“Aw, God, what an asshole. You all right?” Nina raised her hand gingerly to Ace’s cheek, which was a little red where Broker had hit him.
“I’m fine. Good thing his hand was hurt. You see the bandage?”
Nina improvised. “Nailgun, slipped on him. He was putting new planks on the deck for Gull’s Retreat. That’s what we call Cabin Six.”
“Lucky me,” Ace said. “Otherwise he would have coldcocked me. I did not see that punch coming.”
“Ah, that one punch was all he had in him, ’cause I put him down pretty quick,” Gordy said triumphantly.
Ace eyed Gordy like he wasn’t real sure about that. He turned to Nina and said, “What was it you said your old man did?”
“Ex-old man.” Nina arched her back.
“Yeah, yeah, I know, but what does he do?” Ace said.
“What the fucker did was change on me. He was nice enough when we were getting to know each other, then I got pregnant, and we got married, and…ah, shit.” She waved a hand in disgust.
“No, I got that part. I mean what he does for a living. He don’t look like a guy who hangs in an office,” Ace said.
“That’s for sure. He gets a bad stomach in an office. He likes being outside. So he’s got this landscape gig besides the cabins.” An old reflex of protectiveness crept into her language, distancing, wary.
“What about before that?” Ace said, narrowing his eyes.
“Well…” Her eyes hardened up a bit. “There was some stuff he was into before I knew him. Just stories I heard, because he don’t really talk about it.” It came out tone perfect, sounding rehearsed in a way Ace and Gordy would understand. Couched lines used to answer questions that maybe cops had asked.
They were sitting at the bar. Ace and Gordy were drinking coffee. Nina rotated a tumbler in both hands. It was a seven-and-seven she’d poured herself, but about 95 percent ginger ale.
“What kind of stories?” Ace said.
“He used to say the government had no business interfering with people’s rights to smoke a little grass and own a few guns.”
Gordy pounded his palm on the bar. “Hear, hear. For the grass part.”
Ace stared at Gordy, then turned to Nina. “Gordy here thinks the Canucks are going to legalize marijuana. He thinks when that happens it’s going to be like Prohibition again up here.”
“How’s that?” Nina played into their talk.
Gordy grinned. “During Prohibition there was stills lined up along all four thousand miles of the border on the Canadian side. This time it’s going to be one long field of hydroponic weed from Maine to Washington State. Box-loaders kicking out hundred-pound bails of the stuff, whole hay wagons chock-full coming through Mulberry Crossing…”
Nina shrugged, curled her lips a tad, nodded her head back and forth. Gave a knowing smile. The two men leaned forward, almost like dogs sniffing for some common ground. “Phil would dig that. You might say he dabbled in the grass business,” she said.
“He still peddling a little on the side?” Ace asked.
Nina went sour, irritable. “Nah, that was years ago. Christ, I guess what happened was all these heavily armed…black…guys showed up in Minnesota and took over the drug trade on the streets…He decided to head north and reinvent himself.”
Gordy smiled. “Don’t need to mind your language around us. We got nothing against niggers. Ain’t any up here. What we got is Indians. Like that Pinto Joe Reed; now, there’s one ugly son of a bitch.”
Ace smiled. “But you’d take him back in a minute working for you if you could get him away from my brother.”
Gordy shrugged. They dropped the subject.
“So…Phil,” Ace said. “That’s his name, your husband?”
“Yeah. Phil Broker.”
“So Phil got out of organic pharmaceuticals?”
Nina nodded. “He made a little money and bought some shore-front up north on Lake Superior, fixed up these old cabins, and now we’ve got the resort.”
Ace and Gordy looked at each other. Ace gave this nodding gesture, something like permission. Gordy shrugged. Then Ace turned his attention back to Nina, pointed at the travel bag Broker had left, and said, “You’re still in your pajamas. Think maybe it’s time to put on some clothes.”
“Got a point,” Nina said, feeling the tension thicken in the room. She started to slide off the stool.
Then Gordy reached for her purse that was sitting on the counter, tipped it over, and slid out her wallet. Flipped it open-“Your last name is Pryce on your driver’s license. How come his name is different?”
“He could have changed his name to Pryce if he wanted,” Nina said, poised, hands on the bar.
“Uh-huh.” Gordy continued to stare at her as she pushed off the bar, picked up her bag. As she started toward the stairs he snaked out a hairy arm and flattened his palm against her stomach, feeling around there. As she recoiled, he said. “Not upstairs. Pick some clothes out of your bag and put them on, right here.”
“Strip for you? Over my dead body,” Nina said in a steady voice.
“It could be arranged,” Gordy said softly, coming up off his stool. Nina saw Gordy was serious, and Ace was letting it happen. A ripple of goose bumps raised on her bare arms. She instinctively reached over and gripped her glass off the bar, holding it like a hand hatchet as her eyes measured the distance to the door.
“Slow down,” Ace said. “It’s just that Gordy has a suspicious mind.”
“You see, we got a bet,” Gordy said.
Nina narrowed her eyes.
Ace smiled. “Gordy bet me a hundred bucks you’re a cop. He thinks maybe you’re wired.”
“You mean wearing a tape recorder under this?” She plucked at the flimsy shirt.
“Ah, yeah.”
“You’re joking, right?” Nina said.
“ ’Fraid not,” Ace said.
“Show and tell time, honey,” Gordy said.
Nina set the glass down, eased back two steps, lowered the bag, zipped it open, and searched around. She found a pair of shorts and a tank top.
“Okay, I’ll play your silly game.” She walked up to Gordy, dropped the shorts and top on the floor, reached down, crossed her arms, grabbed the hem of the shirt and peeled it up and off as she executed a pirouette. With her back to them, wearing nothing but the low-cut panties from Victoria’s Secret-thank you, Janey-she tossed the shirt accurately over her shoulder. It draped Gordy’s face as she stepped into the shorts, pulled on the tank top, and turned to face them.
Clearly pissed, she said, “Just what makes you guys think you rate a cop, anyway?”
Ace clapped and started to laugh. Gordy removed the shirt and folded his arms, scowling. “You think it’s funny. Well, it ain’t funny.”
“C’mon, man, it is funny,” Ace said.
Gordy slid off his stool, stooped, and emptied the contents of Nina’s bag, immediately retreating as if propelled by a natural aversion to the volume of strange items a woman could stuff into a bag. He returned to poke through the mess for a few seconds, then stepped back once more.
“Gordy,” Ace said firmly.
Grunting, Gordy squatted and pushed the clothes back in. He planted his hands on his knees, stood up, and, far less hostile now, faced Nina. “Um, is Phil the kind of guy who’s going to go brood about what happened out there? And come back on us with a 12-gauge at one in the morning?”
Nina shook her head. “He just turned forty-eight. He don’t bounce so good anymore. I suspect what he’ll do is take Kit back home. His parents are there to help out.”
Gordy threw up his hands in mild disgust, spun on his heel and stomped across the barren barroom, threw open the front door, and continued across the highway. Ace and Nina craned their necks and watched Gordy enter the barnlike Quonset with the rusted Bobcat and windmill out front.
Nina turned to Ace. “He don’t like women. I could tell the way he looked at me.”
Ace shook his head. “He don’t like women like you. Taller than him, lean, smart. He likes ’em about seventeen, no neck, big in front, and stoned.” He made a gesture with both hands cupped before his chest. Then he pointed to his head. “And small up here.”
“So you think I’m a cop?” Nina asked, pretending to be flattered. And confident, because she could cross her heart and hope to die and swear she was not a cop.
“Don’t know what you are,” Ace said, Then he ran his hand along the bar and felt the leather grain and distinctive scale pattern of her wallet. “Don’t know for sure what this is either.”
“Ostrich. Phil’s got a buddy who raises them for the meat and makes leather goods from the hides.”
“Really.” Ace kneaded the leather. “Tell me something.”
Nina threw a wary glance out the front window toward the corrugated tin building where Gordy had disappeared. “Depends.”
“You think ostriches could run with buffalo? After the bar’s gone I was thinking of going out further west, maybe try to raise some buffalo.”
Nina got stuck, once again blindsided by this easygoing, mostly sad, but definitely hard-to-read man. It wasn’t easy to locate the danger in him. But it was there. She had to catch her breath and restart her act.
“It’s okay,” he said.
“What’s okay?” Nina said, letting herself drift, letting the color come into her cheeks.
Ace winked. “That you like me. C’mon, let’s take a ride. I want to show you something.”
In the Tahoe, heading west. “So why would I be a cop?” Nina asked.
“One reason is whiskey. Most of the bars up around the border backdoor a little extra inventory into Canada. Bottle of booze costs fourteen bucks here, sells for thirty-eight up there. Hell of a markup. So there’s money to be made. Same’s true for cigarettes.”
“Give me another reason.”
Ace pointed out the window, at a grain elevator. “See those tanks?”
A big one looked like a giant white sausage to Nina; half a dozen smaller ones sat on wheeled carriages.
Ace went on: “Anhydrous ammonia. Basic fertilizer, used throughout the state. Also an ingredient in making methamphetamine. Meth freaks driving through here from the West Coast are struck dumb by all this stuff just sitting out here, like fat white cows waiting to be milked. They think they’ve died and gone to heaven. Just have to pull over by the side of the road and cook up a batch.”
He turned to look at her. “I’ve sold some whiskey to Canadians from time to time. But I’ve never taken it across the border myself. And I got nothing to do with that meth shit. So if you’re some kind of fancy ATF agent slumming, you gonna have to wait around a long time to get something on me.”
“Give it a rest,” Nina said. Then she stared straight ahead, scanning the straightedge of Highway 5 heading west. After a few minutes Ace slowed and turned left off the road. An overgrown gravel drive led up to a chain-link fence that surrounded a square empty plot. A big white sign with black letters: A7.
“What’s this?” Nina said.
“Where we keep the invisible monsters.”
“I don’t get it,” she said. Then she thought about it and maybe she did.
“They trucked the missiles off to Montana and imploded the silos. They keep the fences up and numbered so Russian satellites can verify that they’re empty. My brother Dale insists they ain’t empty. He says we got these cages all over the county, looks like nothing in them. Dale says they’re still in there, pacing back and forth. Wanting to get out. We just can’t see ’em.”
“Kind of creepy,” Nina said.
“For sure. That’s Dale’s sense of humor. He was the only kid who had trouble with the missiles. Only one I know about. Most of us just took it in stride. We had two silos on our farm. One next to the barn, and one like this, in our wheat field a couple hundred yards from the house. And Dale, he’d have these bad nightmares. Fire falling from the sky, burning up all the animals, stuff like that. Twenty years ago we were still on the farm. I was seventeen, Dale was about eight. I heard this shooting and I ran down to the barn and there was Dale with the.22 rifle. He had shot two cows, some chickens, a pig. He was reloading the gun when I took it away from him.
“And he was crying. Real shook. So I ask him just what the hell he was doing, and he said he didn’t want the animals to suffer in the fire that was going to fall from the sky.” Ace shook his head. “Well, Dad was gonna be pissed for sure, so I went in the house, got out the whiskey, and started drinking. When Dad came in from work he found me shit-faced, shooting pigeons in the barn with that.22. I took the heat for Dale and had to get an extra job to make enough money to replace the stock.”
He looked over at Nina and winked. “That’s when I started drinking.” He slowly turned the Tahoe around and pulled back on the highway. “That’s a true story,” he said. After that they rode in silence for a while. Ace came to an intersection and turned east on State 20.
“So how’s life look today? What you gonna do?” Ace asked.
“Not what I been doing, which was what other people wanted me to do.”
“I can relate to that. The trick is to find what you want to do.”
“Easier said.”
“Amen.”
“So, are you doing what you want to do?” Nina asked.
“I’m driving you, aren’t I?”
“I guess.”
Nina caught herself unconsciously touching at her hair. She put her hand in her lap. Then she reached in her purse, took out an American Spirit, and lit it. “So, you ever have any nightmares?” she asked.
“Lots. Only one real good one, though,” Ace said. He flung his hand at the surrounding fields. “Our people came out here, hell, before practically anybody else. Early 1850s. Lived in one of those sod houses. We found these letters they wrote, and they said one time they got stuck in that house for two days straight while the buffalo came through.”
Nina shook her head.
Ace explained. “Herd of buffalo so big it took two days to pass. And so close-packed my ancestors couldn’t open the door to get to the well.”
“And that’s your dream?”
“Sort of. I dreamed I was up on the border running a dozer, knocking down some bankrupt farmer’s house, and that herd of buffalo came through again. Me trapped on the bulldozer and the buffalo coming forever.”
“Is Ace your real name?”
“Nickname. Name’s Asa. That was my grandfather’s name. Grandfather helped organize the Nonpartisan League after World War One. You ever hear of that?”
Nina cautiously shook her head.
Ace smiled. “Grandpa used to say if you took a railroad man from St. Paul, a mill owner from Minneapolis, and a banker from New York and you stuffed them all in a pickle barrel and rolled the barrel down the hill, there’d always be a son of a bitch on top.”
“Sounds like your grandpa wasn’t a Republican.”
“You got that right. When he had a few beers in him he used to say there’s nothing more dangerous than a bunch of angry farmers with rifles. Was how America started, he’d say.”
Nina sat up a little straighter, attentive. “Sounds like militia talk.”
“Ah, I met some of those guys-just weekend beer bellies, like to dress up in camo. Not real serious folks for the most part.”
Definitely more attentive. “What’s serious?”
“Changing something. Fixing something.” Ace shrugged. “Hey, I’m not much for politics. But I do know that if one guy shoots the banker it’s murder. If twenty guys lynch him it’s a mob; but if the whole county takes him out and strings him up it’s a change of administration. That’s kinda what they did here in the teens and twenties, took over the state, wrote new laws, created the state mill and the state bank. Back then they called them Socialists.”
Ace shook his head and laughed. “Then we become the launch site for all the missiles aimed at Communist Russia. Which made us into a big target. Kinda like payback for what the Nonpartisan League did to the fat cats, maybe.”
Nina eyed him carefully. “You have this habit of surprising people, you know?”
Ace smiled wryly, and Nina thought he could probably do that for a few more years, but once the tiny wrinkles around his mouth came up sharper it’d be sad all the way. He said, “I used to play ball. That’s a game where you stand around a lot. But then if something happens, you got to be on top of it. Got to be ready for surprises, I guess.” His eyes lingered on her when he said that, searching.
She held his gaze. “So what is it you’re going to show me?”
“Just a place where something happened.”
Nina looked away and watched the wind stream through a long row of trees. “What kind of trees are those?”
“Poplars. Immigrants used to plant them. Put ’em in cemeteries when somebody died. Instead of headstones. More windrows to cut down on the wind. Notice how they all kind of bow to the east. That’s the wind.” He grinned and gave her a sidelong glance. “You know why the wind blows in North Dakota?”
She knew that one. “Yeah, yeah. Because Minnesota sucks.”
They laughed and Nina got comfortable, curling her legs under her in the bucket seat, something she hadn’t done in a car with a man since high school.
More dead straight road, fields of wheat and oats and occasional pools of flax that seemed to float against the green like wisps of mirage.
Then a tall gray grain elevator loomed up on the left side of the highway. Ace slowed and turned left. The red sign by the road said STARKWEATHER.
“Quaint name for a town,” Nina said.
“Got an echo to it, that’s for sure,” Ace said. They drove past an abandoned grocery, a shack with a gas pump, and a post office that maybe was still functioning. Ace parked across from a run-down tavern with a big Pabst Blue Ribbon sign hanging over the door. He zipped down the window, fingered a Camel out of his chest pocket, lit it, exhaled, and said, “How many chances you think people get?”
“Not sure. Sometimes I think some people never had a chance.”
“Well, I did. Nineteen eighty-three I graduated high school. Had a good year in Legion ball, batted eight hundred and change. Coach compiled my stats, pulled a few strings, and I got letters from the Twins and the Reds. So I went down to the Twin’s tryout.” He leaned back, smiled. “Knocked two home runs out of the old Met Stadium. Got it on film. That was before video was big. Made the cut the first day.
“Then come the second morning and I’m there warming up and…” He paused and his eyes got stuck remembering. He raised his right knee, moved it in a slow circle. “You could hear the pop clear across the field in the stands.”
“ACL tendon?”
“Big time. They told me where to go to get the best treatment and I went and they give me all this physical therapy. Said it would be six months to heal up. Maybe an operation.
“And I started the program, but I came back here…” His eyes drifted out he window. “Started driving the big stuff for Irv Fuller’s dad. Then, what the hell, I thought I’d try farming. Took over my dad’s place. He’d moved into town by then. Had the Deere dealership and the bar.
“I got in trouble with the bank and tried to cut costs and didn’t pay for crop insurance, and between the hail and the rain and the bugs, that ended my farming career.”
He pointed across the street at the run-down bar.
“Was right in there on a Friday night. I had a little too much to drink and this fool named Bobby Pease, who was just a big bag of wind and a bully and a real mean drunk-well, Bobby decided he was going to throw me out of the bar, and he came at me with a beer bottle and I was not in the best mood, having just lost the farm…” He held up his right hand, studied it. “So I hit him. Just once.”
Ace sighed. “Well, some who were there said it was the fall that broke his neck but I heard it crack when I hit him. He must have been way off balance.” He sucked his teeth and his voice turned wistful. “And I always did hit pretty good. There was more than a few bankrupt farmers on the jury and I’d been working for Fuller, plowing under farmhouses to make more room for the big twelve-bottom plows.” Ace shook his head. “They gave me manslaughter. Reckless endangerment. Cost me a year at Jamestown, the state farm.”
Nina didn’t know what to say.
“But you know what they say about silver linings.” Ace grinned, starting up the Tahoe. “That’s where I got started reading.”