Gordon folds his arms over his chest and scratches his back on the red painted chimney. “You all come all the way down here just to talk about the weather? That it?”
Joel says, “We brought you a present.” He beams Soule-ishly. He looks around. “Now where’d that ol’ present go?” He steps to one side, revealing the boy behind him, a fine-boned androgynous-looking kid, little streaky-blond tuft of a ponytail, a wishful sort of beard on the chin. Shoulders girlishly narrow inside the well-fitted camo BDU shirt. Yeah, a small slim person. But the hands, hands that know the wrench, the pliers, the clamps. Hands with the raised arteries of young manhood and fingernails smashed by fearlessness. And, yes, he has seen this kid somewhere.
“Who’re you?” Gordon asks, stepping away from the chimney. “You look familiar.”
The boy’s eyes, a wolfy gray, shift away. No answer, just a nervous smile.
“It’s Mickey Gammon,” explains Joel. “We just found him in a tree.”
Gordon sort of smiles. Eyes looking off to the left, trying especially hard to imagine the kid in a tree and what for? He looks back at the kid’s face.
“A tree house, actually,” says the pimply purply-faced Evan Martin, “up behind the hog pens.”
Gordon asks, “How old are you, Mickey?”
The room is cool tonight. Old curled linoleum. Walls and old plaster damp and old-smelling. To Mickey, it smells like home. Home of the Lockes, what’s left of them. Mickey stuffs his hands into his jeans pockets with a really thin little smile. He mumbles an answer.
Gordon looks quickly at the thick-studded rebellious-looking leather wristband on the boy’s skinny wrist. He is almost remembering where he has seen this Mickey. Quiet Mickey. Wallflower Mickey. Lost even in the tiniest crowd.
Jaime Crosman says, “You’re about thirteen, ain’tcha Mickey?”
Mickey frowns. Thirteen is not the right guess. He looks straight into Gordon’s eyes. “I said sixteen.”
Phone rings.
Gordon looks irritably at the phone. “You got any family?” he asks Mickey, turning to lift the receiver and to cup his hand around the mouthpiece, still looking at Mickey, waiting for the answer.
Mickey drops his eyes to the box on the desk with a spotty cat in it. Makes a face to dismiss the family idea.
Gordon speaks into the phone with a high squeaky falsetto. “Hold, please. This is Gordie St. Onge’s secretary. Gordie will be with you momentarily.” Mashes the phone receiver against his work shirt. Speaks now in his own real voice. “What do you do with your time, Mickey? When you aren’t in a tree?”
Mickey raises his chin and says, as clearly and deeply as his crackly teenage voice can go, “I’m with the Border Mountain Militia.”
“Ah, yes,” says Gordon, and now, with a wild grin, takes a lunging step forward to the end of the phone cord, puts out a hand. Mickey reluctantly pulls a hand from a pocket. Gordon’s handshake is crushing. “Good to see you again. Good to have the patriots represented here in my humble kitchen!”
Mickey squints. This guy reminds him of Willie Lancaster, sort of.
Gordon winks at Mickey as he turns, phone to ear, saying deeply, “Gordie here.” He listens and talks with the caller a few moments. Once or twice he turns back and, through the frugal low-wattage light, studies Mickey, the boy’s surly expression, the big hole in his jeans showing a white skinny knee, the significant green-and-black embroidered mountain lion militia emblem on his sleeve.
When Gordon is done with the phone, he lays the receiver on the desk and sinks into his wheeled desk chair, rubbing his face till his eyes are reddened. Eyes on Mickey. “So the tree-house thing is probably part of the woodsy survival maneuvers you guys are required to do . . . or is it along the lines of the short-on-finances concept?”
Mickey says, “I’ve got money. I’m workin’.”
“Doing what?”
“Different stuff.”
Gordon nods over and over slowly, as if Mickey were still talking, long after Mickey isn’t talking. Now he stops nodding, and his eyes fall back to Mickey’s hands. “You know cars?”
“Yep.”
Gordon raises a palm to blow Mickey a kiss, just as the phone receiver bursts out with ear-crippling shrieking advice: Hang up and dial again!
Mickey flushes.
The other boys, including CC, who has returned, laugh heartily. Joel Barrington pokes Mickey’s shoulder. “See, I told you Gordo would love you.”
Gordon is stroking one side of his long mustache and scruffy beard thoughtfully. “Would you be free tomorrow morning?”
“Yep.”
“Six-thirty?”
“Don’t matter.”
“Okay, six-thirty. I have an errand to do, gotta pick up some kids who are staying down to East Egypt tonight. You come along, we get to be alone for a minute, we can shoot the shit, then come back and I’ll give you the whole fucking tour, including the European-style windmill, which is fifty feet and which Rex, your worthy captain, helped us design and construct. And you’ll see Our Purple Hope. She is sweet. And still”—he lowers his voice—“still a virgin.” He licks a finger and wiggles it, then winks. “Sound like a plan?”
“Yep.”
“Aren’t we killing that hog tomorrow, early?” Evan asks with a squint, Evan who has already started out the door onto the piazza but now leans against the frame, drumming his fingers there.
“I don’t know,” replies Gordon. “I haven’t seen Aurel. I was in Portland all day.”
Evan groans. “I gotta find out. Man, I hate this being-in-three-places-at-one-time shit.”
Gordon stands up wearily. “Only the dead know rest.”
History (1900s: the past).
The intelligence it took to bring us to modern society may not be enough to get us out of it.
—Albert Einstein
Six-thirty A.M. thereabouts. Dark. Not pitch dark but an iron gray, growing silvery by increments. Growing fast.
Mickey shows up. Dressed the same as last night. Big flappy hole in one knee. He doesn’t knock on any of the farmhouse doors. He just stands out under the ash tree smoking, his shoulders hunched. Waiting.
Gordon steps down off the piazza. Screen door bangs behind him. With one hand he pulls the ring of keys from his belt. He doesn’t look prepared for this appointment. Under one arm, a green-and-black-plaid wool outer shirt, too much of a hurry to put it on.
Mickey drops the short dry butt of his cigarette, crushes it under his heel. He follows Gordon up a long broad path, little bridge, more path, through the dark woods to the Settlement, the big sandy parking lot where Gordon has left his truck. A bit of a trek, going back the same meandering way Mickey just came.
Once they are there, Mickey climbs up into the passenger’s side and waits while Gordon jogs across the quadrangle to the horseshoe of Settlement shops and up inside through one of the porches to fetch something. He returns, flumps a satchel and the wool shirt on the seat between them, and starts the engine. Snaps on the parking lights so that the gauges glow. Gordon listens hard to the engine for a minute or two. He looks at Mickey and smiles.
Mickey flushes. In some ways, Gordon St. Onge is like Willie Lancaster. Mickey doesn’t feel truly safe from nerve-racking surprises.
Gordon pats the satchel. “Breakfast.” He drapes both hands over the wheel and squeezes his eyes shut. Yawns. “Don’t ever go anywhere without your gun, your Bible, and your breakfast.” He chortles happily to himself, eyes watery. He switches on the heater, which sounds awful, sounds like something flapping inside it. Mickey’s eyes lightly caress the satchel, while Gordon quickly studies for the hundredth time the olive-and-black mountain lion in the crescent of letters on Mickey’s sleeve.
Now he stares off to the shadowy fenced-in acreage of young oaks, where a few spotted tractor-sized hogs stand on a high spot in the growing light, all watching the truck. Then he yawns again. Through watery eyes, he looks at Mickey, big grin. Mickey winces. Not in a way that sho
ws, just his blood and guts and insides; everything goes on temporary hold.
Gordon reaches into the satchel and pulls out muffins and rolls. A lot of bready things. A big glass jar of peeled boiled eggs. Ham sandwiches made with big hunks of smoked pork, mustard, and funny farm cheese. Jars of milk. “Maple milk,” he tells Mickey. “Try it.”
Mickey asks, “You always eat this much for breakfast?”
Gordon looks serious and intense, hefts one of the weighty pork sandwiches. “Eating,” he says quietly. “It’s kinda basic.”
Mickey unwraps his own sandwich and chomps into it. There’s something goaty about the cheese. Like the air smells around a buck goat in the fall. The smoked pork is salty. The bread chewy and fresh.
With a full mouth, Gordon says, “I thought it would be great to eat these down by the beach. Like a picnic. But I’m hungry now. I won’t make it to the beach.” He had growled the word now.
The idea of a picnic seems a little fruity to Mickey. He keeps his eyes on his sandwich.
The dawn increases fast. A buttery light has already filled in around the trees of the larger mountain to the southeast.
They eat and talk, the engine running. Something not quite right about the engine. Gordon keeps cocking his head at certain skips. Mickey suggests it’s probably just the plugs. With smacks and slurps and swallows of the sandwich, Gordon tells him, “I’ve abused her lately. She hasn’t had the fuss she needs. My obligations elsewhere have accelerated.” He stops chewing. He looks like he’s about to cry. Instead, he looks out at the yellow haloed mountain and burps.
Mickey finds the maple milk both disgusting and appealing.
Gordon tells a little about Settlement life. He talks about what it’s like for teenagers here. Then Gordon explains that everyone, starting at one’s sixteenth birthday, gets an equal share of a certain percent of the profits of the sawmills and furniture sales and the Community Supported Agriculture program veggie and meat sales, and the veggie sales to the IGA and farm markets, and the sale of sheep and eggs, the skinning and meat cutting in hunting season, and the wreaths and Christmas trees. “So far, it’s worked out pretty good. It gives everyone spending money. Not a lot, but there’s been few complaints.” He explains how food and most basic things come to a person free here. He confesses that the one thing they’re wrestling with right now is health insurance payments. “Evil whoring insurance fuckers have us by the balls. If it were just me, I’d say screw ’em. But . . . it’s not just me. Forgive my vocabulary, Mickey. Are you Christian?”
“’S’okay. I don’t care if you swear.”
The sun is not quite free of the eastern skyline but hovers in a sticky way behind a tall hemlock. Only the tops of the trees to the northwest are painted with the orange light of this new September day.
Mickey is wondering when Gordon is going to really start talking wacko, like about the poison the Settlement people are supposed to be planning to take together or maybe something about the orgies. He doesn’t really want to hear any of it. He listens to Gordon stuffing practically a whole muffin into his mouth and then shifting the old truck into gear. Truck starts down the gravelly Settlement road. Along a ridge of sand to one side, possibly pushed there by someone plowing snow last spring, there is what looks like a tiny piece of broken glass or a huge flake of mica, which explodes with light as the sun finally strikes this little valley, and then the sunlight begins to crawl over the blond Settlement fields. Gordon spreads his fingers right in front of Mickey’s face, rubs his fingers together in the sunlight. “The sun,” he says in a muffled way around his cheekful of muffin. “Nobody owns it yet. Nobody charges us for sunshiny days.”
Mickey looks amused. He has finished eating; he just holds his big jar of maple milk between his thighs and studies the passing hillside of busy-looking Settlement gardens with their army of scarecrows, a tipped-over wheelbarrow, one standing shovel, and one fat woodchuck sitting up on a rock watching the truck pass.
“Sh!” warns Gordon with slitted eyes, looking all about suspiciously. “Whatever you do, Mickey, don’t tell anyone about sun tax. Or sun meters. Sun as a commodity. T’would give ’em ideas. They’ll do it, by God. There’s nothing they won’t steal and sell back to us.” He rests one hand on the shift knob but doesn’t shift, even though the truck lugs down, shivering a little as the Settlement road levels out. He looks at Mickey. “What’s with your family?”
Mickey picks at his leather wristband. “My brother gassed himself in his car.”
“Locke?”
“Yeah.”
“So you lived there until—”
“He went nuts on me. I had ta get out.”
Gordon says softly, “Livin’s tough.”
Mickey says nothing. Just sips his maple milk.
Gordon says, “Now it’s the tree condo.”
Mickey says quickly, “I was in Mass. We were there awhile. Me and my sister and my mother.” He leaves out his mother’s boyfriend Ross, whom he misses.
Gate ahead. Heavy maples closing in, almost dark as night again.
Gordon says, “How’s the baby? I heard there’s a sick baby over there.”
Mickey shakes his head, looks away. “Died.”
Gordon snorts. “God’s been a busy son of a bitch, ain’t he?”
Mickey looks at Gordon’s closer knee, then quickly away, nods.
“Sorry, I did it again. It pops out.”
“S’okay.”
Gordon says solemnly, “I thank God when he’s good. I cuss him when he’s bad.” He grins at Mickey. “I’m not afraid to be honest with God.”
Mickey blinks.
Gordon downshifts. Brakes easy. Mickey gets out and lifts the pole, admiring the ANYONE TRESPASSES WILL BE SHOT. TRY IT. sign while Gordon takes the truck ahead. Mickey lowers the pole and hurries back to the truck.
Once out on the tar road, Gordon asks softly, “What was the baby’s name?”
“Jesse.”
“Jesse,” Gordon repeats the name and the name in his mouth has a warm loving familiarity.
Not much talk now as they head down the creepily steep Heart’s Content Road, then they turn onto the highway that winds down to the lake and beach area: Kool Kone, the Cold Spot (called Hot Spot in winter), and, after that, one bed-and-breakfast with striped awnings called Your Host. Gordon tells Mickey, “We’re goin’ hot ’n’ heavy on a couple photovoltaic cars right now. It’s a real bitch. We thought we’d have one of them rolling by now, but there’s been one delay after another. . . .”
You, crow, have studied the old truck as it left the Settlement and chugs along down Heart’s Content Road.
You had sent out four warning caw!s, so now eddies of the tribe’s caw!s far and near, as well as the multiplying echoes, are disturbing the peace all around purply September-cold Promise Lake. Through the cloven backs and shoulders of cruelly logged mountains, over neighboring fields, dwellings and barns, utility poles, road signs, stone walls, snowmobiles, artesian well covers, bird feeders, and blue-tarp-covered mysteries, black wings thrust onward, this gossip going even farther, following the worn and many roads of tar.
Crows, all of you know well the old pickup truck painted by kids.
Brush marks and dribbles. Starbursts of extra gloss. The truck body, the black-green of living hemlocks. The cab done thickly in the white of a sleet storm. Cab mounts sag. Inspection sticker unthinkably old. Besides the driver, the vessel includes the tree boy (hurrah! hurrah! you say) as it lurches forward on its crooked journey around the lake. But the journey will be short. Of this you are certain, because your many generations know perfectly well the ways and habits of Gordon St. Onge.
They make their way.
Mickey has never seen anyone drive so slow and talk so fast. He has never witnessed such excitement coming out of a person’s mouth. Especially about stuff like gas-free cars, solar and wind power, microenergy-using flywheels. And “zero-point” energy. And plots by international financiers to keep these lifest
yles down and “maintain petroleum as king!” Lots of plots. Lots of “thick closed doors.”
Mickey figures this is probably true but can’t think of what to say back. The Prophet keeps turning toward him with his large nose and wincing scrinching wild eyes, leaving only little-little spaces for Mickey to talk back. Mickey’s once-in-awhile yep seems good enough, ’cause the guy then launches into a speech on the collapse of this civilization, how it’s time has come “anthropology-wise.”
Mickey has no doubt this is also true, but shit—there’s so much. Where does it all come from? They don’t even have TVs at the Settlement, Joel Barrington had told him last night, when he and the others walked down to Gordon’s place. Big rule: no TV. It doesn’t at first occur to Mickey that Gordon is a big reader, a hungry reader and big-questions redneck philosopher. And that the Settlement from time to time has fascinating worldly guests for Parlor Night Salons. Instead, Mickey suspects that the big noisy guy is probably psychic. The Prophet, right?
So Mickey continues to reply “yep” and “yep” and “yep.”
There are too many vibrations coming off this guy. Like Willie Lancaster. Like Willie, the Prophet likes to muckle on to you, mostly the shoulder. But Mickey has gotten to be an expert at staying cool during that sort of thing. Willie musta been rehearsal for this more huge test.
Balancing his maple milk jar on his knee, he tips it back and forth, back and forth.
When they hit bumps, there’s swinging and jouncing of a green plastic Godzilla on its string from the rearview. It has mean little hands and rows of teeth for tearing. But it’s a toy. How come not a cross? Or a shrunken head? Or something voodoo-ish (whatever that would be)? A toy Godzilla seems kind of silly to Mickey.
Meanwhile, the truck cab smells of the big breakfast but also like tools, transmission fluid, a banana (no banana is in sight), and a trace of cow shit. And damp wool. And dog. Kind of homey.
You, crow, of the East Egypt branch of the tribe, watch the green-and-white truck stop at a yellow house next to a green-door church.
The School on Heart's Content Road Page 26
