Q Road (32 page)

“Hey, David!” a man shouted. “Get back here.” The voice sounded like George, but when David stopped and turned, he saw the plump outline of Officer Parks silhouetted in the car's lights. David had never noticed how alike the two men sounded. The cop yelled again, but David kept moving, in the direction of the
Glutton
, as fast as his ankle allowed.

When David was out of sight, Parks approached April May.

She asked, “Is that the kid who started the fire?”

“He's not a bad kid,” Parks said.

“It's a nice fire.”

Parks had to laugh. “Glad to see you're enjoying yourself, Aunt April.”

“So when are you going to move out of that crummy motel?” she asked.

“Soon, I hope.”

THOUGH THE HAZE HAD HUNG IN THE SKY UNTIL AFTER
dark, Rachel'd had a feeling about a hard frost, and she'd not only pulled the pumpkins inside the stock barn to protect them from hooligans, but she'd spread a canvas tarp over the top and carefully tied the tarp rings to the corners of the wagon. Pumpkins could generally handle frost, but she didn't want to take a chance tonight. Then she'd sat in her garden for hours, first waiting for George to come out and chop wood, then waiting to shoot a pumpkin-biting possum, all the while waiting for the ghost of David to tell her what had happened, to tell her why in hell he would smoke in the hay barn. Maybe David's ghost would explain that he didn't start the fire, that Todd and the Higgins kid were really to blame, so she could go down to the river where they'd pitched their tents and kick their asses right now. Really, though, she knew David had abandoned her by his own stupidity, and she knew that eventually his death would harden into a stone in her belly to clank against the
other indigestible facts of life. In this way, her thoughts circled around David but would not settle. She crept into bed after George had already been there a while.

Rachel did not think that George was asleep, though he lay still beside her and breathed evenly. No man in his right mind could really be sleeping after a boy had burned to death in his barn, not to mention the loss of much of the year's alfalfa and straw and all the work that had gone into it. And the barn itself, a landmark on the land and in the man's brain. Even if George wouldn't yet accept that David had been in the barn, even if he didn't know that his missing brother lay below the wreckage, he had known that barn his whole life, had filled it with hay and straw each summer and fall, and he knew there would be no place for next year's twelve hundred bales. This winter there'd be no hay for Higgins's dairy herd, no place for George's four cows to go for cover. She knew George was too busy to string more barbed wire anytime soon, so maybe she'd try to rig up something for the cows near the house. Or maybe they should just put the cows in with the other livestock and hope they all could get along.

Rachel reached over and almost touched George's shoulder, but stopped herself, because she wasn't ready to comfort or be comforted. David's death and the loss of the barn were not the end of the terrible events. She knew that one night in the future, George would be lying beside her as usual, and then he would stop breathing. She might not notice right away, since she'd be asleep, but his body would gradually grow cool. Everything around here was permeated with death—the soil of this farm, her decaying houseboat, even George himself. Still, the blood pulsed hotly through Rachel's veins and she knew she couldn't stay still much longer. Maybe she'd go back outside and lie in a furrow with her Brussels sprouts towering above her and decide what, if anything, to say to George tomorrow, decide whether to offer to help with the corn and beans. She didn't want to be the kind of farmer George was. In her garden
she could know every plant, but in any one acre of his fields there were thousands upon thousands, all alike. Maybe she'd go outside and lie atop one of her mounds and let herself think about Johnny and her mother again, let herself get used to running through the details of that night. Remembering had not made it seem worse, as she'd feared it would. Remembering it all made Rachel feel that, like George, she had a history here.

When David's ghost came to her, she would not let it just fade away without an explanation. She had tried to protect David for the last three years, had tried to nourish him with food, had tried to make him dress warmly. Hadn't that kid realized he had been as important to her as this piece of land? Maybe more important, if that were possible. She pinched at the bullet in her armpit until she could make out its round end. As shallow as it was buried, she thought it might even have passed through Johnny before it found a place in her, maybe putting a drop of his blood inside her, or a tiny piece of his flesh. Well, Rachel didn't want to be the depository of the dead and disappeared anymore. Maybe she'd go outside and scream into the cold air that she was sick to death of death.

There had been several morning frosts, but this was the first really cold night of the year. The Potawatomi women had survived this cold and much worse without houses or houseboats, and according to what she'd read, deer hides were all they had to protect them from the ground and to cover them. As Rachel lay beneath the old goose-down quilt and tightly woven wool blankets, it seemed strange that she could be so rich compared to the people who'd lived here before. In spring, summer, and fall the Potawatomi women gardened and kept their bodies in motion, but in winter they just scraped and sewed hides, and threaded their bone needles, maybe carried buckets of water from the river. They must have suffered from inhaling all that smoke from tent fires, must have ended up breathing the way David did. Those women must have known that their husbands and parents, their sisters and brothers, and even their
children could die around them, and it must have been another kind of coldness they just had to bear. And then there must have been one especially bitter day when the men came home smelling of whiskey and told the women about the treaties they'd signed, told the women they would all have to leave this place.

George shifted slightly beside her. His family belonged to the tribe who conquered the Potawatomi, and now that tribe was being wiped out by the new people with manicured lawns, asphalt driveways, and fake vinyl shutters. Rachel didn't know what tribe she belonged to, now that David was gone. Three years ago, David had defeated sure death when the bullet she fired had swerved around him in the raspberries, but that bullet had apparently circled the planet and come back around to ignite the barn with him in it.

When Rachel heard some noise at the back door, she sat up, grateful for an excuse to get out of bed and stop thinking. Maybe this would be the possum who'd been biting her pumpkins. Over her T-shirt, Rachel put on the thick flannel shirt George had been wearing all day. It hung to her knees. She grabbed her rifle from behind the door and stepped barefoot into the hall.

IF STEVE HAD A CHOICE, HE TOLD HIMSELF, IF DESIRE WERE
a matter of simply deciding, he would not have thought about other women as he lay beside his wife. After Steve had returned from the Barn Grill, Nicole was angry with him, despite his having lugged two good-sized pumpkins from Milton's garden all the way home, just for her. He and Nicole then went out together for some Chinese (he didn't mention he'd already eaten a sandwich) and they returned home to eat it and watch a movie on TV. Before going to bed, Steve had not been able to make himself comfortable, not in his reclining armchair, not on the couch beside Nicole. The moment he'd put his arm around her, he'd wanted to pull it away, but he'd made himself sit there with her head in his armpit for ten minutes before pretending he had to get up and use the toilet. All evening he'd wished his wife were more than one person, that she could change day to day and sometimes become a larger woman, that some days she could embrace him more forcefully, instead of
always being small and focused, like the tender heart of something whose protective body layers had withered away.

He and Nicole would spend Sunday together, possibly going to church with his or her parents, but more likely skipping that and going to the mall to buy clothes and makeup and household knick-knacks. On the way home, he'd suggest they stop and check out the barn to see if it was still burning, and if Nicole didn't want to go, he'd walk there later by himself and then go to the river and check out the boat again. He was already looking forward to Monday, to driving along a country road or a tree-lined street, then stopping at a house that needed fixing up, and meeting a woman in her thirties, forties, or fifties who would offer him coffee or tea, and if she knew what she wanted in the way of home improvement, he would have some thoughts about how well her ideas would work. She might invite him to laugh with her about the parts of her house that were less than perfect, and he would admire the placement of a window or the polished surface of a walnut or oak or pine banister on a stairway leading to bedrooms. He'd pause for a moment in her bathroom to inhale the mingled scents and residual humidity of her morning shower. Compared to the discovery of other women's houses, being alone with his wife was lonesome.

Steve got out of bed and looked up through the window, but he couldn't make out the Harland cupola, which was blocked by the sycamore and the darkness of night. He thought he needed a window room, a houseboat, a barn loft, a tree fort, a hideout of some kind. When he'd first married Nicole, he'd thought she was a small place where he could hide, but he had since learned there was no room for him, for she was surprisingly dense at her center and filled herself entirely. Looking south, Steve could make out a dim glow from where the remnants of the barn burned, the barn in which he might have set up an office and parked his car. He thought of Rachel's face, which then dissolved into the faces of lots of other women.

Later that night, while Steve was asleep, Nicole slipped out of bed to pee, but instead of returning, she clicked on the television and adjusted the volume to barely a drone, and, without even flicking through the channels, settled into watching an infomercial for a line of hair care products that would make color-treated hair super shiny. Sunday she would at least get to the mall, and she'd be able to visit her mother. The light glowed in the breakfast nook next door, which meant that Mrs. Shore was sitting at her window like the ghost of future gloom and bitterness. The world was a sad place, Nicole thought, with Mr. Harland losing his barn and with that old woman over there staring out the window day and night, maybe because Mr. Shore had been unfaithful to her long ago, or maybe because life just didn't deliver up what it had promised. When the breakfast nook light finally switched off next door, it made Nicole even more distressed, knowing that sour old Mrs. Shore had found enough peace to sleep when Nicole could not. Nicole wondered if maybe she should bake a cake for the Harlands as a way of acknowledging their loss. God, she hadn't baked a cake since she'd been married.