Big American flag tacked up on one wall. Really?
DOUBT EVERYTHING.
Ivy goes to the windows, small panes running floor to ceiling. No curtains. She looks out at the thickness of woods and lichen-splattered rocks. That rock-cluttered look of Maine. Even here in this St. Onge-sphere, which seems like another planet, this weird life, it’s really just Maine. Her home.
In a far corner at the end of this row of windows sits Godzilla, about nine feet tall if he were standing, but he’s sitting, his legs crossed at the knee. He is made of various green floral and dotted fabrics. His wide eyes are yellow. He has a smile you could trust. He is naked, but there are commercially-manufactured sneakers on his huge feet. Leaping big lizard! Something like size eighteen! High tops. Spread on his knee is a book. Ivy walks over and looks down. The Guide to North American Reptiles and Amphibians. Godzilla isn’t really reading the book. His eyes are on Ivy.
She hoists up her shoulder bag.
She hears his voice outside the door. And another voice. The door opens and then she can see him and Aurel Soucier there in the library talking, Gordon’s hand on the door latch, and through the cedar smell and the heat that is as awful as, yes, lizard gizzards, she hears they are speaking French. Gordon has sawdust on the backs of both elbows. Aurel is sawdust-free.
Ivy stares at them. Taking in every detail. DOUBT NOTHING, she says to herself.
Aurel departs, singing loudly. By the time Gordon pulls the door closed, Aurel’s song is gone.
She guesses he is six-foot-five or -six. His eyes are on her, coming toward her through the heat and she can FEEL him coming closer, the heat intensifying. Each time she sees him, he’s bigger. And he says with that thickened, low voice that big guys with big necks often have, “Sit, dear. Let’s talk.” He opens a hand to suggest the most deep and comfy-looking upholstered rocker. “Dear” my ass, Ivy’s brain comments to itself.
She sets her jaw. She turns toward this deep chair. Sinks into it.
He one-handedly picks a wooden folding chair from against a wall, flips it open in front of her, backward, close to her knees. He straddles this chair, facing her. Rests one huge sawdusty and insect-gnawed forearm across the back of it. There are dirty sweaty streaks around his eyes, and sweat glistens through the sparse top edges of his beard. He looks exhausted and terrible but his smile is kindly. He says, “Ivy.”
She blinks. She almost trembles. She swallows. She laughs. “Gordon.”
He grins.
She lowers her eyes to his thick, stained fingers on the back of his folding chair.
He leans back, eyes on a pattern of afternoon sun splotches on a gold and blue hooked rug, then suddenly looks back into her eyes. “What now?” he asks. He’s not smiling.
Maine, Ivy. You’re in Maine, her secret voice reminds her.
His weirdly pale eyes are locked on her face. He doesn’t fill her unnerved baffled silence with comforting assurance.
She decides she likes the beered-up goofball Gordon better.
He still waits for her answer.
With her hands folded tightly in her lap and her pulse pounding on both sides of her throat, with her own pale eyes more arctic icy than any time in her life, she says evenly, “One question, if I may be allowed. What is the difference between a nightclub and an elephant fart?”
Without even hearing the answer, Gordon St. Onge throws his head back and laughs.
The forests of the planet Earth speak.
What seems, from the blue and tired meridian of today’s sky, to be a brown rag below, was once me. Thousands and thousands and thousands of life forms found nowhere else, now dried to a crust, twisted legs, steamy eye holes, lush mosses reversed to the logic of powder. Thousands and thousands of miles of me, the very robe of Mother Nature, have been erased by the power of the dollar bill.
The screen speaks.
See the scrungy bad people in the cities and towns across America! They can hurt us. They blow up buildings, they rob, they shoot, they let their children roam and never read to them, they collect welfare, they rape, they piss in front of people and cut people up, they smell and have sores and tattoos and nose rings and nipple rings and swastikas and they never wear pastels. They are dripping in drugs and explosives and have no teeth. They want to hurt us! They are filled with envy and madness. They make our taxes soar. A lot of them are illegal immigrants. Some are not. Whatever, they are COSTING.
And see in the hills! The militias! Oh, god, these crazies have plans to take over the government! They are full of hate and envy and radical right-wing madness and have never been to college and push their women around and teach their children to be like them and they not only have guns, MILITARY guns, they STOCKPILE them, and they will hurt us, oh, this is just so terrible and scary. Oh, but LOOK, see the nice clean pink faces of our president and senators and governors telling us to relax. Tough laws will keep all the scrungy people in line or behind bars or put to sleep with humane death drugs. Down with all the scrungy people! Thank goodness for the strong pink voices of our leaders keeping things safe!
And, yes, FEEL the caring corporations, how they keep our beaches so white, our forests so green, and give a helping hand to our crumbling but costly schools. Those lazy rich unionized teachers have got to go. And PO workers. What a bunch of sponges! And Social Security needs to become more efficient. There are ways, once everything is privatized. See how the corporations cradle us all with warm cozy cuddlies, insurance, phone calls to your older brother and your Mom and carefree banking. FEEEEEEL the strength of America’s giant businesses and deregulated investment banks getting bigger and more there for you.
After a particularly blistery, hot, thick day, now cooling down to a warm, tree-sweet, field-sweet night.
Even super high-test gasoline is sweetness to the nose on such a night. A night like this, everything we see, hear, smell, and touch, we love it.
Just outside Egypt, on the old part of Route 113, Gordon St. Onge stands against the cab of one of the Settlement’s rickety ancient old flatbed trucks, a grip on the gas nozzle, watching the digital numbers flicker across the face of the pumps.
On the back of the Settlement flatbed is a heap of torn up twisted culvert from a “good-neighbor project” in Fryeburg that just about wrung everyone out today. And some pretty nasty bickering. And so here you have aluminum culverting on the way to the dump. Wasn’t too long ago, maybe the age of a chicken, that aluminum culvert was the new way, an improvement over the old quick-to-rust iron culverts, which were superior to the old stone culverts before them (we were told). Now culverts must be plastic (as in fossil. As in petroleum. As in creeping toward the Peak). Oh, yes, shows how we have evolved. It’s the New Age of Man!! The New Dawn!! Doesn’t it almost give us a more upright feeling when we walk? Maybe even less body hair?
But . . . but . . . doesn’t plastic crack when it gets cold? Next time will stone become the best culvert?
The question stays lost in space.
Aurel Soucier has gone into the Convenience Cubicle. (Note that everything is cubicled these days.)
Now half a dozen stripped down Harleys come thundering and popping, passing the cubicle low and slow but there is Gordon, eating a little commercial apple pie lustily, commercial ready-made food being a no-no, a kind of broken law in the St. Onge world. And Gordon feels swept along on the highway of human destiny, the rumblings, the shouldn’ts and what ifs, the single-lane bridges, the soft shoulders, the detours.
A newish pickup pulls in, a young man’s kind of truck with a windshield visor and jazzy fender skirting and a WBLM bumper sticker on the dimpled chrome step-toe bumper. But the driver is older, late sixty on toward sixty-five perhaps. Little cloth cap. Clean-shaven face, but a nice face. Kinda like you’d expect him to speak your name, your first name, and it would be spoken cloud soft.
And someone else there, a passenger. Is it a big dog? No, it’s human. Wild thick hair, deep red-orange, face tipped down like it would be if it wer
e reading.
The oldish guy parks his flashy truck on the other side of the building, goes into the Convenience Cubicle, a medium-to-tall man, big hands, but ever so light and kind of cunning and life-wise.
Gordon laps the sweetness of the apple treat off his fingers, pulls the nozzle from the truck.
When Aurel (Gordon’s cousin, yes, and, yes, short instead of Atlas-sized, and, yes, dark-eyed instead of pale-eyed, but also has a Tourette’s-like squinchy busy face, also has the nose) comes out of the Convenience Cubicle, he is hot on getting over to Gordon to tell him something, but turns and sees the oldish guy behind him, coming over to the flatbed, his eyes dark-blue-ringed light blue, a serene expression, bag of bread and a gallon of milk, one to each hand. He asks “Howzit goin’?” in a way you speak to old friends.
Aurel gives a gentlemanly tip of his saggy-brimmed olive drab bush hat, and his dark glittery eyes are one eye wide and amazed, the other eye squinty and fierce (yes, that look is of the whole St. Onge–Soucier family passed on and on. Perhaps in the not so long ago, a smattering of French kings and French peasants, some squinting and wild-eyed, cruel-eyed, others gentle, got mixed together by passions, thus this complex expression, on a sweet night such as this, while greeting a neighbor circa 2000).
Gordon is trying to place this older guy, which shouldn’t be that hard in a town of nine hundred, but he can’t place him so he just grins and says, “We have entered the advanced age of the petroleum by-product culvert of which humanity can exult in.”
The guy looks up at the slat-sided truck bed heaped with aluminum culvert and looks back at Gordon and says, “Yep.” Then he says, “You seen any wild dogs around?”
Gordon says, “No . . . just fox.” He glances at Aurel. Aurel’s fierce-almost-screaming gaze slides up and down the lean but tough dimensions of this mystery neighbor, and the older guy says, “A lotta rabies in the area. That new strain. That fast-moving strain up from the Carolinas, brought up by raccoons. You hear about that rabid fox ran out of the woods in broad daylight down in Steep Falls? Bit a lady . . . while she was settin’ out with a buncha people at a barbecue. Tore her leg up. Then a couple of dogs got into it with the fox. You know an animal’s skin goes numb when it’s got rabies, so you can’t discourage ’em by no way but dead.”
Gordon crosses his arms, ready to settle in for a chat. Mentions how he knew a family that claimed they ate rabid animals and never got sick. “Must have been dead for two or three days before they touched them.”
Cousin Aurel is bursting with great shrieking poofs of quietness. His eyes, black as eternity, boom like two twelve-pounder howitzers.
Gordon looks curiously at his cousin but then drifts back into conversation with the chatty guy.
Now Aurel heads back into the store to pay up on the gas while Gordon, who never makes a person feel rushed, is just happily beholding the older man’s face and when Aurel returns, Gordon is saying, “so . . . they had to stop feeding birds for all the coons they were drawing . . .” obviously still on the shudderingly wonderful rabies topic, which, like the leprosy topic, always manages to build rather than fade.
After a while, the old guy gives a head-dipping nod and turns to go and Gordon says, “See ya later,” and Aurel hops up into the truck cab and settles in, his back arrow straight, munching on a peppermint, and he commands, “Doan’ move, Ge-yome. Watch t’iss you.”
And Gordon sits straight with his back against the seat as the neighbor’s flashy young-man’s truck makes a little showy sweep across the lot out to the road and the passenger with the thick red hair is looking away, head and shoulders mostly in silhouette.
Gordon looks at Aurel.
Aurel is unwrapping cellophane from another peppermint. “T’at iss Pitch who t’ere iss some stories off hiss memé and hiss papa in a fight . . . bit him . . . bit somet’ing off . . . like hiss t’umb. Killed t’ree wardens, her people an’ wass part Indian an’ very smart woods people an’ got away wit t’mos’ unbeliefable Maine Guide scam where t’ey took city persons off downstate in t’woods and rob ’em wearing bear costumes . . . t’iss I admire sort of, me . . . but you can not belieff everyt’ing you hear. Err . . . t’at is Pitch and t’at iss not hiss truck. Truck off one off his boys . . . t’one t’att has one off t’em lotter-money-union-machinis’ jobs. But t’att wass his daughter wit’ him in t’truck, her . . . t’kid you are trying to meet . . . kid wit’ deform face, her.” His most blazing wide dark eye is steady on Gordon’s surprise. Then breathlessly, “I seen it . . . t’face. A little while some years ago, me. Fife or six year ol’ girl an’ my heart jump when I see t’att poor stretch out face.” He absently digs at the chin of his fine-looking dark beard.
Gordon says, “Why didn’t you tell me who he was?!! I’d’ve gone over and talked with the girl.” He twists the key, revs the engine to life.
Aurel crunches into another mint. “I wass not very sure what wass up. I wass not sure t’girl want you over t’ere pawing her . . . or iff he wanted you to go over t’ere, him. T’iss big school scheme might be juss a secret off t’brot’ers.”
Gordon glares. “I do not paw.”
Aurel blinks. “Oh, mon dieu! You do paw! You are like a vieille mèmére back home of t’Valley. T’es comme les vieilles mèméres p’is les vieilles matantes qui mettaient leurs gros tétons dans les faces d’less p’tits enfants quand qu’ys vont visiter!”
Gordon grins. Big bright smile. “Mais batège, moié, j’aimais ça quand qu’ys faisaient ça!”
Aurel says levelly, “T’girl be terrorfy’ of big giant nice man who act like her mèmére on visit.”
Gordon hangs his head. “Never mind.” He grips the wheel with both hands, looks over at the pumps. “Gas has gone up again. And with Peak Oil at our doors, and Wall Street speculation and corporate hocus pocus . . .” He slips the shift knob into gear and the engine whines its deep low gear voice as the heavy truck rolls away from the pumps and Gordon’s voice goes into high gear, “And still nobody nobody nobody doubts the news! It’s—”
“Stop!” Aurel commands. “Stop t’em complaints! I doan’ want to hear it! Tonight iss one off t’ose special nights. I want to remain an uplifting perky man.”
The grays observe.
High noon for those who know the hours one frame at a time. Our craft has no motion as seen from below. We are simply the syrupy sunless summer sky. But we see her and her square silver craft stopping at the old gray farm place where the man (whose real name sounds like Ge-yome, hard G like oh, gosh!) resides by municipal, state, and federal law of this boundaried nation called USA.
She is tall, crisp, crunchy, hair gray at the ears, feet long, fingers long, long arms, she is flowing toward the house of Guillaume St. Onge. Rain in the air. Rain on its way, not descending. No rumbles or smash of light. The only invasive sound is of her hitting the door or as humans call it, knocking. But there’s no crack to it. She uses her palm. Four flops, the sound of thrown apples. This is the inside-the-porch door. Maybe her strange palm-knock was in the hopes of the door easing open. Lots of soft tumbling shadows, the long narrow porch too busy with its mobiles, homemade candles, rockers, old couch with a black cat in a curl. Visitor locks her eyes with the eyes of the black cat, whose eyes are locked on hers.
After more “knocks” and after some waiting, the visitor leaves her calling card wedged in the inside door. Joyce Marden, Department of Human Services.
Claire St. Onge speaks.
A couple of days a week, I’d be at the university. In the winter, it was three days and meetings with faculty and projects with the students. And a mean blizzard of departmental paperwork. But that summer I just went in to putter and meet with independent study people. Summer seminars and conferences that others were teaching there were quite condensed and intense while the campus was strewn with clumps of strangers with “my name is” tags on their shirts, people generally older than the full-time winter crowd.
The office I shared with the other adju
ncts was exactly a floor above the office of Catherine Court Downey, who was interim chairman of the Art Department. We were friends.
Mostly she did the talking, good at speaking into a person’s eyes, a lot of university gossip, but she also spoke of her marriage and son. She had married at age thirty, waited ten years to get pregnant. “I hesitated for ten years,” she said, eyes solemn, chin cocked, as if listening to her own confessions. Chagall. She hated Chagall, giving academic reasons why Chagall was not to be loved by anyone, especially women. “Unless you live to be raped by a goat.” We both loved our coffees in colossal cups. We both loved peach for a color. Peach sky. Peach walls. Peach fabrics. I loved the old novels, even racist Conrad. At this she would just raise an eyebrow in speechless horror.
Her child’s name was Robert. He was four years old that summer.
Catherine loved her job, loved the university, loved most art, was always breathless, always hurried, was bright and positive-thinking. A little peppery busy bee. I had known Catherine for three years but had never met her son. And I hardly spoke of my private life to her. I am not a secretive person by nature. But my life lately is . . . weird. At least in the way modern-thinking American souls would view it. So I skipped around most details and she would gladly steer it back to other things.
Oh, I told her plenty of stories of my life as a kid growing up Passamaquoddy. I explained to her about Indian identity. Indian pride. Indian anger. Indian passivity. Indian honor. Indian memory before memory. I didn’t tell her too much about my ex, let alone our present new “marriage.” Oh, boy. There’s too much she would have found unacceptable about Gordon and a lot of specifics would make her feel differently about me, too, as if my present life was something that could be debated. Was my life worthy or not worthy? Pitiable? A failure? Fixable? (Fixable being one of her most often used words.)
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 21
