The voice of Mammon observes.
See sheep, there you are bunched at the gate! Sheep do not see beyond the gate. Sheep and democracy! The combination is hilarious.
Graffiti written on a wall inside one of America’s “inner cities.”
IF VOTING COULD REALLY CHANGE ANYTHING,
IT WOULD BE ILLEGAL.
—Emma Goldman
The voice of Mammon (earlier in the twentieth century).
Saddlebag gas tanks will cause a few fiery deaths but are cheaper to make. We will still clear a profit, even after hard lobbying, annoying lawsuits and a number of fair settlements. You figure it in. No sweat.
The voice of Mammon (now almost the twenty-first century).
Merchandise in towers, in piles, in giant high teetering walls, saves space. Space is money. You expect a certain number of claims. A few crushed consumers . . . boo hoo. Yeah, they sue. No problem. It still comes out that we’ll look good in the next several quarters. It’s like floor wax. You figure it in. No sweat. Even after you lobby the stoutly smiling safety regulators, you make millions. Yes, stoutly. America the beautiful! She’s an ace!
Concerning the aforementioned particular details,
the screen—
is blank.
The screen shows us some men being escorted to court.
Scary evil types. They are handcuffed. Here he is, Wayne Plotkowski, yet another weird and crazy man who has cut his victims into pieces. And here is John Kurtz, who took his victims from their night shifts at all-night Stop ’n Rush stores, stabbed them and stabbed them and stabbed them. And here’s Jobi Allaf who, without provocation, blew away two young cops who tried to nicely arrest him in the streets of LA . . . see the faces of those young police officers here . . . they had families! And here is David Cliff James and Jon Dolly, both with known armed-militia connections, arrested in Colorado on Monday by the FBI for possession of illegal weapons. THIS IS PURE EVIL. A GROWING EVIL. WORSE AND WORSE EVERY DAY. MORE EVIL IN THE STREETS THAN EVER! We hate these evil men, don’t we? Nice people HATE evil men. WE HATE THEM WE HATE THEM WE HATE THEM. We FEAR them. And prisons cost so much. And court appeals cost. SO COSTLY. Taxpayers take the burden. These EVIL WEIRDOS are draining our country. Five governors speak tonight about why the death penalty is so practical. And habeas corpus soooooo impractical. KILLLLLLLL THE EVIL SCRUNGIES!!!! Kill ’em fast. Save America for decent hardworking nice people who never break laws and are tired of seeing their taxes soar. Clean up the streets. Clean up the courts. Empty the garbage pails of all these inhuman terrifying types. Get practical. Get tough. Privatize prisons! Privatize police! Private is good. More efficient! Death is cheap! Bleeding hearts are expensive. Cold and mean is the way. Think of your darling little Megan and Tristam. Bleeding hearts ruin futures. KILL! KILL! KILL! Death to garbage!
In a future time, Claire St. Onge (the age-fifty-or-thereabouts, obese, and bespectacled Indian woman Ivy met previously) remembers that day.
What was she after? Even today, looking back, I couldn’t tell you what was in her head that morning. Whatever it was that caused her to impose herself on us. To move those harsh speculative blue eyes over every man, woman, and child like counting heads, tallying something. But our eyes were on her, too, maybe a few outward stares, some sidelong glances. And our arms went around her, hugs and welcomes, some unconditional welcome, some conditional welcome, mix and match, this is the way we had, over the years, become thus, a single big red pulsing heart. We saw that she was this stalwart little rig, beautiful and funny. With an attitude. With posture. And when those husky-voiced remarks weren’t coming like barks from that mouth of hers, you noticed that mouth, how it looked so small and pink and inculpable.
She had the power to destroy us. And the vulnerability to be destroyed. And how do they say it? It’s in the cards. And our little gamble with the media, which had such high stakes, had now officially begun.
The Settlement.
Nearing the last hundred yards of the rutted road, Ivy finally asks about the thick clumsy cables that run along on stout poles to her left, twice crisscrossing overhead.
“Electricity,” Gordon tells her, raising both eyebrows a few times meaningfully.
“From the wind?” Ivy offers.
“From the wind,” Gordon confirms. He smiles, gazing off. And then he frowns and works his mouth around so the mustache is punctuating a kind of scramble of anguish. She is nearly breathless with questions but sounding like a reporter will be a mistake.
Edward grunts, his eyes on the lumpy road.
As they round a curve, the road is less steep, and the trees open out to rolling hilly fields of wildflowers, sheep, a lot of sheep, and a dozen or more brown and black goats with white ribbony tails like deer. And there are cattle, a lot of cattle, many dozens, mostly brown and white, some more like your western longhorn, huddled together in a chummy way, others busy at pulling grass. Mostly meat cattle. Dozens of calves. Some quite new to this world. Off in another area, brown and cream Jersey cows, ready for milking, wait and stare. No tails lift and slap. It is now, for the moment, a fresh fly-free morn.
Ivy sighs. “I heard windmills take a lot of maintenance.”
Gordon: “Oooooo, indeed.”
Edward: “Oooooo, indeed.”
Ivy: “Thus, aren’t they impractical?”
Gordon grins. “Yeah. And keeps our tinkering teens occupied. But you’re probably thinking about large, corporatist schemes. Those would take place with the purpose of efficiency, of cutting working hands out of the equation while sucking millions from US and state treasuries. You see, it all depends on one’s goals.”
Ivy squints. “So windmills aren’t—”
Edward giggles, says, “They’re jungle gyms. They build strong bodies and light up brains and poof up pride . . . all that.”
“I see.” Ivy nods and nods.
Edward says, “It’s all about kids.” Then he tsks in a good-natured way.
Gordon says, “And we have wind-solar cooperatives around the state . . . very social . . . very tight. Like church. A holy spirit thing . . . almost.” He yawns. Mouth like a lion’s.
And across the field, in the stripy shade of young maples, a cluttered sawmill area, the three roofed-over mills unattended, a chips truck with a white blower tube at one end waits unmanned, disconnected, the red cab beaded with dew. Stacks of blond boards on a flatbed truck. No logs on the brow. Just bark and a worm-hunting robin. The robin bursts into the air, then blends into the lower limbs of the young trees.
Swallowing questions is only half the struggle. Ivy tries not to look too hard at the bare parts of these two shirtless men who walk with her, lest she be unprofessional, whorish, boorish. But the scarlet of the bandana around Gordon’s neck is vivid, even from the corner of her eye, and it keeps startling her, keeps calling to her. Ye gods! Eyes ahead!
“And what you just said, Edward, about kids . . . it being really about kids. Someone said that kids painted the mermaids and devils on the big windmill and all the little windmills are—”
“Kids are in charge here,” Edward says. He yawns.
Gordon grins, all those twisted bottom teeth in the dark of his beard.
Ivy sees between the sawmill and quad of buildings a giant lavender swan on a truck. And a cotton-candy pink swan on pallets. Others, lemon yellow, fresh leaf-green, sea-mist green-blue, Creamsicle-orange. Some yet to be painted. From breast to top of swan’s head on arched neck, these are taller than a tall man. “Swan boats?” she wonders.
Gordon nods.
“Made by kids?”
“Well, they’re in the mix.” Gordon is not actually looking at the swans. He is hefting the horned head to the other arm, clenching his teeth against another yawn. Eyes spill with yawn water.
In the distances below flutter the efforts of peppy kazoos. Somebody isn’t tired yet? But there is a melody that is old-fashioned, East Europeanish. Skirling in its haunting refrain. And oh, the cool air is slinky and s
weet!
Edward is mumbling something. Two of his words intercept Ivy’s thoughts: SAWMILL and HELL.
Now off to the left is a sunny terrace of little cottages. Really cute and spiffy. Not grim and denuded like the Mount Carmel building in Waco, Texas, which some of the nameless callers keep comparing the Home School to, as they compare Gordon St. Onge to David Koresh. Ivy flashes a look at Gordon, then back to the little cottages, some done in natural shingles, some with clapboards painted that old New England white, others done up in Easter egg colors or, yes, swan colors: pink, lavender, duckling yellow, buttercup yellow, and grass green, each with a set of solar collectors boxy in their, yes, inefficiency.
Edward kicks a rock.
Meanwhile, on the treed hillside westward, a few shady cottages and good-sized Cape Cod cottages are nestled in brotherishly. Teeny yards, most with white picket fences. Some blessed with stuff, like yellow, blue, and white plastic industrial pails, everything saved in that shrewd old Yankee way. To each of these residences a cable runs, connected to that feeble electricity lifeline that rambles up the mountain to the intermittent generosity of wind turbines, mermaids, gremlins, devils, and the surplus energy of youth.
Fifty or more yards below is that set of connected main buildings where the solstice march had begun last night, a sort of squared U-shaped complex that reminds Ivy of the set of a Hollywood Western, with its roofed-over boardwalks and screened piazzas, much wider than the boardwalks. The whole array has a chunky look, all these porches facing each other across the too-cozy quadrangle, the quadrangle only faintly grassed, mostly toy-strewn. A few tall trees with no lower limbs.
And no surprise to Ivy, a constructed menagerie of huge, murderous-looking prehistoric reptiles, Tyrannosaurus rex, brontosaurus, and that rhino thing with the ruffled bony head, spikes at both ends and a brain in its tail. And there is a winged dragon with frowning brow and actual glass eyes. And suspended from a twenty-foot tripod, a silver space saucer with sculptured frog-like green martians standing on the roof. And there by a set of picnic tables stands a smiling purple cow . . . cow-sized. Ivy says aloud, “Yay gods.”
Tyrannosaurus rex is taller than the ridgepole of a two-story barn, his leering grin way up there between the trees. Twenty-five, thirty feet? Hollow like the mythical Trojan horse. In one robust hind leg, a little doorway. Winding stairs inside take you to the head. In the face, the teeth are really bars for safely viewing the world below.
Ivy laughs one big HAW! “You’ve been busy.”
Gordon snorts. “Not me.”
Eddie says, “They weren’t built. We caught ’em in the woods.”
Ivy really loves these fun guys. Joking. Plaguing, as her grandmother used to call it.
“It’s plain to see, this place is child-friendly.”
To this, Gordon just grunts.
Bricked walkways go everywhere around the quadrangle, and to and from Quonset huts and parking lots and sheds. And there are handicap ramps.
Electric buggies are parked on the quad, their colors as bright as the menagerie, as the windmills, as the merry-go-round, as Gordon’s weird kitchen. And color is not a stingy thing, is it? It is from generosity and joy that color comes, no? Well, yes, and pricy enamel paint.
Ivy says pleasantly, “The colors here are wonderful.”
Gordon narrows his eyes. Was that a stiffening in his shoulders? At first she thought it was a proud response to her compliment. But now she’s not sure. In the absence of A NICE NORMAL INTERVIEW she can only read this guy as you read a strange dog. Will he bite or can I place my hand on his head?
They walk on, Edward grumbling, mostly to himself, husky whispers about tiredness, heat, and again the word “hell.”
Though three sides of the quad are framed by the porches and boardwalks of the big shingled U-shaped building, there is no fully open end. The large Quonset huts, sheds, pens, trucks, and equipment clutterishly stuff up that east side maw. Made of sheet metal and cement block, the Quonset huts have tall wide bays, open now. Ugly but welcoming. Sure looks nice and cool and damp inside them. Ivy, trudging now, less stumbling than on the mountain, she detects this now thickening, sweet, pollen-smelling air is heading for a full boil by noon.
Edward stops at one of the Quonset huts to join a group of men and women, all smoking, and he wastes no time lighting up. Someone calls him “Eddie.”
In another time zone.
Coming to an abrupt stop (making a bit of a rubber-on-tar eeek sound) at the ticket dispenser of a parking garage near New Orleans, Louisiana, a small metallic blue Japanese-make car sports this bumper sticker: MY CHILD IS AN ALFRED E. NORRIS JR. HIGH SCHOOL HONOR STUDENT.
Back in Maine.
Solidly on cement supports at the rear left corner of the Quonset hut where Eddie smokes is a little shacky house with a communications tower rising up. Almost like at the sheriff’s department and jail, but without the dishes.
Gordon sees her looking at the tower but offers no explanation. Bide your time, Ivy. Bide your time. All will reveal itself, Ivy, she tells herself. And what’s the big deal? They are shortwave buffs, right? Or whatever. She shifts her heavy shoulder bag.
Seavey Road. Three miles from the Settlement’s dirt road entrance.
Brianna Vandermast of the sunset hair sniffs the open tube of Snowflake White. She is fifteen years from her birth, formed with a wretched defect. Now she begins to jiggle, her honey-colored eyes halfway closed. She can see in her mind’s eye the bull’s-eye of his sun, the one that rose today, that celebratory fever ball.
She touches her homemade easel with her work boot, her friend.
Only her incomplete sun lays splayed on the rag paper, but his voice, which she has never heard up close, is shouting to a frosty crowd in a canyon of cities, “Liberty!!” This also in her mind’s eye, an ample moon.
She twists the cap back onto Snowflake White, the tube in her woods-scarred fingers gives as if pulsating with blood. One of her legs jiggles some more, not a dance but the madness of her heat. Now she spins, her heavy hair a fountain. The octagon window of her little room is the hole of a cannon, loaded, facing west. She unbuttons her shirt. Heat pours from breasts round enough to nourish the world. Could he be father, she mother? Of a universe. This room is not really a cage. She picks up Cadmium Red. She knows just where he is.
The inside story.
A preteen boy with cinnamon skin and black hair, in nothing but yellow shorts, is darkly frowning. He speeds by Ivy and Gordon on a newish-looking English bike, heading away from the porches where the food is laid out.
“Hey Termite!” Gordon greets him a moment after the bike swooshes by.
“Hey,” the boy calls back in a quiet, routine touching-bases sort of way.
Everywhere are chickens and the mess chickens make. Greenish splats on the brick walkways. A lost feather. The feather is black with iridescent blue.
Ivy almost picks it up.
Loudly, chickens bok! bok! bok! among themselves, that single chicken word worth a paragraph of good news. And roosters, who when they crow look like they are stretching their necks to be sick, but instead, out comes declarations of jubilation, pride, and possession.
Gordon St. Onge swallows drily, or is it hungrily? Then a short suppressed sigh.
On the metal roof of one of the piazzas, a white-and-black cat washes behind her ears with a licked paw.
People are heading for the porches in droves. There are so many screen doors going into the screened porches, some with steps, some with ramps.
Some young people, late teens and twenties, rush past Gordon and Ivy. These are also progressing toward the food.
One guy with an eared cap like babies wear and white and black face paint sidles up to Gordon with a wordless eye-rolling secret-code-sort-of look, then trudges hurriedly on.
Ivy squints suspiciously at this, her baby blues just narrowed cracks.
A crow cawlessly glides quite low through the openness, a fairly creepy Edgar Allan Poe
Nevermore expression on his face, looking for small “earthly remains” to snack on. Or is he trying to warn Ivy?
“Well, the food must be really good,” says Ivy to the side of Gordon’s face. “You wouldn’t see a stampede like this toward any of the restaurants I’ve experienced of late.” She chortles. She looks to see if she’s made him smile. Okay, so he’s sort of smiling.
Inside the porches are dozens of doors that take you into the big side-by-side rooms of the buildings. Like a motel. And there are windows, low and many-paned, mostly uncurtained. The windows and doors, woodwork and shingling and numerous porch columns are no modern rush-rush job. These are about pride and craftsmanship. Pleasing to the soul.
Most of the inner doors are closed meaningfully. A few are wide open, emitting the sounds of kitchen work. Some areas are shadowed, some beginning to show slashes of light from the eager summer sun. The whole massive horseshoe-shaped building is stained brown, dark as creosote, while doors, windows, and trim are painted dark green. It’s really handsome, even as it all seems so hard-pressed by kids and teenagers, and that mishmash of projects and tools and worktables, deep couches, homemade-looking tricycles, and slamming doors. And many long tables heaped with food.
And into this screened space Ivy and Gordon enter. As he pulls open the screen door, Gordon is still awfully quiet. Though as small kids now race past, headed out, he speaks their names in a grave low voice. Like prayer. This strikes Ivy as significant. She makes a mental note. Erin and Tyler. Caitlin. Pria. Rozzie. Rhett. Delanie. Montana. Max. Rusty. Draygon. Katy and Karma, Andrea and Gabe. Wheatalo. Josh. Justin. Jason. Jason. (Yes, two Jasons.) Alex and Sharolta. Seth. Nick. Keya. Shawn and Kedron and Renata. Benjamin. Aleta. Zheebwaklay. Jenna. Jason. (Yes, another Jason.) Olivia. Meesha and Nora. Frank. Anna.
In a future time, Claire St. Onge remembers.
Okay, so we welcomed her.
Hungry?
Shifting the bright yellow papier-mâché head to his other arm, Gordon had held the screen door open for Ivy. And now here is Ivy in the heart of their world. He still says nothing, just looks into her eyes. Warmly. He dips his head in a way that means follow me. Her eyes flick to that oh-so-red bandana knotted around his neck, tries not to glance again to all that splendor below it. She feels around inside her shoulder bag with one hand, hoping to locate a Kleenex to wipe her sweat-gelled face.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 10
