Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  All day, all night, the phone rings. If you answer it, it’ll be somebody, usually Maine or next door, but sometimes Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, North Carolina maybe. “Is this the True Maine Militia?” they ask.

  If I’m the one to hear this, I say, “Wrong number,” and I hang up. I am not the one to get involved in anything political. I don’t understand what half of it’s about. That’s why I vote so the real experts can run things.

  And the mail increaseth.

  More mail this day than the day before. Then even more the day after. And yellow cards from the postmistress declaring: TOO BIG TO FIT.

  So somebody always must go fetch. Cardboard boxes piled behind the PO desk. They load them up, feed sacks lumpy with unraveling hearts and wits from all over Maine and beyond. Sometimes a crew heads for East Egypt on horseback. “The pony express. Goin’ through Indian territory now,” whispers Oz, one of Leona’s teen boys, himself more Indian in the eyes and nose than his father Gordon’s Frenchie-Indian-Italian-Irish mixed-up aspect. The saddles creak, the hooves clop. A new house on the highway, a pit bull runs at them. One of the younger horses goes bananas. But a woman comes to the door and hollers, “Molly! Come! Molly now!” The Settlement mail crew salutes the dog, the woman.

  Another day.

  Even more heft to the mail. And more notes at the gate. More phone, its old clattery jangle most breathless now. Hello! Hello!

  Suppertime at Vandermasts.

  It was Dana’s turn to cook, so of course it’s spaghetti.

  Their father eats with no words but blue eyes twinkling with many, many, many stories. His stories are always short. He has hundreds, all on hair trigger. But he’s moody. He has two moods. His exuberant mood. His tired mood. This is his tired mood. So stories remain represented only in eye twinkles. His cap is off. He stretches an arm over Dana’s plate to get butter. His work shirt cuff is frazzled. Grease. The skidder-breakdown kind.

  Poon is reading the Record Sun to himself, having pushed his plate away, pokes his teeth with a toothpick. Behind him, the bread box and Dana’s new computer, two equally kitcheny type devices in many a small rural home. Computer shows colorful fish images swimming past, then repeating. The computer is “asleep.” But the fish trudge on and on, reminding all that that is not the bread box.

  Poon makes a slight and sudden chickeny noise, his way of laughing when the thing has snuck up on him. He says, “B.V., you look at this. You’re a liberal lady. See how to save a tree.” He gives the paper a lift over to just short of Bree’s full plate. The paper is a bit sideways. Bree hasn’t tugged it completely from Poon’s reach. So she’s sideways, neck crooked. Poon taps a finger on the spot. It’s an op-ed. It says that women need to use less toilet paper. “The one-tissue tinkle,” is suggested. The writer has a woman’s name.

  Bree laughs. “A female elf wrote this. A dehydrated female elf.”

  Poon laughs through his teeth now, shaking his head, his dark-haired blue-eyed round face flushing sunset colors, pulls the paper back to himself.

  “What?” Dana pipes up.

  Bree sighs. “Why doesn’t she piss in her hand? Or wipe with her sleeve? Why bother with one sheet?”

  Their father laughs, just because he is in tune to what is meant to be laughed at from his daughter’s perfect mouth, which is below her freakishly spaced, now alarmed eyes. Her eyes do not look at all freaky to him because a father’s vision that frames his child is as transfiguring and sanctifying as cathedral windows. But he is just now taking note of her alarm.

  Dana sucks spaghetti, long pieces, and points at the paper. He, too, has not seen the op-ed, nor seems to be under its power enough to try to wrestle the pages from Bree.

  Bree says, “Why toilet paper? Why not junk mail?”

  Poon groans, “If I were to make a list of things to give up, junk mail would be one of them. That shiny stuff especially. Not toilet paper.”

  “Junk mail,” says Bree around a full mouth. “Wastes our time, wastes gasoline. And water to process it. And it uses electricity. And why not trim down newspapers . . . the sports and lifestyle and big business sections are so fat!”

  Dana now has a toothpick in his fingers, though not working it yet. Stares at his water glass. His hair has that squashed on top look from wearing a cap while sweating. He says, “Hotels, resorts, restaurants, airports, airplanes . . . they use a lot of paper. Cardboard ’n’ stuff. Paper place mats. Vacation land has to go.”

  Bree swallows. “Biomass chips for all the electricity used on everything stupid. That’s a biggie. How many tons’ve we hauled to the transfer?”

  Their father shakes his head to represent the overly stupendous figure of trucked chips chugging past his weary experience.

  “The rich won’t give up travel,” says Dana. “They’ll tax us for our trips to town.”

  “The system won’t give up travel,” says Bree. “Think about it. The system, the thing, won’t give up travel. Salesmen and soldiers and businessmen in planes and ships full of stuff. It’s all built on travel. This spaghetti traveled!”

  Under the table, the collie groans.

  “Gimme the paper,” says Dana. Holds out a hand. Alas, he is bothered enough.

  The paper is flappingly transferred over the smeared and gunky plates to that hand. Then silently, Dana is reading the op-ed. “Too stupid,” says he, flinging the paper to the nearby empty seat.

  Bree says, “They’ll put the price up anyway, or at least make the toilet paper thinner, smaller, less sheets on a roll . . . the poorer you are, you have no choice. The half tissue tinkle is for the poor.”

  “Then an eighth of a tissue tinkle as the dollar loses more value,” Poon chortles.

  So Bree and her family joke and razz the article a few minutes more. And Dana leans back to touch a kitchen match to his pipe. Bree’s posture feels heavy. It’s suddenly too much work to hold her shoulders up. Such an ordinary evening. The smell of spaghetti and the wood heat and dish soap. And Dana’s cherry-sweet tobacco. But Bree thinks about those who set the priorities. And shape the debates. These waves of approval and disapproval and then regulations. Regulating the folks. Never the system. The system, the thing, steamrolls on and on, its drivers free and well supplied.

  She is laughing and blushing and slurping seconds on spaghetti but realizes that though her stretched-between-the-eyes face has made her feel bad at times, this takes the cake. By using enough toilet paper to do the job, she’s a planet wrecker. And this is the moment where she wishes she was never born.

  Extinction.

  Bree scrolls along the many columns. This computer of Dana’s makes Gordon’s shadow lay muscularly and remindingly upon the walls. Too bad. Inside this house is off-limits to her “husband’s” wrath. The Settlement, ah, yes like diving under the sea to witness the force of miracles, phytoplankton choreography, that dear source, and the bearded crowned Neptune shaking his trident. Yes, a certain deeeeep perfection. But here in this bright little kitchen, one can breathe without oxygen tanks.

  Bree now scrolls down and up, her wide-apart eyes reflecting the world beyond. Is there intelligent life out there on earth? Well, yes. And here’s the PO address for the Human Extinction Society. She paws around for a pen, keeping her insatiable eyes on the screen. Here’s the paper pad. Now she scribbles. Not calligraphy, no need. This is just in case somebody else at the Settlement would be interested in making the pledge to never, never, never procreate.

  She pictures the two brothers who live at home here, their round faces, soft mouths, and their tender awfully quiet ways. Only their oldest brother, who lives upstate, Ben, has kids. She stands up and the collie is up, too, stirred by Bree’s urgency.

  “The exponential descending swarm stops here,” she whispers as she raises a hand of pledge to the Bree reflected in the kitchen window over the sink. Her mutinous hurricane of ripply orange hair pours livingly down over her back and chest. So much hair, that which Mr. St. Onge loves to nuzzle and yet insists on t
ying back with his sometimes sweaty bandanas. She has kept them all. Her treasure.

  Out through the glass pane, she sees the sun looks baggy today in its prison of humidity overly excreted from so many clever human schemes. She knows she cannot give up the life of modest riches, toilet paper, and little trips to the Settlement in the pickup. Or deodorant. Or books! Or dental floss!

  She sees the child she might have had, its whirling hurling fat hands, grasping truckloads of toilet paper. She hears the infant’s cry coming from the mouths of the ghosts of the mighty ceiba trees. And the topsoil has mouths and the dying oceans have mouths. The bats and bugs, fish and plankton, thrushes and frogs. They wail to Bree in their reverse exponents. Oh, dear, it’s not that the human critter’s infestation of earth is a new idea to Bree’s brain. No ho ho. It has been stuck there a lot these days. But gosh, toilet paper! It’s intimacy. Now her internal shout, “This is the last straw!” This demand by the op-ed writer, bearer of virtue and correctness, has put the neck hold on Bree. Killing herself would solve the toilet paper problem . . . that no tinkle, no tissue solution. But Bree isn’t going there. Can’t.

  Again, she imagines the baby she would have had, round-faced like her family and broad backed as Gordon St. Onge, but the tyke transforms now into a thick spotted snake, thrusting through more deep tunnels of self-aggrandizement.

  She recalls the antiabortion bumper sticker she saw once. SMILE. YOUR MOTHER CHOSE LIFE. What does that really mean? Bree has wept over her use of toilet paper!! Even a one-sixteenth-sheet tinkle means DEATH to a world of existing life if Bree is multiplied by future–future pissers.

  They say Bree is a genius but she knows she is no genius. It’s time to simplify. Like the Shakers nearby in the town of New Gloucester, the ones who only adopt, the opposite of the big spout of St. Onge multitudes.

  The dangers of continuing education.

  Butch Martin speaks.

  Um . . . so, things were getting more sticky. And weird. Cory and I had the flatbed out, coming back from Gray, had had a big load of furniture and lathed porch posts, truck bed empty now, sunset boring into my eyes even with the truck visor down and my sunglasses, made no difference. Cory was riding shotgun, window down, elbow out, cold as Moses, but Cory’s showing everyone he’s immune.

  So, um, we pull over into the Convenience Cubicle for gas and I recognize Jaxon Cross off to the side, two little ten-year-old cars, one his. Well, actually the one he always borrows. So I swerve the truck over to that side of the lot. Set the brake so the old beast wouldn’t roll. Piss-poor compression, couldn’t trust it. Needed some serious work but hated to tie her up.

  Cory and I dropped to the tar, stretching and grinning and getting our landlubber legs back. Sun was cowering lower, everything this side of it phasing into dark blue. Big chill. I grabbed my jacket off the seat, expecting to stand around some.

  So there was a whole carload of Jaxon’s anarchist buddies, the Black Bloc, tree huggers, tree sitters, Earth First!, vegans, that entire society of cut-loose young guys and chicks with a keen sense of uh-oh about this too-well-ordered world. That night in that high contrast orange and blue light, they all seemed dust-colored and secondhand black. Their car was all ready for takeoff but they cut off the engine and piled out, stuff falling on the pavement, clothes, backpacks, books, flyers, food wrappers, a withered lemon, a gas mask. The stuff was mashed back in and everyone was smiling these small smiles, some as tight as, you know, jar covers, sealing in the holy didactic, right? That was what Gordo would say about them.

  Their car had bumper stickers. Jaxon’s didn’t. But his looked pretty crammed with stuff like the other one. Sleeping bag zipper pressed against the glass. Brown paper bags. T-shirts. Cardboard with the words THIS SIDE UP.

  We do a back-of-the-shoulder punch-hug, him and me and him and Cory. The others were just smiling on and on in their slouchy rodent-ready-to-scurry ways.

  So Cory Guillaume St. Onge had been letting his thick Indian hair grow out that summer and was wearing, of all things, his camo BDU shirt with the Border Mountain Militia patch, olive and black. Mountain lion in midsnarl. Cory had the showiness monkey on his back as his central tribulation like some guys can’t say no to a big fat drink. Or women. Or driving too fast. Except that it was impossible in this case to say for sure if this would be Cory’s downfall. He drew a lot of stares across the parking lot and through the plate glass of the Cubicle, stares that seemed familiar, that very thing that had always given Gordo a place in this world of . . . what’s the word? Uh . . . deference. So Cory was carrying that gene along.

  One of Jaxon’s buddies had at least one Indian parent. And this guy wore his dark hair long, too. Small patch of black beard, just on the chin under the lip, wholly distinctive. He wasn’t real tall but you’d not think short. He was familiar-looking but I didn’t really know him. He’d probably been over to Jaxon’s father’s once or twice when we stopped in there. Him breezing in and out maybe, like all of us always did. But here in the darkening lot, I catch someone calling him Winter, which was possibly a tree-sit name. They often had tree-sit names which were also good for street protest, withholding their legal names from arresting officers while talking to each other as Blinky or Blue. And they almost always had accents from other states, right? All of them were pretty much my age, twentyish, but they’d been around. Cory, who was sixteen by then, but as tall and powerhoused as a bear on hind legs, and at the moment quiet for a change, he could pass for twenty . . . he must have taken into account Winter’s Indian hair.

  Meanwhile, two of Jaxon’s friends that day were girls, or should I say women, twentyish at least, and were looking Cory and me over. Both were dark-haired, one Topper, one Munch. And Cory and I were looking them over, especially those goldy-white bare necks showing there in their open-zippered hoodies and now the short girl, Topper, had . . . ahem . . . breasts that mattered. Also she wore a big floppy black hat cocked like a mobster, worn over the hood of her hoodie, and the dark front part of her hair. We were all doing these looking-by-glances and smiles, right? Hell, no matter how alert you are between the legs, you never turn into an ass-sniffing dog. Rules are for a reason, even within anarchy. You keep your upright posture, you mainly study faces, and maybe their car tires, and you can make conversation about tires and other car talk, keeping to those sort of wide-open spaces. And you can admire their bumper stickers, like my favorite: AMERICA! YOU CAN CALL FACISM FREEDOM IF IT MAKES YOU HAPPY.

  Cory tells of that day he first thought of blowing

  up bridges.

  Jaxon passed around a joint. Brazen, being right there in the parking lot of the Convenience Cubicle with the big pinky green lights on a timer having just exploded to life and, no doubt, some security cameras and also all those rush-hour windshields watching. Well, you know, rush hour in Brownfield isn’t Boston. But still, there we were . . . on stage.

  So the reefer was slowing my blood while the night chill was goosing my blood . . . heh-heh.

  One of Jaxon’s buddies, Winter, he had the look . . . like the Township. Like Claire and Ma and Geraldine and me and the rest and that always interests me. Munch, one of the girls, was like 3-D, sort of Jewish, sort of Scottish, sort of Japanese . . . or Indonesian maybe. The Maine Frenchie accent was the trick there. Her whole person was a havoc and that sort of twinkly True Maine Militia enthusiasm, heh-heh. My eyes were sort of Scotch-taped to her. My wicked happy eyes. She wore her black bandana peasant-style, there on her black hair. This was the mark. Black . . . bandanas, masks, and sometimes head to foot. Black meant anarchy. Or maybe it meant clean slate, like now it begins.

  Well, whatever, Munch and the other g— . . . uh, woman . . . were looking good and I couldn’t tell who was with who. Meanwhile, except for Winter and Jaxon, the guys were weighted down with dreads, light brown, no variety there. And they were all skinny, like big elves. And they smelled of garlic and time. And arduous travel. And war. Street war. War on America, the place that so many people think exi
sts like one of their bumper stickers pointed out. And here’s another. America’s not a place, it’s a corporate lord’s wet dream. And here’s another: The Maine Blackfly. We breed ’em, you feed ’em.

  One guy had the hood on his hoodie so tight, his especially solidified sort-of-cardboard dreads stuck out on the sides of his face like wacky ears. I never learned his name but the tallest guy they called Roast.

  Jaxon announces in his North Carolina accent, “We’re just back from the city of brotherly constipation . . . copwize I speak thereof. Good to see the drawbridge open up over the moat and allow us back into this here honorable land.” He jabs another freshly lit joint into my fingers and rocks on his heels. All these people wear sneakers so their feet look big and light gray and squishy, heh-heh.

  We all work the reefer seriously down to a sort of smithereen. Winter, the Indian guy, calls it a “safety break,” the thing we’re doing. And there’s soft talk, lazy talk, secrety, with eyes scanning and taking in the larger public scene but nobody is really saying anything that important, although being sixteen at the time, I thought it was all mega-cardinal, heh-heh.

  And oh, how I remember myself being so deep-augered into this place and time. I saw the big honking orange sun drowning in its purple hilly suicide, its fingers of fire still hanging on to the edges of the White Mountains. We were all on the edge of tomorrow, you see, fighting front and back. Then the sun let go. Gone. Just the mountains, like blue tombstones. But here the bunch of us stood in the razor pink-and-green big parking lot light. On display. Like products. Like bad inventory, a going-out-of-business sale.

  “Well,” says Winter in his sort of upper New York state accent, or something.

  So now they were squashing themselves, body and hair, back into their little car. All of this group but Jaxon presently lived up the turnpike, an hour or so ride, and it’s close to an hour to the pike, and Winter himself lived up on the coast. As they putt-putted away, their exhaust smelling like old donuts, one of the girls driving . . . and the last thing I see through the spotty glass of the window with the busted turner that could not be rolled down, is her big nice smile.