Q Road (19 page)

When Steve finally stepped out of the car, he looked not toward Nicole but at the farmhouse, and he seemed to appraise and admire the house as though he wanted to live there, just as he had appraised and admired their own house upon first seeing it and, come to think of it, her mother's house, too. It distressed Nicole to think that her husband might appreciate all houses equally. Steve adjusted the belt holding up his creased khakis and walked toward Rachel Harland, who was now standing by the side door with a bushel basket. Steve's hand was outstretched to shake with her, but
when Rachel Harland did not accept his hand, Steve let it fall away, and Nicole felt sorry for her husband.

The blonde beside the car turned enough that Nicole saw her face and realized she was an older woman, as old as Nicole's mother, fifty maybe, and her hair was gray and silver rather than truly blond. Nicole told herself that Steve couldn't have any interest in such an old woman. Everything, then, was fine, for here was Steve giving a woman a ride and stopping at a house along his route in an attempt to sell windows, possibly with the ulterior motive of buying some land for their dream home. Even Nicole could see that the Harland house needed new windows. Nicole could imagine the drafts coming through the old windows, creating a breeze strong enough to extinguish any flames burning inside, whether they were jack-o'-lanterns or romantic dinner candles.

Nicole did not consider that fresh cool air slipping in from outside might actually make flames burn brighter and hotter than they would burn in Nicole's own well-insulated house.

BEFORE PULLING ONTO QUEER ROAD, TOM PARKS HAD SAT
in the barn driveway and stared across at the Rathburn place, which looked so similar to the house in which he'd grown up: two stories, porch stretching halfway across the front, white-painted clapboards. The new bay window in the dining room seemed like a sensible addition. The Rathburns had always found ways to improve their house, while the Parkses had been so busy farming that they hadn't even kept theirs up. His uncle Larry Rathburn, his mother's brother, was a handy fellow, always fixing or building something. Parks got a kick out of that barn-shaped bird feeder Larry had made and the way the birds fed at the doorways like miniature feathered cattle. Parks's family house used to have a big sugar maple in front that turned orange and red in autumn. Being out here made Tom Parks long for his family—not for his ex-wife and kids in Texas, but for his parents and siblings.

On an autumn day like today, they'd all have been picking the
remaining vegetables from the garden or raking leaves, maybe helping the Harlands bring in hay. The Harlands had seemed an opinionated and energetic lot back then, compared to the quiet Parkses, but for some reason it was the Parks family men who died unnatural and unquiet deaths. As a teenager, Tom Parks's older brother had crossed the tracks at Queer Road without looking, and a freight train had dragged his car a quarter mile toward Kalamazoo. One of Tom's uncles had been shot on opening day of deer season. Then Tom's father'd had the heart attack while driving the tractor and crashed into a tree over by the pond. If Tom Parks had been superstitious, he might have suspected his family carried a curse of some kind. He was careful around guns, railroad tracks, and heavy machinery, but he'd chosen a profession in which there were plenty of violent ways to die. Parks knew he had to stop thinking this way, not so much because he feared death, but because the death of a man whom no woman loved seemed wretched.

George ought to keep that barn door closed and locked, Tom told himself. There was no sense tempting kids to damage your property, and an open barn door was an invitation. Had Tom Parks looked over his shoulder one last time, he might have noticed a stream of smoke rising from the doorway, but Parks thought he'd seen enough. Though he still figured there was a kid hiding in that barn, he didn't really want to hassle kids any more than necessary. He believed that kids needed to hide from adults sometimes, which is why they liked barns and tree houses and forts, even unattached garages and old washhouses. Tom Parks had begged his wife to return to Michigan after his father's death, to move into the old family house, to fix it up and save it. The kids would have a better childhood in the country, he'd told her, with wild lands to roam and safe places to hang out, lots of ways to get trouble out of their systems.

As a teenager, Tom Parks had made plenty of trouble, perhaps as a way of rebelling against the mildness of his family. Around
Halloween, he'd soaped windows, strung toilet paper across people's front yards, and once he'd found a veined, milky afterbirth from his sister's horse foaling, and in the middle of the night dragged it onto a neighbor's front porch. Once he and a friend, not George, had even stolen a car, a nearly new Ford coupe, and then left it out on Red Arrow Highway. In fact, Tom Parks had been the one who originally changed the street signs on this road. George's grandfather Harold, and plenty of others besides, had always called Q Road “Queer Road,” but young Tom Parks was the one who first doctored the
Q RD
signs by painting out the
D
and inserting
UEE
neatly between, and he had done this at every marked intersection for miles. Others had since kept up the tradition—as recently as two months ago somebody doctored a new sign. That proved kids nowadays weren't all that different than he'd been as a kid. If there'd been drugs when Tom Parks was young, he'd probably have taken them, but fortunately, he'd had only alcohol to screw himself up with. And girls, of course. Once a boy got to be about fourteen, he would always have the option of getting screwed up over girls, whether the girls liked him the way they always seemed to like George Harland, or whether they didn't give a damn about him, the way girls, for the most part, hadn't given a damn about Tom Parks.

Even his wife must have disliked him deep down, or she wouldn't have been able to play such a crummy trick on him, getting him to move to Texas and then, after Tom's father died and the farm was sold, divorcing him there. Tom Parks had done his best in staying out West five more years for his daughter and son, but when his ex-wife remarried, Parks could bear the flatness and the dry heat of Texas no longer. Parks's daughter was fifteen and seemed an exotic, glamorous creature—Parks marveled that something so lovely could have sprung from him. If his boy were a troublemaker, then Parks could show a fatherly understanding, pull strings to keep his son from getting whacked by the full force of the
law. Tom Parks would have been happy to drive out to Texas to talk to a cop about cutting his son some slack. But there was no danger of that with the boy's face in the computer screen all the time; the boy hardly even looked up when you were with him. Parks had hoped that his kids might want to move back to Michigan, but neither had even wanted to come visit him this summer. “Maybe I'd come for a week if I had a laptop,” his son had said on the phone.

Gray Cat streaked across Queer Road in front of Parks's car and disappeared so quickly that he could have been a ghost. Though Parks might well have looked in the rearview mirror and seen smoke dribbling upward, he instead shifted into drive and turned left, headed north on Queer Road, telling himself that it was foolish to always be looking back and regretting. Like his aunt April May said the other day, it was better to look to the future, at what you could still do to change things for the better. He touched the cigarette pack in his top pocket and told himself again that in the future George should lock his barns. Parks did finally look in his rearview mirror, but he focused only on the flame-colored leaves of the maples that lined the east side of the road, on land his family used to own. The leaves were bright enough to burn a man's eyes.

A half mile north of the barn, Officer Parks slowed as he approached the vegetable stand. He recognized the pretty blond gal near the pumpkins as the occupant of one of the prefabs that had replaced his house. (Unlike Elaine Shore, the young couple hadn't filed any complaints, God love them.) When he saw his aunt April May on the other side of the pumpkins, Parks gave a blip of his siren and light and pulled into the driveway, to park behind George's truck.

ELAINE SHORE WAS STRAIGHTENING THE GLASS-STOPPERED
bottles in her spice rack for the second time that morning when she heard the blip of the police cruiser, a much-needed reminder of order in this neighborhood. She had already adjusted the condiments in her refrigerator door and lined up all the bottles and tubes in the bathroom. She sat again in her breakfast nook, clad in the quilted nylon bathrobe that had become her uniform in the months since she'd retired from driving the school bus. Across the street at the pumpkin wagon stood the blond wife from next door. Elaine's hair had once been soft and flowing like that, but now even her short strands seemed unmanageable. Elaine had just taken some ibuprofen tablets to fend off a headache she thought might be coming on, but the chaos at the vegetable stand was making her temples throb. First thing in the morning, when the vegetables were arranged in neat rows and the flowers in big glass jars, Elaine admired the colorful rural scene. But when people began getting out of their cars, milling
around, turning each squash and melon over in their hands, messing up the piles, Elaine couldn't bear it. Most people parked on the shoulder at angles so that their cars jutted into the road. And if it wasn't illegal parking, it was those animals getting loose.

The first time Elaine had called the police about the Harlands' animals grazing in her lawn this spring, Officer Parks assured her it would be taken care of, and within a half hour that girl tramped over and, without a word to Elaine, grabbed the pony and started walking it home. The other two animals fell in line. When Elaine shouted at the girl and pointed out to her where the pony had done its business, the girl had looked up and said, “Shit makes good fertilizer.” Elaine had been startled by the girl's face—just for a moment, Elaine thought that girl was an alien. But alien faces, she had reminded herself, were thin and clean. In fact, that round-faced girl with her rumpled clothing and long, messy hair was the complete opposite of an alien. That girl embodied the problem the aliens were coming to solve.

Once Elaine had composed herself, she'd said, “Maybe it's fertilizer for that garden of yours, but it certainly isn't fertilizer for a decent lawn.” Then that girl let go of the pony, walked over, and kicked the pile of manure, sent it spraying all over the lawn so nobody could ever clean it up no matter how long they worked. Elaine was shocked speechless, and it took her a few minutes to regain her composure and march into the house to call the police again. Parks must have talked to the Harlands because the next time the animals got into her lawn Mr. Harland led them away and that girl came over with a shovel and carried the several piles of manure back across the road without a word. Off and on ever since, Elaine had noticed that girl staring over in the most intense way, with her arms crossed over her chest, as though trying to control Elaine's mind. Just seeing that girl made Elaine empty her head of all thoughts in case the girl could read her telepathically.

On October 9, Elaine Shore was grateful to see Officer Parks's
uniformed body pop out of the cruiser, which he'd parked in the driveway, where a person ought to park. She would have preferred, of course, that Officer Parks were more neatly pressed, that his uniform was not so tight across his belly, and that it was not loose and wrinkled elsewhere. The police station ought to be more like the military, she told herself, and they ought to line up all the officers every morning and make sure they looked like proper representatives of the law.

On a Saturday like today, Elaine used to enjoy going out to lunch or visiting her daughter and grandchildren on the west side of Kalamazoo, but nowadays the outside world just seemed too complicated to negotiate. First there was the downtown traffic, and then her daughter's house was messy, and her newest grandbaby's face was always smeared with dirt and jelly, and he drooled so much that he seemed to Elaine downright defective. Since she'd moved out here two years ago, Elaine had become distracted by the wide open space, so much so that she was unable to concentrate, even on her romance novels. Of course, she had been mistaken in originally thinking that the open space was empty; after all, the ground was covered with bugs and caterpillars, and on some mornings tumorlike mushrooms bulged obscenely where the night before there had been nothing. Beneath the soil burrowed moles and snakes and possums; the air was filled with pollen, dirt, and more bugs. The farm world was one of chaos, of life growing out of anyone's control. But it was probably that illusion of empty space that made Elaine contemplate the possibility of alien ships every hour of every day. Or maybe she thought so often of space aliens simply because their arrival was imminent and the hour of invasion was nearing. As she watched those women handling pumpkins across the street, she conjured up for herself a vision of identical naked gray figures walking single file, with synchronized steps, down the ramp of a gleaming windowless spaceship that she imagined had landed in that girl's garden. Today could well be day zero, she told herself, the beginning of the new order.