Dale Shuster stood in the doorway of Shuster and Sons Equipment and watched the commotion across the road in front of the Missile Park, thinking it had been a long time since anybody’d got in a fight in that parking lot. And it didn’t turn out to be much of a fight, anyway, so eventually he turned away. The woman had showed up on Saturday. By the next afternoon, she had guys fighting over her. He shook his head. With his brother Ace it was always women. And not just the kind of women who went with booze. Women liked him.
’Cause he’s good-looking, lean, and has that smile.
The opposite of me.
Dale got a pretty good look at her, and she seemed to be a short-haired redhead, kind of trashy and skinny.
Whatever.
He paced the interior of the pole barn and heard his boot soles echo faintly on the crumbling concrete slab. Empty like a cavern in here. Dale had this habit that, if he didn’t concentrate, he saw things the way they looked when he was a child. Like this place. He remembered it full of big iron-bright-yellow backhoes, crawler dozers, loaders, and graders. Back in the missile time, when Dad was in the money; always chewing a cigar, talking on the phone in the front office, his brother Ace jockeying the big machines around the lot.
Before they got the house in town.
When they still had the farm.
Dale blinked. He was staring up at a dull speckle of light. Holes sprayed in the corrugated sheet metal where Ace, age sixteen, had become exasperated with the pigeons and grabbed the shotgun and pumped off a few shells of birdshot. That was Ace, impulsive. Dale would have been six…
Unlike his brother, Dale was methodical. That’s why their dad left him in charge of shutting down the equipment accounts and selling off the last of the inventory.
A task that was near completion. All he had left on the premises was the one Deere front-loader out back. And the backhoe attachment, which he’d already sold.
He returned to his desk at the front of the building. Shuster and Sons never had much of an office, just the desk, a small refrigerator, a computer, phone, fax, and a TV set mounted on the wall. Off to the right of the desk, walled off behind a partition, were a toilet and sink.
Dale sat down on the ancient swivel chair and stared at the clock. Some things he couldn’t tidy up by being methodical. Like the weather. He picked up the remote and thumbed on the TV. He’d been tuned in to the Weather Channel exclusively for the last week.
Rain was bad for the equipment business.
He waited through a commercial and then watched Heather Tesch stand in front of a map of the United States. Behind her, a straggling green amoeba of precipitation crept across North Dakota, Minnesota, and into Wisconsin. Low pressure squatted on the Midwest, fed by a warm front coming from the Gulf.
The Gulf air drove the jet stream into a coil up and into the North, disrupting the normal pattern. Where the hot Gulf air and cool stuff from Canada collided it was raining like hell. In the wake of the storms, the fields were green sponges.
At least the thunderstorms had moved on through Minnesota and Wisconsin and were petering out along Lake Michigan. It caused delays. Even the biggest crawlers were stymied by mud.
But he’d used up all his waiting sitting behind this desk, sifting through these files. When he started working for his dad he’d had an electric typewriter and a rotary phone. Dad never really trusted him on the big iron; that was Ace’s job, running the machines. Dad put Dale in the office. When he started he’d filled legal pads with his crisp penmanship-Palmer Method-drilled into him at Langdon Elementary in the second grade by flat-chested Miss Heidi Klunder, with skin like oatmeal and skinny blond hair.
Not like Ginny Weller.
That was ten years ago and he could still hear Ginny’s voice like it was right now, like in an echo chamber; still feel the tease of her lips, her moist warm breath against his ear. “C’mon Dale baby, we’re all alone, just you and me. Just be a minute and I’ll give you a feel…”
He dropped his eyes to the computer screen, clicked through the invoices. He tried to avoid looking at the clock on the wall. But in the right-hand corner of the blue bar at the bottom of the screen the digital time stared at him.
Once he had endured time like everybody else. Now he felt it gushing like a Niagara of digital code through his chest. He tried to get his mind around numbers; tried to imagine a million people going about their lives, all of them taking time for granted. None of them knowing for sure how many days, minutes, hours, seconds…
He laughed. Christ, there weren’t a million people in all of North Dakota.
Then, vividly, he pictured the tape hidden in the kitchen pantry, in a box of Fruit Loops. He moved the tape every day to a different hidey-hole.
Thinking about the tape stopped his breath. He almost gasped. The tumescent squirm of anticipation was like the petals of a flower opening deep inside. Gave him shivers.
For years, down in his basement apartment, alone, he’d fanta-sized the image of Ginny Weller down on her knees, begging him not to punish her for what she’d-
The bell on the front door jingled and Gordy Riker strolled in looking very pleased with himself. The image of Ginny vanished. Gordy had an elbow raised and was conspicuously sucking on the knuckles of his right hand.
“Hey, Needle-Dick, we gotta talk.” Gordy bouncy, full of himself, jerked his thick neck back across the road.
“Don’t call me that,” Dale said calmly.
Gordy mugged surprise at Dale’s controlled response. It only slowed him for a few beats. “Okay, sure, I’m sorry. Don’t mean to offend. But the thing is, you gotta talk to Ace.”
“I heard about the woman, and I just saw you hit that guy.”
“You see me put him on his ass with one punch? He’s bigger’n me, too.”
“Who is he?” Dale said.
“Bitch’s husband, she says.” Gordy furrowed his brow.
“What do you mean, ‘she says’?” Dale said.
“Kinda coincidental, don’t you think? She shows up in a bar hardly nobody goes to, on a highway hardly nobody who ain’t local uses,” Gordy said.
“So?”
“And she’s traveling with the only lesbian ever seen north of Grand Forks.”
Dale perked up, went to the window, and stared across the highway at the bar. “A lesbian? Here? No shit.” Now that would be something.
“What I’m saying is, it’s too coincidental. Nobody comes to Langdon except…”
“Yeah, yeah, for weddings, funerals, or unless their job sends them here,” Dale said. He smiled at Gordy’s consternation. “So you think she’s working, huh?” If Gordy was worried, it could only be about one thing. “Some kind of snitch? Cop maybe?”
Gordy shrugged. “Maybe the Canadian excise people are bitching about the whiskey again.”
Dale’s smile broadened, enjoying Gordy’s discomfort. “Ace don’t ship that much. It’s the meth has everybody riled. More likely she’s after you.”
Gordy was not amused. “Ha ha. But that ain’t the point. Ace’s thinking with his pecker. I mean, c’mon, at the very least she’s a lush. And he’s drinking.”
“Think of that: the two of them shacked up in the back room. They’ll drink up the inventory.”
“I’m serious here. They catch him driving and drinking one more time, he’ll be eating takeout pizza in county. Walking the halls for exercise, on one cigarette a day.”
Dale shrugged fatalistically. “It’s because of Darlene and the kids leaving. The divorce.” He made a sympathetic assay with his flat blue eyes. But behind his expression he hid a swell of satisfaction. Ace was finally falling back to earth in flaming, whiskey-soaked pieces, spiraling so low he was almost taking orders from this piece of shit, Gordy, who’d had a D average, who had to go to summer school to graduate. Who had to get special permission from the principal to go on the Senior Trip.
“So what do you say? Have a talk with him.”
Dale nodded without enthusiasm. “He don’t listen to me, you know.”
“At least try.”
“Okay. I’ll talk to him.”
Gordy nodded, looked around. “So, ah, where’s our favorite funny fucking Indian?”
Dale settled back into his desk chair and took his time reaching into the refrigerator, taking out a Coke, popping the top. Gordy called Joe Reed the “funny fucking Indian” because Joe had this very un-Indian habit, according to Gordy, anyway, of always being strictly on time.
So that’s why he’s here. He wants Joe back. Dale jerked his head north. “Went over the border yesterday. Don’t know why. He don’t exactly leave detailed trip tickets. Guy like Joe, I don’t really want to know.”
“I hear you. Well, when he gets his sneaky blanket ass back here, tell him to drop by and talk to me,” Gordy said.
“You ain’t got the balls to say that to his face,” Dale said.
They stared each other down. Gordy broke first, laughed, and said, “You’re absolutely right. But like I said, ask him polite to drop by.”
“I don’t think he’s into running your dope across the border anymore, Gordy,” Dale said.
“Yeah, right. He’s got such a future here, huh?”
“Hey.” Dale brightened. “I just sold off two of my last three machines, Irv Fuller bought ’em. He’s in the big time now. Got that construction outfit outside the Twin Cities, just won the bid on a big job.”
“Irv Fuller.” Gordy made a face.
“Yeah, Irv Fuller,” Dale said. Irv had been Homecoming King. And Ginny Weller had been Homecoming Queen.
“Did Irv pay you?”
“Put some money down,” Dale said.
“That’s Irv. Be twenty years getting the balance.”
Dale shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. I gotta feeling this deal is going to work out for me.”
“Yeah, right. So whattaya say, talk to Ace, will you?”
“I told you. I’ll try.”
“Good. So, ah, what are you going to do?”
“Sell off the last machine and lock the door. You know anybody needs a cheap 644 front-end loader?”
“That one?” Gordy pointed to the big yellow tractor sitting deeper in the shed. “The wheels are bald.”
“That’s why it’s so cheap.”
Gordy shook his head. “Then what? Go down to Florida with your dad?”
Dale grinned broadly. “Probably.”
“Well, good luck, Needle-Dick.”
Dale stood up and placed his hands on his hips. “Don’t call me that ever again.”
Gordy laughed and held out his hands and wiggled his fingers in a mock fright. “Oooh.”
“I mean it, I’m giving you fair warning,” Dale said calmly.
“Needle-Dick.” Gordy grinned, flipped Dale the bird, and walked out of the office. Dale watched him swagger back across the road, go up the porch, and disappear into the Missile Park.
Dale held his fists tight against his chest. Ten years Gordy had been picking on him.
He had lost his focus and now he had to get it back.
He took a couple of cold Cokes from the small refrigerator and tossed them in his backpack. People used to ride him about the pack. Just a tiny thing in his huge hands, the seams parting, yellow with a little blue butterfly on the flap. It had been his schoolbag in elementary school. Just room for two Cokes and a sandwich.
Methodically, he shut off the lights, locked the door, and walked to his ancient Grand Prix. Getting in, his boots poked around, stirring through a compost of hamburger wrappers on the floorboards.
The windshield was clouded with grime. Dale paid no mind. He started the car and drove north along the grid of roads through wind-rippled fields that were mostly empty. Here and there he saw a huge-wheeled tractor. The skeletal rails of a hay wagon. They were waiting on the crop to ripen. Waiting on the custom combiners to come through.
He poked the radio and KNDK came on with the weather for the Drayton, Walhalla, and Langdon area: cloudy and humid, ninety-two degrees. Legion baseball tonight, Langdon at Grafton. First pitch at 5:45, weather permitting. Dale turned it off when the Successful Farmers’ Radio Magazine theme music started up.
He thought of the deserted homes that dotted the fields. Successful farmers, my ass! The houses were just hulks, long since abandoned; the farm families who used to live in them had been torpedoed by consolidation and had sunk out of sight beyond the sea of wheat.
Finally he pulled into an overgrown driveway. He shut off the motor and listened to the buzz of the cicadas. The damp ferment of sodden crops rolled over him as he looked up the drive at the house. He had fields of his own in his chest. He could feel the waves of sadness rippling off to the horizon.
He heaved out and walked toward the peeling farmhouse. Every year it looked more tiny and more run-down. The wind had finally stove in the north end of the barn and now it sagged in on the foundation. The once vibrant red lumber had faded to gray splinters. The old pasture and truck garden were long since plowed up and put into wheat.
He heard a rasp of steel-sheets of rusty tin that had come loose on the Quonset shed in back of the house. A death rattle in the wind.
Hard to believe a family of five had lived in this tiny place. Two bedrooms upstairs, an alcove downstairs with a curtain on a runner for his sister. The old Fisher woodstove.
He stopped and stared at the blister packs of Sudafed torn open and littered on the steps. Rage stirred in his chest as he kicked through the wrappers that dotted the steps and the mud porch. Fuckers. They snuck in here and cooked meth.
He trudged up the stairs and into the room he’d shared with his brother until he was seven. The springs from his old bed lay in a rusted tangle next to the window. The springs creaked as he lowered his weight down on them.
Funny how he remembered this cramped house feeling so clean. Hell, the wind would sift the dust right through the walls. No way to keep the dirt out of the kitchen. But field dirt was different from town dirt. Dad used to say dirt with sweat in it wasn’t really dirty. Dale’s chest fluttered. Last time he remembered being happy was sitting here, looking out the window facing east, watching the sun rise over the fields.
During the time of the missiles.
His eyes fixed on an irregularity in the wheat two hundred yards away. He could barely make out the square of chain link and barbed wire. Once the power lived there, a hundred feet beneath his father’s field. A silo with a Minuteman II. Like his own scary genie.
Sixteen-year-old Ace would say to six-year-old Dale: “Enough power in our field to blow up half of Russia. Just in our field alone.”
There was bad mixed in with the good, like when he would wake up at night convinced he heard the remote controls snapping and hissing under the ground and he just knew the field was going to explode. That fire was going to fall from the sky.
He woke up screaming from the image of the cows and pigs burning up, the rabbits, the geese, the chickens.
Stubby, his cat. Shaggy, his dog.
Never people, though. He never saw people burning. Only animals.
The nightmares changed and he’d just wake up and sneak out and walk across the field and stand at the edge of the mowed grass belt around the wire and hold up his hands, palms out, and try to feel the power radiating out from the silo. Not too close, because they had remote sensors and the air-basers would come by helicopter to check. Little by little he overcame his fear and made friends with it and soon the dreams went away.
All that harnessed energy poised and quiet, down deep in the earth. Dale thought he could actually feel the power in the crops that pushed up out of the earth in the spring. Feel it brood beneath the winter snow. Hear it howl in the blizzard wind.
He’d watch the trucks come in when the air-basers checked the wire and the sensors. In the summer they came and mowed the offset perimeter grass around the wire. Sometimes he’d stand on the road and wave to them.
In the end, Army engineers came with explosives to implode the empty silos. Joe Reed, whom Gordy wanted back working for him, explained how they did it. Joe knew about explosives. He was an Ojibwa from the Turtle Mountain rez and he’d worked in the oil fields up in Alberta. Some folks called him Pinto Joe because of the patchy way his face healed after an oil well blew up on him.
So they blew them in on themselves and filled them with dirt and strung barbed wire around the sites so they looked like little graveyards dotting the wheat. Something about verification, like the empty silos left open for the ABM sites south on State 1, at Nekoma.
He looked up. Little empty graveyards, so the Russian satellites could count them.
Dale drew up his legs and hugged his arms to his chest. Sometimes he felt like a buried atomic bomb they’d missed when they’d pulled out the Minutemen and the Spartans and the Sprints. The missile fields had all gone to seed and fallow. But what if they missed one? What if buried deep under the wheat there was one last cone of latent power?
Poised.
Dale shut his eyes and imagined his gross body swept away in the launch flames. Then they’d see him for who he really was, a moment of beautiful fire and grace exploding into the sky.
The moment passed.
He clambered off the old springs and walked down the stairs, running his finger along the wall like he’d done every day of his childhood. He trudged through the rooms littered with wrappers and plastic bottles and went outside. He looked up at the heavy, roiling clouds, gravid with rain. Far to the west a shiver of lightning.
Dale looked up at the relentless clouds that combined and came apart against each other. The constant gray churn could be the gears of history up there, meshing, grinding out fate.
The future.
He went around back of the house and stood for a long time staring at a pile of meth trash. There were discarded coffee filters gummy with pink and white residue; plastic funnels; a cracked blender; aluminum foil boxes; discolored Pyrex dishes; plastic jugs; and a scorched twenty-pound propane cylinder.
Furious, Dale kicked at the heap of refuse. Then he walked to the Quonset, dug around in the debris, and found an old leaf rake, a regular rake, and a shovel. He returned to the pile. Methodically, he cleared away the drug-cooking garbage until he revealed a square of railroad ties buried in the weeds.
The sand was damp from the rain and it was easy to spade up the thistles and burdock. Then he raked them in a pile and flung them away.
Sweating now, breathing heavy, he spaded over the sand, ran the rake through it until he had excavated several strata of buried refuse: old pop bottle caps, a spoon, one of his sister’s Barbie dolls.
He snatched up the brown plastic figurine and slowly snapped off the arms, then the legs, and finally the head. He hurled the pieces away.
Then he sat down on the ties and removed his boots and mismatched socks and stuck his bare feet in the clean raked sand. He wiggled his toes.
Dad had built the sandbox for him when he was four.
Slowly Dale shaped two squat castle towers in the sand. The damp sand set up well as he carefully smoothed off the tops, making them round and symmetrical. He took a can of Coke from his pack, opened it, and sat hunched forward, staring at the sand castles and sipping the Coke.
When he finished the soda, he threw the empty can toward the pile of crud he’d raked from the sandbox. Then he reached into his pack and took out a small yellow precision-die-cast replica of a John Deere front-loader.
Not like the toys he’d owned as a kid, a collector’s item from Dad’s dealership-the same dealership whose demise he was presiding over. The tiny tractor had sat on a shelf at home.
In the basement, where Dale lived.
He bent over on all fours and ran the small vehicle back and forth in the clean sand. Then, in a sudden burst of rage he slammed the replica into the towers, smashing them.
“Kashuusshhewww!” he shouted, making explosive sounds as he grabbed double handfuls of sand and threw them into the air.
“Ka-boom.”