After the Rain (3 page)

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.

He nodded to Gordy, who was behind the bar drinking a can of Coke for breakfast. Sweating standing still, Gordy was strapped into a black Velcroed back brace. Square and muscular, always unshaven. Even as a little kid, Gordy had lots of hair; a cross between the Energizer Bunny and a werewolf.

“Late night, huh?” Gordy asked. Friendly enough except for his restless, calculating eyes. He was, still, for all his ambitious plans, the hired help. And you could never tell when this hung-over shadow of Ace Shuster would experience a lethal two-minute relapse back to when he was the baddest thing in three counties.

Ace nodded and climbed on a bar stool. Gordy put two Alka Seltzers in a glass, poured in some water, and pushed it across the bar. Ace drank his breakfast. Gordy poured a cup of black coffee, slid it over along with a copy of the
Grand Forks Herald
.

“So what’s going on?” Ace asked.

“Nothing much. Just the last few pickups tonight, tomorrow.”

Ace nodded. They were cleaning out the last of the booze. Pickups
after ten. There were only three full-time deputies and one highway patrol in the county. They seldom staffed from ten at night to six
A.M.
There was more Border Patrol around since 9/11, but they seldom patrolled the prairie roads the Canucks used when they came down to shop for the whiskey.

“Don’t suppose anybody called?” Ace said.

“Nah.”

Figured. Liquidation. Ace thought it a fitting word to describe the demise of a drinking joint. Everything must go. The license, the building, the chairs, the cash register. Ace himself. Ace’s function was to preside over the dismantling of the Missile Park Bar. Just like Dale was selling off the last of Dad’s heavy equipment at the shed across the road. Dad moved to Florida, picked up a golf club, and never looked back. Ma, expert at denial and rationalization, went to church and played bridge.

Ace sipped his coffee, lit his first Camel of the day, and opened the paper.

“I already looked, nothing new on Ginny,” Gordy said. Ginny Weller, a town girl who’d moved to Grand Forks, had gone missing last month.

Ace nodded, scanned the section anyway, and turned to the commodities markets in business. “Three-dollar spring wheat,” he said and shook his head.

“Umm,” Gordy mumbled. He was a town kid whose father ran a string of failing gas stations. He’d never sat on a tractor in his life.

Ace passed on sports, repelled when he saw a lot of Minnesota purple in the feature football art. He came to the daily crossword and settled in on 1 across. “Four-letter word for southern veggie,” he said.

“Corn,” Gordy said.

“C’mon numbnuts. It says
southern
.”

“Ah, grits?”

“
Four
letters,” Ace said. He checked 1 down. Dark yellow. After
a moment he penciled in “ocher,” which gave him an O for 1 across. Okay. He got it. He was starting to pencil in “okra,” when he heard tires crunch to a stop on the weed-choked trap rock out front.

Ace and Gordy exchanged surprised looks when they heard something they hadn’t heard at the Missile Park in a long, long time: female voices. And these female voices were on the shrill side, pitched high, banging back and forth at each other.

Ace winced and looked at Gordy, who shrugged, came around the bar, went to the front, and looked out the window.

“Two chicks and a little girl,” Gordy said.

“What are they driving?”

“Looks like a red Volvo. Hard to tell the way it’s all dusted up. With Minnesota plates. Got an old green Wellstone sticker on the bumper. And, ah, this rainbow-type decal.”

Ace’s expression jiggled between a wince and a grin, “A Volvo, huh? Boy. They’re lost for sure.”

“I hear you. Jeez, busy day—old Chevy truck just pulled in, too. Arizona plates.”

“So what are they yelling about? The women.”

“Ah.” Gordy craned his neck closer to the window. “Sounds like one of them wants to use the john and the other one ain’t buying it, says it’s just an excuse to have a drink. Now the other one and the little girl are trying to talk her out of it.”

“What’s she look like?” Ace asked.

“Which one?”

“The one who wants a drink.”

“Ah, she’s a redhead, not bad; kinda tough-looking.”

Ace came forward off his stool. “How do you mean, tough?”

Gordy grinned. “Tough like the grim-fucking-reaper. She’s got this skull-and-crossbones tattooed on her shoulder.”

Ace nodded. Gordy would like that. Like it better if she had a Harley logo tattooed on her ass.

Just then the door opened. And Ace expected to see a tough redhead
walk through. Instead, it was a leather-tanned older guy wearing this flowery, flowing orange and red Hawaiian shirt, with a full head of hair going white. Ace sat up and took notice. You don’t see that many older guys with forearms like that, who walked so light on their feet. Who came into a room checking everything with those pale quiet eyes. Ace had seen eyes like that on serious lifers during the month he spent on orientation in the Bismarck state pen before they sent him out to do the easy time on the farm.

“I’d get near a phone if I was you, call nine-one-one,” the guy said, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder. “Got a cat fight goin’ out there.” He walked to the bar, sat down, and stared at the wall full of pictures.

Gordy came up. The guy said, “You serving any lunch?”

“Sorry, the kitchen’s closed. We’ve sort of gone out of business,” Gordy said.

Very clearly Ace heard one of the women yell, “Yeah, well, I didn’t drive all the way out here to watch you crawl into a bottle in Nowhere, North Dakota, goddammit.”