Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  “I can’t see why this would be a bad time,” she presses. “What’s so different about now from, say, next year?”

  He just smiles.

  “You probably would have the last word. Even once you have given in to a VCR, you’d have control over what people watch here.” She smiles.

  “Could be.” He smiles.

  While she is taking her capsules, Robert, her child, yes, hers and Phan’s child, comes skipping from the opposite table, where a squiggling gang of kids are planning their day, going over committee and crew lists with Gail St. Onge, who is “clerk of the house.” Robert pushes in between his mother and Gordon and flomps his face and arms onto the table as if he is exhausted. Catherine rubs his back, the feel of his Settlement-made brown sweater bristly as life itself. “Coming down with something?” She touches his shining hair.

  He sighs. A big manly sigh. “I was just hired to be on the soda panel check crew.”

  “The what?”

  “Solar,” Gordon whispers, then swigs more beer.

  “The soda panel check crew,” repeats Robert, standing straight now, his superhero stance.

  Catherine smiles. Again she both hates and loves this place. This place!

  “Congratulations, Robert!” She shakes his hand.

  Bree and the nature of art.

  Alone today, she makes a fire in the woodstove though the day has turned out clammy and too warm. She doesn’t need heat. She needs a vanishing point.

  She begins to tear up THE BOOKS.

  The collie dog steps around, excited and happy over the fun sound of tearing rag paper. The interesting smell of colors and the whites and blacks with weighty names a dog would never appreciate such as titanium and zinc.

  Bree does not feel attachment to this old work, only blistering shame now that there is no such thing as privacy or trust. NO such thing as a sister.

  Her large hands work as well as paper shredders or wood chippers. Fast. The books she shared with them are not the only books. There are others. Never shared. The book of Bree and the Civil War soldiers, so handsome! So romantic! She had only been twelve then and the soldiers were kissing her hair or smooching her neck. No wild sex yet. That would come to mind later. Thank heavens the Settlement bunch never saw the pirates! Bree had been reading some history on pirates, how they had been sailors, slaves actually, and brutalized by sea captains on the British empire’s corporate ships.

  But as soon as pirates manned their own vessels, they were into democracy and all voted on things. And they performed plays! Bree put herself on their ships, sometimes as a girl pirate, sometimes as a hostage but a hostage who sympathized. The sex was great. A real seething brawl. Bree had the whole crew to herself. Not her slaves, exactly. They were always willing. She could always imagine them, their breathing, their livingness. The ship rolled. The sea was a wall. The decks were slick. All those tough bare feet. Hands missing. Hooks. All those beards, tattoos, and scars. Men of all races, slave ships often overtaken, the “cargo” enlisted into liberty. Stolen rum. Stolen food. Stolen gunpowder, enough for suicide (of the whole ship) when needed. Bree would be there. Girl pirate in the crow’s nest, the great mast, the phallic symbol. What’s wrong with phallic symbols?

  And yeah, there over every tilting ship is the lilac-color cast of justice, fairness, whatever you want to call it, the only thing Mother Nature never gives. You have to steal that. You have to get mean in the process.

  And pirates sang a lot. Ho hee ho hee! And they would fuck. Fuck Bree.

  So much noise. Wind.

  Wapping sails.

  Chains and winches.

  Bellers and hoots.

  And the flag of DEATH.

  JOLLY. Death would come like party time.

  MEN. Like Maine men, shy and serious, or loud and bragging, drunk and in your face, unforgiving and pissed off at lords and enemy captains, pissed off at phonies, and pissed off at suck-ups. And at God.

  All of this goes into the odd-smelling fire, torn first, shredded small enough to fit.

  The beautiful faces. The beautiful bodies. The fire of a young girl’s freedom to imagine, transformed by the fire of a match into ash. Images shriveled. Calligraphy words gone as if they never were. Bree bereft.

  Bree sighs, weeps, howls, screams, down on one knee at the little woodstove door. The collie laps her face. Dog. Best of souls.

  Bree, the incorrigible doodler.

  Another day. The sky a wizardly blue, deepening, the sun a red closing eye beyond the fields.

  She knows she should be in the kitchen helping her brother, Dana, make his “Mexican Special” because the mess he makes when unattended would take twenty people to clean up. He tries, oh, he tries to remember all those splats on the floor, drizzles over the counter. He sometimes claims he’s color-blind. She doesn’t buy it.

  She can hear through the open windows the pans clunking, lids clanking, hears the can opener cranking, hears the refrigerator door . . . ominous sounds. But she stays where she is, in the early evening light. Outside. Under the world’s most human-looking tree, colossal old maple with a face and arms. Its being radiates against Bree’s shoulders and the back of her skull as she leans back, resting her eyes. On her lap, her drawing pad. She has drawn a picture of “souls.” These are random souls. But as she looks down now, she notices how the faces look like her brothers, her father, her aunts. She thinks perhaps they look like herself, had her face not been deformed. And like her mother, had her mother not died. She understands how it is that the artist’s hand conveys from every cell, from the DNA of generations, the self. Yeah, conveys the self. The artist unconsciously constructs a child of his or her SELF.

  She frowns. Wondering. She understands that, yeah, all her work is probably like this, every face preexisting like a ready egg tucked in her ovaries . . . every face having a soul. And yes, no wonder the Settlement women and Catherine believed mistakenly that her fantasy pictures were of her brothers! She feels a pang, deep, like something bursting and stinging, a grief. How long will Catherine be dead to her, Bree’s own heart steeled against her beautiful friend? Had Bree resisted mothering?

  An old-fashioned late summer day.

  A lot of late-morning traffic using the bridge in East Egypt, bridge of arched stone colonnades, and a too-narrow passage for those who need to push through a day.

  Today’s sky is a blue to marvel. Roar of the falls. And seeming to float on the edge of the falls, the hunkering woolen mill, shut down for almost ten years now. Everything going to China. Part of the empty parking lot and loading area is nearly under the bridge, and from there the bridge is laid out up there against the sky. Though it is not a tall bridge, quite level with the road, it remains true to the fact that here in these hills life is a series of God-sized stairs.

  Howie Stover’s Dodge is having trouble. Had to coast it down into the empty lot from the road and bridge area above. Gordon St. Onge helping, leaning over the engine, his back to the bridge, saying stuff that makes Howie laugh. Now Gordon ambles over to his own truck to find a smaller wrench . . . Howie facing the bridge, looking up at something, a tactless stare.

  Gordon turns and sees, his eye that flinches doing so in its most stark-raving mad-looking way.

  Bree up there on the bridge. Bree up there in the sky.

  Yes, bridge so narrow. Made in those days when you had an old horse and wagon or a Model A and time to be polite. Bree on its skinny sidewalk, standing against the stone and mortar “rail,” hands in the pockets of a longish yellow print dress that Gordon has never seen her wear before, a soft gosling yellow with wee flowers or dots, hard to tell from here. Not sleeveless, but almost. Just at-the-shoulder cuffs. Lovely young arms. And some sort of shoes, not work boots. He can’t tell for certain from so far. The eyes of her wronged-by-the-gods face stare into Gordon’s.

  “Hey!” he bellers.

  She lifts one hand from its deep pocket for a wagging-of-the-fingertips-only wave, rather girlish. The bridge rumbles
and thunders with each crossing.

  Gordon feels in his whole person the million and one dangers that could tear at her, some to tear her body, some to tear her heart. Traffic! Dirty air! Deep dammed-up river! Cruel people! Misguided people. How such a face can lead evil out from evil’s deepest tunnels and chambers.

  A tractor trailer, hauling fuel, hisses and groans into the curve, up onto the bridge, too fast, lifts her hair.

  He turns back to finish with Howie Stover’s car, replacing the last hose, finger tightening nuts, reshaping a clamp with his fingers. Howie: thanks! thanks! Now slipping in behind the wheel, he starts the engine. Gordon at Howie’s car window, a blackened hand resting on the roof, leaning down, talk, talk, talk, talk. Then as the car putters away up onto the roadway, heading north into Egypt away from the bridge, Gordon sees Bree is still standing there, hands in pockets, hair lifting, then settling around her face again to hide it, and when next the air is made violent again by a rumbling UPS van behind her, her yellow dress dances, wraps tight around her hips and legs.

  He goes up the curbed tar lane that leads to the road, then onto the bridge, loping, his chunk of keys making their music, and as he gets close to Bree, he says breathlessly, “Hey.” And as he steps very close, she tips her head down so her hair does its faithful work of covering her face from him.

  “What brings you back to Egypt . . . ah, specifically, this spot?” he asks, wagging his head, pale eyes full of pleased twinkles.

  She points toward the little white ranch building next to the brick P.O., Phillip Pap, D.D.S. printed on the white Colonial-style sign.

  Gordon sees parked there Pitch Vandermast’s pickup with chains, gas cans, and tool box in the bed but no one in the cab. Bree, driving without a license as usual. Driving around like that since she was eight years old, as he has heard.

  A tractor trailer passes, a load of biomass chips, and Bree’s heavy ripply red hair lifts off her shoulders.

  Gordon turns and watches the truck swing around the curve, close to the bank, fast, too fast.

  Now a load of pulp. Brakes hiss deafeningly. Driver shouts down from his open window, “BEEEE VEEE!”

  Bree turns and gives a manly abrupt half-wave. She says to Gordon with a giggle, “That’s Kenny.”

  He narrows his eyes, “Kenny who?”

  She leans forward deeply, as if to check one of her dressy Settlement-made moccasins for a loose lacing. Her hair fully covers her face now and inside that hair are low almost tuneful giggles. “Kenny Levasseur. Helped do Dad’s lots on Richardson Pond.”

  “Somebody you’re sweet on?” Gordon asks.

  She keeps her face down, poking the cracked cement sidewalk with her right moccasin, ramming it, ramming it, so like most nerved-up fifteen-year-olds might do, and her dress again churns around her legs and Gordon steps against her, catches the back of her hair with one hand and pulls it gently back, which causes her malformed face to raise up to him. She promptly covers her face with her hands.

  “Don’t cover your face like that,” he says.

  He keeps ahold of her hair, waiting.

  Eventually she drops her hands. Eyes shut. A big closed-lip smile. “Now I have to look at you,” she tells him. Giggle, giggle. Opens her eyes; blink, blink. “It’s sinful. You’re almost forty.”

  He reaches back around to the back pocket of his work pants and tugs out a bandana, wrinkled, red, turns her slightly, ties her hair back, tight.

  “You take liberties,” she murmurs, then giggle giggle. “They say it. And it’s true.”

  “When’s your appointment, Brianna?” he asks.

  “Twenty minutes ago.”

  “Bad girl.”

  She looks down, smiles again, lowers her face some more but her hair does not accommodate. “He’s very nice. Kinda cute, tells good jokes.” She giggles.

  “The dentist? Or that Kenny guy?”

  “Dentist.” She laughs. “Who’s remembering Kenny?”

  “We need to talk,” he says. “Your Dad’s truck is okay to stay there?”

  “Sure,” she says.

  They walk down to his truck parked by the old mill’s loading zone, boarded up lower windows, and a KEEP OUT sign on each iron column of the dock.

  As they pull open the cab doors, Gordon remarks that her dress is too beautiful for the dentist. “So what’s this with impressing the dentist?”

  Giggle. Giggle. “It’s the hygienist, Ariel, I’m going to see today.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Auntie got this for me. I just came down from there. It was Goodwill. Deal of a lifetime.” She swings her hips to make the soft skirt flutter.

  He closes his eyes, seems to chew on his tongue, then turns and raises a leg to get into the truck.

  The truck starts up without a hitch, unlike sometimes.

  They ride along out of town, truck windows down, the dappled light of sun and trees slipping across the hood and windshield. The road is dirt, recently graded. It leads into New Hampshire and higher elevations. Under the tires, sand and loose stones kick up and thwonk at the fender walls. “We saw a fisher cat on this road once,” Bree tells him. “Broad daylight. His head looked red. Red ears. But actually their ears are sort of gray. But . . . they were red . . . see . . . the sun transformed him . . . big black and red . . . like a demon. He was really something.” She wags her head, pulls on her ears. Sighs. “And he was a long one.” She opens her long work-tanned arms to show. (Yes, some redheads do tan.) “He stopped and defied us as we came on but then got himself into the culvert in the nick of time. Dad had his revolver with him and was reaching for it. Dad doesn’t like fisher cats.”

  The dappled light dances everywhere.

  “They can jump sixteen feet,” says Gordon.

  Bree asks, “You ever seen one?”

  “A couple live ones. A lotta dead ones.”

  “Dead? How?”

  “Trappers feel entitled since fishers have such an interesting rap.”

  “Wipe out the fishers is what they say.” She sniffs.

  “Yeah, they say that.”

  “Fishers kill pet cats.”

  “Pet cats, on the other hand, kill everything.” Gordon sweeps his hand across the horizon. “Or play with their victims.”

  “Yep.”

  “Juncos. Swipe ’em right out of the sky and then pop on the thumbscrews. That’s the kitty-cat motto.”

  She giggle-snorts. “It’s not funny but it’s the way you say a thing.”

  Now a half mile or so with no words.

  A small plastic green Godzilla swings from Gordon’s rearview mirror. “I like that,” says Bree, giving it a little tap with her freckled fingers. It spins gaily. “Smaller version of your east parlor one. Maybe this one is actually Gorgon. From the movie where Gorgon was a mother.”

  Gordon sighs. “This one is big, dopey, well-meaning, and misunderstood.”

  “Yeah,” she says with a low laugh.

  They talk and ride into the day, over the miles of roads leading to Gorham, New Hampshire, and around down through, back to Maine, South Paris, and Norway. A lotta road.

  She is talking to him in a normal way for the first time. In her husky low smoker’s voice. How many years has she smoked? Someday he will ask. She talks not as a genius and not with the idiotic giggles. She tells him about herself. Confessions like gifts, like little boxes unwrapped. Gifts for him. And he tells her something he has never told anyone before. About his worldly fears, yes. But also about obsession. Compulsions. How he fears himself. And she hears him. She nods sagely. Then she gets so silly again, like a kid. Making funny noises, a couple of illogical uninformed conclusions. A moment later she is near genius. And her intuition borders on the creepy. Like she has a third hand, a ghost hand that feels his thoughts, giving them little squeezes. Now she asks, “Okay if I smoke out the window?”

  He looks at her.

  “I need it.”

  “Of course. I have nothing new to tell you about the stuff.”


  Then more miles. More fossil fuel. Another cigarette. Day getting late. On a crumbly tar road somewhere beyond the main drag of Harrison, Maine, he shifts down, takes another road, eases the truck onto a solid-looking shoulder, drives cracklingly into dense ferns, brakes easy, shuts off the engine. “I’m going to love you up,” he tells her. He knocks away the buckle of his seat belt and gets up on his knees over her and, a hand on each side of her face, kisses the straining blue-green area where the bridge of her nose sets between the eyes, that space that didn’t form right, the nose, her face hot and salty.

  She has a grip on the batch of keys that hang from his belt, fondling them in nervousness. But he now drops one hand to grip both of her hands together, pressing them against his crotch, and he kisses her mouth. Through all this, she is agreeable, but not reciprocal. He kisses her throat. He takes her throat between his hands. This throat is trusting. Of course. He has never known a woman who did not present her throat like this. TRUST. He thinks that it is this way with most men and women, trust, full trust. Most. Yeah, he can’t imagine it any other way. He erases Claire’s scoldings a few nights ago about his assumptions. Assumptions? Nothing that brainy. Just the steering wheel of the body. But it is true—no woman has ever said no. All of them pushed back in that way that means heat, in that way that cannot be misunderstood. Though Bree is being awfully . . . uh, complex.

  He says, “They told you . . . about my situation?”

  She sort of smiles. “The ugly polygamy word?”

  “Yes. So you know.”

  “Yes, sir. It’s public knowledge, isn’t it? The people’s airwaves and so forth.”

  “Well, I would not deceive you. I want to be sure you know it’s true. So much shit. So much gossip. I want to cut through that.”

  She lowers her eyes to where his hands are now dropping from her neck to again grasp hers and jam them against the hard glut of his crotch. And he is thinking how by law, he is now a true criminal. Now the radio callers are correct. Now the gossipers are right. Catherine Court Downey is correct. His mother’s fears? Bull’s eye. This is what he really is. Sick. But why does it not seem sick? He feels he and she are a hundred years away from this culture of . . . issuing authorities, legislators, social workers, and incorrectness. He, Guillaume St. Onge, has created an alternate universe, Settlement life, Settlement allowances, Settlement devotion. The fear of the law, of police, that he should be feeling, is trying for his attention but falling away.