Q Road (20 page)

Elaine Shore really hadn't known that living here in the country was going to involve all this disorder, starting with the lawn: in their old place in Milwood the lawn had been all grass, not wild weeds that could grow six inches in one night so you had to beg your husband to mow the lawn practically every day. The most you could hope for out here was that the lawn was short and green. If it was just short and green you were grateful. And how she had loved the neat, fresh rows of farmland corn when she and her husband had driven by in search of a plot of land to purchase. But at this time of year, when you saw the brown stalks drying in the field, you realized that the rows weren't as straight as you'd originally thought and the plants themselves were just plain dirty. And when Harland harvested, the machinery threw dust and reddish chaff into the air. That stuff floated and came to rest on her window ledges, on the sidewalk leading from the driveway to the front door, on cars if they weren't in the garage with the door sealed. It fell in a blizzard on her lawn and on her asphalted and curbed driveway. Afterward, all winter, the fields lay barren in stubble.

She'd driven a school bus for twenty-five years, and in the last five of those years she had been at her wit's end about the way kids refused to sit in their seats, always squirming, tossing objects, snacking despite the sign
NO FOOD OR DRINK
. There had been a time she'd liked the kids and the driving, just as there had been a time she'd enjoyed her husband, but both interests had expired. Before they moved to Greenland Township, Elaine and her husband hadn't slept in the same bed for years. In the new Greenland house, Elaine had tried to sleep with him again. She had even tried making love with him once, but the result was just too sloppy, and to be honest she felt a little queasy even thinking about the whole business. That was why she slept in the spare room. Love had never measured up to the romance novels, but after moving to Greenland, Elaine knew all that fumbling was over for good.

Which was fine, because it gave her more energy to focus on
talking with her real estate lawyer and with members of the zoning board and other township officials. Elaine was looking toward the future of this neighborhood. Her lawyer said that she should attend every township meeting and file every possible complaint. He said she should consider herself a pioneer, blazing a trail for others who would come here in the future, when the neighborhood would be row upon row of neat houses and paved driveways. The best hope for this neighborhood, the lawyer had told her, was to get enough people moving out here side by side that the property values went up and people like the Whitbys, Higginses, and Harlands couldn't afford to keep paying the taxes. Elaine would be an agent for change, the lawyer said, and Elaine took a certain amount of pride in that designation. When enough folks moved in, city water and sewer and natural gas would be piped out, and then they would begin to get these bugs and weeds under control. Elaine would be responsible for bringing civilization to this untamed place.

Elaine's husband suddenly appeared outside the window, and his physical presence startled her. There he was, walking along the driveway from the mailbox as though everything was fine with the world. He returned to the house by the kitchen door and put a pile of mail in front of Elaine, then calmly filled up his coffee cup again, as though chaos weren't swirling around them. Elaine smoothed her hair back from her face with both hands, but she could still feel it touching her forehead. She straightened the pile of mail in preparation for going through it one piece at a time.

“It's all advertising,” her husband said, leaning against the door frame. “Why don't you get outside today, take a walk or something. You haven't even gotten dressed for a week.”

Elaine looked back across the street and said, “Do you think they're paying taxes on that money they take in for those vegetables?”

Her husband shook his head and carried his coffee cup back into the TV room. As soon as he was gone, Elaine unfolded a
brochure advertising a Florida retirement village and laid it atop the news spread of the alien landing. Of course Elaine was committed to her mission in Greenland Township, but a week ago, without telling her husband, she had called the Pelican Retirement Corporation and requested this information. The glossy picture before her featured white trailers in a row, each with a little attached front porch, and on each porch stood one tidy round table and two or three deck chairs. Each of the homes had a tiny lush lawn containing exactly one miniature palm tree or spiky bush, and the rest of nature was kept at bay. The development looked even better than she had imagined from the display ad in the
Weekly World News.

Elaine sighed and folded her arms on the table and leaned into them so that her hands rested lightly against her breasts. She told herself that her husband would be singing a different tune come spring, when the wind blew over from the pig farm. Oh, yes. Elaine had discovered that life in the country was not all it was cracked up to be. Out in the country with these selfish farmers, it was apparently too much to ask to sit in your own kitchen with the window open two inches without smelling manure. In this neighborhood, it was considered unreasonable to want livestock to remain inside their fences and out of your lawn. People here didn't care about the difference between legal and illegal parking, and it was foolish to hope that they could have enough self-control to admire the neatly stacked vegetables and pumpkins at the farm stand the way Elaine did and think
how quaint
, and drive on by to the grocery store.

RACHEL WATCHED SALLY PETTING THE ANIMALS AT THE
fence line. The skinny bitch couldn't be bothered to get food or medicine for David, but she could drive around with neighbor men all day. Rachel wished one of the animals would take a bite out of Sally. Maybe Rachel could teach Martini the pony to bite on command. Then if Sally asked to borrow George's truck, Rachel would tell her to go to hell and give Martini the signal, and he would reach across the barbed wire and chomp her.

“Nice day. The neighborhood is beautiful this time of year,” said the man from across the street, as though Rachel gave a damn what he thought of the neighborhood. Rachel meant to ignore him, but he was a big guy, even taller and broader than he had looked from a distance. Rachel wished George could hire a man this size to help him, but this particular man seemed way too clean. He smelled of soap and his skin reflected light—he was probably impossible to tolerate in sunshine. Rachel was only standing there
to keep an eye on Sally, she told herself, to prevent her from bothering George. Sally turned away from the animals and approached with an exaggerated swing of her hips.

“Rachel!” Sally said, with fake delighted surprise. Sally could brighten her face and give the illusion of being animated, the way a small, sickly bird puffed out its feathers to look larger and healthier than it was. The layers of Sally's hair fell upon one another in a way that made Rachel think of those stupid white domestic ducks preening on the riverbank. Rachel imagined herself wrenching and twisting Sally's bird body, snapping her in two. Sally picked two pumpkin gourds from the bushel basket Rachel was holding and pressed them onto her breasts so that the stems stuck out like long, curling, alien nipples. The neighbor man laughed hesitantly, as though waiting for Rachel's approval. Upon seeing Sally's big-knuckled hands wrapped around the tiny pumpkins, Rachel smiled and snorted a laugh. She couldn't help noticing Sally's hands looked just like David's. Rachel put down her bushel basket and looked around in hopes of seeing David. She should run out and find him and give him a couple of apples, at least. Wherever he was, he was bound to be really hungry by now. Rachel wiped her hands on her jeans.

Sally put the gourds back in the basket and said, “I need to ask George if he can give me a ride to the store today.”

“No fucking way, Sally. He's busy.” Rachel watched the animals beside the stock barn and tried to rid herself of having momentarily liked Sally, or Sally's hands anyway. The donkey was chewing on George's ex-wife's llama's neck. Maybe the donkey would be the one she'd train to bite.

George came out of the animal barn and disappeared into his toolshed without Sally spotting him. George apparently hadn't noticed that Tom Parks had pulled into the driveway behind the truck, and was over there fondling pumpkins with April May and the blonde from across the street. Rachel wasn't about to go out of
her way to announce his arrival. Even though Parks's concern about Margo's disappearance seemed sincere, Rachel had to hate him for the way he had tried to talk George out of marrying her, right up until the ceremony six weeks ago.

Sally pretended she hadn't heard Rachel's “No fucking way.” Sally smiled at Steve before addressing Rachel again. “I'll just ask George if I can borrow his truck. David needs a puffer.” Sally tipped her head back and shook her hair and smiled, and in Sally's face, Rachel saw David's widely spaced brown eyes.

“Go to hell, Sally.”

“Hey, can I get a pumpkin for David to carve?” Sally said. She didn't seem to notice she'd just been sent to hell.

“Sally, I can take you to the store,” offered the salesman.

“Rachel, you must already know Steve,” Sally said.

“We're neighbors,” the salesman said. “We've been waving to each other for months.”

Rachel rolled her eyes, but found herself feeling warm toward the man nonetheless. She said, “Well, I guess you've never called the goddamn police on the livestock.”

“I'm an animal lover.” The salesman appeared to blush. “Glad to finally meet you.”

This time Rachel accepted the big soft hand, and oddly enough, she liked the feel of the damn thing, which made her think of warm, dry sand in her fingers. She hesitated before letting his hand go, grasping it slightly longer and tighter than she had meant to, against the feeling of it slipping away.

Standing so close to the house, Steve could confirm what he'd suspected, that the wood trim was dry, even brittle, and that what had looked like unpainted horizontal boards actually had ancient specks of white paint, which meant that this house was not even stained with a natural finish, but was entirely unprotected from the elements. He couldn't hold back any longer. “You really need some windows and siding. Have you got red squirrels in the walls?”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Here's my card. I sell insulated windows and vinyl siding. That's one of the biggest problems around here, the red squirrels.” He pushed the card toward her.

“We only just got the damn squirrels.” Despite an inclination to reach out and accept the card, Rachel stood her ground. “You must have driven them little sons of bitches scurrying out of other people's houses right over here.”

“If I did, I certainly didn't mean to.” Steve didn't try to defend himself by saying that he'd only been assigned to this part of the county a few months ago. There was nothing to be gained by getting defensive with a customer. He withdrew the card, put it back in his pocket. In truth, Steve rather preferred the cranky women to the nice ones. The nice ones were nice with everybody, so you had no idea where you stood, but once you won over the cranky gals, you were in. From a distance, he'd figured Rachel was about twenty-seven years old, and he'd assumed that the birth date in the
Gazette
marriage license listing had been a typographical error, but up close she indeed looked seventeen. He wouldn't have taken Harland for a cradle robber, but there she was.

“If you sell windows,” Rachel said, “then you can get me a piece of glass to replace a broken window pane.”

“You may want to replace the whole window.”

“It's just a damn pane of glass.”

“I can take a look at it,” he said. “You guys heat with LP gas?”

“Oil and wood.”

Anyone could see the aboveground oil tank behind the house and the pile of firewood outside the back door, but Steve had wanted to make conversation. “You're paying a lot for that oil, and you're probably losing about forty percent of your heat through these windows and window frames. And if we put vinyl siding on, we layer insulation between the wood and the vinyl. Do your windows rattle in the wind?”

“Hell yes, the windows rattle. Windows always rattle.”

“If they're rattling, you could be losing even more heat. I'll be able to give you an estimate in twenty minutes.”

“We aren't going to buy any damn windows. Any extra money we get we're buying land. Land is all I care about.” Rachel didn't understand why she was chattering on to this guy, saying more than she'd said to George all week. It must be something in the air today, she thought.

“Maybe buying windows will save you so much money on oil that you can buy even more land.” Steve smiled. “No obligation. I promise not to be a pushy salesman, especially being your neighbor and all.” He stared into her face. “I'll check out that broken window for you.”