Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  Lieutenant Craigie’s voice over the phone.

  A voice. Bass. Toneless. Not the brotherly, good-buddy voice so many of the local cops have, which Ivy rather enjoys. Local cops are just regular guys. In the inner sanctum of the municipal public safety buildings, they horse around with each other and smile charmingly and tell Ivy jokes and even good recipes for cookies and casseroles and one officer always talks about his old cats. State police, being military, are never, even in person, more than a mouth, big Smokey hat, a pair of dark glasses, and a hand with paperwork extended out of that blue-gray haze of look-alike platoons. And then there’s the flashlight in your eyes routine and the light washing over your lap like you might be hugging a stuffed sack of bank money.

  Ivy takes note that Lieutenant Craigie’s voice is, yes, deep. Leaping bullfrogs! This means he must be older, one of the originals, the larger two-hundred-pound make and model, from the days before budget cuts. Nowadays, state cops are, just as their cars, almost tiny. Small men with squeaky voices in compact cars. Yes, budget cuts. Less gas. Less fabric in the uniform. Less leather. Less tinted Plexiglas in the tiny sunglasses. More money left over for bazookas, tear gas, door-smasher-openers, tanks. Tasers. Dogs that sniff. Machines that see through your clothes, count your cash, and take pictures of your eyeballs. HAW! HAW!

  The deep voice informs Ivy that there has been no investigation concerning Mr. St. Onge.

  Ivy asks if there have been a substantial number of calls from the public concerning “legal and/or illegal weirdness” at the St. Onge Settlement or pertaining to the conduct of Mr. St. Onge himself.

  There is a lonnnnng hesitation. Lieutenant Craigie says deeply, “We have no reason to investigate Mr. St. Onge for anything, either civil or criminal. There are no investigations, no warrants . . . nothing.”

  “But have there been people calling you reporting . . . decomposed bodies and—”

  “We have no reason to investigate Mr. St. Onge at this time,” the lieutenant repeats. Like a skipping record. Although the words “at this time” weigh like forty cement trucks in Ivy’s consideration.

  The grays.

  Tonight we decide to capture a newborn beaver. We enjoy cradling such little bundles, peeking into the mashed little countenance, flattened ears, sucking grunting little mouth. We never place such ones on the laboratory table, but pass it from hand to hand so that all hands feel the exploding force within. Such mystery. Even we grays so far advanced over the primitive human Earthlings never pretend to know it all. Inside our heads are oooohs and ahhs and tee-hees.

  Our lack of illusion of time and the thumping of our multisensory flylike eyes and several fingers enjoy this sweetie for a year. Such a thrill! Merely a moment in time beaver Earthlings perceive. And so when we place her back in her stick hut, no one missed her, she never became chilled, and will remember nothing.

  At the Record Sun.

  Ivy stares at three “satin finish” color photos her editor’s buddy, Gil Zaniewski, has sent her. The old Instamatic stuff. Cheesy flash-paled faces and red eyes. Like a bunch of raccoons caught in a trash can looking up into a blaze of headlights, four young people on a couch, then the back of a head of someone standing in the foreground, all those knees. Couch must have been deep. No smiles. The edge of an old tiled fireplace shows in one corner. The second photo shows three faces filling the frame, cheek to cheek, big alligator smiles. Quite out of focus.

  A third photo features just a young guy sitting sideways at a kitchen table, a small, rotating-type summer fan on the table edge, closer to the camera than the guy’s face. Fan blades are motionless.

  On the backs of the photos, in round girlish handwriting: Sept 19 1980. Names: Jen, Nick Hardy, Gil, Gordo. Then: Gil, Claire, Tina. The young guy at the table: Gordo.

  A wave of guilt swooshes over Ivy. She sees that he is the youngest face in the crowd, probably about eighteen or nineteen. The same pale eyes as today. Brown beard. No frosty gray. There’s that creaseless baby-fat look across the cheeks that goes with youth. He is either talking or eating, mouth turned in an odd way, eyes not quite on the camera, never suspecting this picture would be used someday in a file on him, a file of proof meant to turn the world against him.

  Another day at the Record Sun.

  For the dozenth time, Ivy picks the Zaniewski photos from her folder, and all the printed-out news articles and photos, spreads them on her desk.

  She hunches over them. Only her eyes move. No rustle from the fabric of her chirpy youthful clothes. But her head is roaring with questions. Would this man brutalize children? Sure, he teases and wrastles them, toughens them with miniterrors and overdoses of fun, but does he punish them brutally? And does he sexually invade them? Does he killll them?

  With each photo image, she studies not just his eyes, but his hands and fingers. At that legislative hearing on school testing, his testimony is punctuated, pronounced, underscored by his hands.

  AUGUST

  The grays.

  We abducted some purple hair. (Oops! Wrong word. Not abducted. We plucked a sample from her hairbrush.) She was asleep under her quilt of insect designs. Night or noon. It matters not. We will never be known.

  See here’s the thing. Time is nonsense. Human scientists say with assurance that it would take centuries or more for us “space aliens” to get here to the Little Round Blue and White Goldilocks planet “from another galaxy.” But this is because all Earthlings—ant or anteater, buffalo or boxer dog—can only perceive linear, evenly measured, perfectly paced, tick-tock time and apronlike space with Earth at the center of it all. But that is beside the point. We are not visitors. We are the ancient web and to them, we are too fast, too slow, too reversible for them to detect. Unless we decide to give them a thrill. We, too, have our playful sporty sides. And also, sometimes, we screw up.

  But getting the purple hair? It was on our lab table even before it left her boar bristle brush. Before cataloging it we watched it awhile. It’s ghosty spirals seemed anxious, like the little reporter, who took a prescription pill before bed in order to let go of the day.

  Ivy chews on a thumbnail, not her usual habit.

  Of course it was just a dream, Ivy assures herself. Very gray, very bald, fly-eyed men with poor posture standing around her dresser and mirror. They were naked but had no genitals. Okaaaay. These are the dreams of a woman under impossible pressures. This is where a life of approach-avoidance and a crappy low-pay newspaper job takes you.

  The press returns to the St. Onge Settlement.

  She begins her trek up the rutted dirt road that zigzags to the bald rock summit of windmills. What looks like flies crawling along up there just below the summit, she has been told, is really the road crew doing road improvements, widening the roadway and building small stone culvert bridges. Their earnest dream is to brick the whole road with golfball-sized stones. To prevent erosion. Man, that’s ambition for you.

  And down below it all,

  Ivy trudges on.

  In the sky the sun begins to vibrate, its violence nonnegotiable.

  Gordon sees Ivy Morelli coming up the grade, flowers in her hand, stopping to chat with the ox driver, Butch Martin, who is not a lot younger than Ivy. Ivy pats the broad forehead of an ox. Ivy and Butch talk and laugh. The wet swimmy heat increaseth by another five degrees.

  As the oxen and Butch move on down around the curve, open with only steamy treetops on one side, Ivy turns and watches them and then there’s the view of the Settlement fields dotted with sheep, and orchards, and many many small gardens, some terraced, and then irrigation ponds, and then to the world beyond the Settlement, with Heart’s Content Road threading through the trees . . . and then in another direction, the summer homes and their docks and boats, gray beaches and the warm blue pond called Promise Lake and its three little tufty islands.

  Ivy turns, resumes her hike up the soft rutted road. Ivy Morelli with the steely blue eyes and small pink mouth and robust shoulder bag. Lovely (but cunning) Ivy Mor
elli. THE PRESS.

  Gordon leans on his shovel. Shuts his eyes.

  Ernest Smith growls, “Company.”

  Squishy, overly stout, yes, jumbo Roy Day turns and sees Ivy, gives the waistband of his sagging gray jogging pants a couple of violent hikes and says, “Oh, good. She can have my shovel.”

  Aurel Soucier is quick to unknot the sleeves of his khaki shirt from around his waist and slip the shirt on over his sticky arms and back. He does not believe it is nice to go shirtless in front of women guests.

  Giving his shovel a hard pitch into the back of the tool wagon (clank!), Gordon stands there in the spotty shade with the dogs and deerflies and mosquitoes and greenheads and dragonflies, unknotting the red bandana from around his neck, wobs it up, and presses the red wob to each of his burning eyes. He doesn’t really like this surprise.

  Some hoarse Frenchy whispering is bubbling around the peripheries of the road crew. Close to quitting time anyway. One of the understandings here at the Settlement is that hard labor under an uncompromising sun or boring tasks are never committed to for more than one, two, or three hours a day, unless there’s some life-or-death oh-my-god-help-us emergency. But the big question now, whispered, of course, is what is ol’ Gordo going to do about THE PRESS.

  Yes, many Settlement worrywarts have been howling that a town meeting on the Record Sun issue is overdue. But Gordon had snorted, “She’s gone for good.”

  Aurel, a close confidant in all matters, watches his cousin without comment, an unusual silence for him.

  Gordon looks over at Aurel’s face, which is given that crescent shadow by the Vietnam War bush hat, and Gordon just tips his head from side to side, giving his neck muscles a workout while keeping his eyes fixed on Aurel’s eyes. Smacks a deerfly. Misses. Smacks again. Misses.

  There behind the tool wagon, Ivy finds Gordon. She says, “Hi,” trying very hard not to do the BOLD STARE or even the OBVIOUS GLANCE at his chest, with its shameless tornado shape of dark hair that comes to a gentle taper down through his navel then disappears under the sun-faced buckle. And maddeningly muscled-out long, bare arms. And the hands, blackened by pine pitch, calloused by tools, and one very gummy, purple-pink, meaty, raw, dribbly, torn knuckle. Behind Ivy, Aurel is now loudly advising someone, “T’heat make you loos’ yourrr potassium,” his voluptuous French Rs unfurling through the sweet polleny air. And Ivy’s neck trickles.

  A chainsaw is jerked to life a few yards uphill. A few finishing touches? And the big dogs are trying to get a sniff of Ivy’s crotch and shapely bottom while the small, white, puggish-face dogs must settle for her socks and sneakers. Ivy warns them all, “Go on. Go! Get!”

  Greg Junkins drags his shepherd mix away. “No! Get!” Ivy tells the others. And they are now being dragged away by the collars by blushing, apologizing owners. Except for the small white dogs, who just lose interest and stroll away.

  Gordon is very quiet, just stroking one side of his mustache with a middle finger, eyes on Ivy’s short bowl haircut with its outer-spacesque purple cast.

  Now a deerfly finds Ivy and she begins to shout at it.

  Gordon gives a few swipes at his own deerflies.

  Aurel is now loudly urging someone, “So eat lots of bananas . . . orr . . . mushroom!” Then he sidles off into the wagging ferns to climb agilely up into the cage of the skidder and revs the monster-deep roaring snoring stinking diesel engine to life. The skidder churns around in a wide sashaying circle and backs to one of the oozing popple stumps and Rick Crosman tosses his kid, Jaime, the end of the cable and chains.

  All this racket. Ivy’s questions will never reach ears.

  “I thought we were done!” the boy Benjamin whines, kicks a rock.

  A young ox turns his head Benjamin’s way.

  But most everyone is watching Jaime Crosman’s shoulders work as he deftly tightens the chokers around the stump. Jaime is as blond as his father, despite his Chilean first name, and Jaime is, these days, nearly as tall and strapping as his father, and the father is one of those very young-looking forty-year-olds, and so they look more like brothers.

  Ivy is watching with awful alertness as the father steps quickly to Jaime’s side. Can’t hear what he says. Nobody can.

  The skidder gives another slow deep groan, Aurel up there in the caged-up cab fooling around.

  Jaime’s father . . . something about his legs and shoulders. Like commencing a cramp. He swings half around as if to leave, then turns back again, closer to Jaime now, almost close enough to kiss Jaime as Jaime stands up from finishing with the chains.

  Gordon is looking at Ivy’s very thick shoulder bag, her light blue T-shirt that reads UNIVERSITY OF MAINE. Earrings, tiny pewter open books. Shorts made of camo material. Her intellectual military look? She is bouncing on the balls of her feet like a prizefighter, wagging her bouquet of wildflowers and taking in everything. So young, so playful, so pretty. What is he feeling? Does he feel utterly and suddenly afraid of everything? Of life? He shouts lightheartedly to her over the racket, “You wouldn’t be carrying any lemonade in that bag of yours, would you?”

  It is hard not to notice, in spite of the barking dogs and dust and clangs and horrid stratas of diesel smoke and devoted blood-lusting flies, that the ever-so-blond Chilean-named boy Jaime sneeringly enounces “FUCK YOU,” into the face of his young-looking blond father, Rick Crosman, who now moves fast, smack-punches the son in the mouth hard, hard as hell, and the kid stumbles back, eyes wild, blood dribbling from between his teeth, a lot of blood, which is what you get when your tongue is burst. And several of the men yell, “Hey!” and “Cool it!” or just hoot, unable to latch on to a real word. Greg and Mo step into the space from which Jaime is lunging forward to spit an impressive red blot on the dead center of his father’s pale beige T-shirt because you know that although he is as big as his father, he is still just the son of the father, afraid to hit back. But his father smacks him again, the left cheek of Jaime’s face now burning cherry pink. And Eddie Martin and Mo and Greg are all reaching for Rick in a sort of silly-looking way, as if to give him little doggie pats, but it is no doubt that they know he’s too red hot to touch.

  Now Jaime runs. His father doesn’t chase, just stands and watches, dust broiling around him. It is done.

  Ivy Morelli stares sub-zero-polar-cold daggers at Gordon but he ignores her, reaches for his shirt on the back of the tool wagon, then turns back to her with a big grin and speaks in a Daffy Duck voice, “Despicable!” Then in his own voice, “Come along, Ms. Morelli! Let’s go down to the shops and witness some eight-year-olds studying Shakespeare.”

  Ivy and Gordon.

  And they go. Down along the rutted road, out of the noise of that Settlement temple called work. However, spilling from both their faces and bodies their sweat is almost noisy.

  Gordon pulls his shirt on, buttons up.

  Ivy is frowning, frowning, frowning, slapping one of her shapely tanned thighs with the poor limp flowers.

  At last, Gordon wonders aloud, “What are you thinking?”

  She replies sadly, “I don’t know.”

  He sighs. With empathy. “Mammals are so unpredictable. All those synapses. All those nerve endings.” He hangs his head a minute and looks at her sideways. “We can’t always live our good philosophies.”

  “Some do,” Ivy says.

  Gordon looks at the press and retorts, “Baby, spare me.”

  “It’s a matter of self control,” she says bitingly.

  “In air-conditioning with lemonade at the ready, and a nice soft chair, self control is possible.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she mocks him.

  He reaches with a black-stained and gummy hand to touch her moist right ear just above the churning warm pewter earring. She hardly knows what her hand is doing . . . it just claws at him . . . again, like the first time they met, unable to draw blood, but indeed, he does jerk his hand back. Then she pitches her flowers at him, somewhat playfully. And says tiredly, “Oh, I suppose next you
’ll tell me God said Spare the rod, spoil the child.”

  He brushes some vetch vine from his shirt. “No, Ms. Morelli. It’s all science. You see, your control just now was lost in a flurry of wonderfully mammalish chemical synapses.” He wiggles his fingers at her. “Sssssssssss!”

  “I . . . I’m sorry,” she says. “I am just a hot-blooded Italian . . . and Irish. You’re right. It’s all science.”

  He stops walking, beams at her. “Me, too! Italian and Irish!”

  She laughs. HAW HAW. “I thought you were all French.” She lies.

  “French, Maine Indian, Italian, Irish . . . I’m global.”

  She laughs. They walk again. His work shirt is dark green, but faded. It fills up the whole northeast side of Ivy’s peripheral vision as they scuff and crunch along the rest of the way, chatting and laughing, telling Italian and Irish anecdotes. Gordon quotes Heywood Broun, “‘The Irish are the crybabies of the Western world. The mildest quip will set them off into resolutions and protests.’”

  Upon reaching her sporty red car, parked seethingly in the sun near the largest Quonset hut, Ivy tells him, “The paper is very interested in doing a story on your people now. But I promised you I’d drop it.”

  He looks at her with sudden tiredness. “Right.”

  She says, “I have in my bag a pad, five pens, a tape recorder, and several blank tapes ready to roll . . . in case you want to talk officially.”

  He narrows his eyes on the middle of her young throat. “I don’t.”

  “Well.” She sighs. Drops her shoulders, glances at the swollen streaks caused by her nails on his right forearm. She leans back against the scorching surface of her car, pulls away quickly, shaking her burned hand. “There are reporters less understanding than me . . . less nice . . . uh . . . more professional . . . who . . . are . . . all set . . . for when the authorities swoop in here, which Brian . . . my editor . . . thinks could be any day now.”