The School on Heart's Content Road

by Carolyn Chute

  Concerning the aforementioned particular details, the screen

  is blank.

  Donnie Locke is late for work again.

  He’ll be docked. He may be fired, maybe not. Whatever. Since he started job two at the sub shop, there’s that funny little overlap—not really an overlap, but the time between jobs has a shape and size into which he has tried to fit things that don’t fit, like a quick trip home, or stopping to mail back that pair of shoes that didn’t fit his oldest girl, Elizabeth. And now, with Erika working at the day care, and their own kids in the other day care and the after-school-care, this car, their only car, needs to run like a rocket, but chunka chunka chunka.

  He sits in the car now, in the parking lot of the Chain, staring at the busy glassy store entrance and the puddles, dimpled with rain, a lighter rain than a few minutes ago. Headlights on. Windshield wipers whapping. Gauges lit in green, yellow, and blue. He is late and getting later by the minute.

  But the pressure inside him is worse than outside him. It’s like inside him, pushing at the skin, is a muscled thing the size of a man twice his height: arms, chest, organs, all hurting with hardness. He can’t fight anymore. He is just turning into a rock. Soon he will be a petrified man.

  He has moments of zest, whenever he has worked himself up to put his plan into action. He has everything ready: vacuum cleaner hose, everything. But like everything else he’s tried to do lately, he fails. But he is going to do it. Before the week is out he is going to do it. He doesn’t have a bye-bye note. He doesn’t need one. Nobody will have to guess why this piece of shit wanted out. ’Cause, man, he’s doing everybody a favor.

  WOW! WOW!

  The economy! See it grow! See it GLOW. Wow! Wow! See how lucky we are to have a great economy now, after that recession a few years back, which was so hard on everyone. Wow-eeeeee. Grin. Grin. See all the people in other countries living in cardboard. See how lucky weeee are. We. We. We. Grin. Grin.

  In a major city in America.

  Several thousand professional liberal-type people and a sprinkling of labor-union folks again march and rally to show deep discontent. Again, big banners about government corruption and corporate power (one and the same?). Again, huge puppets bow and prance. Again, streets are blocked with peaceful protestors. Faces are smashed into the sidewalk. Tear gas. Pepper spray. Hundreds of FBI, thousands of cops. Cops beating plainclothes cops, oops! FBI and cops trying to arrest each other, oops! Warehouse doors bashed down again, as in other protests; the big puppets who talk must be silenced! Silence is a must. Too much noise in America.

  The screen moans.

  Not again? This small group of extremist troublemaking rioters and violent types bothering police . . . throwing tear gas back at police, tipping over Dumpsters. Why do people keep doing this? Haven’t they got anything better to do? See here, an interview with a nice man trying to get to work, but traffic was snarled by the silly protesting violent rioters. Something very terrible could happen with all these blocked streets.

  The screen breathes a sigh of relief.

  Today, the city is back to normal. Oh, well. Just silliness. The real news is that Senator James McVie is proposing another investigation concerning you-know-who in that lust scandal. STAY TUNED!

  Mickey speaks.

  Doc wasn’t at the meeting today. He doesn’t come to many meetings ’cause he works most weekends. I guess God is different for different people. I always pictured God to be this big giant squishy white-cloud guy, kinda like a snowman. No eyes. But he could see everything, see how everything was going.

  Doc . . . I bet if you asked Doc what God looked like, he’d describe himself. Little shithead with fat red lips and mean-looking ears and black hair with a spot of bald on top—small spot. Hair looks wet. Eyes brown and bulgy. No beard. Just face.

  Rex doesn’t get tough with Doc. Not like you see him do with Willie. I wish he did. I don’t like it that maybe Rex likes Doc. I want him to think Doc’s a problem. I can’t tell what goes on in Rex’s brain. Except for Willie and Rex’s brother, the teacher, Rex doesn’t talk about people much. He’s all business, all militia. That’s okay. I don’t give a shit. I just wish he’d give a sign that Doc’s brain ain’t like his brain.

  Okay, so I ain’t all for queers . . . you know, the queer thing. Men and men. Women and women. But I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. Who gives a shit? As long as they use their own sheets. And then, with Doc, it’s abortions and rock ’n’ roll and movies with sex and divorced women and—oh, yes—welfare people. Doc wants all these people crucified. I mean it. He said he wants them nailed to crosses in the middle of town so everybody can walk by and learn from this.

  He says the Constitution will make this possible. I’m not real good reading the kind of words that are in the Constitution, but this other guy, Art, he’s got all the amendments memorized and . . . you know . . . like some people tell jokes, he tells amendments. None so far say anything about crosses.

  You won’t see me argue with Doc. I don’t say anything to him, not even “Hi.” Nobody argues with him. In fact, nobody argues at meetings. Sometimes there’s quiet spots where I think someone is pissed at somebody. And I know there’s talk behind backs, a lot of talk behind backs. Rex is probably the only one that don’t talk behind backs.

  Anyway, so Doc also likes to say God wants the fags and whores and liberals and all people of false religion, especially Jews, to die bad, to die slow. And he says, if we don’t do God’s will, God will be mad at us, that leaving these people to their own sin makes us sinners too. Makes us cohorts. So we gotta stop them.

  Makes me nervous. I start feeling like . . . like he might think I’m a fag, and every time I move I think he’s watching me with his bulgy mean eyes to see if I do something faggish. Like I say, I never thought much about those kinda guys before, but now I think about them . . . how I gotta be sure I don’t make some impression like I’m a fag supporter. I just don’t think God gives a shit about those kind of guys one way or the other. After all, God made them. If God is so perfect, then he doesn’t make mistakes, so fags aren’t mistakes. They’re just . . . you know . . . weird. If God is really just a big cloud man, snowman or somethin’, he probably thinks all the ways all people do sex looks pretty hilarious.

  Anyway, Doc wasn’t at today’s meeting. We are planning a buncha things. Like the food drive, which involves the Maine Militia too, which is upstate. And maybe we’re gonna meet with the White Mountain Militia. I ain’t met any of those guys in New Hampshire yet. We also’ve got plans to do a winter survival bivouac after Christmas—a weekend, maybe three days. We went to the preparedness expo in Bangor last weekend, so we had to talk about that.

  Finally, when the meeting was fizzing out—two guys were asleep—Rex announces that nine Settlement guys are joining our militia officially, including Gordon and his son Cory, who I met. He looks like an Indian or Japanese, but I’d say Indian.

  Rex then said it again that we ought to all go up to the Settlement at some point to see their shortwave setup, which is better than Willie’s. When it’s ready, they can do a pretty good radio show. I figure it’ll be a good opportunity to see the Prophet’s wives up close. I wonder if Samantha is one of them. Bree, the one with the stretched face, was acting horny over him, I think. It’s going to be like going to a circus. Man.

  The screen philosophizes.

  Without me, you would be cut off. With events, I am on top. And I am fast. Without me, you’d be lost. Without me, there is shame, a low score for you, so to speak. An F in staying abreast.

  Mickey speaks.

  Stopped in to see Rex.

  His mother says to me, “Sorry to hear about your brother.”

  I look at her but I don’t know what she’s talking about.

  “I’m really sorry. You tell your people if there’s anything we can do, to let us know.”

  I kinda watch the microwave, which has just beeped, but nobody notices. I say, “Yep.” I look at
her and nod to be polite. But I think some shit has happened with them where I used to live. Maybe she means about Jesse, but she’s already talked and talked about Jesse, so this is not Jesse. Rex’s mum thinks I live back there with them. She thinks I know all the shit already, but those people might as well be on the moon. I want to forget those people and all their shit. Especially Donnie, my brother, the king, who oughta have his crown shoved up his ass.

  She says, “Mickey?”

  “Yep.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yep.”

  “I have something for them. Just a pie. I hope your sister-in-law and your mum like peach pie.”

  “Yep.”

  “Sure you’re okay?”

  I smile sort’ve, so she’ll stop asking me if I’m okay.

  In his tree house in the woods, Mickey contemplates.

  I’m not a talker. I can think, but I can’t yak it up. I’m not stupid. Them at school always acted like I was stupid. They said I was a bad boy. Ha-ha. Maybe I am bad. Once, I wasn’t bad. You know how it is: until you go to school, everything you do is perfect and cute; then you gotta start being something different, proving something. Like you are steppin’ into one big test. It sucks.

  So, okay, I got bad. But bad is better than stupid, right? Bad makes them look up to you. They fear you a little. That’s what respect is. Respect is fear. Some teacher with her little tight-assed walk says, “You are late,” “You took too long in the library,” “You didn’t read the whole chapter?” And everybody is looking at you. Are you going to look dippy? Are you going to cry? Are you going to apologize? No. You say as loud as you can, “Dry up, cunthead.”

  Well, I didn’t actually say that. But I thought it and she didn’t like my expression. She didn’t like my face.

  And she didn’t like the smell of cigarettes on me. Or when I had a buzz, she didn’t like the look of a buzz.

  There were others who were bad, and we hung out together. But they would always try to break you up. Like you made each other bad.

  Before I became really and totally bad, they talked to me in baby talk. And they have Special Ed. This means you are retarded. More baby talk and all the special shit. Everyone looking down on you.

  When I got really and totally bad, like sleeping in class and, my favorite, leaving the premises without permission and putting my feet up on a desk and doing deals—you know, firecrackers, twice, weed, only once—and then this guy Derrick brought his Remington hunting rifle to school to see if I was interested, which I wasn’t. You know, it wasn’t loaded. But when they caught us, it was like we were death penalty material. If they’d had an electric chair in the office of the Holy Principal, they’d of used it.

  Nowadays since the “Million Moms,” which Rex says is the CIA, they’ve gone into total mental mode over people’s guns. You trade a gun like that in your school, your life would really be over—no joke. You’d be on TV. You’d be put up for all the twittipated world to despise. Fine. That’s still lots better than stupid. Smart, famous, and despised. Or stupid. Pick one.

  Okay, so me, I got elevated to semi-evil status. It was great. No more wet baby talk. I could walk down the hall like a man, not baby goo.

  So then instead of baby talk, they squint their eyes and threaten: DETENTION. SUSPENSION. And they scream down the hallway, “GAMMON, WHERE ARE YOUR BOOKS?!!” “GAMMON, WHAT ARE YOU DOING OUT OF CLASS?!!” Big army talk.

  They use you as an example of fucking up. “GAMMON, STAND UP! SIT STRAIGHT! WAKE UP. SEE, EVERYONE, YOU’LL BE LIKE GAMMON IF YOU DON’T TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY.”

  My brother, Don, was always good in school. They loved Don. “Good in school.” This means you are smart, they say. This means you are a good person. This means you are a success. My brother Don, they loved. He was even pretty good in sports. He was a fucking suck-up.

  And now, guess what? He’s dead.

  Long night.

  Tonight, sleeping on his back in the center of the bed, Rex York is jerked awake by that gasping screech he knows so very well, a screech that boils bright red and electric between lunacy and grief: the sound of his wife when she comes. His ex-wife, whose ring he still wears.

  Up on one elbow now, eyes swollen by sleep, he knows it was a dream. No pictures in this dream, just the screech. Marsha York. His wife. How many times did she make that sound, hundreds? You don’t count a thing like that. She told him once that coming felt just like a contraction while having a baby, a labor pain. Just like it. Only instead of pain, it is . . . well, the opposite of pain. And yeah, he knows there’s nothing else in life that feels that far over the edge, there is nothing else that takes you a hundred miles from this planet, stars drifting left and right, which is all you can see because you are fainting and falling and turning inside out. Part of you is fire. Part of you is snow.

  Sometimes Rex is angry that Marsha left him and, worse, remarried. But sometimes he just feels cut free. Not in the dazzling starry space of coming but the dark bottomed-out space of waking up in starless desolation. Alone.

  He gets up and finds the bathroom, then spends the rest of the long night in the back attic room, on the computer, tapping out plans for the three-day survival drill in a wooded hundred acres above Bethel. Lists, directions to and from, and exercises to test the mettle of those who participate.

  Long night continued. Mickey Gammon doesn’t pray aloud, but his lips move a little.

  Father or God, please don’t be mad if I say it wrong. It is kinda cold tonight. I used to like tree houses. Now it’s different.

  I like to think of you as Big Cloud Man. I hope that isn’t insulting, ’cause I mean it as a good thing.

  I wonder how Ma and Erika are taking it: Donnie’s suicide. I bet Erika is crying her eyes out. You can probably see right into the house now. I’m glad in a way I can’t see Erika. But in a way I want to see her more than anything else about that friggin’ place.

  So Jesse is dead. And Donnie is dead. Okay. All dead. You can see all the dead people, right? And they can see you?

  Nobody knows I’m here, I guess. Nobody has come and told me to get out. I heard different things about the people who own this land. They seem kinda nuts. I heard they have orgies and have a time when they are all going to take poison. And all the women fuck the leader, the big guy with the weird eyes, the Prophet. And they are real religious, I think. Maybe, God, you like that part. Rex doesn’t say they’re nuts. I’ve seen some of them. Just the other day, someplace near Bangor, we checked out this windmill they made. Also they came to one of our meetings. They seemed okay at the meeting. We did CPR. There was a girl named Samantha I would like to have done CPR with instead of the little kid we used. Then I saw her in Lincoln. Near Bangor. She is an officer for their militia. Ha-ha. They call it a militia, but it’s pretty pussy-ish. Kind of like a girl’s club.

  I try to imagine her at the orgies they’re supposed to have. But the poison part is weird. She has real perfect little tits and blonde hair she wore with a kerchief wrapped around her forehead to the meeting. Like a blonde Apache. She wore military boots and camo at the windmill thing. She looks like she might bite and it would feel great.

  I hope I’m not saying anything wrong here. I don’t have any real prayers memorized, but Rex says it’s good to pray. I hope you are real nice to Jesse. He’s just a little guy and probably doesn’t understand why he’s flying around up there with you now. I . . . I still can’t believe what happened to him. Cancer is a bitch.

  Okay, so I was hoping I could make enough money this past couple weeks to rent something . . . a room or a camp on the pond winter rate . . . or to buy a truck. Old truck. I could sleep in a truck and run the heater. There’s a way to rig it so you won’t get fumes—longer tailpipe. Even if I don’t have a license I could at least own the truck. But stuff is expensive. Please, Father or God, get me a place, one to come along soon. I’ll pray more often. I’ll pray tomorrow night too. Also, my Bible that Rex gave me. I am sorry I have a shitty time re
ading. I can’t keep words straight. They just fuzz over and mix up. I am sorry. But maybe if I just open it and think about you. And Jesus, who used a bullwhip on the money guys. Can that be true? Anyways, the pages feel soft, like skin and flowers. I keep it with my service pistol in the box at night—as you know, of course. When I get a truck and a license, I’ll wear the pistol under my jacket and I’ll put the Bible on the dash.

  Donnie and I . . . it was bad. Probably he was up there with you reading my mind before I knew he was dead, and I was calling him a shithead. When he was dying, was he, like, depressed? How did he feel? I wish I could know. Fuck. Everything’s coming down.

  Another lesson in government. Secret Agent Jane speaks.

  After supper, Gordie wants to take me for a ride. He says it’s a date. It is kind of coldish with cloudishness, so I wear my new jacket, which is black and sexy with a belt and puckered sleeves that I almost made myself except Suzelle made most of it. I have this purse that is all beads. White. And five dollars that Granpa gave me when he was on his visit yesterday. His name is also Granpa Pete.

  Where Gordie and I go is to the beach on Promise Lake, which is dull and almost dark. Across the road is Kool Kone. But CLOSED FOR THE SEASON. No place to spend money. But Gordie hugs me and we walk. My shoes are not good for beaches. They are clogs. So I take them off, and my socks, and Gordie carries them for me but still hugs me while we walk and my feet humple along in the cold sand.

  When we find a rock to sit on, Gordie holds my hand and kisses both my ears. Then he explains that we can’t go see Mum tomorrow after all because she has something to take care of. In Boston. She’s in Boston in another jail place.