Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  “Ho! Ho! Hey ho hee!” the small king in the distance ahead is wailing.

  From the rear, pressing onward, a tall youth dressed like a biker (maybe he is a biker) and another tall teen, not a good sport, wearing just jeans and a basketball-type shirt in a shameless exhibition of plainness. The teens, much taller people than the soldiers of the army, hang together in a tight group as if unprecedented natural disaster might separate them. One of these teen girls is so blonde, her hair is just tumbling watery ice. Another girl, also quite blonde, wears a black robe like a judge. These teens go at a faster clip than Ivy and her escorts, and soon they are merged into the elbows, shoulders, legs, and weird heads up ahead, and then merged into coiling mashy dark gray dawn and crisscrossing light beams.

  No childly voice asks the usual question, Are we there yet? After twenty-five minutes of this climb, it is a few lower voices that ask it.

  Now the drum picks up. The BRUOOOOOMMMMMs closer together, quickening the sense of drama, and now a crashing of many small drums and the perfect rhythm of at least fifty sets of spoons, but it seems to Ivy like thousands . . . CHINK-CHINK-CHINKA-CHINK! CHINK-CHINK-CHINKA-CHINK! BRUOOOOMMMM . . .

  Meanwhile, kazoos buzz merrily with tunes that don’t match. Ivy sort of loves the kazoos.

  Up ahead, the woods on either side are ready to part. Ah, yes, there the treeless rock summit of the mountain against the whitening sky.

  . . . CHINK-CHINK-CHINKA-CHINK! CHINK-CHINK-CHINKA-CHINK! BRUOOOOOOMMMMMM . . .

  At least a hundred voices begin a chant, imperfect and layered, toddlers, kids, and teens, women and men, each layer a dark ribbon drawn through the riddle-like core of the whole. Each of Ivy’s questions have become balloons, too full. The whole scene spins. The human sound is impermeable. “COMMMMME SUNNNNNNNN . . . COMMMMMME SUNNNNNNNNN . . . COMMMMMMMME SUNNNNNNNN . . .” Over and over and over with the BRUOOOOMMMMM and the tweedles and the CHINK-CHINK-CHINKA-CHINK! and the heavy breathing between and the yeowling of babies and now two more electric buggies come humming past, straining and jerking over the ruts and rocks, a masked youth at the wheel of each. And to each, a passenger, a crone or a geezer.

  The last one is a buggy, styled like an ATV, bigger tires, less luxury, but humming quietly like the rest. Who is the lucky passenger, legs dangling? Ivy can see the bald eyeless head and patient shoulders of an ancient damaged and blinded man, his arms around the driver, the sweet thick night-dawn forced across his cheeks and skull. No mask. Just a star of dark paint on his forehead. And he smiles steadily, serenely, though the rough ride jounces and thrashes him.

  Ivy has a flashback to the IGA and the woman with tomato soup and crackers for a face. What is it that makes Gordon St. Onge purr over life’s lost or weird or badly damaged creatures? Kindness? Of course. Of course. Mr. St. Onge is a kindly person. Right? But those women in the kitchen the other night, stopping in a busy day to help a small dog. Eerily ordinary people.

  CHINKA-CHINKA “COME SUNNN.”

  Everyone is itchy. Damp. Everyone trying to keep in step and keep up with the chanting. An elbow brushes Ivy’s, passing by. An iridescent robe flicks against her leg, passing by. A man with a papier-mâché palomino horse’s head stumbles past. The chant goes on, “COMMMMMMMMME SUNNNNNNNN . . . COMMMMMMMME SUNNNNNNN . . .” and the sound of it is as something before memory, before calendars and computers, before plastic, before even the wheel and the flint and the knife, older than greenly lit waters, out from the first mating, before the first troubled cry. Old as June frogs. And in the distance, behind Ivy, way down below, some mashy unmoving water beyond the Settlement, frogs’ voices continue, continue, continue unbroken.

  The sky is growing more pale, like nervousness. Some of the soft June stars are drowning in it. A hundred yards away the first brave wood thrush tweedles and rattles out his watery soprano. The terrible masks and hats and tails and wigs all flood past, Ivy among the slower marchers, these dropping way back. A huge papier-mâché grasshopper head rides on a slim teen girl’s body. A shirtless teen boy wearing a necklace of warty gourds painted silver and rusty small old-timey oil cans, his face painted primary red, keeps washing his weak flashlight over certain faces to make them complain. “Squeeze me! Squeeze me!” a phoebe pleads from distances, some woodshed or cottage eave, his castle. Now robins are warming up. Now the teacher bird, “Cheechurr! Cheechurr!”

  Ivy itches. Ivy hurts. But whenever anyone gets a look at her face in the sloshy beam of a waved flashlight, she smiles. A preteen girl shines a flashlight directly on Ivy’s striped socks and heavy 1800s button-up boot-shoes and nods fast and approvingly, thinking, of course, that this is a costume.

  The sky takes on the look of pearly day.

  Up ahead, filling the sky . . . what is it? A fifty-foot structure of wood and steel, its blades and turbine at rest. A windmill designed in the way of the “old countries,” with a wooden door you can enter. And all around this structure are a dozen or so modern steel derrick two-blade windmills, one or two in the style of upright egg beaters. The rest can’t be serious. About thirty chest-high little windmillesque sculptures. Made from old table legs, wire, broom handles, tree limbs. Mostly tipi-style. Some pink. Some zebra striped. One gold, a true brother of one of those merry-go-round beasts. And yes, some with heads meant to turn in restless air. Kiddie-tech. Could this be meant as school?

  The armed and chanting army is the first to reach the summit . . . and dogs, of course. The army circles around on the edge of the highest drop-off of rock that overlooks the east, the narrow end of the pond that’s known as Promise Lake, and the village of North Egypt.

  The chanting army is sticky. It is a grave and beaten-looking army, flushed, wide-eyed, jiggling with nerved-up overtired leg willies, gummy hair, overdressed or barely dressed, bug-bitten, bleeding and itchy, bruised, swollen, ripped and torn, all smelling like hot copper pennies and the unslept night, and a cheery warm lipstick smell from several sources, which are those faces glorified with zigzags of crimson Avon. Giving the center of this army its great eminence is a single orange plume rising out of a World War II army helmet. No member of this army is over four feet tall. Ivy has been noting all of this. Indeed, the evil of militarism seems not to be discouraged here. Evil? Or ignorance? Or what? What could be worse? Ivy narrows her eyes.

  More chanting painted faces arrive at the summit. And now the teens in their fraternal clump. And now the adults. Casual, mostly flop-eared dogs are everywhere, looking pleased. The electric cars hum to a stop. Slowly, slowly the light of dawn is now framed in meaty red clouds in the east and the chanting of high and deep voices intensifies. “COMMMMMMMME SUNNNNNNNN!!!! . . . COMMMMMMMME SUNNNNNNNN!!!!!! . . .” CHINK! BRUOOM! CHINK! BRUOOM! CHINK! BRUOOM! CHINK! BRUOOM! faster and faster and faster all the smaller drums rattle and kazoos splutter and a single flute soars, all coming to an unbearable climax like revel, like rage, like a pounding bed, like birth, like war, old and new. Not school.

  So what is it? In her recent memory, Gordon St. Onge’s voice: “If you were to write this story now . . .”

  Now.

  Now at the summit, the dawn is giving everything cool silvery and fevery pink contours and flashlights go off one at a time, two at a time. Through the climactic chanting of rough and sweet voices and the chunk-chunk of spoons and the soaring of the flute, Ivy sees a man-shaped creature standing with two other man-shaped figures, each with a small child riding his shoulders, each man sporting a papier-mâché head . . . and all are shirtless. Ivy’s pale eyes widen. She knows one is Gordon St. Onge by his size and the way he moves. And that big copper belt buckle. He has a red bandana knotted around his neck—not in cowboy fashion but with the ends rolled up under to make it more like a dog collar, and his grimacing papier-mâché head is painted a bold enamel yellow, and out from the temples of his big weird head soar horns three feet long. Yes! The Viking!

  Ivy pushes both palms hard against her eyes. All the flashlights are off now. People stand at attention. Only the
dogs are circling. Ivy sees that the little towhead kid on Gordon’s bare shoulders has a good grip on each of the horns like he’s steering a bicycle. Ivy watches hard as Gordon absently scratches the dark hair of his chest and she edges over to the sheer rock drop-off and looks down nearly a hundred feet into the tops of trees and now the pearly and flushy sky is changing to cream and now to lemon and now to a brighter sweeter lemon all within their picture frame of hostile red gold boiling clouds. And the words to the tumultuous chant have changed now. “COMMMME SUNNNNN . . . COMMMMMMMME SUNNNNNNNNN . . . YOOOOOOOO ARRRRRRRRE THE POWERRRRRRR . . .” CHINK-CHINK-CHINKA-CHINK! BRUOOOOOOMMMMMM . . . “WEEEEEE ARRRRRRRRRE THE POWERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. WEEEEEEE ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRE AND YOOOOOOOOOOOOOU ARRRRRRRE ONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNE!” CHINK-CHINK-CHINKA-CHINK” . . . this for another twenty minutes . . . and another . . . and now a sturdy finger of fire in the distant treetops many towns away. Then a wriggling of that finger. Now it leaps! And now it is blinding. And the chanting and flutes have stopped cold.

  That’s it. A choreographed, well-planned, well-timed ceasing of their noise. But this isn’t really silence because thousands of chirruping tweedling birds are still speaking from thousands of dark trees, north, south, east, and west.

  The silently bellowing red-orange morning sun falls on each human face and demonic mask and glossy-eyed fake head. Red sun in the morning, sailors take warning. Or is it just pollution and steam from the melting poles? Is it just the end of the world?

  Such a quiet army. Such dignity. Each chubby or slight hand easy on its weapon of choice. Each set of shoulders squared. Such readiness. And yet a sense of submission to the immeasurable force stationed there in the east, growing bigger. The source. Of. All. Life.

  Ivy’s eyes keep returning to Gordon St. Onge. And soon she realizes it’s not just she who needs him in her view. She looks around at the hundred or more faces painted with blood-gold light. All these eyes seem to behold him as much as they do the sunrise. Oh, how humans have need for a leader. They always fall into that old-as-ice pattern. Big Man, sometimes Big Woman. Part of the elementary, top of the Needs List: The Great Figure, air , water, temperature, food, and rest. His place inexorable even if he’s no more than an inelegant goofball illusion.

  Okay, what’s next? She expects now the sermon by Gordon, who else? Most surely, the moment for a self-made messiah’s messages from God is ripe, and these followers are most surely primed.

  But all Gordon does is monkey around like a kid, pushing at some three- and four-year-olds with the sole of his work boot while the tyke on his shoulders shrieks and hangs on to the three-foot horns for dear life. A mob of screeching little kids now comes running. A lot of towheads, with grease-painted faces and glittering eyes, grab Gordon by the legs. Some to try to wrastle him down, some just seem to enjoy hugging. And one kid sorrowfully wails, while a teenager turns to the burning sky and howls.

  One of the small homely white dogs sits down and howls. And now kids of all ages are howling. Some teenagers who have a coyote’s yodelly cry really perfected join in. And now a few happy delirious screams. One fine sort of Swiss-style yodeler. All this, heard from a mile away by the more civilized parts of East Egypt village would be unsettling.

  And three miles away.

  In her little attic room with an octagon window to her left and tall lace-up work boots on her feet, fifteen-year-old Brianna Vandermast plunges her brush into fudgy yellow-white paint and begins today’s work on a sun that will rival the real. Her genius never leaves this fumy room.

  This is all she knows of the St. Onge Settlement’s solstice celebration. Simply the sun. The rest is rumor.

  Her attic room is hot. Her broad forehead beads and drips. She coughs. The cigs, the paint. Her serpents of risk.

  She has never been to the Settlement and yet in both of her strange eyes there is a knowing and in her brain a muscular thick discord. Her time of staying away is running out. She knows there is a plot in the works among her brothers.

  The ugly moment.

  Now the people have begun to head back down the mountain to a big breakfast. The downhill trek will be, of course, easier. People will be chatting, carrying their papier-mâché heads or masks or funny hats, kids whining, a lot of tripping and falling, kids with sleepy eyes and tired blistery unreasonable demands, but no mosquitoes as the air has now gone blessedly chill. The new sun will paint the high tops of the higher-ground trees as the people step along below into blue shadow, down . . . down . . . down to the good smells of that heavy breakfast.

  From across the little zigzag of stragglers, still standing at the summit, Gordon St. Onge, not yet shed of his grimacing yellow-horned head, points at Ivy, a command, like a cop singling someone out of traffic, ordering her to pull over so she can get a lecture and summons.

  She stoops to pull up one of her green-and-white striped socks as the huge and ridiculous horned figure weaves its way between small Settlementers and even smaller windmills, over to her. He is no longer carrying a kid on his shoulders, just bare shoulders, muscled, and angry. People scoot aside to make way for him to reach her.

  Nearby, one of the little square steadfast white-haired women, who has been occupied helping a two-foot-tall dinosaur get shed of the bottom half of his costume so he could pee, calls to Ivy, “Someone should get you some peroxide for those scratches on your face.” Ivy had kinda forgotten her culvert battle scars.

  The woman glances at Gordon, now standing by Ivy. His big yellow papier-mâché head is leering but his body still looks angry. She says to Ivy in a small voice, “Well, I shall go along. I see you have a friend.”

  Ivy watches all the women leaving in a whirl of kids and dogs, teens, men, and humming electric buggies. Just three people remain. A clean-shaven man stands with his papier-mâché toucan’s head under one bare arm, smoking a cigarette in the shadow of the monstrous old European windmill. He seems to be waiting for Gordon. Ivy remembers this man from the piazza last night. He’s not a small man but he seems elfin as he stands there with the windmill looming overhead.

  Why are its six shingled walls all painted black with faces of ghouls and spirits and flushingly real-looking mermaids and she devils in reds, purples, and veiny taupe? Haw! Haw! Haw! These are no ladies! See the orange and fiery eyes of the largest she devil blazing with power. Why is power the obtrusive theme of everything Ivy has seen here so far? Where are the answers to the questions that Ivy must pretend not to want to ask? Haw! Haw! Haw! Haw! Ye gods! Light my fire, baby. Haw! Haw! Heavy equipment operator need not inquire, only to move mountains. Haw! Our Ivy gives Gordon’s chest a slow seductive study, then says with her big laugh, “I know it’s you.”

  No reply. And he doesn’t pull off the head like she expects him to, and at first this seems so funny to her. She blinks happily and says, “Moo!”

  But the longer he stands there, the moment turns ugly. She cannot see his eyes, only the anger in his hands and arms. Like a spider is watching her, a big spider. Ivy stops smiling, feels discomfort drop over her.

  The sun expands larger and higher and warmer. Less red.

  He says slowly, “What . . . am . . . I . . . going . . . to . . . do . . . with . . . you? I can’t let you out of here with your tongue still attached to your mouth . . . you fucking little play-dirty reporter.” Finally, he reaches to pull off the head. And she sees that although the body and the voice are tight with threat, his pale eyes are not dangerous, just part sullen, part jokey.

  She snorts. “I thought there was about to be a human sacrifice.”

  He chuckles. “Wasn’t the walk up here with all this stifling gear enough of a human sacrifice?” He turns and winks at the other man and calls, “I’m ready to eat a sacrificed hog. What about you, Edward?”

  “Me? Yuh!!” the guy calls back, putting a heel to his cigarette butt.

  Gordon reaches with one hand, almost brushing a knuckle over her cheek. “You’ve been bleeding.”

  “All parta the job,” she says wi
th a sniff.

  And so they turn toward the road, Ivy shuffling along in her shiny black button-up bootlets between the two men. Down on the road ahead of them are some young mothers, early twenties, Ivy’s age. And real small kids. The kind with fat, padded, rear ends, who stop every three feet to squat down and admire a rock or twig. One old waddly Labbish black dog. One circling, bouncing young Labbish black dog.

  Ivy doesn’t look at either of the men who accompany her but talks to the rutted rocky mess of road at her feet. “You think I’m hostile. But I’m not hostile. I’m not trying to catch you at anything, Gordon. There was nothing here tonight anyone could call awful. It’s no different than . . . than Halloween! Or some nice festival. Mardi Gras or something. It’s not exactly something you should be criticized for. I . . . I think it was exciting . . . and creative . . . and . . . and great!!”

  Edward, the clean-shaven man, marvels, “You liked it, huh?”

  Both men look at each other and bust out in wild laughter, gone into that stage of delirious exhaustion where everything is funny. Edward hoists his big toucan head back on. “You call this fun?”

  And Gordon makes a really stupid part chicken, part Three Stooges, “Bluurup! Bluurup!” sound and both guys laugh hysterically and stagger around and Edward stumbles, goes down on one knee. “Call the ambulance! Shoot the bird! Shoot the bird!” which makes no sense at first until Ivy gets it, the bird is him, the toucan. And at this moment, Ivy thinks, there is nothing prophet-like about Gordon St. Onge.

  Is this, to our Ivy, the disappointing end, the beginning, or the middle?

  The TV screen calls out to America.

  See the November elections coming! (Yes, it’s now only summer.) Large on the horizon on smooth wheels, bubbling and popping and tuneful. RED. WHITE. BLUE. VOTE! VOTE! It makes all the difference. Things would be so good if everyone voted. Voting is everything. See the big appealing faces, purple and greenly tinted screen faces. Hear their words. A blames B. B blames A. Pick one. A or B. VOTE! VOTE! Voting is your right. Voting is democracy. Democracy is easy. Go go go! Vote vote vote! Make your choice. A or B.