Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  Ivy looks around. She sees Brian’s head, over there in his cubicle. He’s on the phone, the soft Star Trek light of his computer giving his face an otherworldly warmth, like warm cream or warm snow. Her eyes settle on the rubber Ronald Reagan with the hole of his chewed-off nose, Bill Clinton’s head tipped over on its side, nearly at the edge of Laura’s desk.

  She tries to remember if Gordon had actually answered her question about stockpiling weapons. Yes or no. Seems he gave some squirrelly answer, seems he soared off on a philosophical zigzag, a friggin’ crafty detour.

  She thinks of all those little white homely push-faced dogs and the Scottie named CANNONBALL . . . yeah, CANNONBALL of all things. Willie Lancaster’s dogs. Militia dogs. Militia people. The militia connection. She holds her forehead a minute, blinking, thinking. Then reads the article through again. And again. And again.

  Ivy strikes gold online.

  His grayish eyes aren’t at all frigid as she had imagined they would be. Nor do they hold that end-of-the-road dimness that all other people in these police station photos have. His eyes reflect joy. As if lightbulbs of happiness are making him slightly squint, maybe a store window Christmas tree, the kind that twinkles and maybe dangles with pottery elves, glass balls, little silver bells, and cellophane-wrapped candy canes. He wears a Jack the Ripper sort of beard. He is thirty-eight years old. (The Record Sun item said “thirty-six.”) No previous arrest. Not even speeding. Ivy has had eleven speeding tickets. But not William D. Lancaster. His teeth are a little bit bucked . . . how does Ivy know? Because his mouth is smiling a big happy smile. Ivy thinks the news item on his detainment should have been accompanied by this photo. How its oddness catches the eye! A story in itself.

  Ivy investigates the militia connection, for a quotable quote.

  She had called his residence and gotten none other than the very pregnant fifteen-year-old-looking Dee Dee who she’d observed at the Settlement noon meal during her “tour.” Dee Dee pleasantly offers to arrange an interview with her father but said it was probably best for Ivy to meet her and her husband Lou-EE down at the Settlement first and they can ride up together “just to be sure Dad doesn’t answer the door buck naked. Or worse.”

  Ivy tips her head. Worse? What could be worse? Bleeding from the eye sockets?

  The girl has spoken pleasantly but not laughingly, though Ivy has a clear-as-glass memory of Dee Dee Lancaster St. Onge from the tour day, her grand entrance at the meal, the gray eyes teasing, perusing, smooching, embracing.

  And so here Ivy is now. And here is the very and massively pregnant child pumping on the pedals of a wee bitty eensie Toyota pickup, a vehicle born before its driver was, gears crunching, cab sagging on one side, the light of evening revealed through the floor. Ivy compares the speed of the craft to an ox-pulled plow, digging in, biting into late summer’s cold earth, willing them backward instead of onward.

  Dee Dee admits, “He knows you’re coming. He figured it out. I had sorta wanted to—”

  “Sneak up on him?”

  “Right,” replies Dee Dee pleasantly. A store-bought purple bandana girds Dee Dee’s lopsided loose French-twist-bun-ponytail. Store-bought gray sweatshirt, too short, revealing the school-globe-sized midriff, collar and cuffs of a blouse of that crisp 1950s country red-and-white check, little pearlesque top button. No embroidery or patchwork. Not much that is Settlement-fashioned about little Dee Dee Lancaster St. Onge, not tonight anyway. And there are the jeans, the fat black socks and work boots. Wristwatch with black boyish leather band. Pretty little hand working the gearshift.

  Meanwhile, oh where is Dee Dee’s husband Lou-EE St. Onge (cousin of Gordon’s from “THE County,” Aroostook)? No room for Lou-EE. Not in this Lilliputian truck cab, the shift stick on the floor where a third pair of feet might go. So Lou-EE is stretched out in the rusty, almost frothy, crackly, about-to-rip-off-and-away truck bed. Remember, Lou-EE is the guy with the scraggly lonnng black beard, the holstered gun, the big-brimmed brown felt mountaineer hat, no shoulders, hipbones but no hips, lonnng legs and lonnng arms and green-golden-brown eyes with a black-brown outer ring on the irises. Raven lashes. Riveting beautiful eyes but no rivet in his glance, no zeal, no charisma. Eyes, shoulders, long arms ardentless. His beauty is all poetry but no rhyme.

  He rarely speaks. Though when he does, he carries a bit of the melodic, the Aroostook, the ending branches of the Acadian tree, going, going, gone, the way the younger generations always get ironed out and starched and made uniform by modern school and TV.

  He hugs the Scottish terrier Cannonball close to himself, advising her to keep her mammoth head down in case a lawman or tattletale should pass and observe the marvel of this yellow trucklette full of outlaws on the go. It has been twenty years since the Toyota has passed for a sticker.

  Dark is coming earlier and earlier now in the usual late August way. The tree tunnel they ride through makes the sky a checkerboard, like Dee Dee’s blouse. They ascend a hill, a leveling, then more hill. Dee Dee sees fine with just the parking lights and the pinky gold twilight, and that semiradar of being home sweet home.

  At the top of the next grade there’s an opening on the left but the glory of the western sky is made inferior by the pinky-green-orange super progress mercury light on the garage side of a modern house.

  Dee Dee nods toward that house. “Both of them are teachers. One the mom, one the son. Both always trying to teach Dad.”

  “Teach him what?” Ivy leans forward to try to see through the schoolteachers’ proud crackingly clear lighted-from-within picture windows.

  Dee Dee shrugs. “Everything. They keep calling the constable on him.” She sets the truck’s turn signal (which works!) to blinking friskily, an unnecessary, dutiful action given that there’s not a soul around. Ivy considers this an elderly person’s trait, quirky for a person of Dee Dee’s generation.

  The vessel now dips achingly and squeakily and squealingly and putt-putt-puttingly to the right. Ivy can make out pine trees with trunks the diameters of living room rugs. Just woods? The wee truck ka-chunks to a stop behind an old tarp-covered snowmobile. It’s for certain there is no light in the Lancasters’ windows, their mobile home wedged back inside the dozens of shoulder-to-shoulder pine giants. In fact, there are two connected mobile homes. It brings to Ivy’s mind a train of boxcars, ghostlike in some creepy freight yard.

  Dee Dee is already out, slamming (and slamming it two more times) the truck door and she is talking low to Lou-EE, who must be climbing out of the crispy rust-riddled truck bed because the truck with Ivy still half in it whimpers and shivers and boings all over and Ivy is now fully stepping forth, hefting her shoulder bag and feeling her right earlobe with the small twinkly star earring, rhinestone and pewter, yes, dressy. And her most conservative newspaper reporterly outfit, gray and black top, khaki trousers, prissy shoes with leather-looking ruffly rumples across the top. A flick of cologne. This is also her funeral outfit, whenever that need arises.

  Small dogs are barking inside the trailers.

  Dee Dee starts ahead. Lou-EE and Cannonball hover around near the edge of the piney blackness, Cannonball’s nose snorts deeply of the six o’clock (though it’s not six o’clock) doggy news on grass stalks and pebbles.

  Ivy can vaguely make out more vehicles. More buildings. More stuff.

  Ivy can’t see Dee Dee but as the girl goes along the path ahead, the scrunching of twigs and scuffing of grit leads the way in audio. Ivy follows, feeling with the toes of her funeral shoes. Small dog voices make increased uproar in the trailers.

  “That’s his shop.”

  Ivy jumps. She didn’t know Lou-EE was so close behind.

  Ivy says, “His shop?” Her eyes are adjusting enough to see Lou-EE’s pointing hand, the fingers long but muscular. Maybe not ardentless, just wisely heedful. The building to the right that he is referring to is built snugly among the mighty pine trunks. Unlit old windows like a church or courthouse. Kind of cuckoo and eerie when viewed out of c
ontext, in this dark unwelcoming.

  “That’s where Dee Dee and I live.” Lou-EE’s hand points to a place beyond the shop.

  Ivy sees a five-story pink (or yellow?) rocket-shaped house overly close to the shop. No lighted windows there, either.

  “Dad! Daaadd!” Dee Dee’s voice broadcasts inside the mobile home.

  Small white forms surround Ivy. They snort as they breathe in her socks and dressy pant legs. She can’t see Cannonball at all. Black against black. Just these dozen white shapes that shift like a Rubik’s cube. Ivy recalls how they roam the Settlement but are always referred to as “Willie Lancaster’s dogs,” yes, rangy, curl-tailed, mash-faced, long legs in back, short in front, no collars, free as the breeze.

  “Daaaaad!” and “Daddy! Pleeeeze!” Dee Dee’s voice lurches through the rooms of the trailer, a light here and there filling a curtained window, flicking on, then off. The two trailers are connected by a trellis “hallway,” which Dee Dee passes through twice, once each way, calling all the while. And Lou-EE seems to have vaporized, he’s so soundless. But now Ivy discovers his pythonesque form on the path still behind her, silhouetted by small bands of the pinky-greeny-orangey light from the neighbor’s house as they slant through the Lancasters’ many formidable pines.

  Ivy proceeds closer to the door through which Dee Dee went, startled now by the vague shape of a portable chipper and a sided-up flatbed truck with lettering on the doors parked close to the steps. A slash of the space-age light from the neighbors causes part of one fender to glow. Ivy leans toward the truck and, wide-eyed, works through the letters. WILLIAM D. LANCASTER & SON/LANDSCAPING AND TREE WORK.

  Something touches Ivy’s trouser leg. She gasps audibly. It’s just one of the white dogs, though most have gone out to sniff further news from Dee Dee and Lou-EE’s truck.

  Lou-EE is now somehow ahead of Ivy, had slipped by like a fish, heavy revolver, huge hat and all, and he’s on the step of the mobile home. Now a snapping sound. And Dee Dee is saying from the doorway, “He’s here. He’s just . . . not here.” And most of the white dogs are now suddenly on the step, too. And the snapping sound again. Lou-EE says, “Porch light is burned out.”

  Dee Dee tsks. “Too coincidental. It’s one of Dad’s conspiracies.”

  Ivy sees no reason to get much closer to the step. Pretty silly to have EVERYBODY on the step.

  Dee Dee says pleasantly, “If we wait, we’ll win.”

  Ivy says pleasantly, “I’m not in a rush.” A white dog is snorting at her foot, a slobbery hoglike snort so powerful it pulls her sock away by inches. Her eyes are adjusting better and better even as the twilight is withering from pinky-blue to purplish-slate out beyond this strange bodeful forest and beyond the brilliantly lit teacherly house. Suddenly a FACE is floating before Ivy’s, a hideous nonhuman FACE. Ivy grabs at her own throat, sort of strangling herself. Ivy admires the shape of the body and stance. Jeans. Bare feet down there, pale. No shirt. Pale, tight, agile-looking physique. Not a burgers, fries, and Coke man. Not a desk man. She knows that six days a week, William D. Lancaster is a tree-climbing man. Ivy decides the mask is a mouse or a squirrel. Yes, exactly. Rocky the Flying Squirrel, friend of Bullwinkle the Moose. It is supposed to be a cute mask, maybe? Like the TV cartoon was? But here and now, it is otherworldly and makes Ivy’s heartbeats hurt.

  “Dad,” says Dee Dee. “This is Ivy Morelli from the Record Sun. She wants to interview you about guns in general. Ivy, this is my father.”

  Ivy puts out her hand, “Hello.” She had expected noise, from all she’d heard about Willie Lancaster. Hooting and tee-heeing and bragging and carrying on. But the eyes in the mask just gaze (or so it seems) into Ivy’s eyes, the mask’s frozen grin (with squirrelly teeth, a little bit like Willie’s real ones in the police mug shot) speaks not. Oh, this izzzz disquietingly reminiscent of Gordon and his yellow horned head and silence. It’s not the thing itself but the doubling effect that creeps our Ivy out so that her neck hairs turn into spiders.

  But now the big squirrel shifts his bare shoulders, arms raising out from his body just a bit, making him look even bigger. Again the “other” is exhumed; she sees Gordon in the creamy yellow dawn wearing his papier mâché head, big, crayon-yellow, horned. That writhing silence. What izzz it about masks and silence that men just love to put between you and them? Leaping lizard dicks!

  She says evenly, “Out collecting nuts?” Ivy likes how she just said that. She feels his power dissolve like shattered bulletproof glass.

  The squirrel’s shoulders shift again and he moves closer to Ivy just as Dee Dee is trying to situate herself between them. And several white dogs are also moving along en masse to be part of this important congress. The squirrel’s paw looks to be nudging at Ivy’s hand . . . to finally shake hands? . . . but something is in his hand and Ivy is recoiling. Willie swivels and slaps audibly the object into Dee Dee’s two hands, which she had been quick to position there, like clockwork, she being as quick and fluid as her dad is. And predicting his moves? These are, yes, spooky people.

  Ivy has remained two steps back. It seems there can be no normal interviews in this part of the world. Her next flashback is Gordon at the merry-go-round, refusing to talk sense and chasing her to her car with his bull-bear-gorilla routine.

  Now Dee Dee is speaking pleasantly and the plastic squirrel face is nodding and grinning. “You got them.” She sighs. “All natural.”

  Voice from the mask: “As opposed to supernatural . . . ooooooweeeeee. Burn you at the stake when you order from the Supernatural Vitamin Company.” Now the squirrel suddenly makes a crackly scream and hops around as if something is burning his feet. The crowd of white dogs bursts apart, then recoalesces pantingly.

  “Dad gets deals,” Dee Dee says pleasantly, turning to Ivy. “It’s some club they all get stuff from through the militia. Colloidal silver-making gadgets and that kind of stuff.” Dee Dee kisses the bottle. “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Don’t let Lou-EE eat them,” Willie hisses.

  Lou-EE remains in the distance. He’s squatted down and Ivy can now make out in the gloom the Scottie dog Cannonball receiving ear scratches there. She is said to be Willie’s dog. But maybe Lou-EE believes she’s his own.

  Dee Dee turns to Ivy again, “These are prenatal.”

  Willie is now also turned to Ivy staring. Can he smell through Ivy’s dressy cologne her fear? Or just see her cowering soul with his naked eyes? Or maybe it’s his “Willie radar.” Dee Dee had chattered earlier on about her father’s “radar” for when it comes to his many triumphs of agility and being at the right place at the right time. Whatever it is, Ivy can tell, Willie loves people’s fear.

  Dee Dee is rolling the big bottle in her hands. Her little silhouetted ponytail shudders with happiness.

  Willie steps closer to Ivy.

  She impels herself to remain marble firm.

  “You pregnant?” he asks her.

  Ivy snorts.

  Willie snorts, too. “I can get you a deal, dear.”

  “I don’t need any, thank you,” Ivy replies not as icily as she believes he deserves because she is finally becoming trained to the fact that reacting is unprofessional, or rather it is unproductive. What would a CIA operative do in enemy territory? Maybe women cuffing and scratching is on par with women fainting? Ivy now smarts with patience.

  “You are pregnant,” he says.

  Ivy sighs.

  Dee Dee says pleasantly, “Dad, she’s here to interview you. Let’s go in and sit down. Guns. Remember? Your favorite subject.”

  Willie’s body is still frozen in place, his eyes still frozen on Ivy. “It’s war, Nancy. You know? A war is on us. And we all get shell shock. Some of us get pregnant. But all of us get shell shock.” He steps closer. To Ivy.

  She doesn’t flicker a muscle. Meanwhile, there is a decisive probing-snorting-grunting around her feet. Seems a tongue is wrapped around one ankle.

  “The medic will deliver!” Willie exclaims, then howls wolf
ishly, grabs for her hand.

  Her feet jerk, both of them, but not a leap. He has her by the wrist. His hands are coarse, woody. And dry. And gentle. He pokes a bit to get a pulse.

  “He’s not a medic,” chides Dee Dee, her face a heart shape of gray floating near, grainy in Ivy’s peripheral vision. “Daaad, please. Take off the kiddie mask and let’s sit down.”

  “All the lights are off, dear,” says he.

  “Well put them on,” Dee Dee says with a tsk.

  “They’re all broke.”

  “But I had them on in the house a minute ago,” she insists.

  “They’re all broke now. Light is an aid to spies.” Revolves his plastic-faced head meaningfully toward Ivy’s.

  Returning the gaze, Ivy’s eyes are slitted, imagining she and Willie are duking it out on a sheeeer rocky sky-high pinnacle. Which one will it be who falls to his death?

  Dee Dee sighs. “I’m sorry, Ivy. It’s my fault. I should have known.”

  Now Willie is taking Ivy’s pulse on both sides of her wrist. “Your heart has . . .” Seems he is squinting at her. “Heat. That means you are pregnant. Or—” He moves his pulse-taking up to her forearm under her long sleeve. “You want to be.”

  “Dahhd,” Dee Dee says between gritted teeth.

  Ivy almost hears herself roar: Oh, shut up, Dee Dee. The girl’s whining is now so grotesque. Ivy’s sorrow at the Settlement-militia connection is already making too much toxic babble in her heart.

  Releasing Ivy’s arm, Willie sneers. “No lights. And I keep the mask. I am not interested in departing with my identity to the newspaper, which never ceases to side with the enemy . . . and screw up, no offense, dear” (a nod to Ivy), “but I do have to protect myself. This is war. And I am part of a covert defense team loyal to the Republic only, not to the entertainment biz that you work for, which means tonight I am nobody. I am just Casper, the friendly ghost.”

  Perfectly clear. His goofing around is not play. Ivy nods.

  Now Willie places both hands on his belt buckle.