Gordon laughs.
Child kicks harder. And now a scream, like real terror.
Ivy stands up.
Sentry Heather edges around the chair, moves closer into Ivy’s humid space.
Ivy laughs a little, still standing there, square-shouldered now, no longer in that withering sleepy undertow of the day. She doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes. She hears Aurel, still in his chair there, making a grave sound. No more working on his gum.
A few kids have gathered like dogs around a dog fight, waiting for signals, feeling the wildness in their own muscles and glands, ready to help the winner, or maybe the loser, depending on their respective natures.
Some of the adults are smiling. But these are vitreous smiles.
Ivy looks right at those smiles and her heart pounds hard.
Gordon rears his head back. “Swammmmmmmmmmp man eeeeeeeeeeeeat Michelllllllll. YUMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!”
The kid makes a sickening shriek. And then pretends he is going to spit straight up into Gordon’s face.
So Gordon does the same, pretends he’s going to spit.
Kid cries, “Stop!”
Two sweaty-looking women push through the circle of tensed kids.
“Enough, Gordon!”
“Gordon! Let him alone!”
Ivy can’t believe her eyes. Gordon is now doing a really disgusting thing. A gleaming pendulant of drool is hanging from his mouth as he works up more and more serious spit to add to it, letting it out of his mouth by inches, letting it hang over the kid’s screaming face. Quite a few people are laughing over this. Ivy glares at them.
Heather, seeing Ivy’s face, says, “It’s nothing.”
Warm trickle on the back of Ivy’s neck. She is going to leave now. Going home. Needs to stop the wacky scramble of her feelings. But the story. She needs this story. Newspaper story, maybe. But for sure, the story . . . like you wouldn’t get halfway up Mount Everest and quit just because you got a mild headache on the lower slopes.
Bev is getting closer to the brawl. “Gordon, I don’t believe this!”
And now another voice, “Arrêstez-donc d’agaçer les infants!”
Ivy turns to see several heat-pinked women coming from the kitchen, among them the blonde twins Ivy met at Gordon’s farmhouse a few nights ago. “T’es baveux! Yést trop fatigué, lui. Les enfants sont tannés de toié!” one of them despairs.
Gordon’s pendulum of spit gets longer and longer, swinging over the kid’s face. Using all his earthly might, the child twists to free himself. “Uh! Uh! Inhhhhhhh!”
“He’ll have terrible dreams after this,” Bev laments.
The little guy seems on the verge of fainting, his gasps weakening, his face looking tranced, just as Gordon makes a horrid snorting noise and sucks the pendant back into his mouth.
“Jesus.” Eddie breathes this somewhat admiringly.
“This is nothing new,” one grandmotherish, bespectacled woman tells Ivy.
“No?” says Ivy. “Routine, huh?” She swallows her sarcasm, sees the bespectacled eyes of Gordon’s ex staring at her in that flat measured way from a group of women and kids beyond a clump of empty chairs.
Walking backward so she won’t miss any of the show, a young girl wearing a real showcase of embroidery, the whole dress splotched with creatures and flowers and suns and also small cow horns (real ones) poking out of her hair, collides with an “oops!” into Ivy, then speaks behind her hand. “Drinking makes men into fools.”
Gordon releases the kid. Kid jumps to his feet and, violently hyped up, runs three or four paces, kicks a chair leg, grabs a one-eyed plastic doll from the floor and pitches it at Gordon, gets him square in the middle of his hairy stomach.
And three miles away.
Fifteen-year-old Brianna Vandermast washes the pale mixed yellows from hands and brushes, the turpentine’s alluring stink unfolding through all channels clear to her spine. Her human but not human eyes close tight for a moment. Though the paint is merely margarine color and other harmless tints in their travels up her arms and shirt front and now whirling in tuna cans of the cleaner, the thing she has just finished making on the easel is hurtingly sunny to dilated eyes.
But also the cheeks of her face are rosy and burn to touch. She is riled by her season for mating, so much so that this image of a sun roars through the walls to the real sun and the two suns, to her mind, are savage side-by-side ready testicles hunting for her. This causes the entire little Vandermast home to perspire.
Yes, back there at the Settlement, the sun climbs. The hot pudding air thickens.
Shifting her shoulder bag, Ivy explains to Bev and Barbara that she really needs to go check on her car. “If I don’t come back, could I have the tour another day. I’m—”
There’s the feel of flypaper-tacky bare arms around her and the smell of drink. “Who is afraid of the pressssssssss?” a deep voice whispers hotly against her ear. It’s Gordon, locking her head against his shirtless ribs, her butterfly necklace digging her throat.
“Owwww!” she complains, puts a hand out, fingertips finding the sticky solidness of his shoulder.
His gruff whisper, “Yep! This is the press!” Now loudly, “Keep it under your hats, everybody, about our plans for mass suicide and all those stockpiled assault weapons and especially the child slavery!!!”
One or two chuckles from men sitting close by, through which Ivy can hear Eddie’s coaxing. “Ivy, tell the world about the sawmill. I want to see it in the headlines. SWAT team rescues man slave from sawmill.”
Many, many chuckles from all around.
Someone in the way off distance screams, “Tick!!!!”
“Gordon!” It’s Barbara. “Please don’t embarrass Ivy . . . and us. Stop now! Let her go!”
Gordon obeys, lifts away his long arm, and Ivy steps free.
Ivy faces him, smiling stiffly. “I’m leaving.”
Very nearby, a broad-chested Scottish terrier is slurping up a cup of milky coffee someone left on the floor.
Gordon laughs. “Don’t be mad. It’s just playing around. We celebrate today, right?”
“No, Cannonball!” A very young-looking pregnant girl races to snatch the cup from the Scottie.
Ivy stares into Gordon’s eyes. “I’m not sure if I’m mad. I’m not sure exactly what it is I feel, Mr. Teacher Man.” She smoothes out her skirt.
Gordon looks at the floor. “I’m not as drunk as you think. It’s just tiredness.”
“All drunks have their excuses,” Barbara says disgustedly, chin raised. She’s as squarely shaped and sunburned as Bev, but her nose is handsome, not puggy, her eyes dark and deep and penetrating, her Brooklyn, New York–accented voice softer but even more authoritative than Bev’s.
Someone is again scolding. “Stop it, Cannonball!”
A wild-haired, early-gray witchy-looking young woman places a hand on Gordon’s arm but speaks to Ivy. “I have an idea, Ivy. Stay just a few more minutes. Some of the kids are going to do a beautiful solstice skit. Please don’t miss it. They want with all their hearts for you to see it. And this can give Gordon some time to shape up a little, to smooth this over. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s overtired. We all are. He’s not always like this, not a Mr. Gorilla.”
“But he is,” replies Ivy, with a nasty little laugh, eyes into his eyes. “When I showed up for my promised interview last week, he was a gorilla then.” She laughs again.
Barbara says worriedly, “Ivy, you can’t know him in a day.”
Gordon backs up to the rocker abandoned by Aurel, who left moments ago to take the swamp-monster-ravished little boy off to bed. (Yes, he was Aurel’s son.)
Barbara makes a squinty-eyed scolding face at Gordon.
Gordon stretches his legs out. Settles in. Rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands, looks up at the trim little reporter and Barbara and the witchy-haired woman who are now conferring. Eventually catching Ivy’s eye, he pats the seat of the big upholstered chair between his rocker and
Eddie’s. “Ivy,” he says.
Ivy looks at his hand. Then a little to the right, at Eddie’s bejeweled belt. Coins. Pearls. Rubies. Diamonds. Metal studs. Circles of mirror glass. And much, much more! How could a grown man want to wear a belt like that? Ivy slides her eyes back to Gordon’s face.
She sinks into the big chair. She understands now, the power she has over them. Is it a good feeling? Or a shabby feeling?
Before the solstice skit begins.
Ivy and Gordon talk. Nobody interrupts. Only small interruptions, such as his ex, Claire, stopping in front of him to drop a worn pale chambray shirt into his lap. She glides away. He stands to slip the shirt on, buttoning every button, tucking it in nice and neat, eyeing everyone, smiling crookedly at those who still flash him reproving looks. Then he sits again, one hand spread on each of the rocker’s wooden arms. He answers Ivy’s questions politely. His voice isn’t fully free of its gooey beery hard-cider drawl. But there is an effort, at least. He tells her how it was the kids who founded the Solstice March, some of the older kids when they were younger. He tells her to ignore Eddie on the sawmill subject. “Nobody works here more than an hour without a break. Plenty of breaks. And a casual pace.” Ivy replies that that is wonderful.
In the next chair, Eddie lets go with a long groaning yawn, which ends in a piteous squeak.
Ivy laughs.
Somebody brings Ivy a lemonade. She drinks it slow, deep and slow. It reverberates down through her soul . . . like shock.
Gordon keeps rubbing his eyes, blinking oddly, straining free of his drunkenness, it seems.
And then Jane arrives.
It’s the first time Ivy has seen her since last night at the farm place, howling for Gordon not to leave, to stay and share a book.
She heads straight for Gordon’s chair. She is so erect, long-legged, too graceful to be only six years old, too tall! But he had said she was six, didn’t he? And she has that African stature, straight as a stab of sound. She stands in front of Gordon and says huskily, “I miss you.” Her eyes are filled with shuddering tears.
He reaches for her wrist, pulls her to his lap. She climbs up and then folds her long limbs, making herself almost tiny. He takes her head into his two huge hands, her floofy dark curls boiling warmly through his fingers and he gazes into her dark, dark sultry eyes and he says, “My lamb.”
From a future time, Claire St. Onge (Gordon’s ex) reflects.
So he stopped guzzling beers and cider. And she stayed awhile, but not for the tour, which we all agreed would be best on a day when we were all working the shops. For now too many people had gone home to bed. Everything was shut down. All but the sawmills, and there was no stopping that job, with so many orders coming in from Harrison. It just seemed best that she come back in a week or so when we were all fresh. And she laughed this sudden and titanic HAW HAW that seemed too robust for one so petite and pretty, and she agreed, said she’d had enough “jungle weather.”
Some of our girls walked her down to her car, carrying the strawberries and peas and greens we were sending home with her. She promised she’d be back.
Jane tells us of visiting her mother.
Beth is the one this time to drive. She has good hair, blonde curlycue’s practically perfect and long. And there’s the look of a scream on her face, which would go with how she’d get on her knees with the mike and have her eyes closed and growl: “Commme onnn, Comme onnn . . . give meee a little piece,” and she has the right voice. Mum’s favorite singer but I forget her name. But Beth’ll never make it on stage cuz her nose isn’t good. And her eyebrows are in the wrong place and I asked if she could sing and she said, “Nope.”
When we got to the jail place she says, “This rat hole is run by noodleheads.”
I said, “All of them are cop guards. You’ll see.”
“I’ve seen ’em before. I’ve seen this rat hole plenty,” she says. She says she visited Andy here, and Mike, whoever they are. And also her sister and her other sister and her nephew.
When we finally get inside, Beth hardly says a word at first but she talks with her eyebrows, like she looks at me and wags them up and wags them down a buncha times. Secret code for noodleheads, noodlebrains, and “turds,” which are her words she uses a lot.
The cop guards are standing behind her so they can’t see the code. Good thing.
We get a special room to sit in. Mum said before that it’s cuz she’s so dangerous a criminal. I laughed at that.
Now here we are and it’s Mum on one side of the table and me and Beth on the other side and a cop guard over by the door. He’s as tall as Gordie but no hair. Maybe chemotherr-a-pee which you get like Aunt Bette for sick lungs. He might be sick. He doesn’t look happyish.
Mum says, “You have a new sundress. I love mint green.”
Beth says, “They made about forty outfits outta that bolt. We all look like moon men if we wear that green on the same day.”
I frown. Usually Claire or Gordie drive here and they don’t get on my nerves this bad.
Mum is laughing at the moon men thing but I keep my eyes squinched.
Mum’s hair is blonde but not like Beth’s. Mum’s is called Light ’n Streak and swirls like sunny water so so pretty. And her eyes are blue jewels. But sad to say Mum’s suit is orange. Nobody really wears that kind of orange on purpose. But it’s the law here you have to wear orange if you live here.
I try to hold still cuz the chairs we have to sit in are the folding kind and probably could crash down under you.
Everything here is the law. Nobody can touch. So probably nobody can wiggle. It’s a lot like school only at school nobody would be caught dead in orange. And no guns. Guns are evil. Cops aren’t really evil, Lee Lynn, who came here once, too, told me. I guess they just want to look evil.
Lee Lynn is another one of the mothers at the Settlement. Those mothers all have plenty to say about everything. Beth is one of the worst cuz she butts in wicked.
I take a deep breath. I say to Mum, “They . . . ate . . . a . . . goat. They . . . put . . . some . . . in . . . my . . . plate . . . and—”
Beth very fast interrupts with saying, “Lamb, not goat!!!” and she makes her eyebrows joggle around and she is laughing like a jerk. “Goat!!!” she says again almost in a pure scream.
“Mum . . . I . . . want . . . to . . . stay . . . here.”
Mum looks very much more pale than ever (she is of the white kind of person anyway, not the brownish kind of person like me) and she opens her mouth but Beth busts in, “The food here rots. And plastic forks. You’d hate it, Janie.”
I squint very mean at Beth. I have just about had it.
Mum says softly, “They don’t let kids stay. I wish they did.”
“Kids in jail!” Beth hollers. Her voice is croaky, which I may have forgot to mention. She has a long-sleeve shirt so she’s not goose bumps like me. You do not want to wear a sexy sundress in a cement jail that has no sun. But I wanted to look pretty for Mum.
Mum says to me with a small smile, “You ride one of Gordon’s horses yet?”
I shake my head.
Beth makes a snorting noise and looks right at me. “Well, at least be glad that wasn’t a roasted leg of horse on your plate.” And she laughs, her voice more scratchy than it ever was. “Sometimes it is!” Her eyebrows go almost on top of her head. “Horse pie.”
I look into Mum’s eyes and she into mine and we are mixed together in our minds and I don’t need to move my mouth for Mum to hear my misery so nobody interrupts me. My sad words just pour and pour and pour into my Mum all the details of how unbelievable it is at Gordie’s and how I am starving to death cuz I cannot eat their stuff that grows IN DIRT or that had skin and eyes once. My brain cries into her brain: See how I am turning into a skeleton!, but Beth real loud says, “I don’t know what it is but every time I get inside these locked-up forts I gotta pee.”
I drop my face into my hands because in about fourteen seconds I am going to lose it and fo
rget to have a heartbeat.
Ivy is not in the newsroom.
No, instead she perches woundedly (yes, like a purple, pink, blue, yellow but mostly scabby red bird after a cat attack) on the examining table and the doctor actually says, “Uh-oh,” which real doctors never say, but this one might never, in all her days, have witnessed such a total, almost noisy case of poison ivy.
Ivy speaks from the crusted seam of her mouth, “I . . . was . . . in . . . a . . . ditch. It . . . was . . . night.”
“Find any nightcrawlers? You can get twenty-five cents apiece.”
Normally Ivy loves her funny doctor.
From a future time, Bonnie Loo speaks.
There were several things that happened that summer that you could call bad omens . . . or turning points . . . or wrong turns. Whatever it is that puts you on that deadly course.
After the day the little newspaper cunt scoped out our solstice thing, Gordon had an old friend come visit. Skip was his name. A common occurrence. Old friends. New friends. Coming for an afternoon or evening or for a few days. But this time, it went differently.
Claire St. Onge remembers.
Gordon had started up the beers and cider on the Solstice Day, which was a few days before Skip and Pamela’s visit. Whatever came to his hand he would slobber down and this made him into his flushy, high-minded orator self, which is forever close to the surface.
Settlement woman, Penny, tells us.
Gordon’s friend Skip was married. He and his wife were staying in that nice lavender-and-white-papered room upstairs over the main part of the house down to Gordon’s. The room had a table fan because the heat and humidity had come back worse than ever. Like airplane glue. The wife was a professional opera singer. A soprano. You would not believe her voice. Like something from the sky. She sang a little piece for us, yes, opera, while our Eric played the piano. This woman was a little person and sat so straight at our big loud chaotic meals and all our girls were in love with her. As well as Eric, who was doing his showy “Ricardo” routine and charming the pants off both the guests.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 14
