“ ’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.”