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The School on Heart's Content Road

Page 38

by Carolyn Chute


  When Gordon hears the screen door slam two porches down and Rex’s measured boot steps, he is just finishing the beer.

  By the time Rex reaches Gordon’s chair, ringed by those nearly exhausted candles, he finds Gordon opening another beer.

  Now a big disgusting burp.

  Rex can’t bear looking into Gordon’s droopy bleary eyes. He gazes at the shingled wall instead and says, “Okay. So it’s done. What other kind of lunatic things have you got planned?”

  Gordon lowers the beer to the floor with his long-armed reach, burps again, and runs a finger under his tight pistol belt. He says in a slurred way, “I told you. This was the conniving of my little girls.” He lowers his voice to a whisper more secret than the militia’s huddle a few minutes ago under the Tyrannosaurus. “You know this, brother. Women are more dangerous today. They used to be dangerous in little ways. Now they . . . they’re”—big burp—“awful.” Shakes his head. “Awful, my brother.” He leans forward and holds his face.

  Rex stares at the mountain lion on Gordon’s sleeve as he says coldly, “The FBI is watching you. They like to know what your vices are so they can twist you up in them and push you over. That wasn’t smart, getting them to know you think pot is okay. Even the beer. It’s sloppy.”

  Gordon raises his face. Big drunken squinty-eyed smile. “Right. The FBI.” He snickers.

  Then he sees something he has never seen before, a look crossing Rex’s face. Not the cold eyes, but the mouth. A tightening of the jaw, like maybe Rex wants to hit him.

  Gordon says, “I guess you’re right, brother.”

  Rex says evenly, “Self-control is what you have to have if you want to represent the Border Mountain Militia.”

  Gordon looks up. Nods. He sees another porch candle has bit the dust. Yet another going down.

  Rex keeps on. “And when somebody, whether it’s an operative or just some bubble brain, is out there yelling Kill ’em! you make it clear that that’s not in the program, okay? And it’s not in the program. Not yet. You hearing me?”

  “I suppose you’re pissed about what I said about the Constitution,” Gordon says, with a snort. “And the Republic of Maine. Personally, that idea makes me practically horny.”

  Rex takes in breath. Then silence.

  Gordon digs hard into the graying chin of his beard. Closes his eyes. “I can only say what comes to me. I can’t preplan. It’s the way I am, okay? I am not a machine like you.”

  Rex stares straight up at the watery unraveling patterns of light on the open beams of the piazza ceiling.

  After a lot of silence and a few more bristly words, down to the last working-hard candle, Rex says he’s going home to bed.

  Somehow this recipe for Popeye Pie in Bonnie Lucretia St. Onge’s handwriting winds up as evidence in the FBI files.

  Get out big old enamel rect. roaster. Line with crust. For extra crowds Sundays use 9 trays. Enuf considering some won’t eat it. Use other stuff on tables for choice. Kitchen crew: chop spinach, break eggs while in the huge colander (that enameled one), steam the spinach. Kettle: add hot spinach, some butter, baking powder, scrunched bread crusts, and the beaten eggs. Mix this stuff while crew grates cheeses: Cow, goat, whatever cheeses you have plenty of. You want a lot of cheese. This is the winner ingredient.

  Into the ovens.

  Very, very, very popular, even for some who despise a plain green spinach naked.

  Watch your muscles grow!

  Back to the present. The clock ticks and the stars move around some.

  Lotta band people spending the night here, not ready for bed: kinda wound.

  “It’s only two A.M.!” they say, laughing.

  They drag out a cooler of classy-looking long-necked beers. And whoa! Four very pretty bottles of golden black-and-white-label Jack.

  Sunday morning.

  Mickey is in the Winter Kitchen, that big eating room in the horseshoe building. He eats. Keeps his head down, though not as shy as his mother, Britta, who lives here now but never eats in these public buildings. Erika is here, a few seats away, with the Locke household’s girl gang. The girl gang has been absorbed into the shrieking, laughing, kazooing confusion of Settlement kids like fresh eggs into cake batter.

  The young guys who are at Mickey’s left and across the table are quiet, just buttering bread, looking into each other’s eyes. Something is in the air. What?

  Gordon is not here at breakfast, but his name is. Mickey hears one of the wives whisper it, a gossipy whisper. Mickey pushes stringy pork through egg yolk. He looks quick to see that the whispering voice is Lee Lynn, a wife of Gordon’s who is sort of young but has gray witchy hair. She is telling a group of other wives beyond where Erika sits that Gordon was “very bad” last night. He was “looped” and he “had sex.” With Glory York. Over on the lake. “Some party a bunch of them went to after the meeting.” And “Glory was dancing naked” and “Gordon was dressed, but pissing on himself . . . wore his militia jacket even” and then . . .

  From here on, the details are so pornographic, Mickey is not digesting the food, let alone chewing it. He never realized grown women talked this way. Movie women, sure, but not Maine women. He always thought they just talked about fashions and relationships. Or that at least they would use code.

  The witchy Lee Lynn further explains. “Gordon’s hand was up to the wrist in Glory’s vagina. But then he was too drunk to” blah blah blah, “so Glory helped him.”

  Mickey’s stomach is a small cannonball inside. He doesn’t look up into the Martin boys’ faces, just at the insides of his eyelids, because his eyes are shut. It is not envy this time, it is fear. Because clearly inside his brain he sees Rex’s face, and none of Rex’s controlled expressions are on it.

  Next day, Monday, in the early A.M.

  Long purple shadows and heavy frosty dew. Fat gold sun squeezes up between the mountaintop trees. One of the clean-up crews moves along behind a humming slow-going solar buggy. Cans and paper bags and balled-up tissues and flyers left from the crowds are tossed into the cart. Like the rest of the clean-up crew, Jane Meserve is dressed warm, wearing old sweaters and heavy pants. Jane’s old sweater is rust-colored with green fir trees, and it hangs long in a somewhat glamour-ish way. She pauses from stooping and heaving trash to gaze with longing up into the woods, her chin up, big sultry eyes wet from the chill, nose a little bit red, thinking of her true love, Mickey, for whom she has composed a long love letter and needs to deliver it in a secret way as soon as possible.

  Also Monday morning at the residence of Richard York, the Agency goes for the throat.

  Pulling up now is a late-model truck driven by a stranger. Stranger steps out. Big guy. Big blond guy with a tan and—yuh, he looks like a California type, beachy with a square jaw and fastidiously shaved to imitate eternal youth. But the truck plates say MAINE. He is not Marty Lees aka Gary Larch. He is not the fresh-faced agent with the SEA DOGS cap. He is yet another one. There are plenty.

  He looks tired. His pale eyes are reddened. When he meets Ruth York at the door, he will introduce himself as a friend of Rex’s. “I need to see Rex.” And Ruth will allow him entry, just as that wooden hand-shaped wall plaque inside the glassed-in porch reads ENTER.

  This beachy blond stranger shows Rex snapshots.

  Rex’s eyes dilate, then slip-slide over the first two pictures. He doesn’t study them, just the slip and the slide. He doesn’t go to the third, fourth, and fifth picture, simply hands them back, eyes into eyes, maybe wondering who the beachy stranger is but maybe not even that; maybe in some way Rex York is falling through a hole in the floor and in the earth into a hot jungly steam of confusion.

  Blood brothers.

  Noontime, Denise’s Diner in East Egypt. Gordon is meeting with a man named Hal Vorhees about a deal on milled lumber. A big deal. Enough to put the Settlement books in the black for a long while. Gordon does not look well. One of those hangovers that lasts several days. Aspirins have no effect. A thousand cute litt
le hot-cold wires electrocute his skull. He knows he will never drink again. Too many regrets, the ones he can remember and the ones he can’t. He listens to what the man has to say. He nods. He clears his throat. He finishes his second glass of water. He wears a black wool jacket, Settlement-made. It feels too tight. Thick bags under his eyes. Beet-colored hickies all over his neck. He remembers her baby talk but not her suck-kiss-biting his neck. He pokes at the pancake in his plate. He is facing the door through which customers mosey in, some taking off their billed caps, most leaving them on. The guy, Hal Vorhees, talks. Words. Gestures. Stuff about sealed bids for building a fire station. Stuff about Marty Cain, a name, a familiar name . . . but Gordon is looking up at the door now, seeing just what he knew he’d eventually see: Rex pushing through that door, his Browning semiauto service pistol in one hand.

  Gordon grips the table. His head on fire, part hangover, part terror, arms on fire, feet on fire, he begins to rise, not quite out of the booth by the time Rex arrives at the table and traps Gordon there.

  Gordon’s face has gone from sick gray to the gray of fight-or-flight, his mouth open stupidly. Rex raises the service pistol, flicks off one of the safeties.

  Gordon sees this—the hand with the gun and Rex’s eyes—all in one huge picture. Rex does something odd with his mouth, like chewing food . . . and he does something odd with his shoulders, like bracing against cold, then tosses the gun into Gordon’s plate with the pancakes in it, and the plate breaks in four almost perfect pieces, and the man, Hal Vorhees, is up very very quick, hollering, “Hey!”

  Rex looks worse than Gordon, his pale cold-as-ever eyes lost in bagginess. Not tired, more like a person looks after a long cry. No cap. His hair is flat on one side. In addition to the big mustache, a hobo beard has begun to fill in the rest. Chewing gum. Yes, that’s what is going on in his mouth. He is chewing gum as if to pulverize it into nonmatter. Slisk. Slisk. Slisk. Breathing hard through his nose. The man who never loses control has crossed a line.

  People around the diner have gotten mighty quiet. It’s as if the place were empty. Maybe it is. Neither Rex nor Gordon look around much.

  Gordon is speechless. In this moment, he knows that any word of excuse or apology from his mouth would be flabby and ridiculous.

  Rex speaks low. “I am not going to blow the back of your shirt out, you goddam piece of garbage . . . but I am not . . . your . . . brother. “

  Gordon is visibly anguished.

  Rex spits his gum into Gordon’s water glass, grabs Gordon’s shirt in both hands, and knocks him almost onto the table.

  A voice from the kitchen yells, “Out!” and “Outside!”

  And somehow Gordon is pushing ahead of Rex, running, and Rex follows, running, with his head down, breathing thickly through his teeth and nose, leaving the gun on the broken plate. And outside the door, a woman in a Disneyland sweatshirt and jogging pants is in the way, trying to step off the porch, as Rex leaps and has Gordon around the throat from behind and Gordon is trying to shake him and get turned around, and the woman hollers, “Jesus God!” and flattens herself to the board-and-batten outside wall of the diner.

  Gordon squirms backward out of Rex’s reach, and rams the center of his spine—“Unh!”—into the six-by-six post of the small porch entry-way roof. The two men push and shove their way off the porch, among parked cars and trucks, kind of like kids testing each other, checking each other’s bulk through the density of shoulder and elbow. Although bulk is not really the question. Gordon is bigger in bulk. But Rex is immense with rage and some weird humid wide-eyed bafflement.

  Once they are out into the sandy open lot, Rex drives his fist with perfect eloquence into Gordon’s face, seeming to split one eyeball wide, the lid, the brow, made into fissures, and you can almost hear the gloink of the blood letting go, and Rex climbs up one side of Gordon now with a baseball-sized rock and smashes up the other side of Gordon’s face so fast it’s like a hilarious speeded-up old movie, and Gordon drives a fist into Rex’s rock-hard middle, but none of his self-defense is anywhere near as mighty as Rex, coming on and on and on in inexhaustible fury.

  Gordon is down. Rex goes to kicking yet still hangs on to the slick bloody rock, and Gordon’s whole face gleams and streams a surreal paintlike red. Gordon is trying to get up. Once he is actually up on his knees. But Rex comes back again to kick blood from the one remaining unmutilated ear.

  More kicking. More rock. More, more, more. Another minute. Another ten minutes. Another ten minutes. People shrieking and bellering “Stop it!”

  Where are the state police? Where is the sheriff? The game warden? The constable? There’s a good crowd of people bunched around, but no one steps in.

  Rex hears it in his head, but more real than this parking lot—the explosion. The crumpling dusty boom! of the falling wall. Yowls. And boom! boom! boom! Rocket City. And he can smell it. But he can’t see it. He can only see the singular. The one. The target. But now it is Maine, not Pleiku. Not 1968. No mistake. But there has been . . . a mistake. No. No mistake. The threat walks tall.

  The fighting and pummeling are slower. Both men are panting. No cops. The usual wait for law enforcement, Egypt, Maine, not being the hub of anything. Nature prevails. Seems an hour before the first officer’s voice is demanding, “Manners! Manners, Mr. York!” By now, Gordon St. Onge is not recognizable to any who know him. There are the sounds of cop radios and cop feet, the sound of Rex getting handcuffed, though Rex says nothing. There’s just his hard raspy gasping for breath.

  Gordon can only imagine the cold look of Rex’s eyes, the squared shoulders and military bearing not in any way diminished by exhaustion or the humiliation of arrest.

  Gordon cannot see.

  Rex cannot see.

  When Rex is pushed into a cruiser, door slammed, somebody asks, “Was the firearm used to threaten anyone’s life or threaten bodily injury?”

  And someone else asks, “What firearm?”

  A woman’s voice now: “It was a rock.” Her voice is familiar, someone from around town who always wishes Gordon a chipper “Hello!” in the bank or P.O.

  Another siren now, drawing near, another staticky radio and voices that ask questions of other voices.

  Gordon is still on his knees, hands between his thighs. He is beginning to forget what that nice thought was. The nice voice. Who was it? Worse than the blaze of pain in his shoulders, face, gums, tongue, lips, eyes, cheekbones, ears, temples, skull, collarbone, wrists, hands, stomach, hips, is the feeling that something is wrong with the way the day is going. What?

  And now something odd, something in the tissues of his head letting go.

  Too white.

  The dust of gold.

  He just kind of eases his head down, his forehead on the sand, hands still between his thighs.

  Rex.

  There is something stupidly comforting about the cement smell of this place and its hollowness. Its dry heat. They are talking to him, instructing, giving him something to wear.

  Between times, when he is waiting for another one of them, with more that they want him to do, he thinks about God. He tries to imagine God’s voice, if God had a real voice. The voice would be calm and instructive. Do this. Do that. God is never angry. Rex knows this. Unlike, for instance, Doc, who would tell you about an eye for an eye. Yeah, sure, God would feel surprise at times. And fatherly-type anger. But nothing like revenge. And never anything like flipping out.

  Rex can’t imagine life in the coming weeks, years. In a place like this, he can’t recognize himself. Richard York no longer exists. He thinks of himself, the way he was before today, not so much as a being, but as a place. And his people. And the way he handled things. He was proud of that. Before today.

  They told him Gordon is dead, but he’s pretty sure they are making that up to break him. He knows how they work. They want him to bust into tears and tell them his life’s story.

  His pal, Gordon. His daughter, Glory. All of it.

  Gordo
n. Yeah.

  Rex has always liked to think of those moments in early television when spilled milk whooshed up back into the bottle, when a broken dish snapped back into a seamless glossy whole. Hey, and remember when the lady used to smile into her dish . . . and you’d see her face in the dish smiling about how great a job her dish soap did. And in real life too. His mother and father were smiling. They got along. There was a lotta years there where he never knew how nasty life can get. His life then, it was just like on TV . . . yeah, it really was.

  Secret Agent Jane speaks.

  The path is so easy to find. Sometimes woods are okay. You get used to woods after a while. Sort of. I go along in a beautiful sexy way in case somebody in the trees is spying on me. Maybe Mickey. But really probably not. He is with some guys working to make their shortwave radio, which they love. They say it will be for “patriot news” when it is finally fixed. Butchie who lives here says soon the only news will be like on horsebacks. This is way weird.

  The path gets steepish here and my new moccasins make scruffs, and then acorns roll and there are hard red berries growing in a plant, and once I saw here some white ones with black dots like small eyeballs. Everybody says don’t eat the eyeball ones, they are poison. Ha-ha! Who would eat a thing that looked like an eyeball anyway?

  Here is a tiny tree cone. So tiny. So cute. I hold it a minute. Mickey is kind of in the air. Everything feels Mickeyish and wonderful and speedy and leafish and bright.

  Now I’m walking in a sunny place of shriveled flowers, but some flowers deep down are still alive and bugs are singing with their legs. This sound is pretty. But also it is sad and autumnish inside you. Most bugs have died in frost. Only these lonely ones now.

  The path goes back in the woods and up along a steep part again. A lot of rocks and moss stuff. A lot of up up up in a mountainish way.

 

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