Ace grinned and laughed. “Thing about high school and Sally was, I had this old Chevy, three on the tree. The seat was more, ah…”
“Friendly toward gathering energy,” Nina said tartly. “That was then. This is now. I’m too old to fool around in cars, or fields.”
Ace mouthed a silent laugh. “You’re right. That’s for kids.” Abruptly he cranked the key, put the car in gear, and started to drive.
The uses of silence. In the quiet refuge of her thoughts, she concocted sexual scenarios. Starts, stalled middles, and no finish. Just couldn’t make it work.
But the flush clung to her cheeks. Her freckles must look like copper rivets. But she could only allow herself so much indulgence. The lapse ran its course.
Now they passed through the town’s one flashing red light and were going the opposite direction, north. Not casual. He was very deliberate today. Like he was working through stations.
More forever fields to go with the forever sky. Add desolate deserted houses. They pulled into an overgrown driveway. Now what?
Ace got out, fingered a cigarette from his chest pocket, carefully not revealing the pack. Broker had told her about that one. Old yardbird reflex-hide your smokes from the other cons. He lit it with a plastic Bic, then stood smoking and staring at the gray wood siding and broken windows and the weeds. The collapsing barn. A rusted Quonset.
He marched forward and she followed him until they stood on the cracked concrete next to the side entrance to a mud porch.
Ace pointed at a rusted twenty-pound propane tank that lay on its side on the steps. The kind used in gas grills. It was surrounded by other trash-Pyrex two-quart measuring cups, Mason jars, rectangular Corning dishes, worn-out plastic funnels, discarded rubber gloves.
“Tell me what you see,” he said.
Nina shrugged. “Lots of junk. Somebody’s old grill tank.”
He studied her face. “Why’s it stained blue all around the brass valve?”
“What is this, twenty questions?”
“Only two so far,” Ace said. He turned and walked to the back of the house.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“I grew up here. Tried farming here. Place has been abandoned for years.”
“Somebody’s been here. Look.” She pointed to the carefully raked sand in a frame of weathered railroad ties. “The sandbox is clean.”
Ace squatted on his haunches and trailed his fingers through the rain-pocked sand. He reached over and picked up a tiny yellow tractor with a shovel on the front. The detail on it was too exact for a toy. It was the kind of replica some men keep on their desks. He put it back down where it had been, next to two half-destroyed sand-castle towers. More ruins, eroded by the rain.
“Dale, probably. He comes out here. Sometime he brings a sleeping bag and stays up there. In our old room.” He pointed to the broken window on the second story.
“That’s pretty sad.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Dale’s smart enough. He functions fine. He’s just socially…”-Ace scrunched his eyebrows looking for a word-“remote. Like, he got to this threshold and decided not to come out and play. I don’t think it’s a limitation. I think it’s a choice he made.”
“How about friends?” Nina made it sound like a logical question. Just talking along.
“Not really, except for Joe Reed. They been hanging out together the last couple of months.”
Her voice speeded up. “The guy with the burns and the bad hand?”
Ace nodded. “Pinto Joe. Got burned up in the Alberta oil fields. Well got away on him. Caught fire.”
“Where’s he from?”
“Don’t know for sure. He don’t say. Turtle Mountain, I guess.” Ace said. His hand floated up and touched her lightly on the cheekbone, under her eye. “You got to work on your eyes, Nina. When something catches your attention it’s like shark fins turning on a dime in there.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Means, you want to know about Joe, you better go ask Joe.” He walked past her, toward the Tahoe.
Driving again. Back to town. Mile by mile, she felt the tension building. She almost had to laugh at the extra freight the female soldier was obligated to carry. If captured, she could expect to be raped. And, like they drummed into you, her whole body was a weapon-to include, apparently, what nature put between her legs. If war was an extension of diplomacy by other means, was sex, too, an extension of war?
She did laugh.
“What?” Ace asked.
“Nothing,” she said. She had been through Airborne and Ranger school. She had been to Escape and Evasion. She had shot pistol on the Marksmanship Unit. Eleven years ago she gunned down two Iraqi Republican Guards close enough to see their eyes react to her bullets. That was hot-blooded killing. Now she was looking straight at cold-blooded sex in the line of duty.
She made practical calculations. Six days since her period. Probably should insist on a condom. Get some health history. And get a hold of yourself. Stop acting like a piece of driftwood coming in with the tide.
Do your job, goddammit. Afterwards he might open up and talk. That was the idea, wasn’t it?
They spoke hardly at all on the drive back to the Missile Park. Some of it had to do with a shift in the air; here and there patches of sun collapsed the cloud chapel, dappling the fields with light.
He parked in back of the bar, got out, and opened the back door. She followed him inside, through the storeroom into the main bar. The lights were out. Gordy was nowhere in sight.
Ace walked to the bar, sat on a stool, and stared at his reflection in the mirror. She sat on the stool next to him.
“So what are you going to do?” he said staring straight ahead, talking to her reflection.
“What do you think I should do?” she said to his reflection. She thought about how mirrors work. They throw back reversed images, right? Like little lies.
“Okay, then.” He heaved off the stool, walked to the stairway, and went up to the apartment.
Nina stood up, squared her shoulders, and climbed the darkened stairs.
He was waiting in the small living room. There was a bottle of Seagrams on the kitchen table. He got two glasses from the draining board and poured two short drinks. He handed her a glass. She sipped the whiskey then set it on the desk. He tossed down his drink, put the glass back on the counter.
Then he stood, hands at his sides. Not gloating or even expecting much. More like, just very much present, as if he knew the few things he was good at. He was a player who knew how to make a play. He knew how to touch a woman.
And as if borne by a swell, she drifted up to him. He put his arms around her and kissed her. She let herself go, melting into him.
Ace was obviously a good time. But, holding him, she could feel the hollowness. Could almost smell the doubt filter through the whiskey on his breath, taste it pump in and out of his lungs. She knew that a strong enough wind would blow him and his party-time erection away.
But she managed a reasonably wanton kiss, part nostalgia for things missed, part exploration, but with not too much tongue. Just enough to jolt his circuits. Then she drew back and looked at him. “So what is it you think you know?”
His blue eyes were half wary, half joking. But honest. “The only thing I know for sure is when some other man’s wife wants something she ain’t getting at home.”
“Like now?”
“We’ll see.” His practiced hand moved up her butt and followed the seam of the zipper at the back of the flimsy, outrageously expensive dress Janey had picked out for her. Like a bead of cool mercury, the zipper ran down her back. Then Ace stepped back to watch.
Nina kicked off the sandals. Then she wiggled her shoulders in an instinctual move. As the cotton slipped over her shoulders and down her arms, she watched his melancholy eyes as they studied the ripple of light and shadow play down the front of her body. Not desire so much as curiosity. And this sense of waiting for something.