Glass door of the Convenience Cubicle swings open and closed a time or two. It is a very small store. Guy on the other side of the pumps finishes, goes in to pay. Another car pulls in, takes the space at the pumps. A truck pulls out. Another car pulls in. Late summer song bugs chirring and cheeping in the tall grass down the embankment behind. A distant crashing; tailgate of some dump truck slamming back into place. The change in Gordon’s hands almost melodious. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Gordon says, “You read the short version of The Recipe yet?”
Gas nozzle jerks once. “The what?”
“That thing I gave you the other day. Shows a furry thing, Bigfoot. Drawn by one of our kids.”
Rex is watching the digits, squeezing the gas nozzle nice ’n’ easy to round out the figure to $9.50. “I haven’t had a chance.”
“What about the other one? The orange one?”
“What about it?”
“What did you think? Good, huh?” Gordon doesn’t expect Rex to be charmed by the piece. It doesn’t speak much of martial law or of common law or any detailed solutions, just the bit about all the red ants rising against The Thing, so lyrically told and tale-like, a literal person such as Rex would skim. But wouldn’t its urgency speak to any militiaman’s bristled-up spirit? “You haven’t read it yet, my brother?”
“I’ve been out straight.”
Gordon watches Rex shove the gas nozzle into its cradle. Capable hands. Wedding ring. Military black-faced wristwatch. Now reaching to replace the gas cap. Reaching for his wallet. Eyes now come up, meet Gordon’s.
A black wave of despair washes over Gordon. Gives him a stony expression that matches Rex’s.
Rex says, “I’m going in to pay.”
Gordon says a bit loudly, “I’ve been reading those articles you and Art and Doc’ve been burying me with. Long fucking articles about Russians being trained as spies in Massachusetts collecting welfare and Gorbachev in California who, by the way, is a capitalist, not a commie. Tsk. Then you got gay men poisoning the world with some weird new dis—”
“I didn’t give you anything like that.”
“Well, Art and Doc did. And Willie with his welfare state obsession—”
“But I did not.” Rex’s steely eyes are fixed on Gordon’s face.
Gordon shoves his hands with the change deep into the pockets of his new Settlement-made jeans. Then looks at Rex. “This stuff in The Recipe is important, R—”
“Okay, don’t cry. I’ll read it. Every word.”
Gordon pulls a small bottle of aspirin from his pocket. Works off the child-proof cap.
Rex watches Gordon toss three aspirin into his mouth and chew them up. Rex looks disgusted. Then, “I don’t know where I put that long one you gave me. The one with the orange. I was going to give it to Thad.”
“I’ll get some kids to bring over another copy tonight. One of the committees for saving the world.” Gordon grins.
Rex snorts. But a friendly snort. Turns away.
At breakfast. Winter kitchen.
In the wildly fluttering candlelight of the tables, rose and yellow, green and blue, Catherine Court Downey has chosen the wooden chair at the opposite end of one of two connected tables, and this means she faces Gordon, who is sitting at the far-off other end eating lustily from a plate of hot buttered applesauce and eggs.
Beyond the wide archway to the cook’s kitchen, the incandescent light is bright and important. Steph, one of Gordon’s wives, smashes walnuts in a plastic (yes, plastic) bag with a rolling pin while Jacquie Lessard is talking to her from the sink. And two preteens are helping a four-year-old break and separate eggs. No eggs have landed on the floor. Yet.
Back at the tables, a toddler, blonde, with a huge cheery-looking mouth, reaches for Catherine to pick her up and Catherine, yes, picks her up and the child snuggles into Catherine’s big floppy white boatneck sweater. “What’s your name?” Catherine whispers.
The child simpers, whispers something back.
Catherine is trying to figure out if this is one of Gordon’s. She decides that she’s not.
Ricardo, wearing a flashy gilded paisley 1960s Nehru jacket (frighteningly out of fashion) and a red neckerchief and funny pants, pours Catherine a glass of juice and pats her head and pivots away with a flourish. He could pass as a Parisian waiter if he didn’t also seem so much like an auntie . . . too loving to be a waiter. He is always kissing people on the head or ears, sometimes passing by with a baby under each arm. She keeps studying him to see if he looks like Gordon but there’s no resemblance. Though tall, the boy’s face is too narrow, foxy almost. And none of that significant St. Onge nose.
She sighs happily. She glows. Some of the young mothers are settling in the chairs around her, asking if she slept well.
No, she didn’t sleep well, she tells them. But how she glows! And her light brown eyes reflect the vivaciousness of the life of these rooms. Catherine the Vulnerable is gone. Here sits Catherine the Sagacious, Catherine the Up-’n’-at-’em. The toddler on her lap stares at her face. The child is mesmerized by Catherine’s face. Catherine gives this little one a really squeezy hug and again sighs. She is anxious to deal with the “Bree issue.” She glances around for the girl but Bree is nowhere this morning, not at this meal. She knows that usually Bree has breakfast with her brothers and father back home, and the father’s girlfriend sometimes stays there. Nobody is clear on John “Pitch” Vandermast’s exact living arrangements with that woman.
When Catherine speaks, all the young mothers listen attentively. “We need to get Bree to some professionals.” She details her plan to approach Bree this evening while Bree is painting up in “the studio.” Right after “dinner” (she means supper). She looks down through the long tunnel of fluttering candlelight between the dozens of seated people to Gordon, who is now wearing his old man reading glasses and studying something written on a small square of brown paper, frowning. A chubby young man stands next to him, glasses, no whiskers, but a long brown ponytail. He passes Gordon another piece of paper, which Gordon takes hesitantly from his hand.
Ricardo with the Nehru jacket and neckerchief brushes past Catherine’s chair, carrying two big canning jars of dark stuff on his head, using his hands, of course. He is singing loudly, “Riiiiide the snake . . . toooo the lake! The snake he’s lonnnng! Seven miles! He’s ollld! And his skin is colllld!”
The mothers tell Catherine how hard this whole Bree situation has been, that everyone feels their hands are tied.
Catherine glances again down the long, long connected tables to Gordon as he is writing with a pen on one of the scraps of paper. “Well,” she smiles at the mothers. “Today we will be taking step one. There is no excuse for enabling.”
She understands that the girl must be in a great spiraling space of aloneness. And now the footsteps of her rescuers will enter that space and bring her OUT. Tonight!
Late afternoon.
Catherine is coming up the Settlement’s gravel road in her car, a little metallic-mint-colored thing. She sees up ahead a flatbed truck pulling out from the sawmill yard, and as it approaches her, she sees from its driver’s side window an arm waving to stop her.
It is Gordon. Dark hair a mess. Metal-frame cop-style sunglasses and all that beard. Nothing showing of those eyes, those pale eyes usually so unsettling in his dusky face. Then she sees Robert’s face. And two somewhat familiar men. She shifts her car into park, hops out, sees that Gordon is opening the truck door, but then he closes it as he sees her coming.
He pulls off his sunglasses, lays them on the dash. Catherine sees that the guy holding Robert is in his twenties, sunglasses, no beard, thick brown ponytail, a shirt of some awful plaid, unbuttoned to show off a T-shirt that has some sort of awful advertisement.
But now, even as she takes that last step up to the truck’s open window and that sweet smell of freshly-milled pine . . . or hemlock . . . from the high load strapped on back, she hears a sound. A whomping. From the sou
th.
Coming closer fast, then slowing, surrounding them, it seems. WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP.
She sees that Gordon’s eyes are raised, fixed on this thing in the sky behind her head, and one of the men is leaning forward, the one who has Robert on his lap and maybe Robert was trying to speak to her . . . she sees his mouth shaped around the word Mommy, but the sky is now really opening up with the deafening WHOMPING and the aircraft is now really in their space here, swinging around the treetops on the nearer mountain of the St. Onge land. Now it hovers exactly above this truck and car. It leans in and away. It’s wind gives the row of oaks along the road a thrashing. They crackle and hiss like fire. She watches the white star on army green, the side of the aircraft, lift again and angle away farther. All the while, its maddening racket beating straight down. She can feel her hair move a little, even now. She sees that Robert is excited, thrilled actually. Mouth open. Pointing.
Now the horrid thing is back. Like it wants to play. Like it wants you to throw it a stick or a soccer ball.
Then it is departing and Gordon says something Catherine can’t hear and he grins weirdly. He and the other men laugh. Together. Loud. Ugly laughter that seems completely sexual to Catherine, and in some way about her. Worse even than her suspicion that he has seduced-raped a fifteen-year-old already-damaged girl, is this, the blustery hilarity of three men, their open mouths, opening, closing throat muscles, thick necks, the ultimate macho arrogance.
But what Gordon is really doing now is quietly noticing how strong Catherine Court Downey looks. Self-contained. He can’t imagine being like that. It doesn’t ring true. Self-containment. It’s an eccentric concept to him, in man or woman. It has such a reptilian ring to it. But she is also radiating something else. That mischievous arch of those brows. A let’s-play lightheartedness? The disgust for her that he felt especially last night is gone, as he lingeringly studies her face, the small dark shapely mole by her mouth, and then the mouth itself, and her throat. The throat. He is stirred. He reaches. His arm is long and his large hand enters her space, fingers almost closing in on her shoulder but she’s not quite close enough. He lowers his hand, lets it hang outside the warm truck door. He says, “Howzit goin’?”
She says, “Very well, thank you.” She stares directly into his eyes.
He says, “Well, you look good. Claire says teaching this year has started off pretty smooth . . . for both of you.”
She steps close now, almost against the idling truck, within his easy reach. “Yes. Smooth.” She smiles.
“Mommy! The helicopter was loud!” Robert calls, stretching his neck to see better out across the edge of the high truck door from where he sits on the young guy’s lap. No seat belt. No car seat. Soon she will have to ask them not to put Robert in danger again like that but now isn’t the time. She is trying so hard to feel the family’s embrace and not recoil from every prickle. In this moment, the Settlement feels like a deep bath in perfectly warm water. The only wrong note is coming from her insides.
“Yes.” She nods eagerly. And her smile. A professional smile. Almost a magazine smile, which lasts long into the growing quietness as the thwomping-chomping of the helicopter gets farther away and nobody in the truck speaks. “Wait!” she cries.
She suddenly remembers something. Steps back to her car, bending in to sort through crackling bags.
Behind her she hears Gordon shifting into neutral, setting the brake, settling in.
She finds what she wants, gifts for Robert. She passes them up to Gordon now. Glow-in-the-dark figures, one green, one yellow, one blue, one pink, one gray. Not a monster-faced muscley warrior. Not a Yoda. Not a Troll. But something of the latest personable creature epidemic. Big-eyed, cute, asexual, and plastic. And shrink-wrapped in more plastic.
“Neat!” says Robert as Gordon hands each one over.
Catherine nods, the smile unstoppable. Yes, like a picture, and yet a too desperate hardworking paddling-along eagerness in her brown eyes.
“Thank you, Mommy,” says Robert.
Catherine looks into Gordon’s eyes, which are terribly green and scrutinizing. Benign scrutiny, yes. But scrutiny nonetheless. And the late afternoon sun on his face, a reckless September gold. Brings out those two or three red hairs among the brown, black, and gray of his short beard. It brings out his age. Almost forty.
He asks, “What are you planning for Robert. Is he expected at school? In Portland?”
“Yes, he’s preregistered in Portland, but—” She sighs. “We’re not ready to go back there yet . . . to live.”
Lightning quick, Gordon looks her up and down. “Take your time, Robert’s okay here. He’s my Mr. Buddy.” He looks around at Robert.
Robert’s high voice giggles. “Mr. Budeeee! You are!”
“I mean it,” Gordon says, looking back at her. He reaches for his sunglasses. “Take your time. You’re important to Claire. You’re good for her.” He slips the dark glasses on, and sort of reaches again, as if to touch her shoulder but now again she is out of reach. He sees her smile is still in place. But her posture is bracing against something, like weariness. He draws back his hand, this time into the truck, fingers folding around the wheel. “Are you coming to supper?”
“I thought I might.”
“Sit with me,” he says, his eyes behind the dark glasses unreadable. “We need to talk.” He shifts the truck. The emergency brake thumps free. The truck rolls forward an inch or so, making the sand crunch sleepily.
Catherine tells him, “That would be nice. Yes.” Then she says cheerily, “Have fun, Robert!” And waves to him. He says, “Yep” in a manly way. Yep is his new word, almost a-yup, probably a-yuh next. Even his yep is now spoken with a distinct Maine accent.
Then the truck rumbles along downhill. Now something like gunfire . . . a spray of heavy acorns raining down on the truck cab and on the load of lumber as it moves under that row of high oaks.
Catherine’s heart is beating too fast, like tachycardia. And this worries her. Her heart. Her lungs and organs. She worries that the antidepressants mixed with all those downers have harmed her, and maybe all the wrong things you eat over the years adds up in your body. All those toxins, those poisons that so many experts say you store in your fat. But she is afraid to think “diet.” When she has dieted in the past, she went too far. Right now, all she wants is moderation and a clear head.
She thinks of Bree. Poor Bree. Tonight when she gets Bree to talk about what men have done to her, she’ll not only bring other Settlement women with her for that important women-only assurance that the girl needs desperately, but some gifts she shopped for today, things that will go with the girl’s stormy red hair.
At supper out on the piazzas, a warm weedy sweet September evening, creaking with the lusty rhythm of tall grass bugs, so stirring and restive to humans.
There are two new faces. Brady and Sadie. Brother and sister. Both with dark eyes and silvery blond hair. Silvery complexions. Long necks. Elegantly swanlike in their physicality, their breezy substance, professional-class in speech and in their teeth, perfect as mathematics. Sadie is healthy. Brady has the DREADED IMMUNE SYSTEM ILLNESS. Early stages. Sadie is eighteen. Brady is twenty-three. He lived in New York for two years. The parents whom Brady came home to live with again can no longer take the neighbors’ AIDS hysteria abuse anymore. They dread the phone ringing, dread cars passing slowly by the house. Brady offered to leave. But Sadie is his shadow as she is almost his mirror image. And so this morning they arrived, knowing no one, looking like two silvery Christmas card angels. Now Sadie and Brady are here, at the table, one on either side of Gordon.
He has welcomed them both. With shrewd reasoning, he understands that all in the Settlement will learn best this way. Love. AIDS. Stigma. Politics. Hysteria. THE WORLD. Grief. When the young man dies, doesn’t a healthy community grow even healthier from shared grief? The temple of Life raised from Death. How cold-headed! Would you say coldhearted? No matter, he had said to them, “Welcome
.”
Before supper, Catherine and Claire had talked. Catherine said, “I’ll pick up all the literature I can get my hands on tomorrow . . . HIV positive, AIDS, spirochete virus, all of it.” She meant at the university, where she would have a full day of classes, including one night class. So many of her days are really packed.
Catherine knows many an HIV and AIDS story, from students and friends of friends . . . there are enough of their stories to make it clear that Brady should keep his secret quiet for a little while. Not tell more than a few folks here until everyone loves him as an ordinary person first, an identity separate from his disease. When she suggested this to Claire, Claire hesitated, then agreed. She and Catherine hugged. Then they walked to supper together, Catherine with her little basket of vitamins and healing herbs. And in the other hand hung some of the bags of little gifts she had bought earlier that day for all the children and for Bree.
She goes straight to Gordon and he sees her coming and reaches back to another table for an empty chair and, with ease, he one-handedly swings the heavy chair to the corner of his table, smiling at Sadie. “Scoot over, dear. Make room for Catherine Court Downey.” He stresses Court playfully and when Catherine settles in tightly between the silvery swanlike girl and Gordon, Gordon introduces the brother and sister to Catherine and then whispers close to Catherine’s ear, “I’m glad you remembered to sit with me.”
She places her little basket on the table, arranges her shopping bags under her chair. AIDS. AIDS. AIDS. AIDS. She is ever so drawn to the young Brady’s pale profile. She is ever so bothered by the young Brady’s pale profile. AIDS. AIDS. AIDS. AIDS. She feels a bit faint. Her sympathy is a perfect white fire.
As the three long tables (and several small tables) of people eat strips of moose steak and onions, new potatoes, huge beets (sliced), chopped kale, pickled five-bean salad, golden rolls and some sort of weedy bread (better than you think), and three kinds of pies, Gordon rambles on and on to Catherine about education and the community, a “family community.” And he talks about Robert. He talks passionately about Robert. He talks coaxingly about Robert. And once Robert comes from another table and buddies up to Gordon, they swing at each other, play pokes. Catherine watches, smiling. A queenly smile. The great velocity of discord in her eyes barely detectable.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 51
