And the True Maine Militia’s State House doings come up, bringing brightness and giggles and breathy praises. Another skinny joint comes around, dispelled into the dampness of the low-hung black sky.
When he is back in their space, on Butch’s and Cory’s side of the fire, more dry hemlock, brown needles and all, being heaved onto the flames by two sedate hooded figures, Jaxon purrs, “Yeahhh, we all have to find our own way. It’s like this. Some feel that you have to make fear in the consciousness of the elite gentlemen and ladies, that history shows there’s no change without that fear. Others just want to nicely lie in the street and get arrested and jailed and released and hope for the best.”
His squinting eyes play over some of those of his resident friends still gossiping by the shed. “But better to do something than nothing at all. We all have to do it our own way.” He keeps smiling but looks down at the ground. “It’s just that if us of the working class can’t rise to the occasion, who will? You got the professional class with their lighting and holding candles . . . which is . . . very nice and what they are willing to do . . . and they do the ten seconds in jail thing. It’s all important. Lectures, slideshows, letters, all of it. It gives breath to the resistance. But y’all know what, Mister Butch, Mister Cory? The professionals, the . . . uh . . . honor students . . . are always critical of whatever we do . . . they won’t support us. If they could just look at actual history, they could see how important all tactics are, and they would at least support serious tactics, not always be standing there trying to please the system by pissing on us. It’s not us that’s the enemy, man!” He’s still smiling on and on, gold doubloon swirling, in rage? Or as they say in love and outrage? But his voice is so creamy. No whine. Bushy-tailed and breathy, he goes on, “It’s more than that they don’t want to risk their hides . . .” He pronounces this haahds. “It’s that they’re still looking for that gummy star on the forehead from the big hand. They were always plastered with those and that feeling of pleasure carries through into their adult lives, and ratting on us bad kids was part of how they became teacher’s pets then . . . and now. Ya’ll see what I mean? It’s the class war. I have nothing against their tactics but I wish they’d find it in their hearts and minds to not deter the decisive tactics of their fellow dissidents.”
Cory, not realizing he’s doing it, has leaned in closer to Jaxon, and now a step closer, Cory ever quick, believing suddenly that he is getting nearer to the moment before the pact where Jaxon holds his gaze and Butch’s gaze and asks, “Will you?”
So Cory’s limbs go evermore icy, his lightbulb-bright fist-sized heart not huge enough to shove his blood out to the edges of ruder possibilities, of being dragged out of the thickness of the weald to the realm of the lost, where you are cut off, where they will lower you into the windowless, sunless, cloudless, moonless, starless, scentless, soundless, textureless, inculcately bright and breathless hold in a prison in this land where more people are locked up tight and airless than any other nation in the world. This like the fires of hell while the star-honored professionals are holding their candles and feeling goodie?
Cory steps back from Jaxon and all this while Jaxon is rocking to and fro luxuriously. Two hooded guys are positioning a couple of white plastic pails upside down, drums, though the guy with the guitar goes on ahead, solo, with “Sloop John B.” And yes, Jaxon, yes, takes Cory, yes, by the sleeve and nods to Butch and, yes, leads them away from the friendly guttural flames. Butch is way too dignified, too chin-up. And sixteen-year-old Cory with a beer in one gloved hand, is still chilled no matter how warm the beer and hot the front of his jacket and knees, no matter what, now led to that farther shed almost to the first line of tents and tarps. And Butch, now even more solemn, so chin-up that his throat can’t hide its wobbling swallows of emotion even as the eyes are so distant and Jaxon looks back toward the fire, only half smiling, toward a certain hooded face it seems.
And yes, two figures rise, two of the leanest guys, both with black knitted caps. And the falcon woman makes a motion to follow. And Jaxon purrs, “Y’all are my friendzzz, Mister Butch, Mister Cory.”
Cory doesn’t realize Jaxon’s eyes are so squarely on him so when he looks back it jumps him, especially because in the high contrast-licking light, Jaxon has got more granite and more razor to that hard cut-your-throat smile. And then he lifts his fingers off Cory’s jacket sleeve and opens the shed door.
No flashlight, but Jaxon finds the bag of promised books by ESP or something and he says in a gravelly way that the stash includes about three years’ worth of CounterPunches, a bit smoodgy with underlinings.
And Cory sees stacked satin surfaces. The other, the feared, the real reason he and Butch have been brought over here.
Jaxon whispers as he leans toward the blurry glowy shapes, or you could say toward the precipice, “Y’all see this,” and tugs now on Butch’s sleeve, then Cory’s, moving them deeper into the wheeling dark. His syrupy whisper, this maybe not so trustworthy a thing of his voice, “Y’all see what the Anti-Rich Society has been up to so far, its humble efforts to help turn the empire upside down and . . . uh . . . inside out.”
Cory’s black restive Passamaquoddy eyes widen. Butch’s chin lowers. Both faces are draining to the perfect white of lard. And with both, a whirring deep-most tremble inside their clothes. Both of them are seeing. But . . . but . . . what is it that they are looking at?
Well, it’s a bunch of electronics . . . uh . . . equipment . . . yes . . . wire, which Jaxon always pronounces “waaahrr.” No full auto military weapons, no stuff for bombs, no dynamite. What Jaxon whispers, close and steamy, and dazzling is, “The people’s airwaves. Empire stole them. We steal them back.” He is smiling at Cory and it’s not the outlaw smile now but a sort of church smile, a full churchy smile, maybe a lover’s smile swollen and glazy, though Cory realizes he has seen layers of this onion before, Jaxon the complex, but also Jaxon the basic, because Jaxon is just another of the species, human and deeply shivering, eyes on a promise. Cory now fears Jaxon Cross. Because, well, being plain ol’ human is a thing to fear, right?
And Butch grooms his mustache, head cocked, hearing in echoes the New Jersey Militia and all their fuss over radio. Radio?
Yeah, the thing EVERYBODY wants their hands on. Yeah, everybody wants to crawl into their neighbor’s brain and scream.
A hand on his arm. Like a shotgun blast to his insides. One of the skinny women, long-limbed, lightweight as old celery, elf princess, but has this old-time-actressy self-assured voice, very deep like a guy’s, scratchy, maybe damaged somehow, but also sexy, god, yes, sexy, says, “The FCC could bust in here now and smash this all to kingdom come. Whenever we set up, we have to stay on the move. We travel around, set up, move on. Right now, the Anti-Rich Society is having a sweet slumber till the posse loses our trail.” The hand squeezes the arm, Butch’s solid steady exploding arm.
And then Butch home too late, quietly places himself in his bed.
His mouth remembers the smoke and the watery soup. The seeds. The popcorn. Though he hasn’t eaten for hours since, he’s not hungry. And not tired. But oh, his head has been launched! Like a sixteen-pounder cannonball fired over into the enemy’s fortifications. His sense of duty so perfectly cast iron, yes, but the projectile is so high in the sky it is not arcing. It is a little bit missing from earth’s atmosphere. He thinks only of the very wrongness of the masters of this empire, their plots, ah, yes, conspiracies, but so much that is blatant like a creep flashing his pecker from his open trenchcoat, their intentions to build their thrones and their fancies on the pain of peak oil, peak soil, peak water, peak climate, peak ocean life, starving peoples, refugee people, new slavery, and all ruin. Yeah, it is their sneaky, noisy unrestrained wickedness with no Sherlock Holmes or Batman or wizards to stop them! But the smell of bonfire smoke on himself, his pores and follicles, this takes on the consequentiality of deepest oldest brotherhood, of secrecy of the moonless plot, of being. Plot versus plot.
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br /> Okay, so kings and lords and power piled high with big rocks is natural but also natural is the emperor awakening with a knife to his throat. And all of this nature knots up hard into a single juggernaut . . . that big dreamy faithy smile over a tiny pile of radio broadcast equipment . . . or guns . . . these someone somewhere else will fall on for hope, while the millions of skull cups, ancient vessels of their once ever-turning eyes boil over now with empty air and dust of those people who once hoped, under other empires. So what? While they stood they were beautiful in their insurrection! And all the layers and layers in all the ages of “man” shall be this beautiful lost star! The sky tonight has been blacker than he can stand, but—
Crunch! Munch-munch-munch-munch. Smunch! It’s Kirky in his bed, three feet away. Smells like one of his slow-dried zucchini rampages. Often devours them by the bucket, sweet and crackly. Some nights it’s the less-racket but more-zoom-to-the-blood maple candies shaped like leaves. Blizzards of those churned out by crews, stashed in hiding places, then found. Yumm.
Kirky’s crunching and munching and pleasure intensify, faster, louder, surrounding Butch’s head and robust heart, heart of a soldier, bouncing and braced, on hair trigger, waiting for orders from the right authority, that which is licit to him, waiting, held-breath.
BOOK THREE:
BLOOD
BROTHERS
At the Record Sun.
Ivy Morelli and her new hair. She bustles into the newsroom carrying a big box of apples. She stops at each desk, saying brightly, “Help yourself!”
Her editor, Brian Fitch, who is just returning to his desk from somewhere, pretends not to notice her unreporterly hair. He just looks into the box.
Ivy says, “I picked these yesterday.”
Brian says, “I want a banana.”
Ivy laughs her deep raffish laugh.
As he passes by, Bert Williams, copy desk man, cuffs Brian across the arm with the rolled up sports section, paws around in the box, then veers away, munching on his apple.
Ivy hisses to Brian, “You’re spoiled.”
Brian frowns. “I want what I want.”
“These are Red Delicious,” says Ivy.
“Ack! Red Delicious taste like a cross between a pear and a tennis ball.”
Ivy rolls her eyes.
He wiggles a finger to draw her to a window. He looks out the window at the other building and the sunny street at one corner. He speaks gravely, “St. Onge people are having an event. The gates are coming down.”
Ivy lowers the box to the floor, ruffles her choppy hair into a greater storm with one hand, sighs.
Says he, “They are forefront in the news these days. In a way I hadn’t predicted. You know . . . with the True Maine Militia and all those precocious pretty little adolescents. You know . . . cute. Sweet. Disneyish, sort of. So . . . it’s hard to say where this is going. But . . . if something does happen . . . even if it’s not another Waco, Texas . . . even if it’s just the social workers taking a kid—”
“Are they taking a kid?”
“No. But if.”
She looks down at her apples, touches the box with her toe.
“Wanna go chat with them again, Ivy? Before the event.”
“You know it’s not easy to get in there now.”
“You can.”
“I’d rather not, as you know.” She looks off toward the executive managing editor’s door, which still has the old frosty window and moving shadow beyond. In spite of all the changes here, cheap modernity that smells like a chemistry lab, there are still a few nice old touches. “Why don’t you send one of your real reporters. I’m features. Remember? Cute people stories. Remember? Why not send Tommy. He’s hard-assed enough.”
“Sometimes hard-assed isn’t hard enough. Sometimes sweet and soft is actually harder.”
Ivy looks like she’s about to spit on Brian. Maybe the scratch routine. But she smiles and flutters her eyes now. “Then send in a bunny.”
With a groan Beth St. Onge recalls.
Oh, yes, they couldn’t let it lie. Not these kids. It ’twas another big hoo-ha, With another buncha pictures and stuff in the Record Sun. Oh, but this time the crowds were invited to the Settlement! All of them strangers. Any number of them could be carrying lice.
“Lyn” Potter. Agent. (Actually, he’s just an operative, very low on the Bureau totem pole, almost no face at all. Just a black line in the text of your dossier.)
Whole box of Wheaties. Hell, I’m a big guy. So it’s like eating air. Normally, I eat only a can of plain tuna for breakfast. But today it’s tuna and air. The whole spread. They say there will be lots of food where I’m going today. Willpower is the thing. Long as nobody has a tray of homemade macaroons. Those boogers are the only thing that could make me bend.
The funny thing about this crowd shit is you wonder sometime if most of them aren’t cops and such pretending to be the enemy. It was in Philly recently that three cops got their kidneys pulverized by other cops who didn’t know the guys who they had down were cops cuz only those with the sticks were in blue. But that was different. War on protestors always gets ouchy. You got a protest, you have a potential mob. You have to show force. You have kidneys to bang, the press being elsewhere if you do the right job funneling everybody in different directions. And you don’t want a picture on front of the big papers with some teenage girl having her teeth ground into the cement. Too much color. Oh, boy. But generally speaking the big networks, big papers, what have you, won’t get you for that these days. Cop death gets the bright lights.
But today the only cop death I can foresee might be that pan of macaroons, if there is such. Today it’s going to be a little girl tea party. I just need to show up wearing a harmless smile. My contact has me looking for certain people, rating potentials. A certain babe is top of the list.
Busy at the FCC.
They’ve relocated again, Bob. We just got a call. We’re on it. It’s easy to follow ants. They always leave a little trail of vegan cookie crumbs.
Secret Agent Jane observes.
Some people can’t believe their eyes how many stranger people are showing up. Some people’s eyes pop out. Bonnie Loo says it is the reporter lady’s fault. Then she says it’s Bree’s fault. Beth, one of the other mothers, tells Bonnie Loo to please shut up. Bonnie Loo is putting actual red frosting on a big cake. Geraldine says red food dye causes cancer. Bonnie Loo laughs and says, “Yeah, mass suicide!” She squirts a whole lot extra in as she says these words.
What we observe.
Streams of humans, then a high tide of humans. The one they call Guillaume knocks over a vase of goldenrod.
Leona St. Onge remembers.
Gordon fondled the ears of children who had come with their parents. His pale eyes were intrusive. Maybe some parents felt afraid. Others felt blessed. Healed. Made new. Depending on what they came here looking for.
Whitney remembers.
Two vans. They were backing slowly through the crowd. They braked flush with the high plywood stage, which crews had built it in a hurry that last week at the end of the piazza on the south side of the horseshoe. The vans were spiffied up with purple and lime green fleur-de-lis and yellow musical notes and, in big print, BAND FROM THE COUNTY.
More people were hiking up the dusty Settlement road. No cars allowed inside the gates except “officials.” Gatekeepers were assisting visitors with parking down along the paved Heart’s Content Road, lining that road for a mile! The day seemed so perfect.
Penny St. Onge.
All of us who wore Gordon’s silver ring also on this big day wore a red sash. The sashes were wool. They were thickly embroidered with suns, vines, flowers, what Brianna called, “colors of bounty.” She had made the first one and got all the rest of us, the wives, to make one so “we’d be woven together by the color red, color of hearts.” Bree’s words.
This pretty much shamed a few naughty mouths that had been gossiping of Brianna’s tendency to hang out with only Sett
lement teenagers.
And so.
Eventually, Gordon reaches the end of the last piazza, temporarily connected to the high temporary stage. There is a little temporary set of stairs there made of short Settlement pine culls. So good to see his old friends and distant cousins from Aroostook, THE County. He embraces them all, a smooch or three, some partylike yeowls, then he and they chat, catch up on some things. Gordon swept happily along in that cheery hoarse back-of-the-throat Acadian-English mix, the patois.
These people, these words that his mother, Marian, wishes to deny him to this day. And yet he loves Marian. And so these musicians with their effervescence and frequent yips of joy are a category of outlaws.
And behold! There is Rex. Is Gordon forgiven for his transgressions?
He and Gordon both stand with their arms folded across their chests, watching people, hearing the cackling tangle of voices within the confines of the horseshoe of porch-fronted buildings, moss, grass, and trees. Rex’s boots are shined, military bearing, but no olive cap. Work pants. Brown T-shirt. No dark cop-like glasses to cover his ever-frosty eyes.
Strangers’ kids love the huge hollow dinosaurs, purple cow, and spaceship, a childly face showing in every little opening and hatch of these fabulous bright creations.
A pair of college professors and their families pass through, looking for Claire and the “college crew.”
Gordon has absorbed Rex’s solemnity, his own face now a mirror of his friend’s. Big cold blueberry muffins go by. Settlement-made, heaped on a platter. Cold whole milk in big jars. Milk with a good cow taste. Makes the palms of your hands cold when you hold one of those jars, which makes a really nice cold feeling bust out on your forehead even though the rest of you is a little too warm from the bustle of the day.
Quite a bit of fried chicken left. More people coming, laying down food from their own kitchens outside the Settlement, from other towns, from other states, salads of vegetable or macaroni, chewy bars, cookies, brownies, pies, biscuits, muffins, breads, and beans. And ice cream. And fruits. And soda. And beer. And chips.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 68
