Now Gordon steps around her and leads the way past a slumped old couch where a long-legged dark-haired toddler has needed no time at all to sail off into sleep. On this porch, Gordon St. Onge seems even taller, the slanted ceiling near the screened side barely an inch above his head. Against the inside wall between the first couch and another couch—which is heaped with cast-off costumes, papier-mâché heads, rubber hands, scarves, paper flowers, hats, gauzy veils, carved swords, spoons, and bells, and homemade kazoos—he easy-carefully parks the horned head. Ivy notes for the many-eth time that the horns are real, from some creature, utterly deceased.
The smell of smoked meat frying is thick.
Standing behind Gordon, Ivy watches a guy in his mid-to-late thirties who is just getting to his feet from retying and old woman’s shoe, a woman in an expansive black rocker with carved dogs heads above its back. The guy is quite short. Ivy is taller. But he’s broad-shouldered. Thick-legged in his old-timey plaid Bermuda shorts. Haw! Bright blue T-shirt that doesn’t conceal his large almost hairless belly and his deep belly button. Pug-like face. Eyes big and round, blue, like his T-shirt. His face and arms are tanned, even the freckles. Carroty red beard and carroty hair are ripply, the hair stands up all over his head and there’s a pink impression across his forehead. Must’ve just pulled off one of those papier-mâché heads. But that carroty hair, it’s his real hair! And the beard, real. Ivy blinks. My god, he looks just like one of those adorably ugly troll dolls that were the rage before she was born.
The guy glances at Ivy, then to Gordon. His eyes widen, reading something on Gordon’s face. He turns away suddenly.
Is Gordon choreographing an Ivy-boycott here as he did in the IGA?
Ivy’s eyes flash to the row of elderly people, three in wheelchairs. Most are dressed winterishly, in sweaters, long pants, and heavy socks. One of these oldsters is embroidering a small pillow. Her hands are lumpy, knuckles like acorns, close-to-useless-looking but the embroidery roses she has nearly completed are satiny and perfect.
Ivy hopes one of these ancient knobby beings will smile at her. But none of these old people look up into Ivy’s pretty face . . . oh, Ivy Morelli with her cold shrewd baby blues! But now she hears the whine of a fast-going wheelchair behind her and shifts around to see a white-haired guy . . . but he’s young . . . a VERY blond youngish guy. White-blond dreadlocks-dense ponytail like a fanning out of lumpy grapeshot from a touched-off cannon. Very pink scalp where his hair parts. One knob of an earring. He has just whizzed from the kitchen door and is now heading out. Nods to Ivy. Winks. Ivy nods back, straining to make her cold eyes warm, less narrow, more wide open . . . the appropriate giddy look. The guy gives the screen door a hard shove with his right foot and out he goes.
Gordon whispers to a chubby young boy whose eyes flash to Ivy’s face, then down to the corner of the table that he stands next to as he nods and nods, then gallops purposefully away. Ivy sees he wears a ballooning smock of black spots on white . . . a clown? A cow?
Like the piazza back at Gordon’s house, here wind chimes and mobiles hang in her face. There is a mess of lawn chairs and old wooden rocking chairs, stools, and old town-hall-style folding wooden chairs as well as kitchen chairs with pretty seat cushions. But Gordon’s narrow piazza was just the length of his Cape and its ell. These six vast piazzas are nearly as big as town hall meeting rooms, and even the boardwalks all swarm and thump and squeak with life and with this heavy, drizzly celebration of food. There are many long tables, many bowls and platters, all quaking and quivering with flesh and vegetables. Someone cackles, “Oh, it’s the Grand and Exalted Poopah of the Physica and Mystica!” while on another porch someone groans, “It’s already warm as piss out.”
Oh, the details. Ivy’s right hand tightens. If only she could take notes! How will she remember all of this?
Ivy says loudly, “MMMMMMM. Everything smells good. First class!” She looks to Gordon’s face. Her eyes silently cry out to him. PLEASE DON’T SHUT ME OUT. DON’T MAKE THEM HATE ME. I’M YOUR FRIEND!!!! NOT A REPORTER. But now her eyes are sliding up and down the open porches, calculating. Friend? Her eyes flick toward the screen and out beyond. Eyes widen. It’s the crow. Perched on the head of a midsized dinosaur. Ivy marvels at this, the crow’s accusing stare. She looks away.
After the thing with the sunrise and the walk back, quite a few people leave in droves, in cars and trucks, same as Ivy had observed them coming last night. But a great horde has remained.
An overtired child on another porch whimpers, then powerfully screams. Ivy doesn’t look in that direction, just hikes up her shoulder bag, which is again slipping.
The motion on these porches could give you air- and seasickness. More swinging arms pass. A couple of thick necks and falling necks, the normal stuff but also some deformities. A highly concentrated mess of deformities. Things too long, too short, too missing. Some bodies just hunched, with swinging beefy arms. Muscle fibers of the back stretched tractor-wide, probably from heavy work and too much maleness. Jeez, how they resemble our tree cousins, the orangutans, hunchy but pleasant-faced. Not totally erect. But still they’re us, Ivy decides.
This is really STUPID, not to be able to ask questions. A FRIEND can ask questions. So many questions keep flying at Ivy, like a blizzard of asterisks, commas, and exclamation marks. Like how many of these kids can’t read? And to start with, HOW MANY KIDS?
Though all the tables aren’t filled, there is a spillover into the more comfy chairs, and while a lot of men and young boys and those Ivy thinks of as monkey men are scooched along one inner wall, some mill about, talking loud, a little bit hyped. One spit-sprays while laughing. There is exhausted edgy aimless energy everywhere. A few people are still outside, sitting on the steps or standing under the trees. The light there at the moment is sloshing from side to side. One red, bloated woman leans against the green shin of a dinosaur, drinking from a coffee mug, watching a dead-looking child sprawled in the shady grass. All are tiredly sinking.
Smoke tendrils rise above a group of women. None seem ashamed. Cigarettes down to the butts like wharf workers. One gal has a silver face. One’s face is purple, her hair bleached orangey blonde. These women are smiling, laughing. Kind of lollypopping around and whispering as one lights up again, flicks an ash; her long, cold, white cig held like an old 1950s magazine ad. Inside on this porch, big casual long-tailed dogs stroll among chairs and tables, kind of smiling. White flat-faced curly-tailed little dogs are zipping around with their noses to the floor. Ivy sees one of them piss on a wall. It seems only she saw the wall get pissed on. She steps closer to Gordon as an army of kids with swords and guns, helmets, and feathers, charges by.
Ivy says loudly (over the murmur and roar of the humanity here), “Cute army!”
Gordon just says, “I’ve called you up some first aid.”
Something catches Ivy’s eye. She sees it is a baby being lifted from a wicker bassinet and held to a shoulder.
Meanwhile, a tiny, child-sized, pale, almost silvery old woman in a pink summer dress, socks, and sweater, is carried by an Atlas-built very Indian-looking teen boy to a deep chair with a tray set up for the old woman to eat on. The old woman is smiling all around. A closed-mouth smile. Like one of those Smiley-face buttons that, as the troll dolls, were once the rage. Ivy is more impressed by the horrors, however, slithering her blue, blue, blue eyes over all those smoking mothers and kiddies with wooden guns, the gateway to real live guns and drive-by shootings, bloodstained bank lobbies and bank tellers without heads, closed-casket funerals and leaping lizards! Yay gods! Front-page news.
The chubby boy with the black-and-white polka-dot smock returns with a huge bottle of peroxide and some cotton balls. He looks long into Ivy’s eyes, bold and warm. He explains in a husky way, “I’m with the first aid crew.” He’s not more than eleven, Ivy decides. “Do I call you Doctor?” she asks.
“Yep,” he replies with his eyes fixed on the scratch on her face.
“Nowadays y
ou should wear plastic gloves,” she warns him. “When dealing with blood.”
He glances up at Gordon, who is turned sideways now listening to two twenty-ish-year-old guys with ball caps and no shirts talking “board feet” and “the order that was doubled.” One guy has an expensive-looking watch but corduroy patches on the knees of his jeans. The other has a lot of tattoos. One entire arm a spider web, a realistic black spider on the shoulder. Chubby boy seems reluctant to interrupt this conversation, just stares a moment at the side of Gordon’s face, then he turns to Ivy. “Well,” he sighs. “Here.” He hands Ivy the cotton and peroxide. “You do it.”
And now he does a really sweet thing. He pats her, kind of rubs her arm, a comforting gesture, while she is twisting the cap off the peroxide. He nods approvingly, still patting and rubbing her arm as she touches the cotton to the open bottle. “Not much blood,” he tells her as he studies her cheek.
Gordon turns now, sees this procedure, winks at Ivy, then resumes the conversation with the two young men.
“What’s your name?” Ivy asks the boy.
“Alexander.”
“You going to make a career out of medicine?”
He looks into her eyes warmly but with a peculiar twinkle that means Ivy’s question is “cute,” as if she were the child, he the elder.
Ivy is trying to decide if he is a healer or a patronizer, a little redneck asshole in the making. She’s almost too tired to work that hard figuring it out.
The day is growing very warm.
People are so hungry, many are already done eating whole hams and other smoky body parts, barely chewed stuff swallowed too speedily, stiff as fabric, bulging and biffing along down that esophagusy pathway between their lungs. Whole platters of pancakes and tender wild birds being consumed, some left with just greasy puddles or crumbs. Jam is being dumped on muffins and rolls in big globs. Cherry jam. Berry jam. Tomato jam. Maple syrup and honey and orangey farm butter. Nightmarish amounts of cholesterol-riddled eggs, jars of cream, spreadable cheeses.
The uneasy Edgar Allan Poe feeling has faded now. Ivy notices only the edge of sweetness that is all around her. And Gordon gives her a sticky too-warm one-arm hug and calls to three silk-haired teenage girls who are swinging platters of eggs and spotted muffins to a table already so obscenely loaded with food that the stuff runs together. “Lorrie!” “Shevon!” “Dillon!”
The three girls flash smiles at Ivy. Maybe it’s the long skirts and bare feet, but they seem incapable of pouting, of sassiness, of ever knowing boredom. Or envy. Even as they reappear with more platters of heavy food, and indeed, all three girls are tall and full-breasted, they seem fairylike and light-stepping, as if the porch’s wooden floor could be clouds.
Now Gordon introduces Ivy to a man around sixty who carries two plastic jugs of something watery, one in each hand. “This is Pete.” “This is Ivy.”
With one sharp nod, no words, Pete bears two teeth: his smile. A cut-grass smell pours out of his faded-blue T-shirt, work pants, stained straw cowboy hat, his skin, even his wedding ring, so it seems. But darn. What’s in the jugs? Would the revenuers approve?
A hurried young woman with a long brown braid grasps Ivy’s elbow and cries out, “Welcome Ivy!” as she sort of flies through to the next piazza.
Gordon takes Ivy’s hand, leads her to a man who sits in a deep chair. He has no eyes. No teeth. Not even false teeth. And not much hair. Ivy well remembers this old guy from the march up the mountain. He had ridden in style.
And Ivy is not surprised to see Gordon bowing down to blow a kind of frisky Morse code on each of the man’s badly scarred temples and the man smiles gummily and his long pale satiny fingers close around Gordon’s tanned forearm and the old voice, high and scratchy, speaks a toneless, “Gorr.” Seems the old man is also nearly deaf.
Gordon stands straight again, rubbing the center of his chest openhanded, staring at two men who are crossing the quadrangle. Next to his head, suspended motionless, is a mobile of pottery doves painted purple with red eyes and red beaks, which match febrificly the red bandana knotted around his neck. He squints one eye, the other eye widening, cheek twitching moth-like, and then deeply, he asks, “So, Ivy. Do you love my family? Do you feel a throb in your soul?”
Ivy laughs. A mighty HAW HAW . . . because of the melodramatic way he has spoken, and yeah, at the idea that you could LOVE a bunch of people, slightly more familiar than a swarm at any given airport. So it is teasing on his part? Or naïveté, the small-world redneck kind. Or?
His pale eyes are staring with intensity for an answer. His eyes are not icy and revealing like Ivy’s eyes, but whirling with layers and junctions and those joshing interstices, as when in his gloomily lighted kitchen he said, “Yeah, I’m for the great white male thing,” and that thing about cutting out her tongue back up on the mountain. This Gordon St. Onge is holding her hostage on a gravityless pitch-dark planet.
She gives her weighty shoulder bag another hike and says, “Who wouldn’t love these folks?”
He smiles here in the heart of his great hive.
Now a teen boy, the one who had carried the old woman, comes to stand beside Gordon.
Gordon turns away from Ivy somewhat, faces the wall of screen.
The boy has a broad face with American Indian looks. Hair somewhat short. Very black. A fresh-looking green work shirt. Sleeves rolled to the elbow. No jewelry. No tattoos. His eyes are as black as possible. His hands are a bit battered-looking for so young a person. He opens one of these hands on the back of Gordon’s neck as if to knead Gordon’s tired muscles or pull Gordon backward by the red bandana. He is the same height and build as Gordon, almost exactly, give or take a couple of inches. And he is all manly seriousness. The two of them stare out at the quadrangle and there on the back of Gordon’s neck the big boy’s big hand remains. Gordon replies, “Yes,” to a question that was not asked. The boy’s jaws had not moved.
Now the boy speaks. “Figures.”
Gordon says, “John get Webb to take his place?”
The boy shrugs. “He said he was going to.”
Now appears a teen girl with short shining brown hair. Her T-shirt reads THIS BODY CLIMBED MOUNT WASHINGTON. She passes by with what looks like a scrapbook under one arm and smiles at Ivy then looks into Gordon’s eyes in a warm significant way. She sneers at the Indian boy. A taunt. Then she is gone, mixed in with the mob. And now Ivy watches others pass, a slim preteen boy with plastic-frame glasses and his arm in a sling, accompanied by a man about sixty or so in work shirt and jeans and old sneakers, followed by a fat brown-and-gray dog with one blue eye, one brown. As this trio passes, the sixtyish guy with the old sneakers gives Ivy’s left arm a squeeze without even looking at her or Gordon. The Indian boy is moving away now to find a chair at the table and from another table a balding man with blondish hair on his arms like two light-colored rugs gets up with his dish and comes to stand next to Gordon as he eats. He asks with a full mouth, “Danny show up? Slisk, slisk, slurp . . .”
Gordon says, “Yep.”
“The order has doubled, huh? Munch, munch, slisk . . .”
“So I’m told.”
There is cigar smoke tumbling through the air from the quadrangle and somewhere another kid is crying tiredly.
A skinny bare arm passes with a tattoo of a lightbulb with rays.
Ivy is thinking, there is something ABNORMAL about this. Not some broken law necessarily, not something to bring SWAT teams and DHS marauders. But a thing that is not understandable. It makes a NORMAL person feel EDGY. She stares at the big bare back of Gordon St. Onge, at the balding man next to him with the blond hairy arms and plate of food, and she stares at the spotty morning light flooding both men. Their talk is urgent. And all around the eyes of the many watch Gordon; the men, the children, the women, and especially the teens.
To be engulfed by nearly a hundred admiring people, to be the solid CENTER of nearly a hundred admiring people, to maintain that in a secluded place, away
from the rest of America . . . well . . . it certainly would make a great feature story, Ivy. She peeks guiltily toward the crow. But he is gone.
Guy with plate of food moves away, Gordon’s hot right arm crushes Ivy not painfully. But gets her attention. “We need to feed you. I’m just figuring the best way.”
Ivy snorts. “Usually through the mouth.”
He laughs, takes her hand. “We’ll have to try that.” He tugs her along, nearer to the kitchen door. Ivy sees that under one of the couches that they pass is a black cat with yellow eyes, those eyes square on Ivy. Another earnest spirit-wraith come to cleave to Ivy’s conscience.
The Voice of Mammon.
Whatever the people who work and serve believe in, whatever consumers believe in, is what we of corporatism must be the authors of. WE ARE YOUR AUNTIES AND UNKIES, YOUR PRIESTS. WE ARE WISDOM INCARNATE. WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS. YOUR ONLY FRIENDS.
History (the old, old, old, old, old past).
I have to make him think that carrying those mastodon haunches all by himself is an honor.
Time? Back in the present. Place? Egypt, Maine.
Now a young guy in jeans and Budweiser T-shirt and Red Sox cap blocks Gordon’s way and smacks a small box into Gordon’s palm. “If this doesn’t fit, they say it’s out.”
Ivy sees the short very VERY overweight (no, wickedly overweight) Indian woman who had been holding the little dog that first night when Ivy arrived uninvited. The woman is not a waddler, but graceful. As a soap bubble would, she actually glides. She is wearing a cardboard crown on her graying black hair. Crown painted gold, of course. No work shirt this time. She wears a black V-neck T-shirt and a long skirt of blue-and-orange-and-red stripes. Awning stripes. Big fucking stripes. Ivy’s cold blue eyes soften a notch. Our Ivy LOVES stripes. The woman’s long hair is knotted up under the crown. Her nineteenth-century (or turn-of-the-century 1900) glasses are steamy. The Budweiser T-shirt guy has roamed away and Ivy speaks to Gordon, “I met her. Before.” She nods toward the Indian woman’s departing figure.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 11
