"I don't think he's into running your dope across the border anymore, Gordy," Dale said.

"Yeah, right. He's got such a future here, huh?"

"Hey." Dale brightened. "I just sold off two of my last three machines, Irv Fuller bought 'em. He's in the big time now. Got that construction outfit outside the Twin Cities, just won the bid on a big job."

"Irv Fuller." Gordy made a face.

"Yeah, Irv Fuller," Dale said. Irv had been Homecoming King. And Ginny Weller had been Homecoming Queen.

"Did Irv pay you?"

"Put some money down," Dale said.

"That's Irv. Be twenty years getting the balance."

Dale shrugged. "Oh, I don't know. I gotta feeling this deal is going to work out for me."

"Yeah, right. So whattaya say, talk to Ace, will you?"

"I told you. I'll try."

"Good. So, ah, what are you going to do?"

"Sell off the last machine and lock the door. You know anybody needs a cheap 644 front-end loader?"

"That one?" Gordy pointed to the big yellow tractor sitting deeper in the shed. "The wheels are bald."

"That's why it's so cheap."

Gordy shook his head. "Then what? Go down to Florida with your dad?"

Dale grinned broadly. "Probably."

"Well, good luck, Needle-d.i.c.k."

Dale stood up and placed his hands on his hips. "Don't call me that ever again."

Gordy laughed and held out his hands and wiggled his fingers in a mock fright. "Oooh."

"I mean it, I'm giving you fair warning," Dale said calmly.

"Needle-d.i.c.k." Gordy grinned, flipped Dale the bird, and walked out of the office. Dale watched him swagger back across the road, go up the porch, and disappear into the Missile Park.

Dale held his fists tight against his chest. Ten years Gordy had been picking on him.

He had lost his focus and now he had to get it back.

He took a couple of cold c.o.kes from the small refrigerator and tossed them in his backpack. People used to ride him about the pack. Just a tiny thing in his huge hands, the seams parting, yellow with a little blue b.u.t.terfly on the flap. It had been his schoolbag in elementary school. Just room for two c.o.kes and a sandwich.

Methodically, he shut off the lights, locked the door, and walked to his ancient Grand Prix. Getting in, his boots poked around, stirring through a compost of hamburger wrappers on the floorboards.

The windshield was clouded with grime. Dale paid no mind. He started the car and drove north along the grid of roads through wind-rippled fields that were mostly empty. Here and there he saw a huge-wheeled tractor. The skeletal rails of a hay wagon. They were waiting on the crop to ripen. Waiting on the custom combiners to come through.

He poked the radio and KNDK came on with the weather for the Drayton, Walhalla, and Langdon area: cloudy and humid, ninety-two degrees. Legion baseball tonight, Langdon at Grafton. First pitch at 5:45, weather permitting. Dale turned it off when the Successful Farmers' Radio Magazine Successful Farmers' Radio Magazine theme music started up. theme music started up.

He thought of the deserted homes that dotted the fields. Successful farmers, my a.s.s! Successful farmers, my a.s.s! The houses were just hulks, long since abandoned; the farm families who used to live in them had been torpedoed by consolidation and had sunk out of sight beyond the sea of wheat. The houses were just hulks, long since abandoned; the farm families who used to live in them had been torpedoed by consolidation and had sunk out of sight beyond the sea of wheat.

Finally he pulled into an overgrown driveway. He shut off the motor and listened to the buzz of the cicadas. The damp ferment of sodden crops rolled over him as he looked up the drive at the house. He had fields of his own in his chest. He could feel the waves of sadness rippling off to the horizon.

He heaved out and walked toward the peeling farmhouse. Every year it looked more tiny and more run-down. The wind had finally stove in the north end of the barn and now it sagged in on the foundation. The once vibrant red lumber had faded to gray splinters. The old pasture and truck garden were long since plowed up and put into wheat.

He heard a rasp of steel-sheets of rusty tin that had come loose on the Quonset shed in back of the house. A death rattle in the wind.

Hard to believe a family of five had lived in this tiny place. Two bedrooms upstairs, an alcove downstairs with a curtain on a runner for his sister. The old Fisher woodstove.

He stopped and stared at the blister packs of Sudafed torn open and littered on the steps. Rage stirred in his chest as he kicked through the wrappers that dotted the steps and the mud porch. f.u.c.kers. They snuck in here and cooked meth. f.u.c.kers. They snuck in here and cooked meth.

He trudged up the stairs and into the room he'd shared with his brother until he was seven. The springs from his old bed lay in a rusted tangle next to the window. The springs creaked as he lowered his weight down on them.

Funny how he remembered this cramped house feeling so clean. h.e.l.l, the wind would sift the dust right through the walls. No way to keep the dirt out of the kitchen. But field dirt was different from town dirt. Dad used to say dirt with sweat in it wasn't really dirty. Dale's chest fluttered. Last time he remembered being happy was sitting here, looking out the window facing east, watching the sun rise over the fields.

During the time of the missiles.

His eyes fixed on an irregularity in the wheat two hundred yards away. He could barely make out the square of chain link and barbed wire. Once the power lived there, a hundred feet beneath his father's field. A silo with a Minuteman II. Like his own scary genie.

Sixteen-year-old Ace would say to six-year-old Dale: "Enough power in our field to blow up half of Russia. Just in our field alone."

There was bad mixed in with the good, like when he would wake up at night convinced he heard the remote controls snapping and hissing under the ground and he just knew the field was going to explode. That fire was going to fall from the sky.

He woke up screaming from the image of the cows and pigs burning up, the rabbits, the geese, the chickens.

Stubby, his cat. s.h.a.ggy, his dog.

Never people, though. He never saw people burning. Only animals.

The nightmares changed and he'd just wake up and sneak out and walk across the field and stand at the edge of the mowed gra.s.s belt around the wire and hold up his hands, palms out, and try to feel the power radiating out from the silo. Not too close, because they had remote sensors and the air-basers would come by helicopter to check. Little by little he overcame his fear and made friends with it and soon the dreams went away.

All that harnessed energy poised and quiet, down deep in the earth. Dale thought he could actually feel the power in the crops that pushed up out of the earth in the spring. Feel it brood beneath the winter snow. Hear it howl in the blizzard wind.

He'd watch the trucks come in when the air-basers checked the wire and the sensors. In the summer they came and mowed the offset perimeter gra.s.s around the wire. Sometimes he'd stand on the road and wave to them.

In the end, Army engineers came with explosives to implode the empty silos. Joe Reed, whom Gordy wanted back working for him, explained how they did it. Joe knew about explosives. He was an Ojibwa from the Turtle Mountain rez and he'd worked in the oil fields up in Alberta. Some folks called him Pinto Joe because of the patchy way his face healed after an oil well blew up on him.

So they blew them in on themselves and filled them with dirt and strung barbed wire around the sites so they looked like little graveyards dotting the wheat. Something about verification, like the empty silos left open for the ABM sites south on State 1, at Nekoma.

He looked up. Little empty graveyards, so the Russian satellites could count them.

Dale drew up his legs and hugged his arms to his chest. Sometimes he felt like a buried atomic bomb they'd missed when they'd pulled out the Minutemen and the Spartans and the Sprints. The missile fields had all gone to seed and fallow. But what if they missed one? What if buried deep under the wheat there was one last cone of latent power?

Poised.

Dale shut his eyes and imagined his gross body swept away in the launch flames. Then they'd see him for who he really was, a moment of beautiful fire and grace exploding into the sky.

The moment pa.s.sed.

He clambered off the old springs and walked down the stairs, running his finger along the wall like he'd done every day of his childhood. He trudged through the rooms littered with wrappers and plastic bottles and went outside. He looked up at the heavy, roiling clouds, gravid with rain. Far to the west a shiver of lightning.

Dale looked up at the relentless clouds that combined and came apart against each other. The constant gray churn could be the gears of history up there, meshing, grinding out fate.

The future.

He went around back of the house and stood for a long time staring at a pile of meth trash. There were discarded coffee filters gummy with pink and white residue; plastic funnels; a cracked blender; aluminum foil boxes; discolored Pyrex dishes; plastic jugs; and a scorched twenty-pound propane cylinder.

Furious, Dale kicked at the heap of refuse. Then he walked to the Quonset, dug around in the debris, and found an old leaf rake, a regular rake, and a shovel. He returned to the pile. Methodically, he cleared away the drug-cooking garbage until he revealed a square of railroad ties buried in the weeds.

The sand was damp from the rain and it was easy to spade up the thistles and burdock. Then he raked them in a pile and flung them away.

Sweating now, breathing heavy, he spaded over the sand, ran the rake through it until he had excavated several strata of buried refuse: old pop bottle caps, a spoon, one of his sister's Barbie dolls.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed up the brown plastic figurine and slowly snapped off the arms, then the legs, and finally the head. He hurled the pieces away.

Then he sat down on the ties and removed his boots and mismatched socks and stuck his bare feet in the clean raked sand. He wiggled his toes.

Dad had built the sandbox for him when he was four.

Slowly Dale shaped two squat castle towers in the sand. The damp sand set up well as he carefully smoothed off the tops, making them round and symmetrical. He took a can of c.o.ke from his pack, opened it, and sat hunched forward, staring at the sand castles and sipping the c.o.ke.

When he finished the soda, he threw the empty can toward the pile of crud he'd raked from the sandbox. Then he reached into his pack and took out a small yellow precision-die-cast replica of a John Deere front-loader.

Not like the toys he'd owned as a kid, a collector's item from Dad's dealership-the same dealership whose demise he was presiding over. The tiny tractor had sat on a shelf at home.

In the bas.e.m.e.nt, where Dale lived.

He bent over on all fours and ran the small vehicle back and forth in the clean sand. Then, in a sudden burst of rage he slammed the replica into the towers, smashing them.

"Kashuusshhewww!" he shouted, making explosive sounds as he grabbed double handfuls of sand and threw them into the air.

"Ka-boom."

Chapter Sixteen.

"Aw, G.o.d, what an a.s.shole. You all right?" Nina raised her hand gingerly to Ace's cheek, which was a little red where Broker had hit him. what an a.s.shole. 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 coldc.o.c.ked me. I did not did not see that punch coming." 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?"

"Exold man." Nina arched her back.

"Yeah, yeah, I know, but what does he do do?" Ace said.

"What the f.u.c.ker 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, s.h.i.t." 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 rehea.r.s.ed 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 gra.s.s and own a few guns."

Gordy pounded his palm on the bar. "Hear, hear. For the gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 n.i.g.g.e.rs. Ain't any up here. What we got is Indians. Like that Pinto Joe Reed; now, there's one ugly son of a b.i.t.c.h."