Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  “Okay, funny man. It’s your ass,” Ivy snarls and hangs up.

  Ivy.

  “Shit!” She hates herself. And now she even fears herself. Certainly she fears for her job. Other reporters stay cool, smooth as cream. They’d still be in Gordon St. Onge’s good graces. Faces controlled, voices almost electronic. Ivy Morelli was never meant to be a reporter. Maybe a prison warden, dog trainer, a cop . . . or a school principal . . . yes. When you have people in handcuffs or you are four times their size, it doesn’t really matter that you say everything wrong.

  Her editor, Brian Fitch, three desks away, is playing his computer keyboard like a concerto, his expression serene. She turns her back on him. She sees her half-consumed high-fructose buttercup-colored fruit drink on the edge of her desk. She sighs. She remembers a test that was given in sixth grade.

  Which would you rather be doing?

  Pick one.

  A. Writing a poem.

  B. Doing a science experiment.

  C. Watching the construction of a new bridge.

  D. Debating the pros and cons of flying a kite in a thunderstorm.

  E. Reading about the Battle of Waterloo.

  Of course Ivy would rather be watching construction! All those half-naked bodies. All those tans. All those come-hither voices and catcalls and winks to her and her girlfriends. (Which today would be against the law; yes, illegal voices, lawsuit catcalls, and heavy-fine-to-pay winks.)

  The test continued.

  Which would you rather be doing?

  Pick one.

  A. Helping someone bandage amputated limbs.

  B. Playing chess.

  C. Visiting a fashion designer.

  D. Reading about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

  E. Watching a man operate a bulldozer.

  Ivy had imagined the man on the bulldozer to have dark sunglasses, a hairy chest, and a tan the color of a proud lion. All the grouped choices were like this. One titillating centerpiece surrounded by the painfully deadly dull. Or fraught with tiled walls and bloody quivering goo.

  A few weeks later the test results were distributed along the ruler straight rows of her class. This was not a test with a score. No ho. This test told you, in a word, what your career would . . . should be.

  Other students were nurses, secretaries, history teachers, lawyers, commercial designers, artists, and so forth. But Ivy would be a heavy equipment operator.

  Not a reporter.

  As a heavy equipment operator, she could say stuff like, “Okay, funny man. It’s your ass,” and it would have no ill effects.

  Ivy glances around at Brian Fitch. He looks so right and okay with himself. She considers all the others, flipping through their notebooks or gliding through Record Sun library info on their screens. All of them meant to be reporters.

  The grays.

  Mouthless, yes. But our goals would be inconceivable to you even if we noisily explained. Our technology (fashioned and propelled by the combined mind that us grays, yes, have), we confess, has swept some Earthlings aboard temporarily, some human. We are careful to pick those seen by their society to be unreliable, in case they remember and talk of us from their wet moving concave mouths. But so far, none have remembered much, mostly confused shocking dreams of what other Earthlings often do to one another in the name of “great” systems, in the name of “reason” and “advanced” medicine or “therapy” and “national intelligence” or “national security” or “defense” or “freedom.” That Earthling humans have these words with which to confuse each other causes us to mouthlessly and sadly grimace.

  Again, we rarely invite Earthlings onto our crafts. We are committed to noninterference. Other than a few warnings and comfort beams sent through sensory perception to flush their cheeks, we keep our cool. Ah, Earth! The prickly paradoxes! Mother Nature’s heartless laboratory. Mother of skulls, mother of superlatives, mother of the eensie, the roots, the blooms, the blood, dust devils and ice, milk and hungers; mother of webbed-up flies in all their forms. We ache with the wish to pluck you all from her cruel tournaments of excellence. Ah, here comes one now. Earthling in her craft. Red with four wheels. In our unseen dimension, we hover to watch her with our seeing hearts, our beating eyes.

  The press shows up unannounced.

  Ivy doesn’t call to plead this time. She just shows up, her low sporty car slipping between Gordon’s green-and-white Chevy pickup and one light color compact car. It is almost nine at night, but still there’s a slab of soggy daylight in the higher open fields, and through the trees is the tired paleness of the west. The air is sweet and stout. The air is cake. Pie. Pudding. But no. It is a sweetness far beyond the human hand.

  Ivy sings, “Oh green, the grass! Buzzy the bug! Ah paradise!” as she rushes the house, her shoulder bag slapping her hip, head bent. Whining mosquitoes whirl around her hair, ears, neck, alight on her arms, prick at her legs. She swipes them off. She says grittily, “Paradise is hell, Ivy, baby.” Ivy izzz happy. Ivy the child reporter. Ivy all mean innocence. Which way will the hurt fall?

  “Yerff!! Yerff!!” A dog inside the house. Smallish sounding dog.

  Ivy is dressed tonight in her wholesome young-person look. Oversized off-gray US Marines T-shirt. White shorts that show her strong legs, shaved and golden and glossy. And sneakers. And thick synthetic-fiber pink socks. And a white paper painter’s cap worn backward on her short bowl of lustrous dark hair. And that silent circle of pretty fish surging around her slim arm.

  She sees light. She hears murmurs. Do you, the reader, ever notice how it is when a bunch of humans talk? Ivy hears that murmured kind of rutabagarutabaga through a set of open windows. See there the long screened porch. Rutabagarutabagarutabaga. Ivy has never been so ready for the SCOOP. The news, yes, but something deeper and wider, something as gritty and swarthy as the hole from a hardworking excavator. Out come the rocks! Out come the beetles and badgers. REV! REV! REV! Clang! Another big rock rolls from the shovel. Thump! Ah! It is ALL OF IT RIGHT HERE!

  She takes the two steps to the porch in a bound. She jerks the screen door wide. Squinching her eyes for better seeing power, she peers down the porch’s length. Sees many chairs, all in positions of abandonment.

  The inside door to the kitchen is open and she can hear the simmering cooling down rutabagarutabagas beyond, due to their probably having heard our Ivy’s superhero-type landing on their door sill.

  Ivy’s heart is skipping all over the place, beating in her neck.

  Dog squeals, a cry of pain or terror or something.

  Next to Ivy’s head, a set of steel-pipe wind chimes hang like the legs of a creature freshly killed.

  She hops onto the threshold, pausing now to inhale deeply that summery old farmhouse smell. She also notes that there are no smells of supper. No scorched meat. Nothing fruity or veggie. Nothing casserolish or stir-fried speaks to her nose. Big kitchen. Wallpapered. A gaudy modern print of jungle birds that you could either find gorgeous and brave, or just tacky. Most wall space is concealed with teetering stacks of wooden apple boxes and registered milk crates all stuffed with tools, work gloves, jars with nails, and little doohickeys of hardware, rusty mixed with new. Cupboard doors are shut tight. They seem clean. She can’t make out in this dim light any kiddie fingerprints.

  Skyscrapers of apple boxes lean toward Ivy. They yearn toward her pink socks, slender tattooed arm, white paper hat, welcoming her. The rutabagas go even more hushy, then they are no more. The humans do not welcome Ivy. No one rushes her way with tea or even just a warm hand. There is a pause in the rotating movement of the earth.

  There’s only one source of light, cold and fluorescent, a fixture low over a broad heaped workbench and desk in an impassable-looking open pantryway that is connected to what is possibly a shedway or second pantryway section of the ell. The door is blocked by yet another, smaller, desk, this one heaped with papers, references, manuals, folders, a few books in a happy-go-lucky topsy-turvy stack, a roll of postage stamps i
n a glass jar, a box of new envelopes, a loose calendar page, a roll of duct tape, masking tape, every kind of tape, little towers of tape, even audio tapes, these in a big weirdly shaped glass jar, an early model electric typewriter, a flashlight, a beer bottle, a can of pens and markers, and very fancy postal scales. No Bibles. Not much sign yet of heavy-duty religion. No guns.

  The rest of the kitchen, including where Ivy stands, is in a kind of desolate blue shadow. Cold to the soul.

  The dog cries out again.

  “Lay back, Pepper,” a woman’s voice commands.

  Ivy can see no dog, only the backs of several women squatted down in a cluster near the lighted desks, all of them pivoting now on their haunches to glance up at Ivy who is standing there in those blue shadows, Ivy with her heavy shoulder bag and her feet wide apart in a way that looks empowered, US Marines across the chest of her T-shirt in letters that seem now about a foot tall.

  Two short, square, ruddy white-haired women rise to their feet. One says, “The reporter gal,” in a not-too-surprised way. The other one just smiles. Like a tightly gloved hand.

  Ivy returns the smile. “Yes. I’m Ivy Morelli . . . Record Sun,” and reaches forward for the hand of the nearest of these two little ruddy women, yes, they are shorter even than our Ivy. The nearest woman gives no name, just pats Ivy’s hand and coos with one of the more dimply soft sounds of the great rutabagarutabaga.

  Ivy asks, “What do we have here?” in her most friendly among-girls voice and stepping closer to the cluster of still-squatted women, sees that there is a woman seated in the middle of them all. It’s an old-style wooden desk chair with wheels and arms. Painted gray. This seated woman is as close to the fluorescent light fixture as she can get, hunched over with a grip on a flashlight and a small muscular truly ugly, flat-faced, curly-tailed white dog who is jerking and twisting and grunting hotly like a pig.

  “Trying to find a splinter,” speaks a voice behind Ivy, the voice of the woman who had rubbed Ivy’s hand. And Ivy is sure that voice is the same wonderfully ripply voice she spoke with on the phone a few days back.

  Ivy counts five women. She burns each and every one of their faces and forms into her memory. And her cold blue eyes, accentuated by their dark lashes, glide all around.

  When one of the women, a medium-aged blonde, sees Ivy doing this, Ivy hunches her shoulders and lets them drop in a guilty-little-girl way. And she sighs. She wonders what is beyond the many closed doors of this room. She wonders, wonders, wonders, wonders while the women are dealing with the job at hand, big grip on small dog.

  “She’ll give up the struggle after a while, but only if we don’t give up. If we give up, she’ll know she can win next time,” insists the woman hunched over in the desk chair. She, short-legged. She, round as a bubble. And could she be age fifty? American Indian face. Metal-frame glasses. Long hair, parted in the middle, black and gray. A man’s blue chambray work shirt fits taut over her truck-driver-sized arms and mighty, oh, very indeed mighty breasts. She doesn’t raise her eyes to Ivy, just keeps her head bowed over the straining dog. Her dark-gold dimpled hands on both dog and flashlight wear only a simple wedding ring, nothing twinkly, nothing ornate, and yet the hands themselves are resplendent with their task.

  Ivy asks, “What kind of dog is that?”

  The Indian woman speaks without looking up, “Mastiff Chihuahua mix.” Some of the women chortle over this.

  Ivy smiles. “In other words, unknown.”

  The Indian woman sighs, “No one can trace Pepper to the Mayflower, that’s for sure.” And now she raises her eyes to Ivy. Unreadable flat eyes. Through the glasses maybe something is lost. Does that dimple by her mouth mean warmth? Reflections purling and whirlpooling on the glass parts of those old-time spectacles play with our Ivy’s mind.

  One of the short square white-haired women speaks, not the one with the ripply warm voice and Maine accent, but a New York–type accent. “I would offer you some lemonade, Ivy . . . if you were at my house. But—”

  Ivy cuts in, “This is Gordon’s house, right?”

  The woman seems not to have heard, but chatters on. “Nothing like lemonade on a warm evening after a hot day,” and then she is saying something about little tea cakes, how she and Bev keep a lot of tea cakes for surprise visitors.

  Bev. Bev. Bev. Ivy takes a mental note of this name. Bev. Who is Bev?

  “Thank you anyway.” Ivy tries to look friendly. She smiles. But her chilly eyes move from one short square white-haired woman to the other in a calculating way. If Ivy were an actress, she would only get the parts of killers or evil sorceresses. She twists the visor of her painter’s cap to one side, “I can’t stay long anyway. I just dropped in to see if Gordon was around.”

  “He’s not around,” says the Indian woman a little too quickly, without looking up from the grunting, wild-eyed dog who is locked into paralysis inside her powerful arms.

  Ivy looks back to the two white-haired pinkly white women. Both seem about sixty. Both have very short straight Ringo hair cuts. No perms. One wears a men’s-style shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows. The other a T-shirt that reads GRAND CANYON. The picture beneath the words is hard to make out with the bent head of a younger blonde woman blocking Ivy’s view of it, but one can assume the picture is of the Grand Canyon, all orange and purple and splendorous. Both these white-haired ruddy women look bouncy and fit and as audacious as Ivy. Marines T-shirts would not look improbable on them . . . as the caissons go rolling along ♫ . . . hup! hup! hup!

  Ivy’s pale eyes slide onto the two younger women, both blondes, and yes, indeed, all these women seem like normal average everyday women. Surprise! Surprise!

  The dog ki-yi’s sharply.

  “It’s okay, Pepper,” all the women speak in unison.

  Now the flashlight is in the hand of a blonde woman. The Indian woman leans in very close to the paw in question. The little bony paw now seems to be the center of a very intense spiritual universe. The yellow light of the flashlight on this paw! Everything else lit dimly blue and insignificant and filled with indescribable metaphysical pain and Ivy isn’t breathing at all.

  Suddenly, Ivy sees that the two blonde women must be identical twins, or at least look-alike sisters. Ivy exhales slowly, the strap of her bag slips off her shoulder, then kinda positions itself at the center of a small painted wooden table beside her, a table that is oddly bare. She explains, “I have a twin sister. Identical. Her name is Ida. You know . . . Ida and Ivy.” She rolls her eyes, sighs, giggles. “What are your names?”

  “Jacquie and Josee,” replies one of the blondes with a big happy laugh.

  Of this woman who has spoken, Ivy asks, “How are you all related to Gordon? Just friends?”

  The dog screams horribly, then silence.

  Ivy catches the eye of the other twin. “You live in this house?”

  “Naw! Naw!” Having both hands on the dog, she kind of dips her head around to indicate the room. “Diss not cozee enough for me. I like knickknacks . . . dem poofy coushes, me.” Her smile is sad. This sadness intrigues Ivy.

  “Well there!” exclaims the Indian woman. “You see that toenail? That’s it. It’s her toenail. It’s busted off and split up inside the quick. No wonder she hurts.”

  There are comforting doggie words from the group. “Poo poo poo pooo pooo” and “teeny wints is sore.”

  The Indian woman lifts her round face, her glasses flashing the flinty, square, bluish light. “Somehow she got it crushed or caught it in something—”

  “All t’em dogs is always underfoot,” complains one of the twins.

  “I’ll bet it’s those damn plywood floors in Willie’s shop. Those spaces between,” surmises the ripply voiced white-haired woman.

  No sounds of kids beyond the many doors. No mention of kids. No sign of kids’ things. Ivy is looking and listening for all she’s worth. She sees that one twin has a long thick curly ponytail, not at all a cheap blonde color, but a very handsome streaky tawny
and silver. What the other twin has is the cheap blonde color, commercial and orangey and cut quite short. They are late thirties, perhaps forty. Both have plastic large-frame modern glasses. Their mouths look tender. Their shoulders sloped and soft. Both lively small women, dressed youthfully, one in a blazing pink cotton top, utterly pink, poundingly pink, a pink painful shaft to each eye if you look long; the other gal in a sleeveless black shell showing shapely golden shoulders and arms.

  Ivy tries to imagine Gordon St. Onge in this kitchen, his height, his heavy walk, his scary unpredictable quick moves. Yes, this is his space, lair of the monster yet to be defined. Where in the hell is he?

  “Where do you live?” Ivy asks the nearest twin who stands up and stretches and Ivy sees that upon the chest of her black shell top simmers a small bright cross. This blonde glances quickly into the bespectacled eyes of the Indian woman, then frowns.

  Ivy knows now. These women have been instructed. This is ugly indeed. She wants to blurt out, Where are your children? She wants to ask, Are you in danger? Does he insist God has chosen him to instruct you? Does he talk about an Apocalypse?!!!! Does he insist upon your submission? Why are you here?!!!!!!!!!!!

  The Indian woman throws open her arms and the small white dog nearly flies, hits the floor at a skid, hopping three-leggedly past Ivy out onto the dark piazza, bangs itself against the screen door. Door jerks open. Dog gone.

  Ivy’s voice has an uncharacteristic apologetic squeak to it. “I didn’t plan on stopping by. It was a spur of the moment thing. If I’d known, I’d have made my white-chip cookies, or something . . .” She falters. “On the way through town here, I checked at a store. But it was just closing. He shut the door right in my face . . . this guy did. I begged him to take pity. But he was hard-hearted.”

  While the white-haired women insist gifts are not necessary, the Indian woman, brushing off the wide thighs of her jeans, declares, “It’s a nightie-night town.”