Mickey speaks.
So me and Rex are all that’s left. He says to come in the house. He takes me upstairs to where his computer is. He says it is asleep. I figured he was going to e-mail the rest of the militia, special bulletin about the weirdness in the yard. But we just sat there in two fat chairs and Rex breathed through his bottom teeth.
We both stared at the door and around. He was thunking his fingers on the bookcase next to his chair. The room smelled like the heat register and also like new blankets.
We sat there some more and then I say, “Where’d that guy come from?”
Rex’s eyes move from the sleeping computer screen to my face and he says, “Watching our house.”
“Is he the FBI?”
He squints down at the legs of the computer table. “More like Hollywood. That sort of thing. Between Gordo and this militia, there are”—he smiles sickly—“fans.”
I don’t want to seem dumb so I laugh.
Then he stretches his right arm out along the bookcase, wiggles his fingers, looks at his watch, nods his head like to music. This with the nodding is not his usual thing either.
“So,” I say, “it’s probably not the FBI.”
His head keeps nodding. “Newspapers are read by the FBI.”
“And computers too,” I add.
And he says, “Without a doubt.”
I look at the computer keyboard, so clean you’d think fingers never touched it.
Within hours, the newspapers fill up with independent photographer Cal Alonsky’s creep-out-the-public militia photos.
Gordon St. Onge, thirty-nine-year-old leader of the Maine separatist group known as the Settlement, is identified in the photos, although his face is just a profile. His body—one visible leg, dark work shirt, and pale jeans—is blurred, truck door blurred, and there’s a most definite fleeing look.
Forty-nine-year-old Richard “Rex” York, captain of the locally notorious Border Mountain Militia, is also named in the caption under the photos, while Butch Martin and Mickey Gammon and the rest are just called unidentified men or unidentified others.
The SKS in Butch Martin’s hand is called an assault weapon.
Each newspaper offers a brief article to accompany the photos, just to let you know there is now a St. Onge armed militia connection. Though mostly what you see is a rehash of previous articles, borrowing and lifting, and what you wind up with from so much borrowing and lifting is that in some of the newly hatched articles, Rex is living in Edgecomb, Maine, and he’s an electronics engineer, while Gordon appears in a Buffalo, New York, paper as a twenty-nine-year-old, which is okay because the man identified in the photo as Gordon St. Onge is Butch Martin.
But the pictures themselves don’t lie, do they? See there? The expressions on all the men’s faces are mighty unfriendly.
Mail pours in. The phone gives the kitchen wall a continuous shaking.
And again the call-in radio shows buzz with the name Gordon St. Onge and the St. Onge situation in Egypt and now the militia connection.
Clippings are sent to the Settlement, one with the caption ANGRY WHITE MEN IN MAINE. One photo shows Rex—yes, always the soldier—facing the camera down, his olive-drab army cap covering his forehead but not his eyes. Dozens of versions of the same article, some photocopied, some the actual clippings, some sent by Gordon’s friends, some sent anonymously. Perhaps these are people who were friends but who now no longer think of themselves that way.
Federal Building: Special Agent (S.A.) Kashmar thoughtfully reads reports.
Okay, so you Guillaume St. Onge (alias Gordon, Gordo, Gordie, the Prophet) are developing. You know. Like a case of spotted-ass purple fever. You’ll be seeing new and absolutely improved terrorist laws someday, two or three years down the lane. As soon as the network, rogue or otherwise, can get something big and creepy to sway the public, you know, wackos such as you or wacko Arabs, wacko Cubans, or some stinky mix, the hydra swinging its heads in the wind and having an intimate relationship with the cause of brightly burning booming buildings, jihads, massacred American schoolkids, whatever it takes our network of—ahem—specialists to create a wave of public indignation. You see, it’s all about the two C s, control and consent. We control the population, and we let you all consent to our doing it.
Gordon St. Onge takes two small boys and three older girls to a meeting of the Border Mountain Militia.
A friend of Rex’s, one of his old volunteer fire department and rescue connections, a certified CPR man, comes to start the militia on CPR lessons and other first-aid skills.
Some of the Settlement kids already know this stuff, right at home.
Mickey watches from his straight-backed chair by the sewing machine and TV. His eyes function like a falcon’s, on target, recording every smallest move, but his eyes appear to be disinterested, not like the eyes of something that is fainted or dead but just pale temperatureless boredom.
Most of the militiamen get a kick out of the Settlement’s smart kids. A couple just seem annoyed, as old tomcats would be in a room full of hell-raising kittens.
Okay, we just said Mickey looks bored, but basically he’s paralyzed. Her name is Samantha, blonde as snow, a blonde-white-gold girl with Apache kerchief around her forehead, a print of diamonds and cyclones the color of warm gore. Her breasts (tits to Mickey) are inside a black burlappy top. Her bra makes her breasts look like small warheads. Jeans, not tight but not empty. Work boots, the kind skinheads wear. Would take five business days to lace them up. Mickey’s neck feels like an ostrich’s with a cantaloupe in it.
There’s another girl, about the same age as Samantha, he thinks. About his own age. Her name is Bree. Most of the Settlement kids are part of things, asking questions, blabbing away, please and thank you and all that. Eager, like blue jays. But Bree doesn’t talk. Can she talk? She is certainly wrecked in looks. An accident? A birth problem? Leprosy, like the Bible? She has red hair, orange and snaky. Kind of great hair, actually. There’s a ton of it, long and alive. But her face—man, it is split in half. Or maybe stretched, mostly between the eyes. Her face scares Mickey for a while. Her eyes are brownish yellow. Her lashes yellow. Each eye is kind of sexy, if it were in a human face . . . like Samantha’s. But her face is outer space.
Still, she keeps her face straight ahead, hair bunched around the sides, smiling at the little kids, while the big ones she communicates to with ESP or some other animalish vibrations. But she does not look at the Prophet. She sits next to the Prophet but she never looks at him. They are squeezed together side by side on Rex’s deep fake leather couch. Actually, it’s the kind of couch so squishy that you sit in it. The third person who sits there varies: sometimes a Settlement kid, sometimes one of Rex’s men. Because of the CPR and rescue lessons, people are moving around a lot, nobody falling asleep as they do at most of Rex’s meetings.
The Prophet, Gordon St. Onge, whatever, he is like the newspaper. Eyes as light as Rex’s but not controlled. Rex has controlled eyes. The Prophet has totally insane eyes. And one cheek jumps. And—what Mickey can never get used to—he’s, like, seven feet tall, or almost anyway. He talks; his voice is like a big drum. He wears a billed cap on sweaty hair. His neck is as wide as four necks.
The youngest Settlement kid, Max, is chosen to be the heart attack victim.
Ruth York is not home today, but she has left two pans of blond brownies on the table.
There on the couch, Bree (with the red snake hair and stretched face) and Gordon St. Onge are sitting in a way his bicep touches her shoulder and the outside of his left boot and her right come together. Looks like it’s not on purpose, but who knows?
Rex and the rescue guy talk about profuse bleeding.
Willie Lancaster isn’t around today, but Doc is. CPR is not his subject. Jews or fags or socialists or welfare whores are his subjects. He looks restless, jiggling his leg and reddening his ears.
Max, the heart attack victim, chirps from his prone position on the rug, “Imagin
e me squished by a truck!”
Mickey watches the Prophet, who is also distracted. Mickey knows there is not a word he can speak that would get the white-haired Samantha to feel for him, Mickey, what he, Mickey, feels for her: bothered.
And now the fire department guy is resuscitating the little kid on the rug.
Doc jiggles his leg faster.
Art, with the sea-captain beard and high voice, breasts, big belly, and mostly nothing like Doc, asks a question about lungs and trachea, which one of the teeniest kids has the correct answer to. And the reddish-haired Bob of Rex’s militia, who is dying and gets a disabled vet check every month, laughs like a tree full of monkeys.
Next will be tourniquets. And then contusions. Whatever.
The blood-red chamois shirt the Prophet is wearing draws Mickey’s eye. He sees the guy is staring out the window (with its stout fiberglass drapes swept open today) at the Herefords pushing their way through tall weeds across the wet gooshy part of the field.
And Gabriel, one of the Settlement kids, says, “You would look like a pizza. You wouldn’t want to be resuscitated.” He says this last word slowly but perfectly, as far as Mickey can tell.
Mickey speaks.
So we all say good-bye out in the yard. One kid is so little, the Prophet carries her out on his shoulders. The blonde one, Samantha, yells “Horripilation!” and hugs herself. I guess they like big words. Whatever. The important thing is this time nobody jumps out at us with a buncha cameras.
Between militia meetings, they meet in the gravel pit on the Boundary Road.
The day is hot, but a dry hot. Kind of feels good. Clouds shaped like bunnies and little fishes slide along in the blue-green sky. The tall grasses chorus with every kind of creaking hopping insect. The goldenrod, in full glory, smells wild and weedy. And now, too, the smell of gunpowder.
Gordon St. Onge wears earphone-type hearing protection, stands with feet apart, and squeezes the trigger of the Russian-made SKS, one of Rex’s many military weapons.
The impact of this shot gives the target frame a little shiver, but his shoulder doesn’t budge. This is his worst hit. One cautious shot at a time, he has been trying to pull his hits back into the cluster of holes around the 10X circle of the silhouette target’s chest.
He likes this SKS. He’s seen them before, handled one, but never shot one. Some of the others had paratrooper stocks. This one is plain. Yes, the SKS is considered cheesy. But the tabby-cat-like grain on this Russian and its high, rather restless red flush please his eye. And this one has a thirty-shot extended magazine. Really cheap-made. But doesn’t jam. One of the few that doesn’t jam. Hard to come by. The Chinese SKS lying across the tailgate is not his friend. He glares at it. Jammed on the eighth or ninth shot every time, pinching a line across the cartridge. Cartridge half in, half out, on top of the gun, inches from his nose. He fingers one of the cartridges, steel of a greenish cast, slender and seductive as a church spire. He loads the magazine of the Russian with only four of these. Then he’s ready, raises the rifle, fires.
Rex sits on the tailgate of the truck, one foot on the ground, one foot swinging ever so slightly, watching the target through a spotting scope, eyes glinting behind his dark glasses.
Rex and Gordon have just had a rugged argument about common law. And then about Russia. And although Gordon has done most of the ranting, this time Rex stood up for himself.
Gordon steps away, losing interest in his target, which he knows is bad without asking. Shooting is like art, not carpentry or chemistry. There are good days, bad days, blocks and rushes. He doesn’t watch as Rex walks the hundred yards to the bank, his boots out of hearing now, just the stirring careeeeek . . . careeeeek and innnnnk . . . innnnnnk of the bugs in the nearby weeds.
When Rex returns and plants his feet apart to take aim at the fresh target, Gordon’s eyes jump to his friend’s back. By some fluke, they have both worn pale blue chambray work shirts. Cute, Gordon thinks to himself disgustedly. He sees the way Rex unhesitatingly settles the M-16’s stock against his shoulder. Like you’d grab a broom and poke its straw ends into a dusty corner. He doesn’t dawdle. No squinting or painful concentration and indecision and deep breaths. No shuffling and cocking his head from side to side. None of that. He just does it. Bang!bang!bang!bang!bang!bang!bang!bang!bang!bang! This is his favorite rifle. You could call it a sniper’s gun. Springfield, thirty-ought-six. Now with a serious scope, mounted just in the last few months. And, yeah, a big hole. Many big holes now in the X of the target man’s heart. Hits that are so tight, they make one single shredded two-inch gobbed mess in the paper. Gordon would be able to see better through the spotting scope on the truck, but he doesn’t look.
Rex’s earphone-type hearing protectors are gray. Gordon stares dead center of Rex’s dark head as Rex fires again and again, working the paper heart into oblivion.
Gordon speaks, assuming Rex cannot hear him. “You goddam right-wing fucker.”
Rex turns smoothly, kind of a pivot. Rifle loaded with ammunition that costs an arm and a leg, not nice cheap SKS ammunition. Rifle lowered, finger now flipping the safety up, he looks at Gordon’s mouth. His pale eyes are wide. “What?” he demands.
Gordon wags his head apologetically. “I called you a right-wing fucker.”
Rex raises his chin. His chest fills with a deep carefully taken breath. He says quietly, “I’d call you a name too, but I do not know what you are.” He doesn’t smile, but his eyes crinkle a bit at the edges. He pulls off the ear protectors and puts a hand through his thinning dark hair. “So I’ll just call you a fucker.”
Gordon dwells so much lately on the past, that which was between himself and Rex, some memories silky and thin and shredded, others clear.
He came to know Rex in the years after the war. After the conflict, that is. Yeah, the conflict. Like the difference between a little argument and a punch in the face? No, rather like the difference between a story and a lie. Because it wasn’t even a war. It was a barbeque. And the hotdogs were alive. So he has heard.
Rex wasn’t married any too quickly after Vietnam. He once put his cold gray-blue eyes on Gordon’s face and said, “You don’t go from the three-legged sack race to the tea-and-dolls party in the same day.” He was talking about something else at the time, not the war. But Rex never talked about the war. Vietnam War knowledge wasn’t a thing you could just store neatly, like gardening hints or small-engine repair. It was a thing that would blister and pimple and seep from life in general when you least expected it.
So instead of getting a girl, Rex joined the “volunteer fire” and sported a special volunteer license-plate holder and, on the dash of his new truck, a red light to flash when he was on his way to a fire. And during most of his after-work hours (he worked in a lumberyard and box shop before getting his electrician’s license), he hung out at Gin-Tom’s Lake View, which is now what they call the Cold Spot or Hot Spot, depending on the season. When Gordon was old enough to drink legally, Rex had already been situated awhile in that bar.
So there they were, Gordon eighteen. Rex twenty-eight. Rex drank moderately most of the time. He just liked that dark, crampy, smoky, noisy place, which had, despite its name, no view. No windows, in fact.
Sometimes Rex did get drunk. And he was fun. A dry weird humor, not noisy, almost on the edge of playfulness. Like if you gave a mountain lion a catnip toy, who would then roll quietly onto his back and chew on his own tail or the bars of his cage. And his eyes would be different.
Across the road from the barroom, throughout the winter months, Promise Lake (then called Swett’s Pond) was the hub of the male social wheel of Egypt and other nearby towns. Twenty to forty ice shacks. Snowmobiles. Trucks. Bonfires. And bass and trout the size of small men. This was the years before mercury poisoning. (Or before the public discovered it). Though these fishermen, even now, have never believed in such scares. Rex and Gordon and half a dozen Beans and Sonny Ballanger and Donnie Rowe and Russ Pelter, Tim Cash and any number
of Verrills (different ones at different times), and guys from the salvage yard (different ones at different times), and that biker bunch from Brownfield, all fished and laughed and argued and drank and pissed, fished and laughed and argued and drank and pissed. . . .
Over the years since then, even after Gordon settled in with Claire over in Mechanic Falls and Rex married Marsha and their little girl, Glory, was born, all those years, Gordon and Rex would stop in on one another. And keep track. And neither forgets the past, though, like war, it’s not really mentioned. Not a lot of this “remember the time” like you hear some people do.
But surely Rex must hear the boot steps of the past following him, as Gordon does. That part of the past following that other past, and preceding the more recent past . . . and now the Gordon and Rex present.
My brother.
How did Gordon start to think this way of Rex? Rex as brother. What was the moment? For there was, indeed, a moment.
Somebody—he thinks he remembers it was Paul Gregs, another vet, dead since then in a paper-mill lab chemical “accident”—Paul and Rex and Gordon all piled into Paul’s car . . . maybe there was another guy, he can’t remember who.
Paul wanted reefer, so they went to fetch it.
Paul’s dealer came to the door and said he was out of stuff, but if they drove to Harrison and went to the bar there, they’d find plenty. Gold. All bud. “Ask for the Fly,” the dealer said.
So they got to the bar and people were in the parking lot smoking stuff, and when they asked for the Fly they were told inside, and the air outside was all smoky and herbish and nice, right up to the door of the bar, and inside the door they asked for the Fly and a thumb was jerked toward the bar, so they all herded over to the bar and got beers and looked around, and there up on the stool was the Fly, no need to ask.
The School on Heart's Content Road Page 20
