“Christ, first I’m used. Now I’m working?” Broker’s right hand shot out and seized her bare arm above the elbow. Hard.
“Ow.”
It felt good to touch her, to feel her move. “Pass it to me when I grab your hand.”
“Hey!” Shuster lurched up alert on the porch and called out. “Talk is okay. Grabbing is not okay.”
“…Turned into a regular little whore. Don’t care who you give it to…” Broker’s voice rose as he pulled her in close and they tussled, twisting her wrist with his good hand, feeling her insert the folded paper into his injured palm. Turning, he winced with pain as he slipped it in his pocket. He released her wrist and raised his hand, palm open, as if to slap her.
Nina’s expression was suitably indignant and furious from a distance but, close in, there was a smirk, possibly even erotic, in her eyes. “God, I love it when you talk dirty,” she said under her breath.
“You’re enjoying this, whoring for George W.,” he said between clenched teeth.
She whispered right back. “Oh really? What about that sleazy little cunt Jolene Sommer you fucked last year?”
“We were separated,” he yelled, suddenly on the defensive, feeling the force drain from his raised hand. Should have never never told her about Jolene.
“Asshole!” she shouted back.
On the porch, Ace turned to Gordy. “I think I just won a hundred bucks, ’cause you can’t fake that. Uh-uh. Those people are definitely married.”
Nina stepped inside the arc of Broker’s swing and slapped his face. Stung, Broker recoiled, recovered, and grabbed a fistful of her short hair and wrenched her head to the side. Then he held her at arm’s length as she swung at him, a haymaker windmilling in midair…
Shuster came off the porch fast, athletic; he stepped between them and announced, “You’re outta line, fella.”
Broker reached around him to get at Nina. Shuster shouldered him, holding his hands up, all defense, not aggressive, trying to be reasonable. “I said, you’re outta line.”
Broker turned his attention to Shuster. He blinked, his face worked. His breath came in a rush. All his anger flashed like chain lightning, and he had to ground it somewhere or he’d just burn up right there. Before he realized it, he had squared off. Shuster’s hands came up. But they were still open and signifying calm.
“Man…”
Broker changed up the speed, his hands a blur. He feinted right with his shoulder and fired a left jab, very crisp and fast, that piled into Shuster’s right cheek-
BIGMISTAKE!!!!!!!
The force went out of the punch and his whole nervous system cringed and scream-balled up like a spider in a flame. His knees buckled, his good hand shot to protect his fiery left hand. Shuster blinked, surprised, raised his hand to his face.
Now Gordy trotted forward and muttered to Shuster. “Step back, Ace. You can’t be mixin’ in this. You got that DUI, remember? They’ll throw you back in jail.”
Gordy came straight ahead and Broker resigned himself to taking a punch for Delta Force, Donald Rumsfeld, and Homeland Security. Goddamn shit!
Gordy let fly, a powerful but sloppy overhand right. Like he was driving an engineer stake into hardpan. Jarred, seeing a starburst, Broker took it high on the left cheek and temple.
Broker staggered back, shook his head. Gingerly he tested his cheekbone. Unbroken. He’d have a black eye. A sore neck. Shuster restrained Gordy’s cocked right fist. “That’s enough, Gordy. Let him go,” he said.
Gordy Riker bounced, doing a huff-and-puff number with his shoulders. Broker did a modified Charlie Chaplin pratfall, tripping as he stepped back. He fell on his butt on the damp trap rock. Gordy hovered-porcupiney, short-fused, mean. Then, when Broker didn’t attempt to get up, Gordy swaggered back to the bar.
Shuster walked Nina protectively back toward the porch, then stopped and came back to where Broker sat unceremoniously on his rear end.
“You don’t gotta listen to me but I’m going to give you a little advice. I just been through a divorce myself, and one thing I learned is people need a little space.”
Broker glared at him, all the while muttering deep inside how, granted, his left hand was under the weather and how maybe he should get up and introduce this hayseed to his right hand. Instead, he reflected that the ability to defer satisfaction was a sign of maturity; so he played his assigned role and remained on his butt.
Shuster joined Nina and Gordy and they went back up the steps into the saloon. Broker dropped his eyes and stared at a tiny procession of black ants picking their way through the pebbles.
Maybe you could stick around.
Yes, dear.
Broker grimaced and felt a puffy bruise swelling up below his left eye. He looked up and down the deserted highway. Just the green fields, the low gray clouds. Across the road he saw a rusting Bobcat sitting in weeds in what had once been a parking lot. A fading John Deere logo painted up on the front of a large washed-out yellow pole barn. Weather-beaten letters spelled SHUSTER AND SONS EQUIPMENT. Thought he saw the shadow of someone standing in the doorway, watching. When he looked again, the guy was gone.
“You’re asking a lot,” he said under his breath as he slowly got to his feet.
Chapter Fifteen
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.