Bree.
Gordon, the ram, my teacher, my myth, finally you have given yourself to the people.
Lyn Potter. Operative. Yes, low on the Bureau totem pole. In fact, you could say he’s only ether. No face. A cloud man. But with a little camera, he’s a wizard, you see. He speaks.
I got maybe eight hundred frames of the speech. The lighting was a problem at first but I got him so he is recognizable. See him wearing the camo BDU jacket and pistol belt. Patch of the Border Mountain Militia. See here he’s chugging beer during his speech. He rolls a gigantic pretend joint from a newspaper or something, pretends to smoke it, just to make some point, the point being he’s egging Americans on to disrespect law. He got people worked up. Here, see, about four hundred shots of people being worked up. And plenty of guns around, guys with arms folded, a pistol on the hip or see this: gun against the ribs. And a guy on that Quonset hut roof with a rifle. He has been identified as William Daniel Lancaster. Sharpshooter. And his brother, a sharpshooter in ’Nam, died there. So this live one wears the brother’s dog tags. So the live one has a grudge against America seems like.
So meanwhile, St. Onge has America under his spell. And his militia buddies got us in their sights.
The end.
Just as liquids evaporate, the crowd and its cackling and piping and peppery din doesn’t do a fast bye-bye. An hour later, there are still dark clumps of chatter all over the quad and in the sandy lot and downhill along the road. Yet another forty-five minutes, the black sky of ferocious stars presses down and all of it is cold. Then there is mostly emptiness, the last of stranger voices gotten tiny beyond the downhill woods. Voices still becoming farther, hear them? They’re mere peeps.
Gail St. Onge thinking back.
And then it was over. No heart attacks. No fights. Just one broken garden gate. And litter. We could deal with that. But then actually it wasn’t over. The part that changed our lives forever was yet to come.
Brothers.
Out on the quad just beyond the porch screen behind where he sits are voices. Settlementers, Rex’s men, and beyond that the band dismantling wire and drums, and beyond that more Settlement people, his family. And Butch’s and Cory’s anarchist friends occupying the radio building for a few more days. Only two or three strangers still. Three fellows: Mr. Sea Dogs cap, Mr. Wizard-of-Oz-Lion-laugh, and a guy with beach-boy looks who’s used his camera the way a ten-year-old does. You know, not afraid to waste film on people’s feet or people with their mouths full. He’s got the band guys in his crosshairs now, a great shot of those tangled wires and a fiddle case full of maple leaves.
But Gordon is alone. He’s inside one of the big porches, in a rocker, leaning forward, holding his face with one hand, beer in the other. The chair has hand-carved bear heads on the back, the wooden faces look to be singing; assuredly there is mirth.
But now Rex materializes and he is standing erect, a cemetery corner stone. He is looking down into the world of the stealthful mountain lion of the Border Mountain Militia patch on Gordon’s left biceps. Cheery candles on either side of the rocker ripple and scribble pink and white light over everything stuffed into this moment of silence. Then Rex’s iron voice, “The FBI is watching you. They like to know what your vices are so they can twist you up in them and push you over. That wasn’t smart, getting them to know you think pot is okay. Even beer. It’s sloppy. But when some guys yell ‘kill the president,’ you say ‘No way in hell.’ That was an operative setting the mood . . . or trying to. You can’t leave that hanging. You don’t just let them take over.”
Gordon’s big face, one eye stuttering, the other a flame, looks up. His huge hands drop to his knees. “Right. The FBI.” He snickers. He snickers because he is drunk and because Rex is . . . is . . . corny? That melodramatic tightness around that crawling-to-the-jaws mustache. Now there’s something Gordon has never seen before, a look crossing Rex’s face and body, far exceeding the hostility over the letter to the governor. This is all concentrated in Rex’s jaw and all the teeth locked to prevent saying more, because Rex is an officer and a gentleman, right? He makes no goof ups. But somehow the jaws and the teeth and the unsaid words are all braked against something that is trembling around and outside him as if he were blanketed with biting flies.
Gordon says, “I guess you’re right, brother.”
“Self-control is what you have to have if you want to represent the Border Mountain Militia.”
Gordon looks up and gives a couple of jerky nods.
The light around them gets blotchy, one of the pink-glass Settlement-made spirit faces going out. Just an embery orange piece of wick left. A puny glow. Then not even that.
Two a.m.
The musical cousins and their musical friends from THE County are pretty revved up, not ready for bed. They have brought a present. A cooler of long-necked Canadian beers and four scary-looking oversized bottles of bourbon, as golden and gloinky as the river Styx.
Late night news. See!
Crazy extremist throws something at the camera. What is it? Just pretending? Now he’s screaming. No way to make out what he’s going on about. All wobbly and a few extremist followers making sounds on top of his sounds. Now the so-called Prophet is shaking his fist, eyes on the camera, “GOD SAVE THE REPUBLIC OF MAINE!!” You know these racist hate-filled militias. Time to speak to experts now on what to expect and whether or not authorities should be sent in to save the children. But first a close-up of the Prophet’s face. See his temples throb! See his perspiration. Fear for your darling Heather and Josh and your dog and your stuff!!!!
Vaughan Hill Road. The old farm place with “updated” windows, the biggest one covered in fiberglass drapes, sort of green. Glassed-in porch. Wood plaque shaped like a pointing hand reads: ENTER.
The glass porch door shivers as someone knocks. A body-builder-type platinum blond guy. Tanned. Older in daylight than he would look at night. He is shaved totally and as fresh-scented as morning. His truck plates say: MAINE.
Rex’s mother Ruth swings that glass outer door wide.
The big guy says, “Hi. I’m Andy. I need to see Rex.” He adds that he and Rex are friends.
Ruth leads him in past the wooden hand plaque, into the kitchen that smells of sausages and eggs and one of those dish soaps that is advertised to break down grease but stinks like some mild form of nerve gas. And the house smells of its own tender oldness.
The magic of photography.
There is the stack of prints in Rex’s hand. A “bad hand” you’d say if it were a deck of cards. Rex only looks at the top one, if you call it looking. His eyes turn ever so oily and hollow and just drip over the edge of his thumb. He hands them back to the stranger, Andy, no friend.
Rex is now very still, himself a picture.
In a voice as high as a woman’s for such a brawny fellow, the stranger says, “There are more.” And another thing about this voice, there’s no accent, or rather there is an accent, every voice has an accent, but not the kind of accent you could locate on a bright map. There’s no indication of a childhood. It’s as if this figure in Rex’s living room were manufactured and plugged into the wall. He speaks toward Rex’s now iron profile, “I just thought you ought to know.”
Next day. Shortly after noontime in Denise’s Diner parking lot.
What is that large human-shaped object on the dirt? Put you to mind of the Vietnam War era Buddhists who set themselves on fire with gasoline and a kitchen match. They would, just this same way, eventually slump forward or to one side, life still roiling deep inside the crust. No face or fingers, just an overroasted black. But here today the figure isn’t black crust. It is running down in slippery falling solid red sheets of paint. No, not paint. Warm blood. The figure moves, but how can it be alive? No face. No ears.
The crowd of people that has scurried from the diner or stopped their passing cars is all shouting at once, so many who witnessed the making of that gleaming red thing slumped now so quietly in the sun.
Police wearing latex gloves push Rex York into the cruiser. His knuckles are a little shredded. Some of the blood on his hands and clothes is his own, some Gordon’s. Mixed. And where is the rock he used to blind his foe, to crunch the skull, make knots of the ears? Everyone wonders. But everything around is perfectly matched, a tarp-sized circle of red around the melting red man, rocks, sand, little poofs of grass and plantain.
And wasn’t there a gun? Someone said gun. But maybe that was cast aside. Maybe Rex forgot how to make such a thing work. When Rex came looking for Gordon and found his face at a table in the diner, how did Rex navigate, his own musculature wobbling with creatureliness, with savagery, with something older and rawer and less negotiable than a loaded gun?
The sacrificed figure is moving a little, perhaps wondering on some wiffy forgotten question. But then it stops moving.
After Brian calls Ivy to tell her the news.
She is just outside the State House where she was going in to get more grubby stuff to feed her column. Still in her car, parking garage so stinky, echoing, groaning with other vehicles whipping into those narrow slots around her, she now pushes her extra jacket into her face. She is weeping, of course, but there’s ever so slight confusion concerning which teacher man is being carried in to MMC. David Morelli’s little head? Or this swollen head and face bigger than a bread box, this Brian described, this that showed in the photos the Record Sun’s Jamie Knowles got as the rescue unit was unloading.
Glory York remembering.
These guys I knew were having a late-night party on the lake. I was surprised to see Gordon show up. Him and his Aroostook County cousins and some guys I never saw before, all of them revved up after their big-kid-militia event. And everybody was full of beer or Jim or Jack. I was so sloshed I almost don’t remember any of it, except that in those days Gordon had become as famous as the Beatles. Therefore, I had a crush on him. I was nineteen years old and full of crushes.
I danced naked. For him. Though it seemed I danced for everyone there, so the legend goes.
Gordon and I wound up together in the frosty grass and cold sand and in the jillion pictures some weird mystery guy showed dad. And my father became someone none of us knew. He became the mystery.
And then Gordon was brain dead.
What happened between Gordon and me at that party could have just floated away like a funny little soap bubble, with all my other wild party memories of those years, if it hadn’t been for those mystery pictures stuck to my father’s eyes.
The family.
Sitting, standing, they crowd several waiting rooms. They line hall walls. Some are designated to press the nurse’s station for news or call home to the farm place to those waiting and worrying there.
Newspaper reporters and even radio interviewers, they come and they go. Some say in a sincere hush how sorry and how terrible. Others are twinkle-eyed with amusement or there’s something too sugary in their awe as they speak and as they scan the St. Onge gathering as though the family were made up of dancing poodles and elephants wearing tutus.
Dark-haired Senator Mary Wright appears in a brisk red coat, striding along in flat quiet shoes, her face not just grave today but gray.
The reporters clamor, “Senator Wright!” and “Senator, what brings you here today?”
As brisk as her red coat, her words to them, “Same thing you’re here for.” But her smile is one of true sorrow. Then she turns sharply to the approach of a pair of St. Onge teenagers whose cheeks she pecks and then as more approach, her petite scarlet presence is swallowed in a group hug.
At the same time, Gordon’s mother, Marian, walks, almost runs from the elevators. No one moves toward her but Whitney, who is already in her path between a laundry cart and clutch of reporters, does not step aside. She faces Marian’s approach square on.
How handsome Marian Depaolo St. Onge is, gray-streaked dark hair clipped just above the collar of her stylish belted brown jacket. And Whitney with her messy slept-on-last-night honey yellow ponytail, not a homely girl, but Gordon’s corkscrew grimace gives one of her Slavic-ish Nordic-ish green eyes a one-second bulge, eyebrow high. But see up close, Marian’s green eyes are knotty and pink and terrible from hours of off-and-on wailing.
Face-to-face now, both women are equally tall. Oldest of all the children of Guillaume, Whitney opens her arms. She is not rebuffed. Neither one speaks, just the long, long straining crush of their embrace. Then Marian moves on, past all the other teens and tykes, no stopping, no glancing from side to side. So many have that look. The look of him. But even today in its heat of feeling, Marian cannot manage an enfolding that diametric or that complicit.
Senator Mary is back-to so Marian is unaware of her old fond acquaintance and vice versa.
The nurses repeatedly insist they cannot permit everyone to visit the patient, even though there’s a five-minute limit and big no-visit time between to keep the bedside clear. “Only the im-med-i-ate family.”
What’s that?
Well, Marian for sure. One mother. Easy enough. In she goes.
When she’s finished and comes out of that ICU doorway, she is crying infantlike, a wide-mouthed wahhh! and hurries lopingly and unladylike in the other direction from the family, the senator, the media. And around the farthest corner, a wider corridor, she vanishes.
Inner voice of the Bureau.
Your bewilderment is becoming on you. Yes, just as God has his reasons so do we.
Conscious.
Then there is the morning that the surgeon wearing a pastel-stripe short-sleeve shirt like a businessman meets the earliest arrivals of the family and some who had spent the night here. Doctor has a wall-to-wall smile.
He brags that all the surgeons involved did a remarkable job with the blah blah and the blah blah blah and the blah. He explains that Gordon, now conscious, is stirring. He is not paralyzed, has no numbness in the extremities. He remembers who he is and aced other basic quiz questions. No memory of recent events, though. That’s pretty common, due to blah blah blah of the blah blah. And of course, in these cases of blah, the speech will be bungled for a while. Therapy should help. But his speech is pretty amazing all the same.
The doctor never speaks of the missing teeth, which are not his specialty. Teeth? What are those but decoration. The brain is the center of the universe. No brain, no universe. But here he brags up the work of Dr. Lofchie who will be in later today to examine Gordon’s eyes, especially the surgery done on the right one. He speaks further on trauma of blah and further brags up the new procedures used and how “we” pulled it off.
At some point in all this Bonnie Loo has dropped to the floor in the middle of the little listening group, sort of on her knees but more of an around-the-campfire style sprawly-leg thing and her hands folded like prayer. She is sobbing in relief but soundlessly, and all this so fast no one has time to wonder if she’s fainted. She’s whispering “Jesus Jesus Jesus.” Her floppy orange-streaked black topknot goes from side to side in front of her bowed face. This praying is not a Bonnie Loo thing.
The doctor advises in an unchanging upbeat way, “She shouldn’t be on the floor.”
Another day. Claire St. Onge speaks.
When I go in to see him, he raises an arm hello . . . so I know he can see me but there is still only a small wet slit for his “good” eye, the other one bandaged, and a voice that’s croaky and thick.
Aurel comes up to the other side of the bed, taking off his red felt crusher hat, his favorite hat for fall. Aurel, looking especially fit. His short dark beard. Every hair. Shining. He smells of the outdoors, the big cold outdoors.
I yearn to be alone with Gordon. I yearn for this terribly. But I can tell Aurel wishes for the same. He and Gordon have always been as close as it gets. In fact, when we told the nurses Aurel was Gordon’s half brother in order to get him in for his ICU visit, we didn’t have to lie much.
I pick up Gordon’s good hand and stroke the palm and wish for all I can never have,
though I had it once upon a time. Then I scold myself . . . ye gods, Claire, you have more now than you had yesterday. Yesterday Gordon was in a coma, ten million miles away, a tiny star.
Aurel’s eyes. Glittering. Dark. Predatory (in looks only). He pats the covers of the bed beside Gordon and says softly, “Guillaume, vous savez, mon vieux, on a besoin de vois chez nous.”
I stare at Aurel. I know what he wants. He wants to touch Gordon. Hug him up. Two Frenchies. This is the way. But Gordon looks so broken. Gordon’s head is turned toward Aurel, though there’s zero expression in the bloated shaved weirdly purple face.
I turn and study the four people behind the waist-high counter of the nurses station. I’m still so distrusting of Dr. Tureen’s telling us that Gordon has “made it.” Gordon hasn’t really said anything intelligent yet, not to any of the family. And what about his eye!
Aurel outdoes himself with nervous chatter, less soft now, urgent, newsy.
Gordon’s one visible eye (crimson), is fixed on Aurel and I feel his hand pulling from mine and I let go and he carefully grasps the red felt crusher hat in Aurel’s hands, tugs it away, presses it to his chest for a minute, then pretends that he is about to squish it onto his own head and says croakily, “Chez nous!” and nods twice, then flings one of those long legs out from under the covers like he’s ready to go, and a sharp-eyed nurse comes on the run to punish us.
Translation of Aurel’s words to Gordon.
Ge-yome, you know, my old one, we have need of you at home.
At the Record Sun.
Ivy Morelli stops at Ken Meyer’s desk and stands behind him watching the screen as his fingers almost soundlessly run over the keys, messing around with the York–St. Onge update, getting it in shape . . . front page . . . deadline in twenty minutes.
So far it reads:
Dispute-1 TK+ DISPUTE SETTLED THE MILITIA WAY
St. Onge remains in critical condition+++
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 70
