Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

With narrowed eyes, she asks, “Then why do you do the stupid thing tonight?”

  Ivy breaks in. “Is there something I can help with?”

  This is ignored.

  Gordon lifts the girl easily up over the front of his shirt to his shoulder, cave-man style, and she moans. “Pleeeeeeze Gordie! Just one book!” And Ivy can hear the husky-voiced piteous pleading all the way up the creaking stairs and now crying in the room above . . . and then a scream . . . and sobs . . . another scream . . . a lot of sobs . . . heartbreaking sobs . . . and something hitting the floor with a thwonk. A book? No, something much larger than a book.

  Ivy, take note of this opportunity, she commands herself and scoots over to the fluorescent-lighted desk of piled papers and calendar pages and mail. A THICK manila folder (yes, stone-age filing folder) with CLIMATE CHANGE scrawled (as if by a bear) across its middle. An old yellowed book lies open. Old-style 1940s print. Dull-looking as all hell . . . Calls for the Sub Treasury plan by Alliancemen were met with vituperation by both parties, sometimes murder . . .

  And what’s this? She peels up one edge of a piece of scrap paper that is clipped to the page. A man’s handwriting in blue ballpoint ink reads: Waving the bloody shirt. Then scribbled below are names, including James Hogg and Charles Lamb. Cute. And maybe there’s a Pete Turkey and Bob Chicken and Madeline Cow. Oh, and here’s another scribbled-on piece of scrap. Farmer’s Tribune. But what really begs to be investigated are the three old-timey rotary files, the thousand-card-apiece kind, thick and bristling with white, yellow, pink, and blue cards. One rotary is flipped open to:

  Nelson, Linda

  Turner, Maine CSA active

  Next one is:

  Newell, Rick and Eve-Lynn

  CSA Egypt pick up

  Then:

  Norton, A.

  CSA Egypt pick up

  Each of these includes a phone number. Some have mailing addresses, some with incomplete addresses. No e-mail. No fax.

  And what, Ivy wonders, is a CSA?

  Now:

  Nugent, Tim and J.

  Peppy G. Route 113

  Fryeburg 4 units

  14-foot rotor diameter, 6kw RPM-v-current output

  monitor brake, √ surplus power.

  Ivy leans closer. Turns the file to face her. She flips a few cards.

  Perkins, Don

  Hiram Hill Road left, right, left by burned camp

  one existing

  42 inch diameter

  25 watts

  15 mph

  Tip up

  No program.

  Ivy flips a card. But now there is a real bloodcurdling shriek upstairs. Ivy snatches her hand back fast. She heads back to the table, her heavy shoes making stealth a bit of a job. Bloody shirt. Vituperation. Lamb. Hogg. No program. And Jane. What to make of Jane?

  In a while Gordon reappears, forcing the errrnking swollen door shut behind him, and says tiredly, “That was Jane.”

  Ivy nods, waiting for more, waiting for an earnest explanation of the sobs and shrieks, but he says no more.

  Ivy says pleasantly, “She’s a gorgeous kid.”

  He goes to the table and gathers up spoons and cups. He places her beret with care into her hands.

  Ivy asks, “How old is she?”

  “Six.”

  “She’s tall. Really big for six, isn’t she?”

  He makes fast work of putting the sugar and jar of cream away. He buttons the top button of his shirt. There’s something in his teeth. Crunching. He is not interested in making conversation about Jane. And yet he looks at Ivy with such tenderness, apologetic, almost fawning, a look she’s seen on his face before, even before tonight, the day of the merry-go-round.

  She says, “Well, I see you’re getting ready to head out. And me . . . all caffeined up and no place to go but home.”

  He smiles, blinking now, pushes something into his mouth. “I’ll walk you to your car.” Again his teeth crunch on something.

  Ivy presses. “Where on earth are you going? I guess I’m not allowed to know, huh?”

  He takes her arm gently, really gently, and steers her toward the door. She sees the aspirin bottle in his other hand. He is eating the things like candy. He says, “Don’t be mad.”

  She says, “I’m mad.”

  He says, “How mad?”

  She says, “Real mad.”

  He hangs his head with theatrical chagrin.

  She pulls away from his hand and scoots ahead of him out onto the dark piazza, hefting her bag more securely onto her shoulder. There, only a few feet from the open door, are two men. She gasps. How long have they been there? One is standing slouchily. One is sitting still in a rocker. The one who is standing is young, maybe nineteen. Thin. Deep-set eyes. Too deep. In the near dark he looks skeletal but in a way that skeletal is appealing, sort of. If you can appreciate a wraith. Ivy can make out that he is wearing two belts, one a gun belt. Dark holster. And darker, the handle of a gun. His long mountain-man beard is black. Thin. Just a few long, long scribbles cast over the front of his dark plaid shirt. The textured dark edges of this young guy transfuse amicably with the summer night. Not in a buttery way, but slinky. He just looks at Ivy, no hello, no nod. And for once, Ivy is dumbstruck. The man in the rocker is older, forties, clean shaven. In fact, he’s starkly shaved. Like the winner of a shaving contest. His jaws look hard and glassy and so white he kinda glows against the dark porch behind him. But he smiles at Ivy. And he says, “How do?” or “Hello,” but so softly, it’s more like a mime.

  Gordon takes Ivy’s hand, leads her down the steps, screen door slamming behind, now out across the twilit yard to her car, the cheeping and gloinking of frogs so close it is all around, over and under, a universe of ancient sound, older than music, old, timeless, but oh, no, not permanent; as we know, it could be eclipsed, it could be erased by the megahuman footprint, or so it is said. And Ivy says, “You don’t trust me. I mean you really don’t trust me.”

  He looks up at the sky, as if for rain. No sign of rain.

  All of the field (crowned by the unseen merry-go-round) is fireflies. Sailing along and winking, smearing trails of their hiccuppy “wattage,” their one-of-a-kind sex appeal, so the glowery, weedy, gray-flush dusk between them looks black.

  She sighs. She squashes her beret down over her hair, right down to her eyebrows.

  “It’s nothing personal,” says he.

  “Can I . . . come here again?” She despises the snivelly weak little-girl way her voice is coming out.

  He steps up to her car and opens the door for her.

  She ducks into the seat, pulls the door shut.

  He reaches down through the open window, feels along the door handle, snaps the lock in place, like tucking her in, father-like. He explains, “Everyone is welcome here. Absolutely everyone. We are not elitist here. We are not a closed society. We’re just a family. I have always encouraged people to visit—”

  She interrupts. “Except the press.” She gives him a big tight smile. “You do not want the press.”

  He says firmly, “I do not want the press.” He stands back away from her car now.

  She starts up the engine, which is still new and obedient but has a kind of cheap toy-like buzz.

  He tells her, “People out there where you live and work . . .” He gestures toward the west where the sticky summer daylight that had haloed the mountain for so long has finally died. Just that ghostly solstice gray. “They have been agreeable to a certain kind of order. A new order. Or rather an old order made more orderly, like, you know, gourmet here, garbage there. They’ve gottem a collection of laws that are unanswerable. Their power has no face. There are a collection of laws and a collection of sickening events that are both nature-made and man-made, but both exacted by that faceless power. That system that has no heartbeat but is alive. And the media are an arm of that power. You, my friend, no matter what you do, it will always turn your hand for you . . . as long as you—” He stands up straighter, grins sheepis
hly, wipes the top of his hand across his whiskery mouth, now makes a gesture like forget everything I just said. He blows up his cheeks around a wooshy sigh. He reaches in and rests his open hand on her beret, endearingly. The father. “Drive slowly, little one.” He backs away, eyes into her eyes, then heads for the house.

  The grays.

  Her scarlet craft buzzes away. We follow at a safe distance, our craft fueled not with sparks or smoke but with the circulatory currents of ourselves, the technology of our living ghosts, gray as dust, tender and rubbery as an exhale. So maybe we cause the June leaves to stir a little.

  Ivy in her car a mile away from the St. Onge place, thinking aloud.

  “He really is a nut. Psychotic or something. Holy cow stars! I’m lucky to be alive.”

  Observe our Ivy being poisoned (yes, really poisoned this time).

  She is no longer afraid. Just mad. The cheap but earnest engine that pulls her along sings as she turns in to the driveway of a real estate agency in North Egypt, makes a wide turn, then out on the road, heads back to the hills.

  When the first stone walls of Gordon St. Onge’s land reappear, Ivy pulls the car off and parks on an angled sandy shoulder. She locks up, leaving her beret on the seat, hoists her bag, and starts walking. “Fuck his goddamn eyes, that arrogant son of a bitch!” she snarls.

  With no flashlight, she can’t see anything but a paleness of pavement, which is similar to the saggy gray solstice sky above, which shows along the thin squiggly gap between the overhead trees. The best she can do is feel her way along with one foot. When the first car comes along, headlights burning through the ferny semifoggy downhill distance, she hurtles into the foliage and waits for it to pass. She has hurtfully found out there is a deep culvert here. Rocks, roots, stumps, mooshy moss, mushy ooze, and an aluminum can. And probably a nation of wood ticks on every leaf while every leaf is sweating greenly, swallowing her legs and arms, her face and neck, creeping, crawling, ruffly exhalings as it sniffs our Ivy’s ears and hair.

  After about twenty-five cars and twenty-five ordeals with the culvert and that complicated sticky embrace of the woods, all in less than ten minutes, she realizes there’s a suspiciously large amount of traffic tonight for Heart’s Content Road, a road in the middle of nowhere, leading to nowhere, right?

  From among the hundreds of letters and writings of Gordon St. Onge, boxed, filed or piled around his kitchen and rooms, is this smoodgey carbon copy of a lengthy philosophical letter dated from the mid-1990s. It is addressed to Herb Butler of Berkeley, California, a professor of Victorian-era literature, and one of Gordon’s ten trillion old friends. Eventually, it’ll wind up in the hands of “authorities” who “attend” the Settlement’s subversive public events over the months to come. Here is an excerpt:

  . . . How can we explain the imaginations of children, that persistent stuff that comes from a place other than our instruction, comes from the heart of play, comes raw? We erroneously assume children know nothing. We assume we fill their emptiness with our aspirations, disciplines, experiences, laws, and mortal dreads. But maybe we only push aside rudely what they are born knowing, because surely they’re born knowing the several million years of the human saga, which has been scratched like frost on their shining DNA . . .

  As if the merry-go-round had come alive, and, yes, Ivy is here. It is almost dawn.

  The marching army is warming up, all soldiers armed with nothing less than a good heavy stick. Some have rapiers with ornately carved handles. And guns. All fashioned out of wood, foil, cardboard, or metal tubing. Orders are shouted. The army mills about, however. And nobody listens.

  The long connected porches around the Settlement’s quadrangle tremble and creak. The clatter of swords and various armaments and banners are flashing in the rosy light of open doorways and the rows of citronella candles set along a vast sill. Solemn tweedling of three or four recorders. One nice flute, someone with talent. Countless merry reckless kazoos. More shouted orders. More milling. Hours pass. Soon it will be dawn. But for now the fireflies make you dizzy because, across and upward, the wide murky fields and sky seem to have reversed themselves, mad flashing stars below, murk above. But there has not been a perfect switch. That sticky piece of meatless bone in the bluish broth up there. That is the waning moon.

  A man takes chewing gum out of his mouth and leans forward to fussily attach it to a coffee mug on the porch sill, then stands, adjusts his Vietnam War bush hat, and says, “I guess t’iss iss t’e time.” (Incidentally this is the fellow Ivy had seen in the truck with Gordon and the tyke that rainy day.)

  Men and women rise slowly, reluctantly, from chairs while others step out from the many lighted doors. More have assembled on the quadrangle and parking lot, those who are still arriving from elsewhere, from “out in the world,” meaning mostly other parts of Egypt. Or Brownfield, maybe.

  “Ready for this?!” one voice calls in a spongy, tired voice and maybe a little walk-the-plank resignation.

  “Ready or not!!!!” a laughing voice calls back.

  In many hands, many flashlights. But see the night isn’t black, not true night, only that smelterish dun, wide-open, swollen, dizzy June, the Great Pause.

  Now the low BRUOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMs of a massive drum, five or six languidly-spaced beats, then nothing.

  A baby makes an ugly sound, getting ready to really complain.

  Motherly voice comforts, “Sweeeeeeeee.”

  The army clomps off the many porches onto the grass and brick pathways, churns into the parking area between the Quonset huts, between the clumps of visitors, maintaining grave soldierly expressions.

  “There they go,” a thin scrawl of a voice observes, an elderly voice.

  The men, women, and children who have arrived in cars, trucks, jeeps, and on a few good-looking Harleys are now mixing with the Settlement folk, joining in step behind the army, adding more flashlight beams and lanterns to the undark. And now a coordinated clinking of scores of spoons. Clinka! Chink! Chink!

  A huge form swirls past, caped and hooded in black, all but the face, which is made up in greasepaint like a skull.

  The big drum BRUOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMs.

  See other huge shapes with faces made monsterific! The look of meanness is all around.

  Several small buggy-sized cars humming like refrigerators cut slickly through the procession. The drivers of these cars have paper bag faces or papier-mâché heads or greasepaint or rubber masks in varying degrees of hideousness and splendor. One has dozens of tiny yarn braids in all colors of the rainbow. The little cars sport dim headlights that bounce over the rough ground and make a broad stagy spectacle of the backs of people’s legs and their rears and the faces of toddlers turning around to stare. Chink! Chinka! Chink! hail the spoons.

  Mosquitoes hunt for flushed salty skin.

  Mosquitoes find flushed salty skin.

  The recorders don’t seem to be trying to play a real tune.

  The swords are restless.

  The marching feet are out of step.

  Clomp! Clomp! Rattle-rustle-clink-clank! Chinka! Chink! Tromp! Tromp! Scuff. Scuff. They march east. Then upward.

  And Ivy is among them, amazed.

  Yes, she had stood with them for those hours before their ascent. And some of the women recognized her. Offered her goldenrod tea. No, thanks. Given her a tall jar of heavenly cool water. Down it went. But now they have begun the march. They stick close to her so she can walk in the wash of their ceremonial flashlights. She has seen that the two short square white-haired women (the ones who had “welcomed” her in Gordon’s kitchen a couple days ago) work their spoons deftly, practiced. One is dressed as a cowboy: chaps and a Wyatt Earp hat. The other wears that familiar Grand Canyon T-shirt but with a Minnie Pearl paper-flower hat. Close behind them, unfamiliar women ring pretty bells and back at the rear of the long river of marchers, a single cowbell has been insistently clanking.

  Now a boinging wish-wash of many more flashlights sunny-up this rutt
ed lane, heading up through the woods. Actually, the humid sticky cobweb of sky is now throwing new light enough to see quite well by without all these persistent flashlights on Ivy’s feet for gawdsakes. Ivy hurries way ahead. Oops! Ivy on all fours in a rutty roughy stone-strewn sort of pit trap.

  Voices rain down from above.

  “Oh, dear!” and “You okay?!” and “You hurt?”

  There are dogs, of course. The long-tailed kind, mostly with black Lab, golden retriever, pit bull, and Rottweiler connections, tails tuned like stiff rear antennas and tongues ribbon-like and hanging from the sides of their mouths. They are interested in how Ivy is not upright. And, seeming to be everywhere at once, are countless small white dogs with pushed-in faces, curled tails, and pale-lashed pig eyes. The Willie Lancaster dogs. Ivy brushes herself off as she stands. HAW! HAW! “Okay, sport!” she dismisses the nearest ugly white thing slobbering on her sock. Kids offer condolences. The women worry she’s broken a bone. HAW! HAW! Ivy’s good cheer settles the air. “Leaping alligators, I’m not even going to sue you!” HAW! HAW!

  Ivy intends to memorize. No questions. Just the sleuth with her senses flaring. She sees, marching at the head of the army now, a king. Wears a small crown with enormous jewels, a small purple robe with a realish-looking ermine border. And small sneakers. “Ho! Hey ho!” he bawls. Or maybe it’s a she.

  Trees close in, monsterific.

  The pale solstice night gets tighter, and, yes, nighter, would seem like pitch-darkness to unadjusted eyes, the utter squares of brilliance of the Quonset hut bays sliding away behind. Now the rutted lane rises up sharply. The true march up the mountain begins. The larger human forms can be heard at times to be really huffing, not keeping up with the fast-paced army. Everyone burns with rivers of sweat and feeding mosquitoes and hardworking hearts.

  From out of the leafy almost-darkness someone’s watch flickers red digits.

  A tricorn hat passes.

  “Who are yooooooo?” a small voice wonders of its companion but there is no reply.

  Two raccoon-tail hats. And a head with waggling antennae like a fairy or an elf. These hurry past. Ivy’s brain records.