Gray Cat approached but stopped about ten feet away, when both the cat and the boy heard the porch door of the Rathburn house opening. Gray Cat sped away into the cornfield and David hid beside the bedspring portion of the fence, which had blackened from the heat. From there, squatting down, he watched April May lug an old cloth-covered chair across the street. David knew he should help her, but he wanted to stay hidden, and really she seemed to be doing fine by herself. When April May stopped, David thought she was going to sit in the chair beside the fire, but after a rest she kept dragging the chair closer, so close her skin must have been burning. Then she lifted the chair and heaved it onto the fire. It tipped over onto the hot coals and looked like a defeated throne of hell. David watched it blacken and burst into flame. April May stood with her hands on her lower back for a while, then walked around the fire, as if to see it from other angles.
As she approached his hiding place, April May said aloud, “God, I love a fire.”
David assumed she was talking to him, and he almost stood to respond, but when she moved away and said it again, he realized she was talking to herself. Maybe she, too, would need his help sometime in the future. David could help her and everybody else and so become the secret hero of Queer Road. Gray Cat rubbed against his leg, and David ran his hand over the cat’s body. Gray Cat purred roughly, made a sound that started, stalled out, and started again. Maybe Gray Cat would become his truest friend in the new life. David didn’t notice the car slowing on the road behind him until it turned into the driveway. He stood to see which vehicle it was, and inadvertently showed himself in the headlights before turning and running toward the creek, panting and dragging his bad foot.
“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.”
35
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 p
lanet 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.
36
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.
She’d thought marriage would make her want to do simple things such as bake cakes. She had thought that marriage would make life richer—just the knowledge that the man she loved had committed to her should make every moment sparkle. Surely Steve had promised her that life with him would be warm and fun. But instead it was … God, she didn’t even have the words to describe what her life felt like. Over the course of several hours of any day, she felt sad, happy, hurt, then vulnerable, then self-confident. Each day she wove the threads of those emotions into a fabric to wrap around herself, but for all that, she thought she might never be able to express another meaningful idea to anyone else ever again. By getting married, she’d put herself on the shelf, and other people now saw her as taken care of, finished off. She’d planned and executed her wedding, and she’d done a fabulous job—everybody said so—but rather than a fresh new start on life, the wedding had turned out to be the beginning of the end. If she didn’t do something that made a difference soon, then in thirty years she would be another gloomy old lady staring out of her house at a world that confounded her.
Nicole got up, and in her heart-patterned flannel pajamas, she walked into and out of all the rooms of her little house, including the smaller bedroom, which was Steve’s home office, and she ended up in the kitchen, where she stood for a long time before she grabbed the biggest knife from the knife holder and carried it toward Steve. As she crossed the threshold between the living room and the bedroom, she grasped the handle with both hands, and as she approached the bed, she extended her arms straight out in front of her. She studied the big, dumb body of her husband and imagined she could see beads of sweat excreted from his pores. His hair was flattened on the side of his head, and his mouth hung open. His exposed arm looked flabby in sleep. She had hoped that this man could mean everything to her. She was fully aware that she would never be able to explain to her mother or anyone else how murder was the only remedy for her situation. She positioned the knife directly above his chest. She lifted her arms and felt all the forces of the universe collect in her tensed muscles. At the top of her thrust, the clock snapped from 1:52 to 1:53 and she awoke from her trance, a princess of a bride transformed into an aging married woman with bleached hair and a blotchy complexion. She let her arms drop to her sides.
She hurried out of the bedroom, through the living room and kitchen, to the sliding glass door and outside onto the plank deck. She knew that killing Steve was a fantasy, just as her idea of a perfect marriage had been a fantasy, the way her white house with a view of a barn and a bridge over a stream amounted to nothing more than a puff of smoke. On the picnic table before her sat the two pumpkins Steve had brought home earlier. Only now did she consider it was pretty impressive that he’d carried them all that distance from the Barn Grill. She went to the bigger of the two, and without hesitation stabbed it with all the strength in both her arms. With that thrust, she felt something snap in her chest, something like a popcorn kernel popping. It required some force to yank the knife out. She positioned herself over the pumpkin and stabbed it again. When she freed the knife, the pumpkin toppled to the wooden deck. She got down on her knees and stabbed it, again and again, through its ribs, and as she sliced, her white breath fanned from her nose and mouth. The pumpkin rolled over and she stabbed it while it lay on its back. The next attempt missed the pumpkin entirely; she thrust the knife between two boards of the deck. When she looked up, she saw her husband standing in the doorway.
He swallowed audibly. “What are you doing, honey?”
“Carving this pumpkin.” She was a little out of breath.
“It looked like you were stabbing it.”
<
br /> “I guess I slipped.” She lifted the knife one more time, thrust it into the pumpkin, and left it there.
Steve laughed nervously and shifted his weight to his other bare foot. Beneath his T-shirt, his stomach extended over the waistband of his boxers. When he noticed her looking, he sucked it in. He said, “Aren’t you cold?”
Nicole hadn’t even noticed that her pajama sleeves had ridden up. Her forearms were goose-bumped and steam seemed to be rising from her skin. Steve tilted his head in a way that signaled he was good-natured, but the gesture seemed forced.
“Tomorrow,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Tomorrow I’m going to offer to help George Harland with his farming. Milton at the Barn Grill told me that the guy who worked for him moved to Indiana and left him in a bind. He could lose the whole place.”
Nicole was eyeing the knife, wondering if she should pull it out and stab the pumpkin one last time tonight. Or maybe she’d wait until tomorrow, and then do some serious carving.
“If he loses the farm, we might end up living next to a subdivision. I think I’d be good at it, you know,” Steve said. “Farming. I’m going to offer to help him however I can. Then I figure when he needs windows he’ll come to me.”
She said, “Do you think I should bake them a cake or something?”
“You know, cake would sure hit the spot right now.”
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