Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  Ivy regards the Indian woman steadily, that lap, now empty, one dimpled hand on each wide thigh. And this woman stares back, chin raised now, and her eyes behind her metal-frame glasses are lost in flat blue utility-cool reflections of refrigerator and cupboard doors and towers of cluttered shelves. Ivy says, “The kids must really love that little dog. You can tell when a dog has been given a lot of love.”

  One of the white-haired women touches Ivy’s shoulder. The ripply wide warm familiar laugh is gone. The voice is now granular, staticky, “Don’t.”

  The other white-haired woman, this one with the New York City accent and Grand Canyon on her chest, says in a heavy way, “Ohhhhh, I guess. Hmmmmm,” then turns away and stands by the sink staring down. Prayer? Or just avoiding the big bulging not-very-nice moment where it was necessary to figuratively take a broom to the guest. SWAT!

  The phone rings. The short square white-haired pinkly white woman with the Maine accent answers it, writes something on paper on the desk, slips it carefully down over a tall spike of notes. She makes no real conversation with the caller, just “Of course” and “You bet” and “I know it.” Then “Yes, playing doctor to one of Willy Lancaster’s little dogs.” Then some listening. Then, “Bye-bye.”

  It has fallen into Ivy Morelli’s sizzling mental notebook.

  WILLY LANCASTER.

  Jane Meserve speaks.

  I would run away but I don’t know where I am. I would walk.

  There’s a phone here. It’s always ringing. But it’s never Mumma. People . . . hundreds of people call Gordie. Gordie knows the whole world. La la la la la. I hate Gordie’s voice. “Hi, Bob,” “Hi, Janet,” “Hi, Mary,” “Hi, Gus,” “Hi, Dave,” “Hi, Stan,” “Hi, Art,” “Hi, Doug,” “Hi, Ray,” “Hi, Vic,” “Hi, Pooch,” “Hi, Randy,” “Hi, BoBo,” “Hi, Frank” . . . laugh laugh laugh talk talk talk. “Bye, Bob,” “Bye, Janet,” “Bye, Gus,” “Bye, Dave” . . . while I am right here at the table crying and weak for food. Nobody knows how mean Gordie is. Everybody thinks he is so nice. But if you saw me, you would see my eyes are sinkish and I get skinnier. While Gordie is on the phone, he eats and looks at me and is so happy to see me with nothing to eat.

  The press calls the William D. Lancasters, after a brief impatient search in the area directory and then a call to Information.

  “Hello. This is Ivy Morelli with the Record Sun. Is this the residence of Willie Lancaster?”

  TV in the background. Into the phone a woman’s voice speaks, cigarette husky. Or husky from shouting. Or maybe a cold. Or crying? “Yes, ’tis.”

  “I’m interviewing people at the Home School and some of them over there mentioned your family’s name. I’m hoping you or Willie would like to talk with me about the school.”

  “Mmmmh.”

  “Pretty nice school, huh?”

  “I don’t go down there. It’s my daughter that goes . . . her and her husband.”

  “And their children?”

  “No kids . . . yet.”

  “Do you remember when Gordon first opened the doors of his school?”

  “I dunno . . . a while back. It’s not actually a school. Some people call it that . . . the Home School . . . but there’s really something about that . . . something how people started calling it that . . . other people. My girl calls it the Settlement because . . . well, you know . . . it’s a community.”

  Ivy says quickly, “Oh, I know . . . but, you know . . . it’s kind of a school, because of all the kids.”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  Ivy presses on. “If you were to say the things you like best and least about the school, the Settlement, what would those things be?”

  The woman’s voice has no high or low tones, just throaty sluggishly paced words, strategically placed, as you might set the table with plate, knife, spoon, fork, napkin. “Oh, I dunno. Should be Dee Dee you talk to about this.”

  “Do you have her phone number?”

  “They don’t have a phone. They use ours.”

  Dogs bark. Several dogs. It’s the voice of that small, white, curl-tailed, flat-faced dog with the hurt paw at Gordon’s house last night, but multiplied five or six times.

  Ivy suggests, “Your daughter must live nearby.”

  The woman makes no reply but now speaks to someone else, then returns to say in her deadpan voice, “Someone’s here.” The vivacious dither of dog voices closes in so Ivy can’t hear what the woman is calling out to the someone who has arrived.

  Ivy waits, squeezing her lips with her fingers and pulling them out into a long shape, then tapping her fingers on the desk, then rubs her silky hair violently.

  Woman’s voice returns. “You still there?”

  “Yes, I am,” Ivy replies so nicely, almost fondly. “I’m wondering if I can stop by soon and talk with Dee Dee?”

  “You’ll need to ask her that. I can’t predict her comin’s and goin’s. I know tonight they’ll be late but tomorrow she’s going to be here for supper, her Dad’s birthday, and you can catch her then and make your plans.”

  Ivy wants to ask one more thing from this lifelessly agreeable woman but the dogs seem to be knocking things over. Or maybe the visitors are knocking things over. So Ivy just says thank you and bye.

  The woman’s bye is more like “B’bye” as friends would say good-bye to each other, but oh-so calm and unruffled and toneless.

  Now in boldest print, Ivy taps out the words: COMMUNITY and SETTLEMENT on the screen.

  Ivy narrows her eyes.

  The following p.m. The press taps out the Lancasters’ phone number. Dee Dee, the daughter, is right there.

  The dogs are quiet this time but Happy Birthday tooooo yooooooooo, obscenities, ghoulish laughter, and screams in the background make the Lancaster daughter’s soft words hard to decipher, but Ivy is sure that the young woman (who sounds like a little girl) has been instructed by Gordon St. Onge because the girl says, “Not a school. Just family. Gordon is my husband’s cousin.” And then quickly, “I really can’t talk. I’m not feeling well.” And she doesn’t budge when Ivy tries to weasel another answer out of her. “I’m really sorry. I’m sick. Gotta go. B’bye,” and the girl is gone, just the utterly black hollow of the hung-up phone remains. Ivy thinks this over.

  The girl didn’t seem sick. Nor did she seem afraid of anyone. Or drugged. If anyone is drugged, it’s the Lancaster mother. The daughter’s voice wasn’t anything like her mother’s, that methodical drone. The girl seemed happy. Happy and hurried. And very soft. And young! Too young to be married. How young is she? Fourteen? Ivy needs to know. The little bit she has found out so far has not disproven the prickly red-hot prophet hypothesis. The prophet and his devoted followers. Ooooo wow yes! This is the kind of story America loves.

  Ivy tails him.

  On Thursday morning she packs her bag with pens, lined pads, tape recorder, spare earrings, cassettes, cell phone (which only works in parking lots of big-box stores) (and only sometimes), Kleenex, cash. And away she goes. Her car is held tight in the grip of heavy rain, windshield wipers whacking away, radio on low. She is decked out in a black beret, jeans, sandals, and an old-fashioned white eyelet blouse. Beret and blouse and jeans now splattered and soggy from her sprint to and from the newspaper building. The earrings she wears she has kept simple. Just studs. To keep the holes from slamming shut on her. You can’t turn your back on pierced flesh.

  But Ivy feels so good. It is good to get out of the city. Even a small city. The wet greenness of the overhanging trees and steep fields of new corn are close and solid as surging sea. Barefoot, her soaked sandals now tossed in the bucket seat beside her, she sees, before she makes the turn onto Heart’s Content Road, the dark green-and-white pickup coming downhill. She makes the split-second decision to keep going straight, speeding up, turning in a driveway a few yards after the curve, coming back fast, easily catching up with the truck as it toodles along into town.

  Yep, it’s him. She can make out the dar
k brown back of his head in the cab’s steamy back window. He wears no cap. What is it that looks red? Must be his shirt.

  Two other heads. One small. A child! Really and truly and alas.

  Ivy tailgates. She hangs there right on his bumper and rides it hard. She doesn’t even try to be discreet. When he brakes, she brakes. When he speeds up slightly on straightaways, she speeds up slightly on straightaways. But this is the way Ivy always drives, isn’t it? Everyone knows that to drive less aggressively and more courteously is . . . well . . . part of the romantic and impractical past. A form of congealment. You’ll never get anywhere if you don’t progress out of those old ways. You must go with the flow, and more.

  He must recognize her, but he never pulls off the pavement to have it out with her, either to terrorize her or to just say, “Hey, Ivy. Howzit goin’?”

  He just keeps poking along as if no Ivy were there. The child’s head turns. Child stands up on his knees in the seat, which means he hasn’t got his seat belt fastened. No child seat, either. Hmmmm. The child rubs away some steam from the glass and stares gravely through the window at Ivy with small, squinty, deeply-lodged-looking eyes . . . not big innocent eyes. He has a small chin. Not a child who is chubby-cheeked. Nor rosy. His hair is dark. Combed like the hair of cowboys in the old forties and fifties movies. Like Ronald Reagan. Little bump of wet hair in the front. Very churchy. This is what Ivy had expected Gordon St. Onge’s hair to look like before she saw newspaper clippings of him and before she met him. She had expected more “church.” But here now is the first real kid Ivy has tracked down in association with “the Prophet.” That’s what some of those persons Ivy has interviewed had called St. Onge (jokingly, it seemed), “the Prophet.” Probably due to the line of her questioning, her references to “cult,” her reminders to them of the spellbinding shadow of Waco’s David Koresh in flames. Okay, and here is a real live kid, finally, churchy hair, no seat belt.

  The third head wears a brimmed Vietnam War–type bush hat, olive green. This head keeps turning toward Gordon. The guy is chatty. Seems to talk the whole way. Bearded chin wags, lotta hand gestures. But Ivy never sees him putting the kid back into his seat belt. The guy just talks around the kid while the kid grips the back of the seat or the empty plastic gun racks that show behind the men’s heads. And the kid watches Ivy.

  Yes, yes, gun racks. How had she missed this before?

  The old truck chugs through town now, horn tooting, lights flashing in an almost celebratory way to nearly every vehicle that approaches. Left-turn signal blinks at the IGA entrance. Truck turns.

  To one side of the IGA, the nearest mountain is soft and pale with fog but for its humpy, dark, hard, watchful, old, woodsy mass showing there in places where the fog is tattered.

  Truck eases into a parking space while Ivy whips into a space in the next row, her sporty red car lurching to a stop.

  She jams her feet into the cold squashy sandals. She hippity-hops out, swinging her loaded shoulder bag into place. There by the fender of her car, she waits in the beating-down blinding rain, kinda bouncing, ready, watching the doors of the truck but nothing happens while the long drenching seconds tick away. The bush hat guy is still talking and nodding and gesturing to Gordon with both hands. And the kid is still squinting at Ivy through the drizzling back window.

  The rain thickens, big fisty close-together cold bloppy splats.

  Ivy bounces. Ivy’s baby blues flutter, punched by the rain, which comes even more ruthlessly now and seems to squeal, overlaid by church choir. Now the hissssss of tires passing through the slosh. The shoulders of Ivy’s dress are as wet as if from a swim. Now the countenance of the wiggly sky roars! Ouch!! The rain is now a nail gun, grape shot, bam, bam, bam; she thinks of the army word: ordnance. She stands tall, taking it and taking it.

  Finally both truck doors open simultaneously and s-l-o-w-l-y.

  The talking man, still talking, is short and wiry and to match his Vietnam War hat, wears a loose camo shirt. The boy is small and hoppety and has lost interest in Ivy as the small wiry man grips his hand. Gordon is still stepping from the truck, alas raising up to his full Viking height and immediately turns and looks at Ivy and melodramatically covers his eyes. His chamois shirt is deep foreboding blood red.

  Now he turns and walks with the man and the boy through the rain, yes, walks, not hurries. None of the three seem to mind rain. The short wiry man and Gordon chatter in pleasant tones back and forth now in a foreign language! Ivy listens for all she’s worth as she slops after them, the parking lot an inch deep in water.

  Under the IGA overhang, the man and boy turn a sharp right and head for the auto parts store next door while Gordon moseys through the automatic-opening door of the IGA, not looking back.

  Ivy gets close enough behind to scoot in the door while it is still open for him. He doesn’t acknowledge this, just strides deliberately onward while Ivy pulls off her black beret and brushes off some of the more beaded-up wetness. She takes mental note of everything about him, red damp shirt hanging over his belt on one side, not very tucked in and tidy. His cuffs flap at his wrists, unbuttoned. Hair: cowlicks galore. He stops to pick up a cellophane-wrapped lettuce that had somehow gotten dropped on the floor. He tenderly arranges it among the other lettuces. His eyes: deep and tired, the whites off-colored, the pale irises not so penetrating as the day of the merry-go-round. His beard and skin and slope-shouldered-but-brute-strength bearing seem different in supermarket light than the hot blue spotty merry-go-round shade but, yes, this is the same son of a bitch who grabbed Ivy Morelli’s reporter pad.

  He lopes on down the first aisle. No shopping carriage. No tote basket. He just ambles along straight to the deli and smacks the counter bell with his palm. Meat cutter appears in smeared apron and they talk loudly about . . . about . . . something. Ivy can’t tell what. The fluorescent lights are buzzing. Or is it the chattering of her teeth being too loud so close to her ears? She just can’t make out the exchange, though she can tell it’s not in a foreign language. She lingers in the aisle nearby, “Potato Chips & Snacks” on one side, “Wine & Liquor” on the other. She is scribbling down notes and holding out her mike, which she knows won’t pick up anything but various mumbles and the dusky squeak of the carriage wheels of the old woman who is shuffling past with a single can of soup in the child seat and the needs-a-nap scream of a real toddler in the next aisle. But it doesn’t matter that this tape is useless, because Ivy is convinced that theatrics is the way into the Prophet’s good graces, because isn’t he himself a bad act? Though right now he is still ignoring her. And she is freezing TO DEATH. Wet woman juxtaposed with the supermarket’s North Pole air.

  She snaps off several frames of him and the meat cutter, both in profile, the meat cutter a tallish guy but Gordon towering, redwoodlike, Zeus-like . . . uh . . . err, yuh, godlike, but a god that is a slob. The meat cutter points Ivy out to Gordon. Gordon whispers something to the meat cutter and then the meat cutter also seems to forget Ivy is there.

  An unwet woman in expensive-looking tuck-waisted shorts and a nice navy-blue top and haircut of a glossy dark brown and with an adorable, dry, not-at-all-rained-upon chubby-cheeked child in the seat of a loaded carriage wheels smoothly over to the deli and studies the rows of meats and salads. It’s a small deli. Little small-town-type deli. Not a massive selection. Bare spaces from understocking. The meat cutter asks the woman if he can help her. She says a brisk yes and chooses some Swiss cheese, some pastrami. She glances at Gordon who is staring at the pastrami with a wild look in his eye. She keeps glancing at his profile and she just can’t help herself, she gurgles, “Weren’t you here first?”

  Gordon turns his head and his pale weird eyes bore right into her. “Just shooting the breeze,” says he with a grin. The most amazingly beautiful grin, showing all his teeth, the jammed overcrowded bottom ones and the fine straight top ones, all framed by the wild brown and black gush of his big mustache and bearded chin and drenched hair and Ivy speaks cle
arly and meaningfully into her tape recorder mike, “Bewitches women.”

  The woman is, yes, flushing. She coaxes her child, “Elizabeth, look. See the lobsters walking around,” and points to a glass tank of green, sluggishly desperate lobsters with pegged claws. The kid stares, riveted by this horror. The woman looks again at Gordon. Can’t keep her eyes off him. “My daughter just had lobster for the first time this summer.”

  The child’s eyes are getting wider on the lobsters. Her mouth trembles. Soon there may be tears.

  Gordon asks the woman where she’s from.

  She proudly names a city, not a home state, just the name of a far, faraway city, a well-known city in another state. And maybe that city in that state is not her home exactly, just the city and state she presently resides in. Hardly an accent at all. Hard to pinpoint. A come-and-go mix. A woman from a place where it never rains, she and her hatchling just having reverse-vaporized onto the scene. This visitor and the Prophet chat a minute about weather and biting bugs as the meat cutter weighs and wraps the purchases. Gordon leans toward the woman. Close. She looks up at him with a helplessly glazed expression. He opens a hand over the child’s head, then lightly touches the tip of one of the child’s ears. The child does not jerk her head away from this stranger. The child is just suddenly and swimmingly serene. Her hair is a thin blonde sprawl, not scissored to perfection like her mother’s.

  Gordon caresses the child’s ear, running a finger deeply into its curves, and tugs the little lobe. Then he opens his hand around the little foot in the little baby sandal. The child just lets her foot lay trustingly in this huge hand, her eyes into his eyes. She doesn’t smile. Her expression is dreamy, like a person looking out a window at falling snow or blowing leaves.

  Gordon fingers the ankle. Sweet chubby ankle. No words. No baby talk. His right eyelid and brow twitch slightly. Something Tourette’s-ish there.