Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  Ivy blurts out, without taking her eyes off the whole of him, “Dee Dee, ask him why he and his friend had Bibles in a barroom. And a gun. Ask him what the significance of Bibles as juxtaposed with guns means to the militia movement. Just a few facts on the militia movement, its goals, its activities, that sort of stuff,” she presses on. Because this is what Ivy wants more than anything? To be more than a girl scout reporter, to be a real journalist? To . . . uncover . . . the . . . scoop?

  Dee Dee says, “Dad?”

  Willie yells, “Watch this!” He makes a dive for Lou-EE . . . no, not Lou-EE, but Cannonball, whose stubby thick legs pedal as Willie transports her through the air, sets her down easy-careful between himself and Ivy. “No. No. This won’t do. You have to see this, Miss Reporter Lady,” Willie says, and jogs to the shop building, flicks on a light. The elegant churchy old windows spectacularly lay patterns of ivory and lacy gray across the yard. Everybody is squinting because of its suddenness.

  Cannonball’s tail quivers. It’s plain she knows what is about to be. There’s a routine here. The man. The dog. Some hand-in-glove almost mythical fellowship, these Lancasters and their big trees and their pleasant savagery. And terrorism. The terrier’s deep eyes under her trollesque brows gleam.

  “Don’t let her in the road,” says Lou-EE in a soft way, spoken it seems to someone behind himself though no one is there. Something about this both warms and breaks Ivy’s heart. Gentle, gentle Lou-EE.

  “She won’t go in the road, Auntie Lou,” Willie taunts, straddling the short-legged large-headed no-necked sturdy black dog with his bare feet.

  In a flash-glance, Ivy takes a mental snapshot of oh-so-young Lou-EE, his oversized brown felt hat now in his two sets of long fingers, his black, black hair, almost baby-fine, parted in the middle on his small head, that vulnerable hair-part, his long black eyelashes lowered upon his becoming eyes. A moment ago he had been a boy and his dog, now he is a boy, bereft. Ivy HATES Willie Lancaster. She didn’t exactly HATE him till now. Now, yes, full steam revulsion.

  “Now for some militia activity. And militia goals. Biblical, and let me concentrate, Ultima! Ratio! Regum! No, I’m not about to fuck this dog.” He snickers, shakes his head, squirrel face grinning on and on. Willie leans forward bending low, still gripping Cannonball’s massive-for-a-small-dog shoulders with his lower calves and pushes her backward an inch at a time, snugger and snugger between his tightening lower calves. He whispers in golf tournament fashion, “The artillery team is now loading the cannon. This one is a thirty-three pounder.” More pushing, another inch. Another, though actually Cannonball isn’t progressing backward. It’s just part of the great and perfected illusion. Cannonball’s eyes get a transfixed focus and all is silent around her. There are millions of merry stars in each of her deep slanted beady eyes.

  “Cast iron is what we’re working with here,” Willie’s voice whispers.

  “She’s really Dad’s dog,” Dee Dee whispers to Ivy.

  Lou-EE says nothing to correct this.

  “Shhh!” Willie scolds, “Quiet behind the earthworks.”

  Willie is now reaching behind, takes the end of the Scottie’s stubby (but not docked, just stubby) tail in his fingers. He makes a hissing sound . . . yes, like a fuse. “Ready?!!?” Willie has screamed the question.

  “Yes!” calls out Dee Dee.

  “Ready Lou-EE!!?” Willie screams again.

  “Yep,” Lou-EE answers flatly.

  “Ready, Nancy?!!”

  “Ivy,” Ivy corrects him.

  “Whatever,” he says.

  There’s a fluttering of one of the layers of light. This is the neighbors across the road flashing their big garage lamp. A warning.

  Willie therefore gets louder. “FIVE!! . . . FOUR!! . . . THREE!! . . . TWO!! . . . ONE!!! . . . FIRE!!!” Willie’s bare feet spring apart and Cannonball tears off back across the yard, across the front of the shop and into the darkness that embraces the rocket-shaped house, residence of Lou-EE and Dee Dee, into the blacker depths of woodsy black backyard beyond.

  Now a squeal and a snarling. And ki-yi-ing.

  “Oh, no,” says Dee Dee. She hurries pregnantly off toward the darkness and these sounds of struggle.

  Willie screams, “On target!! The enemy took a hit!!”

  Neighbors’ light flashes again.

  Dee Dee returns waddling pregnantly with Cannonball sagging heavily under one arm and she’s pushing a dirty-faced, mashed-faced, pop-eyed panting speckledy white dog along with a foot. Dee Dee explains, “Usually Cannonball just makes a loop and comes right back, but poor Boopie was in the loop. Cannonball’s in very serious brawling mode.” Dee Dee groans as she lowers the thirty-three-pounder to the walkway. Cannonball’s eyes sparkle and she gives herself a shake. The white dog turns to face the other way.

  “Anything else you want to know about the militia, Florence?!!! Or you Bernice?!!!!” Willie broadcasts his voice to include the schoolteacher neighbors, but faces Ivy.

  Ivy says, “Yes, the Bible. What sort of religion is involved in your group?”

  Willie is silent. Then he farts. Otherwise, no response.

  Dee Dee sighs ponderously. “It’s my fault, Ivy. I should have known he would act retarded. No sense wasting your time on this thing.” She flings out a hand toward her grinning masked bare-chested father. “This . . . animal.”

  Willie’s voice croaks, “Chicka Dee Dee dear, I’ve been up since four. I’m going nightie-night. Lights out.” He strides through the brontosaurus necks that are his pine trees, toward his shop. How, Ivy wonders, does this guy combine that trudgy redneck gait with the split-hoof bat-fast agility of Pan? The frothy, too elegant, cathedralesque light collapses within an eye blink. Now again only the deep sea murk of nearly no light. Except now, seizurelike, the neighbors are working the switch of their big garage lamp.

  Ivy assures Dee Dee, “Don’t worry. It’s been fun You’re a sweetheart. You, too, Lou-EE. Actually—”

  “GRASS IS THIRSTY!!!” Willie’s scream blares into the mountainy twilit distances as he spins around and heads back along the walkway to the road to go piss on the neighbor’s lawn, a broad wake of several four-legged white Boopie-like shapes accompanying him.

  “Stay.” Lou-EE grabs Cannonball, ever protective of her. She’ll never know the sheer freedom the white ill-favored dumpy Boopie Lancaster vagabonds have. Lou-EE scoops the handsome black Scottie up, holds her against his heart.

  Ivy distressed.

  The road at night, pouring seventy miles per hour under her wheels in a residential zone, is imaginary. Shadows, limbs, manhole covers, four-way stops sizzle in and out of Ivy’s thoughts, which is where the real world is. She mulls the Gordon St. Onge–Willie Lancaster connection. It makes her nauseated. All of it a mystery. Gaps, deletions, ums, and detours. Then there’s the Rex York guy, the militia captain. But his number is unlisted . . . or under someone else’s name. But whoever wrote the police item has it. Or his e-mail. Or something. They interviewed him in the store. Caught him off guard, right? Like a weasel. Willie the squirrel, Rex the weasel.

  Meanwhile, there’s a part of Gordon, some dark seam, not visible yet. She visualizes him now standing before her, only half: one leg, one arm, half a head, one blinking wincing Tourette-like eye. Is it evil, his “other” side? The crisp masked demons frolick about him with Bibles and cannons and pink pine-tree-size penises, clearly in her mind’s eye.

  Oh, Jesus! Up ahead the dark roadway pulling toward her at seventy miles per hour. And in it the fluttering and seesawing of small luminous patches. A person on a bicycle on the pavement, Ivy’s side of the road! She veers just in time, her heart muscle splitting and shuffling like a deck of cards. Man, oh, man, leaping hamburger!!

  Why doesn’t everyone just stay off the road at night unless they are a wall of clarity? Such as Ivy’s sporty car . . . a fire-engine-red blur.

  City hall in Portland, Maine. Ivy Morelli takes on the great Kotzschmar.

  She s
its in a hunch on a marble step of the wide semicircular staircase, running a pen over the pages of her reporter pad, revising one sentence over and over, not wanting to lose the thread of the sentence but exploring all its possibilities. If she loses the basic feel of this sentence, it’ll never come back. The power of the great Kotzschmar and the passions of Bach always make one feel as though the hot core of the earth has been given voice, especiall—“Shit” she cusses. “Sappy to the max.” And wouldn’t as though the hot planet Mars was visited be better? But wait a minute, is Mars hot or cold? Well, it looks hot. But it’s probably the Papa Bear planet porridge-wise. Or was it Mama Bear’s porridge that was cold?

  She tries to start over, somehow winds up with the pen in her mouth. Is there ink on her face now?

  Feet. A lot of feet to a crowd. Some slisking and clucking and scuffing past Ivy up and down the stairs. The marble is cold. Nice. Nice against her rear and thighs and through the near-nothingness of her purple pantyhose.

  She glances up to think of other hot poignant places besides the earth’s core and maybe Mars, and a better, less sappy word than passion, and she sees HIM, Gordon St. Onge, dressed in a light blue chambray work shirt, dark blue work pants, his usual work boots, but carrying a dress jacket . . . pinkish gray, tweedy, professorial. His hair and beard newly trimmed. He is wearing cheapie plastic drugstore reading glasses, now reading aloud from the concert program to a group of people around him. Clearly these are Settlement people. Kids, one with bloody-looking sores. Not chicken pox. More like a breaking down of the skin. Maybe leprosy?

  And adults. One a really frail-looking old guy with crossed eyes, neatly combed white hair and a hand-carved cane.

  A whole bunch of handsome, broad-assed, line-faced women in their late forties or fifties, awkward in “society,” but Ivy has no doubt they are all grand empresses back in that St. Onge situation in those hills. And the younger one, Bonnie Loo, wearing a soft pink but tight T-shirt and jeans. At least a bra this time, but not dressy like the other women. Her hair is knotted up in a black floral bandana. Her acne scars are more rough and poxy in this light. On her shapely left hand is a plain silver wedding ring. Most of the other women wear similar silver rings. Settlement-made, you can be sure.

  Just as expected, Bonnie Loo does not look happy to see Ivy. Ivy feels the steadfast scorch of Bonnie Loo’s orange-brown fox-color eyes.

  And lo and behold there is the silvery-eyed Lily, depregnanted, must have left the baby home! Yes, Lily who believes in computers and called Gordon a pig during the tour a few saggy hot weeks ago.

  And there is another young girl. Girlish mouth. Girlish skin. Hair in a wild, youthful, thick rigmarole, orangey-red. But Jesus. What a face. A strapping hourglass-shaped girl. She wears an emerald knit dress that accentuates her shape and looks really swell with that orange hair. But the face. Like a face in a convex funhouse mirror. Is she fourteen or twenty? Ivy never saw this one before. She wouldn’t have forgotten her if she had.

  She remembers well the ox driver who now stands a bit to the left of Gordon. Handsome-as-hell guy in his very early twenties. Dark. Cocky-looking in a jostly kidding-around sort of way. And a brown commercial T-shirt that reads: ARCTIC CAT. Around him are a few teenaged guys and kids, kids who also look familiar. She recalls that the ox driver’s old-fashioned nickname is Butch.

  And Jane. The kid now wears a weird dress that surely looks made of plastic, splattered with huge gold stars. BIG gold earrings. And on her feet, commercial, very tall-heeled plastic see-through sandals, the clear plastic filled with blue and pink glitter. Jesus. What a character!

  And Ivy can’t help but notice that included in this cozy little Settlement group, listening to Gordon read the after-intermission selections, are State Senator Mary Wright and Majority Leader Joe Savagneau, whose faces Ivy knows oh, so well. Holy shit, she whispers, squeezing her knees together, wriggling her toes. Holy lizard shit. And leaping politicians.

  She sees now that Gordon is looking up the stairs at her. He shakes his head, an oh-god-please-no kind of head shake, then drops both bespectacled eyes back on the program.

  Ivy snatches her camera and, still sitting . . . FLASH! . . . slip

  . . . FLASH! . . . slip . . . FLASH . . . slip. By the time she reaches that fourth frame, Gordon has thrust up two fingers for rabbit ears behind the dark head of the petite and svelte Senator Wright and the senator looks up toward Ivy with a silly grin Ivy has never imagined on that senatorial face. Ivy waves to her, who, of course, recognizes Ivy, the terrorist columnist.

  And the ox driver is thoughtfully feeling his scruffily bearded jaw.

  And the voluptuously built funhouse-mirror-faced redheaded gal is looking right into Ivy’s eyes, smiling a little.

  Jane has struck a pose for the camera, hand on hip, eyelids lowered, the look you’d see if you opened a Playboy. Or, of course, MTV, which was probably a companion of Jane’s prior to the drug warriors pounding down the doors of her home after arresting her mother on Route 202 and leaving the family dog in the sweltering car to die.

  And Gordon’s plastic glasses are not becoming.

  And the dresses the Settlement women wear are home-sewn florals with hundreds of tucks and gathers and every sort of overzealous sewing flourish.

  Senator Joe Savagneau calls out to Ivy, “Will the Kotzschmar be on a pedestal or a pickle?”

  Ivy chortles. “Concert’s not over yet. I’m waiting for one little slip.”

  “One little flat note, eh?” Joe calls back.

  “That’s right,” says Ivy, rising slowly, knees together, camera over one shoulder, shoulder bag over the other.

  Gordon’s eyes move over her clogs, over her purple-tinted legs and short dress of an old-fashioned yellow print . . . a fabric like the Settlement women might use . . . except this dress is so short and part of a total effect. Cute sleeves. Cute little old-timey white collar. But that one long flashy earring. Yes, one. Yes, long. It drags back and forth over her shoulder. Made of yellow and purple objects . . . beads, shells, and plastic animal likenesses and one tiny yellow and black crap-type die. A heavy earring. She hops down the stairs, earring alive and clonking against itself. She is so very young, agile. She sees that the ox driver and the white-haired old feller are watching her, too. She hops, hops, hops the last three steps one at a time.

  Gordon, of course, turns the introductions into a playful mess. Some are laughing. Some are scolding him. Senator Joe Savagneau is more boisterous and cheery than Ivy thinks is his natural way. Has he been drinking? Maybe drugging. The possibilities for surprise tonight seem limitless. Gordon puts his arm around Ivy. “Come with us afterward. We’re doing coffee and whatnot before we head back to the sticks.”

  “Sure,” says Ivy, her eyes glittering over the faces of the legislators. “I’m fascinated.” Then she explains that she has really come here with friends, a married couple with kids who she knows will not want to stay out, so she’ll need a ride to the restaurant if they are driving, and then home, if someone wouldn’t mind.

  She gets several offers.

  Gordon grabs her nose. Gently. But it looks like he’s really wrenching it. “Friggin’ newshound,” he growls.

  She ducks her head, her short, purplishly dark, silky hair shimmering from side to side.

  Then he pretends to grab her reporter pad, but this time she’s faster. And not afraid. She plops the pad into her bag.

  Jane says, “I’m hungry.”

  Over in the other lobby, the crowd is beginning to churn back through the doors to the great cavernous space of the auditorium. There again, up on the back wall of the stage, are the towering pipes of the organ’s grand facade rising well over twenty feet high, painted gold. The velvet seats are maroon. A little hard. Well, okay, very hard. But there is nothing to fault. Ivy feels kindly tonight.

  From a future time, Bonnie Loo remembers certain things of that critical summer. Here, she speaks.

  A half-hour or so later . . . after the pipe
organ concert, we were all squashed into a corner with two long tables pushed together at a not-too-noisy and not-too-dark place that had a jazz pianist.

  I was afraid. Gordon was in the reporter’s hand, in her palm, ready to be tossed to the great big fucked-up greedy EYE of the public. Anybody could see that she was just a shrewd little hardheaded, tight-cunted, smarmy, brat-bitch opportunist pretending to be Gordon’s friend.

  Here and now, Jane speaks.

  I only ask Gordie about thirty-eight times if we can go to McDonald’s. This place is queeeer. The music the man plays is queer. The walls are queer. The smell is queer. When we get to order stuff, you only have to wait for four hundred years for them to make one little piece of cake stuff. I am trying to be nice about this. TRYING. My secret-agent glasses are in someone’s car. I have no power.

  Gordie sits beside me, his arm around me sometimes. I say “WHERE is it?”

  He says these things to me: “Rome wasn’t built in a day, Jane.” And “Patience is a virtue.”

  At McDonald’s you do not have to have virtue.

  The pleasures of the outside world.

  Everyone orders something nice.

  It is a pure kind of night.

  Chris Butler’s hair is real but seems a crude musty brown imitation, clipped, contrite, some of it in clusters, some of it in scalpy splutters. It crabs along his skull, most of it on the left side. He wears a plain gray T-shirt and trousers. The flush of blood shows through his skin in the small territories between sores, and he is covered with sores. “A condition,” some have called it but it has dominated his world since birth. It is said to be “not a fatal condition.” But it is no way no how a life-fulfilling condition, either. Though tonight he is visibly bright-eyed and smiley. At age thirteen, he is a pretty good pianist. It was his idea to come tonight to hear the Kotzschmar played. Because of his too-tender fingers he can never practice enough. But maybe if he broke his afternoon nap in two, he could work in another twenty minutes of practice before the smarting and stinging begins. Imagine playing the Kotzschmar! Oh, to be that lucky organist!