Q Road (12 page)

“So I'll have four hundred forty acres.”

“We both own all of it until I die, then it's all yours.”

“Fine. When can we get married?” Rachel brushed ants off her shoulder and put her jeans beneath her as a pillow, fidgeting in an effort to stay calm. She had never considered marriage. Marriage was as foreign to her as Milton's god. For the Potawatomi Corn Girl, getting married meant going away and losing everything; for Rachel, marriage would mean staying and getting what she'd always wanted. The thought of owning the land made her dizzy and a little sleepy, as though she had spent a long day hunting and now needed to rest before cooking and eating her kill.

“How old are you?” George asked.

“Fifteen.”

“Holy mother of Christ.” George looked up at the darkening sky. “Strike me dead, God, if that's what you want. Strike me dead now!”

Rachel studied a deep L-shaped scar on his shoulder, then looked down his long, pale body, to his tender-looking feet. She wondered how a man with such feet had survived here. All men apparently felt free to call on Milton's god whenever it suited them, as if He were up there with nothing better to do than serve, punish, or reward them. Rachel wanted too much in this world to sit around and wait for God to give it to her, and she wasn't about to risk His taking it away.

She dug at the dirt beneath her, mounding more of it up under her head. In the year and a half she'd been alone, she had yearned for this property, but she hadn't considered what she'd do if it were really hers. She supposed she'd want bees to make honey, and Jonathan apple trees, and even more blackcap raspberries. She'd grow tall grass near the river for lightning bugs. She wondered if all those textures of soil—silty muck, sand, blue clay, and dark woods loam—would feel different when she owned them. She considered the low growth beneath wide-spreading oaks on the ridge and the beds of soft needles beneath white pines at the sandy place and the sponginess of heavily rooted soil near the water's edge where ground birds were reluctant to leave nests of speckled eggs. And as for this garden, she would grow more peppers and cucumbers than Milton Taylor. A dozen times a day all summer, she'd bite into ripe tomatoes and let the juice run down her face. She'd produce hundreds of squashes of every color and shape, and there'd be no end of sweetness in her muskmelons and watermelons.

She sank the fingers of her left hand into the torn-up soil of her new Indian garden, which she already loved more deeply than she imagined she would ever love a person, even David Retakker. She rubbed her hip and belly with a handful of cool black dirt. She would lie on Johnny's grave and see how it felt to own his dead body. She wondered how long it took this soil to devour a person completely.

George Harland lay beside her in the dirt, ecstatic and afraid, thinking about how bad a person he had become. He thought he now understood every crooked, immoral man who wanted something he shouldn't have, wanted it badly enough that he'd sell his soul to get it. He sympathized with Johnny, who once went to jail for stabbing a man in a fight over that man's wife. He understood the robbers of banks and liquor stores who needed money for drugs; maybe there was even sense in the cold killing of civilians in times of war if the killing moved the soldiers toward
their desired ends. As George lay beside Rachel, the world seemed to him vaster and more complicated than before, and he finally understood the gravity of what his grandfather Harold had tried to tell him all those years ago, that once you had forsaken the simple rules about right and wrong and set out on your own, the universe was a humbling place. In the future as in the past, this farm should be handed along responsibly from one generation to the next, but George would give it away as a love token. His grandmother sharing her land with his grandfather seemed a sober business, but George sharing it with Rachel was like rollicking drunkenness.

If she'd stay, his life would change completely. He'd be chancing jail. He would stop going to township meetings, and he and Rachel couldn't very well go to lunch together in Greenland. George didn't know how April May or Milton would receive the news but he was glad for the first time that his police officer buddy Tom Parks had moved to Texas. (George was able to forget momentarily that Parks had written, saying he would be returning within a few months.) George's life was about to become strange and, to the outside world, sordid. George's mouth watered for that change. He had never liked going to township meetings anyway.

“What would happen if your ma found you here with me?” George asked.

Rachel turned and glanced behind her, but otherwise did not respond. One of her breasts was uncovered, so George leaned into her and pressed his cheek there and inhaled her river smell, for which he would happily forsake all other perfumes. When he opened his eyes, he noticed a bluish welt on her shoulder, and he wondered if she'd been violated in some way, tied up maybe, and it took him awhile to realize it was a disfigurement from carrying that rifle on a sling. He resisted a desire to brush away the dirt from her body. He noticed a starburst of white and red scars near her armpit. Oh, Rachel, he thought, and closed his eyes again in order
not to see other wounds. George thought his heart would pound through his ribs with this new emotion, this mixture of love and terror. He tried to breathe evenly so she would think he was asleep. He felt her reach out and touch his forehead. She whispered, “Damn you to hell.”

ON OCTOBER 9, 1999, SIX WEEKS AFTER GEORGE HARLAND
married Rachel Crane (and a year and a half after George had originally proposed in the garden), Officer Tom Parks of the Kalamazoo County Sheriff's Department watched seagulls land and fight over the stale butter-flavored popcorn somebody had tossed out into the cop shop's parking lot. As George Harland threw the thirty-eighth bale of straw to David inside the big barn miles to the east, Tom Parks looked up from the gulls to study the painting he'd recently hung above the window, a depiction of three lean Indian men in buckskin and single-feather headdress. On the way to work this morning, something about the weather had made Tom Parks feel uneasy, depressed even, and a little anxious. Though the grass and farmlands were dry enough to burn, the air felt wet and heavy. This seemed to Parks the kind of day on which a fellow could make a rash decision that would screw up the rest of his life—say, deciding to move to Texas, as Parks had done some years ago. Or agreeing
to sell his family's farm or allowing the house to be torn down. On a day like today, a cop might clearly make out a gun in another guy's hand and shoot, only to learn later it had been one of those little telephones or a cable-cutting tool.

Parks unwrapped his carry-out egg, cheese, and sausage sandwich without looking at it. He didn't know why he bought fast food—it didn't fill him up but only piqued his appetite for something finer, less processed. When he was first married, his wife had cooked for him in the mornings, and those breakfasts had filled him, surely. In five bites the sandwich was gone, and Tom Parks searched the wrinkles of the paper wrapper for more, before wadding it into a tight ball, stuffing it in the bag, and throwing the bag into the can under his desk. He knew he'd need something else before lunch.

Out in Greenland Tom Parks rarely saw gulls, but they always showed up in downtown Kalamazoo, in mall parking lots and here at the county cop shop. When the gulls landed on the asphalt, you could see they were big birds, as big as wild ducks. So why was there no gull à l'orange? he wondered. Why no Peking gull? If the gulls had been around when Tom Parks and George Harland were kids, they would've tried eating them. They'd killed and cooked all sorts of creatures from the sky and water—English sparrows, ducks, crayfish, bluegills, even river catfish, which had probably been toxic. Back then neither he nor George had cared that the Harlands owned the creek that flowed into the river, no more than they had cared that the Parkses owned the little pond on the east side of Queer Road from which the creek flowed. Now George owned it all. Parks wondered if the seagulls followed the roads thinking they were streams, if they landed in parking lots thinking they were ponds and lakes. Asphalt probably looked like water from the sky, and once the birds landed, they were too foolish to be disappointed.

Stress always made Parks overeat. He'd overeaten all through
his divorce, but his habit had never been so bad as since his return to Greenland last autumn. That business with George and Rachel had been a heck of a thing to come back to. It was bad enough to return from Texas to face two new houses on his old land and the Taylor farm turned into a golf course, but to find his best friend shacked up with a kid was too much. Not only was Rachel a fraction of George's age, but everything about the girl made Tom Parks nervous, starting with her mother's disappearance, and that awful swearing—if any kid of his swore that way, he'd wash her mouth out with soap. Parks hated her dragging that rifle around, though strictly speaking it wasn't illegal on private land. He'd tried to talk George out of marrying Rachel, but George had refused to listen to reason, and Parks hadn't been able to figure out how to encourage a breakup between two people who apparently didn't even talk to each other.

Milton Taylor had been distressed too and for a time had tried to prevent the union, but then Milton changed his mind and committed himself to seeing the two legally joined, figuring it was better than their living in sin. George was Parks's best friend, and so Parks eventually agreed that as soon as Rachel turned seventeen he would testify before the judge that this marriage was reasonable. Because it had been important to George, Parks had even agreed to witness the courthouse ceremony. George had looked neat and clean in a suit jacket, which Parks recognized as the one he'd worn to the funeral of Parks's father years ago, but Rachel looked the way she always did in a pair of George's jeans rolled up over cheap canvas shoes. There was no denying she was a unique-looking girl—even the magistrate, Deborah Vissers, had been visibly shocked by her and looked repeatedly to Parks for acknowledgment of the strangeness of this marriage, when she normally would have been smiling in a congratulatory way at the bride and groom.

“Does the groom have a ring?” Vissers had asked.

George shook his head. Rachel just stared at her. Vissers pronounced
them husband and wife without a ring, and despite Parks's reservations, he found himself becoming tearful. Parks had been divorced more than six years, and he doubted any woman would ever again want to marry him or even make love with him.

There'd been some trouble getting Rachel inside the Kalamazoo county courthouse to begin with, because even when she emptied her pockets, she set off the metal detector. She begrudgingly told the guards she had a bullet in the back of her arm from a shooting accident, and she'd rolled her sleeve all the way up to her armpit to expose flesh scarred as though wild animals had clawed at her. The sight had made Tom Parks's skin crawl, had made him feel queasy and confused. George had looked fearful standing on the other side, as if worried the guards would keep Rachel and not give her back. Once outside the building afterward, while waiting for George and Milton, Parks found himself briefly alone with the girl, and he had to ask, “Why'd you want to go and marry such an old guy as George?” Parks couldn't help but compare her to George's first wife, Carla, their old schoolmate, flirtatious and funny; by the end, though, Carla had been bored out of her mind by farm life. She'd headed out to California even before their divorce was final.

“Because I want his damn land,” Rachel said. Parks didn't look into her face but down at her hand, which was clutching the marriage license as though it were cash or a blue chip stock certificate—or rather, he told himself, a deed to property. Parks had said good-bye and gone off and sat in his cruiser and stewed. All he could think of was that George had paid for Parks's family land fair and square, while this kid had no right to it. Now, as he sat at his desk in the station, he tried to focus some anger on George for taking up with the girl, but mostly the anger bounced back to himself for selling out, for being such a fool. Way back when Tom and his wife had been on the verge of divorce the first time, when his wife insisted they move to Texas and get a fresh start, Parks had agreed they needed a drastic measure to save their marriage; but if he'd
stayed in Michigan, maybe his father wouldn't have died of a heart attack, as he did less than a year after Tom left. If Tom had stayed, he would have found an alternative to selling the family property. And if Tom Parks and his wife had divorced in Michigan, the local courts would never have allowed her to take the kids so far away, but since they'd split up in Texas, Tom had no way to make them move back. Thinking about all this made Parks crave something creamy or chocolate from the vending machine, which stood only about twelve feet from his desk.