The second time I showed up for breakfast, that next morning, again before daylight, again the big kitchen noisy and chaotic, the light beautiful and eerie, the food all over the three long tables in pans and trays, in HEAPS! . . . some people singing “Happy Birthday” to whoever, I couldn’t tell . . . there he was at the head of the two longer connected tables, his hands folded as if for prayer. He smiled at me. I sort of smiled back. This time he was surrounded by elderly men, like bishops and deacons, like lords! They had that sort of look about them, their chins up, old raggedy necks, small eyes lost in collapsed lids, all watching the room as if God had given THEM some special privilege, special rights, above the women and kids who brought them coffee and cold juice.
Robert and I were invited to sit with a group of young mothers, girls actually, with their children older than Robert.
I looked toward the end of the table and saw “the Prophet,” some here called him that as a joke, referring to the recent newspaper and radio publicity with lightheartedness, not the shame I would have imagined. And there he was looking right at me. His eyes were white! Almost like he had no eyes. Light from nearby glass lamps were dull in comparison. He was magic. He was beautiful. He was the patriarch who gathers you into the heat of his harem, then owns you. I almost stood up and went to him. I was so susceptible! I was easy prey. The newspapers and radio call-in shows that now discussed him didn’t know the half of it.
At the merry-go-round at the tree line just above the St. Onge farm place.
Short, square, ruddy-faced, gray-haired Barbara who almost daily visits the Settlement but actually lives in a house in East Egypt Village, sits on the edge of the unmoving carousel deck while a Settlement child climbs on and off the saddled monsters. The child has a bad heart and tires easily. Short, square, ruddy-faced gray-haired Bev, Barbara’s “dear one” who lives with her, stands with hands on hips glaring at the old generator, which is silent.
Barbara, the Record Sun on her knee, reads aloud, “Hyannis. A trucker who held a load of potato chips hostage returned them yesterday but police say he will be charged. Charles Monahon of Ohio delivered 1,153 cases to the New Hyde Park, NY, distributor that expected them August 8. Monahon called the Fitchburg Sentinel and Gazette on August 7 to say he was kidnapping the chips because his employer, Kitco, Inc., based in Townsend, owed him and fellow employees over $6,000 in bonuses and vacation pay, and vacations that were promised but never happened.”
Suddenly, there is the sound of gunshots in the distance.
Then nothing but the forlorn creak-creak of tall grass bugs.
Bev looks across the two-headed golden merry-go-round beast to the boy, who has no reaction to the gunfire. His back is to her, he’s sitting sideways on a yellow and black striped creature, swinging a foot, and murmuring to himself. Seems content.
Now the brrrrrrrrrrrrrt! of fire from full automatic rifles, then just the cheery tall grass bugs.
Bev says, “It’s them. The militia. In the pit down there on Boundary Road.”
Barbara shivers.
Bev says, “The whole world . . . it’s flying apart.”
Then again, Brrrrrrrrrrt! Brrrrrrrrrrrrrt! Brrrrrrrrrrrrrt!
Beth St. Onge remembering.
Well, there he was again. His old “brother.” Richard York. Alias “Rex.” Rex’s militia had been in the news. Gordon got himself in the news. So there you have it. They were both stars now!
Claire St. Onge remembering.
They weren’t real brothers, but years ago they were two bucks on the loose. After Rex met Marsha, and Gordon and I were settling in, the “brothers” drank less, roamed less, but voilà . . . the Settlement happened. And Rex was in the thick of it, welding the steel towers for the wind plants, wiring cottages. And some of the time his little girl came here instead of public school. Her name? Glory. Glory indeed.
Bonnie Loo St. Onge speaks.
Yeah, the thing that rattled Rex’s cage and got him re-enthused about the Settlement after a few months of his being under a rock or something, was Ms. Purple Hair’s feature on us, which she had promised she wouldn’t print without Gordon’s approval. I guess things must have been a bit sizzly in her little purple-haired tattooed hollow heart, hot for the man. The way Gordon came off in that feature was like some god. Well that was a stretch. But Rex, in the Record Sun article that quoted him, came off as looking like the Son of Sam. Charles Manson maybe. No, wait, Timothy McVeigh. And that’s a stretch. And Willie was also in the article, being Willie. Goofing around in some bar with a militia crony, a gun, and a Bible. Spent an hour in the slammer. The man doesn’t drink, the man doesn’t shoot, and I can’t believe he’s ever been in a church. But for the record, the Record Sun . . . hello! . . . seems our whole Egypt municipality was bent and recolored into a baaad thriller movie. Soooo Rex and Gordon must’ve felt they needed to share their pain. But you put two heads like those two noodles together and soon we were all being swept down an even darker road through a grimmer fairy tale.
I should have moved out of the Settlement then. I had already stored a couple cardboard boxes of my stuff at Ma’s. But, well, I wasn’t ready yet to riiiip my heart out even though as things were, all my guts were being turned over fire on a spit.
They met several evenings this way. At the old farm place. Gordon rocks the child to sleep while he himself gets revved up. Rex is usually seamlessly silent.
Tonight Gordon has a beer, Settlement-made of course. Rex has empty hands. He is clean in every way, not even an imbiber of desserts. Has a stiff military bearing like there’s a shovel handle in his back. The dark mustache creeps down to his jaws. In brighter light there’s a haggardness in parentheses, the mustache less dark, more of a jaded brown. He removes his army cap by the visor. Eyes as pale as Gordon’s but more of a blue, like fairer skies, but their purpose is not to transmit love and moods as Gordon’s are, but to be meters, to gauge and measure you. Is this leadership? Or fear? Is Rex, like Gordon, getting hotter with fear each day? One might wonder if most unmonied American men are, especially those with the chillest eyes.
See Rex’s hands. He doesn’t play with the cap. His fingers are simply unfurled. If Rex could tell you why he wears the gold band on his left hand, he would tell you through this kind of stubbornness, where after six years of divorce, after a woman has left you to go somewhere else with someone else, not a bitter battle divorce where people do calisthenics in court over who gets what, nothing like that, just a heart-wrenching quiet throat-choking tight-jawed miserable severing of two lives . . . he could tell you how this feels and how this is against God. And how if your wife can be lost, anything can be.
He has been told by some that God will hurt his ex-wife bad for this, though he sees it more the other way around. That she has hurt God. He sees God as the strong silent type, distant and hard to communicate with, but generous and genius and huge and flabbergasted at this ungratefulness of Marsha’s. Someday, when Marsha realizes her mistake, her very bad mistake, she’ll come back to complete this marriage, this holy plan, cemented by her first wedding vows to him, Richard York, and by the conception and birth of their daughter, their confused wild daughter . . . and so . . . Richard York waits and waits and waits. He waits in a kind of vacuum of purity. Cool, righteous, flabbergasted. Strong, silent, and desolate.
Yes, Marsha York is her name. Her new married name, Marsha Stevens, is against “The Law,” the only real law, God’s law.
For Gordon, this pain of his “brother’s,” expressed only indirectly, as statements of more general law and order, is pain to Gordon. Gordon feels what Rex feels, pulse to pulse in sync. Gordon is now swinging his head like a bull. Yes, the verbal arc of their brotherishness comes with the enjoinment to remain only on the perimeters of consolement, as evidenced tonight by Gordon, who after fifty minutes of political wrangling, bellers “Yeah! Yeah! Anthropology! I’m guilty! History! Guilty! Some of us are obsessed with concepts. Others with little doo-doos!”
Rex winces
. Slaps his soft olive-drab cap back on his head.
In the meantime.
Secret Agent Jane is, as most always, now equipped with her pink-lensed white-framed heart-shaped secret agent glasses, which give her the power to understand even Gordon’s sweaty socioeconomic-political philosophy and Rex’s crusty counterpunches.
The night beyond the porch screen is almost as dark and quiet as a closed hand. Mosquitoes want in. They scream for blood.
Gordon is snorting at something Rex has just declared. Yes, Rex declares, Gordon snorts. Rex states. Gordon interrupts. Gordon raves. Gordon thunders around and around the subject he can’t shake off tonight. The world’s children.
But the word “children” causes Rex’s mind to graze over the faces of the younger “men” in his militia, always on his mind. Mickey, fifteen, scrawny, somewhat orphaned. Six-foot-one Thad, fourteen years old. Tires easily. Needs more outdoors. The rugged kind of outdoors. Rex does not like to dwell on Jane, whom Gordon calls “war torn.” Rex almost sighs. As usual, kid-made candles that smell like hot fields, almost like marijuana at times, give unworthy light to the long porch diluted with chairs, mobiles, little round rugs, wooden toy trucks, embroidered dolls, and papier mâché monsters. All this in opposition to Rex’s fondness for simplicity. Yet, this to him is his other home.
And yes, Gordon is his “brother.” Gordon ten years younger than he. Gordon a kid back then. A kid with a twitching-eye-big-puppy grin, fun and clever, more of a strategizer than you’d first notice. Rex just home from “the conflict” wanted nothing but a very little little piece of America. He joined the “volunteer fire department,” he got his electrician’s license, and he and Gordon lathered themselves in the confusion of the remainder of the 1970s, Rex to ascertain that his terrible initiation was finished, while Gordon searched for the sacred.
Yeah, Gordon would be one to see the sacred in the act of tonguing a stripper during her performance at the fair, evermore profound because he and “his brother” took turns, and so it seemed that she, a queen rising out of the stage in a greenish light and tinfoil-like music, was the issuing authority.
Oh, yes, there is always an issuing authority in America. And this one was here to permit brotherhood. To under-twenty-one-homeboy Gordon, this was sacred. To “the vet,” it was just another muddy river, but it was home. And he allowed that it was good.
Neither man will forget the sound of her bare feet stamping the wooden stage, side to side, with that swinging long hair . . . thump! pause. Thump! pause. Thump! On and on.
But now life is lived differently.
On the hill below, on Heart’s Content Road, curvy but tarred, is the buzzing of a small car engine.
Over the last couple of weeks, THE ARGUMENT prevails. Gordon has called Rex a right-wing fucker. Rex has suggested Gordon reads too many “commie books.” So Rex, the worldly vet who has felt deeply OUT THERE, smelled what’s OUT THERE, bled OUT THERE, looked into their eyes OUT THERE, seen their running backs and worse, their creeping-up shadows, has heard the yong and phong of their speech, has now come to this: a world cut down to size. No, not a “world.” “World” is the wrong word. A spot. Small enough to stand on, and the necessity of walking its boundaries, to stand sentry beside. A spot that he wishes not to see unraveled. And here’s Gordon full of all that is undefined, all that is too big, all that is teetering like the tin globe on the seventh-grade homeroom teacher’s desk. All that is everywhere. So maybe Gordon is the enemy? Eh? Maybe Gordon is not his “brother.”
The engine on the hill perseveres. Gordon cocks his head. It’s the same engine sound that belongs to Ivy Morelli. Gordon, still raving about the frightening future for the world’s kids, yes, stops midword. Jane raises her cheek from his shirtfront, her pillow.
Churning up into the dooryard a low car, yes small, yes red, same as Ivy’s.
Rex turns from where he stands to view the face of a woman with handsome, thick, dark-streaked, mostly gray hair in a professional-class cut, appearing.
This woman pulls the screen door wide with familiarity. This fairly tall large-framed woman is not a bit slope-shouldered, like some tall large-framed people tend to get; for instance, Gordon. The woman wears well her white round-collared blouse. Pastel print shorts. Lo, she is no stranger to Rex. Nor to Jane. Jane gives her special glasses a little one-fingered adjustment.
In a show of gentlemanliness, Rex pulls off his olive-drab army cap again as Marian St. Onge steps into the porch.
When this woman recognizes Rex, she closes her eyes prayerfully, gives Gordon a long-suffering look, and heads in through the doorway to the dim blue-lit kitchen. She seems not to have seen Jane at all whatsoever, zilch.
Jane, referring to the one and only time she has met Marian, says with a sad sigh, “Gordie, your mum is still upset.”
Gordon just grunts.
Jane says, consolingly, “Your mum looks so pretty tonight, though. She has herself fixed up good.”
The candles tonight have been made by Jane and the soft fleshy light that fills the porch is significant and owned.
Rex and Gordon are looking into each other’s shadowy eyes, which they have been doing since Marian Depaolo St. Onge walked so brusquely between them, and Gordon’s eyes now get that slightly crazed look he often has, one eye wide, one eye flinched narrow. “My mother,” he says reverently, “worries me. She drives too fast.” He lowers his bottle of beer to the floor.
Marian St. Onge has driven a long way for this surprise visit, at least an hour and a half. Although Gordon visits her in Wiscasset almost every week, it is rare that she darkens this door. It is almost as if she knew she’d catch Gordon at some new and deeply troubling nose dive into further debasement, each debasement being a full level lower than the last. And Gordon says, “I’m still thinking of bringing some kids to one of your meetings. It’s in the works.”
Rex squints at his black military boots, soft rose-colored reflections of Secret Agent Jane’s candles there across the toes. He is now standing with his back to the screen, his olive military cap loose in one hand. Behind him, that old porch screening breaks the gray night up into pepper-sized gray pieces.
In the kitchen, there’s a scary silence, worse than an angry smash of dishes or a slammed door.
Jane commands, “Gordie, tell me a story about when you were little and she was your mum.”
“Not now,” he tells her, tightening his arms. “You have had a full hour of stories, yours and mine and none of it worked getting you to the land of sweet dreams.”
Phone rings.
“Cuz he’s here.” She nods toward Rex. “He is inlegal.”
Rex shifts a bit.
Gordon says, “You said that before and you mean illegal.”
“Whatever,” says Jane. “Milishish are in the news.” She fingers the stems of her pink-lensed glasses, one hand to each stem, holding them tight as if to steady them against a sight that is accompanied by a big wind.
Rex doesn’t shift a second time, but he radiates. His pale eyes lock to Jane’s heart-shaped lenses, the two powers testing.
Gordon says, “You don’t have a TV anymore, Jane. No more red herrings, lies, and crap from that source.”
Jane reaches to possessively pat Gordon’s whiskery mouth. “Some people still have them. They tellll.”
“Of course,” Gordon replies on a beery burp. “But the Oklahoma City bombing was rigged by the government, big banks, whatever. They own big media.” What a sucker. He’s taken her bait. Just like he fell for the bait of the Duotron Lindsey lobbyist.
Gordon’s face turns to watch his mother’s shadow swaying through the sickly blue kitchen light at the window beside and behind him. She is mumbling to someone.
Says Gordon, “Look, Lady Jane. It’s time to nod off. Think of sheep. Multiply and divide ’em.”
“Gross.”
He resumes a bit of chair rocking.
Rex fits his cap back on, more meticulously this time.
No
w they all hear Marian St. Onge’s voice talking, the only words audible being, “Rex York,” clearly spoken three times in a most distressed and crackling way.
Suddenly Jane queries, “What . . . do . . . you . . . mean? . . . Oklihomish City?”
Oops! Now Gordon sees. The trap. He sucks in the sweet weedy late summer night, nose whistling, lips under the mustache sealed.
Jane snickers to herself. “Well, everybody knows that Willie guy, went . . . to . . . jail. His friend.” She jabs her pointing finger at Rex. “It was about gunzz. In murder they use guns a lot.”
Rex had, himself, just arrived, not quite fifty minutes before Marian. Not enough time to get his muscular ideology fully tangled up in Gordon’s loud bottomless zigzagging. And he has zero reaction to the husky bluster of Secret Agent Jane. He turns a little toward the screen door, then back toward the chair he had picked out to possibly sit in for a spell before he felt the significance of Marian’s cold shoulder. Years ago, she had thought of Rex as a “good model” for her confused and only child.
Gordon says, “Sit, Richard. I want to hear more about that patriot group in western Mass. The ones with the tank.” He doesn’t say this softly. He says it like maybe he wants to jab Marian with this? Is this Gordon’s mean twisted side leaking out? Or would he see it as mere teasing? Or is he unaware of how his big voice and his sensibilities sweep in all ears within a half mile, and how it could someday be his felo-de-se. The otherworldly candle flames flutter and twist. And from the kitchen, his mother’s voice speaks again, words unclear, tone clearly distraught.
After Rex’s truck turns out of the yard, sleeping Jane is carried upstairs to her bed.
The wind picks up. It brings a coolness that speaks at every open window. As the mobiles and chimes come to life out on the piazza, there is the symphony of shimmering metal and tinkling glass and the thot . . . thot . . . thot of wood to wood.
He stands at the kitchen sink, one knee jiggling against the cupboard door, which causes a nearby tower of books to sway, the kind of books with footnotes and uh-oh nasty no-hope-but-fascinating facts in a variety of disciplines. He gulps down aspirin with water. Yes, this kitchen that has more unanswered mail and phone messages and books than food, a kitchen of cheapskate low-wattage fluorescent light, which he insists on because the house is still on the “corporate grid,” not wired to converters and batteries yet. No microwave here, no automatic mooshers and mashers, no bing, no whirr. A kitchen of “resistance.” A kitchen with a handsome woman, Marian Depaolo St. Onge, rewrapping a little dish of cold, cooked, frozen, and thawed, and recooked dandelion greens. “Here’s this and I brought you some éclairs. Also, I’ve started getting a lot of mail at the house . . . mail addressed to you in care of me. And one call for you. A stranger. Even though I’m unlisted.”
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 46