Just now, Aurel Soucier is hurrying past with five arm-swinging preteen boys, and Rex nods and Aurel nods back.
Gordon presses, “So you and the militia were just on your way to the Yukon when you looked up and saw us up here on the hill.”
Rex almost smiles, eyes shadowy behind the dark glasses.
Gordon looks into the remains of his sandwich, which is dribbling pickle juice through his fingers. “Something secret, huh?”
“Not at all. T’was the preparedness expo in Bangor. We talked about it before, remember? And I gave you the flyer about it. And as I recall, that M.O.M.†† article. But you don’t really read any of the materials I give you.” He looks away now, stroking one side of his dark mustache with good-humored irritation. In the brightness of the day, close range like this, Gordon sees his old friend is getting, yes, old. A few less hairs at the temples, five or six gray hairs in the sideburns. A line across the forehead, harder lines around the mouth, and a thinness of the lips, a softness under the chin, settling, leaving a bony line along the shaved parts of the jaws. And what’s behind those dark glasses? More age, yuh, and fifty years of disappointments, yet the guy still stands like a fighter.
†† Militia of Montana.
Gordon sees that Bree has hung her head. Resting her eyes? Tired? All the teenagers up late last night giggling and whispering, drinking more sodas (soda being against the mother-made rules at the Settlement). Noticeable how Bree spends less and less time with the Settlement “grown-ups.” Her eyes are closed but Gordon knows she’s listening for all she’s worth to him and Rex.
Rex says, “All the New England militias were represented, Maine, Mass, New Hampshire, Vermont. Everyone well represented. Maine militias were very well represented. The Virginia Militia, the man I mentioned to you who you’ve probably forgotten, since you never listen to me . . . they never made it after all. But there was representation from Virginia. Mostly just New England, of course. They have expos elsewhere as you would know, if you had been reading the materials I gave you.”
“I recall now about the gentleman from Virginia. Brother, I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
A Malamute walks directly toward Rex, but stays back a few yards, staring up into Rex’s face, then growls at Rex and moves on.
“Funny,” says Gordon. “He’s liked everyone else.” Now he pushes the last of his sandwich into his mouth, says with his mouth full, “Help yourself. Lotsa food. Lincoln people churning out the goodies.”
Rex nods.
Gordon swallows, says, “Bangor is still a long ways south. Nice of you to . . . uh . . . stop by.”
Rex looks around, sinks his thumbs into the pockets of his work pants. “There’s weirdness going on right now.” He looks at Gordon. “Something in the air. A lotta talk.”
Gordon chews faster, noisier.
Rex says, “People using your name at the expo.”
Gordon nods.
“Patriots want to know you.”
Gordon flutters his eyes exaggeratedly, presenting the look of a person everybody wants to know.
Rex says, “And everybody seemed to know you were here . . . in Lincoln. They’ve been paying a lot of attention to you. Keeping track of you. Checking you out. Mark Bunn asked if I knew you, you and me living in the same town.”
“What did you say? Did you say you knew me?”
Rex is really into his militia mode now. He speaks tonelessly, which strikes Gordon as both funny and sort of neat. “I told him I knew you.”
“Did you tell him we used to suck pussy together? You know, at the fair?”
Rex flushes. Gets clown cheeks. Remains silent.
Gordon asks, “Okay, so what did they say about me?”
“They think you have a militia . . . you know . . . that which your kids wrote in the paper. And all that other newspaper foolishness prior to that. It confused them. They think you’re . . . you know . . . a militia. They think you’re sympathetic.”
“I am! I am sympathetic!” Gordon chokes just a little, and something half-chewed flies out of his mouth just past Rex’s sleeve.
“Well, in a twisted way,” Rex says grumpily.
Gordon looks through the trees at the group of camouflage shirts that are circled around the food table. The notorious Willie Lancaster with the slightly bucked front teeth and Jack-the-Ripper beard is here. Willie hasn’t warmed up to his surroundings yet, isn’t his usual frisky self. He just skulks around, smiling like a cat that’s just swallowed a whole jungle of canaries.
Gordon says, “I see your main man is staying out of jail. Talk about twisted.”
Rex says nothing to this.
Gordon notices that Jane Meserve is over by the table that has the big cakes on it. She isn’t wearing her secret agent heart-shaped glasses at the moment, but she is staring at the militiamen in a way like she’s memorizing details.
A stranger, a short woman, mid-thirties, with glasses and a T-shirt that reads: I ♥ My RADTECH, approaches Gordon. Just behind her is a man with glasses and a close shave, a baby in a baby sling, and another man with no baby, both men in pastel knit shirts and khaki shorts and sandals, one shirt the color of a rose, the other the color of lemon sherbet. Neither man seems to be with the woman or with each other, just kind of trailing along. The woman looks into Gordon’s face as she steps closer and closer, steps in front of Rex but not facing Rex, not acknowledging Rex.
Rex raises his chin a notch, drops his hands behind his back cop-style, keeping his feet apart, and surveys the crowd as the woman asks Gordon, “Are you Gordon St. Onge?”
Gordon smiles boyishly, “Yep.”
“It’s wonderful to meet you,” she tells him, her eyes fixed on his eyes, which are, in person, even more striking and more chillingly pale than in newspapers. And his lashes and brows so dark, kind of Shakespearean and dramaesque. Rex’s eyes are rather pale and striking, too (which is probably why, years ago, “The Fly,” a very nice reefer dealer in a bar, thought they were brothers), but his are behind dark glasses and staring down at the tar road, where more cars are arriving.
Gordon asks, “What’s your name?”
“Peggy Moffett. I’m here with a bunch of us from work. We thought we’d come over and see if you were still here. Some said it was Sunday, some said no, it was today.” She glances back over at the crowded tables.
Gordon wipes his hands on the ass of his work pants and then takes the woman in his arms and kisses the top of her head. This is all quick and playful but the woman shrieks and is now all quivery and hoppy and high-colored, like the winner on a game show, and this draws her friends, who hurry from the tables, several women in jeans and T-shirts, funny hats that read Bert’s Fried Clams and they all line up for hugs and Gordon hugs them all and smooches their ears. They all shriek and hop around and laugh. Gordon turns to a lost-looking man wearing a snowy T-shirt with the Bert’s Fried Clams logo written small on one side of his chest. Probably Bert himself. Gordon clasps the man’s hand hard, saying, “Good to meet you. Where do you live?” And the man tells Gordon about his situation, which is harried and hurting, and how it seems lately he is up against a wall.
Willie Lancaster in the background.
Gordon proceeds to smooch three little girls who have hurried here moments ago to find out what all the squealing and hopping was about. The group here by the maples gets bigger. There is some conversation about wind plants and solar energy. And organized money usurping the rights of human people, the obscenity of money buying access to our national and state capitals.
A few yards away is the soft click of a 35mm camera, somebody capturing the moment. Several distance shots of Gordon St. Onge and Richard York standing there together, and perhaps in these photos part of Brianna “St. Onge” will show there behind them, one knee and a leg of her jeans perhaps.
Now, more people are coming to Gordon, two or three at a time, wanting to shake his hand. They look up at him in that way that says You are much taller than your newspaper pi
ctures, but boy do you really look just like your newspaper pictures. We’d know you anywhere.
Such a preponderance of pastels. A man wearing a knit shirt and tuck-waisted shorts the colors of bananas and whipped cream stands near reading a flyer. A woman a distance to his left. Collared knit shirt of lilac, shorts palest khaki, hair cut at satisfying angles. She tips a cup of coffee to her lips. Beyond her two women together. Cantaloupe and celery shirts. Two cups of coffee. All edging nearer to “the Prophet.” Here they come. Peach. Vanilla. White and chartreuse. White and white. Little polyester fanny packs around their waists. White long-visored golf caps.
Rex says in a low voice, “This is weird.”
Gordon groans his agreement, then steps back and behind Bree’s chair, places both hands on her shoulders and her shoulders shrug lovingly against his palms. Gordon, always playful and affectionate with all women. You wouldn’t know which ones were wives if you didn’t know. He almost never publicly makes serious passes at any of his own wives, nothing, no serious caresses to one wife in front of another. And yet this, whatever it is that is between him and this girl, is it definable? Bree lays her head back against his belt buckle and his fingers knead more deeply into her shoulders, neck, and skull, her red hair gushes and exclaims through his fingers.
Notorious Willie Lancaster, gray-eyed and sly, yes, known to be boorish and lewd, yes, known to be merry, he is quite near now, standing with another militiaman. He watches Gordon’s hands on Bree, then he looks at Bree’s face, in profile to him, as she now draws her head forward, her expression triumphant.
More strangers.
A great thickening and layering and mixing of faces, clicking cameras, shoulders and elbows, all ears trying to pick up on the subject of talk, and Gordon’s reflex to their attention to him is to get unnecessarily louder, “Any of you hear of the Oglemobile?”
A voice in the back layer of the crowd yells, “Yessss!”
As Gordon rattles off details about an ingenious car mechanic, “a real tinkerer who wanted to make a four-cycle engine run longer on a gallon of gas,” a good half of the crowd just starts to bemusedly watch Gordon’s teeth and tongue as these mesmerizing words fall from his mouth, words like “micromesh screen,” “carburetor jets,” “brass fittings,” “alley ways,” “intake pinhole,” “atomized effect,” “screen below the main jets,” “four half and halfs,” “twenty-five hours straight on a pint of gas,” “one hundred plus miles to the gallon,” “making kits the average person could work with.”
They watch how his thickened fingers illustrate and shape these images. Yes, a few guys add details to this, as they had heard the Oglemobile story before, while cameras click, camcorders sweep, one pausing on that young Settlement mother not far behind Gordon, changing a baby’s embroidery-edged cloth diaper on the grass in the dappled shade of the trees, baby waving a flower, baby’s hand fat and dimpled, baby quite noisy in her ease and joy with the moment.
Now Gordon is shouting to the crowd, “This feller, this inventor . . . guess what he does!”
“Gets a patent!” one of the strangers calls out.
“Yes! Yes!” Gordon shouts back. “And then . . .”
“Gets rich!” someone exclaims with a single punctuating clap of her hands.
Jane Meserve, who has come to stand close to Gordon, is now facing the crowd. Such commanding dark eyes. And see her floofy movie star hair! Given extra glamoury touches by the Settlement beauty crew the evening before the trip. And a Settlement-made jumper, a plaid of powdery pinks and grays, precisely smocked. Lots of perky buttons. Black tights. Her beloved difficult-to-walk-in thick-heeled sandals. There is just no place where glamour isn’t a must. Now as another camera clicks and another camcorder sweeps around, Jane strikes a sexy pose and smiles lushly and MTV-ishly. And now, seeing that so many eyes angle away from Gordon’s face down onto her, she lifts her skirt just a little, to show a bit of her black-tighted thigh.
“Yes! He got rich!” someone off to the right calls.
A couple others yip and yahoo over this delicious scenario of instant wealth.
‘Welllll, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.” Gordon’s eyes blaze over the crowd. “That’s the pivot here. That’s the basic deep-most philosophical really-screwed-up American faith reflex, that the purpose of inventiveness is to get rich!”
People squint with bewilderment.
Rex surveys the crowd. Behind his dark glasses, those eyes brush over dozens of hands, waists, pockets with cigarettes or reading glasses, the way a shirt hangs on a certain guy, the way some people walk, the suspiciousness of some people’s mannerisms. He has folded his arms across his chest, feet still apart, black military boots shined impressively. He exudes a meticulous, all-in-order, machinelike countenance you would not be inclined to mess with. And this expression of Rex’s never alters one iota over the next forty-five minutes as Gordon preaches to the crowd the things that cause him to be more animated, insanely animated, shared fears and hard truths that pull more and more and more and more lives toward his own.
And so, Bree is satiated.
Pushing through the crowd.
A woman with a long, neatly trimmed braid, jeans, dressy jacket, glasses, nice green eyes, and a tape recorder reveals in a professional schooled, nonaccent which newspaper it is that employs her. “Tell me, Gordon, what is it that has brought you people up here to Lincoln today?”
Gordon is on one knee, wiping mustard off the face of one of his young sons with his own red bandana. With his face trapped in his father’s grip, the child’s eyes can only roll up sideways to the face of the woman.
A lot of questions coming at Gordon at once. People are pushing. Good-natured but urgent. Noisy.
The woman asks her question again, louder and somewhat rephrased. Gordon stands slowly to his full height and looks down into the reporter’s face, his own face reddened from having had his head down, his eyes bloodshot from the unrelenting sun of three days, of mixed-up sleep, and too many people pulling him too many ways, and yet he is charged, faster and faster, head humming. “You mean you want me to kind of condense what I already just said for the last . . . uh . . . forty-five minutes?”
She laughs pleasantly. “Well, sure.”
“I’m sorry,” he says softly, not hostile, just soft. “I can’t. I can’t condense it.”
“Just a few words?” she begs him pleasantly.
And he wonders, “Are you the only reporter here?”
“I’m not sure. But—”
He turns and looks toward the windmill, the three blades as motionless as a tired face with too many dangerous secrets. He looks back at her.
While people take this as their opportunity to hit him with their questions and suggestions and fears, saying, “Gordon?” and tapping his arm, the reporter slips from her big canvas satchel a handful of papers and pushes them into Gordon’s hand. It’s the condensed form of The Recipe, and the thick one that he and Bree had worked on together, their plot to save the world. And there are several flyers he’s never laid eyes on before. The familiar bigfoot creature, the Abominable Hairy Patriot, is plastered all over each, wearing different outfits, patriot hat, or sometimes a wide singing mouth where usually the creature’s face is all just white hair. He sees that one of these flyers is actually a song sheet. “This Land’s Not My Land,” a skewed version of that Woody Guthrie favorite. Another: “The No-Wing Militia Song.” At the bottom of each paper reads: SEE YOUR TRUE MAINE MILITIA RECRUITING OFFICER TODAY!
He looks up into the reporter’s eyes, and at the others standing around, looking eager but patient.
Reporter tells him, “The recruiting officer of the True Maine, a Ms. Samantha Butler . . . and Ms. Whitney St. Onge, both called me at different times last week. They said you’d be here today . . . and that you’d be interested in speaking with me.”
Gordon glances over at the trees where he last saw Bree but she’s gone. Now he looks down at his feet.
The reporter is tal
king. “Well, I’ve already met these girls here today, interviewed them . . . already. And they were kind enough to supply me with all that great stuff!” She laughs a friendly in-collusion sort of laugh. “So now I’m wondering what kind of comments you might make, if not about your wonderful speech here today, then about the True Maine Militia and its goals. And perhaps the Border Mountain Militia, which is also here today, I see. You’re a member?”
Gordon studies her a long moment, then, raising one eyebrow over a crazed-looking green eye, slowly raises a fist and bellers, “GOD SAVE THE REPUBLIC!” Who but she would have seen square-on the razzy twinkles in that one wider eye, but she was not familiar enough to decipher his joshing from nonjoshing and it wouldn’t matter anyway, for a bunch of cameras click and the reporter gently scrawls across her lined pad, nods, and says, “Thank you,” then again laughs pleasantly.
Lorraine Martin recalls.
I guess he was goofing around.
Steph St. Onge.
Oh, boy.
Beth St. Onge.
He came off as a fucking nut with that fist business. Hitler. Stalin. Mussolini. Ready to do a send-off with the big tanks. Maine the Republic, ha! ha! More like Maine the dot.
Claire St. Onge.
He was doing it for Rex, I guess. Rex mattered so much. He would beat up on Rex during their front porch and kitchen debates, then make it up to him with this, whatever this was. The republic? The fist? A war? The good brother?
Gail St. Onge.
I understood Gordon completely at that moment. It was like he was winking all the while.
Glennice St. Onge.
He had his reasons.
Butch Martin looking back to that day.
Well, um, you should’ve seen the reporter’s face. She was lappin’ it up. They’re all alike. They’re like pigeons. Eat your popcorn, then gone. Only a couple days later they fly over and shit the popcorn out on top of your head. So Gordon, man, he feeds ’em shit.
The very last night in Lincoln.
With leaf crunchings and branch snappings, he trudges up into the woods to piss, which is cheating and thoughtless because the Christians have a rented kept-spotless “porta potty” close by.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 60
