Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  Bree is wistful. Is she, too, considering these wonders?

  And so the “ship” is now turning, the sea monster’s ho-hum face and snaky neck leading the way around a sharper bend of the small island. Soooo slowly. One could imagine it as predatorily, looking for villages to plunder. The boys’s faces are a mix of strain from pedaling and glorious evil imaginings.

  Bree bows her head.

  The effusive tat-tat-tat-tat of a downy woodpecker on the island fills Bree’s and Claire’s silences. And the pedals and churning paddle wheel combine clicks, clunks, and slurps as water separating at the bow lisps. Old Dorothy’s fidgeting goes scruff scruff. And Claire stroking Bree’s jacket arm, less scruff, more wispy. Bree’s eyes are closed and also her ears are shut because this is just the husk of Bree. Her true self is in the seam between the pages of the booklet she is presently reading on corporate chartering sent to her from the leftist group she hopes will return here soon to do a workshop. She is considering renting the town hall meeting room, more centralized, to attract those who get twittipated and wet themselves over the word “militia.” She visualizes a table of healthy snacks, no uniforms, no guns, nothing to scare weak Americans.

  Then she has some ideas on an invitation to the Human Extinc—

  “Bree?” Claire’s voice barges in, her right hand still fussing with Bree’s sleeve.

  Bree’s overly spaced eyes seem woozy.

  “Bree, hey, we are sisters.” Pat-pat. Pat-pat. Fingers on the sleeve.

  Bree’s head turns toward Claire. Plainly, “sister” is not what Bree sees in the bespectacled age-fifty round face, Claire’s as-ever unfriendly expression. Bree says urgently, “I’m going to get fixed. I’m going to get my tubes tied.”

  Claire blinks. She whispers, “Gosh.” And what is Claire herself but “fixed” behind her harshly disguised overflowingness?

  Bree says, “It’s my duty. To the world.” She then rushes on to share with Claire the statistics on overpopulation, the reality of shrinking resources. “So there’s no need of me adding another mouth to feed and . . . and rear end to wipe.”

  “Yes,” says Claire. “I guess you’re right.” Claire frowns, then cocks her head, keen to a certain sweep of time, of years evaporated. Of that time when she had wept for her . . . uh . . . duty to the world.

  Bree gazes straight ahead, then to the left of the island’s stout lichen-blistered trees, the vista opening as the “ship” comes “sneaking” out of the snug cove. The boys’ jolly conniving for “ship” improvements goes on. Could turbo engines be made? The boys are tiring, eyes wet from October’s hard stinging air.

  Ah, dream on. Engines are the “soon past,” Gordon and Aurel have said.

  The paddle wheel’s and rudder’s watery surges and shivers match perfectly the energy pulses of their feet, beginning to drag slightly. But they persevere. They commence circling another island. Teeny. Not big enough to build a camp on. A hemlock tree. A boulder. Some weedy tufts. A gray plastic pail split up the side, having floated ashore. Doubtful that there’s a message folded up in it.

  Bree frowns. What does she see in Claire’s face? Bree has no paintings, sketches, or calligraphy verse to define or box-wrap this afflicted matter. Father, brothers, and, recently, sisters, yes, impulse, gossip, giggles, schemes. But what of the hardness in Bree that still resists mothering?

  “Bree?” Claire slings her right arm around Bree’s shoulders.

  Bree sort of swells, sort of shrinks, mashes her cheek into Claire’s bright orangey-yellow knit hat. And Bree is hugging her back. No, Claire is not just another sister.

  Claire, though, cut and tied to prevent procreation and who is such a short little person, is Gordon’s only real wife, isn’t she? She straddles it all. If there were no Claire, there’s no Gordon. Claire, the glue. And Bree supposes that all is perfection between Gordon and Claire, decades shredded, washed away but rich with branches, roots, and vines, like twin mountains resisting erasure.

  Bree remains with her cheek on little Claire’s head, and Claire remains with her one-armed embrace of her, and the other arm around Dorothy. Claire peers at that old dear one and finds her asleep. Now Claire looks at the sky, straight up at all that golden and purple October congestion, like the sky needs to sneeze.

  The ship ponderously changes course, aiming for open water, back to join the flotilla of pastel swans all progressing earnestly over the face of the “sea.”

  When the Viking ship penetrates the great swan flotilla, the boys give it all they’ve got, and soon the race is on. But swans are no sissies. In fact, a pink swan wins the race.

  History (the past).

  They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage.

  —Captain Bellamy, pirate

  Old sedan, squatted down with the weight of so many.

  It mutters up Horne Hill, past the erect pine post and tidy mailbox of Jaxon Cross’s father, L.N. Cross, Box 990. Then it mutter-mutters up the wide dirt drive to the destination, so many inside the car glass, painfully dignified of face, looking out, these young fellows of the Settlement, altogether homing in on that plume of smoke moiling up behind a set of barn-red sheds. Since the old car already knew where to go, it made a fluid bend around to the rear of the sheds, no pause for bearings. Then here we are!

  Two bird-lean young woman and one little kid are already close by, even before the doors swing open. Kid has white upright hair like cartoon fear. One woman has close-together miss-nothing light eyes and a lonnnng narrow nose. A falcon woman. She is known by the name Sip, and she’s old enough to have rocked and nested and soldiered Earth First!ishly in the towers of old growth, holding the line, she and they and the towers as one crackling endangered thing. And now here she stands, plain. Serene. Her eyes and long nose, forehead, swivel to scan these younger friends being sort of choked out of the car. They are all buttoning up or fluffing out their layers as the wind now coolly sniffs at them, their peculiar Settlement odors, and the two young women and child also put off odors, theirs being kippered by the tribal fires and close private spaces made up from blue plastic tarps and tents, down over that back field of bouncing October grasses.

  Falcon woman informs them that they are late for the “christening,” meaning their garden just below the tents and tarps on the rock-crusty hillside, garden ready for next year. “Christening” means the garlic is in the earth now, for which there was a ceremony. These, Jaxon’s resident friends, can now call themselves a “farm collective.”

  Cory explains that this is the first they could get away from Settlement work, though they rushed all day.

  “Never rush, never rest,” says the falcon woman, quoting somebody literary.

  This day has never once known a sun, just slobbery dank cloud, sometimes moaning, and now in the west a travail the color of cole slaw.

  The zingy-haired little kid’s face is calm and a smile is forming on one side of her mouth. Maybe she takes for granted that there will always be groupings that come and go, assortments immune to gravity; travelers, busy folk, all tired maybe, from a nation that never settles, and they, all so enthused, all part of what matters, all eventually erased by the terminus of another event or season or perhaps there was an arrest. She, tyke, would have serenely watched as such groups have arrived hello!, the prize gained, the story told, the meals, the two-day sleep, bye-bye, then wiped away by the huge hand of the ever-continuing process. But by her side always, her tall windswept mother.

  The house on the grassy crest above them all is cedar shingle with black trim, well-kept, tight, no drafts. Just ghosts. And Jaxon’s kin of his birth and of some disagreement. This is no longer where Jaxon lives with his father and siblings and ghost mother. Maybe Jaxon lives outside now, like a gray dog, self-plunged into all these blowing-around souls hunched up to the bonfire, night coming on, steadied only by the intimacy with the lit
tle red barn and little red shed buildings and bright tents.

  All these people! Like an egg-throwing but loveable audience to the ugly never-ending story of kings and moats, turrets and dungeons. These, the darling hoods, the “dreds” in some cases, nose rings, which one woman has three of. All so young. Just beginning. All in wonder at themselves. Well, one woman and two guys less young, the woman’s chin tucked into her zippered sweater, eyes watering from the smoke and cold. Her eyes, as all eyes of these well-smoked and chilled young people, shimmer with regard to the arriving Settlementers, Butch, Cory, Oz, Jaime, C.C., Rusty, Jeremy, and Seth. Nods go both ways. Some raised hands, that three-fingered hey-friend how-do “wave.”

  “You just missed Jaxon,” someone says, pointing to the kettle of soup on the fire.

  A husky laugh from one of the hooded, zippered-up, gloved, and sneakered women.

  A guy with dreads enough to muffle his ears and almost his eyes, gives one warning strum to a guitar.

  Another guy, long face, chin shaved and pointed in profile like a smiling quarter moon says, “We raised him special for this soup.”

  “Ha! He’s in that soup!” howls a shadowy hooded figure by the larger shed, not far from the fire.

  “No-o-o-o,” laughs the someone who had started all this. “I meaahnt Jaxon isn’t here but would you please stay and have soup.”

  Merriness prevails.

  The sky clots further, now damper. Hunting for jointed bones and other predictors of storm.

  Now the guitar and harmonica go in tandem up against the smoke and flames and the crackle-pop of it all. And around goes a bag of cookies made with that special butter. And a plate of rubbery celery stalks and then raisins in a very nice red pottery bowl.

  Someone swings another noisy tangle of hemlock onto the fire.

  Now voices hooting and shouting and some better at actually singing, a Phil Ochs song, he who these days you could maybe call a forefather.

  As the cold unhomey sky more deeply purples and bruises everything and the fire expands, all eyes are gold like treasure. One guy and two women blend voices as an old old old Irish ballad wails and sighs all by itself it seems, sorrowing of a sturdy people, of strained harvests, of strangers with swords. With his ever-so-stoic expression and Rexlike mustache and muscular fingers, the magically-appearing always-trusty kazoo, which normally has the taint of fun, now shivers with firelight and eminence in Butch’s fingers and lips.

  These people and this place are no longer strange to Butch, nor to Cory, nor these others who have come. They have begun to merge with Jaxon and these wanderers with tree-sit names and outlaw postures, and these last few nights have merged even snugger, tonight dishing soup, hands pressing along many skimpy joints, eyes tearing to the pontifical fireside smoke.

  Impotence becomes witchery. Poor is rich. Young is ancient.

  Oh, but Butch’s chest and neck are tight with his worriments, eyes dodging to the littlest red shed, which seems to contain a very dangerous thing. But he isn’t trusted enough to be part of it, so it seems. Thus, his wonderings buck-kick him. How cherry pink is the color of his failing. Full blush shame.

  When Jaxon materializes, it is full night.

  Six-pack of brew slung down to the group by one fist. And the stranger with him, short stocky in-his-thirties guy with dark blond ponytail and red cap, another six-pack there. “Still plenty of soup left,” they are told. Soup, hot, thin, weenie bits of veggies and rubbery grain things, potatoes in crap-die size, exotically herbed. And the star of all things, garlic. And around goes a big brown bagful of popcorn, butterless, heartlessly vegan. At one point Cory and Butch and Oz, who is age thirteen and ever-so-smiley, find themselves with Jaxon inside the largest shed. This interior smells strongly of cold apples. A guy sleeps on a sort of cot, his sleeping bag zipped, just hair and a nose and an ear pierced with a pencil-sized spike.

  “Works nights,” whispers Jaxon, nodding that way, nothing more said. This interior is colder and damper and ruder than out was. On a workbench, bowls of grapes, a package of crackers, bowls of seeds from which Jaxon tears handfuls and laps from his palm. And, ever the hospitable Southerner, offers the same to others.

  On the gray board and studding is a poster of black-masked Subcomandante Marcos, camo shirt, crossed bandoliers, a bulky black military rifle not familiar to these three Mainers. The famous Zapatista reads from something maplike in his hands. His reading holds his eyes as if each eye were about to be born into a revised world. This image, this wall of only studs, is scantily lighted by the bare low-watt bulb over the sink.

  So sudden it jumps the three Settlement guys, the somewhat disembodied voice, Jaxon’s voice, his drawl but no honey. Full-throated, each word a billboard-sized thud of threat to someone who isn’t here in this cold shed. Jaxon’s eyes are closed loosely for he must see clearly his foe now. “Treat . . . us . . . like . . . dogs . . . and . . . we . . . will . . . become . . . wolves.” His killer smile spreads like butter over his face, eyes opened. “That dogs should dare this botheration of them with our little weapons and little words; we haven’t got a chance they say. But dogs of the world are on the move, even here, boys, even here in this nation where it is dearly believed a booger is a rose, a rose is a booger.”

  Now Jaxon is rustling around trying to root out a book from the many books and stuff here. After a while he shrugs and out they all go from cold apple to cold smoke. He explains that, “it will turn up.”

  The singing plunges on into the subject of rain and the highway, ever so melancholy, which causes Butch to reach again for his kazoo. He sees through the fire one girl’s face metamorphosed by the spitting untrustworthy light into a skull wearing a hood. He holds the instrument away from his mouth. He grooms his Rexlike mustache, his eyes drifting, sees Jaxon’s nasty smile spread over him, Butch. How the fire draws all these beings, some with chattering teeth, the skinny blonde patient child moving closer to her falcon mother who stands with a blanket about her shoulders and can, winglike, wrap the little one up in both the fabric and comforting murmurs, for this night testifies as part of no scanty evidence, these people are homeless.

  Jaxon keeps standing, his back to the fire, eyes now on the smallest reddest shed, shed of mystery. Shed that is perhaps more central than the fire, the real magnet to these souls. He asks about the True Maine Militia, reports that he heard about it from friends in Augusta. He speaks in his lush North Carolina warm-blooded way, “I’m amazed I haven’t heard about this from you boys directlike.”

  Butch shrugs.

  Cory snorts. “Theatrics mostly.”

  Jaxon’s scary smile expands. “Yeahhh. Guerrilla theater.” His eyes leave off their characteristic squint, almost popping, then drill each Settlement throat.

  Cory and Butch glance at each other, marveling.

  Supple still, Jaxon’s voice tells a story. He repeats over and over the theme of “diversity of tactics.” Then promises more books and articles on such. He unwraps something from one of his ten million pockets, stuffs part of it into his whiskery mouth, smiling, chewing, smiling. He says around this chewing and smiling, “Before ya’ll leave, I’ll load you up.” This loading up always means reading materials. “So whatever you do, don’t sneak away without telling me, hear? Like that time when I was working on Fetus’s car and you boys left literatureless.” He has about five black bandanas bunched around his neck this night, gives his neck the bulk of a storybook lion. One might suppose his endless smile derives its power from its resemblance to a warning sneer but especially just from its endlessness. And there’s certain power in the lighthouse flash of the doubloon spinning from his ear. He usually rocks back on his heels while talking, now it’s more side to side, not as a rubbery-legged drunk would but as, yes, a pirate would while on rough open seas . . . his experienced no-worry reflex to the sea’s vaster power. “All you Mainers and your young’ns over there at your Settlement school situation ought to be familiarized with Mr. Taylor’s The Liberty Men and The G
reat Proprietors. It’s Maine in the late 1700s, early 1800s. Man, it’s your roots. Rebellion. It’s your inheritance. And now it portends.” He rocks on his sneakered feet, in the to-and-fro mode, not nervously, just an easy, generous shift of his not-scanty body weight. “And y’all seen the new one by Doctor Martin Luther King Junior’s lawyer buddy Mister Pepper about how the state did it. I’ve got you your own precious copy to curl up with. Just think of me as y’all’s librarian, hear? Those books are all set aside for you. I did it with my own hands. But somebody must have cooked them in the soup.” He chuckles, getting very straight in the shoulders. “More soup?”

  “The soup that has everything!” a hooded woman laughs from the cold dark outside of the fire, nearer to the largest shed.

  “Soup of champions!” screams one guy with dreads, throwing up a fist.

  For a while now Jaxon mopes around pleasantly, eating from the passed-around bowls and boxes and bags. Though he brought beer, he doesn’t drink any. He mostly talks, listens, punches shoulders, ambling around and around the fire like clock hands. The Settlementers watch him with admiration and in return he watches them; in spite of his sneer-smile, he seems to be honorably amazed by them.

  A light goes on in an upstairs room of the real house up on the rise. Jaxon eyes the house carefully, then stuffs more of the going-around-the-fire food into his mouth. Music has stopped. Lots of gaspy ha-ha talk of friends and doings. Stories of very recent arrests, something about organizing Maine loggers in a border protest against the big-biz controlled Labor Department, and the way some funny cops handled that, and the total hilarity of taking over the Labor Department office, the upcoming hearing on that. Yes, it seems there is a lot of flagrante delicto in the shared short history of these somewhat homeless, fairly cheerful, totally durable, vegan wraiths.