Q Road (5 page)

“There's something about your face,” Johnny said, “that could drive a man crazy.” He moved his whiskered cheek to her other shoulder and kissed her neck.

Rachel said nothing, only breathed deeply in her attempt to slow time and to fight this new sort of nausea. Her body seemed to be growing softer, the pores of her skin seemed to be opening, and the sharp smell of animal was now coming partly from her.

“I'm guessing you haven't been spoiled by other men yet. I'm guessing I could still teach you something.”

“Go to hell,” Rachel whispered. She liked the feel of saying “hell.” She also liked the sensation of her own long hair brushing her neck and shoulders. Rachel knew her mother would be so mad, madder than ever before, if she knew what was happening.

“Do you know this is the oldest barn in Greenland?” Johnny whispered and slid his warm hands beneath her flannel shirt.

Rachel felt she might vomit, but her skin rose in bumps to meet his hands.

“My great-great-grandfather built this barn,” Johnny said, “chopped down his own trees to make the lumber. Where the guy got the energy for that shit, I don't know. I guess he stayed sober
like George, the damn dull, penny-pinching son of a bitch. Me, now, I can relax and be generous.”

Rachel was thinking of saying “What do you got to be generous with?” but she was no longer sure what Johnny did or didn't have. She was considering that a person's body was something to know the way a stretch of woods or a sandy place was something to know.

When Johnny slid his arms out from around her, she felt bare. He stepped through and around the rail, and Rachel grabbed his arm to pull him toward her on the other side. Johnny laughed and unbuttoned Rachel's shirt. He unwrapped her shoulders to reveal the hint of breasts. She didn't help him undress her, but neither did she resist. Johnny rubbed his whiskers against her flat chest, and when he kissed her mouth, Rachel did not kiss him in return, did not even know how, but just kept concentrating on slowing time, on lengthening all those seconds in which she might become accustomed to his smell. He yanked off his cowboy boots, tossed one, then the other, into the straw. A chicken squawked and flew up.

“Maybe I should wait for you to get a little older.” Johnny dragged his pants off. “But I'm the sort of guy who might not be around here long.”

Rachel gasped as he laid his warm body on hers on the barn floor, gasped not because the man was too heavy but because he was moving too fast. She had the sense that weight and speed were somehow the same thing, that even a small woman could lie with a giant, just so long as he moved slowly. Despite his experience with dozens of young girls, Johnny didn't understand the way a girl needed the adventure to progress more slowly. For Johnny, such girls were like the illegal swimming holes he used to sneak into as a teenager—even as he was undressing and diving in, his mind was set on getting away without being caught.

Johnny was not as muscular as Rachel, and when she felt his ribs slice against her chest she placed her hands on his sides to protect herself. Rachel never closed her eyes and neither did Johnny.
He stared into her face, while the brief stab of pain she felt inside dissolved into a kind of easy weightlessness. Johnny's hair fell forward, his face relaxed, and some drool on his lip gave the impression of melting. When Rachel screamed “No!” she was not expressing pain, and she was not afraid of what was happening to his face, nor was she alarmed at the cool sensation of a blob of chicken shit that had soaked through the straw beneath her. She screamed because the footsteps approaching were those of her mother, now standing in the doorway with the .22. There would be hell to pay, Rachel knew. As Johnny moaned, “Oh God, girl,” the air exploded. Feathers flew up, and Johnny's body slammed hard onto hers as though another man had jumped onto his back.

“You animal!” Margo yelled.

Rachel tried to pull away, but her mother fired three more times and Rachel felt a bullet drive her shoulder into the barn floor. Her lungs emptied beneath Johnny's weight, and she had to fight for the strength to push him off her. Johnny's body was lifeless, and a chicken lay dead beside him. Rachel smelled skunk and looked up at her mother, then back at Johnny and the dead chicken. She couldn't grab hold of what had just happened. She could only wonder what the hell that chicken had been doing so close.

ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 9, 1999, GEORGE WALKED
down behind the oldest barn in the township, and around the little pasture adjoining the building's lower level, to where a set of bedsprings was tied into the woven wire fence. He grabbed hold and shook the rusty metal bedsprings and found the repair stronger than the rest of the fence, the way scar tissue from a wound was usually tougher than the skin around it. The white-faced steer looked up from the hay pile on the barn's dirt floor to see what the rattling was about. When the cattle had busted down the fence a few days ago, George wasn't around, so Rachel, resourceful girl that she was, dragged some bedsprings over from the O Road dump and patched the fence herself. Thirty years ago, when George inherited his grandfather's farm, it was orderly barnyards, freshly painted buildings, neat woodpiles, and taut fences. Today it was quick, cheap repairs and never mind cosmetics. Now that you could hardly buy a cup of coffee with the
money you got for a bushel of corn, George knew he had to give up those old ideas about mowed lawns and perfect fences. The bedsprings were an announcement to the world that farming was no longer a sensible way of making a living, and George couldn't help but also see them as an admission that he himself was no longer a respectable man.

George's father had never liked farming, which is how George inherited one of the largest tracts of land in the county at the age of twenty-two. Neither George's father (now living in Florida) nor Johnny should have been surprised at Old Harold's decision, since five generations of tradition held that the land should be kept whole rather than being split among heirs. Johnny had claimed he wanted to be George's partner, but he was bone lazy, often in jail, and George had seen neither hide nor hair of him since an argument they'd had three years ago September. In the last few years, George had been entertaining a hope that his nephew Todd—actually his ex-wife's nephew—might have an inclination toward farming. That was seeming less likely, though, especially after the broken window this morning. The long and short of George's life in Greenland Township was that he continually repaired his aging farm equipment, that between planting and harvesting he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the bank, and that until two and a half years ago, he'd farmed with the mindlessness of a woolly bear crawling toward hibernation. Two and a half years ago he'd come across Rachel Crane standing in a field near the river, dangling her .22.

A few minutes before eight o'clock, George walked up the incline to his truck, to wait for David Retakker. He noticed that April May was still sitting on her front steps across the street. For her part, April May noticed David the neighbor boy approaching on his bicycle. Her back had loosened up fine, but the pain in her foot had gotten worse. This was not the usual ache; she must have clunked against something in the barn without realizing, must have
hit the exact spot where sixty-five years ago a nail had gone into the bottom of her foot and come out the top.

Harold Harland had been some sort of cousin to April May's mother, and when April May was a little girl, the old man often reminded her she was special for being born half in one month and half in the next. Hurting her foot so dramatically the day of the big tornado made her special too, Harold said. The day of the 1934 tornado was the same day that April May's beloved elementary teacher Mrs. O'Kearsy failed to show up at school, and even the little girls of Greenland knew she would not be back. When the tornado began to roar outside, April May crouched under her desk as she'd been instructed, and in her cramped position she considered that Mrs. O'Kearsy might be causing the storm because the townspeople had sent her away. When part of the schoolhouse roof was torn off and a patch of green sky became visible, April May thought maybe the storm was caused by her own anger about losing her favorite person in the world. When the winds died, the man who'd been filling in as teacher finally let the students go. April May ran outside to find the schoolhouse chimney toppled, and soon she discovered that nearly every building in Greenland Center was damaged. April May did not go straight home, but ran through the streets, alongside downed power wires and mangled fences and outbuildings torn off their foundations and left slumping in the road. She spun through the chaos as though she were a tornado herself. She couldn't bear to pick her way carefully around the debris after that monstrous coiled wind had sprung open her whole neighborhood. After hours of running, jumping, and climbing trees to look at the wreckage, April May had stepped on a nail stuck to some cabinet trim. She came onto the finishing nail at precisely the wrong angle, stepping straight down so the nail's tip went all the way through and protruded near her middle toes. When she yanked it out from the bottom, the amount of blood astounded her. She limped home, then waited four drowsy hours with her foot
elevated before the doctor arrived to give her the injection. She fell asleep the moment the needle pricked her skin, and didn't rouse until the following morning.

This gray morning sixty-five years later, the pain in her foot seemed as fresh as the day of the tornado, and April May thought maybe she was being woken up once and for all. Just then David Retakker reached the driveway leading to the barn, and April May watched him stop and hide himself and his bike behind a clutch of bright red sumac.

David peered through the branches and tried to catch his breath before approaching the barn. George seemed eight feet tall to him, and though George did not wear cowboy boots—he wore tan steel-toed work boots—David thought he looked the way a cowboy ought to look, tall and straight as a fence post. George did not wear a cowboy hat, but he rested so easily against his truck that he reminded David of the Marlboro man on the poster his dad had hung in the hallway before he left. David had changed bedrooms recently so he could sleep in what had been George's room growing up.

David's dad, Mike, used to work for George, before he moved to Indiana four months ago to live with a woman who had three other kids. The one time David had visited his dad down there, neither of them had known what to do. Mike took him out to a breakfast of pancakes and eggs and bacon, and they stayed there at the restaurant a long time, Mike leaning back into the corner of the booth, sucking at one cigarette after another and blowing out smoke. Mike asked David: How was sixth grade? Was it any different than fifth? and David shrugged and stifled a cough. David waited until after they'd finished eating, then used his breather in the bathroom; otherwise Mike would have said, “You still having to use that old puffer?” or, worse, “I guess I shouldn't be smoking around you.”

David glanced across the road at April May's house and noticed
she was sitting on her steps watching him. He straightened his shoulders and tried to pretend he hadn't been hiding. When she waved, he waved back, then threw his leg over his bike and rode up the driveway toward George.

“Eight o'clock on the dot. Right on time,” George said, without any reference to watch or clock. “You're the most on-time kid I know.”

David was so happy at George's compliment that any words he might have used to express himself would have embarrassed him. David was grateful it was Saturday and he didn't have to be at school, glad the leaves on the maples at either end of the barn were blazing orange, and ecstatic that he would be helping George. He didn't mind that the sky was dreary this morning, or that he was still out of breath. Or that he hadn't eaten a meal since his free school lunch the day before. The lunch had been chili, a stick of cheese, a square of corn bread with butter and a pear half in syrup.

“As soon as you catch your breath, you climb up top,” George said. “I'll throw the bales to you.”

David nodded yes again and again until he reminded himself to stop. He tried not to smile too much, but when George jostled his shoulder with a callused hand, David almost lost his balance with smiling.

George looked away from David, figuring it was best to let the kid collect himself. George wasn't accustomed to this sort of wholesale admiration. Rachel didn't admire him that way, which was fine with him. Yesterday, Rachel had come into the house and stood by the back door with her arms crossed, watching him. Watching him was something she had started doing in just the last few weeks. Her gaze was so intense that it seemed to George wise to avoid meeting it too often. George had been paying bills, and he'd muttered something about David's mother, Sally. Until four months ago, the free rent on George's other house was part of Mike's pay as the hired man, but when Mike went away, he left
Sally and David here to be George's responsibility, the way people from the city of Kalamazoo drove out to the country and tossed their unwanted kittens and puppies out of the car near a barn, hoping someone else would take care of them. Since George wasn't getting a farmhand, he ought to be getting rent for that house. George felt softhearted about David, but he also saw that living out here with his ma wasn't doing the boy any good. Maybe if they were in town, Sally'd get a job and get some structure in her life, and maybe then she'd take better care of her son.