Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  Jaxon seemed in no hurry and neither did Butchie and since Butchie was our driver, it was fine by me to stand around some more. I had layers enough under the BDU shirt to do an Antarctic expedition. But no gloves. And, shit, the metallic pink parking lot glare always seems to intensify miseries if you’ve got them, hot or cold.

  Meanwhile, Jaxon had been to the front, IMF and World Bank protests in the city of New York. Lots of Philly protests, for instance one for Mumia Abu Jamal on death row who was framed for being a radio host and Panther, too noisy about “institutionalized injustice” against poor people, a reeeal heavy dose of it on people of dark skin. And there were the politicians and their conventions, which needed the attention of chaos specialists and other bodies volunteering to a state of imbrication in the streets.

  And then it “came to pass,” to use Jaxon’s own words, that Jaxon and others with fake names and black masks, in flowing anarchist form, smashed blocks and blocks of windows of business chains, after the cops, clad in Kevlar and other moon-man gear, teargassed and pepper-sprayed the pacifist folk who were not doing anything but saying hello to the empire, to The Thing as Bree V. called it. Cops had even teargassed and pepper-sprayed the faces of little kids and rubber bulleted the knees of the white-haired people, some in wheelchairs and leaning on canes. You ever see a rubber bullet? About as rubber as a bowling ball and the size of a claw-hammer handle. Many of the Black Bloc and others had locked themselves together preventing the corporate critters from getting into their closed-door murder-the-world plans. So after the cops waddling around in their moon-man suits bashed and burned flesh and eyes, the A-boys, admittedly unsurprised, admittedly on hair trigger, began to turn glass into falling stars.

  I could see Butch’s eyes. He had that glimmer. Pink. From the parking lot lights and from the reefer and from the lure of the class-war stories and just the zing and wildness of Jaxon himself, showering over us like, yeah, like stars of beautiful broken glass and his rose-color courtly manners oozed. He would call even us “sir” and the girls “ma’am.” Okay, so see, he and his father and sisters were from the South. Well. Heh-heh. There you go.

  Well, it was easy to see that Butch had already marched up the plank of this ship with its black flag and would go wherever it was going to float him.

  Butch remembering.

  Man, um . . . did Cory’s eyes look bright to hear all the gutsy shit Jaxon and his buddies had been up to. And Jaxon was really reeling off the tales, some repeats from times we’d been up there to the hill, his father’s place. Cory was maybe memorizing the stories but the picture of Jaxon himself in that present moment was worth keeping. He looked a lot like his dad, the gray eyes and face shape, but his dad dressed like a middle-aged carpenter, not a pirate. Picture a pirate and you see Jaxon, except unlike guys climbing masts, and unlike the other anarchists, he wasn’t spidery-bone-muscled. He had a little bit of pudge. Not fat. But stocky, okay? Very short beard like a cool movie beard, black knit watch cap with ends of a grayish-black bandana sticking out in back, and one around his neck. One gold earring sort of like a doubloon. His brown hair was not long, not short but good and scruffy like cut with kindergarten scissors. He’d been the victim of bad scarring acne, and there was this hard criminal smile. If you didn’t know he was our wholesome good-guy Jaxon, you’d think he was about to cut your little throat and smile doing it.

  And . . . um . . . let’s see, he wore cargo pants like all the others. That’s what they called them. Cargo pants. A million pockets to carry all your cargo in, ha!

  His father wore glasses. Jaxon didn’t but when he wasn’t smiling, he looked at you funny, so maybe he needed them. He was average height. Me, too. So Cory was the towering one in this unplanned cold night meeting. Boy was I wishing I’d remembered my damn gloves. Blew on my hands. Made use of pockets, the few I had. I see one of our CSA people going in to pay for gas. We nod.

  So . . . um . . . then Jaxon whips out a toothbrush from one of his pockets, plucks out the lint from the bristles, and starts brushing his teeth. Funny guy.

  For more pockets, his all-black BDU military shirt has . . . yeah, a slew of pockets. And under this heavy shirt, more like a jacket really, is a gray hoodie, there’s thermal sleeves at his wrists so he’s got at least that under the hoodie and under everything is a thick layer of tattoos that I’d seen before in T-shirt weather. Some standard dragons, vines, gremlins, and such shit but also, on the forearm, a red cross that he had explained goes with the idea that he and one of his local buddies are licensed EMTs. At the big protests they serve as medics for fainting people or people with other heat problems, heart attacks, strokes. But when the cops are sicced on the crowd and people get pulverized, you are cordoned in or out, not just with yellow tape but by a thick line of helmeted Kevlared moon men, so you can’t assist anyone . . . the whole matter becomes battleground and rules of decency are off. But I can see Jaxon and his sugary manners of “ma’am” this and “ma’am” that helping stove-up lady protestors off the hot tar and they would feel comforted and safe in his hands.

  So that’s the red cross, right?

  On the palm of his hand . . . ouch . . . is the tattooed telephone number of a legal aid volunteer. “One of my souvenirs,” he called it. The original was in magic marker on the inside of his forearm.

  So maybe you can picture Jaxon Cross. Now picture him brushing his teeth and around this he is insisting, “No change has ever happened without fear in the hearts of the elites. If you think so, the history you’ve been immersed in has been doctored.” He spits into the stooping weeds at the edge of the tar. Already a plastic baby diaper curled there and some fast-food soft drink cups. “You need . . . this is proven historically . . . chaotic out-of-control protests and all-out property damage. You can’t scare an empire with prissy-pants obedience.”

  I saw Cory blinking a bunch. Like the kid that he was. Sixteen years he’d been in the world, right? And this war talk might have been too much for him. There he was in his militia jacket and mighty mountain lion, and I’d seen him take the X out of a lot of two-hundred-yard targets, his fingers like silk, like a river, like shadow over the mechanisms of old and new guns, lever action, bolt action, semiauto. BUT cozy brimful Settlement peace and love was all his bones knew. Kazoos and blueberry pie. Road work and sawmill work with ten million breaks.

  Well, yeah, me, too. That was the stuff I was made of, too. And I’m kinda with my brother Kirky on the idea that humans can never get it right. And wasn’t this anarchist antihierarchy shit just another religion?

  Nevertheless, I had been thinking hard in those days about the difference between standing up or lying down as the red, white, and blue bulldozer track crunches along over other folks’ bodies, their lives, homes, livelihoods, headed in my direction. I’m not into glory. But dignity is a kind of instinct, I think. I resent being used. Fuck! What is the right thing? Just to take it as they dish it? To just lie there warm and wet? Like a fat whitish-green loam grub?

  So Jaxon turns with his toothbrush handle wagging in front of his mouth, no handed. Then he whips open one of the back doors of his little shit-box car and just like the other guys, all this stuff falls out, paper bags and a sneaker and a cell phone, or part of one, and he stuffs his toothbrush away and gets to pawing through the insides of several backpacks and finally finds a little soft-cover book. He purrs, “The book I told you about last time. Churchill. I told you about Churchill, right?”

  Cory and I both give little grunts. Yes, Churchill. And he doesn’t mean Winston Churchill.

  Jaxon is smiling away, his best cut-your-throat smile and all those pox scars and black bandanas and the doubloon spinning, brimming woozily with shit-assed parking-lot light, and the beard cut in a way as to only surround the cold clean smile. And now here’s the little book.

  At some point in all this, I remark, “I have a Winchester. I have no plans of shooting anyone. But . . . it would be a really idiotic thing for the American people to holler for gun con
trol for many reasons . . . like how many more poor people would be stuffed in prison . . . for . . . um, you know, just being armed. Like the drug war. It’s war on the poor! Concentration camps for the poor. Millions of human beings in . . . um . . . in cages. That’s what we got with prohibition now! Fuck! . . . and besides . . . I can’t see . . . I don’t get it . . . I can’t understand . . . people giving up the right to . . . you know . . . the second amendment . . . because . . . um . . . because we may need it tomorrow. Things change. Giving up amendments . . . messing with the Bill of Rights . . . making ourselves more like loyal subjects . . . surrendering by mass consent our fucking rights! Any of our rights. Just givin’ ’em up! So passive. Like dogs! But especially . . . um . . . self-defense. And . . . you know . . . revolt against tyranny. Today is today. You never know what’s around the corner.”

  But there’s Jaxon standing there facing us with the little book in his two hands, like a preacher about to bless us, no, like a pirate, no, like a young man of his time. His sinister grin is gone. His eyes are squinty but also kindly and EMTish and rescuing and committed. Voice edged with husky sorrow, “Yeah, Mister Butch, sure. But what about dynamite? It’s already illegal.”

  Cory confesses.

  Over the coming days, Butch and I had this between us. This that if nobody fights the system and its handful of suited-up lords, then the vast majority of people are fucked, these people of the world. Oh, yes, pretty small world, like a smelt, BIG high-tech net for the little bug-eyed smelt.

  But if you do fight them, heh-heh, unspeakable punishment befalls you. Little windowless high-tech dungeon cell, twenty-three hours a day would be the best you could hope for. Till you die.

  But for the worst, torture with a capital T, that’s the cold-hot nerve kind and the water up your nose kind, you’ll get that till you die.

  Either way, you will know helllll till the end of time.

  Think of it, the courage it would take to bait a beast like that, The Thing, with its eye on you, those atrocities that the United States of America is ready and equipped to commit on courage.

  Well . . . heh-heh . . . Butchie and I would go around and around with this. Courage? Or coward? Either way, we were damned. It was, each day, the both of us going to a nice breakfast in the Settlement kitchens, food for the gods, an act of shame.

  Butchie confesses.

  Yeah, if I stayed only with Rex’s kitchen militia, no courage necessary. Just Stonehenge patience. If we diddled around helping the girls with their theatrics, no courage there. No risk. No damnation. So after a while, Cory and I stopped hashing it over because we were both embarrassed in front of each other.

  Um . . . maybe Jaxon Cross was himself just talk. Just philosophy. So all his high moral ground in honey and hush was probably his own way of fooling himself, because he really could not risk the agony of a live burial, America’s prize for its real soldiers.

  Maybe we were all just waiting. Waiting for what would be around the corner. The day when The Thing gave us no choice. We’d just be on reflexes and high holy adrenaline.

  It has been said, it has been shown from history, that many atrocities for scaring the public are done with set-up patsies, events bright and shiny, media as tool, bombs, bangs, assassinations, sinking phantom ships, twists, turns, big red lies boiling right out of the cold genius of the top most humanity, then broadcast over and over until people’s minds believe.

  I’m no reader, but others are and they share with us that don’t. And man, the Caesars and Napoleons, their ghosts are just like socks, passed on and on and on to like souls, decade after decade, century after century. The others, the holocausted-on souls, the slave and servitude souls, they are recycled socks, too. It’s the swarming model. We all move together to protect our oppressors. But somehow, I’m a fluke. On TV and in public school I’d be called sick. Cuz yes, sir and ma’am, do not fuck with my answered and unanswered questions, the then and now and how the world works. Some out there would not call me an A-plus, no diplomas, no degrees. But to me, the jewel of my mind is mine. Do not ever fuck with my mind, ma’am, sir. Do. Not.

  In a small town in Ohio, not far from Youngstown, it is evening.

  A man sits in a chair and pulls from a crinkly bag some new socks. Big sale. SIX pair inside a paper adhesive band. He unlaces his shoes, eager to see how well these fit. He’s been discouraged with socks in the past. They seem to run a bit smaller than the stated size. He holds a pair up. They look large enough. They are dark blue. He wanted black but these only came in dark blue. He pushes his bare foot into one of the socks. Kkkkkkkchhhhhhhhrippppp! His foot goes right through the heel of the sock. It’s like the sock was rotten. But new. The man realizes it’s not rotten, just cheesy. He swallows. Closes his eyes. “This is thievery,” he whispers. “I’ve been robbed!” He feels anger banging all through his various organs and arteries like nano-thermite charges.

  At the beauty salon in Portland.

  Ivy Morelli, Record Sun reporter and columnist, holds her dog biscuit earrings in her hands while Sandra cuts away. She can see Sandra in the mirror but she can’t really see her own hair. She has to trust that the outcome will be right.

  Ivy’s new hair.

  It is the same violet-black but instead of that shimmery bowl-do, it is now shorter and fashionably spiked. Chaos hair, Ivy likes to call it. Ten-thousand-volt hair. Wonder hair. Ivy just LOVES her new hair. What else is there to live for?

  Lily Davis’s computer lust unabated.

  It was one of the few times Gordon and I were across the table from each other at a meal. It was after Pryor was born, so I wasn’t working my fork and spoon, just rubbing Pryor’s back as he gurgled and grunted there on my shoulder, trying to eat my hair. Okay, I plunged in. I brought up the subject once again of getting on line, just one computer, one for all to share. “It saves money on mail,” I pointed out.

  He slowly shook aspirin from a bottle, put them in one cheek, then stuffed almost a whole yeast roll in the other cheek, then chompingly mixed it all together, swallowed some of it, then, around the rest, he said something like this: “In the future, they’ll implant very dinky little computers in babies, right between the eyes or maybe the brain stem. And this will cause the entire population eventually to raise their right hand all at the same time, or wiggle their toes, or shout this or that, turn their heads all the same, maybe sleep all at the same time during certain events. These computers will be free of charge. In fact, they’ll be the law. Why not wait for then and be a model of compliance?”

  I picked up a vegetable, pea or something, and tossed it into his plate.

  He laughed. “Bombs away!”

  The prayer.

  The dining room, like the parlor and the kitchen, is cluttered with books in towers, plastic milk crates of files, bags of yet-to-be-answered mail, and is also wallpapered in blue but no gray clipper ships and anchor patterns repeating. Or orange flowers and pink parrots . . . the kitchen decor. Just a white-dotted sheer blue; except that the big maple beyond, aflutter with breezy purply-red leaves (what’s left of them) and the blinding yellows of the woodline beyond that come to invade through the glass and turn the walls into wagging, bouncing, watery squares a thousand shades of lavender.

  You see there is the table. Coffee cups and papers. Every straight-back dining room chair occupied by a man. Even the several extra chairs, captains and rockers. The corner hutch, as we know, is emptied since long ago of Marian Depaolo St. Onge’s best china.

  But some of her homemade ceramics remain, wedged and mashed between Gordon’s journals, newsletters, and files. Boarded up as all the others, another small fireplace. The room is cold. Rex has not brought any of “his men.” Only these Settlement guys on hand, now wear the patch.

  The boy Mickey, being both one of Rex’s men and a new Settlement resident, got swept along by the grave whispers of Cory and Jaime and Butch at meals. And so he is here, eyes open on the ceramic cherub he remembers from an earlier meeting here, up th
ere in the catty-corner dish hutch. Bubblegum pink, the cherub’s skin. Would his nephew Jesse, so recently dead, only two years old, limbs just twigs and vapor, having sort of starved to death (or is it that cancer possesses you and its invisible mouths suck out your fat?); would Jesse already look as dreamy as that winged one? Would he have that little curvy pleased mouth? Mickey isn’t paying any attention to the prayer that the New Jersey militia guy, “Pastor Lon” is rattling off.

  But Gordon is. You can tell. His eyes are open, too, but squinting at his coffee cup. His shortish-longish dark brown hair has burst into a bunch of cowlicks for no reason.

  Rex’s eyes are open, too; you can always be sure of that.

  Cory and Butch just look at the middle of the table, one set of eyes Passamaquoddy black, the other that brimming mix of THE County. And his, Butch’s, eyes seem more public, less cryptic these days, now that he has that gallant Rex York mustache to compose his mouth with. And all the thin smoky soups and war drums (inverted white pails) and covenants of his hoodied brothers and sisters in anarchy, make revel in each of his light-brown irises.

  Pastor Lon had started his prayer by promising God he will join others in keeping (Mexican and Somali especially) immigrants out of America. “They are breaking the laws of the Constitution, which is God’s law and God’s will, because they themselves are illegal.”

  Mickey notices the tip of the chubby too-pink cherub’s wing has been chipped off. A gritty white spot shows.

  Pastor Lon goes on in a pleasant voice, his mouth and cheeks practically match the cherub’s, sort of curved up at the corners. “And God, the Father and Creator, power of all powers, You call us today to enact Your will and law concerning sodomizers. We know your wrath at those who wickedly disobey your will and your law against sodomy . . .”

  Mickey’s eyes slide to the faces of Jaime and Butch and Cory. All three pairs of eyes are now politely closed, hands folded. He glances at Eddie Martin, Butch’s dad, who is putting off an explosion of smell, like marigolds but probably not marigolds. But then maybe, yes, marigolds. Settlement people never see commercials to guide them out of embarrassingly smelly homemade soaps and greasy salves. But if you are wearing Old Spice (which Mickey is not but smells like a goat in rut and rat piss and ferment); but let’s say you smell like Old Spice and you are among Settlement people, you will stand out like a madly twinkling Christmas tree.