Down at the old farm place, where the only phone for everyone is, Jane holds the pre-1990s-style receiver to her ear.
She isn’t speaking presently, just listening, her brown floofy curly hair in a Settlement-made hair clip of painted beads, beans, and acorns glued onto cardboard. She and Lisa have had countless phone calls such as this, the phone voices miniature, due to wires and plastic, due to the miles. She keeps her face away from the room where others stand. She listens to the voice, miniaturized but also, yes, faltering and worn down. Her mother.
In this moment, Jane is not losing control. No screams and wails. What is it you call it when the blur and belled-out tears won’t break free of the little pools, one pool to each eye?
Finally, Jane speaks. “Mum. What about me? Tell them.” She has said this feebly, due to her new A-plus understanding of how it is that nothing spoken matters to the law.
She listens to the reply. She listens, listens, listens. Finally, the tears swish free. They explore in a zigzaggy way down her impossibly soft cheeks. “Mum. That doesn’t matter. I need you.”
Penny St. Onge remembers well when the announcement was made.
Flyers were flying into the mail and onto telephone poles around town and out past the bridge, and even on the way to Portland or Lewiston, those routes to schoolesque field trips.
There were a few quick phone calls.
Nobody asked Gordon or any of us old fogies for permission. We were just advised that this would be a “spectacular event.” Quite a few of the elders and some mothers—most of the mothers—and some dads were asked to serve on planning committees.
This would be a public meeting of the True Maine Militia, also serving as a one-hundredth-birthday party for our beloved Annie Brody (“Annie B”).
Gordon didn’t throw a fit this time, though some expected it. He and Rex and the Border Mountain guys were just getting back from visiting a militia in Mass. When Gail and Lorraine showed him the flyer, he just behaved pleasantly. Pleasant and, yes, pale.
So the plan was to have the gate open on the day and the unneighborly YOU’LL BE SHOT sign taken down. Instead, there’d be a welcoming crew at the new little guard house (which was actually John Lungren’s fishing shack). As prospective rallyers came through, they’d be handed information flyers and song sheets.
A letter-writing committee sent off a plea to Gordon’s Aroostook relatives who play in the Band from THE County. Picture an Acadian-rock mix and you’ve got it. Music to dance by.
The Build-a-Stage Committee was rounded up. The Giant Cake Committee. Crews for the cooks. Five Clean-up Crews. First Aid Crew. Skits and sing-alongs were planned. More True Maine Militia membership cards were manufactured.
And, of course, a big op-ed is mailed off to the Record Sun.
Late morning. Record Sun reporter Ivy Morelli hurries into the City Room.
There is a note on her desk from Brian Fitch, her editor. Also a flyer, made by an old-fashioned printer and touched up with crayons.
The flyer is the public invitation to the True Maine Militia meeting at the Settlement in Egypt on Saturday, which will be combined with a one-hundredth-birthday celebration for Annie Brody.
Everybody welcome! Bring a dish or salad or bread or dessert. If you aren’t much of a cook, bring chips or just bring yourself. There will be music by the Band from THE County, from Eagle Lake and Frenchville, for you to shake a leg by.
In one prominent corner of the flyer there is the Abominable Hairy Patriot (Bigfoot in white winter coat) standing on a mountaintop with a look of Don’t-mess-with-me, hands on hips, legs apart. And there is a cartoon version of an old lady who has the same Don’t-mess-with-me expression, and a polka-dot dress. And see the personal details about her life written in footnote.
Don’t miss this IMPORTANT EVENT if you love old ladies and you love America.
P.S. We will be having an official firing of the official True Maine Militia cannon. So don’t miss that!
Let’s get ready for the Million Man Woman Kid Dog March!
There are directions to the Settlement, time and date. No rain date. Ivy lays this on her desk and picks up Brian’s note.
Ivy, yes, we are going with this. Op-ed page and one photo. Bangor’s using it too. Everybody is going to be there when those gates come down: local, New England, national. Big media free-for-all. It’ll eat those St. Onge people up. Those gun-toting kids are damn cute. One can only imagine the angle on this that will surface. Sheesh.
Just thought you might like the flyer for your mementos.
Then Brian has drawn the really goofy smiling face that serves as his signature.
S.A. Kashmar finds some really fascinating communications on the Internet.
“Okay, Pretty Boy, I like your style,” he declares, then drawling out the name that fills nearly every line of print on the screen. Another agent, Sears, standing behind him, twists open his little shapely bottle of cran-apple juice and says, “Kentucky, aye? Weren’t they in the Berkshires last week? These were seventy-seven-year-old white supremacists in Adams. But everything else St. Onge is about is like an afternoon with Mister Rogers.” He laughs through his nose.
Kashmar reaches for a printout sheet on his other desk. “I just can’t figure him. It’s like watching a three-headed billygoat.”
“What’s this?”
“The satellite one?” He stretches his head to check.
“Yuh.”
“That’s the place. Study it. We’re going to be there when they open that gate. Meanwhile, we’ve got to get Lees into that militia. These Maine guys need a goal. Something more specific and—uh—more manly than birthday parties for old ladies and cartoon newsletters by little kiddies. And visits to half-dead old white supremacists who just want to talk about sore feet.”
“I agree with you one hundred percent.”
Secret Agent Jane, almost seven, tells us about her heart-to-heart talk with scarlet-haired fifteen-year-old Bree St. Onge.
Bree is sometimes my best friend. You would think it would be hard to have a horror-faced person for a best friend, but it’s not. I feel sorry for Bree because she will probably not ever get men and she’ll never be famous. But if you look at her face a certain way, you can see she looks just like a kitty.
I say, “I still love him. It’s worse now.”
Bree and I always talk about men. She doesn’t mind. But probably inside she minds. She asks me, “What did you two talk about on your starlight ride?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Well, we had a flashlight and fixed the chart thing.”
“But nothing else?”
I shrug. Bree and I are doing the copy machine for the song things people will sing about scary stuff at Annie B’s party. The stuff of the horridable world. She flaps the paper funny before she pushes it in the tray. She says, “Maybe you need to love a guy who talks.”
“No, I still love Mickey. I always will.”
“You loved him at first sight.”
“Yes.” I sigh. “But he smokes.”
“He’ll be sorry someday. It’s yukky,” Bree says. She herself smokes. Everybody knows it.
“Cigarettes make you have chemotherapy.”
“Yes,” she says. She presses the button, and the papers start to print. She turns and smiles, her cat face happy. “I have a test for you.”
“Oh, no.”
“About Mickey,” she says, big smile.
I laugh.
“What color are his eyes? Exactly, now. Let’s see how good your powers of observation are.”
“I can’t remember.”
“Notice next time.”
“I notice mostly his clothes.” I wrinkle my nose. “He should really fix his clothes better.”
“Well, when you get married in a few years, you can fix him the way you like.” She kind of laughs funny.
I say, “I will.”
“And kissing,” she says. “You can kiss for hours.�
�
I get embarrassed just a little.
“Jane and Mickey, sitting in a tree, K.I.S.S.I.N.G.”
“Shut up or I’ll die.”
Bree makes a smeeerch! kissing noise with her lips.
“Stop it, Bree! I mean it!”
When we are done with the paper stuff, we both squash our faces on the glass. You do this and push the button and the light slides by your eyes and you get a picture of your face. We also do hands. Once we tried doing a leaf and a flower but they didn’t come out. Bree says, “Watch this.” She takes off this pretty red sash thing she wears and puts it on the glass. It comes out weird and black. “Well, that didn’t work.” Bree sighs. “But experimenting is fun, isn’t it?”
Now we do our faces shrunk, which there is a button for. And now some tiny shrunk hands. And now huge hands. We laugh and laugh.
Rex afraid.
It is that dream again. The one he’s had once or twice a month for a couple years now, various variations on the theme where his home is covered with ants. All the exterior of his home—roof, walls, windows—is a carpet of ants, ants the size of squirrels. He keeps his eyes closed and doesn’t move because if he moves, the worst, the unspeakable, will happen.
Click click click click click; he hears the thousands of shell-like feet scurrying all over the clapboards.
Tonight he, in his dream, opens his eyes and sees through a window at least forty of them staring in at him, their heads floating on stick necks but their eyes more human than bug.
He howls, a metal-to-metal sound, climbing his throat and dead tongue, a siren of the night, warning the others. What others? He is alone, the only survivor.
Late evening, just before the Big Day.
Hearing voices behind him, Gordon turns on the path between the St. Onge farm place and the Settlement, snaps off his flashlight, waits. He yanks his bandanna from his pocket, works it around in his nose, looks up at the stars through the leaves. It is his cousin-in-law Ray Pinette’s voice he hears coming closer, the voice of a big thick-necked man, though Ray is a short guy but, yes, thick-necked, broad-shouldered, bulky. Ray is beaming his flashlight over the rooty path, and there is a young woman trudging along with him, who speaks a few soft words.
When they discover Gordon standing there, Ray complains predictably. “Jesus, you are harder to find than a dollar.”
Gordon tries to make out the woman’s face in the dark, lit only in outlines by the flashlights pointed at the ground. She is young. A little familiar. Somebody from town.
“She’s looking for Mickey,” Ray says. “She was parked down by the gate when I was coming in. I could tell she wasn’t a TV crew.” He chuckles. “So where is Mickey?”
The young woman wears a T-shirt with the face of a Persian cat on the chest, sweater under one arm, little shoulder bag there. She is a plump pink-cheeked brown-haired girl no more than twenty-three or twenty-four.
Gordon sees in her face the look. Fear. Surrender. Help me. He reaches out a hand. She reaches out her hand. Her fingers fold around his thumb. He says, “You’re Donnie Locke’s wife.”
Her reply is a sob, eyes squeezed shut, still gripping his thumb. He takes her into his arms, doing the possible thing, in lieu of all that can never be possible, his desire to erase all suffering.
From a future time, Glennice St. Onge, devoted churchgoer, remembers.
Gordon was a pure saint.
Rex’s dream crescendo.
The click click click of ant feet is almost like crackles of fire. Yes! Like fire. And the smell of it, fire dry, sky weedy-humid. Thousands of stiff feet, marching all over his home, now soft feet, slippered feet, sneaking, whispering past, up and all over his home.
But also, yes, fire, just fire, the ants lost in the incredible past. And now explosions, a thousand explosions inside a thousand more. He hears wailing, the squalls of infants, smells blood and more burning.
He crawls ever so slowly from where he lies, the heavy humidity dripping while he, Rex, feels heavy as ice. Another crisp body, left behind in its entirety, or was it just a hand, just a burger-dried black bone of the leg? All humans here small as children. Tiny cries. Tiny terror. Tiny grief. But replacing themselves. A hundred-hundred more. And why? They are not invincible, he was advised. Boom! Another rocket. Boom! A collapsing wall.
He is not hurt. He is perfectly perfect, crawling through the doorway into a safer zone of the universe, less humid, dearly dry, and yet a prenatal place large enough for a medium-sized man.
Suddenly he can see his home from a mile away. Why is it so dinky? Is it so small maybe because of distance? But also because Gordon is standing beside it and he is so huge, his head is up there with the sun! And he is waving his arms in goofball fashion, and Rex is trying so so so hard to yell quit it!!!!! but Rex can’t get out any voice at all, just a miserable little moan, like a wooden ball in his neck. Gordon is now stumbling, falling. His million tons of flesh are falling. Rex screams. He’s actually and really sitting up in bed when he is finally awake, heart pounding, his mother Ruth in the hall, “Ricky? You okay?”
FBI operative Marty Lees is up before dawn.
He munches on Cheerios. Cheerios in the bowl. Picture of Cheerios on the box, and there’s two boxes of other stuff. Flakes and chocolate puffs. He reads one box, ingredients, daily minimum requirements, bar code, and things you can send away for. Outer-space killers with guns that kill with light. Don’t hurt so much. Ain’t that cute?
Checks clock. Thinks of the day ahead. The whole St. Onge dog-and-pony show. Birthday party and kiddies’ militia. Cute girlies in army boots. Speeches. Singing. A country-rock-folksy band with a buncha Frenchmen. Whatever.
Special Agent Kevin Moore prepares.
This is a different person from Marty Lees, aka Gary Larch. He leans toward the mirror to inspect the bleeding nick on his chin and sees how wide and expressionless his eyes look in this dim light, this bedroom where his new wife, Tara, still sleeps. His baseball cap reads SEA DOGS, the Maine team. He smiles a big smile.
See, I’m a nice guy. I’m one of you. A neighbor—sort of—give or take a hundred miles. Well, you know, Maine is big. But see, I’m just a guy. I talk like you.
Just a young feller with fresh blond honest looks. Probably As in school. Probably wouldn’t hurt a fly. Probably loves his new bride. Probably remembers his mother on Mother’s Day. Sure! This is all true! There is nothing really to pretend, except his name and his game. Today should be easy. Fun, in fact. Just his eyes. Eyes open. Just instincts. Just charting the course.
Lyn Potter. Yet another agent?
Actually, he’s just an operative, no bennies, no recognition, no face, a nonexistent sort of guy, you might say. Just a black line in the text of your dossier.
Wheaties. You eat ’em fast and they don’t get soggy. Supposed to be a lotta really good food at the St. Onge thing. Good. Eat their food, then see ’em in court. Good food doesn’t make ’em good Americans.
Glory.
Daddy screamed in the night. One of his nightmares. And that got Gram up.
Glory’s hangover screamed too. Not a scream of the mouth, just a scream of one’s total existence.
But then all was again quiet and she dozed. Now again, a scream. Not his but hers. Yeah, all of her cells ripping free of the 80-proof vodka.
She opens one eye. The clock isn’t there. Where is it? On the floor. She can tell by the dimness of the room it is nowhere near time to get up anyway.
Secret Agent Jane.
Everyone says, “Put on your best dress.”
Okay. And now I practice in the mirror the look for my face. Special and sexy. But now I try my secret heart-shapes glasses, which maybe look a little geeky—which I heard Kirky actually say, Jane’s glasses are so geeky. But they have power. Okay. I think maybe I need to see what’s really going on. I can’t tell what’s really going on. Maybe nobody knows what’s really going on. Everybody is acting crazy. But with these glasses, I will be able to see w
hat no one else sees. It is important to know people’s thoughts.
Early Saturday A.M. Settlement parking lot.
Mickey slows the solar buggy and drops his feet to the dirt, his sneaker toes dragging. Waves the other guys on. He is looking through the frizzy dawn light at a car he does not recognize, at a face he does recognize. Car backseat heaped with stuff, hard to make out what. Looks like a small mountain chain. The face is his mother’s.
He snaps off his headlight and kills the motor, the funny weak refrigerator sound, the source that causes so much here at the Settlement to move, beam, or make toast.
In the silence her soft voice is everything. “Mickey.” Her false teeth show. Not a smile.
There are feet running, hopping. He turns on the seat, lifting one leg off the machine as Erika and his sister Elizabeth arrive, huffing and exclaiming.
“See, Mum, he’s not dead!” This is Elizabeth.
“I knew he wasn’t dead,” Britta says simply. He sees she is wearing her old-lady blue sweater but has a girlish barrette in her hair. She has changed her hairdo to be more like Erika’s.
“She acted like you were dead,” Erika says, smiling.
Britta is looking at the solar buggy.
Erika is pulling at Mickey’s sleeve. “Hey, little brother. You’re older.”
Sounds like a flock of going-south birds, honking back and forth in the sky. But it’s coming through the parked cars from the quad of trees.
Erika has wrapped both arms around him. “Not even a little bit dead,” she whispers, like a secret in his ear. A choky whisper filled with the sorrow of other losses. He sees, over around her ear and her brown wing of hair, that the honking, hooting flock is his nieces, Donnie’s girls, the girl gang.
Still hanging on to him, Erika says, “We can’t keep the house. Mr. St. Onge says they’ll make us a cottage here. It’s been real bad, Mickey.”
Micky says, “I’m sorry.”
Erika is smiling at him in a funny way. “For what?”
He shrugs.
Britta’s eyes rise up to his face again in that sneaking-up-on-you way she has. He believes her if she says she knew he wasn’t dead. His mother never lies. But wasn’t he dead there for a while, even to himself?
The School on Heart's Content Road Page 32
