She agrees that it is beautiful.
“Don’t hurt us,” he says deeply, quietly.
She laughs, unsure how else to respond. “I promise.”
She watches him stand, taking all of his beers with him to a wicker rocker a few seats away, which crackles and squeals as he sinks into it, one side of his face collapsing into twitches, both eyes rolling as if to express alarm but it’s probably just his Tourette’s-like affliction. In the seat next to him is a woman with a funny hat, glasses, and a jumper of navy blue with embroidery over the chest. Very pregnant. She looks to be crabby and unwelcoming but when Gordon presses his cold beer to her cheek and temple, she leans closer, gratefully. Now he slides the beer to the back of her neck. She laughs. Lowers her face. Her funny hat falls off.
Down at the end of the nearest table another something made of glass smashes on the floor and a small kid laughs hysterically.
Her thoughts.
Yeah, all of this, here and now, top of the fold.
And then—
About seven overtired little kids start screaming simultaneously on various piazzas.
One is dragged away kicking and struggling. Spitting. Swearing.
Now Heather behind Ivy’s chair yawns in a big way.
From the busiest of the kitchen doors, the one that has the fluttery light of semi-outdoors beyond, classy Ricardo, the boy with the magnanimous, goldy-brown nice-person eyes and Chinese pants and genie slippers, brings Ivy a plate. Mmmm, sausages, ham, eggs, heavy bread AND a huge muffin, dense preserves, kind of figgy-looking, a giant glass of lemonade, and a clean rag “for wiping hands,” and Ivy points out that no one else but the very old and frail or mindless or new babies has had food brought to them, and Ricardo laughs at Ivy’s apologetic expression as she says, “I can’t eat all of this. I’m so sorry.”
“You better or you’ll get a spank,” he says, then bends to kiss the top of her shining hair. Then he heads back out to the kitchen door, the one that looks outdoorsy. A summer kitchen?
“I love your brother,” Ivy tells the girl behind her chair.
Eddie, with the belt of jewels and coins and the salesman smile, returns to his chair now with a glass of lemonade. He looks long at Ivy’s plate, which she hasn’t started eating from yet. “Howzit goin’, Ivy? I myself would have brought you something, but Eric . . . I mean Ricardo . . . he always steals the show.”
The sentry behind Ivy’s chair clears her throat.
Eddie leans toward Ivy and whispers with cold, lemonadish breath against her ear, “Eric . . . I mean Ricardo is pretty Hollywoodish, huh?”
The sentry behind Ivy’s chair snarls, “I can hear you, Edward.”
Ivy says, “I love Ricardo. He’s top-shelf.”
The sentry snorts. “Unlike Eddie. He’s bottom-drawer.”
Eddie tee-hees. “Heather’s got a one-two-three punch.”
Ivy is starting to really admire this Heather, her sentry. And yes, a sentry is what she is. Ivy feels powerful and important. That she requires a guard! But she really meant it when she told Gordon she is no longer writing this story. Actually, as we all know, that’s a lie. She wants this story as soon as she figures out what the hell it is. But then the job would be to convince Gordon St. Onge of the advantages of printing it. Right? The story, yes. With his blessing.
Eddie sips from his lemonade noisily.
“Slob,” says Heather disdainfully.
Ivy sees that Gordon hasn’t fetched a plate yet. Not only has he finished off the second or third, maybe fourth beer, but the man she saw a while ago with the jugs of stuff is pouring some of that stuff into a big glass for Gordon.
Ivy isn’t hungry at all, but she eats. The food is hot. The air is a hot hug. Dogs are panting, staring at the floor around people’s feet, watching for whatever might fly off from busy plates above them. The steam over the mountain behind the Quonset huts looks greasy and predatory. Sticky Ivy yawns vastly, covering her mouth. She watches kids accumulate around Gordon. A sedate group of preteens are playing Twenty Questions. She hears some of the questions and answers, others are muffled by the loud talk of a new group that’s just arrived . . . and the army of small kids that charges past again, a small king in the lead, his crown a perfect fit.
Eddie says, “I want to die before ten-thirty.”
Ivy stares a moment at a girl of about seven or eight who, with white feathers pinned in her dark auburn curls and a gorgeous embroidered white blouse, is asleep on the floor in a sprawl in front of Gordon’s chair. Gordon has just raised his left boot to use this child as a foot rest, which causes the Twenty Questions crowd to scold him. Their name for him is “Gordie.” Gordon looks over at Ivy and his eyes twinkle, one eyebrow raised fiendishly . . . on purpose . . . not his usual tic.
Ivy has MORE than twenty questions. Hundreds of questions. All mighty. She swallows them all.
Ivy eats. The slippery eggs and tender ham are just as hot as when they first arrived.
A kid stops to show Ivy a jar with wood ticks scuttling up the sides.
Ivy eats. She yawns. She swallows more questions. She sees that the sickly, hatchet-faced woman about eight seats away, the one with the afghan on her lap, wearing an oversized shirt, is still staring vacantly. What is that dusky purplish erotic-looking area of flesh showing there between the afghan and her midriff? It’s the head of a brand-new child, which Ivy hadn’t noticed until now. A child perhaps a day old. Perhaps a few hours old. A young girl sits next to this woman now and rubs her shoulder. Is the woman depressed?
Ivy opens her mouth and jams in a glob of scrambled egg.
She looks up and sees three young girls she has not seen before now, smiling down at her. Long hair. Long skirts. Satiated, almost dreamy eyes and the smiles of angels. And all pregnant.
“Hi, Ivy,” one says in a low, too-sweet, beguiling way.
Waco, yes? The prophet who spreads his progeny like seeding the lawn? Waco, yes? Waco, no? This is different? This is nothing like self-sacrifice and puritan thrift. Here is wild celebration. The colors! Colors of jubilation! And no Bible. Not a one. Not even a quick grace before all this gobbling of food. Forget the callers, Ivy. Forget them. All of them are cranks.
“We’ll take you on a tour!” one of the girls exclaims. “After you’re done eating!”
Ivy smiles. “Thank you, guys. I’d love it.” She sees their ankles and feet, compliant—or would the word be complementary?—with the surface of the porch floor. Feet spread to balance the body, that heft, each pregnancy rounded, pumpkin perfect under the summer fabrics, all patchworks, one dress done in variations of mints, one in yellows, one with all different prints of pink rosebuds or pinker rosebuds, and flushing rose blossoms on white and cream, blossoms large and tiny. Three girls, three fetuses, two silver wedding rings, one gold with a diamond.
The man at Ivy’s right rises achingly from his chair, looks at Eddie a long moment, then says in a dark, raspy way, “Guess I’ll take a nap.”
Eddie says, “Shut up.”
The man cackles, then walks slowly away through the hot, joyless, flabby, thick, adhesive, dizzying summer steam.
“Sawmill man,” one of the girls speaks sadly, her eyes on Eddie. “In another life you were bad.”
“And it was fun,” says Eddie, and rocks his nearly empty lemonade glass on one knee. He yawns with great feeling, yawn-tears trickling over his cheeks.
Ivy holds back a shuddering yawn, which Eddie’s yawn has inspired.
And the big hot ointmenty steam doesn’t move at all, just thickens, bigger and bigger, gray-yellow in the open distances beyond the quad. It is hard to remember what a fresh breeze would feel like.
Ivy looks at Eddie, who winks. He is now no-handedly balancing his empty lemonade glass on one thigh. She knows now that she has never seen jeans so tight.
She peers over at Gordon. But there is no Gordon. His wicker seat is empty. Empty beer bottles around his chair.
The sentry behind Ivy yawns. She
is now resting her head on her crossed arms on the back of the chair.
The sentry sighs, her too warm breath against the back of Ivy’s neck, and now her fingers are touching Ivy’s neck, playing with the nape hairs that have begun to lengthen again since Ivy’s last clip. Ivy is starting to feel buried alive in hot hands, hot smiles, a drawstring of hospitality. Teeth are coming at her. Ears. More dog tails glide by, panting jaws. Sun dapples mixed with tendrils from hot coffee and steamy pregnancies, all of it slobbering, staggering, sticking, spraying.
Sentry says on a poof of hell-hot breath, “Before you go, you have to see the shops. You’ll love the shops. We’ll get you some guides.”
Ivy has a thought. What if I just had a notion to ROAM through the shops, whatever these shops are, wherever they are . . . what if I just wanted to do it by myself . . . EXPLORE . . . hee ha! OBVIOUSLY, THEY DON’T WANT OL’ IVY EXPLORING. Another flash of sinisterness hits our Ivy. A headline in the Record Sun: CHILDREN FOUND IN CAGES AS PUNISHMENT FOR READING BEFORE THE AGE OF TWENTY. SCHOLARLY ACHIEVEMENT FOUND TO BE AGAINST ST. ONGE FERTILITY LAW . . . this headline plays before Ivy’s sweaty bloodshot exhausted eyes.
And the short, fat, gliding, awning-striped Indian woman, Gordon’s ex, with cardboard crown and flowing hem, passes with two kettle covers, giving one teenaged boy a really mean look and he salutes her.
Voice of the sentry whispers, “I love your hair, Ivy. How’d you make it purple?”
“It’s a tint,” Ivy tells her.
Sentry says, “It’s magical. That color. It changes as you squint.”
The French connection.
The empty seat at Ivy’s left is now being filled by the man Ivy remembers from the rainy IGA day, the one who was riding along with Gordon in that old truck. Olive-drab Vietnam War bush hat. He’s about fifty, her quick guess, probably a vet. His eyes are fierce and dark, close together in his small face. His beard is shapely, well-tended, dark, no gray. Shirt and pants today are khaki, light as sand. Fresh-looking. He is happily snapping gum, done with his meal. Wags a knee from side to side. Ivy remembers the rainy day well. He had spoken what seemed like a foreign language. Most likely Maine French. The patois.
Ivy says, “Hi. I’m Ivy.” She puts out her hand.
As he reaches to grasp her hand, his dark eyes simmer. He doesn’t offer his name, though. He snaps his gum, leans back now. Adjusts his bush hat.
Ivy says, “I’m a friend of Gordon’s. It’s Ivy. Like the plant.”
He snaps his gum, dark eyes returning to her.
“You have a little boy. He was with you the other day in town.”
He nods. Smiles. “A few, t’em. All sizes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Oh-RELL Soucier,” he says quickly. “Good to meet you.” He says this last part as he is looking away again, snapping his gum mercilessly, wagging one knee, smiling around at the busy scene. Then, “You nott mine t’iss heat, you? Fun, eh? All t’iss dribbling, t’ere?”
Ivy laughs. “Well, winter is so long. We should enjoy this while it lasts.”
He squints at her, a similar wild-man expression to those that occasionally take over Gordon’s face. And he says, “T’iss sucks.”
Ivy laughs. One of her best HAW HAWs.
He says, “T’iss woult be okay if we coult all be up to our necks in t’Promise Lake and not some off us kept priss-norr here of t’mighty dollar.” His rs roll like powerful sea waves toward Ivy, then recede.
Ivy is working this kept prisoner here confession through her head. “Your name, French?”
“Oh, yes.”
“How do you spell it?”
He wags his knee from side to side on each letter as he spells out A.U.R.E.L. S.O.U.C.I.E.R. and then politely asks how she spells hers.
One of the short, square, ruddy-faced women, Bev or Barbara, passes in time to give Aurel’s knee a slap. “Now don’t you start teasing her!” she warns him. And then forlornly glancing into Ivy’s eyes, she complains, “These men think they’re clever.”
Aurel says, mostly to himself, as the ruddy-faced woman is now gone into the depths of the mob, “Teassing iss naturrr’ss way of making a nice time, her.” He winks at Ivy. With both eyes.
Gordon trudges toward them now, wiping his face with his red bandana, the one that used to be tied around his neck. He stops in front of the three chairs, Aurel and Ivy looking up, Eddie covering his face, whispering to the heavens, “It is ninety degrees, ninety-nine-percent humidity. And satan stands before me.”
Gordon ignores this. He is stuffing the bandana into the rear pocket of his pants. He is squinting at the wall behind Aurel’s head. No beers in his hands. And no homemade hard stuff. But he is past feeling good, isn’t he? He is feeling VERY good. He crookedly grins at Aurel.
Aurel looks at Ivy. “I am nott on the sawmill crew so satan nott bot’er me a bit.” He looks up again at Gordon’s grinning face.
Eddie says, “I love the sawmill . . . TOMORROW. But not today.”
Ivy sees the whorish-looking Bonnie Loo with the brassy orange-and-black hair who had stared at her with such venom, now out on the quadrangle with another youngish woman, both smoking. Without the knives of her eyes showing, her profile is more noticeably seared with old acne scars. She moves with thrusts of chest, wagging her hippy rear. Some could see sexy gal. Ivy sees upright bear.
Gordon’s voice is gentle but gurgly, as though he needs to swallow frogs. “Aurel, meet the press.”
“We met. But I been forbid’denn to play and be fun.” He looks off sulkily in the direction that the ruddy-faced woman disappeared to.
Gordon scooches down now in front of Ivy but turns a bit toward Aurel. “Ivy,” he says, clearing his throat, “This man is my cousin.”
There is a long silence into which Ivy says, “Really,” . . . but then more silence, and then Gordon muckles onto Aurel’s ankles and then, slumping down onto his knees, kisses Aurel’s boots, one smooch to each boot. “My cousin! My cousin! I love you!”
“I know it!” Aurel insists. “No need to prove it all ways, you. Get your lips off my leg, t’ere.”
The ruddy-faced woman returns. She looks at the back of Gordon’s head worriedly as she passes, says nothing.
Gordon swivels somewhat, now facing Ivy with his bleary eyes. “The press. Wants to write a flashy story about guns and sex.”
Aurel says with a little chuckle, “She’s come to the right place.”
Gordon snorts. And as if on cue, the kid army with its swords and guns and clubs storms past, led by the king with a crown of jewels like the ones on Eddie’s belt. Something like fifteen small kids. Painty and gritty and foody and sweaty. “Dat’s him dere,” Aurel tells Ivy, pointing at one of the tail end soldiers. “T’one you saw in town. Mike. He’s mine.”
Ivy nods.
The sentry yawns. A deep groaning booming emptying-out, almost man-sized growl.
Gordon stands. Ivy looks up at his profile as he is caressing his own bare chest in a distracted way, staring after the army, which is advancing to the kitchen doorways.
Heather the sentry touches both of Ivy’s ears ever so slightly. It makes Ivy’s skin feel electric and yet sleepy. She sinks a little more deeply into her chair.
Bonnie Loo remembers.
I was cooking that day . . . as in chef . . . kitchen duty. Both kitchens, the summer kitchen out back, lower level, and our regular cook’s kitchen inside, the whole rangy complex. And all my crew. Phew . . . pots, pans, stir, crush, and chop. Yeah, so I was cooking this banquet. And I was cooking, too . . . yeah, as in hot person. And as in pissed-off.
The sun was blazing. Everything was fuzzy and sticky and spumy and as vile to the eye as it was to the skin. The distant roofs glowed. Sand sparkled. Chickens and tweet-type tree birds were quiet. Everyone was taking their kids off to bed. For me it was another cigarette. And another. I just wanted the day to end. Be done. And the sly little bitch would be gone. Mizzz Newzy News.
Slowi
ng up at a sweltering road-under-construction area, just outside Abingdon, Virginia, a now-dusty two-door compact car . . .
has two serious-looking faces behind the windshield and in the back window, a bumper sticker that reads: MY CHILD IS A BOONE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL HONOR STUDENT.
The grays.
Once, we captured an “honor student” bumper sticker. We pressed it out upon our lab bench and stared at it. It flailed under our careful study, telling us its story. Papery and stretchy, it was yet another of quadriptillions of manifestations of the tricks among all beings condemned to livingness, to time locked in the Goldilocks planet’s heavy bag of gravity and succulent temperatures. It spoke in a nah-nah bray, one of humanity’s bumper sticker noises we have mapped alongside the housefly larvae’s bustle and the fly’s own high-noon buzz. An honor student bumper sticker has no ghost. Nor kindness. A fly has a generous ghost. It calls out, “Hello! Hi! Hi! Hi!” Thus, we rate flies best.
Meanwhile, back in the southwest mountains of Maine.
The floor shakes. Now a screech. A small boy runs. Gordon lunges around a table after him. Boy wears a man-sized black tricorn hat. Hat falls to the floor.
Both of Gordon’s arms lock around the kid’s middle and the kid howls, “Don’t!” as Gordon mashes his hot huge bearded face into his neck and growls, “Hairy hungry swamp booger eateth the red ant . . . hee hee!”
The boy struggles free, screaming, laughing in a crazed way, runs past chairs of outstretched legs toward one of the screened doors. Gordon bounds after him, the whole broad piazza thundering with his weight and the wild jingle of the thick wob of keys on his belt. He drags the kid by a foot to the floor, warning hoarsely, “Hairy swamp monster guy says YUMMMMMMMMMMMMM . . . me eat red ant!”
Ivy looks down at her own hands. A creepiness drops over her like a fog hotter than the actual air. She peeks. Gordon’s very sticky-looking body covers all but one of the kid’s legs with its sneakered foot, kicking.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 13
