Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  He is still looking at her. Staring. He. Is. Not. Discreet.

  “You are a smart guy,” says she.

  “In some ways,” says he.

  “You are smart . . . but some would say formless. And others would say hysterical. Paranoid would be a word.” She is bracing herself to ask him some more pointed questions. Her small mouth tightens.

  The car ahead almost turns off on Beverly Lane, a road with one little house and a flagpole. A square of lawn in between simmering new-growth woods. But then the turn blinker dies and the car continues.

  Gordon has started to rattle on again, reeling out his abundant, iron, no-rest, answers-only philosophy. No, he’s certainly not Socrates, or Schopenhauer, or Goethe. But none of it sounds like the stuff of a child molester, either, or quite like a right-wing militia type. But there are contradictions. And sharp angles. Whirlpools. Depth charges. Thrashings. Like a man wrestling a bear.

  Ivy seems truly to have forgotten the need for speed. Ferns bunched in the culverts by the road’s edge are no longer blurred like green projectile vomiting. Between the first car and Ivy’s, a squirrel, long-bodied, long-tailed, casually crosses the pavement as if on a slow oceanic wave. Everything about the day seems sane and soft and sleepy. Sort of Valiumized. Ivy steers with one hand, listening to Gordon’s voice, and thinking.

  He looks down now at her hand on the wheel. She wears three thick silver rings today. Goes great with the camo shorts. “Deep down. Deep deep deep down you feel like a bad person because you don’t like kids.” He reaches for her arm, warm through the T-shirt sleeve, gives it a hard fatherly squeeze. Releases. One-hundred percent full patronizing mode.

  She says nothing, just takes the next gentle curve with her eyes on the road.

  He says, “Humans don’t hatch out. We aren’t supposed to wiggle off into the woods, each one of us fully equipped to live. Humans are the group thing! Even introverts aren’t independent. We are a dependent creature. Group. Mizz Ivy, you don’t really think those big school systems and big corporations make very good families, do you? But most of us have come to depend on these, with some twisted belief that these structures made of fluorescent light, brick, plastic, and their immortal charters actually care. As you know, the devil hath the ability to assume a pleasing shape.”

  Ivy smiles, her own patronizing mode. “But Gordon, humans adapt. We can do it. We can become different, successfully global. The horse is out of the barn. It’s too late to gripe. Don’t you think it’s better to perfect what we have? Big can work. And besides, most of us don’t want to live in a tribe. I don’t. I want space. I want privacy. All you’re saying is nothing new. It’s just the same ol’ hippie recipe for social discontent and anger at change.”

  Red wob of bandana has reappeared and he is mopping his forehead and his neck under the short beard. He looks at her. “When the dollar becomes ten cents and cheap oil and gas become not cheap and social security is privatized, thus dead—”

  Ivy’s foot pounces on the accelerator. She alas passes the other car on a straightaway, but a much too short straightaway, and a, yes, loaded tandem logging truck bursts over the hill, all grille and tall windshield and snarl and teetering weight of its load. But she makes it in time.

  Very, very, very, very close call.

  Gordon’s eyes are popping.

  Ivy is jubilant. “There!” And now her sporty car burns like hell up the road, motor buzzing and the wind roars in at both windows, tearing at Ivy’s silky violet hair.

  Gordon says, “Any time you get tired of driving, I’ll drive awhile.”

  She glares at him.

  “I don’t think there’s any more ice-cream places until you get to Canada.” He says this with a playful little poke at her elbow. “Why don’t we just go back to ol’ Kool Kone. Who needs more than Kool Kone? Too much variety is sometimes the cyanide hidden in the spice of life.”

  She asks coldly, “Do people ever tell you they get sick of you being a know-it-all?”

  “Yep.”

  “Who is Jane? Why does she live with you, Gordon?”

  “Jane is a casualty of the drug war. In some ways, a fatality. A human sacrifice. Her grandfather, Pete Meserve, is an old friend . . . lives in South Paris, right in town. You’d like him. The state temporarily gave Jane over to him after the foster parents couldn’t stand her . . . but Pete, though a calm and patient man, is a widower, has a service station to run. He felt Jane would do better down here with us, more family-like. More attentive. The state knows of this little transfer. She’s on the list.”

  “List?”

  “Yeah the list of reasons case workers keep leaving their cards in my door.”

  “But Jane. Wouldn’t the newsworthiness of her mother’s crime put more pressure on—”

  “I have friends in high places with the department . . . helps a little . . . and the state is overloaded, as you know . . . but things can change. Always, things change.”

  “Okay, you pass the truth test on that one.”

  He gives her a sharp look. “I see . . . this is the way you treat your friends? With tests? Isn’t playing dumb in order to test a person a type of deceit?”

  “But I thought maybe you were deceiving me.”

  Ivy’s car comes up behind yet another car that is going the speed limit. Ivy taps the horn lightly, guns the engine, flashes the lights, trying to coerce the driver of that car to get out of the way. The backs of the heads of the two people in that car’s rear seat seem huge.

  “Want me to drive?” Gordon persists.

  “No. Don’t ever say it again.”

  “Okay, fine . . . so tell me . . . what authorities does your editor hear from that are about to make hell for my family? And for Jane.”

  “Well, he’s actually hearing from people he knows, other editors and people in agencies speaking unofficially and hearing rumors, but nothing definite yet, but he and some of his information sources seem to think something is up. Starting with DHS, the superintendent of schools in your district, the state police, and Gordon, I’m afraid, the Maine Bureau of Drug Enforcement and there was some mention of firearms, the illegal kind.” She takes a breath. “And then there’s some neighbor of yours who claims there are skulls and bodies of animals at the bottom of a drop-off, some charred. To some people this suggests Satan worship. When I called the state police to see what they had to say about all this, the lieutenant told me absolutely nothing. But your name made him breathe funny. I could hear his thoughts. Your name was a kinda household word with him, I could tell. If ten people a week are calling the paper to report all this stuff, and they call him more often, his file must be as thick as the one I have on you, and I have a nice thick file on you.” She smiles guiltily.

  Gordon says, “You’re right. This is bad news for my family.” He looks at his hands with a dull inward study. “You’re a nice person. I’m grateful for your openness.”

  Ivy turns and heads back to North Egypt.

  The sun is high but angled now in their faces. Down go the visors.

  Ivy asks, “What about the firearms accusation?”

  Gordon laughs.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Oh, nothing.” His pale eyes twinkle.

  She wiggles the fingers of her left hand.

  He says, “So are we hippies all peace and love and silliness and stuff, as you accused me of, or are we armed terrorists? Pick one. You can’t have both.”

  “How many guns do you people have on the premises?”

  He closes his eyes.

  “Can I ask how many guns you personally have, Gordon? And why, for godsakes, do you have to have a gun?”

  He clasps his hands in his lap, his head sort of bowed. He says softly, “This is not the question that is really before America now. The question is how many things can the Friedmanites privatize? Police, prisons, schools, hospitals, Social Security, post office, annnd . . . the Pentagon . . . national intelligence, etc. How much more campaign finance
money can be gushed into Capitol Hill from K Street? And how many superfluous American people can America get into the camps, uh prisons, that is, and nursing homes of the shoulder to shoulder sort without the productive-big-spending-nice-upper-buffer-class people objecting? How many things can America outlaw that superfluous people do to enhance this operation, and how much money can be made doing it? All those antiterror bills and antidrug laws . . . the template. Next the War on Tobacco and War on Firearms. Ah, the money to be made!! The intensifying of the great monied network. We used to call it organized crime. But it’s too big now. Aren’t prohibitions glorious!”

  No he is not speaking softly anymore and his head’s at a horns-locking angle. “And the debt of policing the world. Of taking over the world. A new more beefed-up Cold War in the making. And some actual war, boom boom. And you got the CIA-type secret wars, getting people out there across the seas to fight each other. Chaos is America’s finest weapon! And secrecy is a weapon. And those oh so precious politically correct nonviolent sanctions. Starve ’em! Freeze ’em!” He actually growls.

  Ivy winces.

  He chortles. “Oh, and then, as. You. Know, Mz. News, we have questions such as climate change, the acidic changes in the ocean, desertification of whole once-fertile regions, and Peak Oil. The climate disasters and sinking islands are not a hundred years away anymore. They. HAVE. BEGUN. These are the questions that Americans need to have in their big fat mouths!”

  Ivy has gotten suddenly bleach-white, such as TV faces did when the olden days’ reception went fizzy. Leaping Three Stooges. Again, she wonders why he doesn’t include overpopulation in his list of mighty questions, an obvious blind spot for the otherwise all-seeing pessimistic philosopher. And she sighs so hard her teeth whistle.

  Meanwhile, none of this has interrupted him. He’s been going on, “. . . clean water scarcity, the nightmare of nightmares for all living beings. These are the questions you need to be asking, Mzzz. News.” He sort of chokes, on the edge of a fatally deep emotion here, but his eyes just remain on his hands, his head bowed again.

  Ivy gives the car more gas, straight into the sun. After a while she declares, with an indignant raise of the chin, “Guns shouldn’t be in the hands of children.”

  “Neither should cars,” he says, glancing at her ringed hands on the wheel.

  She says evenly, “Speaking of the drug war, people are saying the children of the Home School are drugged . . . or are using drugs.”

  “Baby, we’re beer and cider drinkers!” he says with almost squeaky outrage. “And . . . uh . . . maple milk.”

  “What about the kids? The callers interest is only in the kids. Do Settlement kids have their hands on drugs?”

  He closes his eyes. “This is not the question before America. The question is how many superfluous people can be processed from point A to point B, the coming-soon, local privatized-profitized public schools and labor, uh, prison camps. The police-military state. The antiquarianizing of the last remnant scraps of human rights for the nonlords and nonladies of neofeudal America!”

  “Gordon, you’re evading my questions.”

  “I’m redesigning your questions to make them intelligent questions instead of baby questions. Your little gun issue, just like that little street drug issue, is another Pharaohic Klepto scheme to get poor superfluous people into the camps . . . gulags . . . cages. To throw the book at ’em, you need prohibitions. Thennn you got cheeeeeap labor. And bye-bye labor unions. Ker-pow! All they need is food in the supermarkets to run low. Or overpriced . . . same thing. The climate, the water, the oil, erosion, super storms, super weeds, super bugs . . . you’ll see it. Chaos! Then out come the government guns. Round ’em up, boys! If they don’t have natural emergencies, they’ll rig up some assisted kind. The stakes are high, baby. The . . . stakes . . . are . . . high.”

  She looks at him quickly, sees the indignant set of his mouth. Actually, his mouth is a comically dramatic sneer, his eyes blazing. Of course, there is something funny and sweet and appealing about his outrage and fear, at least on one level. The adorable paranoia. What’s this with the camps? But then Peak Oil wasn’t paranoia after all. But. The. Camps. THAT one is nutty.

  She presses on. “Do the Settlement kids have their hands on drugs?”

  “What about the kids in public schools? Do they have their hands on drugs? They’re loaded with the stuff. They have the four-year-olds stand on carpet remnants in rows to keep from getting the pills mixed up when they pass out the school meds. We’re talking off-label antipsychotic shit, which is preferable because the patent is still virgin. The Big Pharma folks got a drug for everything from friskiness to dirty fingernails. Left-handedness to shyness. Maybe the government oughta push a little CS gas into a few public schools, or you know, blow ’em away. With those nice police guns. Nice government guns. Government guns are softer. Kinder, gentler, more sanctified. There’s also the electric chair, and the very nice nonviolent socially approved IV death drugs. That would certainly teach all those little public school kiddies to ‘just say no.’ And then there’s the CIA. Remember them? Better chat with those boogers. Since they are goddamn drug providers. But you’ll get a bunch of smoke and mirrors there! And ‘no comment.’ ‘Plausible deniability.’ And blacked-out files. Melts in the mouth, not in the hand.”

  She liked him better when he bowed his head, the humility, the sweet sorrow. The red steamy anger pisses her off.

  She says deeply, evenly, “My question.”

  He sniffs with annoyance, picks at the knee of his jeans, squints.

  She suggests, “Maybe marijuana is just freely used by Settlement adults in the presence of kids?”

  “I don’t have any snooping devices in people’s houses!” He says around a nasty laugh. “But––” He slouches down in the seat, his knees up higher, and the sun fills his eyes. “I’m not going to tell you that Settlement adolescents can’t find a little weed around town. You see, I’m not naive enough to think there are drug-free zones.” He laughs again. “It’s embarrassing to think there are people who actually believe that, especially with their mass incarceration schools where a couple thousand kids comingle in a nearly invisible blur, and then by god are allowed to go home, ahem, for a few hours after two p.m.” He chortles. “Drug-free zones!?” He sighs blubberingly like a whoopee cushion. “Oh, but I forgot. Now they have ceiling cameras in the schools.” He shivers. Not a joke shiver. His neck and back really crawl.

  A baseball-sized bug splats the windshield. Ivy twists knobs, wipers slash through washer fluid, smearing the greasy syrupy bug remains, which, with the sun, makes visibility poor, but Ivy doesn’t let up off the gas pedal. The little red sporty car just hurtles onward into the gray gauzy unseen unknown.

  Gordon sits up suddenly, grips the dash. “I wanna go home. I need my Mumma.”

  Ivy sighs with disgust. She lets up off the gas just a little. The windshield is slowly clearing. There is a visible road ahead, now overhung with trees, a glowing OSHA gold-painted stripe down the center of the black pavement and here and there, pillars of sunlight, as if God were trying to communicate.

  Gordon says softly, “I’m not ashamed to say that our kids are curious and adventurous.” He watches the blue, green, black, and yellow woods fluttering past through his side window, and now reaches out to open his hand into the wind. He gives her a guilty pup look. “I do too much beer and hard cider, you may have noticed.” Sighs. “I . . . am a fuck-up in that way. It’s just the way it is. All by itself it pours down my throat.” He laughs a little too loudly. “In the 1920s, there was this nice idea on that. To help the fuck-ups walk the line. But the de-fucking-up idea was just—”

  “Oh, please,” groans Ivy. “Shut up.” She smiles a wide professional plastic smile, then her own smile wending through the other smile, small and flummoxed. Tired of his preaching. Thirsty for his personal sins to be revealed. People stories are personal. And his closeness to her in the car is tautly personal, his hot work smell, h
is fear and her hungers are grafted.

  When she brings the little car to a stop at an intersection, glancing to her right over his knees, he reaches for her nearest hand, which has a loose grip on the steering wheel, pulls the hand to his mouth, kisses her palm, the beard coarse and sun-warmed. Ivy lets this happen. He places the hand back on the wheel. Now flings his head back against the headrest, jerks his knees up higher, eyes squinched. “Where’s my Mumma?” he says sadly. “I need a nap.”

  Ivy laughs. “Be a good boy now and you can have ice cream.”

  Banana boat.

  At Kool Kone, the picnic table is a gooey, relishy, chocolaty, birdy mess. They sit very carefully. They are face-to-face, with the little tipsy table between them, four obliging weeping willows and a pine tree above. Two other picnic tables are also sticky and birdy and pine-pitch-splattered, but no people. Just one young guy in a pickup truck waiting across the small sandy lot.

  Ivy’s cone is lime sherbet “hard serve.” The loveliest of pale greens, so cold, there’s a little smokiness as her lips touch it.

  He has a banana boat, more like a banana ship. Dished up with soft serve. Other cars and pickups pull in. Gordon recognizes them all, waves or nods or salutes them. They holler out, “Hey Gordo! Howzit goin’?!” A few people come over to chat. They come and they go.

  The heat of the day increaseth. Ivy’s cone was, yes, small, but it had grown larger, swelling out over her hand, over her many rings, had run down her wrist. Stain there in the center of the “o” of her T-shirt lettering. Sweat is sticky. Ice cream is sticky. Ivy blinks through the distinctions of clingy heat and wobbling light at Gordon’s face.

  “This is fun,” says he.

  Ivy laughs. “I think you’re easy to please.”

  He grins, kind of stupidly.