She seems to be hunkering down lower in the seat.
He says with a kind of don’t-be-too-hard-on-me whine, “I ain’t got nothing against the left.”
She laughs, head thrown back, but quickly drops her face again and covers it with both hands.
“This is harder than I thought,” he says.
She is keeping her famously ghastly face hidden in her fingers.
“A whole buncha stuff we need to cover,” he complains. “Three thousand years of civilization, our respective outlooks, and more, more, MORE!!!” He gives her a wild look, one eye squinted, one eye HUGE. “And YOU!” he sniffs sadly, “Are making me feel rushed.”
She giggles into her hands. A perfect giggle. Like tonic.
He stays. He stays right there by the truck the whole hour and a half that the Vandermast brothers are inside watching the photovoltaic crew work. And almost the whole while, Bree Vandermast hides her face and giggles. Maybe a phrase here. A word there. But Gordon does most of the talking. Meanwhile, she smokes three times, hangs her hand out the window with the long cigarette erect in two fingers. Cars come and go. People leave, go trotting past, some carrying kids knocked out by sleep.
As he sees Poon and Dana coming toward the parking lot, Gordon pushes himself away from the truck window a little suddenly and, though what he has just been yakking about was only deer hunting, he now says deeply, “I don’t HATE left-wingers . . . nor the right-wingers, notta one. Two halves of big industrialism and finance and empire. Fine. Fine. Together they give us a whole. Lefts, rights. Those are people who are on a roll with their surpluses and maps . . . see?” He pats his chest. “Me? I am a man of questions. No map. No surpluses. Just baby man, see? I am not capable of wisdom ’cause all I do is . . . is whine. Goo goo. Ga ga. Wah! That’s me. Baby man.”
And he turns toward the two guys, nods, bows to Bree and salutes each of the two Vandermast brothers and strides away.
In a future time, Brianna Vandermast remembers.
My head was filled with epiphanies that summer. The closer I got to him, the more I loved everything and everyone. Even in the darkness of my little bedroom at night, the inside walls of my mouth moved in such a way as to kiss or to swallow, all the appetites of my livingness. In my mind I saw, in bright parade, toads and microorganisms and weighty sashaying elephants, sweet chubby babies and my most aggravating relatives and acquaintances, the most fearsome people of history, and my dear brothers, and all the world’s rock stars, the fashion queens, and forecasters of weather. All of them blurry, their flesh like fog. Only their eyes were vivid. And I wanted to put my arms around them all. Or at least paint them in colors I’d never seen before. I would invent new colors! I believed I could.
Gordon St. Onge talks about the girl to others.
He tells how she appeared in the dark parking lot with her brothers. After all that chasing around to find her, she just showed up on her own! But all she did was giggle. Hid her face and giggled.
Out in the world.
A most recent study shows extreme cynicism spreading into areas of the population where, in previous studies, low rates of cynicism were found. In fact, in some areas of the nation where cynicism cannot be related directly to lowering real wage, it manifests itself in less tangible concerns such as a feeling that the sky is falling or lack of leadership in public offices or no time with family or just no time or a sense of evil in everything or lack of caring in society or fear of violent crime, or everything seems speeded up. These types of cynicism had risen 300 percent in three years.
Saturday. Ivy Morelli at home.
Ivy Morelli’s apartment is two rooms and a kitchenette. Who would need more? She has plenty of space in her bedroom for her computer, worktable, a small television with VCR, and her queen-sized bed with wacky quilt of bugs and spiders that her twin sister, Ida, bought her. Ivy’s niece and nephew love it when they visit. First thing when they come in, they both squeal, “Let’s go see the bugs!!!!”
This morning, after a long, weird, swirly night’s sleep, Ivy lies in her bed listening to the muffled early a.m. clinks and rumbles of construction three streets over. She holds up her hands, turns them. She turns them more and more slowly, as if to hypnotize herself. Her one slim ring with its wee kernels of turquoise! Her shapely fingers, hard wrists. Peasantish and unbreakable-looking. Mighty Ivy.
On the night tables are scented candles and packets of incense. They smell like pine or vanilla or just weirdly wonderful. She goes through stages of burning these, usually rainy evenings or on those rare free Friday nights when she might have friends over, then the scents are great for atmosphere.
The whole apartment is white-walled and light. A lot of windows for an apartment, everyone says. Nothing like the new apartment complexes and condos with one featured picture window and three or four piteous portholes in the back. Here the floors are polyurethaned, a very light oak. In the living room–dining room combo, Ivy has wacky theater posters on the largest interior wall and a framed photo that her friend Tulani took of Ivy’s feet wearing pink high-topped sneakers with double lacings. What a hoot!
No plants. Not even a small, loveless cactus.
No family pictures. She doesn’t want her place to look too cluttered, too tacky, too cloying, too much like . . . like an old maid’s . . . please forgive the expression. HAW! HAW!
There are two nice, big, pale mauve couches. A beanbag chair. A stereo and another TV (bigger than the bedroom TV) that is often running but which Ivy never sits down for. For real TV watching, her bedroom TV fills the bill.
Her kitchenette is small and cluttered with seasonings and special cooking and preparation devices. She goes through spells of liking to cook. Then for many weeks, she’s happy to have a few crackers with cheese spread.
The bathroom is perfect. Everything tile or glass or chrome. No grimy crevices. And though that window is small, she has decorated it with colored tissue to look like a huge green and yellow parrot on succulent jungle boughs, a kind of color-separated leaded-glass effect. Better than old-maidish ruffled curtains!
Nothing is a deal these days. Everything costs. Her full-time job and her freelance articles still pay the rent. She can still get food and bare basics. There’s the old saying about paying your own way and carrying your own weight. Well, as her friend Tulani insists, “Today that’s all you can deal with. Your own weight. Like a herd animal, ready to run. Your fourteen hours a day of accumulated jobs with their accumulated commute-hours support no other life but yours. Go, go, go. Like buffalo. Like nervous elk. Stay lean. Stay ready.” And yet all nights are so terribly deep.
Ivy’s mother’s name is Maureen. Her father is David. They are proud of Ivy.
Would they be proud if they guessed that their Ivy is having a case of voluntary amnesia concerning Peak Oil? Peak food. Peak water. Peak soil. She sighs. Peak Oil. The thing that, according to independent scientists and Settlement seven-year-olds, could end their world if not dealt with? Like climate change, which at least has been honored with some public debate, not dead silence. Ivy Morelli, no hero is she.
She drops her hands on the sheet. She dreads the newsroom, vendor of people stories. She is thinking up a good way to tell Brian, her editor, that she wants to drop the Home School story, that there is no story. After all, nobody else wants to touch these anonymous calls or even the calls by those who give their names. After all, these callers are just people. Seems nobody is interested in strenuously investigating the unofficiated. And the officials are never available to officiate. So let’s just pretend the St. Onge Settlement does not exist. Yeah. Does. Not. Exist. We’re good at that, huh?
That way, Ivy never really has to return to Egypt, to the troubling allure of it, to the big questions, all those questions, especially those ones Ivy needs to ask Ivy about Ivy.
The screen crows:
We are America! We are proud! We are number ONE in the world! We are on top! We are rich! We are as tall as the sky! We are the fastest, the
free-est, the most just. We kick butt! We are loyal and cheerful and never complain. We are about choice and democracy. We have merged with the deity of possibilities. America is tomorrow. Bigger TVs for instance, and smaller phones. Soon we will invent a cure for death. We will never die! New livers and eyebrows will grow with the gulping of a pill. We will soon be immortal! Nothing will stop us. Get out of our way! We will kill the challengers with our mean machines in the sky, remote control. Yes, these exist! Soon to be unveiled. We are the champions. You are mere bug splats. Stay tuned!
The voice of Mammon.
Gray suits glide in and out of DC, slip in and out of state houses, seamless as new dolls. These are men and women who are charmingly seeing to it that interests are met. I command it so.
Yes, things are changing. Business people, bankers, my reps, and my policies must decide who will be blind and who will see, who will be twisted and prone and who will walk, who will live and who will die. Who is jailed and who walks. Who is elected and who makes the throwing-in-the-towel speech. This can no longer be a matter for others to handle. Only I am capable of these verdicts, being unencumbered by emotions. Only I know what is at stake. Only I can imagine it. What is at stake? The planet in the palm of my hand and all the plain human race profitable to me, useful, pliant, robotic. More so even than red oxen under the maple yoke and under the meat cleaver. This is the role of big men since the beginning, this glittery seat on high. Don’t you see, human inventiveness has made me, and has fashioned my magnificence. It is meant. There is no we, though the writhing billions in their tender skins believe it so.
Evening, a warm delectable dusk. Cagey DHS§ child protective case worker shows up again at Gordon St. Onge’s old house on Heart’s Content Road.
§ Maine’s Department of Human Services was not Department of Health and Human Services until after September 11, 2011, when crafty reorganizations occurred high and low.
She steps out of her square silvery car.
Gordon is there in the dooryard.
She puts her hand of long fingers out to him, a small white valise in her other hand, the soft nylon kind with a zipper. They shake hands. She gives her name, adds that she is from the Department of Human Services, and she speaks his real name, clearly, boldly, not as a question but as a known fact. “Guillaume St. Onge.”
Gordon understands that this person sees herself as a rescuer. He looks steadily into her eyes. Her eyes are not warm. But they are not the eyes of a machine, either. She is, in her off hours, a very nice person.
Nevertheless, she gives off a business-like industrial consumer smell.
He gives off the smell of freshly milled fir and labor. Blond sawdust powders and flecks his pant legs and shirt front. He has not spoken yet. He has only just stepped down from one of the Settlement trucks, accepted the handshake, while up on the high truck seat, two little boys wait, two small heads with close-cropped summer hair.
As Gordon now smilingly stares into the woman’s eyes, having still made no reply to the greeting (is he even now lost in philosophical reverie?), she glances away toward the sign nailed to the ash tree, hand painted: OFICE, then around back to Gordon’s face. “Guillaume, I have only a few questions. It’s important that we talk. I’m only here to help you. We need to clear up some . . . some claims.”
A couple of crickets creak from the tall grass. Just two. But a whole platoon of mosquitoes has arrived, touching down on warm flesh.
The truck is heaped with fir two-by-fours and one-by-sixes. Fragrance mixes with the pewy odor of the mumbling truck engine. Gordon’s graying dark beard looks, yes, devilish in the near dark, and his thoughts are terrible as he feels the first sparks of another one of his spells of outrage coming on. His pale eyes bore into her even as he smiles, and the mosquitoes whine excitedly now, the woman brushing first at one ear, then another, trying to outstare Gordon who looks, yes, like he might smilingly kill her, but his voice, as he speaks now, is deeply melodious and fatherly, “Tu sais, Madame, la journée est quasiment finit. T’as pas d’famille qui t’attends?” He smiles on and on. His voice is going soft and poofy, as to a newborn child’s ear. “Tu sais, la liberté, c’est comme eul soleil qui basse, eul temps de la journée quand la plupart du monde commencent à s’endormir. Et liu avec d’la courage peut marcher en confiance vers les ombres qui s’etendent . . .”
The little boys lean out the window, watching the woman’s face, which is looking at Gordon’s mouth. Everyone’s hands brush and slap at the ever-growing whining airforce of insects. And Gordon’s voice just gets deeper, more thickly and hoarsely soft, just a shade funeralesque, but more exactly like something whispered between groans in an X-rated film, so this is confusing to her? and his eyes don’t leave her eyes as his steps come closer . . . one step . . . then two . . . his killer look gone. “Sans lois et regimes, y regarde ses champs, ses bois, quelques étoiles gênées, les dos noirs des arbres qui boudent . . .” He gives the top of his left hand a powerful smack. “Ces p’tites bêtes agaçant, les bibites sans merci, les moudits maringouins—” His face breaks out in dramatic eye-rolling despair. Smacks his hands together to end at least one life, then murderously looks around. Then his expression again goes tender. “Y ’ont des bons intentions et y’s essaient ainque faire leur ouvrage, mais y’s peuvent rendrai fou un homme libre. Oh, be’n, c’est l’prix qu’on ‘pay,’ pour la liberté. Penses-tu que ces petites piqûres peuvent déranger l’âme d’un homme libre? Et regardes-ça, ça rend les enfants fou, en toué cas.”
At this point, the little boys are calling out to Gordon in English to hurry, and he turns slowly with a raised fist and snarls, “Fermez-donc vos mautadits gueules quand j’parle à Madame Maringouin!”
One little boy giggles manically, whispers to the other and both giggle, then one calls, “Vas! Vas-t’en, Madame Maringouin-Mosquito! Bzzz bzzz vite dans ta char! On va te donner une bonne claque!”
The second little boy, giggling almost to the point of choking, calls out something in very old Hebrew, which renders him suddenly solemn, some pronouncement that he has learned from Barbara (of Bev and Barbara) about life and struggle and courage. But then he lapses instantly back to giggles when he’s done.
Gordon has gambled on the likelihood that this woman knows no Valley or Maine mill town French or any combination of the two and as her expression grows more and more disgusted, he knows he has gambled right.
She tells him (in English) that she is not tricked. She tells him she knows he can speak English.
“Ahn? Excusez? J’comprends pas.”
“Yeah. We no comprends you, too!” calls one giggly voice from the truck cab, and then two pale faces in the near dark fall way into the truck’s interior, twittering madly, and the horn blows.
The woman calls to the boys. “How are you boys this evening?”
And the answer comes promptly, “Poo poo Swamp Man spits in your mouth!”
It is too twilightish now to see the woman’s angry flush. She tells Gordon (in English) that she will return with others.
He looks at her in exaggerated puzzlement, then nods and says something in his French, ripply, velvety words, purling along all in one breath.
In a few minutes, the state woman’s car is picking up speed on the hill, headed down, headlights blazing in the claylike dusk. Behind her rolls the great flatbed truck, headlights a little cockeyed, Gordon and his assistants headed to a destination three towns away to make a late evening delivery, the unloading being kinda hard work for little boys, some would say, not to mention it being kinda late to be up. No seat belts in the old truck. Children on the edge of peril.
Gordon, driving one-handed now, still not far behind the state woman’s car, though she is gaining speed, hears his mother Marian’s voice, You court disaster, Gordon. You bait them. You beg to be a criminal. Someday, when you no longer have friends in high places, because you’ve turned them all against you, you’ll see how hard the law can come down on you.
Loose transl
ation of Gordon’s words to the state woman.
“You know, Madame, the day is almost done. You have no family that awaits you? You know, liberty, it’s like the sun going down, the time of day when most people begin to go to sleep. And he who has courage can walk with confidence among the lengthening shadows. Without laws and regimes, he regards his meadows, his woods, these few shy stars, the black backs of these sulking trees . . . these little teasing beasts, these bugs without mercy, these damn mosquitoes . . .”
Then while he fights a few mosquitoes, “They have good intentions and they’re only trying to do their jobs, but they can drive a free man crazy. Oh well, it’s the price we pay for liberty—do you think these little picks can devour the soul of a free man? Oh, well, look at that, they can drive the children crazy, in any case.”
Then, facing the boisterous kids with raised fist, he snarls, “Shut your damn mouths while I talk to Mrs. Mosquito!”
And one small boy calls out, “Go! Go away, Mrs. Maringouin-Mosquito! Bzz bzz quick in your car! We’re going to give you a good clack!”
And now, hours later.
In the night, inside a tumbling black sleep of exhaustion, almost dreamless, Gordon hears his own voice answering his mother, “Certainement.”
For the second time this month, Gordon St. Onge gets Shawn Phillips on the phone.
“Hey Gordo.” A chuckle.
“Very funny, Mr. Phillips. Can’t you call off your meat hound?”
“Yeah, yeah. Well, have mercy on me, Gordo. You don’t know what it’s like up here. There are certain . . . uh . . . appearances one must keep up lest one look like one is not doing his job.”
Gordon grunts.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 26
