The girl replies with her dusky flutelike call.
Gordon again wipes his mouth. Paces a small circle. Once. In pleasant agitation. Now stands squinting up at the little octagon window. The collie sits down next to Gordon’s leg, smiles up at him. Gordon sees the lighter shadow of a face beyond the dark screen. He cups his hands around his mouth. He calls, “So, what’s the difference between a nightclub and an elephant fart!!!!?”
He hears her giggle.
He drops his hands.
Again, her giggle.
He waits.
The reply is just another giggle. And then a long minute of no sound but for the UPS truck off in a more distant, softer, ring of space and time. Only the space and time between Gordon and that little window and the ten minutes he has been here are clear. He calls out, “The difference izzz one is a barroom, the other is a baROOOOOOOm.”
Another giggle, though a pretty fancy giggle. But it’s clear that Brianna Vandermast isn’t ready for the Home School. Nor is she ready for the Prophet. Because after her giggle, nothing.
Gordon looks sadly at the collie dog, who flumps his thick tail.
In a future time, Brianna Vandermast remembers.
I believe that Mother Nature and God are both chemistry. The elements. Synapses. The gaseous, the electric, the salt, and the solid. Sometimes fresh, sometimes carrion rotting into a universe of microlife.
I believe the soul is something else. Something unnamable, indescribable. It feels nothing. It is spared of tribulation.
I saw him and knew there was a difficult mission, all twisted in the agonies of the body and brain, nature and God. There was a fire over every inch of me. I was young and so the time ahead seemed long. The light at the window looked infinite.
The voice of Mammon.
Here in America, land of the free, we now have one good job for every two hundred able persons. What indeed is a good job? You aren’t even a legal citizen while on the boss’s property. But hey, you get pretty good pay. Then there’s endless low-pay, no bennies temp jobs for all the rest, the losers. The odd men out. They get what they deserve, right? And what does it take to DESERVE?
Bend low, kiss our asses! Hurry now. Hurry. Others are right behind you with more accommodating lips.
Meanwhile, what is that written on everything
you touch?
Made in China.
History as it happens, as written by Katy and Karma, age five (both). Heavily edited by Oceanna and Heather and Toon.
At breakfast everybody was wet in the hair because of rain that was going sideways. Josee says eggs are coming out of our ears. There is an egg recipe cubby set up “for the duration.”
Today Annie B. gets a visit from the beauty crew. She lives in the village and is ninety-nine-and-three-quarters-years old. Old. Her street is Pleasant Street.
Also the compost crew gets to go to town to get more buckets. So they were jolly.
Echo is visiting from the Township. We traded Brant for her for two weeks. Welcome Echo!! Brant is on the swanboat crew, which is awfully behind, but he is enjoying a change of scenery his papa said. So Brant is full of happiness and the scenery here is basically the same.
Samantha says there is a rumor that Gordon’s stocks and bonds are drying up because he sells them. She says he is in rebellion. This will affect the accounts.
Benjamin says American flags are now made in China. Beth said why do we need a flag anyway, we know where we are.
Gail says factory jobs are demeaning, that she ought to know.
Beth strangled Theodan and he laughed and knocked everything over getting under the table. Slippery eggs slid.
Later, at our philosophy salon, Rachel said she read a book by a positive man who said there is going to be a great transformation, that humans are going to change and peace will prevail.
Kirky said no way. “It’s easier to put the peel back on the banana than it is to talk monkeys out of being monkeys.”
Bonnie Loo who stops throwing up by salon time said, “Picture this. The red-hot red telephone that sets off the bomb launchers and these hairy chimpanzee hands playing around with it. Not to mention all those chimp hands and brilliantly considerate chimp minds who cut you off in traffic and pass on hills being in charge of everything else that hangs over our heads.”
Back at breakfast time, Beth crossed her arms on the table and spit a prune pit into her coffee cup.
Evan told a joke he heard at the shingle mill last night. It was wicked funny. An elephant fart that goes ba-ROOOOOOM!!
We got thirty people so far to sign up for the planetarium trip. I’ve seen it before and they twinkle like real ones in a real sky.
Also while we are so close, Gordie wants us to visit his friends who live at the ocean on rocks. His friends are rich but very nice.
Arthur is sick. Something old-age-ish.
Windmill crew has their hands full tomorrow. Lights are out on the lane.
Guess who is also pregnant. (Besides Bonnie Loo and everybody else.) To be announced.
Cindy signed up for the Christmas tree planting crew by mistake. She called it double booking.
Next day, Ivy arrives at work, swings her shoulder bag onto the floor next to her desk and sees eight calls are on her voice mail.
After settling in with a bottle of blueberry-banana-passion-fruit drink, she runs through the calls. One is from a guy who gives only “Bill” for a name and no call-back number. He speaks slowly and clearly with a Connecticut or New York suburbs accent. He suggests that Ivy Morelli might find it interesting that Lisa Meserve, the dental assistant from Augusta who was arrested in that big marijuana bust a few weeks ago, is the single mother of an African-American child and that child was put in the care of a foster home but was then transferred to a second foster home in three days, and the next week was transferred to her maternal grandfather, Peter Meserve, a widower who owns and operates a service station in Mexico, Maine, but then this child was unofficially transported by Peter Meserve to the St. Onge “compound” in Egypt and several interested parties have proof that the whole marijuana deal has gone through the St. Onge operation, as most likely much drug dealing is, other drugs as well, and illegal guns and illegal gun components, and will continue until the situation is vigorously investigated.
The voice of Bill further explains, “I am leaving this message with all the big papers, not just yours, and with several reporters and editors at each. So whoever does something with it first . . . well . . . you know what I’m saying. It’s an opportunity, Ms. Morelli . . . CLICK!!!” Dial tone. The next message begins.
The grays.
See, it’s like this: our craft, though undetected by Earthling sensories 99.9 percent of the time, are everywhere, bumper to bumper! All sizes, some of them mere motes. We shift our craft square dance–like or, rather, we flow as droplets of a broad casual river. The skies, the interiors of caves and all structures are made up of our volume, as many of us as there are stars but closer together. In your disdain and erasure of the ghost layer, in your tearing of the gossamer net to replace it with only your VOICE and your FORCE and your TODAYS, you have lost your opportunity to find out that the net of all life is unraveling. Thus we grays are the dulcet antithesis of void. We are not from “another planet.” We have always been right here, though once you were not, not in your present dimensions.
Do not be embarrassed. In our sorties, we see it all, even up your noses.
Another night. Quarter to three.
Gordon St. Onge sprawls in his wheeled desk chair in the kitchen of the old farm place, knees apart, distractedly pushing one work boot against the leg of a heaped desk, which makes the wheeled chair go back an inch, then another inch, then another. He stares down at a note in his hands. A note that did not come by mail. Only a few moments ago, just home from late work at the sawmills, he found this note stuck in the screen door. It is written with fountain pen in familiar and flowery calligraphy.
It reads:
&
nbsp; Teacher! Teacher! Don’t waste time on me. Go beyond the safe margins of these hills. Take courage. Millions have yet to hear the truth. And millions want to be part of your family! Please share with all of America the sweetness of your heart. Take the stampeding cattle the way of the good. Into the embrace.
It is unsigned. But he knows.
He sniffs the paper. Cigarettes. So she is a smoker. He hadn’t sniffed the book of paintings. He drops the hand with the note onto one thigh, shuts his eyes. Brianna Vandermast. What do you know about power? What do you know of the world? What do you know about good and bad? What do you know about me?
During the rest of the night.
He sleeps and dreams. He dreams he dances with a woman. A frenetic dance. Not really touching, but almost. A wild dance of gypsies. Her hair is greenish white, textured like long grass. Rustles drily like long grass. He feels watched in a most terrible way. And this makes him dance harder.
Tracking Brianna.
Near noon on the Old Dyer Road at the landing of a logging and chipping operation, where miles of skid roads converge. Such a tangled mess and muck, and the racket of machinery at varying levels of “efficiency.” And Brianna.
Yes, they say she is here. “There!” one of the men down on the landing points to the forked skid road. And so Gordon nods, thanks him, and starts the climb.
But after ten minutes of ruts and slash and rock, what he finds is one of the Vandermast brothers working alone at a good clip above a high wall of small rock caves. He is dropping medium-sized recent-growth beech trees . . . CRACKLE-CRACKLE-FLUMPH! over and over and over as he climbs higher along the ridge, looking full of purpose, agile as a bug on a wall. Dirty baseball cap. Messy T-shirt. Sawdust-splattered green work pants. Sneakers. He turns now and discovers Gordon. Gordon sees that Vandermast look, round face and worried eyes. Gentle people.
The Vandermast nods hello to Gordon. Finishes a cut. Kicks out the notch. Swings around to press the twenty-pound saw into the heart, jerks the saw away, gives the tree a slap with the heel of his free hand and walks away with the slow descending crackling and crashing behind him. Now he shuts off the saw.
He digs out his ear plugs, slips them into a pocket of his pants, and hops down off the glittery shelf of ledge to where Gordon is still walking up toward him and the sort-of-silence is nice. All machinery now is in the distance, even the skidder that had just groaned past a minute before. Now it’s only the sound of feet crunching, a mosquito singing near the ear, and the Vandermast guy saying, “Hey’ doin’?”
Gordon says, “I didn’t think there were many flesh-and-blood loggers left in the logging biz, but here you are.”
The guy makes no reply to this but Gordon goes on in his chatty way. And as he rattles on like this, the quiet guy sets his saw down and swipes at a half dozen mosquitoes that have taken an interest in the back of his head, ears, and sweaty temples. For a few moments, both men just fight off bugs and breathe in the heavenly green, wood-redolent air. The day is not a bright one. No sun. No shadows. Just a nice even gray. A gray worthy thing. Too muggy-warm though. Earlier, there had been drizzle.
“Think there’re porcupines in those caves?” Gordon wonders, looking up at the high wall of dark rock and oven-sized caves and still-standing but badly skidder-barked hemlocks.
The Vandermast’s eyes twinkle mightily. “Well, the sure way to know is you go up there and stick your hand in one a’them little holes.” He scratches roughly at a mosquito bite on one knuckle, then scratches luxuriously at one on his arm. This is the clean-shaven pipe-smoking taller Vandermast brother, although there’s no pipe in sight at the moment. This is Dana Vandermast, although Gordon doesn’t know the name yet. He knows only Pitch and Poon, who are really John and Mark. This one, Dana, has never earned any livelier name.
On the skid road above and the skid road below on the left, there are the hurtling groans of two skidders coming closer, none visible.
Dana says, “I need my dinna.” He scooches down for his saw and starts down the hill with Gordon alongside. Stepping over and under and through limbs, rock, and root, stump and rain-wet ferns, Gordon asks, “So where is everybody? I saw Cole’s outfit down on the road and a couple of your rigs, but—”
“If you mean where’s Brianna?, she saw you coming. So she took off.”
Gordon grunts unhappily. Claps a mosquito between his palms.
One-handed, Dana Vandermast slips his pipe into his mouth, doesn’t light it. Just likes to have something to grip in his teeth as he goes along. The two men trudge along the rest of the way without any talk.
Down below, around the landing and along the narrow high-crowned paved road, there are a half dozen parked cars and pickups. And in the bulldozed sandfilled “yard,” the vast chipper reigns. This was once efficiency at its near best. A walled-up little room-sized contraption of churning gears and belts and blades, bristling outside with levers, and there’s the deafening howl, and the jaws that feed it, all part of the day in the life of this one fabulous never satisfied creature. Tomato orange and scarred. In payments and interest and repairs and fuel, would it be worth a quarter million?
Gordon recalls one of the paintings at the end of Brianna’s big book. It showed that shimmering wall of tomato orange and an even oranger fellerbuncher, while before it stood a long row of tiny men, smaller than real life, all with empty hands hanging. Even in featureless silhouette, you could see that they were all buck naked. The verse had read:
How can we call this phantasm by the name Progress when all it does is diminish us?
Here in real life, Gordon recognizes the real-life operator of this real life chipper. Larry McMannis. The guy looks a little proud, a little bored. Hands on a lever. His tight T-shirt is light blue. His back is narrow, long, and ribby. Tall guy. Hard hat with ear protectors. Long serpentine-like neck.
The box truck being fed the chips is now nearly glutted. Because you always go a little over. It’s the only way. Otherwise, you might as well quit. As the verse to another one of Brianna’s pictures asks: Where is the last honest man? In debt, in shame, begging the grave?
Gordon walks with Dana Vandermast to the road’s shoulder. Dana’s pickup has a red volunteer firefighter’s light on the dash and, on the seat, a sandwich in a bag. He lowers the heavy saw onto the tailgate, wipes his forehead with a wrist, and says, “She’s scary.”
Gordon looks harder at this guy’s face. She? Meaning the business? A machine? A huge tree? Or—
“I don’t mean her face. Everybody gets used to her face after a time.” He glances across the road at the fern-filled woods, then up the tar road headed toward New Hampshire. “She reads piles of stuff . . . words as long as my arm. For a long time now. Since she was a little squirt. That book Poon showed you, Gordie . . . ’twas just the tip of the iceberg. She gives me the willies . . . like she’s not complete’ human. Or maybe she’s more than one human. Maybe part of her birth defect was two brains. Both of them scheming.” He smiles down at his feet. A shy gesture. He pulls a plastic pouch of tobacco from a pocket. “She don’t want what normal girls want. You can’t interest her in a movie or a cute pair of shoes. She’s schemy, like I say. I ain’t no match for her giant ideas and plots. Nobody is. Not Dad. He’s the one that says she might have an extra brain. So I said get an X-ray. Ha-ha. But he’s creeped out ’n’ afraid it’ll turn out true. He says let’s just ride it. But we want her out of school. They’ve complained she’s taking over, outfoxing them all.” He blinks fast. “She’s just a kid. That means she really ain’t got no sense.”
Gordon strokes his mustache thoughtfully, staring up along the trees where he and Dana had just come from.
The crisscrossed heap of hemlock next to the chipper is now only a single layer. Another tractor trailer backs up to take the place of the one that’s now headed down the road. One truck is old. One truck is new like a silken newborn thing. The valves of both grunt and chuff and the exhaust from the stacks is baby blue. And both trucks spe
ak the word debt! Spelled out in thunder.
The chipper screams.
Gordon says, “I got a note from her. Did she have one of you guys bring it over last night?”
As Dana draws on the pipe to get it going, his worried eyes move over Gordon’s face. “She probably come over there by herself. Pulled a sneaky. Since she was about nine years old, she’ll take one of the trucks and go riding around by herself at night . . . which of course is when cops are most likely to stop people.”
“They stop her?”
“Yep.”
“What do they do?”
“A variety of things.” He laughs a little uneasily. “So what’d it say? The note.”
“Well, it’s hard to describe.”
Dana smiles, nods knowingly. The smoke is a sweet spiraling cloud. He glances again toward the woods, up and down the road. Somewhere Brianna is standing, maybe watching. Slapping mosquitoes. She is, for certain, slapping mosquitoes.
The screen gooily scolds and cajoles.
Low voter turnout at the primaries. This is bad. We just don’t understand you people! It is so perplexing! Voting will turn things around. You NEED to vote. Look at all those poor souls in those countries with rigged elections and dictators and sneakiness. But you Americans are just lazy! Here you have the power to vote and you just goof off!
The grays.
This morning we captured from the roadside an abandoned TV. It is on our laboratory table now, making noises. It is not plugged in but our large teacup-sized dark eyes in our fibrous-but-flossy faces meld with its essence and hear its voice. Unlike the ivy, it does not cry or show terror. It coos. Blue poofs of loud sweet talk and sticky sales pitches reach out with human hands, smashing through the screen, grabbing one of us to pull into that terrible chamber of hurry-up music, burgers, politicians, insurances, pills, promises of joy.
The one being pulled through the screen gets away, of course. Though we are all slightly winded from pulling.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 24
