familiar sounds that he’d heard all his life. The wind doing its low howl down from Manitoba. The steady backbeat chug of a tractor somewhere out in the green grain ocean. Another enslaved North Dakotan, addicted to adversity. Dumb shit. Probably trying to pull a swather through his flax in this weather. Ace shook his head. The goddamn wind and the goddamn wheat and the goddamn tractor going on forever.

He saw a corner of clotted gray sky in the window over the bed. He smelled a moody ferment of rain in the air. Barley, durum wheat, and the pungent perfume of canola. God, would it rain again today?

As if on cue, the tractor stuttered and then quit.

Had it rained last night? He couldn’t remember. Which meant he drove home blacked out. From where? Okay. Work it back. He got a snapshot of a dark-haired woman with a pretty face, except when she opened her mouth her teeth were too big. There was an Old Milwaukee beer sign over her shoulder. He didn’t remember the woman but he recognized the sign.

At the bar in Starkweather.

Where else.

Ace shook his head. Dumb to go back there. Like picking at a scab.

Then he got the flash again. Why not something fast and pretty just for him? Why not today?

Damn. Just something…

Ace rolled over and planted his bare feet on the floor. Originally this room over the bar had been his dad’s office, then it was a storeroom. Next they’d converted it to a one bedroom apartment, then a hangout for Friday- night poker games. Then they’d rented it out again. When they ran out of renters it was converted back to a storeroom. Ace rubbed his eyes. Since he and Darlene split up he’d been storing himself here.

He stood up and tested his balance. He had talked Darlene into no lawyers-a friendly separation and division of resources, she getting the lion’s share, of course, plus alimony and child support. Like in the old joke about fires, floods, and twisters. Hurricane Darlene got the house in the end. She promptly sold the house and moved back to Bismarck, where they had malls and designer coffee.

Downstairs, he heard Gordy working at the hyper rate of a meth-addicted beaver-stacking crates of booze for pickup on the loading dock in the back of the storeroom.

Gordy Riker was the dark side of the relentless prairie work ethic. He labored to consolidate a corner of the smuggling in the county. Ace’s dad’s network was his present coup. Ace didn’t care to continue the family franchise, so Gordy worked hard, selling off the equipment, cleaning out the last of the inventory. Through hard work and attention to detail, he was inheriting the network of Canadian drivers who ran the booze and cigarettes north, and folding them into his plan to bring drugs south. Ace just signed off, took his cut, and sent the rest to Dad in Florida. The plan was to sell everything. After four generations, the Shusters were leaving North Dakota.

The feeling came back, a warm honey spiral in his chest, a sensation of sparkly gold dust- snap-just like that, in his fingertips.

Lucky.

But reluctantly now, reality came creeping in and he admitted to himself that he started every day like this, wanting to believe that something different would happen. Something just for him.

He got up and went into the shower and sloughed off the top layer of hangover in strong jets of hot water. Eyes shut, he shampooed and shaved by feel. Then he toweled off in front of the wash basin. The mirror was a murky cloud of steam, like his memory of last night. He rubbed a tiny circle in the fogged glass. Just enough to see one bloodshot blue eye staring back at him, like coming from way off there in some deep shit. Which pretty much summed it up.

But thirty minutes into the day, the good feeling accompanied him into the small living room. His space was sparse and tidy; short on furniture and long on books. As a young man he became a dedicated reader; during a twelve-month stay at the James River Correctional Center at Jamestown, the state farm east of Bismarck. Wrapped in a towel, he sat down at his desk, opened the middle drawer, and took out two items; just like he’d done every morning for the last month. It was his little comic ceremony, which, nevertheless, contained a dark grain of truth.

First: he placed the well-worn Vintage paperback on the desk. Albert Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus.

Second: next to the book he placed the old.38-caliber pistol Dad used to keep under the bar. The pistol was not real clean but it was real loaded.

He open the thumbed pages to the first chapter and read the first couple sentences: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

The lucky feeling was still cooking in his chest as he closed the book, so he put it and the pistol back in the drawer and stood up.

Ace dressed in faded jeans, a faded red T-shirt with the neck and sleeves scissored out, and a pair of old running shoes. He came down the stairs into the main room of the bar, which was a dogleg that wrapped around the old kitchen, now an office space. The booths had been removed and sold to a new malt shop on Main Street. The place had been stripped bare, just an empty mirror and three bar stools. One table and some chairs remained in the main room where Ace usually had his coffee and read his morning paper. And there was the old pinball machine. Ace wasn’t going to sell that. No way. That would go with him.

A dozen framed newspaper photos hung on the wall in the alcove off the bar. A small flag. Ace made a mental note to take the pictures and the flag off the wall and box them. He’d promised them to the North Dakota Room at the county library.