Q Road (35 page)

Later that night, Parks struggled to stay awake, because he had not been beside a woman for years, and despite the gritty sheets and the beery smell of her, lying with Sally felt heavenly. He'd made love with her, but she seemed to have drifted to sleep or at least lost interest after a while, so he'd given up trying to pleasure her. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders, and though she had at first seemed weightless, eventually his arm was being crushed and he had to pull it out from under her. While she snored quietly Parks got up from the bed to open the window and listen for night sounds. As a boy, as George's friend, he'd slept in this house plenty of times, back when Old Harold and Henrietta still lived in the big house on Queer Road. Parks looked in the direction of the barn and thought he could detect the glow of coals and even the smell of ancient wood burning.

As he stared across George's land, Parks thought he might possibly get used to Rachel. After all, if she hadn't killed her mother, then she and George were just another May-December marriage, like the salesman said. He didn't understand why George desired such a girl, but being in Sally's bed forced him to acknowledge the strangeness of desire. Next time Parks saw Rachel, he wouldn't give her time to turn away from him. He'd look into her face without
flinching, and as plain as day he'd say, “Lose the gun, Rachel. It scares people.” Then he'd move on to some other topic of conversation with George. Rachel was, of course, just a kid, and kids needed time to grow, space to think. And space she had!

David would come home in his own time. God knew, Parks himself had done stupid things as a boy, and even a good kid could screw up. A twelve-year-old would be okay on his own for a few hours, and maybe some regretful nighttime wandering would do him good. Parks liked the thought of his own daughter or son walking through fields and woods, wondering about life, getting away from TV and computers, away from homework and gymnastics practice. Parks thought maybe he would like to live in this house and pay George rent and take care of Sally, and in the middle of the night it didn't sound nearly as crazy an idea as it might have during the day. If Parks could keep his overtime hours down, he could become some kind of part-time partner to George. Maybe eventually Parks could build a new house of his own. Surely George would sell him a piece of land cheap. He'd need enough that if his son or daughter someday wanted to come back and build a house beside his, there'd be room. He needed enough land that if a woman fell in love with him and wanted a horse, Parks could fence a few acres. And being there with Sally made it no longer seem out of the question that a woman might someday want him. When he got ahead moneywise, he'd put up a pole barn or two, and he'd reserve space for a garden in case the woman who eventually fell in love with him was so inclined. Parks left the window cracked two inches and crawled back into the bed beside Sally. Despite his efforts to stay awake, he succumbed to sleep.

Woolly bears continued crawling across the fields separating Sally's and George's houses. As David had suspected, the woolly bears of Greenland numbered in the millions, and while everybody slept, the live caterpillars climbed over the bodies of the dead ones and continued on into the farmlands, yards, and wooded windbreaks
between fields. Though the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the disappearance of the wolverine (also called the glutton) from Michigan showed that nature was vulnerable to humans, the woolly bears had proven themselves adaptable, and since few cars passed during the night, a good number of them made it across the road. Autumn woolly bears didn't ask for much, just a little protection from automobiles, tractors, stomping livestock, and spiked golf shoes, so they could survive long enough to freeze, thaw, and build a cocoon of silk and their own bristles, so they could make it to that most remarkable of days in late spring when they would awaken into wings and become invulnerable to the old dangers. Next spring, just like this spring and the one before, a good number of the caterpillars would wake up from under logs, spin cocoons, and emerge as small white moths to dance like pieces of ash above a fire, with only a short time in which to mate before dying.

Across the fields separating the houses, beneath a sky hungry for its new moon, Rachel shaped sausage patties and placed them in the largest cast-iron pan George had inherited from his grandparents. David hadn't been able to decide which he wanted, bacon or sausage, and Rachel couldn't decide either, so she took out a pound of each. When the sausage patties were cooked on one side, she flipped them over and moved them around to make room for the bacon.

David asked, “Do you really think George is coming down?”

“He sure as shit will. He'll smell bacon cooking even in his sleep.” Rachel was wondering why he wasn't down already, but she didn't want David to know she was worried. She sat across from him and said, “You don't know how George lost his finger, do you?”

“He got it caught in the baler somehow,” David said, scratching both armpits at once. “Baling twine cut it off. Twenty-some years ago, he told me.”

“What the hell did they do with the finger?”

“I don't know.”

“See, you don't know everything.” Rachel went back to the stove. She was sure there was more to the story, and George would tell her if she asked, but the meat was getting cooked through without George coming down the stairs. She crowded the bacon on top of the sausage and cracked the first egg into the grease, then had to pick out pieces of shell. Where was George?

David said, “Why would you care about a dead piece of finger?” He folded his finger back and pressed it down on his thigh, pretending once again it was like George's.

“Why in the hell do you do that?” Rachel said, shaking her head.

David shrugged.

When George entered the kitchen barefoot in jeans and no shirt, Rachel was jolted awake. Her husband was alive and perfect, reborn. She wanted to walk over and press her face to his chest and let his arms fold around her. Instead she turned away and yelled into the frying pan, “David says he's sorry for burning down your fucking barn.”

George took three plates out of the dish drainer and put them on the table. Rachel watched him and decided he didn't look anywhere near death. She had seen that gash like a letter L on his left biceps a thousand times and she'd often pressed her finger or her cheek against its ridges. Before today it had been enough to locate and memorize the landmark, but now she wanted to know how that scar and all the others had come to etch him. George got two sets of forks and knives out of the dish drainer, and a third from the drawer. He looked up at Rachel, surprised she was still watching him.

“I'm sorry,” David said. “I'm more sorry than I know how to say. I'll make up for it even if it takes me twenty years.”

“I'm going to miss that barn.” George sat at the table. “That barn could hold twelve hundred bales.”

Rachel lifted the bacon strips out and put them on a brown bag
she'd flattened onto a Blue Willow plate. “Let's get some damn chickens,” she said. “I'm tired of buying eggs.”

“I'll feed them,” David said. “If you get chickens, I'll feed them and collect the eggs and clean their coop and everything. And I'll feed all the other animals.”

Rachel said, “David and I will figure out something for the cows.”

“My great-great-grandfather built that barn in 1864,” George said.

Rachel fought an urge to scream. Yes, his ancestors built the barn, and yes, his dead brother was buried there, but Johnny and his great-great-grandfather were dead, and just look at the miracle of David being alive. She tipped her head back to hold in what threatened to spill out of her.

George said, “Before the barn was there, it was a campsite for the Horseshoe Clan of Potawatomi Indians.”

“Rachel's tribe,” David said.

Rachel spooned grease over the eggs to cook their tops and did not turn or shout that her mother had shot Johnny without thinking, that nobody had meant to kill anybody, that her mother was not in her right mind, and that her mother had not always been so bad. Someday she would tell George how sorry her mother must have been.

George said, “There was a beautiful woman, a teacher, who lived in the house that used to be down there. When she left, a tornado destroyed the house.”

“Why did she leave?” David asked.

“Barn swallows have nested in that barn for a hundred and thirty-five years,” George said. “I don't know where they'll go next year.”

Rachel put the rest of the meat on the plate with tongs and scooped up the eggs, and when she turned around, she saw David was crying and wheezing.

“It's time to shut the hell up and eat.” Rachel banged the plate of meat and eggs on the table. “David, make toast.”

David dragged himself up and put two pieces of bread in the toaster beside the dish drainer and wiped his eyes with his burred shirtsleeve. When George saw how he was limping, he looked to Rachel. She wanted to go stand behind George with his head against her belly and say that David should sleep in the other bedroom, but first she needed to know that George would forgive him. The three of them ate all the sausage, most of the bacon, nine eggs, and half a loaf of bread, plus a quart of homemade tomato juice. As they slowed down and stopped eating, Rachel realized that nobody had spoken at all and David didn't seem to be able to inhale a full breath anymore. His mouth looked swollen and he kept scratching his chest and armpits. What would normally have been tiny pink scratches on his wrists were bright gashes.

“Why are you scratching?” George asked. “Is that from the straw?”

Rachel said, “Did you get in poison ivy again? Let me see.”

David displayed his forearms, then lifted his shirt to show his chest, red from scratching and a little swollen. Some loose hay and bits of straw fell to the slate floor around him. His arms dropped to his sides in exhaustion at the effort of lifting them. Rachel noticed his neck was also red.

“Shit! I forgot about your medicine!” Rachel said. She went out to the mudroom and retrieved the inhaler from her jacket pocket and slapped it down beside his plate. “You should be more goddamn careful.”

David inhaled the medicine, but was unable to hold it in his lungs. On his next attempt he seemed unable even to breathe through the tube.

“He doesn't look so good,” George said. “Maybe we should take him to the emergency room.”

As Gray Cat slept beside the fire dreaming of summer-yellow birds, and as Parks lay beside Sally dreaming he would be loved, Sally dreamed of California (where she would go at the end of February, without her son) and David, Rachel, and George piled into the Ford truck and headed down Queer Road. David sat in the middle, and both Rachel and George rolled their windows down to let in as much air as possible on the way to the hospital, though George wasn't so sure the cold was good for the boy. As April May dreamed of traveling, as Milton dreamed of Jesus, and as Steve and Nicole began to smell golden butter cake from the oven, George turned onto M-96 and headed west toward Kalamazoo. Rachel let the wind blow on her at about eighty miles an hour, but still David's breathing was shallow. Rachel inhaled deeply and held the breath until David inhaled beside her, and she exhaled and waited for David to follow. Again they breathed together, in and out. And in and out. And again. When they pulled to a stop at a flashing red, Rachel noticed that George was breathing along with her, so she let George take over. She looked through her open window at a roadside rectangle of scrubby weeds beneath a streetlight. The yellow October grass made her think of an animal like a giant coyote that might suddenly roll over or stand and shake itself off. It made Rachel think of her old idea that the south and north sides of the river were animals whose backbones were the two banks of the river. Rachel reached for the familiar hickory stock of her rifle, before remembering she'd left it lying in the grass. The gun had killed Johnny and had nearly killed David twice—maybe she ought to bury it in one of her garden mounds. As Elaine dreamed of aliens transporting her to a spaceship for unspeakable study, as two neighborhood hooligans lay fondling themselves in tents on land they didn't know they loved, as bodies continued to decay in graves beneath the boys, Rachel decided that burying a perfectly good gun
would be stupid and wasteful. Whenever they got home, she would clean and oil it.

As George accelerated back up to eighty, as the truck began to shimmy and rattle, Rachel imagined the big animal beneath them shifting and rolling its shoulders, loosening the asphalt, letting them drive over but shaking the broken road off behind their truck. Though she was nearly bursting to speak to George—about chickens and apple trees and bees for honey—Rachel remained silent for David's sake, resting her jaw, allowing her body to fill with
hells
and
fucks
and
goddamns
that she'd expel for the doctors and nurses and all the other strangers they would encounter at Bronson Methodist Hospital. Rachel had the whole of the future to decide what to tell George and what to ask him, but on this night the three of them would need all of her determined cursing as they struggled, bringing David back from the dead, once and for all.