From a future time, Bonnie Loo despairs.
So they showed up at the shops the second night. Second supper. I wasn’t cooking. I was a total person of leisure that night, except for the hard work of sweating. Gordon wasn’t there when his friends first settled in with their plates and smiles. He had been down at his house supposedly dealing with his mail and writing out money orders, trying to squeeze it in after helping Aurel and Josee mend goat fences for the afternoon while his guests went swimming with Penny and Gail and some others who were playing host.
When Gordon finally showed up at supper, he had the most crazy look I’ve ever seen in his eyes. He was dirty. Streaked. Smeared. Seedy. Hadn’t changed or washed up. Usually he was washed up and was a sweetie for supper. He knows it matters. Not counting the solstice and weird shit like that, supper has always been a sort of heartfelt ceremony. But he looked interrupted. His work shirt was unbuttoned and flapping. If he’d grown suddenly into a werewolf it couldn’t have froze my guts any more.
Settlementer Beth recalls.
First thing I saw of him was he was down at the far end of the piazzas, standing there by one table, eyes fixed on Shell’s new baby, who was rolled up like a periwinkle in old Tante Lucienne’s arms. He wasn’t standing over the baby. This wasn’t one of those coo at the baby routines. He was at some distance. Staring. His hair was all gummy. No cap. Wet shirt wide open. Like a rescue crew had just pulled him from a cove. Like a homeless man roaming in the subway tunnels of some fucking turd city. Meanwhile, his guests looked like they were going out to a ball and smelled like perfume factories.
Penny speaks again.
The visitors, at the side of one table far down into the second porch, saw Gordon, of course. Everyone saw Gordon. But the visitors just quietly murmured and munched. I guess they knew Gordon was no white-tie type anyway. And besides, the big soups were thick and heady with fresh herbs. The lamb was tender. The greens were sweet. The breads were perfect. The butter, the cheeses all shades of white and gold. Dozens of jars of preserves. We’ve always preserved everything. Just short of preserving rocks and beech leaves and poison toadstools! The little cukes and radishes and baby spinach and lettuce, plantain leaf, and scallions in the salad were fresh as the air. And the big pitchers of water right from the pumps were almost frosty.
Bonnie Loo.
BANG! Gordon’s fist on the table. Set off a few startled screeches and one baby started crying . . . and he bellered, “America!” He reached to spread the fingers of his right hand on the head of one of the Soucier kids. “IT EXECUTES CHILDREN!! IT BURNS CHILDREN ALIVE!!!! Pierces them with death needles! Virginia! Waco, Texas! Huntsville, Texas! You thought America only murdered kids in other countries? No, right here, too. Home sweet home. People fry! Armies and police! CS gas! Lethal injection! The chair and drooling mobs . . . America is a vile place! A frightening vile place! Posing. As. Para-dize.”
“Pace!!” Lee Lynn’s baby Hazel called out and I saw Lee Lynn hide a confused smile.
From the pocket of his dirty splotchy green work pants, Gordon tugged a folded paper, unfolded it slowly, everyone’s eyes on that paper. He held it up. It showed a dark face. I couldn’t make it out from where I sat but I could tell it was the face of a person who was of a dark race.
“Here’s one in Texas! They’re going to kill him Thursday!!! Maybe he’s guilty! Regardless! Whatever. He is a poor person. They, the government, are going to kill this person because he is poor. You ever see rich folk on death row? NEVER!!!! Rich folk do killlllll. They killlll plenty. But no matter! It is the poor among us that must be washed away, the extra-useless useless poor! They willlll kill this moneyless captive, now rendered completely harmless, kill this person for political purposes! But this shit is supported by other lowly not very wealthy citizens for reasons of bloodlust . . . hot, fuck-hot pecker-cunt balls on the walls bloodlust droolin’ in their shoes, and getting’ it offfff!” He squeezed his eyes shut then opened them and they were popping out. And he was frothing at the mouth. Drooling. Spitting.
The whole piazza had become a misty gray silence with everybody embarrassed or nauseated . . . because that’s what you feel . . . sick . . . when someone is screaming and sort of wet around the face.
And he railed on, “Now that ain’t civilized! Doesn’t that put America up a notch on the evolution scale! Fuck, no! Puts it down on the floor of some giant chicken house, where beings just shit and squawk and peck each other to death. I am just so proud to be American I’m about to wet myself. Wanna see me wet myself?”
My heart was skipping. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, he hadn’t done it.
Beth again. This is what she was thinking.
Fuckarooni! Thank Christ the reporter wasn’t here soaking this up. Then the whole world would know what a coocoo looloo G was under his funzy exterior.
Claire tells what she remembers.
After supper there was still no sign of Gordon. He had left us holding the bag as far as the guests situation. Fine. Some of us took them to the east parlor for tea, to hang out with the piano for a while. The woman, Pamela, told me that it was upsetting to see Gordon act like that in front of the children, that it would probably give them nightmares. Skip, the husband, seemed amused, and said, “He even scared me. I wasn’t sure what he’d do next. Like next he might take all his clothes off . . . maybe wrap himself in the flag and . . . uh . . . hurt himself.”
I figured he was teasing but the wife asked in her sweet, small, but penetrating and so well modulated voice, “Do you suppose he needs to see someone. A professional? A chance to talk about what might be bothering him?”
And I looked at her, eyes into her eyes, a smile and tone of voice coming to me that I didn’t intend. “Now what on earth could be bothering him?” I asked.
And now back to Bonnie Loo. From a future time, she speaks.
In the morning, Gordon was somber but pleasant with his two guests and smoothed everything over with them. They left after breakfast, all smiles, with their bright L.L.Bean packs and their bags of Settlement veggies and preserves. All our young girls moaned that their shining star, Pamela, was leaving. They promised her they’d write. And some would keep that promise. Handwritten letters were a major deal with many people here, young and old, even our dear computerphile Lily and some of the boys who thought personal computers as essential to life as iron lungs, fire trucks, and blood transfusions. So all was well.
But a few nights later, at supper, Gordon, still agitated, began another rant. Our peace man, Nathan Knapp, wasn’t at supper during the last episode. A loner, he was not a regular at meals. And there were people here his wife found to be . . . well, they “ruffle her feathers” as my stepfather Reuben would say. But on nights when Nathan had a salon or committee with the kids after supper, he’d hang around on the edge of the meal, in some rocker or porch swing, or sometimes he’d sit by the table and nibble. This time, he stood in the kitchen door with Glennice and me, and I watched how he didn’t take his eyes off Gordon.
Now Gordon’s rant was about how America is a front for big, big megabanks and corporations, and their empire-building “intelligence” and military power. He emitted bloodcurdling screams this time. “America isn’t what you think it is! It’s a garbage bucket dressed up as an angel! But the flies give it away! Unless you’re too dumb a fucker to know what flies are!” Then he was working up way past the screams, booming like a cannon, pacing, banging his hand on the table.
I could feel his voice in my chest muscles and tear ducts. Some of the grown-ups left the porch. The kids just lapsed into hearty chants of “America is bad! America is bad! America is bad!” And with their bodies, some of them struck poses of passion and militancy, smacked one palm with the other fist or thonked the table. Little revolutionaries in the making? Even toddlers. Baby rebels. Okay, it was sort of cute, but—
Lee Lynn and Suzelle and Lorraine and Beth and Jacquie huddled with me out in the kitchen to whisper, “What’s he doing? None of this world st
uff is new! Why’s he doing this now? Why now?”
“He’s fucking crazier than usual. But he’ll land pretty soon when his hangovers get the better of him,” I assured them. “He never has thought of this here as America, anyway.” I laughed. “We are our own nation, by gawd.”
Meanwhile, Gordon’s big thick voice bellers, “EVIL GROWS!” and the children scream, “EVIL GROWS!” Quite a few adult voices chanting now, primed by the lumbering power of Gordon’s theatrics. “EVIL GROWS!” Then a stomping sound. “EVIL GROWS!” Stomp! “EVIL GROWS!” Stomp! . . .
And in the doorway, committedly pacifist in every cell of his being, Nathan Knapp, still standing there, in a trim, stripy, short-sleeved sport shirt and jeans, hands behind his back, composed, terribly composed.
Three miles away on the Seavey Road, little wallpapered room.
Supper cooking smells tumble up the stairs to meet the fumes of artist’s oils. The little octagon window is open for the smell of the long weltery day to join in.
On beaverboard, she has begun another sun, this one with clots of green and a mountain-slanty horizon from which it lifts.
This artist has a spider’s eye and a spider’s touch, giving the ball of green fire a silken logic, none of her paintings meant to be public, not ever. There is a belief among her brothers and father that she is a painfully private person.
Another evening.
The long tables are heaped with plates of bones and bread crusts and fruit pits and grease, the piazza screens dark-streaked and glistening from a just-finished very windy electrical storm.
Gordon is conspicuously agitated, restlessly staring around at faces and feet and pools of water left on the porch floors from the rain. All through the meal he didn’t sit long in any one seat, kept shifting, now mostly stands, a cup in his hand full of his favorite drink, a brew of fresh cow’s milk and maple syrup. No beer or cider.
And it has come to this, as it has never been before, that the Settlement people are WITH him, inside and out. Yeah, the hale and flushy oneness of these denizens with this man, so that when he begins to rage on about a certain thing he has just heard and read, the very latest in the all-consuming earth-swallowing mess of humanity, and he throws up both fists and in a vicious, raspy, almost gurgly howl, screams, “Evil grows!!” the refrain of “EVIL GROWS!” comes back to him from the mouths of kids and adults, and they are all swaying from side to side as he sways from side to side, and again “EVIL GROWS!” so that back and forth, he shouts and they echo, breathing in unison. He growls, “Our system swallows us all like a ruinous pocking plague!!!” And “Our government, our Congress, the devil dollar prances among them! The dollar marches over the planet, forcing its way, followed by bombs! EVIL GROWS!”
See the batch of kids at the far end of the table, some with black brushy Passamaquoddy hair and such eyes! And those with hair of dandelion yellow. Those young mothers sitting along the inside of the longest table, the young men and older men, older women, and so forth, mixing their voices to call back, and now the foot stomping, all in sync and some people with spoons or forks striking their glasses and cups or the hollow-sounding table . . . Stomp! Tink! Clonk! “EVIL GROWS!” And, “Pencils don’t vote! Money does!!!” Gordon groans. Groans echo him.
After it is finished, Gordon is walking to the kitchen and there is a sudden BANG! A chair falling? A slammed door? And he drops to the floor. Hard. Rolls onto his side. And there are all sorts of gasps and a few shrieks. “What is it!!” some people cry out.
“You okay, Gordon!!!” Helpers hurry to draw in around him.
He gets to his feet, flushing, while some hands brush off his clothes.
A few laughs now. Little nervous laughs of relief. “He said he thought it was a gunshot,” someone is telling someone else.
But that is silly, isn’t it?
He sits at one of the tables now, across from a Settlement man named John Lungren, who studies Gordon’s face but asks nothing.
And Gordon says in a low ugly way, “I need a drink.” And John Lungren knows he doesn’t mean maple milk.
In a future time, Bonnie Loo remembers.
That night after that particular incident, he came to my little house and of course Jetta wanted to show him how she sewed assorted buttons on her smock all by herself. And he admired each button, the clear plastic one made to look like glass, the maroon one, the cloth-covered one, the butterscotch one, the metal one with the eagle on it. Some of these buttons were quite old. The women had collected them over the years, enough to fill several dozen huge glass mayonnaise jars. That sewing shop had a lot of things some would call real finds.
After the kids were in bed, Gordon sat on the little sofa and rubbed and rubbed his face and beard, hard and slow. He was a bit drunk at that point, having proceeded to drink cider after his maple milk. That was his supper. Never mind food. He smelled drunk. But he also smelled good. He wore that T-shirt Lee Lynn had made, a real nice spring-meadow green, a little misshapen on one sleeve. But fresh. He had changed since supper. And his beard and hair were bathtub wet and combed, though now messy from hard rubbing.
I said, “You okay, Gordon?” I came over and sat down beside him.
“Just dandy,” he said.
The Voice of Mammon
Fulllll spec-trummmmmm dominannnnnnnce of the plannnettt, all its resources, water, energy, foooooood and human labor, technology, weapons of mass control and exterminationnnnnnn, willllll be the proppp-er-ty of meeeeee. Bend overrrrrr. Humpa-humpa. What? What did you say little man, little lady? Obscene? Ha! You haven’t seen nothinnnnnnng yetttttt.
The grays.
Meanwhile, we observe this aforementioned, most recent development, the crescendo of the spinning ages of the nongray two-leggeds and their surplus food ruckus. Interesting but no wow to us, the more sensate among this species are beginning to froth at the mouth.
History as it happens (as written by Katy and Karma and Draygon with help from Margo and Oceanna and Aleta).
Some of us want to start a committee, although Whitney thinks we have too many committees. But otherwise, she’s into what we suggest for a committee. A death row support project. We got Claire to help us. She got the number to call Gordie’s priest buddy or minister maybe who told us the addresses. Oceanna reported to us that Claire and Bonnie Loo said okay on the postage. We have a list of names to write letters to guys the government is going to kill. Gordie’s right. None of them are rich. Glennice said Jesus would approve of our committee. She said, “Pray for everybody.” Maybe. So then Whitney says we have nine letters so far to Jeffrey and four to Carrie, a girl one. Samantha said this is only the start because we will change the fucking world. That was actually her word, fucking. What about that? Margo says do not censor. Glennice says censor.
One of Gordon’s weekly visits to his mother’s home in Wiscasset.
She brings him coffee in a pottery mug with a textured snake wrapped around it. Her name is Marian St. Onge, her married name. She was born Mary Grace Depaolo of the Depaolo family . . . Big construction money, not aristocratic roots. Just Portland people. Waterfront Italian and Irish. Loud, steamy hardworking people. But sometimes, with money, vitreous (and silly) airs eventually ingrain themselves. For Marian, there have been airs, and one can never mention her name change from Catholic-sounding Mary Grace, or how Gordon’s name is really Guillaume after his father Guillaume, who Marian renamed “Gary.”
Marian is not a lonely old lady. She is perfectly connected to the family and to community groups and to a “better” church, one that has no kneeling. And besides, she’s not an “old lady.” She is tall and poised, has fashionable glasses when not wearing her contacts. Small earrings. High cheekbones and almond-shaped gray eyes. Her graying dark hair is clipped appropriately and attractively. She has a reasonable selection of conservative-dress sweater vests, which she wears over conservative blouses. Today’s blouse is a soft blue-green. Vest, brown. Trousers are denim. Shoes are the slip-on kind. A wristwatch
, of course, for the woman on the go, as she whizzes around in her sporty red car. One ring, a tasteful white gold with pink stones. Not gems, just pretty stones.
But today she also wears a huge plastic smiley-face button. Marian has some contradictions, yes.
What Gordon sees now is his mother’s crisp blue-green sleeve, and her reaching out to place in his hand the aspirin he asked for.
She sits across from him in a white wicker chair, sunlight pouring over the deep red wall-to-wall carpet. In a moment, she will need to draw the drapes. The big TV is off. Its greenish flat glossy surface has only a reflection of the lighted kitchen through the archway. She tells him some news of the family. He nods, palms the childproof lid back onto the aspirin bottle. He is alone on this visit. He has brought no one. Sometimes he brings one of the Settlement kids along, or a friend, these who anguish Marian, these creatures he takes aboard his ship of antisocials, losers, and Aroostook Frenchies whose farms now belong to Irving (the oil company of Canada). So many relatives of Gordon’s father, the Souciers, etc. She prefers to disconnect that plug. At least shake it out of her mind.
But this afternoon, it is just Gordon alone.
“You’ve been drinking?” Her expression now is artificially pleasant.
“Actually, I haven’t. Not this week.”
“I thought you always drank.”
He says nothing. Sets the aspirin bottle on the white marble end table.
She fidgets with a cuff of her blouse.
He asks, “Would you like to go with me to Keene State College? I have a friend there. She’s doing a lecture on charitable foundations. How they manipulate the population. How they shape minds. As in mind control. She’s found them out. She’s a socialist. Happens to be.”
“Why do you torture me?”
“I’m not. This woman is interesting. She’s an intellectual. She’s . . .” He smiles teasingly. “. . . respectable. You’d approve.”
“Stop.”
“Maybe you’d like all my friends to be . . . harmless, mindless coward robotons with spines of Jell-O.”
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 15
