In a voice cracking with anger, the man bellers, as if in a room of deaf people, “Harriet! When are you people going to do like Representative Connell’s been sayin’ an’ start fingerprintin’ them so they’ll stop rippin’ the taxpayer off?!”
The woman behind the counter flushes. “Go on, David. Don’t start on that. I don’t need indigestion today.” And she laughs.
And Erika walks out. The hall walls are made of skinny vertical boards painted white. Her flip-flops make an echoey racket. The tall windows in the meeting room are all open, screened. Little stage at one end. Bare. The wood worn a warm yellow brown. She finds the can of pens. She takes her time, hoping the man will be gone.
But he’s not. When she returns to the hall, he’s there, hanging around by the bulletin board. He looks right at her, but he shows no recognition. Light from the doorway just touches his glasses as he turns away. And his face doesn’t really look angry anymore. Said his spiel and feels better now? Or is it that, without a gang, posse, or pack, his might is diminished? Here in the hallway, his bald-faced humanity is all he’s got.
Now seated in metal chairs between two heaped desks, Erika and the clerk go over what papers and proof of income will be needed. They talk awhile about how town assistance works. Sometimes, Erika’s voice seems uncharacteristically little-girlish. The clerk’s hair is white. Her blouse and slacks are white and cream. She tells Erika that even though Donnie’s part-time thirty-nine-hours-a-week job is not making ends meet, as long as they own two houses they cannot be eligible for assistance. “And all that land too.” The clerk sighs. By the guidelines, the Lockes and Gammons are not destitute, and destitute is what they must be. She suggests that Erika and Donnie go to the bank and mortgage one of their houses for a loan to live on for awhile.
Erika begins to smile in a most strange way. And the stars now as thick as TV snow make a cold pressure upon her eyes.
The woman, Harriet, who is on the other side of Erika’s silvery wall of stars, is now suggesting they sell the big house and live in the smaller one, or sell both places and keep two and a half acres for a trailer. On the market, they could get quite a sum for their real estate.
Real estate.
Erika speaks now, her voice squeaking with panic. “There’s really only one house. The place my mother-in-law lives in is really just a garage and bathroom. No stove or anything. The floor is cement. It’s just one room. She’s really with us in our house all day.”
Harriet smiles. “Can she work?”
Erika frowns. “She’s too shy. I mean she’s really shy.”
“Too shy to work?”
“Too shy, yes,” Erika murmurs.
“Can’t she watch the kids while you work?”
Erika blinks. She lowers her eyes and says with shame, “I want to be with my son.”
“But can’t she get a state check? And MaineCare? With her little one, she sounds eligible . . . and the fifteen-year-old. She would probably be eli—”
Erika interrupts. “It would be nice if Donnie could get a raise or something . . . or if they’d give him health insurance. It’s not like he’s goofing off! He works!” Her voice gets quite babyish. Lilty and brightly amazed.
Harriet laughs. “Well, nowadays they want us all working. Nobody stays home.” She laughs again. “This gives burglars jobs, too . . . all those empty houses!” And she laughs again.
Erika giggles girlishly, then looks down at her hands with shame. “I really just want to be home with the kids.”
Harriet snaps her pen, eyes sliding up and down the fine print of qualification rules. “Perhaps you can get Britta to move out. Turn her place back into a garage. Tear out the toilet and sink. The acreage doesn’t actually matter rule-wise, as long as it’s all part of your primary residence.”
Erika cocks her head, trying to make sense of this. No stars now. Just the clear hard edges of the clerk’s desks and the computer screen and map of Maine on the wall and the slight gurgle of realization. Of it: the vast order of things, the world’s logic, a global thing, even here in this room, especially here in this room, bouncing and leering and hilarious and formidable and growing bigger by the minute.
Erika says sweetly, “I just want a little help with my baby’s medicine, that’s all. Just his pain pills. Why can’t we get just that one thing without . . . all . . . you know . . . all that?”
“Like I said earlier, if you aren’t eligible for MaineCare, the hospitals have a program for that!” Harriet says cheerfully. “At least they help with a percent of certain types of medicine. Even doctors, working with the drug companies—they have a way of getting certain drugs free, I heard. There’s some paperwork on that. It all depends on income, though. And there are services through various agencies that could help with various areas of need. There’s a regional services coordinator who is in here twice a month who can help you make out the right papers to the various agencies. Just bring all your paperwork here and that other stuff you’ll need . . . oh, here . . . it looks here like you might be eligible for fuel assistance and winterization next winter . . . oh, and I think maybe . . .” She is running a finger over the small chart. “Family counseling services. You could get that. The services coordinator can—”
Erika interrupts. “I just want pain medicine. Just that.”
The clerk goes on studying the charts on her desk, snapping her pen. Her tongue makes a soft deep-thinking sound against her teeth. She sighs. “There was a pretty good state program for prescriptions, but the legislature gutted it last term. The waiting list on that one was impossible anyway.” She sighs again. “I can see you aren’t eligible for MaineCare. The second house will be a problem with them too. And your husband makes a little too much. It’s iffy. You could try. It depends on what your expenses are, although they don’t give you much leeway for expenses anymore. Maybe if he moved out! Your husband.” She says this jokingly.
Erika looks down at her hands. “It goes like this. We get his pay. We buy the medicine first. Usually after the medicine and bills, there’s just a little bit for groceries. We get the medicine first and pay the lights, and gas for the car, and everything like that . . . groceries last. We lost the phone. There’s just so much!” Her voice rises, childlike, not a shriek exactly, but a little thrilled thin edge to it. “It’s those doctors! And tests! When Jesse was first sick, I couldn’t believe how much they ask for those tests. Just the few times we went . . . it’ll take us forever to catch up! Then also Elizabeth, my husband’s oldest, she has trouble with her feet and legs: special shoes ’n’ stuff. Gas for Donnie to get to work is wicked. My mother-in-law’s youngest had some infected mosquito bites. Made her sick. That salve and antibiotic was wicked expensive. And this spring all the kids needed sneakers. Except Mickey. He just goes around like a bum. And then the roof leaked! It was only in one little spot, but even that was four hundred dollars to fix! Everything is just so much! Liability insurance is more this year. And my driver’s license had to be renewed last month, for the picture and everything . . . and then you know our property taxes; we’ve stayed right up with those . . . and then propane; we ran out of that but got some last week . . . and toilet paper and wax paper and a new can opener ’cause the other busted and we can’t open cans with anything else, and the—”
The clerk has put up her hand. “I’m sorry! The state guidelines determine most of this, even for the towns. At town meetin’, we only vote on the total recommended amount for the year. But the guidelines for eligibility are set. It’s not up to me. I hear you, Erika, but it’s not up to me. I’m sorry.”
She has used Erika’s name. The warm sound of her name. This woman’s voice, the family resemblance of her mouth and eyes to so many others in town. The sweet humid summer air that has oozed in the open windows, mixed with the imposing woody old smell of the building, these things that are permanent and emollient and too beautiful. For the first time since Jesse’s cancer, Erika breaks down in front of someone. So unpretty. Her crying i
s like snorting.
The clerk shoots up out of her own seat and gets Erika a box of tissues, one thing she, as a human being, can do for another human being, a simple gesture, unencumbered, unprohibited, not too costly.
Not far across town (yes, in the town of Egypt), at the St. Onge Settlement, six-and-a-half-year-old Jane Meserve speaks again.
Somebody pleeeze help! You will not believe this horridable place!
Britta at home.
Her name is Britta Gammon. Her head and face are small. Her lips press together with self-conscious indignation against the toothless, rootless mouth, the dentures never filling out her mouth the way her teeth had. This makes her gray eyes look big and wishful. In Massachusetts, someone had thought her large gray eyes could make him whole. But here she is, back in Egypt, Maine, since Massachusetts “didn’t work out.”
And now her younger son, Mickey, passes through the living room, coming home from somewhere. Mickey says nothing to his mother, just nods. A nice nod, vaguely friendly.
Britta says nothing to Mickey, but she watches him pass. The TV could hold her attention in the absence of real life, but nothing can win her regard above and beyond her daughter and sons and daughter-in-law and grandchildren and her men who made it all happen.
Shyness. Just how shy is Britta Gammon? Well, she has never been able to look anyone in the eye, not even family. And she’s not affectionate. But she’s always there. She is right where you’d expect her to be. Like a sturdy little mushroom.
Donnie Locke finds whiskey in the cupboard.
The child Jesse lies soured on layers of sheets in the living room, silent and rigid now, after his last siege of tears, cries that are softer today, for he has no muscle left to belt out his former wildcat yowls.
His father, Donnie, with the pale walrus mustache and chain-store name tag, comes home from work and stands in the doorway, feeling the doorframe over and over and over.
He turns to the kitchen, remembering something. When he reappears, he is gripping by the neck a half-full bottle of bourbon that has been in the corner cupboard for years. But you see it is, of course, still good. He knows, as everyone knows, a good drink sometimes helps. He goes to the couch and kneels. At his back, the TV is giving the world and national news. The child’s evaporated monkey-small face turns slowly to the left, toward his father, because he can smell his father, that smell of the great chain store, of its chemically treated fabrics and acres of stock, oceans of stock, with that tidal-wavelike come-and-go rhythm of stock moving, on sale, big sale, big specials, big buys, the universe of all necessity and heart’s content there on display.
The father strokes the little one’s cool sweaty head, thinking how it is you would interest this child in a drink, in getting drunk, that thing you associate with fun.
Again, Jesse throws out one rigid leg and lets out a sweet, nearly lovely, small trill of agony, and young Erika flies from the back bedroom, where her two stepdaughters await sleep, for she must be a comfort to them too, the healthy ones, can’t neglect the healthy ones, whose flourishing you must not resent in the shadow of the other’s dying, and Erika is wearing a knee-length lilac nightie, her face so round and pudgy and wifely, but with eyes like a dragon’s, red and terrible, eyes that have not slept for weeks.
She slumps to the couch at the end where Jesse’s feet are, then sees the ridiculous thing that is in her husband’s hand.
He, in the seriousness of the moment, becomes taken with a goofy grin. “Hard stuff.”
No money. No groceries. And now and then no medicine. No money. No groceries. No medicine. The hollow precincts of every commoditized need unmet.
He adds quickly, “It’ll help him.”
Erika hisses something, too much teeth and tongue to be audible. No words, just smoke. A dragon. A bitch. No cooing sweet-natured plump cutie. Not today.
Donnie places one hand behind his son’s head, to lift him, get him ready for a swallow, but the young mother leaps up and drives her knee into her husband’s shoulder as he is squatted there and he says angrily, “If I were in that kind of pain, I’d want this!!! I’d want to be passed out!!”
“You are nuts!!!!” Erika shrieks. No fainting fear-stars cross her vision now. Her vision is sharp and actual. Everything in her body and brain is instantly aligned.
Donnie reaches again for the boy’s head and shoulders, and Erika shoves Donnie with the palms of both hands, but this also jars Jesse and he is taken by a terrible ghostly lament, both weak and filled with power. And Donnie bellers, “Maybe it’ll kill him! Yeah, let’s kill him! Let’s make him happy! Die baby boy sweet fuckin’ Jesus die!” And he grabs the boy’s skeletal shoulders. But Erika is, within a split moment, on Donnie’s back, so the bottle tips and a stinking bourbon wave spreads over the child’s pajama top and face and he goes rigid again with wrinkled brow, wide-open jaws, straight-out legs, arms to his sides, his fair little trill of despair seeming to come from the center of his concave chest, and somehow now Erika has the bottle, running to the kitchen, and Donnie just kneels and covers the rigid, now breathlessly panting, Jesse with himself.
“A gun,” Donnie whispers. Then yells it. “A gun! For a gun, I would give anything, Erika! Where is Mickey’s rifle?!”
Erika’s voice from the kitchen: “monster!”
And then he hollers, “No, you! You! You, Erika, are the big bitch monster who says No, we don’t sell the house or mortgage it. And Oh my, my, the hospital might take it!! You are the one who says not to get him his chemo! They said they’d save him! They said they’d save him!!!!”
In the kitchen, silence.
In the night, into the silence of their wide-awake regrets and into the silence of Jesse’s wide-awake dying, Donnie whispers.
“I’m sorry, Erika.”
And she whispers, “I couldn’t believe you said that.”
And he whispers, “It came out.”
“We agreed about the treatments. We agreed.”
“It came out.”
And now she is off in a free fall of sobs.
And he says, “No no no no no no,” so gently, and strokes her soft young wifely neck and wrists and forearms, all the most trusting places.
“No no no no no no no . . .”
The screen shivers.
Be afraid. Poor people are lazy and immoral, and violence is on their fingertips for some reason, who knows the reason, it’s just their idea of fun. It’s always this way; they steal cars drugs money and gunnnnnz! They are filled with sex and rotten teeth and food stamps and Cadillacs and bad English! The men are bozos and incestuous. Poor women are all victims of poor, domestically violent men. But the big thing to remember is poor men for some reason all want to be armed and want to hurt hurt hurt kill kill kill. Here comes another one out of court, shackled and in an orange suit for shooting three times in the air to scare his girlfriend, who had all the charge cards. Weeee are so lucky to have police and politicians to keep these poor and violent and lazy-for-some-reason guys off of you and your darling Brendan and Olivia and your golden retriever and your stuff.
The militia at home.
It is Sunday, early evening.
Two days of rain: warm rain, cold rain, a lotta rain. The culverts hiss and giggle with road runoff from the higher hills.
Mickey moves along the road’s crown, light-footed as ever, the rain punching his eyes, punching him all over.
Richard “Rex” York’s home welcomes you. When Mickey raps on the door inside the little glassed-in porch, a voice hollers from somewhere, “In here!” And beside the door is a varnished plaque shaped like a hand with a pointing finger that reads ENTER.
And so Mickey steps into the kitchen. There is a smell. Something supperish, a supper already eaten. But something else too, something besides meat and potatoes. He thinks it is hot cookies or cake, you know, cookies or cake still baking away. The gray Formica-topped table and the counters are wiped clean. Mickey glances to his right, through an open pantry door that
shows a red and green metal Christmas tree stand on top of a small barbecue grill with a laundry basket on top, and other pantry-shedway-type stuff stacked or standing.
This house is an old farm place that rural people yearned to modernize and fulfilled their yearnings with avocado indoor-outdoor carpeting in the pantry and all the walls of the whole house done in cheesy sixteenth-inch paneling that doesn’t look at all like wood but just a picture of wood. Funny about fads. Probably in many of these old farmhouses, there is gorgeous golden real knotty pine board paneling completely plastered over with this 1970s plasticky latest-thing-gotta-have-it brown-black plywood sheet paneling.
Also, here at the York residence, those tall, narrow, handsome, many-paned, good-for-the-soul, low-to-the-floor windows, the original ones, have been ripped out and replaced with small windows with cranks, set high like rectangular portholes, and, of course, in the living room, a bay picture window covered with glossy fiberglass drapes thick as a fort fence.
In similar homes, you’ll find sliding glass doors, always with the accompanying dog-nose prints, splats and smears of ice cream or ordinary baby goo, pollen, woodstove smoke in filmy gray-green streaks with a view of the “deck,” where the barbecue and laundry basket and stuffed gray trash bags are kept, and maybe a cat is out there on the rail, licking her paw or eating a live mouse. But here at Rex’s home, fad has not gotten that far. The place still feels a little farmlike. Coats and jackets hang on hooks on the kitchen side of the thick old cellar door. The old white-painted corner cabinet top is heaped with papers and hats and tools and the innards of a broken lamp.
Again the voice, calling “In here!” from the living room, where Mickey can see feet raised up on the footrest of a La-Z-Boy, feet dressed in black military boots. Mickey heads toward these feet.
Yes, it is him, the one Mickey is looking for.
Rex’s eyes fall on the rifle Mickey has in his hands, and he nods into Mickey’s eyes. Rex seems different. No army cap. No metal-frame sunglasses. No red T-shirt, just a stiff dark-blue work shirt. The shirt makes him seem older, like a father or grandfather, just a regular age-fifty-looking guy. So bare in the face and head, more exposed. His hair is dark brown like the mustache, not much gray. But thinning a bit at the temples. And he doesn’t comb his hair funny to hide it.
The School on Heart's Content Road Page 3
