Parks meanwhile was telling himself that if he still owned his land today, he wouldn’t sell one square foot no matter what it took to get the money for taxes. He’d sell drugs confiscated from drug busts before he’d sell any of his land. He startled himself with this last thought. Something happened to him when he got out here by his old land; being here made him feel a little like one of those nuts who holed up in an underground root cellar with guns and survival gear.
George nodded and repeated himself. “That’s how it turns out, all right. I can’t very well stop paying the electric over there, but I did let the phone get disconnected.”
Parks imagined he knew why George let Sally live there for free—for the same reason that people fed the birds, because it was a pleasure to watch them land and then fly away at a whim. Especially, it was nice to watch such a carefree, light sort of creature when you felt your own life was toilsome and undignified, and when your own body was growing fat and sluggish.
“So you think I ought to lock that barn?” George said.
“You probably ought to. You said hay was high this year.” Parks glanced around for Sally but couldn’t locate her, and instead looked over at Elaine Shore’s house, where his own house used to be. Elaine Shore was the silliest of the complainers, but at least her alien encounter calls provided some comic relief. The worst folks were a mile or two away in cornfield developments of a few dozen two-story houses side by side, where half the people had motion detector lights that went off all night for every stray cat and raccoon, and the other half were calling the cops complaining about their neighbor’s lights. And a lot of them had put in thousand-dollar burglar alarm systems, all hooked up downtown, and on some of those false alarms, fellows had to go out and check, and if another car wasn’t able to make it there fast enough, they’d call and wake up Parks at the Greenland Motor Court, where he was still paying the weekly rate after almost a year.
George said, “I should get four dollars a bale for the second and third cuttings of alfalfa, but about a third of that’s oat straw.”
Parks felt stupid for not having noticed it was straw. He had half a mind to go take another look, to make sure he could still tell the difference. Parks said, “Still, that’s worth something, right?”
“I got two-fifty a bale for some straw this week, from a guy who told me he was going to feed it to his fat ponies,” George said. “Wind must be picking up. I can smell Whitby’s.”
Parks sniffed the air but could not smell pigs, probably due to a little allergic trouble he’d been having off and on since returning from Texas. Whitby’s didn’t have a modern operation over there, just an old-fashioned farm with about three hundred head of Durocs that you saw out rooting for bugs and worms between feedings. Apparently when the Whitbys’ neighbors sold those plots for the subdivision, somebody didn’t get the word that living downwind of a pig farm was going to be a little fragrant, especially when the farmers in all directions, including Harland, were spreading the manure on their fields. This spring dozens of calls had come in, complicated public nuisance claims that sounded as though they’d been fashioned by lawyers. Folks who spent Saturday and Sunday mornings sitting on their screened porches drinking cappuccino and enjoying the wide expanses were threatening lawsuits, no doubt making their money off pork bellies and corn futures, some of them. Meanwhile the folks growing the corn were working eighteen-hour days and trying to keep the shit off themselves.
“Yessir, you probably ought to lock that barn,” Parks said. “How much you got in there?”
“Three hundred-some bales of straw, almost eight hundred of alfalfa.”
Both men looked in the direction of the hay barn a half mile down the road, but they couldn’t see it because they were standing in front of the toolshed. Out in the open pasture, Martini the pony whinnied.
“No sense taking a chance on losing it, George.”
“You’re probably right.”
“You know, George, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something of a serious nature. I’m wondering if you can tell me exactly, or as best you can remember, anyhow, when your brother came up missing three years ago?”
“Oh, I could probably calculate it. It was the last part of September, and it was a full moon. When he got out of jail in August, he came back, and for a couple weeks he helped me some. Then he found out I’d given Margo Crane that sliver of land, and he was so mad he would hardly talk to me for the next few weeks. Last time I saw him was on a Friday evening, third or fourth Friday in September. He asked to borrow my truck, and I said no because he’d been drinking. He took off walking down Queer Road, and I never saw him again.”
“And you didn’t report him missing?”
“Well, you know Johnny. If he’s not in jail, then he’s probably hiding out for some reason.”
“Last Friday in September, you might be saying?”
“I can tell you it was a bright night, a full harvest moon. Johnny always acted crazy in a full moon.”
Parks cleared his throat. “I’m pretty certain that was the same time Margo Crane disappeared.” Parks could have said more, but everything was so pleasant out here that he didn’t want to disturb the air with what he was thinking, so he only said, “I know you thought she came up missing later, but it was most likely around the same time.”
George sighed. “Beans are getting dry enough to harvest. A guy could sure use a brother about now.”
Parks nodded in agreement, but it struck him that even when George had bad luck, it seemed to benefit him. If that freeloading Johnny were still here, George would probably feel some kind of obligation to share the farm with him, maybe even give him some land.
“Hope it doesn’t rain,” Parks said, but he wasn’t sure how sincerely he meant it. Parks wanted to be driving his own wagonloads of dry beans and corn to Climax, and he’d be jealous of George driving his. Hard to believe that Parks used to feel put out when he had to help his dad with farm work.
“No rain’s forecasted,” George said. “But you can’t ever be sure, especially when the sky is like this.”
23
RACHEL WATCHED HER HUSBAND TALKING TO PARKS OVER at the fence between the stock barn and the toolshed, watched him hold a long piece of metal away from himself until he located a big clean stone on which to rest the end. Rachel caught a few stray words from their conversation: window, pumpkins, alfalfa. Taking George for her husband in that courthouse ceremony meant owning his land, she’d been telling herself for six weeks, and that was all. It was becoming more and more difficult, however, to fight the desire to talk to him, even at the risk of babbling about nothing, even at the risk of spoiling everything with facts George didn’t need to know. Watching her husband rest one elbow on the fence post now made her want to go put her hands on him and open him up like an old barn she’d slept in for years, but she didn’t want to talk to Tom Parks, especially not since she’d been so damn stupid last week as to tell him when her mother really disappeared. The truth had a way of slipping out without your realizing it, which was clear proof that talking just led to trouble. Rachel turned away so that she could barely see George in her peripheral vision, which somehow made her imagine his body stretched out enough to cover hundreds of acres.
She looked back when she heard George say “David.” Parks was holding out a flattened green-and-white cigarette pack. Both George and Parks shook their heads, as though wishing the cigarettes didn’t exist. Rachel knew David had been smoking recently—she’d smelled smoke on him and told him he was an idiot. Maybe Parks had something to do with David’s not showing up here yet, or maybe that window-busting Todd was responsible. After this rush of business at the produce tables, Rachel would head down to the barn with some apples, and maybe an egg sandwich, to see if he was, by some chance, still there. Because Rachel hadn’t noticed Sally entering the house, she was surprised to see her come out in front of the salesman. Sally walked right to Steve’s Thunderbird and folded her arms over the top, as though
staking a careless claim on the car and the man, maybe even on the land. For months she had already been saying, with her body: I’m just going to live here, even though I don’t give a damn about this place. Though Rachel didn’t smoke, she considered going over and saying to Sally, “Give me a goddamn cigarette.” No, she’d be even more forceful than that. “Sally, give me a cigarette, and then get the hell off my farm.”
As Rachel approached the car, the salesman turned and greeted her, plain as day. He still smelled like soap, but he also smelled like an animal captured and subdued. She’d already forgotten how big and soft he was, how different from George, who was wiry and muscled. Something seemed wrong to Rachel, and she didn’t know if it was just because the salesman was standing so close to her. The air smelled wrong, burnt maybe, and her body felt as though it might give birth to something small but weighty, the way lead shot was small but weighty. She reached inside her jacket and felt, through her shirt, the bullet lodged near her armpit.
“They make an awful lot of noise at night, don’t they?” the salesman said. His eyes were on her hand moving under her jacket.
“Who the hell are you talking about?” She let her hand drop.
“Those red squirrels.”
“So?”
“They scratch and scrabble,” Steve said. “And they chew wires, too. They can even cause electrical fires.”
Rachel looked the salesman square in the face, and though she’d meant to be hostile toward him, she found his face pleasant. “Hell yes,” she said, though in truth the squirrels didn’t much bother her, because sleeping in this house was quieter than any other place she’d slept.
“You need siding and windows worse than anyone I’ve seen all year,” Steve said. “I’m writing you up an estimate. Seeing how I’m your neighbor, I’ll make you a good deal.”
Rachel couldn’t think of any reason to disagree with the salesman’s writing up an estimate. After all, she could start the wood-stove with any kind of paper.
“So George is burning today,” the salesman said. “I saw the fire from the cupola. That’s what you call that little room, right? A cupola?”
“A cupola,” she repeated. It sounded like something for chickens. She wanted to go interrupt George and Tom Parks and ask: What is a cupola? And also, she wanted to ask whether George smelled something wrong in the air. But she was in no hurry to leave the salesman; standing there talking to him was like standing beside a big spreading tree. In the months she’d avoided this guy, she’d never considered he might be a good neighbor—not as good as Milton or April May, but good enough.
“The attic room with all the windows up there. And isn’t it a little dry to be burning?” Steve said. He was glad Rachel was looking at him. Her eyes were deep and dark, and her lips were red like a tart Michigan apple, inviting him to bite. If they were alone and she kept looking at him that way, he would move toward her until his mouth covered hers, and then he’d slide a hand beneath her jacket.
“It is too dry to be burning,” Rachel said. “Where’s this damn fire?”
“You can’t see it from here.”
Rachel followed the salesman around the trees to the fence line, and her eyes followed his finger south, across cornfields waiting to be harvested, toward the old barn, where smoke dribbled up from the horizon, a sickening gray inverted waterfall. She stared for another few seconds before shouting, “George!”
George looked up from his conversation with Parks, gave Rachel a contented look that said her scream had not sounded as loud and crazy to him as it had inside her head, or perhaps to him she sounded this crazy all the time, so he was used to it. His look suggested that all was more or less right with the world and the seasons, or as right as it could be with red squirrels in the walls, no hired man, and corn and soy prices lower than they were twenty years ago. George didn’t register the panic in Rachel’s eyes, perhaps because outdoors he was accustomed to looking across swaths of land to judge the readiness of fields, to know the coming weather from evidence brewing at horizons.
Rachel pointed south, but she felt uncertain about her sense of direction without her gun. George walked around the stock barn and to the fence line.
Parks followed. “Holy shit, George. That’s your barn!”
Rachel was grateful to Tom Parks for saying it. Perhaps Parks, too, could someday be a decent neighbor.
George walked quickly to his truck. Because he was still looking at the fire, he didn’t notice that the truck was blocked in the driveway by Parks’s cruiser behind, the Thunderbird on one side, and eighty-foot-high walnut trees and the pasture fence elsewhere. Parks sat in his cruiser with the door hanging open and his feet, nearly as wide as they were long, planted on the ground. “Come in, this is two-five-five, Parks here.” He spoke into his radio. “There’s a fire on Queer Road, about twenty-seven hundred north. … That’s Q Road. Barn belonging to George Harland.” He paused. “There’s no house.” The response that followed over the radio sounded to Rachel like the sputtering of angry crows.
Parks said, “George. There’s water down there, right?”
George clutched the door handle of his truck. The other hand still held the greasy tractor part. “There’s a well with a hand pump,” George said. “Well point might be clogged.” George kept staring toward the barn as though gathering more information about the weather between here and there. He opened his truck door.
Martini ran a short distance in the pasture. He stopped abruptly, reared up, and ran back to the fence line. The other animals stamped and snorted.
Rachel knew the well point was fine. She’d rinsed her face in the water just three days ago. All her life she’d drunk from that well, but was there enough water to put out a fire? “And the creek!” Rachel shouted.
Tom Parks nodded and spoke into his radio. Rachel saw him take the cigarette pack out of his pocket and study it as the radio cackled a response. Then he placed the pack on the dashboard.
One after another the people around the vegetable stand either put down or clutched more tightly their melons, pumpkins, and Brussels sprouts as they moved for clearer views of the smoke rising to the south. Nicole Hoekstra, however, continued to stare at her husband.
April May Rathburn was out of range of the men’s voices, and she’d left her driving glasses in her car, so as she looked through the trees, she wondered if that smoke could possibly be coming from her house.
“George, come on,” Parks said. “Let’s get down there.”
“I’ve got irrigation hoses out back,” George said.
“Hoses won’t do you no good. Fire department will be here in five minutes with a lot bigger hoses, and you’ve got to be there. Leave that thing here.”
George placed the greasy metal shaft atop the nearest railroad tie fence post. To Rachel this all seemed to be happening in slow motion, the men speaking, the smoke thickening in the distance, the metal shaft lying forlorn, woolly bears creeping around her feet so slowly that they would never get anywhere, never reach safe places, never in a million years.
Though she had often willed time to slow, she now feared she would be trapped in this hopeless, sluggish moment forever, the worst possible moment, with her still feeling friendly toward the salesman and his talk of vinyl frames and insulating glass. Rachel had never cared about resisting decay before now.
With his back to her, George seemed thin enough that he might disappear. Parks got into his front seat, started the quiet engine, and called out, “Come on, George. We’ve got to get down there before the trucks.”
George looked over at Rachel as though establishing her location, and then turned away and curled his body into the front passenger seat of the county cruiser.
24
NICOLE LOOKED DOWN TO SEE HER HAND STROKING AN acorn squash as though it were a baby animal she’d rescued from abandonment. She caressed the green ribs, admired the way they rose to meet at the top of the squash in a burst of pumpkin orange. When she looked back at Steve, she sa
w that the old blonde was pressed against him, and both were looking off the way a couple together thirty years might watch the sun setting, without saying a word, because they’d already said all that mattered. They were together inside the Harland house for half an hour, time enough to do just about anything. That woman, a stranger, was having a perfect marriage with Nicole’s husband, and Nicole had nothing.
“Look.” Mrs. Rathburn elbowed Nicole. “Something’s on fire.”
Until then, Nicole had been looking so intently at Steve and the blonde that she hadn’t thought to wonder what the two of them were actually staring at. When she finally looked south, Nicole saw a plume of smoke rise from what was probably somebody’s house on fire. She felt a little ashamed that she didn’t remember what house was there. Mrs. Rathburn’s? But if it were her house, surely she would be more upset. Nicole looked down at the squash in her hand, greener than the greenest lawn, as dark and cool as the deepest pond. She’d always thought she didn’t care for squash, but now she wasn’t sure. The flavor was earthy, if she recalled correctly, musky perhaps, and maybe she’d been too young to appreciate it. She had no idea how to cook such a squash, but she could ask her mother.
Nicole looked back toward the rising smoke. She imagined inviting those people to her house—whatever people were losing everything in the fire. Those now homeless people would appreciate the simple but tasteful appointing of her house, the museum prints of flowers and the rolltop desk Steve had given her on their first anniversary. To people without a home, her house would feel like one. They’d admire her things and thank her, and she’d say, oh, it was nothing, that she was glad to help. For the first time in her life, she would devote herself to strangers, who, by continually talking of what they’d lost, would remind her of all she had. When Steve got home from work, she wouldn’t have been watching for his car; instead she’d have been busy getting those people situated and fed. And later, when everybody had a cup of tea or a beer or soda, all of them would sit around the kitchen table and listen to the story of how the fire started and within minutes tore their lives apart. Nicole and Steve would look at each other across the table, sharing a sense of how fortunate they were. But would Steve still want another woman?
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