Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  Meanwhile, with his arm around one of those commanding middle-aged mothers, talking down at the side of her face, Gordon is gesturing with his free hand. Rex’s militia is an educational experience! A great opportunity! See history in the making, right? In the cases of those real narrow-eyed mothers who argue a bit, he acts silly, wags his head, covers his ears or leaves them for later, for bed, where they are more easily influenced.

  He works side by side with some teen boys and girls, all armed with knives, hacking some early blue Hubbards free of the vine, hefting them, so satisfyingly heavy and polish smooth, handsomely lumpy, grasshoppers and crickets plunking against pant legs, sun hot but dry, shirts around waists, billed caps pulled low. To kids Gordon says nothing about the militia. He means well. He wants to respect the wishes of other adults here. Yes. He. Means. Well. He really does. But—

  He whispers to his wife Glennice while heading back for supper, walking up the dusty road. She closes her eyes, a tear on one cheek. “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t just say yes and not mean it!” he implores, almost squeakily.

  Glennice, who is normally so cheery, so upbeat, so Christian, produces another tear, and says, “okay,” even less enthusiastically than her previous “yes, sir.”

  It’s different with the other Settlement fathers. There’s no objections, verbal or nonverbal. A couple dads even want to go with Gordon to “see what it’s all about.” Is there militia in the heart of almost every working-class man? The servant? The peasant? The slave? The system’s cogs? The rich person’s ox? Even here at the Settlement, the memory of OUT THERE never washes away but is spurred into the bones.

  Over the next couple of days, Gordon moves from shop to shop, Quonset hut to Quonset hut, hay field and sawmill, like hot fission, pushing to fill up space, large objects quivering, nobody left unconvinced.

  Now, out in the Midwest.

  Another dozen family farms auctioned off yesterday, another dozen today. One suicide.

  Some experts speak of job training, food stamps, medications, all to help these families with the “change.”

  Depression. It’s like anything. It can be fixed! Right? The system takes. The system gives. It crawls high and low, growing. Growth! Growth! Growth!

  And la la la la, the sun will shine on us all. And the electronic bluebird will bow and chirp and bless.

  And—

  The militia grows.

  Out in the world.

  In dozens of French cities, tens of thousands of jobless people are demonstrating. In many cases occupying unemployment offices, welfare offices, utility companies, and repossession agencies, they push their way into pricey stores and yuppie restaurants and make raids on superdooper markets.

  Soon, the Paris Trade Center and elite École Normale Supérieure are occupied. Police arrive and use varieties of force to solve the problem, but the heroic mob charges on to take over an amphitheater at nearby Jussieu University.

  Now months have passed since the riots. Leaflets! Assemblies! Talk of revolution! Even those with jobs join the jobless. If you look at a map, you will see the shape of France but its angry voice is matched by angry, writhing voices all over the planet. Australia. Argentina. Japan. Kashmir. Haiti. Britain. Egypt. Sudan. Yemen, Tunisia, Syria, Libya, Colombia. Though, of course, in most cases, each one’s common people never know of the other’s shaking fist.

  Screens far and near . . .

  are blank as a floor concerning the aforementioned.

  In a small town in Indiana, a woman is preparing a quick supper for herself.

  She cranks open a can of clams, those small kind that look like “newborn” clams. The woman presses down the loose lid now to squeeze out the water. She gasps. There’s only a half inch of clams on the bottom. Each time she buys these things, they cost a bit more and there’s more water, less clams. She sighs. Trying, yes, really making a brave effort to accept that she has been robbed. No, better to think of it as a good thing, the “green” thing, cutting back, saving the planet. Indeed, if you get angry about things, you are like those types on TV being dragged to jail . . . shabby and low-class. She takes a deep breath, lets it out, thinks positive . . . yes, a positive thinker. She smiles, opens a second can of clams to make up the difference.

  Denise’s Diner.

  While out on an errand, Gordon sees Rex’s YORK ELECTRIC van parked outside Denise’s Diner and so he decides that today is the day he will eat his noon meal at Denise’s Diner.

  Inside, there is only one visible empty seat. Conveniently, it’s the stool at the counter right next to Rex York.

  Gordon spreads his legs and, from behind the stool, lowers himself onto the seat and Rex looks up at him, then back at his half-eaten crab roll, then at the three coffee pots on the burners in front of him.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. York.”

  Rex nods gravely at the three coffee pots.

  The waitress, a big-built long-faced girl with acne scars, some relation of Bonnie Loo’s, flips to the new page of her pad. “Hungry?” she asks.

  Gordon smiles. He looks up at the list of specials on the wall with a look too wild and too passionate and too lunatic for such an ordinary list of greasy, salty, fried stuff. “I . . . I want that baked bean thing . . . no . . . wait . . . I want that macaroni and cheese.”

  “Red hot dog comes with that. You want corn or peas?”

  He rubs his thickly bearded chin a long moment, staring passionately into midair. “Peas.”

  “You get a roll with that, too,” she says.

  “I’m glad,” he says.

  “Coffee?” She flips his upside-down cup upright.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He looks down the length of the diner. A hand waves. He waves back. Another relation of Bonnie Loo’s. Then another hand. Now, nodding once in a manly way, Jeff Johnson, who has just recently married and is “struggling,” they say. Everyone looks familiar. Everyone. Now he looks the other way and there’s more nods. No strangers. No passers-through. He sighs happily. Turns his creaky stool from left to right, right to left, restlessly. Looks back at Rex, who is chewing food in a most dignified manner, no food whatsoever hanging off his mustache. Gordon can never be sure of his own.

  The late summer sun, blasting in at all the big windows, jumps and wags and flickers as people walk through it or stretch out a hand for a relish jar.

  Minutes later. Gordon and Rex now eat side by side without much talking. Eventually they discuss and agree to both order pecan pie, even Rex, who never eats dessert . . . Gordon pressing him to “lighten up.”

  Then, at last, outside in the sandy lot, Rex has something for Gordon. First a copy of the (outdated, sort of) FBI Project Megiddo report, which defines all the ways an American, (certain difficult Americans but also including just average people . . . people who own firearms and surmise the government doesn’t want them to . . . or people who believe there is a new world order) . . . how these people are probably terrorists. Terrorists, yes. That is the word. And “paranoid.” This is what you are if you do not believe the big-business-owned and “intelligence”-guided government is your friend.

  Gordon gives this a quick scan, then tucks it under one arm.

  And stapled together are two Internet printouts, one from Australia, the other a photocopied article from a publication that Gordon has never heard of. Some sportsman’s magazine that details a suggested plan for global citizens disarmament, presented by a Japanese delegation to the United Nations and supported merrily by US delegates. It doesn’t say it becomes official policy but . . . but it feels real. You can feel the cold hands of lords and ladies stretching in through your front yard gate, into the rooms of your home, down your shirt front. If you aren’t rich enough to be a legal “person,” that is. Rights for the rich, retractable privileges for everyone else.

  Now a whole folder stuffed with clippings and printouts of intrusive gun laws and bans in Canada and England, with delegates to the United Nations’ “positive” remarks on these underline
d in pen or yellow highlighter. Some include the statement by the attorney general of the United States that guns in the hands of citizens are bad, citizen disarmament “timely.” None are bills or impending laws. Partisan rhetoric, for certain. Some of this stuff is taken from sources like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Gordon tucks the whole thickness of reading material under an arm and watches Rex standing there looking at the road, which is momentarily quiet.

  Gordon swallows. “Maybe I owe you an apology, Brother.” Sort of. At least honor a brother’s fear, right? How many hours have they argued the last few days, Gordon accusing Rex of silly paranoia.

  Rex turns his icy blue-gray eyes on Gordon. Now he reaches in his pants pocket for his wallet, picks from one of the little plastic photo sheathes a laminated card. On one side, it is a photo. Geronimo with what looks like an old trap-door rifle. The stock is kinda blurry. Hard to tell. But the man’s face is clear. On the other side of the card, in cheapie-style computer print: BORDER MOUNTAIN MILITIA/625-8693, RFD2, Box 350, Egypt, Maine, 04047.

  Gordon looks back again at Geronimo. Firm set mouth, eyes boring right into Gordon’s. He is remembering the words that go with that face, words he offered Marian just a few nights ago: I think I am a good man, but all over the world they say I am a bad man.

  Gordon says nothing, just quietly returns the photo card to his friend’s hand, keeps a grip on the folder.

  Gordon now feels the door swinging back. Slam! All his new hopes to fight the thing, for instance, Bree’s and his THE RECIPE, are so embarrassingly childly and dopey and sweet, while the militias have known all along that the only possible outcome was glorious defeat. He swallows, then says, “I’m still bringing some people with me to one’ve your meetings, Captain.”

  Rex nods, slipping his wallet back into place. “Maybe my men can meet at your place before long. Check out some of your goodies. Your shortwave. And they might like the photovoltaic stuff. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against that stuff. It’s not that I’m against it.”

  Gordon says, “I would be honored to have you all.”

  Rex says, “I’ll see what I can do. Why don’t you just come over to the next meeting at my place and we can work out the details.”

  “Hey. Yuh. Sure. Let’s give it hell.”

  He is slouched in the one upholstered chair in the cool parlor of the old farm place, door closed. Silence as tight and unstammering as the innermost room of the sepulcher of a dead Bible-days hotshot.

  Overhead, the old-timey frosted glass light fixture, suspended from its thick bronze chain, gives off a raging hundred watts. All around him the books in leaning towers, academics and their end notes, glossaries, introductions and afterwords. Stuff of the philosopher. Stuff of thought. Stuff of the informed. While spread open on his thighs, the Project Megiddo report, its first page flashing the seal of the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.

  This first page reads: The attached analysis, entitled Project Megiddo, is an FBI strategic assessment of the potential for domestic terrorism in the United States undertaken in anticipation of or response to the arrival of the new millennium.

  He turns to the next page.

  BOOK TWO:

  WOLVES

  It begins.

  Settlement trucks are crowded between a mound of split firewood and the Yorks’ glassed-in porch. Indoors, eight Settlement men are talking “militia,” talking of being “prepared,” bursts of laughter, rolling grumbles. Not much of the husky loud voice of Gordon St. Onge. These nights he is less argumentative, stares down into a galaxy of new thoughts just above his folded hands.

  None of “Rex’s men” are on hand, unless you count one meager wordless fifteen-year-old, Mickey Gammon, outfitted in a camo BDU jacket with the Border Mountain Militia’s shoulder patch embroidered green and black, a mountain lion in midsnarl. Olive-drab pistol belt. Hair in a streaky blond ponytail. More of a mouse tail, thin and bewildered, not overly shampooed, it’s length probably meant to display manly rebellion.

  Jolly.

  On the third night, as they linger in Rex’s dooryard, a small car burns up the driveway, lurches to a stop in billows of dust behind Rex’s gray work van. And out hops (like a cricket) a fellow whose multiple cameras all flash at once. In the stricture of dying green evening light, these bursts make a sort of war fire in everyone’s eyes. But the man is so smiley and white of teeth, so jolly, then poof, he’s gone.

  In no time . . .

  Independent photographer Cal Alonsky’s shots of the infamous “Prophet” Guillaume St. Onge and his militia connections creep like bacteria throughout the state of Maine and then outward into America.

  These will be referred to by thousands of worried souls as “angry white men,” which is true if you don’t count dark-skinned Cory St. Onge. All of these guys are angry for sure because they really didn’t like Mr. Alonsky’s style.

  At the Settlement, the mail arrives in even bigger bulges and billows.

  The black old-timey phone in Gordon’s kitchen jangles long into the night.

  Radio talk shows are REALLY at it, squealing away at such words as: “right wing” and “militia terror” and then plain “terrorists” or extra fancy “baby-raping terrorists” punctuated in other instances by “socialist” and “communist,” even “environmentalist.” And “needs to be a law against” and “we need to think of the children” and “I heard they have a bomb.”

  Ah, the magic of Ivy’s pen. How it had torn open the future and out slithered this.

  Thicker.

  He meets again and again with the girl down at the farm place. She hears him out on all the wild things he tells her. Primarily Rex’s fears. She picks up her magic pen and with his passion she merges her genius. The Recipe spumes its evermore improved, deluxe version, as an asteroid would wrap its red-hot tail around the endless bickering between Gordon and Rex, where primarily Rex never says more than a few words.

  It dazzles.

  Now the mail comes in bundles and boxes.

  Letters and cards from all over the country. More folded clippings of the St. Onge-militia-connection photos. Old friends asking Gordon, What’s this surprising development, our old philosopher? And Is this really you?

  But mostly strangers now. A couple of white-supremacist types. But some without any supremacist reference or racist blatherings, but the letters feel white, white and angry. Mostly men. A few women. But oh, they loved Cal Alonsky’s photo. To them it was a warm hello!

  Gordon scribbles down their addresses, adds them to the file. He writes a few short cautious notes to as many as he has time for, laps the stamps.

  Meanwhile, no comments from anyone about his and Bree’s (mostly Bree’s) “no wing” concoction, The Recipe, though he has sent out dozens of copies to acquaintances far and near, those with a political bent, mostly those who would be best described as “liberal,” “liberal” being the Gordon of yesteryear, sort of. “Liberal” means open-minded, right? So, he is certainly that. But he was never quite one of them.

  Bree had asked the print shop crew to do the first page of The Recipe on fluorescent-orange copy paper, blaze orange glowing, like a hunter’s orange vest.

  With The Recipes Gordon has sent out, he includes a short personal urgent note.

  Eventually, a few replies. Like, I haven’t had time to read your opus. But thanks. I will soon. And how are you? Still doing the alternative energy stuff? And blah, blah, blah. And, Still with the militia? Bang! Bang! Ha! Ha! The progressives can knife you in such smiley ways.

  One old friend sent a seven-page typed letter talking about every damn thing BUT The Recipe. Then a scribbled P.S. Thanks for the missive, Gordo. Looks like you’ve been busy.

  Gordon has a vision. Nearly a hundred Recipes in nearly a hundred homes, the top orange page dazzling, straining unsuccessfully to catch the attention of someone who cares.

  In his dumpy, musty, farmhouse kitchen, he reads aloud to B
rianna the letters and cards of friends who just aren’t getting around to reading The Recipe. Nobody is reading The Recipe. He reads their excuses in comical voices to make her giggle. And yes, she had giggled for him.

  Brianna Vandermast’s most recent artwork is placed in Gordon’s hands.

  It shows a robust hairy creature with big feet, big mole-like nose, beady eyes, standing with hands on hips, legs apart. The epitome of defiance and invincibility. It is the “Abominable Hairy Patriot” and he (or is it she?) is pictured at times with a three-corner hat, other times hatless with different expressions. But mostly just one expression. Kindly militance. And mostly he (or she?) has no clothes. Just his (her?) very THICK white fur, which Bree explains, “is probably actually brown in summer.”

  The Abominable Hairy Patriot versus The Thing!! The Thing is portrayed as sort of a sea anemone (side view), and the two opponents help the reader along with a condensed version of The Recipe. This is two sides to one sheet of paper. A ready-to-print flyer.

  All the no-wing concepts are boiled down in a chatty language, more alluring than the language of the first Recipe. Less lyrical. Less rant. More lovable.

  A bit of woodstove fire, a windy cold tumble of rain outside. With his cheapie unbecoming glasses on, Gordon reads through both sides twice, he sitting, Bree standing. Now being breakfast time in the winter kitchen, Settlement people munching, or helping a child to cut up a sausage or to pepper eggs, a small boy spitting food across a table, displays of embroidery strutting by, a mother angrily jerks a kid from his chair, kitchen sink hand pumps clank and squeak and the dear good water explodes into pottery, someone never tiring of “Goodnight, Irene” sailing through another refrain with cheeks full of food, a door slams, laugh, laugh, candles flick and whisper like newborn hearts, the drone of several men just arriving now, every chair filled. Many eyes watch as Gordon takes off his reading glasses and stands. The new Recipe lies brightly on the table. Gordon crushes Bree HARD against himself and she lets him, pressing her horrific face into his shirt.