Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  “Ricardo, you mean?”

  Bree giggles. “Right.”

  “She wears them all the time. She believes they give her power. She’s become a secret agent.”

  “Oh god,” Bree giggles, then moans. “Watch what you say.” She blows smoke hard.

  Samantha sneezes. “Ragweed.”

  Samantha is now fifteen, just like Bree. Slim, small-boned, straight white-blonde hair worn long with an Apache-style bandana around her forehead, a homemade bandana of a red and blue print. White blouse that glows contentiously in the night, like her hair. Dark bushy homemade pants. Work boots, like Bree’s. And haven’t Carmel, Echo, Margo, Whitney, Oceanna, Michelle, Rachel, and Alyson been seen striding around in high-topped work boots lately? Like a skinhead gang, only not bald.

  Now reaching Bree’s truck, Bree drops her cigarette butt in the sand and crushes it with her heel, jams a hand down into the unyielding pocket of her skin-tight jeans.

  Keys emerge. She unlocks the truck.

  Samantha laughs. “’Fraida thieves?”

  “Tonight I am,” Bree says in her smoky low voice. She leans into the cab, tugs at something heavy. When she turns, her so-very-far-apart yellowy-gold-green eyes look into Samantha’s darker ones and she commands, “Don’t show anyone.” In her arms, a huge book. It is wrapped in a blanket. Her wild rippling carroty hair is thick over her shoulders. “It’s my very private story, only for your eyes.”

  Samantha says, “I can’t wait.”

  Bree says, “I trust you with all my heart.”

  Once the heavy book is placed in Samantha’s slim arms, Bree lights up another cigarette and watches Samantha taking the dark brick path toward the first lane of field cottages where she lives.

  This is not the book her brother Poon sneaked out one rainy night to show Claire and Bonnie Loo in the west parlor. This book has never been viewed before by anyone but Bree. It is a bomb, not yet dropped on the Settlement.

  Alone at home in her room, Samantha lifts the heavy cover and glimpses the first page.

  “Oh, my god.” She jumps up and draws the curtains, although these windows overlook nothing but steep meadow. She worries that her mother will wake up and come find her looking at this. Or Chris, who is still out. She’s never wished for a lock for her door before now. This book, too huge to hide quickly. So heavy it indents the bed like a person sleeping there.

  She flomps back onto her bed now. Sitting Indian-style, she lifts the cover again.

  These are drawings with ink, smeared delicately with oil pastels or watercolors. Purples, yellows, blues. Yellowy cream for skin, skin illuminated by odd light. There is a lot of skin. Between the pages of thick rag paper on posterboard (pages of artwork), are thinner pages of calligraphy, bold and ink-black as a proclamation. Names, first names only. Like “Greg” or “Mike.” One name to each picture, though most pictures feature more than one man, and each picture is a story. A story of sex.

  Samantha tries to remember if Bree had actually said whether these were not true stories. Bree called the book “My story,” didn’t she?

  Well, there’s not a lot of plot. Just action. Primarily rape or something. Something. Different guys. One girl. Always Bree.

  Samantha feels watched. She keeps freezing motionless, to cock an ear and to look around her room, over at the window to make sure there’s not even a tiny slit between the closed curtains. And is the curtain fabric thick enough? It feels like objects in the room are looking at her, the postcard of a desert scene, a knob of her bureau, the knots of pine in the ship-lap ceiling. She turns a page, her eyes getting bigger, rounder. The edges of the rag paper of the drawings are coarse but the depictions of bodies have the smooth properties of live bodies, filled with oils and fats, water and salt and surges and currents. Samantha has ever-so-gently started to jiggle one leg.

  The picture before her is of Bree naked, wrists tied with what looks like dog chain, and several oldish men (what Samantha would call oldish . . . you know, twenties and thirties) surrounding her in the middle of an ordinary kitchen. There’s the edge of a supper table, the knobs of a gas stove in fuzzy foreground and background . . . The whole scene is weirdly 3-D.

  Samantha lifts the page; it is naked Bree in profile. Samantha quickly peeks ahead. People standing in spaces like a barn with machinery and stuff around. Or outdoors in the woods . . . all seasons . . . even winter, bare feet in snow. But always, the young woman is Bree. And her face is hard to read. What is that in her eyes? Is she flipping out? Fainting?

  In the first picture the men are dressed for the outdoors, like they have just come in from a January day, knitted caps or billed caps, jackets, sweatshirts, one with gloves bunched in his hand. Their faces are so real. Their eyes! So real. One man’s eyes are dark as night with the overhead ceiling light reflected in them, these eyes on Bree’s body, hand going for his fly.

  No pictures show Bree face-on. Most are in profile. In this scene, her hands are free. Her feet are apart, pelvis forward while the man works his fingers into Bree’s vagina, the pubic hair light and reddish, an ordinary-looking watch on the guy’s wrist, so real looking, as real as the watch on Samantha’s own real wrist, lifting another page. She stares. Makes a funny sound in her nose and neck.

  Lifts another page.

  Sometimes there’s just one man alone. But mostly it’s groups. Mean, leering, greedy? One or two guys wear such blank expressions, like faces people have while baiting a fish hook or replacing a cable on a skidder. Some a little squinty-eyed, like threading a needle. Utilitarian expressions. Some are undressed.

  In some of these pictures there are guys who look an awful lot like the Vandermast brothers. But they have different haircuts and brown eyes. There are no dark-brown-eyed Vandermasts in the real world.

  Samantha turns pages. She finds that in some paintings, Bree stands with pride! And see, in one of these, that “come hither, I dare you” expression. In one, a man is fucking her from behind, while another man in front of her holds her wrists together, gripping them in such a way as to make the contours of his arms look strained; while Bree’s wrists seem melded, those tender vulnerable squirming heartbeats, pulse against pulse. Is this guy a Vandermast brother? The one they call Poon? But, then, no. Older than Poon.

  The face of the man at her back doesn’t show, just his shoulders in a dark shirt, unbuckled flapping belt, a bare hip and bare bent knee, his arms around her, just a touch of blurriness to both him and Bree, as though the motion of his hard jabs puts the whole universe into a spin.

  Samantha leans away from the book, dizzy. But also sharply focused. Everything beyond and outside her revved-up body now takes on a silly unimportant ticking sound.

  The grays.

  That hornet inflection, cool to our pulsating eyes, that chattering, sighing, thrill and worry, little-teen-girlfriends of our ripply-haired cherishling, the raising of the big ballast pages, then other hands, then others, and the murmured word: Bree, Bree, Bree, lounder and louder, like the confluence of grief and spectacle.

  A few Settlement women have gathered.

  They have gathered in the Quonset hut where blonde, petite Josee Soucier (wife of Aurel Soucier who is cousin of Gordon) is milking a gangly white goat. It is for that special milk that she likes to take over to old Mrs. Dunlop in North Egypt who has stomach trouble. And for the best Settlement cheese, goat milk is the way.

  This is not a planned meeting.

  It was just that one remark led to another, one whisper, then another and now the urgent discussion about Bree, yes, Bree Vandermast and her home life.

  Bree has shown the book to three other girls, after Samantha, and like hot lava, the story has filled every room and piazza, every crook and cranny of the whole Settlement except maybe Gordon, who is often the last person to hear of certain types of news.

  Lee Lynn’s voice is high, really tiny for such a tall, grown-up woman, her wild hair streaming from her head, witchy hair, early gray; she’s still in her thirt
ies. She stands barefoot in the mucky hay of the stall area. Long purple and brown print dress. Braless. Big smiling baby Hazel on her hip. “Gail, have you seen the book?”

  Gail says no.

  Josee lifts the pail away from under the goat and sets it on the high corner shelf, a fresh spiderweb under the shelf. She pushes the empty grain pan away with a foot and shoos the goat out through the canvas flap to the fenced-in hillside, where some little girls are rounding up another doe, there being only three who presently aren’t dry. The white goat’s ribbony tail flutters as she hurries out through the flap. A few bah-heh-heh-heh’s. Now Josee stands with feet apart, polishing her glasses on her shirt hem, her glasses modern and attractive to all with modern tastes, nothing like Claire’s old-timey specs. And Josee’s orangey blonde hair is as short as an elf’s since her most recent visit to the beauty shop. And her eyes without her glasses seem to crackle today. Something about the engulfing conversation.

  Bonnie Loo is kind of sour-looking by nature, her ripply black hair is streaked reddish yellow and knotted into a “tail” with a light blue bandana. Her eyes green-gold, fox color. Some days it is glasses for Bonnie Loo, other days it’s contacts. Today it’s glasses. Old I-don’t-give-a-shit glasses with one taped bow. She reaches for Lee Lynn’s baby and settles her onto her own hip, nuzzling her as if she were her own. This means Bonnie Loo isn’t depressed today. Or jealous. Or morning sick.

  Lee Lynn is describing the book. In her tiny voice, she says, “This child, Bree, has been sold like a cow, like you breed a cow. A goat! Who knows how long it’s been going on? Maybe when she was a little girl. These things can get pretty weird.”

  Baby Hazel opens her hand, palm out toward Bonnie Loo’s earring, as if to praise a distant star. Yes, Bonnie Loo is expecting again. Due in March. Child will be named after her dead father if it’s a boy, her mother if it’s a girl. Even though their names aren’t that hot. Beal and Earlene. But these days, Bonnie Loo is beginning to be deeply and achingly attracted to her ancestry, her history, her real people. She’s having second thoughts about Settlement life. The more she fears the future, the more she loves the past. “The book doesn’t say these guys are paying. It doesn’t really say anything.”

  Gail sniffs indignantly. “Just put two and two together.”

  Bonnie Loo says, “I think I recognize Andy Churchill in one of those pictures. And Michael Gavin. You know Michael, don’t you, Steph?”

  Stephanie replies in a quiet voice. “Yep.”

  Witchy-haired Lee Lynn says, “Fine. But why are her brothers and maybe her dad in that woodsy one?”

  Josee finally snarls, “T’at is an excellent question! Why are t’ey involved, t’em? Okay?! Maybe not a sale. But damn kinky. Damn sick!”

  Bonnie Loo picks straw from Baby Hazel’s sundress. “You can imagine anything. You can imagine almost anything. They are always arresting people for one thing or another you never dreamed of.”

  Gail puts up a hand. “Okay . . . right. That’s what we gotta keep in mind. We do not want this to get beyond here . . . for now. Cops and courts and social workers will make a worse mess of the mess she’s in now. They’d put her people in prison. In prison! And she’d feel all twisted up in a weird guilt, sort’ve like survivor guilt but different. We gotta deal with these guys ourselves. We tell them to lay off or else. We get Bree out of there.”

  Josee kicks at the hay. Hands on her hips. “T’ey ought to be in prison, t’em. Bring in t’Marines. Blow ’em away. It iss too terrible what t’ey are doing.”

  Cindy Butler, Samantha’s mother. She has moved here only a couple of years ago, to be part of Settlement life. She is not married. Not “partnered with.” Nor wants to be. Nor does she want to be a modern- world wage slave. She has never felt so grown-up until she came here. Thus she is inexorably defined by this intimate nest of sisters, sign-up sheets, and clockless time. She watches the words fly back and forth between these women, yes, her “sisters.” Finally speaks, “If prison solved the problem, fine. But prison is about revenge. Why is that good for Bree? These aren’t some strangers. These are Bree’s people. Like Gail says, Bree’s going to have mixed-up feelings about them.”

  Josee snarls, “Bad feelings!”

  “Bad feelings, good feelings, strong feelings, protective feelings, all tied in knots,” says Claire. “The important thing is . . . if this is really what we think it is . . . well, Bree has been savaged. We want to put the reins in her hands. Giving it all over to the police and that lot is like giving your wounded heart to a giant monkey. Worse. And I agree that we are a community. We have good instincts. And we care about Bree. Weeee have got this in our laps. We need to think it through very carefully.”

  Josee rolls her eyes. “Poor Bree will be glad to see t’big monkey toss t’em small monkeys in prison, her. She be glad to see t’em in hot boiling oil. Fix t’ere ass.”

  Stephanie says, “But guess what. If the state gets involved, she goes to a foster home of strangers. It won’t be us. You think she’d be placed with us who on the radio and newspapers they would have us as hippie commune freaks? No ho ho! She’ll go to strangers and they’ll have all these therapists all over her. They’ll make her dependent on professionals! She won’t even be able to think in her own way, let alone feel! They work on you to think their way, the bureau way. The DHS is like the mob. (Tsk.) They say stuff like, “If you don’t do as instructed, it won’t bode well for you.”

  “Sounds like Shakespeare,” says eye-rolling Bonnie Loo.

  “Sounds WHITE,” says Passamaquoddy Claire.

  A few of her “white” sisters roll their eyes. One gives Claire a roughhouse hug. “We fain show the DHS our might.”

  “And ye shall make haste,” Claire adds.

  “That was Moses,” Cindy Butler chortles. “You shall this and that.”

  “No that was God,” titters Bonnie Loo. “God lingo.”

  “English translation,” observes Gail.

  “White god,” says Claire.

  Claire’s cousin Leona, mother of many kids, including one of the teen girls who was given the book . . . she has always had this funny little habit in a group, raises her whole arm, like a kid in school. She does this now. She even waves the arm from side to side. “I think,” she says softly, when finally everyone is staring at her expectantly, and her arm is down. “That it would be real bad to act now in any way. Bree has trusted the girls with her secret. Trust is important. How can we work around that? Maybe get the girls themselves to ask her stuff.”

  “They sort’ve have. Sammy did,” Samantha’s mother says. “But it didn’t go anywhere.”

  Lee Lynn says, “So we need to get her to move in here with us before DHS catches wind of this and makes a move on the Vandermasts.”

  “Right.”

  “Right.”

  Dark-haired thick-legged cherubic Hazel squeals, “Riiiiii!!!” and giggles with nose-wrinkled eyes-skwinched enthusiasm and Bonnie Loo smooches her ear, which causes further Hazelesque enthusiasm, “Eeeeeeee-ya ya ya ya! Ma ma ma!”

  Josee fairly hisses (still with hands on hips), “Maybe t’ose horror men not let her move away . . . if t’ey make all t’at money on her, aye?”

  Penny (mother of Whitney) agrees. “They sound pretty sick. The sooner we work on getting her out, the better. She doesn’t have to know the reason. It makes me so sad. Poor little dickens.”

  Leona now wonders, “What happened to Bree’s mother?”

  “Dead.”

  Lee Lynn sighs her tiny soprano sigh. “We need to tell Gordon about this. He’s been getting letters from her. About impersonal subject matter but—.” She squints one eye. “He might—”

  “Ack!” This is Claire’s cousin Geraldine. “Keep him out of it. He’ll bungle this. Men can’t imagine what to do in this kind of thing, except act stupid, and hormone-ish. He’ll probably go over there and get into a brawl and then he’ll wind up in prison with them. You know, Bree would probably take her brother
s’ side if Gordon was over there socking their lights out. Then she’ll shut us all out forever.”

  Stephanie keeps nodding as people talk. Stephanie always freezing, hugged up in a big bunchy sweater. Plump sweet face, rosy, even when she’s cold. Short swingy brown hair. Brown eyes, stylish glasses. Mother of Margo and Oceanna, the un-look-alike twins. That makes Stephanie one of the old-timers here, like Claire, Leona, and Penny. And so her words now have a kind of sanctification. And she is heard. “For now, let’s just give her all the love she needs, lure her here with love. And keep her trust. This is home.”

  Josee squints at each face incredulously. “I’m ready to carry her out off t’at evil place and turn t’garden hose on t’at bunch of lowlifes. I belieff t’slow way iss way wrong, me.”

  Little girls are now shoving another milk goat in through the flap and Hazel points, “Go!” (short for goat) and squirms polywoggishly to get down and so Bonnie Loo accommodates.

  Witchy siren-voiced Lee Lynn hugs Josee. “If it gets to that, you can have the honor of holding the hose.”

  Josee says, “T’ank you very much. I look forward to it. If you forget, I remind you, okay?”

  In a future time, Brianna Vandermast considers.

  I do not believe in the damnation of the soul. The thick, chomping body and brain with all their reflexes falter, suffer, ache, burn, wail.

  However and ever the soul, part of the mighty, filmy and whole, this huge soul can’t feel for it has no physiology. Therefore it can’t sin. Nor can it be coerced.

  Therefore, death is not punishment. Nor is it reward. And it is not nothingness but wholeness. Maybe it is the ultimate embrace.

  Riding to the university.

  Lee Lynn’s dress is orange. Not her harvest orange. Not her pumpkin. And not her other orange. But an August orange. Like the billows of orange blooms you see in certain window boxes. Though her bralessness under such thin fabric can be unnerving to many of those who view her, she never seems to realize. She doesn’t do the sexpot thing, gasping between words and licking her lips. No hip wiggling. No chest heaving. None of that. She just gets on with whatever it is she has to do, breasts wagging, like a critter with a litter. Her dark-streaked gray hair, so unnerving and un-self-realized, is braided today and pinned into a careless cabled blob on top.