Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  He wags his eyebrows at her. “Close enough.” He grabs her arm. “To the High Street parking garage,” he commands with a shake of three fingers in that direction, then nods and tips an imaginary top hat to anyone on the sidewalk who will meet his eyes. He hugs Ivy’s arm tight against his side. He sings and Ivy joins in. They sing without trying to sound good. They sing in all kinds of horrid funny voices. They dance around. People pass them, groups divide around them, ignoring them or chuckling. There’s a cool oceany smell tonight mixed with exhaust. And the smell of treelessness.

  Now they turn down a dim side street, no cars coming, shortcut to the parking garage, and they run like robbers. They cut down another short side street, then, while tearing across the next street, its wide swath of empty one-way lanes, a car turns from a street above and its headlights splash over them. They lunge up onto the sidewalk, Gordon swinging his professorial jacket over his head like a lasso, “Yip yip yip where in tarnation are them doggies!!”

  “Was there anything in those suspect desserts?” Ivy wonders aloud, with her low raffish laugh.

  “Morrrrrrrrr morrrrrrrrrrrrrr! Give me more sugarrrrrrrrr!” Gordon screams, rolling his shoulders against the parking garage wall. Pretends to cry. He stands straight now and says grimly, “Jane Meserve does exactly this.”

  Ivy shakes her head. Her earring of objects casts about.

  A car passes slowly. Abby Road Taxi along its expansive side. Yes, slowly. And quietly. You’d know in a moment (waking from a faint) that you were not in Boston or New York. And that nobody as modern and earnest as our Ivy was at the wheel.

  Gordon trudges on. “My gawd,” he says in the same grim manner. “Us rednecks just do not know how to act right . . .” He looks at her. “In this here civilized place. No more running, dear. No more fun.”

  Now heading down toward the bright entrance and ticket booth where a few people are walking up from the other direction, many of them dressed formally, a man follows this group. Alone, he trudges along the sidewalk as though he carries something on his back. But there’s absolutely nothing on his back. Up close, he is younger than you’d guess. Full lips but bad teeth. Gray sweatshirt and winter-weight wool shirtsleeves showing under that. Checkered polyester old-gentleman trousers. His eyes are blue, like Ivy’s. But not dark-lashed as Ivy’s are. He is quite fair. Smoodged and dirty and fair. As Gordon and Ivy approach, his eyes widen on Gordon’s face. He stops. He stares. Gordon breaks his stride, turns toward the guy, puts his hand out and the guy puts his smoodgy hand out and Gordon clasps his hand, brings it right close to his chest.

  The guy asks, “You Pete?”

  “Gordon,” Gordon tells him. “Are you Pete?”

  The guy nods slowly, his hand still clasped in Gordon’s hand against Gordon’s shirtfront. “Pete,” Gordon says softly, then backs away and trudges on with Ivy hurrying at his side. Ivy says nothing.

  Gordon looks back.

  The guy is watching him. The guy doesn’t follow. The guy, of course, might have followed.

  Gordon waves to the guy with a childly wave. Nods manfully. Then turns and doesn’t look back again.

  Now he and Ivy climb four flights of stairs to the level in the garage where Gordon’s old Chevy is parked.

  Ivy is thinking that Gordon’s impulsiveness is . . . breathtaking . . . scary and breathtaking. Impulsiveness or policy?

  They get all settled in the old pickup, windows rolled down, Gordon fingering the wob of keys from his belt loop, key into ignition, Ivy’s camera and shoulder bag arranged on the seat, but the truck won’t start.

  Gordon gets out. Throws up the hood. Wiggles wires. He cries out, “Mumma! Why is life so hard?” Cementish echoes answer him with his own question.

  He gets back in. He heavily jounces on the seat, twisting the key to try again. Engine does not respond. “Ivy, dear, get behind the wheel. We’re gonna push her down that mighty fine grade. You know ’bout poppin’ the clutch, huh?”

  “Refresh my memory.”

  He explains the steps and, yes, it works, and he runs like hell to catch up and hops in, slams the door and says with a feigned near-faint, “Was it coincidence or our Almighty Vengeful Lord God who put you back behind the wheel again?” Covers his eyes.

  Ivy cackles like a witch, then while she hands the garage attendant the ticket and cash, Gordon tells her, “Down on Park Avenue there are lotsa opportunities to pull over so we can switch places.”

  Ivy cackles even more witchily. She plows on down Park Avenue, shifting and careening the old truck, passes a car on the right, a right lane that is not actually a lane but empty parking spaces.

  Gordon murmurs, “Lord God, Heavenly King, Almighty God and Father, Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father . . . Thou taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us and receive our prayer.” And now he whispers, almost inaudibly, “Domine deus, rex caelestis, Deus, Pater omnipotens, Domine . . .”

  Over the crotch of his work pants, his hands are in a single tight fist of prayer but his eyes are wide on the street ahead, the changing lights, the railroad overpass seesawing its way from fore to aft.

  After they are out of the heart of town, Ivy pulls the truck into a variety store, parks up close to the plate glass window, the truck’s two headlights blazing back at them. Brilliance is everywhere, left, right, and above, floodlights, “mercury” lights, fluorescence, and a bombastment of sunny signs. She jounces on the seat triumphantly, her earring leaping. She looks at him, her chin high and says, “God knows best.”

  Inside the variety store, Gordon pays for a six-pack of cheap beer while Ivy stands next to him, her thumbs hooked into the big pockets of her short dress, glancing around, eyes drifting over the rental video tapes, magazines, and other flashy trashy stuff. She hopes people will see her with Gordon St. Onge. What is it about him? Even these people, none who know him, their eyes spring to him and linger. Sometimes you see them actually doing comically sudden double takes. She thinks of the kid word: Awesome.

  As Gordon and Ivy walk back to the truck, he proprietarily plucks a piece of lint from the shoulder-blade area of her old-fashioned yellow dress. Then he is swinging the six-pack up into the truck bed, arranges it snug against the cab. She doesn’t even pretend to fight him for the wheel. She wants the feel of him driving tonight, of his cautious navigation while she closes her eyes against the sharp unnatural city lights. Yuh, all the most cheap and foul manifestations are chosen to be the best lighted here, it seems.

  The engine clamors to life. As he backs the truck out of its space, as they roll along slowly (the speed limit) toward her home, she watches him, can’t take her eyes off him. He scratches his left ear, then his short beard and long mustache, stroking, stroking thoughtfully with his dirty (from fiddling with things under the truck hood) fingers.

  She tells him some lefts and rights. Her street comes up fast. Parked outside her apartment, he is standing now at the side of the truck bed, staring at the six-pack, stroking and stroking one side of his mustache. He looks at her. His eyes turning on her like that cause her to give a nervous little hop, her glossy black bowl of hair shifting, her earring pirouetting. He opens the cab door and tucks the six-pack carefully on the floor with his rolled-up sport-dress jacket. She watches all this little business with held breath. Puzzled. He locks the cab. Looks at her again, holds his eyes on hers, then laughs. “I’ll walk you up.”

  They walk up the one flight of stairs at the back. There is that old apartment house smell. Dusty varnish.

  She holds the door open for him and he steps past her and she is going a little crazy now, every inch of her pounding with fast blood and readiness.

  She offers him coffee.

  He says, “You have real coffee? You who is subject to the great abandon of performing Elvis’s top two hundred hit songs?”

  “I’ve had this coffee here for two years. Just for you,” she tells him as she plunks the teakettle on the stove. Never mi
nd the microwave. The teakettle is more romantic. She kicks her tallish-heeled sandals into her bedroom, then pads around soundlessly, shorter now, and he is, as ever, the towering Viking.

  She ushers him to the living room area with its art posters, the white walls, the long curtains closed against the street.

  He looks gravely and tiredly at the room, then at her face. Her pretty face. Her twenty-four-year-old, creamy, flustered, beaming little face. He presses his left hand fingers against his mustache, hard, as if to sooth painful teeth or erase unspeakable words. She goes over there and stands right in front of him as he slowly settles there on her little couch with his knees apart and she, even on her feet, is not a tower above him. She steps closer. Another step she will be between his feet and knees. She bends down to him and takes his face in her hands. He stands up quick, causing her to step back. He grabs her to him, gives her a hard bear hug, not foreplay to sex, more like the bear hug of a brother or dad. She breathes in the smell of his shirt, the shirt so many have nuzzled this evening. She cannot believe the feel of the mass of his body inside his shirt.

  She pulls back to see him better, looks up at him, her dark hair slithering in and out of its professionally clipped perfection. “Didn’t you come up here to go to bed with me?” she asks, a little hysterically.

  He gently shakes his head.

  “But you are so solicitous!” she accuses, sharp and high-pitched, almost the voice of another person.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? You bastard!”

  He exhales very, very slowly, looks down at his right work boot and her rug underneath. “Making babies is . . . it’s for a man and wife . . . I believe.”

  She cocks her head. “I have birth control possibilities here. I have, yes, a microwave, two TVs, two VCRs, a push-button telephone, a phone answering machine, a computer, and birth control.”

  He starts to smile over this wit and to speak, but she keeps talking.

  “Are you telling me, Gordon, that you don’t believe in birth control? Are you Mr. Fundamentalist Born Again after all?”

  His eyes squint-blink, then one eye widens, his crazy man look. He looks down at his hands, rubbing his hands together, hands so toughened and callused they hiss as he rubs them. “Naw. I said it wrong. I just think a man oughta keep his pecker to home.”

  Ivy chortles huskily, her voice back to its old self. “So if I was at your house on your property, you’d make love to me.”

  “If you were . . . committed.”

  “Sounds like a mental institution.”

  “Forget committed. If you were devoted.”

  “Like worship?”

  “More like . . . if you were happy and involved there . . . and there was your love.”

  The teakettle’s shriek gives Ivy a jump. She twists around and heads out to the kitchenette, her hands shaking. Snaps off the burner. He follows her. He watches her dig something out from a little apple-shaped canister. “What’s that?” he asks.

  “I’m making myself some warm relaxing mint tea . . . to calm the nerves. I am upset.”

  He wedges around in back of her in the tight space of this not-quite-a-room. “I’m sorry.” Takes her shoulders.

  She swings around and claws him. Draws blood. Really draws blood.

  He presses a thumb to his wound. “You’re getting better at this all the time.”

  “I’m sorry.” She closes her eyes.

  “And for a woman who preaches nonviolence!” he scolds.

  “I said people shouldn’t punch children in the mouth.”

  He looks at her mouth. Small, the top lip almost pointy, pink childly mouth. He takes a step away from her, sideways in the narrow passage, and he breathes in the mint of her gentle tea and his hard, hard tireless coffee, both cups on the counter steaming pleasantly.

  “How come you don’t have kids, Gordon?”

  He has turned away now and keeps his back to her, lingering, considering, mulling, his eyes blinking like one of those quick thinks, like when he decided to leave his beer in the truck and, still with his back to her, he says, “I have children.”

  “I don’t mean figuratively . . . bonded by interdependence and all that stuff. I mean blood . . .” With a single shhh-ing finger, she touches her lips. “I’m sorry. This is a personal and intrusive question. It . . . popped out.”

  He turns around and she is looking at his ringless engine-greasy hands, not his mouth of twisted bottom teeth and kind of savagely long mustache that covers the top teeth of his now cautious smile, as he says, “I am not a monster, Ivy. Okay? You hear me? I am not even David Koresh . . . who was also not a monster.” He pushes his fingers through his hair. “I . . . am just in an odd situation. It would seem unpleasant to some . . . you know . . . it would seem wrong. But . . . you know . . . America, land of the free. Well, I believed that when I was growing up. To me, it meant your personal actions are not guided by the fucking cops and courts and Congress, and, uh . . . Wall Street and Madison Avenue . . . and media but by what your loved ones need. And from a sense of rightness that comes from inside you. I always figured that to comfort and protect my loved ones was the only law. Breaking that law was punishable by the unbearable feeling I would get inside me. There were cops inside me and—”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I . . . have children. Blood children. I have—” He shrugs and flushes. “—a lot of kids.”

  She widens, then narrows her eyes. “Like how many? Give me a rough figure. More than ten?” All her limbs are hardening, face hardening, back stiffening, eyes on his mouth.

  He says, “I’m not on trial here, baby.”

  “Someday you will be on trial, baby. You got some weird stuff here. So . . . it turns out people were right. The anonymous callers! They TRIED to tell me! Now, every day another piece of what they told me comes true! I just don’t quite get it! I mean . . . there’s still the missing link! Or maybe that which is yet to be revealed. The Bible. The goddamn Bible! How is it we have a horny prophet in this picture, but no Bible studies, sermons, and wild preachings!!! What makes your followers believe they have to succumb to you?!! No Bible, just weirdness. At least you could have the decency to thump a Bible while you hump ’em!”

  He breaks into a fine, handsome, huge grin, eyes twinkling, folds his arms across his chest, leans back against the little heaped counter. He is laughing. Yes, laughing.

  She pours her steeped tea through a strainer into a second cup, her hands shaking.

  His smile is gone now, his pale eyes fixed on her hand pouring the hot tea. She jerks a jar of honey from her cupboard and steps away. She won’t look at him. She looks into the sink. She says, “I am going to throw up. I mean it.”

  He says, “It’s not a philosophy . . . it wasn’t an order from the heavens. It . . . it just happened.”

  Her lip curls. “Oh, yeah . . . like that boy Jaime getting smacked in the mouth . . . punched in the mouth. It just happened.”

  He frowns. “I’m familiar with a lot of the Bible. I’ve studied it and I’ve read and met and conversed with a lot of serious Biblical scholars. I’ve studied the scholars on many religions, many religions and practices and beliefs . . . their histories . . . the customs and languages of the peoples who . . . well . . . you know, shaped those religions. Mostly I did this study on my own . . . but . . . a while ago . . . back a while ago, I did two semesters of theology school—”

  She looks at him in a startled way.

  “—but not as a man of God. But as . . . a friend of someone who taught there, who understood me, how it is with me . . . the thing I feel.”

  “Yuh . . . what’s that?”

  He shrugs. “I feel . . . you know . . . I have a response to people that is always alert. Well, you know . . . some people are alert like that to every breath and heartbeat of every living person. It’s dizzying and tiring . . . especially with so many people on the planet.” He snorts, shakes his head. “If you’re that kind of person, y
ou’re plugged into a kind of life force . . . a current, without which you will die. Like dialysis and yet with it, you will die of so much heartbreak . . . and so much fuss. Spread so thin. And you need to be alone so much . . . to get away from all of it . . . to shrink it somehow . . . in your own mind’s eye . . . to rest a bit. Because it’s impossible to not hurt somebody. It fuckin’ hurts.”

  She seems not to be breathing, just watching his mouth for more surprises, more ugliness, whatever it is that lays beyond all this philosophical justification. Which is what it is! Because man, oh, man, leaping lollipops, there are no saints.

  He goes on, “Whoever or whatever created the universe and all this squiggling writhing mean ol’ life, created in all of us thousands of needs so complex, we humans are too stupid to name them all. And you see, Ivy, many many many people get left out. They are called ‘less.’ But they’re not ‘less’! Without them, we’re only a partial picture—”

  “I’ve already heard this, Gordon. You’re repeating yourself.”

  He nods. “Yes, repeat. Repeat. A garment with only ornate buttons but no fabric. The only place some people, the gentle ones, can shine, is within the protection of a family, not out in corporate America and not in the friggin’ streets! Not in one-room apartments with not a soul to knock on their door but the landlord collecting the rent. Not forced to work the three-dollar-an-hour job, institutionalizing their babies in day cares. If society only allows the winners to love and to live, the winners will find that a society of only great ‘achievements’ will be a society that dies a death by laughing gas!” He strokes, of all things, his belt buckle, the ancient face of the sun gone. Now it’s an even quirkier image, a sort of voodoo mask, eyeless, awkwardly and yet magnificently rendered in wood stained red and purple and mustard yellow by, yes, probably, one of his many, many sons or daughters.

  And she is thinking, yes, when he bought that beer, he was about to lose control, he was planning to come here for the night, to drink, to fuck, to sleep it off, then changed his mind. Changed his mind. Domine deus, rex caelestis . . . have mercy on us and receive our prayer. She stares into his face, watching the words come, his deepening voice, that thick-necked big soft voice, “So . . . okay . . . God spoke to us at the Settlement, in a manner of speaking, and said, ‘Do what you need to do to get by.’”