His face pales.
She says, “Okay . . . now that I have your attention, will you talk to me? I won’t turn in anything unless I show you the copy first. It’s breaking one of the rules . . . they don’t like us to do that . . . but . . . that’s what I promise you. We can . . . go for a little ride somewhere. Would you—”
“No.”
She sighs. She looks around the glistening gravel parking lot and then between the Quonset huts and across the sort of grassy quadrangle with its red brick walkways, wooden dinosaur two stories tall, a sheet-metal-covered spaceship and the larger space saucer with Martians positioned on top, and so many trees, great tall straight trees with no lower limbs, majestic as cathedrals, stirring to the soul, and picnic tables, enough picnic tables for a convention of the entire American press corps. But at the moment it’s all abandoned of life, not even a bug-hunting chicken. Sounds of industry in the shadows, the shops, the piazzas, and Quonset huts. The potent secrecy of shadows. She looks down at her sneakers, then up at Gordon’s pale eyes. “I’m your friend, Gordon. That hasn’t changed.”
“I don’t want to ride in your car,” he says. “It looks scary.” He looks over toward the open back bay of the largest Quonset hut. A bunch of people, teens and adults, stand there, watching. One man wears a raggedy pink and green Hawaiian shirt and jeans. Hunched. Long armed. More muscle than mind? None present the look of academic merit. Not any merit exactly. What does it take to deserve being here? Could that be the story? Pinning down that which qualifies you to belong?
Ivy says, “Can I bribe you with an ice cream at Kool Kone? I’ll pay. I heard you’re a cheapskate.”
“In that car?”
She replies, “Yes, sir.”
He turns to the bay with the little group watching, and with great martyrlike dignity, raises his chin and salutes them. Laughing, they all salute back. Then he peels open the little cheapie door of the passenger side of Ivy’s car, folds himself up into the tiny bucket seat, pulls the door tight, and squeezes his eyes shut.
Meanwhile, in Southern Maine, on the outskirts of Portland. A maroon “utility sport” vehicle, shining prettily in the perfect center of the short black tar driveway. One bumper sticker on the vehicle. It reads:
My child is a Jack Middle School Honor Student.
Meanwhile, as the press has been ascending and descending the hill, Jane Meserve is down at the St. Onge farmhouse, where she continues to reside. She speaks.
Bev is on her knees getting some things out from underneath Gordie’s sink, putting all the stuff inside a cardboard box so she can “organize.” She says she could use my help. But I say, “No, thanks.”
Can you believe there’s no TV here at Gordie’s, not even a small emergency TV. And at the Settlement, not one single TV.
No TV. It’s kind of shocking if you think about it.
I go over and sit by Gordie’s desk in the chair with wheels and all his junk just in case the phone rings, which it has done about eight hundred times this morning, and Bev made messages for the message nail. I did a couple. But it was all boring stuff mostly.
I push the chair around to make the wheels turn and I watch Bev. She is probably trying to make it cozy here. People here, all they do is work, work, work. And they use the word “cozy” a lot. One of the times, I helped them at the Settlement, it was fun. Everyone laughed at how I swished the broom at a spider and he ran fast on his little legs. But work is only fun once. You should not have to do it over and over and over.
I says, “Bev, do you ever go to Funtown?”
She says, “No, dear.” She is still on her knees under the sink. I roll my chair closer to see what exactly she’s doing under there. “Why not?”
She laughs. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m not into wild rides . . . and other things keep me busy. We don’t go over to the coast very often, Barbara and I.”
I tell her about all the stuff they have there, especially the water slide, which actually is too terrible for me. “But you can shop there, too. There’s stuff to buy.”
She says, “That certainly sounds wonderful.”
“Gordie would like it,” I tell her, just to see what she says.
She doesn’t say anything.
I wheel around the table, all the way around, working my feet to get up some speed. I says, “Mum always takes me. When she gets out of County,¶ she’ll want to go. And then we can go shopping. We do all the kid movies and the circus. And the Ice Capades. And then McDonald’s and Burger King. And then we get videos, which I pick out.”
¶ What many of us call county jail.
Bev is very, very quiet now, under the sink. I wait to see if she has anything to say but she’s just crawling way inside there to get one small sponge. Her jeans are made of raspberry-color cloth. Very pretty. But her round rear end makes me almost laugh.
I wheel over to the very bright chimney and I put one of my feet up on it and dig around with the heel of my pretty sandal to see what happens to the shine of the paint. It is very shiny paint. The chair wheels go squeaky-squeak back and forth, back and forth. I say, “I’m hungry.” I say it soft.
She finds a clothespin, pops it into the box with the sponge and other stuff, then brushes her hands together, not on her raspberry pants.
I say, “I’m very hungry.” I kinda smash my heel on the chimney with my sandal, not meanish, just trying to make something happen to the shiny paint stuff. In a way, it hurts my foot.
“Well, it’s only been twenty minutes or so since we ate.”
“You ate,” I remind her. I drop my foot and turn the chair to be in her direction. I cross my arms so I can show her I’m not fooling.
“True. But you said you weren’t hungry, dear.” All the while she says this, all I can see is her rear end.
“Well, I’m hungry now.”
Soon Bev is making a jam sandwich for me. I watch her spreading it. It has chunks. I say, “What’s that stuff?”
“Plum,” she says.
“Oh,” I says real smallish. Then, “Maybe you have pancakes. Gordie made me pancakes the other day. I would like pancakes better. And syrup. And some sugar.”
So she fixes me pancakes. But she puts milk in them. And there’s no more flour left to make a new batch. I tell Bev that I hate milk.
“You won’t even know it once the pancakes are done,” she says.
I narrow my eyes, tap my foot, cross my arms, and I say, “I. Do. Not. Like. Milk. At. All. Ever.”
She says she wishes I told her before she put the milk in.
I says I didn’t know she was going to put it in. And I says, “Is there some more eggs here? And bread, white bread. And sugar, perfect, plain, nothing weird.”
She fixes me an egg, but she puts PEPPER in it.
“I told you before how I hate pepper.”
The next egg is perfect. The bread is near the heel part but the sugar is perfect. While I eat, she is quiet, smiling with her big eyes floaty behind the glass parts of her glasses. She is so nice.
Down on Route 160, Ivy passes three cars and a cement truck on a curve.
“Got any suggestions for a better place than Kool Kone?!!” she hollers across the engine sound and wind.
Gordon is feeling his eyes, smoodging dirt and pitch from his fingers across both lids. “Ahhhhh . . . I can’t think for some reason.”
Ivy takes three curves by hugging the high-crowned middle like a race driver, reaches an intersection, and brakes hard, skids on sand. Then off they go, her sneaker clamped to the gas.
The roads going in this direction get curvier and hillier. Ivy goes faster.
There is silence between them.
Suddenly, a car appears ahead. Seems it is driving backward, coming right at them. But it is really just going the speed limit. Ivy mashes the brake, then rides the car’s bumper mercilessly. “These people with nothing to do,” she snarls. “Jesus, buddy, turn up the heat!” She drums her fingers on the door.
Gordon’s hands are
welded to the knees of his old frayed jeans. His eyes are wide and wild-looking on the back window of the car ahead. “The ice cream will keep,” he says softly. “They have refrigeration.”
She glances at him, perplexed. Then tsks. “Don’t worry. I’m a good driver.”
They plow down through North Egypt, where Kool Kone is situated across from the long public beach of Promise Lake. Ivy keeps going. Kool Kone flashes past as Ivy passes on the straightaway.
Now another car ahead. Ivy sighs.
Gordon’s eyes don’t leave the back of the car before them. They are close enough to be attached by a tow bar. Gordon imagines his face, teeth, and knees mixed somehow with the face, teeth, and knees of the people in the other car. He keeps gripping the dash and doing a throat squeak every time the car ahead slows on a curve and Ivy brakes hard.
Gordon wonders, “You got kids?”
She snickers. “You the reporter now?”
“No. I’m your friend. Remember? . . . the friend thing?” He smiles warmly.
“I don’t really like kids,” she says evenly. She glances over at his smiling face. Her confession has not changed his expression.
She glances again.
He is gravely watching the car ahead. He grips his knees again and says, harshly, no kidding around in his tone, “Well, yuh . . . kids are like tumors. They attach themselves to your vitals and then proceed to just suck up all your life till they’re grown and you’re used up.”
She looks at him sharply. “I wouldn’t have expected you to say that, teacher man.”
“Well, we’ll just start with that hard and undeniable fact.” He wiggles his eyebrows. Winks at her.
Ivy guns her engine, taps her horn.
The brake lights of the car ahead come on. A kind of BACK OFF! message.
Gordon grips the dash again.
Ivy snarls, “These people with all the time in the world. And cars like arks! Always blocking every move you try to make.” She taps the horn again. Brake lights flare again. “Jesus!” she snarls. “Why don’t they just pull off the road and let us by?!!” She backs off a smidgen.
Gordon leans back again, though not really relaxed.
“So?” Ivy says. “Go on.”
“Yeah. Where were we?” He looks over at her, his grease-stained smoodged eyes seeming to admire her purple-tinted black hair, her perfect small ear, the vulnerable back of her neck. He says with tiredness and sorrow, “Where are we?” His big frame shifts around, seat belt straining, no place to put his big feet, his knees, his shoulders, the top of his head. “Consider this, Ivy. Consider if you were a cave lady—”
“Cave woman.”
“Cave woman. And a bunch of your tribe were frozen in ice . . . but due to something . . . some radioactive force or weird atmospheric changes . . . caused you all to thaw and wake up. And so you open your eyes and this is what you see. Kids raised by one man and one woman and four TVs and some computers, and institutional day care, and institutional school, soon to be privatized and, oh, boy, we get the profits-vacuum-cleaner up the ass and meanwhile, both parents working jobs. The household is a cubicle a hundred feet in the sky with access only to a cement curbside and asphalt street, and then there are some of these, ahem, families living in split levels with lotsa ‘conveniences’ and easy chemically fuelly ways to keep their grass green and short and wonderful blinking timepieces on their wrists . . . mother, father, kids all staring at their wrists as they run, as if from a mastodon, to their wheeled vehicles and race away, all in opposite directions.” He makes a face. “What would this look like to you?”
Ivy rolls her eyes.
“What about progress, Ivy? Would you call it progress?”
“Welllll,” she concedes.
Gordon goes on, “Oh, but sometimes there’s one woman in the cubicle all day with the baby and one man out there racing around somewhere, maybe one woman with two or three kids allll day with the man out there allll day, or one woman out, one man in with these kids, or the two women thing, one out, one in, or both in, or two men in and out or out and in or any combination of two folks so we have some kind of two parentish thing going on. Then, plenty of day care, the day care biz. And there’s the school thing . . . the indoctrination camps. Picture it? Okay, so, Ivy, tell me, what is the purpose of these kids?”
“Purpose?” Ivy repeats drily.
He smiles at her ever so tiredly.
“You say pur-pose,” Ivy repeats significantly. “Okay, what purpose? Hmm.”
He doesn’t wait for her to think this through. He snarls, “Kids are just junk. Like old baling twine or rags.”
Ivy’s own pale eyes grow round with discomfort. “You’re trying to shock me, Mr. St. Onge.”
He rubs his sticky neck.
She laughs her deep steamy HAW HAW. “Would you be quoted as saying this stuff?” She is already picturing the paraphrasing with the great big fat quotation marks to represent all he has said so far.
The window wind is waggling his damp fracas of brown hair, waggling his sleeve, waggling his collar. He gets one of his involuntary squint-blinks in one eye, so ample that his head jerks.
“Gordon, what happened to love? I thought people had kids in order to give them love?”
“Love? What’s that?”
She scowls. She has nothing but the ethereal. Nothing but the nonsensical. Nothing but the commercial Valentine-card lingo. Nothing but the rote. Leaping lizard hearts! And besides and beyond even that, our Ivy has questions such as, Don’t you think the planet is overpopulated anyway? Isn’t the greatest act of love a nice plump birth control pill? Aren’t you guys thicker than rabbits up there while preaching resource depletion: Excuse me if I’m BAFFLED, but why? Why? Why?
Curve ahead. Ivy’s sporty little car rides the middle of the road, anxious for the chance to swing out around the ‘slow’ car. Her passenger gets a grip on the dash as they are nearing a narrow bridge with two oncoming cars.
“What sort of purpose would children provide, Gordon, if it isn’t love?” she asks, unfazed as the car she is now passing is somehow filling the space she is going to need in order to get back into her own lane in the next two seconds, and the bridge ahead is bringing all this in tightly, like a throat swallowing.
Gordon’s moan is so loud, it seems he is teasing. And yet, he really is afraid of the fast lane, isn’t he? What a baby! He is starting to put off a bad nervous smell just as our young Ivy slips the spirited and sporty hot red car back into its own lane behind the car she can’t seem to get ahead of and the oncoming cars flash past in blurs of green and gray and golden brown.
“Gordon?”
He exhales.
She glances over at him, at his profile, tanned face, the messy hair, pale eyes, soggy shirt. “I’m sorry. Okay? And I want you to know how much I appreciate your candor. I’ll be candid, too. This interview means a lot to me.”
Purpose.
They ride a minute through some open farmland, low-slung telephone wires, a hot weedy wonderful smell whipping in at the windows. For the moment, Ivy seems to have forgotten trying to get around the car that is ahead of them. She is actually following at a safe distance.
Gordon lets one hand plop to the lap of his jeans, one arm along the window.
Ivy says with a squint, “A while back there, you were telling me that kids are just rags and old wire. No purpose. Something like that. What was that?”
“Yeah.”
“You were saying something like kids don’t have a purpose today.”
“Well, other than their purpose as robotons for the Great Kleptocracy.”
“Right,” says Ivy, rolling her baby blues.
Gordon looks off across a neglected hay field dreamily. “Children, their purpose, like with smelly, annoying, mumbling, very senile old people, like bad weather, like miserable hard work, like shared land and shared history, kids, when shared by a people . . . the family . . . the tribe . . . these kids are the tie that binds. At least that’s th
e way it seems to me.” He now absently spreads the fingers of his right hand over his chest. Over his heart. “Without this purpose, a kid is . . . is—” He looks sadly at Ivy. “A nuisance.” He gives an ugly snort, probably meant to be a mean sort of laugh. “And a commodity, of course. Ah! Such a purpose! Keeping the day cares and child counselors and schools in business, eh? But mostly the little critters today are just a pain in the fucking ass.”
“So if—”
“Oh, and the CIA and other mobsters get them Uzis. And drugs. And other stuff to sell. In the streets of LA and other places. Useful there. And the military. Kids are so useful at the hundreds and hundreds of all-important US military bases around the globe. Military contractors. Policing contractors. Profits! You know, children, chickens, and hams. And the pharma companies love their little human mice, which are in the laboratories, uh, public schools, that is. But most especially the usurists, they love the debt purpose of our kids. And . . . oh . . . well, soon, if all the little rugrats accept the computer promise and become good little vessels of the keyboard and screen realm, the lords of capital will consolidate the tech sector globally, locking in their definition of ‘human being,’ we the accessories, while it will be the plastic and wire heartbeat of the world. You see, if you study it, there’s every purpose under the sun for the little dears but . . . not—” He bows his head. “It’s no wonder millions of Americans abort them, neglect them, dehumanize them with kiddie fashions, murder them with fists and blunt objects, and—”
Almost too quickly and too pleasantly, Ivy says, “You are such a philosopher, a redneck Schopenhauer, only different. No questions. Just answers.”
He looks at her with narrowed eyes.
She realizes that she’s repeating what Gordon’s old long-lost friend said about him in that recent telephone interview. Has she said something to make him realize she’s been . . . investigating him? Well, of course she’s investigating! She’s a reporter! No, she is friend. But now, well, yes, reporter, too. She squares her shoulders more severely, swallows drily. She says, “I’m having trouble figuring out where you are.”
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 30