How many hundreds of calls since this child’s arrival here? And how many times has she made this same statement, though it has never once been her mother calling without planning the time?
Gordon says, “That is probably not Mumma calling. Probably a goddam TV producer. Probably the New York Times or USA Today or the goddam FBI or the social worker with all the sharp teeth. Maybe it’s all of them in a phone booth together sharing a quarter.”
Jane laughs deeply. “You’re funny.”
The phone rings.
All up and down this porch, the silent chimes and mobiles hang while just three rockers away leans a four-foot-tall chunk of basswood tree trunk carved out as a beaked and eared totem-pole face. Painted in anxious colors and ringed all over its flat top like a flaming crown are small handsome leaded-glass candle jars that give off a winking rosy light. The candles inside the glass shapes are grayish-green blobs, which smell like mouthwash. Candles made by Jane. Jane the impatient candlemaker. But such a proud thing! It’s as if the rosy light itself is Jane’s. Jane’s radiance. Jane’s willpower. It’s no coincidence that Jane’s face is directed at that light.
The phone rings again.
“Maybe it’s somebody looking for somebody,” Jane insists.
Gordon sets his beer down and tightens his moist arms around her. “Everybody who is anybody is here,” he says.
She tsks. “We are not everybody.”
The phone rings again and again.
An engine can be heard now, down the hill, working hard in low gear. It shifts down again for the last few yards before the St. Onge dooryard, the steepest part of this mountain. Headlights swipe across the house: a pickup truck turning in. No gate, no KEEP OUT signs here at the old farm place. The notorious gate is at the dirt road entrance to the Settlement, a few yards uphill.
The pickup purrs to an easy stop under the ash tree. A late-model truck, the kind with payments (including interest) totaling what a house cost ten years ago, it has a plastic-looking sheen. Engine and lights die. Door opens. Dark shape steps to the ground. Shuts door nice ’n’ easy.
“Who’s that?” Jane asks. The approaching figure walks like a cop.
Gordon says, in his momentous storytelling voice, “Looks like Rex.”
“Who’s Rex?”
“A friend.” Softer now.
Jane tsks. “Tell him we’re busy.”
Gordon slaps her softly. “You want to own a person body and soul.”
Jane tsks and pulls a hand out from under herself with which to slap him . . . softly.
Gordon burps hugely and beerily, eyes steady on the approaching visitor. The guy pulls open the screen door. It gives off a squeal, like ecstasy, like it feels so good to that door spring to be strained and stretched.
Gordon says, “Well, well, well.”
The guy doesn’t speak, just comes to stand before this rocker, which holds the amorphous, dark, Atlas-sized shape of Gordon St. Onge and the child, but the guy is looking in through the doorway of the poorly lit, fluorescently blue kitchen, then down past the fluttering rose candles, down the long porch piazza, with its cluttered gray darkness, and beyond that a darker darkness. He adjusts his soft-visored army cap twice, then, in an offhand way, lets his eyes fall on Gordon and the kid.
Gordon slowly rocks Jane, rubs between her shoulder blades, and teases her ears, and she sighs in that fully absorbed way meant to lock the intruder–new arrival out.
Rex says, “Whose kid? I don’t remember that one.”
“She’s Pete Meserve’s daughter’s daughter.”
Both Jane’s arms stretch languidly upward. The hand without the secret agent glasses takes Gordon’s lips, pinches them shut. She speaks very quietly in her husky womanish voice. “Shut up. No more.”
Gordon nuzzles (with lip farts) Jane’s neck, which makes her sigh with tolerance.
Rex studies Jane with grave interest. He wears jeans tonight, which seem pale and foggy, and a brown T-shirt, which looks almost black in this poor light, T-shirt tucked meticulously into the jeans. Belt buckle is a conservative open square, unlike Gordon’s blustery sun face. Dark brown hair cut razor-straight across the back of the neck, unlike shaggy Gordon. And, as always, a thick brown mustache to the jaws, brown, no gray yet, though he is soon to be fifty. The beard on the chin painstakingly shaved away. Squared shoulders, a fit, tigerish, efficient manner. He stares into Jane’s disdainful black irises with his own, pale as moonlight, his stare that is calm, strategic, direct.
With a rather slow-motion flourish, Jane unfolds her secret agent glasses, not taking her eyes off Rex, slides the glasses on, and continues her stare, which is a look that is calm, strategic, and direct.
Gordon with a big smile. “Well, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen you, Richard.”
Rex would rather be called Rex, of course. Remember, it means king. He says, “Been busy.”
Gordon’s eyes twinkle, though in the near dark, twinkles don’t show up well. “I believe the last we saw of you was back in the snow. We’ve seen Glory a couple-three times and asked about you, but she didn’t have much to say about the old man. So we’ve been left to just wonder and wonder, until—”
With narrowed eyes, Rex cuts in. “I work.”
Gordon flushes, then smiles goofily. “Yes, yes, of course.” Now Gordon’s expression changes. It is one of most high regard. And Rex takes one of the lathed porch columns into his left hand, then leans back against it, one knee bent, a boot heel braced against the low porch wall, and closes his eyes a moment, which means he is in a trusted place.
Gordon says, “We been following you in the papers.”
Rex snorts dismissively, as this of course refers to bad publicity caused by two members of his militia.
Gordon adds, “Since Mr. Lancaster and what’s-his-name raised all that hell in Portland.”
Rex runs his tongue around his mouth, feeling the hard edges of his top teeth.
Gordon’s eyes twinkle again, twinkles unseen. “We only know you now through newspapers and gossip.”
Rex looks at Gordon’s mouth, a shaded area in the darker shadow of his short beard. After a long moment, Rex says, “A lotta people only know you through newspapers and gossip too.”
Gordon chuckles. “Media subtracts. Gossip adds. Magic happens.” Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle.
Rex is deathly silent.
A car passes, toots its horn, then climbs the next hill, probably headed for the Settlement entrance with the gate and KEEP OUT signs. If you belong in the Settlement, you just raise the pole, go on a bit, and replace the pole; then you’re in.
But then, the tooting horn could have been one of the Lancasters, or the Emmonses a half mile beyond, or, beyond that, Dick O’Brien’s people. It is not Bernice, the schoolteacher—unless she bumped the horn by mistake while gawking.
And it was not some media hound come to snoop on the St. Onge Settlement. Unlikely. Snoopers aren’t tooters.
Rex’s left hand moves to his chest, spreads his fingers open a moment there, high near the shoulder. Gordon sees the wedding band. Still there. This is very interesting, this wedding ring business. What kind of man still wears the ring six years after his wife has filled her little car with clothes and left for Massachusetts with another man, filed for divorce, got the divorce, and remarried? Rex will tell you, God does not recognize divorce. God does not recognize the laws of the wicked.
Maybe this is funny. But as Gordon’s eyes move quickly, from the shadowy ringed hand to the dark dooryard and unseen field filled with August evening cricket song, his own mouth is, for the moment, set in a tight line of sadness and longing, in sympathy for his friend.
Rex says, “Your name came up a couple weeks ago, and I do not mean the Santa Claus news. I mean the real world. I figured it was time to check in.”
“How’d my name come up?”
“In a discussion about shortwave.”
Gordon squeezes out one small but necessary beer burp, th
e kind that just kinda whooshes through the teeth. “Our aspirations here are high, but our outcomes are conservative.”
“I say not,” Rex says shortly. “You got a lotta stuff here to turn heads.”
“The basics of life.”
Rex stares hard at Jane a moment, whose white-framed secret agent glasses stare back. Then he looks in the general vicinity of Gordon’s throat. “Right.”
Gordon says, “As far as the radio thing goes, we haven’t fully realized those broadcast possibilities because—”
The phone has started ringing, maybe the hundredth time today, and Jane interrupts the discussion to say, “That really is Mum. She might’ve just got away. Maybe some good people made all the copguards die hot in their cars, huh?”
Gordon says, “No, Jane, it’s not your mum.”
Rex says, “You got a story on that one there, I see.”
Gordon says, “The dramas of the new millennium seem right smack out of the Old Testament.”
Rex looks at Gordon’s hand, now raising the long-necked beer to his mouth: beer, the homemade kind. Rex sort of, but not quite, rolls his eyes and sort of, but not quite, smiles. A schoolmaster who makes beer brewing part of the curriculum. A school that exists on the edge of every caution, on every pause for thought. Rex tugs his cap off and slaps his thigh softly with it, like a countdown. His hair is thinning a bit. Though he’s—yes—headed for fifty, in most ways he seems younger than Gordon, too young to have a well-built woman-sized nineteen-year-old daughter like Glory York, who gives moaning dreams to every man and boy in her perfumy path. And he seems too young to have seen everything there was to see in Vietnam, and felt everything, everything that somehow he now sees and feels in reverse, like a photo negative, everything that somehow tinges all love with regret and gives the past an aura larger than love, and makes him understand that there is no love in paradise, only in struggle. And that life now is getting weird. Weirder than anything he’s ever seen before, but lacking the simplicity of war.
Gordon speaks with a thud of silence between each word. “The . . . Border . . . Mountain . . . Militia.”
Rex says grimly, “There’s no law against it.” He sighs hard. “Yet.”
“Well, no. Not yet,” Gordon agrees, then rearranges Jane in his arms, trying to get himself and her more comfortable. It’s a pretty sweaty grip they have on each other right now, especially Jane’s grip on Gordon, her suspicions about this coplike guy, her hard study of him interrupted by Gordon’s continuous hand gestures. He is saying now to Rex, “I’m just awfully jealous.”
Rex bristles, believing he’s being teased.
And Gordon says, “It’s just good to see somebody showing an interest in doing something about . . . about our troubles. Apathy is unforgivable and ugly. I like to think about you guys . . . all your enthusiasm. I like to think about all the patriots, all these wonderfully pissed-off people.”
Rex leans forward, the skin of his face now shifting, which, together with his dark mustache and pale eyes and the flicker of rosy candlelight, gives him a villainous cast and now most unmistakably shows his age. He straightens his body, slaps his cap back on, and says, “You’re making fun, man.”
“I’m not making fun.” Bright trickles of sweat cruise down Gordon’s temples, disappear into the beard.
Rex exhales nice ’n’ easy.
Gordon knows not to bother to offer Rex a beer. Rex is clean in every way. Even sugar. He won’t touch it. Even his mother’s cookies and fudge. His discipline is evident in the hard planes of his body, unlike the flabby thickness that comes and goes just above Gordon’s belt, and that extra chin he sometimes has in winter months. He now raises his beer to Rex for a toast, the bottle gripped in his fist like a torch, and with a howl that causes both Rex and Jane to jump, “TO THE GREAT CHANGE!”, then upends the bottle. Jane’s head turns so her heart-shaped lenses can sternly behold the spectacle of Gordon’s Adam’s apple jerking up and down under his beard, her fascination for Adam’s apples passionately increased since her discovery of Ber-NEECE’s son’s, which dances more splendidly than anyone else’s. Now Jane’s mind flashes to wonderful Ber-NEECE, the schoolteacher up the road, who promises Jane she’ll have a tape recorder ready for the next visit. Gordon looks into the hazy spots that are Rex’s eyes, his trusted friend.
Moments later.
One of the mobiles turns ever so slightly.
Gordon says, “Here comes the wind,” and looks off toward the southwest happily. “National Weather Service says twenty-five miles per hour by midnight. T’would be better to get a steady ten.”
The candle flames flicker and hop inside their classy leaded-glass holders.
“You still think that is going to do it, don’t you?” Rex snorts, stuffing a thumb in his belt.
“With your own hands you helped put her up. Don’t bad-mouth her.”
Rex says coldly, “It’s not enough.”
“One wind unit is not enough. And one community is not enough, but we are starting to really spread now to—”
“That’s not what I mean,” Rex butts in. He kind of almost sneers.
Now Gordon also sneers. “I know what you mean. But neither are a few hundred small unorganized citizens’ armies enough. I don’t care if you got a hundred thousand guys running around in the woods learning survival skills and playing army. Shit. The bankers’ octopus is just laughing itself silly. Its government, posing as our government, has whole fleets of Apache helicopters. Goddam, they got the bomb.” Pause. “And infiltrators. Bombs away!”
Rex’s eyes on Gordon’s face don’t waver. He says, slowly and carefully and without an inkling of fervor, “It’s not just an army. We’re getting people into local office and—”
“Nazi school committees. We already got ’em,” Gordon snarls.
“The United States Constitution is not Nazi.”
Gordon sniffs indignantly. “The Bill of Rights is used for whatever the mega-men want done with it. Man, oh, man, the Bill of Rights feelgood side deal.” He snorts. “But the Constitution”—he snorts again—“was American’s first NAFTA.”
Rex’s voice, still careful, clear, fervorless. “Do you believe the United States still has separation of powers?”
Gordon tsks. “You are getting sidetracked by details, by the hairs and hooves of the octopus.”
“Well, how about this? Who has more power, the judge or the jury?”
Gordon goes silent.
Rex’s voice, steady, deliberate, unruffled. “It was intended that a jury of your peers, the people, have more power than the judge, that the judge be a kind of referee. But all that’s changed. Judges have so much power they can withhold evidence from juries. Did you know that if you are a juror, it is your right, your obligation, to force a hung jury by finding the defendant innocent, even if all evidence points to his guilt, if you don’t think the law is fair? Like some of these laws they got these days, laws pertaining to the drug war, for instance. And laws on citizens’ weapons. As a juror, you are supposed to vote your conscience. It’s called jury nullification, see? In this way, the people have power . . . in more ways than just voting at the polls. Also the legislative branch. It has been weakened and Supreme Court judges made into kings.”
Now it is Gordon who is silent.
Rex says, “I have some paperwork on this if you are interested. I have quite a bit of material, including copies of the Federalist Papers and Black’s Law Dictionary. If you aren’t interested, I won’t bother you with it. It’s up to you.”
“Yes. I thank you. Please. I’d like to see this stuff.” Gordon smiles brotherishly, though in the sticky hot darkness his smile is just perhaps seen as a deep wrinkle. “So I see you’ve been doing a lot more than wiring new additions.”
A long flat silence now into which Jane gasps. “I’m bored out of my wits. Is anyone else bored out of their wits?”
Gordon is staring at Rex’s dark shadowy form and blue-lighted profile. He says finally, “Meanwh
ile, back to your army. Your military capabilities. I’m not laughing at you, but some are. An—”
Rex interrupts with, “We know our way around here.” He turns his head as the breeze stirs again and the near hills sigh urgently. He looks back at Gordon. “To show you how much the U.S. government knows about Maine, they didn’t even have half of the Piscataquis County towns on their maps when they were scheming with the utilities to dump all that nuclear waste on us a few years back. And the military. Any military. It’s maps. Not geology maps like the nuke waste outfits, but maps. None of them know Maine like you and I do . . . not these hills. This . . . is . . . home.” He swallows, runs a palm over his mustache and mouth, then jerks a thumb toward the road. “Like the Vietcong. How do you suppose the Vietcong did so well?”
Gordon says, “They didn’t win, though. The coke dealers won. Both cokes, cocaine and Coke. And heroin, rubber, and tin. And the big banks. World Bank. IMF. Robert McNamara moved from bombing strategies to banking blackmail strategies, after Bretton Woods was dropped. Remember, his next leap was to head the IMF. Or was it the World Bank? Same difference. Even the octopus gets confused. And then there are the CIA types. Oh, I already said drug dealers, didn’t I? And the behind-closed-doors chemical makers and behind-closed-doors military jets, bombs, and doodad makers? Hmmm. And the behind-closed-doors manufacturing deals needing Vietnamese wage slaves to work on the island of Samoa making what is called American made goods, due to the handy fact that Samoa, with no labor laws, is a possession of the American government—possession? yeah, property—the island and all those quick-fingered Vietnamese girls! Property we speak of. And what else? Hmmm. Who knows what other Mammonish underworld schemes were realized? The truth is lost in a bottle at sea. Boogety boogety shoo.”
Rex laughs. “I don’t think your mother would let you come to one of our meetings.”
Gordon squints one eye, raises the brow of the other. “Probably not.” Then he looks down. Jane has pulled part of his soft old chambray shirt from his pants and, still sporting her heart-shaped dark glasses, almost seems to be sucking on the shirt, her arms and legs loose and trusting. Gordon pushes with his knees to make the rocker creak to and fro ever so slowly. “I weep for my country.”
The School on Heart's Content Road Page 17
