Headed directly for him through the sheets of straight-down icy rain, Bree. Her jumbled hair and green T-shirt flatten and darken. She seems to be about to embrace him. And she sort of does, her fists bunching up the upper arms of his jacket. She gives him a stout shove, then draws him forward to her again, snug. Not a fighter, this man. Perhaps his restraint is due to her sex? Fairer? Weaker? But no, this is our preview to his submission in blood. This is rehearsal for a future of trials.
Rain blows and tugs his and her faces, carrying everything down.
He squeezes his eyes shut, shakes his head.
She tightens her grip on his jacket sleeves.
His eyes are old eyes to a girl of fifteen. His eyes that are filled and fluttering with the beating rain. Her semigenius cannot behold what his captivity within time gives to his sight. He pleads, “We need peace! Not the True Maine Militia! We don’t need more hordes, dear! We need to stop and think!”
Her hands hold fast. She sneers. Her pretty mouth not pretty. “You can have your boy militia! You and your Rexy! Oh, yeah, yeah, you were sweeet! You were! Until somebody else has an idea!”
“That’s not it, Bree! I love your ideas!”
She tightens her grip. She’s strong. Logger girl. She shoves again. His back smacks the truck grille.
He hollers, “Rex York’s group isn’t about publicity or—”
“It isn’t!!?”
“Well.”
“Yuh, ‘well’ is right! And Rex’s militia is just a prawww-duct of great big conservative foundations and their turds on the shortwave and wherever! Rex’s militia is a toilet! The True Maine Militia is people, not political parties, not a movement to help out Wall Street! The True Maine came right out of here!” She draws back one hand as if to punch him but punches her own heart.
“We can’t have all these crowds at the Settlement, Brianna! That’s all I’m saying!”
“We will!”
He grasps her wrist, the wrist of the hand that was lowering from her heart. Perhaps his grasp seemed like aggression because her wrist within his work-stiff palm melts to nothing, withered, gone. And also magically, her teeth are now closed around his empty left hand. She chomps. He swears he hears crunching and alas flings her away.
She loses balance. Goes down. She’s on one knee. She begins to rock, arms around her knees now, sitting in the pebbly road shoulder sand with small rivers of rain, nodding weeds, and there she can view his work boots close range. All those snakes of her wet hair sluice her shirt front and arms. She is not talking now.
His thumb trickles a little blood but oh, how numb and stinging. And his dear one, his Bree, very very quiet. He wants to hold and stroke her, yes, the father thing. To comfort. To cause flourishing, not this, this wound. But he hesitates. Something in the way she is staring at his boots, her muscles tensed. There’s twitching along her right forearm. No, not twitching. Flexing. He turns, squeezes the door handle, jerks open the truck door. “I’m going now!”
“Good,” says she. “You stupid piece of turd!”
He sits in the seat a minute thinking how that last remark was so childish. But of course!
He slams the door. Waits. His thumb smears blood onto the plastic steering wheel. The windshield is dreamy, covered in silver spangles and gray ribbons, gauzy tendrils reflecting his own fucked-up stupidity.
In a future time, Catherine Court Downey remembers.
For me, television has always been two things. It is an educational tool. And it can be soothing in the evening after you’ve put in a long day with students and meetings, especially meetings. So I had brought my twenty-four-inch screen and VCR to my studio at the Settlement. Does this make me a bad person?
We were all facing the TV, a little group I had invited to my studio to watch the AIDS tape. Understand that this was a really moving tape on AIDS victims and at this time only a small core group of us knew that Brady had AIDS. This would prepare the others. Brady wasn’t present. Of course not. I didn’t want any remarks, if there were any of those kinds of remarks, to hurt him. Nor was flashy Ricardo there, whom I suspected was gay.
The room smelled strongly of acrylics, which I had begun working with. My new series. Myself with AIDS. No, I didn’t have AIDS. But in the work I did. I wanted to deeply identify, to FIND OUT. This is the artist’s job, to explore all those mortal dreads. And I can’t tell you how much knowing sweet Brady and Sadie affected me.
I had several twelve-by-fourteen-inch canvases stretched and ready to begin. Unriffled, welcoming, dazzling white, yes, blanc and blank, oh possibilities! Thank you, Gordon St. Onge, for this new world! For this frontier! This is what I was saying to myself as the pale TV light flickered and glided over the canvases that were lined up on my big worktable.
The little group of teenagers, both boys and girls, and some young women I had invited were all quiet as mice, faces tilted up to that big twenty-four-inch screen. We had made popcorn. I was serving wine to the adults. It was a sweet and important evening and I was glad to be able to do this for them. I regretted losing Bree. I was more stunned by that than I was by what was coming down between Phan and I. Phan and I had ended too many years before. And the contests between Gordon and I. It had started to feel GOOD. He was a bastard right from the start. Okay, fine. It was a game. And I was ready to play. Or so I thought.
Meanwhile, it seemed that I’d win Bree back someday when she understood that it was only with love we women tried to protect her. I shiver now to imagine that big groping man with his hands on her within days of our reaching out to her. Didn’t he realize the power that people whom he had offended would have over him? He was committing what used to be called statutory rape! A worse crime today. He’d be registered as a sex offender. And there were other “wives” of his nearly as young as Bree. He was walking on thin ice!
So strange that we could all sit there like normal people watching television, a normal family-evening-type activity, with so much brutality and insanity going on around us.
The documentary was nearly over when we heard him on the stairs. You could tell it was him. He was six-foot-five and all muscled up from all his self-inflicted hard labor and he was rigid with venom for me. His keys wailed against his belt. And we could hear those boots. Clodhoppers. All this is no lie, what I am about to tell you.
When he pushed the door open, I swear I could smell cow manure, yes. He had both hands bandaged, one that we heard he had injured repairing something on the manure spreader. Yes, there is such a contraption. A manure spreader! Blood spotted the bandage and in that dimly lit studio room, blood that looked black, like tar or oil. Some inhuman substance. How the other hand was injured was a mystery.
He seemed to take up the whole room with his size and he looked at young Christian Crocker and young Jaime Crosman, which you are supposed to pronounced Hchheye-me, but they do not, of course. And he said to each of them . . . yes, he said it two distinct times, “Unplug it. Take it out. Destroy it.”
I stood up and shouted, “Are you crazy!” and then to Christian and Jaime I yelled, “Don’t.” I tried to reason with Gordon. “This tape is important. This AIDS tape is important.” But Gordon wouldn’t look at me. He just looked at the two boys . . . a look of threat, like this was their fault, like they, the young males of this Settlement Republic, should have kept this enemy woman in hand.
Do you know what total lunacy is? That place. You will never know that place. Feel grateful!
The boys stood up, really red-faced with embarrassment. And who knows, also maybe terrified of being beaten. They went for the TV.
I said, “That is my property.”
The boys hesitated, the fluttering blues and pinks of the documentary’s final credits passing down across their faces.
Gordon said, “Get it out of here and destroy it.” Again, he said this to the boys, not acknowledging me, or any of the young mothers either, though most of them hardly turned from facing the screen, even after Jaime reached up and pushed the off
button. Only Vancy and Misty and Nova were Gordon’s wives, the others were not. But they all acted the same. Passive, acceptant.
Jaime looked hard at Gordon. He was a blond swaggery boy, a toughie, really redneck, cruel in some ways. But he had been interested in the tape and now seemed upset at how we all had to bow down to Gordon’s shit, excuse me, to Gordon playing Big Man.
I thought for a moment Jaime was going to attack Gordon but after a few seconds of this bold resistance I saw the boy’s shoulders sag, already defeated.
I said, “Don’t anybody destroy my television. Just place it in my car trunk, would you?” I went over to the table by my napping-cot and found my keys.
And believe this, Gordon St. Onge said, “Jaime. C.C. Take the TV to the bank at the back of the killing shed. Fetch my Winchester. It’s still in the cabinet shop area, over by the small lathe . . . yellow door, check the boxes for .32 Special . . . there’s also 22s and 45s. Don’t fuck up.” Then he, too, held out a key that he picked out from that bunch of keys that bristled there on his belt, and he said, “I’ll be along in a minute.”
The boy, C.C., took the key from Gordon’s hand even as I kept mine outstretched. The two boys disconnected the VCR as I watched, dumbstruck. And scared for my life.
The boys ambled out into the poorly lit hallway, each with a piece of equipment, and then down the stairs.
And then Gordon walked to the wall and snapped on the blinding overhead lights, giving everybody the squints. Then he stepped out, closing the door behind him.
I untied the twine I used to hold open the tarp, let the tarp drop so that we now sat in this smaller space, like scared baby birds, our hearts in our throats, whispering. The women who were Gordon’s wives kept still. They looked sad and sickened.
A few minutes later we heard the shots.
Claire, the friend.
I heard the shots. Well, I suppose half of Egypt did, the way this mountain leans out over the open lake. Before long, Catherine found me over in the furniture-making Quonset hut where a bunch of us were setting the pedals, rudders, and little paddle wheels in the latest pair of swan boats . . . each swan different, as a real swan would be who had cracked his way out of an egg into this wicked world. The night was almost cool and was all sleeves and buttoned-up collars, thick socks. My nose felt red. Next thing this hot, moist sobbing dear one is in my arms. She was cracking wide open to let out the hurt.
“She’s a snooty frigid cunt,” Bonnie Loo had grumbled once. But Bonnie Loo had a low view of a lot of people. Catherine was not a cold person. Does a cold person weep? Maybe we owed her a more teeming-with-warm-hearts welcome than this?
Of course the reason behind the gunshots reached our Quonset area before Catherine did, thanks to those Settlement tongues of fire and their tinder pathways! They seemed to enjoy this human sacrifice! That night I had such a revulsion for the whole family.
Catherine and I went briskly past the faces of the other swan makers into the narrow “brooms and coat” hall that connected the two main workrooms and which supported two sets of stairs. It was lighted poorly. One of those little pink four-watters. We cleared the bench of cultch and held hands. I said nothing (nothing that I can recall) while she described what Gordon had done. Her cheeks were flushed to fruit red, her lovely eyes narrowed.
Was I betraying her not to speak more? I nodded, I listened keenly. I kissed her trembling-with-fear knuckles. I listened on and on but I didn’t praise her bringing the TV here. I understood her arguments, the way a TV can be useful. Oh, yes. But also I saw the dangers. She may not have understood that most of us here had voted on the “no TV” ban year after year. Gordon was just a lot more vocal on it . . . his passion colored all his beliefs. Now Catherine’s throat shook. She kept checking my eyes for something, flickering glances. I was betraying her by not calling Gordon a nut, a dangerous man, a criminal. She was on her own with this. I was just a woodchuck on the median strip in the middle of the Maine Turnpike. Either way I go, I’m going to wind up a pancake.
Same night, Claire remembers more.
I now had my little house to myself since Catherine and Robert had begun sleeping nights in her studio. Some of her belongings were still stacked against the bedroom wall here and by the kitchen door and she had accumulated a lot of stuff, mostly new stuff, since she moved here.
Later on that night, although it was not his scheduled night to be with me, Gordon came to my cottage and sat on the edge of the bed, fully dressed. He would often come in like that, in the dark, feeling his way along the walls, getting to this bed without any light whatsoever. And then sit there. He was so at home in my bed, my space, no need even to say, “Hi.”
My head was deep in my pillow. I listened to the night with one ear and waited it out, letting him do his thing. It seemed like peace.
He didn’t move. I was sure peace was not what it was. Such a lot of time passed. I couldn’t stand it. I was bursting.
“Gordon.”
“Yep.”
I spoke from my pillow and he just kept staring out the window, a faint grayness to his face from a partial moon and all the usual stars. “I know she doesn’t belong here but—”
“You’re right. She doesn’t belong here.”
“But she needs to be here. We’ve got to make this work. What about Robert? You’re doing this to Robert, too.”
He swallowed drily.
“She could hurt you, Gordon. She mentioned that she has actually looked up all the statutes about a man your age with a fifteen-year-old. And the punishment. But guess what. She won’t do anything about it. I explained to her that it’s different here than out there . . . that this is a way of life. That nobody is traumatized by your . . . by . . . growing up early. I hope that’s true . . . for Bree. And Gordon, Catherine is a good person.”
He said nothing. He would concede not even that one thing.
“You have never been so hard on anyone here before.” I didn’t learn of all the details of him and Bree’s discord yet. Or the real reason for his bandaged right thumb. He was cloaked up in more than one smothery silence.
I sighed.
He was still facing the window.
“Even when you caught Macky stealing when he was here. And when Esther used to argue with you about putting Gretel in public school!”
“True.”
“This, what you’re doing to Catherine . . . there are better ways to handle it. You certainly have your cruel side. Couldn’t you just talk to her? Can’t you talk for godsakes? Or do you just love running that barbed hook through the tender worm?”
“Tender worm?” he sneered.
“Whatever. I can’t see why you and Catherine can’t communicate. I . . .” I then realized I couldn’t imagine Catherine talking, either. Not at this point.
“It’s not her fault the way she is,” I pressed on. “She has more needs than you realize and she’s my friend!”
Silence.
“She’s just used to another kind of world,” I pressed on further.
“True,” he said huskily.
“She’s not Settlement material. I agree. But this situation between you and her is not all her fault. You are acting like a very little boy.”
“True.”
Gabe Sanborn recalls.
They shot the lady’s TV. Pow! Pow! Pow!
Bonnie Loo.
Yeah, we heard the shots. I had no idea what it was at the time. I wish I’d known. So I could have enjoyed.
Misty St. Onge.
Yes, I was there when he had the boys carry the TV out and shoot it. Catherine didn’t know Gordon. You could tell. If she had, she’d know that the Settlement was created by his scary tireless will. That whole night made me nervous. His will. Her will. Eeeeeeeeeeek!
The screen tells us.
The elections are coming! The elections are coming! See the elections in living color!!! Tweedle tweedle deeee! Tweedle red. Tweedle white. Tweedle blue. Tweedle Republican. Tweedle Democrat. Pick one! O
nly in America do you have the power of this choice!! The power of your VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! Tweedle tweedle doo ding dee deedum. Lucky you. Lucky, oh, you doo dee doo! Democracy!
At the St. Onge Settlement.
The mail increaseth.
Claire St. Onge remembers.
First it was just daytimes she was not around. Then nights. She asked me if I’d keep Robert at my place at night. He wanted to sleep in my bed with me, and that was all right. He didn’t seem afraid of sleeping alone on his floor pallet. But maybe lonely. He was just so meticulous. There is something more tidy about one bed, two beings, I suppose. Whenever she visited, she unloaded bags and bags of gifts. As if she was a visitor, one of those you haven’t seen in thirty years. Gifts for Robert. Gifts for all of us. A lot of gifts. Nice things. Not trash. Nothing Wal-Mart-ish. She looked good. Rested. Had had her hair cut. And straightened. Short. Cute.
But once or twice when I ran into her at the university, she was prickly perfect and peculiar . . . like she might have started to be fed up with me. That I didn’t stand up to Gordon enough in her defense was no small matter. Maybe she was about to take Robert and ease on out of our lives completely. But the next time I saw her, she was her old self. I mean she really was. There was no way she could pretend that well, her funny, gossipy, busy, blurry, mischievous artist self. My heart sang.
Brady dreams.
It is not a dream of terror of the Stygian and endless realm. Nor one of his ostracism dreams, dreams where the word fag or faggot and AIDS aren’t spoken but the jeers or fear that is hitched to them usually shapes the drama. Lots of jeers. And, no, tonight’s dream is not of a precious and arousing tumble with Kennard on the nighttime beach of the lake camp with the camp’s Indian name on the end-of-the-road sign that was sawed out in the shape of an arrow. Nor is this a dream of Kennard’s two dark hands holding out to him the surprise gift of a Himalayan kitten. (Though in real life, Kennard never gave him a kitten.) Also, this is not one of those disorderliness and weirdness dreams he has had lately, that incomprehensible idea of more than twenty St. Onge wives and the pounding running feet of the Settlement children horde with their oftentimes filthy faces, cowlicked hair, and jars of bugs. Their inventions and highfalutin talk mashed in with the swears and the ain’ts.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 57
