Q Road (28 page)

RACHEL JOGGED AROUND THE WEST SIDE OF THE BARN
, through row after row of brittle cornstalks, until she emerged near the creek. When she felt pebbles cutting her feet inside her canvas shoes, she kicked them off and went barefoot through the cold stream without even trying to balance on rocks. She ran along the creek path, faster than she had in years but almost without effort, without even getting out of breath, as though she were being propelled by the fire toward the water, and she slowed only as she reached the
Glutton.
The houseboat's cabin sagged on its iron foundation, and the deck on the shore side was littered with peeled paint. On the dark, rusting hull someone had spray-painted
TODD + JULIE
in white. Remnants of a campfire contained broken, burned glass, and on the bank lay a clear, new Jim Beam fifth bottle with its label peeled halfway off. Rachel had not paid attention to this place for months, but this was the first time she'd felt neglectful.

Instead of climbing onto the boat, Rachel went to her old garden at the edge of the woods. It was shaded by an ancient black willow whose branches seemed impossibly dark in comparison to its yellow finger leaves. She lay on the bed of grass and willow switches, and tried but failed to grab hold of David's being dead: when she'd seen him a few hours ago, he'd been more alive than anybody else she knew. Instead, thoughts of Johnny flooded the space she'd opened up for David, and she didn't feel strong enough to resist them. Maybe Johnny hadn't been anybody's favorite person, but, like David, he had been alive one moment and dead the next. It had been more than three years since she disentangled herself from Johnny's limbs and got up and walked slowly to her mother and took away the rifle and leaned it against the barn wall. Rachel hadn't realized right away that she'd been shot herself, that blood was trickling down her right arm and side; she didn't even immediately register the sensation near her armpit as pain.

While Margo stood frozen, Rachel gradually regained her senses. Her mother's final bullet must have entered her as she turned to pull herself out from under Johnny. Rachel picked up her flannel shirt from the dirt floor and proceeded to dress the wound the way her mother had taught her, tearing a wide strip of flannel from the bottom of the shirt and wrapping it around her shoulder and upper arm to stop the bleeding.

As Rachel was slipping back into what was left of her shirt, Margo finally spoke, almost too quietly to hear. “Go get George Harland.”

Rachel's shaking hands and the skunk smell made the task of buttoning difficult. “I don't know.”

“Just go get him.” Margo's voice rose. “Tell him everything. Go!”

Rachel left the barn running but slowed to a walk and fumbled with her buttons as she reached Queer Road. She saw April May Rathburn standing on her porch but did her best to ignore the tall,
thin figure. Though Rachel had intended to obey her mother, the half-mile walk gave her the opportunity to think, and by the time she reached George's house, she knew she would not awaken George or anybody else. Rachel would not turn her mother in to the authorities. Margo would no more survive in jail than Rachel would be able to live in a foster home. They had lived together on the edge of this land for fourteen years, and if her mother was unable to help herself, then Rachel would save them both.

To avoid being seen by April May, Rachel returned to the barn through the pasture, lugging the borrowed round-end shovel and mattock, with the pony, llama, and donkey in sleepy pursuit. The skunk smell had grown stronger inside the barn in her absence, but she couldn't see her mother anywhere. Rachel leaned the shovel against the wall and struck repeatedly at the ground with the mattock. When a chunk of soil stuck to the blade, she knocked it against a post to clean it. “We have to do this,” she whispered, in case her mother was standing there in the dark somewhere, needing to be convinced. After chopping at the dirt floor for a half hour, Rachel dug with the shovel. She dug without pause until the hole was two feet deep. The skunk smell was disappearing, but she felt some other invisible presence. She stopped and put her ear to Johnny's mouth to hear if he had started breathing again but found him silent and nearly as cool as the dirt floor.

Her armpit had stopped bleeding and her shoveling muscles all seemed to work, which meant she was not likely in danger from her bullet wound. Rachel continued digging through the night, as though this were her life's work, digging and digging, as her hands blistered and then became raw, and all the while she was certain her mother would return to help her finish the job. At the morning's first light, the hole was about as deep as she was tall. Using the sides of the hole to pull herself out was agony, because the rawness of her hands made the dirt feel like shards of glass. Back on the surface, she pushed Johnny over with her foot and rolled him over
twice, and he rolled again as he fell to his final resting spot. The sun was beginning to rise, and light shone through the cracks in the walls, lighting most of the way down to where Johnny's pale bloodless body lay naked, awkwardly curled.

However she arranged his body, he would probably lie for all eternity, but Rachel didn't dare climb down and straighten his neck, for fear she might change her mind about burying him altogether. Things were beginning to seem less clear in the morning light, and her mother was offering no guidance. Maybe Rachel had been wrong. Maybe a person couldn't just go burying another person—maybe the earth would spit him out as soon as she covered him. Maybe he would work his way back up the way drowned carcasses floated to the river's surface. Rachel threw Johnny's pants on top of him without checking the pockets. She dropped his cowboy boots in, one then the other, and flinched when the second boot heel thudded on the side of his face. She kicked the bloody straw onto him and tossed in shovelfuls of the blood-soaked dirt, and then the dead chicken. Though Rachel had wanted to slow time the night before, she now wanted time sped up. She hurried to cover the body with dirt, hoping then she could begin to forget. She had not even finished shoveling when the remaining five chickens approached and began pecking at the edges of the grave in search of bugs and worms. Rachel stomped the surface as flat as she could, moved the excess dirt to the corners of the barn, then rearranged the straw to cover the fresh earth, to make it look as though nothing remarkable had happened during the night, as though nobody's life had changed.

And only after all that did Rachel glance at the doorway and see a tall, thin figure just outside, perfectly still, the early light silhouetting her body, so that she had no decipherable face. Rachel didn't know how long April May had been standing there. Rachel glanced over at the rifle against the wall, and she saw April May turn and look too. Rachel tried to speak, but explaining that she hadn't
killed Johnny seemed an impossible task, more difficult even than burying him. She could only sigh.

April May didn't move.

Rachel sighed again. She had never felt so tired in her life, and all her work was in vain, for April May would tell the authorities, and both Rachel and her mother would have to leave. She sank down on the grave and hugged her knees and hid her face.

She felt a hand touch her forehead and brush her hair back. “Poor girl,” April May said. And for Rachel it seemed as though a long time passed before April May spoke again. “But I don't guess anybody will miss that rotten s.o.b.”

After April May's hand left Rachel's head, Rachel didn't dare look up for a long time. When she finally did, the sun was fully risen, and Rachel was alone on the grave. She was so exhausted that she felt almost peaceful. She had done absolutely everything she could, and she could do no more; whatever would happen, would. Rachel dragged her aching body up the wooden ladder and lay down in the soft hay. She passed out as though bludgeoned, and she slept like death until evening.

Three years later, the willow branches beneath which Rachel lay began to shift in a slight wind, and Rachel was reminded that her old riverside garden had never gotten enough sun. Her mother had refused to cut down this old willow. And though her mother had hacked away at the ropes of poison ivy climbing the tree, she'd insisted they leave poison ivy clustered around its base, in order that the hairy roots might prevent the bank from eroding. Her mother had cared that much about the land, anyway. The massive, gnarled trunk might be hundreds of years old, Rachel thought, might even be the same tree Corn Girl jumped out of. If she jumped at all, that was. Killing herself would have been noble—or so Rachel had always thought—but living and finding a way to stay here would have been much better. Her death could have been an accident just as David's was. Her relatives might have made up the
suicide story to have something to talk about on their sad march west.

After burying Johnny in the barn, Rachel had never seen her mother again.

Rachel sat up and looked into the woods between her mother's land and the golf course. The leaves on the trees nearest her were orange and yellow like some kind of brilliant harvest. Rachel would have preferred rain or snow for the occasion of remembering that night with Johnny, but all that fell around her were leaves in the colors of pumpkins, blood, and summer squash. Those still on the trees rustled in a wind that had risen out of nowhere. Even as she recalled the pain of her blistered hands and the shock of the bullet entering her, the leaves fell softly and brightly to earth, as though the bit of land George had given her mother was some sort of paradise. Rachel noticed some of her old potato plants still growing among the weeds. She sat up and tugged on the plants and dug with her hands to pull up gritty, wrinkled potatoes the size of crab apples. She tossed them toward the water, but they fell short. Some kind of sniveling was coming out of her own throat, and she wiped her nose with her hand and pressed her fingers near her armpit until she felt her bullet. She'd always thought she wanted to be rid of that piece of metal, but her knowledge of exactly where it was now gave her a tiny, dense measure of comfort. She let the bullet go to reach out a finger and pet a woolly bear. It curled under her touch, its coat the colors of fire and charred remains.

She climbed down the bank to the boat and unfastened the combination padlock. As she entered the
Glutton
, the familiar musty smell calmed her, and she left the door open for light, and so the air could circulate. The shades were drawn and she sat for a while inhaling the cool air, perched on an unsteady chair her mother had made of lumber she'd pulled from river snags. Her mother had claimed that anyone could make furniture. This was the single fruit of her furniture-making labor, though, and it was not sturdy. Her
mother was not a builder, she was a killer. Rachel rolled up one deerskin window shade, green with mold, and tied it with the leather strip sewn there. Daylight shone onto sooty iron cooking pots which hung from wall hooks. Grease-coated sugar crystals from maple syrup her mother had boiled down a decade ago still coated the ceiling over the stove. After that experiment her mother decided she shouldn't boil sap inside the
Glutton.
Rachel thought of the way her mother used to crouch perfectly still when she was hunting, so still that she became invisible to her target and even to Rachel. Rachel herself tried to be quiet in her garden, but her mother had been so quiet sometimes that Rachel could look right at her mother's hair curving around her face, and at her pale arm curving alongside the dark, straight rifle, and still not see her mother. It was no wonder that killing Johnny had made her disappear entirely.

Rachel opened the fire door of the cast-iron woodstove, and she placed David's cigarettes on the grate. She went through five kitchen matches whose tips had been softened by humidity before getting one that would light. The plastic on the cigarette pack sizzled and retreated from the flame, then the paper caught fire, blackened, and disappeared. The three cigarettes lay smoldering on the grate.

“Anybody here?” asked a man's voice from outside the boat.

Another person thus startled might have shrieked and stood, but Rachel slid off her chair, squatted, and leveled her rifle at the doorway. A big body appeared there, smelling of soap and musk. “Rachel?” The body stopped abruptly and the arms flew up. “Don't shoot!”

Rachel stood.

“I thought we were friends,” the salesman said.

Rachel let the gun hang on her sling and she crossed her arms. She noticed his leather shoes were dry—unlike her, he'd had the patience to walk until he reached the footbridge.

Steve dipped his head to glance inside the open door of the woodstove.

“Don't look at what I'm doing,” Rachel said.

“What are you doing?”

“None of your damn business.” What a relief to be angry again!

“This is a cute place,” the salesman said. “Is it insulated?”

“I don't come into your damn house and nose around.”

“You would always be welcome at my house, Rachel. Anyway, I thought you lived with George. You two are married, aren't you?” As Steve moved past her, he touched everything along his way, the primitive cupboards, the old woodstove, the tongue-and-groove pine ceiling, which hung only a few inches above his head. The boat looked small with him in it. How had she and her mother both lived here?

Rachel said, “Just because I own George's land now doesn't mean I don't have land of my own.”

“If you're married, then he owns your land the same way you own his.”

“What's your fucking point?” What pissed Rachel off especially was that this thought had not occurred to her. George was giving her his land, but in a sense she was giving back the bit he had given her mother. Was it possible George had married her to have his land back?

Steve said, “Did you know that if you use somebody's land for something like seven years, you can make a claim on it. You can own it.”