by Chuck Logan
“Maybe we’ll find out tomorrow,” he said.
“I think we will find out tomorrow,” she said.
They finished their meal in silence. Beyond the windows, Lake Superior dimmed down to an empty ebony ballroom and a soft-shoe of moonlight. They paid the check and walked into the lobby.
“C’mon, Broker,” she said. “Spin me down the beach.”
45
The superior surf could never really murmur. It was for rolling rocks. Broker smiled at the insight and wondered if he’d just described himself.
Leaving the restaurant, because of the eyeshadow, he noticed that her iris had flecks of green and that her eyelashes were golden; because of the lipstick, he noticed the curve of her upper lip. As they walked the gravel path along the shore he was very aware of the temperature of her leg when it swept against his. And the rustle of her dress, the click of her heels, and the swing of her hips.
She turned and cuddled against his chest and smoothed a hand down his lapel. The languid motion stopped abruptly. “What’s this?”
He tapped the folded files in his inside jacket pocket. “The banking records. Just a precaution.”
Her eyes soaked up the moonlight. “You have any idea what this dress cost? Do me a favor. Stop working for the rest of tonight.” She stepped out, holding his hand high, and twirled back under it into him.
She grinned. “See how easy it is?” She had wrapped his arm around her shoulders and looked up. “Do me another favor,” she said.
“Sure.”
“For one night stop thinking of me as a nine-year-old in braces.”
Actually, Broker was thinking she was more like ice cream in a black dress. “How come you never got married?” he asked, stealing her question to him.
A lake breeze moved across the material of her dress and he felt the motion, warm, inside the skin of his hands. “I don’t need a husband. I need a fucking wife,” she observed frankly.
He took her hand and his fingers grazed the ridges of scars in her palm. “Okay. You’re all grown up.”
“This could be our last night ashore. Know what I mean?”
He nodded. “It could get rough.”
They stopped walking and stood close. A couple in shorts, with wires distorting the silhouettes of their heads, speed-walked by wearing Walkmans in the dark. Like blinders. Another time, Broker might have pushed them into the lake.
“So…maybe there will never be another night quite like this. Why don’t we just appreciate it,” she said. Slowly she raised her arms and put them, no longer hard but soft and willowy, around his neck. As her energy circled him, her hipbones pressed, definite and hard, and it was very warm down there between them.
His capillaries stood up like happy red wires and he lived through a perfect kiss.
“Don’t worry, tomorrow I’ll turn back into a tomboy with a dead frog in my pocket,” she whispered and punctuated it with a hot lick to his earlobe.
“No you won’t.”
“Yes, I will. That’s the problem.”
First they did it with their eyes in the moonlight.
Eloquent with the eyes. The body can only try to take the shape. The body is awkward, it sweats, and fumbles and that is why, even in the dark, you look into each other’s eyes when you make love, to pretend you are not just an animal, to pray that there really is a soul.
Then, like all the best moments of his life, the details were lost in the absence of the ordinary and, like always when he rediscovered this place, he wondered why he couldn’t live here all the time.
For a while they continued to float in each other’s arms soaking up the last tremblers. Then it was eyes again. And breathing returning to normal and the tickle of drying sweat.
Very slowly they found their way back into their own skins and, after an interval, she rolled to the side, removed one of his cigarettes from the pack on the night-stand, lit it, and passed it to him. Now they’d have to talk. Talk ruined the world. What the world needed was a government of eyes.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
Broker exhaled a stream of smoke at the ceiling. “I never thought this would ever happen again.”
“What?”
“Lay in bed with a woman and look at the ceiling and share a cigarette. It’s not allowed in Minnesota.”
They both laughed and Broker knew that when this was over, he would be old. He just knew. Days like this would never never come his way again.
He watched her roll off the bed and go to the refrigerator and open a mineral water. Then she crossed the deep pile carpet in a glide against the triangles of Scandinavian maple that framed the windows. Broker sighed with happy fatalism. The arena was full of pirates. Now he had opened the last two remaining doors and admitted the lady and the tiger.
But for now the night air came tactile through the screens, still special to the moment and they nudged it with their eyes, back and forth across the room, against each other’s skin.
She sat on the window ledge tipped in quicksilver against the night and stars. The cool, beaded bottle rested on her thigh. She drew one knee up and stretched her left arm over it.
He tried to picture her with long hair. A few more pounds.
He tried to picture her…cooking.
Making love with her had been an outrageous clean, free place. And now a long moment of calm.
But nothing was free, was it?
And they had made love in the eye of the storm.
Broker saw the problem. The castle walls in her eyes had been kicked down in the rumpus on the bed. She had been generous. She could play at surrender and back and forth. Now she had to rebuild her fort and stamp out the seeds of romantic entanglement that could sprout like weeds from every drop of her sweat.
With a mischievous salty grin she ambled to the bed. “The trouble with guys,” she said, “is once they find a great piece of ass,” she took a swig of water, “they don’t know what to do with it.”
“Some guys,” said Broker, pushing up on his elbows. So much for the warrior-virgin theory. “I guess we’re used to it being quieter…after.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I know, I should be spacey and postcoital gooey. Was Kimberly, the space alien, like that in the dark?” Tough talk, but her eyes were still big and grave. “All the guys I’ve been with said the same thing: ‘Let’s get married after you quit the army.”
“Well, you quit the army.”
“I didn’t jump. I was pushed. And not because of the Gulf stink. It was later. Because of a little scrap of tin that costs a dollar in the PX.” She laughed and extended her finger. “You got one and I don’t.” She pointed at his penis, but she was talking about the Combat Infantry Badge. She started stacking up the rocks in her eyes.
“Never happen,” said Broker. “They give it to you, they have to open the combat arms to women.”
“I did the work. I should get paid like everybody else.” She pointed to the two scars in her hip. “What’d I do here, knick myself baking cookies?”
“You’re right,” sighed Broker. “Definitely not post-coital gooey.”
Nina put on a freckled roughneck grin. “I have to mind my stereotypes if I’m going to gatecrash their party and nail LaPorte’s scalp to the clubhouse wall.”
“You really think that’ll work?”
“So I’ve been led to believe.” She set the bottle down on the night table. “The same senior officers who put the bug in my ear about LaPorte think it’s inevitable. A woman is going to cross the line in the next five years-the army just needs a push. The kind of push that comes from a big splash. If LaPorte drops from a great height, I’ll get my splash.”
“Ambitious,” said Broker. More comfortable now that it was out in the open.
She jerked her lips in a bawdy grin. “Somebody has to be the first swinging vagina to command a rifle company.” She climbed on the bed and straddled his hips. “You secure enough to handle that kind of ambition?”
“So
unds fine to me.” He reached up for her.
“Uh-uh. This time I get to be on top.”
“Okay.”
“Can you handle that?”
“Like I said, some men-”
“Confident, aren’t you?”
“Too much talk.”
“One last thought before the next round of killing starts. Could you handle being a general’s wife?”
“What?”
Nina looked down with a warm smile and said, “See.” Broker threw the pillow at her. She threw it back.
More serious now, she lay down beside him. A prolonged silence buried the banter and she said, “Tell me about my dad, Broker.”
Broker adjusted a pillow under his head. “His left foot was a cornerstone. Guys like him hold institutions together.”
Nina flicked a curl of lint from a tidy breast and knit her brows. “Had he lived and stayed in the army he’d never have made it past colonel. You know what I mean?”
“Uh-huh. He lived by the book but he wasn’t an ass kisser. He told me once he’d grown up in the shadow of giants. He was talking about men like Ridgway, Bradley, Patton. He had a little of that aura.”
“All gone now.”
“Yeah.”
Nina tossed her head and aimed a puff of breath at her mussed hair. “Oh I don’t know, I just got rolled around by a little of that aura.” She grinned.
Broker slowly clipped her chin with affectionate knuckles. Nina took his cigarette and rolled over and dragged experimentally, holding the smoke between her thumb and index finger.
“In a funny way it’s guys like my dad who held me up in the army. The dinosaurs,” she said, handing back the smoke. “Just a bunch of old white men bitching about upper-body strength.”
“Powell wasn’t an old white man, he didn’t want you guys in the foxholes.”
“He’s wrong. Hell, I’m not a fanatic. I know that most women can’t handle it. But what pisses me off is that they won’t admit that most men can’t handle it either.” She laughed. “John Wayne is still the macho symbol of the soldier. Did you ever see John Wayne run in a movie. No. He always walked.”
“I kinda liked the way he walked.” Broker grinned.
“He was tippy and overweight. He would have dropped dead on a PT test.” She turned to him frankly. “Look at me, what do you see?”
“A damn good-looking female human,” said Broker playfully.
“Right. A female human who weighs about the same as Audie fucking Murphy.” She set her jaw. “Maybe I’ll make it, maybe I won’t. Whoever makes it, she won’t be off the PC funny farm that took over after Tailhook…
“In the end we’ll do it the old-fashioned way.” She sat up and linked her arms around her knees. “It’s just arithmetic. More and more of us are in forward positions. And we’ll be in some dead-end posting and there’ll be a total clusterfuck-like the Rangers in Somalia. When the body parts stop dripping from the trees, the pile of dead ovaries will be bigger than the pile of dead testicles. That’s how you get a soldier’s attention. With a bucket of blood. We know about blood. Hell, we should all be awarded Purple Hearts when we get our first period.”
Broker chose his words carefully. “I think it’s older. We decided we can get dirty in wars and we always lie about how fucked up it really is. If women start getting dirty the same way, who’s going to raise the kids?”
She licked her index finger and chalked a number one in the dark. Her lips curved down. “So how was I? Dirty?”
“Nina…”
Her lips formed a smile but she wasn’t smiling. “I shot two Republican Guards no farther away than it is to that doorway. They came around a burning track. They hesitated. I didn’t. I’ve never felt bad about those two guys in the moral sense. But sometimes I wish I’d had a kid before I killed my first man in combat.”
The Jericho eyes were back and the pliant lover of twenty minutes ago departed her like vapor. She stood up and walked to a chair where she’d thrown her luscious black dress. She picked it up and held it for a moment and rocked it against her cheek. Then she dropped it to the floor and when she turned to him again she wore her nakedness like a tailored Class-A uniform. She planted her knuckles on her hips again and teased, “So, now are you going to tell me where you got the hickey on your neck?”
46
Broker woke up and stretched. For a wonderful half second he drowsed with an adolescent languor until an odor smacked him that was about as far from the memory of lovemaking as you can get: Hoppe’s gun-cleaning solvent.
A shower had knocked the quaff from Nina’s hair and her face was bare of makeup. She wore baggy jeans, a pebble-gray T-shirt, and busted tennis shoes. He sat up and squinted. Probably changed to the bigger jeans because he’d said that dress was too tight at the store…
Her pant legs were drenched almost to the knees. Cockleburs stuck to them. Wet grass and bits of brush were pasted to her rubber soles. He reached for his car keys on the bedside table. Gone.
“What the hell?”
“I took the Jeep up into the hills. Ran a few rounds through the.45 to see where it shoots,” she said mildly as she held up the pistol. “A foot off to the left at eight o’clock over approximately fifty yards…”
Broker rubbed his eyes. “Let me have that cannon. Take the Beretta, it’s lighter.”
Nina hefted the Colt’s weight and said fondly, “Uh-uh, this lump of iron is the longest continuing in-service military handgun in the world for a reason.”
She sat at the table by the kitchenette surrounded by bore brushes, patches and plastic bottles, little wire brushes, cleaning rods, and a box of pistol ammunition. His Beretta lay to one side, obviously oiled. Her fingers flew, reassembling the Colt. The slide ratcheted forward with a springing snap. She fixed him with a direct, scrubbed morning stare. “Last night doesn’t mean I’m your squaw, you got that?”
“C’mon-” said Broker.
“It could complicate taking care of business, agreed?”
“Just a weak moment,” said Broker.
“A choice I made. Nothing weak about it,” she said with finality.
Broker made a face and needed to brush his teeth. Grumbling, he headed to the bathroom.
At the sink he wondered how he would get his Colt back. Should have brought the shotgun. Maybe they should stop on the road and buy one. He’d never relied on handguns, which he considered wildly inaccurate in the hands of normal people-he recalled the army pistol-shooting trophy in Nina’s apartment in Ann Arbor-unless you were an obsessive-compulsive nut who spent thousands of hours at the range. Which she could very well be.
Broker continued to grumble through a shower and a shave. When he came out, he dressed quickly. They packed their bags, clipped on their security belts, jammed guns in their waistbands, left their T-shirts untucked to cover them, and walked from the fancy room without looking back.
Broker jump-started his heart with three thimbles of espresso on the deck of the fern-elegant pastry shop next to the resort. As Nina had a vegetable omelet he watched the pewter sky heat up over the lake. With uncharacteristic ennui he wondered if he’d ever see snow again. Then they hit the road. Nobody tailed them as far as he could determine.
Nina read aloud from Tuna’s prison jacket while Broker monitored the rearview. “Graduate degree in business administration from the University of Michigan extension service. Two years of Vietnamese. Graduate courses in international investment. Tuna and I were going to school together.”
“Biding his time, getting ready for something. He always was a tricky guy but-”
“But what?”
“He always had bad luck.”
“No shit.”
In an hour they had crossed through Duluth and Superior, Wisconsin, and were speeding south on the road they’d originally taken up to Mike and Irene’s. The early morning haze burned off and humidity hugged the fields and tree lines like a lazy bejeweled python. Barefoot, early summer day, when the yellowjacket sti
ngs you in the soft flesh under your instep in the tall wet grass.
They didn’t talk much. The map lay open on Nina’s lap. Twenty years telescoped for Broker. Twenty years in which he had failed at a marriage and put a lot of guys and two or three women in jail. Not much to show. He glanced at Nina, who stared straight ahead. He wondered if some of her concentration was morning-after blues. Passion and spontaneity had overruled precaution last night.
He smiled tightly, remembering his mother’s maxim: Our only real job here on earth is to replace ourselves.
But the fact was, when you’re driving toward who knows what with loaded guns in your pants, you’re a long way from workaday hedges against reality like condoms and diaphragms. Seeming to sense his thoughts she turned and asked, “How are you doing, Broker?”
“We’ll do just fine,” he said.
“I think so too.” For a few moments she held his hand. Broker leaned forward and stepped on the gas.
They turned east on Highway 8 at St. Croix Falls, and then south on County 65. They consulted the map and made a turn on County F and raced down the winding tar two-lane that was hemmed in by hilly fields and a lot of swamp and small woods. They found Loki near a place called Wanderoos.
Like Ryan said. There was nothing there except a decaying A amp; W Root Beer stand with weeds growing in the parking lot and a two-story cinderblock building with four pickups parked behind the loading dock.
The peeling white paint on the building’s side had sprouted quaint Burma Shave whiskers and failed to blot out huge faded letters that spelled out a previous owner: CAMP’S EXTRA MILD CHEESE. 1926. A newer sign was bolted to a pillar on the loading dock and bore an Italian flag-colored cockade logo and the business name: RED, WHITE, AND GREEN, INC. Cracked cement steps rose to the dock and a sign jutted at one end. Office.