Читать книгу The Recipe for Revolution - Carolyn Chute - Страница 15

SEPTEMBER

The voice of Mammon speaks.

For the preservation of this edifice that holds high what is fine and fair, there can be no being too hard on the threat.

The Apparatus speaks.

O masters! O lords and ladies of national and transnational finance, State Department, Pentagon, big media, and other vast grasps. You, the majestics of boardrooms, deeper rooms, private jets, mists, seashores, and “lost” memos; lords of strategic worth; gods of this universe! I am your whip, your bulwark, your sword, your Weedwhacker. Proud to serve you.

Duotron Lindsey International’s CEO Bruce Hummer slitting mail open at his desk, tugs out a grayish newsprint article from Maine, sent by an acquaintance who knows of his summer property up there on the coast.

He leans back, reads. It’s a full three-page, dated feature including photos. Written about wacky people. Very strange. He reads every word. And he stares at and into a face staring back into his brains from a blur of moving and monsterific merry-go-round “horses.” It’s the face of Gordon St. Onge.

From a future time, Claire St. Onge speaks.

This story is a noisy one, my own voice a merest chirp in the roar. But I can say without the vulgarity of pride that though many voices will wrench this story of him into a confusing and grainy spectacle, I am more than any of them your true tour guide.

Delivered.

He is alone down at the old farmplace by the tar road called Heart’s Content Road, as picturesque as its name implies, especially fifteen years ago, when it was still Swett’s Pond Road, picturesque with a capital P.

It is the house and 920 acres where he grew up, an only child, overly adored, and this land, never worked in those years, no tilling, no grazing, just croquet, while the fields were kept mowed by his papa and a neighbor’s borrowed tractor. No barn. That burned long ago. But there are still the old shedways. There is still the ell kitchen, the porch with lathed columns that stand out white in the night from the morose hair-thin glow of the quarter moon. Inside there is still that old dry smell, a house of generations of solemn ghosts.

Yes, it is dark outside now. And inside, too, but for the anemic, yes, thin, single fluorescent old tube light over one of his desks in the officey part of the cluttered kitchen made by taking out the old pantry shed wall. Such thrifty light gives his hands and the opened Fedco catalog the same cold color. He is almost forty and uses old-man reading glasses. He doesn’t flip through this catalog but stares into its depths, Frostbite, Wolf River, Yellow Bellflower, Zestar. He positions the words Monroe Sweet centrally within his entire being, the apple of memory, nearly unbelieved, his Tante Ida’s “pink pies.” Panoramic with longing this great big memory is because he was allowed by his mother Marian to visit Tante Ida and other of his father’s people only ONCE.

He supposes this Aroostook apple will thrive here in Oxford County, but if he invites a couple of these trees into the Settlement orchards, to thrust the solidity of the pink-flesh apple itself into the present, to give it life again in the now, would it not transform the fruit to unremarkability? Death to the spell of memory, deeper in the grave Tante Ida! Her eyes, as black and starry as his papa Guillaume’s, would finally close.

So lifting from the page to the next, his eyes behind the reading glasses readjust. Eyes pale green in a stewed cabbage way, and dark lashes. Not eyes of bird-of-prey-yellowy-pale nor wolf pale. Just a mixed ancestry pale, where there was maybe some jumping of the fence, those silent hearts and peckers that never speak in the records of town halls or in letters in a trunk . . . this dissonance of history’s beds and tall-grass fucking have filled the warm ponds of his eyes with a green of forbearance. And a Tourette’s-like flinch.

He spreads his hand upon the English morello cherry, a huge hand because he is a giant guy as seen by the average. Six-foot-five he is said to be. Seems he is feeling the heartbeat of the page, the heat of this tree where cherries will be hurled into Bonnie Loo’s pies, Bonnie Loo the star cook of the Settlement, Bonnie Loo of the present moment, not twinkling with the magic of death and boyhood memory, Bonnie Loo who can cut you down with her orange-brown eyes and the long considering way she lets out lungs full of cigarette smoke. He sees her clearly the last time she looked at him, three hours ago. His neck muscles tighten, a certain kind of fear.

There are headlights on the wall. He leaves the catalog open flat in the weary light and pushes back the wheeled office chair, pockets the reading glasses, stretches.

Going out onto the old piazza he sees that it is a van and no one is getting out yet. Engine running. Headlights still blazing upon the ell of the house, blazing at him.

As he steps outside he buttons the top button of his shirt and trudges straight into the light, digging into the graying chin of his short dark beard.

Van door opens. “Gordie . . . hey . . . I’m sorry.”

The voice sounds familiar in a way that makes his head break apart and swarm, searching for which decade it hurtles at him from. Not as far back as Tante Ida’s pink pies.

The van is patchy-looking and has a sorry-sounding skip to the engine. The guy still has a ponytail, though he’s looking a bit thin on top. Long skinny jaw. Professional-class teeth. No beard. A laugh like hiccups, like Goofy, the big cartoon dog.

Jack Holmes. Gordon embraces him. Jack laughs. “We got lost and rode all over hell or I’d have been here earlier. Then for a second, I thought no one was here. I thought maybe you sold this place and moved up back with the others. With your . . . uh . . . harem.” He laughs.

Jack Holmes, yes. One of those guys who started out in law school, headed for “success,” then descended into social work and educational newsletter stuff, sporadically funded statehouse lobbying for ridiculous things like support for prisoners’ rights, which don’t exist, and the rights of all races of ex-cons, minimum wagers of all races, welfare recipients of all races, animals, trees, clean water, and breathable air. So Jack Holmes pitched “success” overboard. And yes, the descent has continued, Gordon suspects, eyeing the mottled van.

Gordon stands now with his hands in his pockets, smiling funnyish. “Well, it’s good to see you. You’re looking good for an old warrior on the losing side. Howzit goin’? I mean personally.”

“Gordie, I don’t have a personal life,” Jack says with his little hiccupy laugh. Then he grinds his fists into his sides. “Cold. Feels like a frost. Shit, you’d think this was the Alps. The difference in the weather here is mighty noticeable.”

“Come in then.”

The guy turns back to the van, kind of hops over to the door, which is still hanging open, wiggles a finger for Gordon to come. Then stops, turns with his back to the van, and says, “We need to talk. I want you to meet these people. You can’t get the picture unless you . . . see the picture, okay? These are neighbors of mine. You remember Aaron Rosenthal?”

“Yep.”

“Well, I heard somethin’ . . . from the grapevine . . . that you . . . well, tell me if it’s not true . . . but I heard you took in a kid . . . an orphan of the drug war. The newsworthy dangerous-as-the-day-is-long Lisa Meserve, her little girl?”

Gordon stares into his eyes, says nothing, but wiggles both eyebrows.

“Okay, I thought so. Well, Aaron, he—it’s bad news. You probably heard he went to federal prison.”

Gordon lowers his eyes.

“In fact, Aaron doesn’t exist anymore. He, ah, killed himself in prison . . . down in Georgia. He uh . . . beat himself to death.” He laughs his burbly laugh.

Gordon looks back into Jack’s face. He says without expression, “Pretty funny.” Then the Tourette’s flinch.

“Real funny. And neat. I mean, it would take a certain gift, wouldn’t you say?”

Gordon nods.

Jack hugs himself now, gets a shiver. “Jesus, it feels like snow.” He looks up. “Well, anyway, Aaron had that place over in Norridgewock . . . nice chunk of land . . . it was actually his great-aunt’s . . . she left it to him . . . but just this little bungalow . . . I mean a big dog couldn’t turn around in it, but, man, there was land. Seventy acres. Pretty spot. You know, something somebody would want to grab from a person too poor to finance a team of lawyers. Well, Aaron’s wife dies, Michele. You didn’t know her. She was after the days. She died of breast cancer, age of thirtysomething. And guess what. There’s two kids . . .”

Gordon’s eyes leave Jack’s face and slide over to the van. Then back to Jack’s eyes.

“. . . then he marries Sarah,† who adopts his kids legal smeagle. You know Aaron, attuned to details. He might have had too many interests but you can’t deny his clearheaded perfectionism. I mean, he was a complex man. And life goes on. Sarah started a little kennel. Raised Dobies. And, well, you know Aaron had a . . . green thumb . . . just enjoyed organic farming and . . . and . . . marijuana retailing. You know Aaron . . . wouldn’t hurt a soul . . . no stealing, no drunk driving, a million friends, a million customers . . . and one enemy . . . that’s all it takes is one enemy . . . a spy or somebody mad at you and their finger dialing the drug war hotline . . . one call. In this case, it was a spy.” He lowers his voice. Jerks his thumb toward the darkness beyond the open van door. “These guys have seen action, Gordie.” Shakes his head. No laugh this time. “They broke her arm. Blinded and loosened one eye.” Points at the van. “Had the kids in foster homes . . . two different ones, for two years.” Jack jerks his thumb toward the van again.

“And the narcs grabbed their house and land,” says Gordon, folding his arms across his chest.

Jack snorts. “You psychic?” He snorts again. “Yeah, the usual. A great tradition. Like the cavalry and the surveyors behind them riding in to save the day . . . from those goddamn hostiles . . . yep, very American tradition. Oily as clockworks.” He opens his palm on the van roof. “Come look here and see what’s been made homeless, roaming from one relative’s place to another. No one wants them. Though of course the DHS would steal the kids again if she hadn’t lost their hounds in the dust. It’s one of the DHS rules . . . you can’t move a lot.”

Gordon steps closer, looks inside. A woman about forty with straight white-blond hair and dark roots, haggard face, her gray eyes on him. Neither eye looks very “loose” but she has an expression like a dog that wants to rip out his throat, like a dog that’s been poked and poked and kicked and kicked and kicked again. Her face is the color of ice. Her shoulders are small. She’s bunched up in a big sweater but she still looks cold, even with the heater blasting away and the engine running.

Two preteen or early teen kids. Painfully beautiful faces. Thick blond brushy haircuts, deep Jewish eyes, both sitting up perfectly straight like two bright mushrooms that have appeared under a dark damp porch. He remembers Aaron so well now, ever alert. Aaron, always joking. The kind of jokes that tried to be funny but his sense of irony was usually poorly timed. But you laughed because Aaron was sometimes a little too sad. You wanted to stand between him and that blue-tinged zone. Maybe he did beat himself to death.

“Hey,” Gordon says to the woman.

She stares at him, looks him over. Her mouth opens as if to snarl. She’s missing a tooth. She says, “Hey.”

Jack whispers, “You want them, don’t you?”

Gordon looks again into the fierce weary eyes of the woman and then backs out of the van doorway, then nudges a finger along down one side of his mustache. “For how long?”

“Forever, I guess.”

Benedicta is delivered. Two nights later, a lilac-color dusk and the songbugs creaking thunderously in the tall grasses and mountainy miles of foliage.

Gordon steps off the porch of the old gray farmplace with intentions of heading up to the Settlement along the woodsy path, a shortcut with a little bridge and large, sort of fantasy trees leaning in. Tonight is his night with Misty in her cottage with her cats who all despise him, his body usually occupying the best of Misty’s sunporch chairs as he and she gab about their day. And then he of course always takes up most of the bed. For the cats he doesn’t even make an effort. No invitations to his lap. No stroking them to set off purrs. Also he groans in his sleep and sleepwalks corpselike, which causes all the tails to flick in disdain.

Now, just as he takes a deep breath of the evening, he sees someone standing by the monster ash tree in the sandy lot next to the road, a small elderly person with a two-fisted grip on a leatherlike pocketbook bigger than a bread box. He veers in her direction. There is no parked car and he only vaguely recalls a vehicle slowing down a half hour ago, maybe stopping on the tar road, maybe a thump that would be a slammed door, but he was upstairs washing up.

He can see that the old person is smiling up at him and that she wears no glasses. Her eyes are possibly blue, hard to tell in the flagging light. In his deep big-guy voice, he asks, “You looking for me?”

Her hair isn’t white but an ashy light brown with a neglected perm, the hair jaw-length and listless, but thick and combed with a nice part on the side. She wears a dark button-up sweater, jeans, sneakers. Her nose isn’t small, snoutlike, or curt. Maybe once she was quite handsome. She has been nodding her head to his question, her eyes wide and seeming to show some sense of humor about the moment.

He has a sinking feeling, knowing someone has dumped her off. The way people sometimes dump off boxes of baby rabbits or, once in a while, a pup.

“Well,” says he. “Let’s go up where all the hot corn muffins are and get the world by the tail.”

Once they start up the wooded shortcut, he fumbles for the small flashlight hooked to his belt along with his batch of keys. She isn’t talking. She must be fuzzy of mind. He reaches for her hand as they come upon the rooty part of the trail. He thinks about the aspirin bottle he keeps at all times in a pocket but just keeps on swishing the light through the overbearing purple dusk inside the crackling-underfoot tunnel of old trees.

On a different evening. Alone with fifteen-year-old Seavey Road neighbor girl Brianna Vandermast who visits a lot.

She stands so erect and easy by the scarred dark table in the farmhouse dining room, the old blue-with-white-polka-dots wallpaper Gordon’s mother herself pasted up once upon a time. How musty-cool this room is but the cherry-pink ceramic cherub in the corner hutch cabinet looks overheated.

Bree spreads her ringless hand on the thick, stapled document lying amid three empty coffee mugs on the long leafed table. She asks, “What is this?”

He is just now entering the room with two more mugs, these with maple milk in them, one for her, one for him. His eyes widen. “Oh that. Well, in this world there’s your Recipe. Then there’s their Recipe.”

Her voice has always had a smoky edge. “Project Megiddo, it says. It’s the FBI. But what are you doing with it?” She giggles.

He positions the two brimming mugs on the table. He glances at her face, which is purposely hidden by squiggles and twists of shining young-girl hair, perfectly orange hair, her face deformed by whatever it was that went wrong when she was the size of a thumb . . . or earlier . . . maybe when she was a mere idea . . . though who could imagine Bree, her honey-color eyes set apart like a funhouse mirror image and her mind that to him once seemed shy, nervous, or something . . . but, no, he is beginning to understand that she is not nervous of anything. He bets that the coil of her brain is radiating far more redly than her hair.

He explains, “Everybody has a copy of that thing. It’s not top secret. It was issued to fire departments, cops, EMTs. Rex‡ . . . you know . . . he’s with the volunteer fire crowd.”

“I figured. Cuz of the red light on the dash in his pickup,” she says in a warm way.

He grunts. “Richard York. He’s just like you. He loves to share. He’s probably churned out half a million copies of that report.”

She giggles.

“Drink some of your ambrosia, Athena,” he chuckles, pushes her mug easy-careful across the table toward her hand, which is, yes, ringless, but speckled and dashed with three shades of muscley purple, one shade of red, one splotch of yellow ocher.

She reads aloud: “The attached analysis, entitled Project Megiddo, is an FBI strategic assessment of the potential for domestic terrorism in the United States undertaken in anticipation of or response to the arrival of the new millennium.” She doesn’t look into his face square-on. She never does. But her eyes drift toward his shoulder, his work shirt, and his Sherpa-lined vest. “Have you read this . . . all of it?” She flips through, pausing, blinking.

Gordon speaks in a cartoony play-voice, “If we is to hassle Mr. York about reading our stuff, it’s only fair we reads his.”

She tsks. “Looks like the FBI wants to scare everybody, huh?”

He says nothing. The expression across his dark-lashed eyes is smirky. His cowlicked hair adds greatly to his appearance of What? Me worry? though “weary” is a more accurate word.

But her voice becomes almost academic and there, see her touch her chin with a musing finger. “I mean . . . their language is . . . well, you know, Poeish. You can hear funereal music in the background. I mean . . . it’s funny . . . but not funny. Cuzzz they are trying to make the militia movement guys into something . . . terrorists.” She giggles. “I mean it’s not funny . . . but they sound so . . . like . . . bad actors in . . . well, like Joe Friday!” She hiccups with laughter.

He pulls out a chair and sits with a tired groan.

“America needs to be divided,” she says. “Divided we fall. That’s it in a nutshell. We . . . the little guys. Meanwhile, these . . . these cops or whatever they are . . . they get paid for being dangerous and . . . and silly.” She flips the top page, lets it drop. “I hate to see people be such suckers. There’s got to be a way to outsmart a bunch of funny cops.” She snorts.

“So,” says he, “I saw where the print shop did up about two hundred more of your Abominable Hairy Patriot flyers. What are you going to do with those?”

She giggles. Guiltily. She’s aware of the ethic of thrift Gordon stands firmly on, so she might be feeling she has wronged him? “Oh . . . like, we’ve been passing them out, around. Bulletin board at the town office and IGA. Telephone poles. Windshield wipers.”

“You and your wicked comrades from the Socrates group, right?”

She hesitates, then says lushly, “Sure. Comrades. Which reminds me . . .” She steps around one of his towers of books, a plastic crate of oak tag files, and a couple of satchels of yet-to-be-answered “fan mail” to the nearest darkening window. She keeps her back presented to him. Always her back (and perfect bottom). Always her profile (within the veil of her long hair). Never, never square on. She will face everybody but him, even though he and she have been together so much this summer, perfecting the three versions of The Recipe for Revolution. Is he wronging her to feel suspicious . . . of . . . something? That she is scheming things that she is too young to realize are too hot to handle?

Some here call her gifted, her art, her welter of calligraphy, her way of leading the other girls around by the nose. But she is not sixteen yet. She still believes that monsters can be tamed by princesses, that the world beyond the Settlement gate can be fixed.

She tells him, “I reached the people I told you about . . . the . . . leftists. The ones with the folk school project, the ones who printed that great brochure on democracy versus corporate power.”

He is suddenly and deeply silent.

“They said it would be their pleasure to come,” she adds.

All at once he slurps and sucks and splutters and slobbers away at the edge of his mug of maple milk, the syrup settled languidly at the bottom, then with a red bandanna from his pants pocket, cleans his heavy dark mustache like a cat, defiantly and precisely. And still he offers no words. Runs his tongue over his teeth, getting more mileage out of the maple.

She steps back and turns toward the corner hutch.

One of his eyes tends to widen when he’s overawed by life, the other eye narrowing and flinching. This is happening now. “You send them our Recipe? I mean your Recipe. You are its mastermind,” says he.

“All three versions, yes, which include the one-page flyer.” She giggles. She is reaching to touch one of the pink cherub’s wings. Now his eyes swipe down over the whole of her. Logger girl. Yes, she really does work in the woods with her father and brothers. Often she has turned up at the Settlement for the East Parlor Socrates nights covered in sawdust, smeared with bar and chain oil and the sour grease of the machinery.

He has seen artwork by her, on her passions: woods, sky, work. Her brush refuses to sit, stay, lie down, and happily throws 8.5-magnitude seismographic cracks in all that’s revered.

Yes, the wide slow sway of her hips makes her, in spite of her face, a sexy girl. And yes, she is only fifteen. And he is more tired by the minute and also curious about her stopping in tonight, almost always another hint for him to save the world, always the romanticized plunge into the chasm, like Malcolm X or Emiliano Zapata or Big Bill Haywood. Oh, to be fifteen and foolish, thinking every landing to be so dreamy, so soft, so green!

“Well,” says he. “Keep me posted on when these new friends of yours plan to ride into town.”

She strokes the cherub’s other wing. She’s a tall girl. Almost six feet. He’s a tall man. Six-five. He realizes how at times when he’s near her, she and he seem of a species apart from most Settlementers . . . except his oldest sons and daughters and then his wife Bonnie Loo, who by virtue of the Bean family legacy, is of rugged and towering stature, too.

He is grateful to be sitting down. He’s been up since four. His headache is there right where it always is and basketball-sized. He leans back in the old dining room chair. He watches Bree carefully.

She speaks in a most dreamy way, “What kind of mind believed in wings?” She has, obviously, no interest in her portion of the maple milk.

Gordon says huskily, “Millions still believe in angels. And pregnant virgins. And kings visiting Bethlehem on camels that must be turbo camels to make such good time from North Africa . . . uh . . . . hours after the babe hit the hay. According to Christmas cards.”

She is a bit more in profile to him now, no response to his camel wisecrack, and withdraws her hand from the rigid pink wing, though her fingers are still in the cherub’s personal space. “I guess you’d need wings to flap up to heaven.” She touches without hesitation the cherub’s bright penis, then declares with a release of held breath, “Heaven is on earth.”

The last gooey swig of what’s in Gordon’s mug goes down. He reaches for her full cup, draws it to himself.

Speaking from the future, Claire St. Onge remembers some things.

It changed so much about our lives at the Settlement. That Record Sun feature. And all the “wire” pieces and talk-show fervor that came on its heels. We could never hide anything again and we had plenty to hide, all that which made up Gordon’s humanity. He was stood on a stage now. He was cut into “bytes,” a collage for the titillation of America. All of us at the Settlement were part of that collage, like some sort of jokey frat-boy art.

But our gardens wagged in the rains, simmered in the sun, and our children continued to be vivacious. And our elderly elders wore their invisible crowns, chin up. At times we could pretend nothing had changed.

When I get a minute, I’ll tell you a little about the reporter who was the first to crash into our lives . . . the lovely and fox-cunning Ivy Morelli of the Record Sun. Bonnie Loo hissed that she was a bitch and a cunt, but to me she seemed just another vulnerable sticky soul snagged by our towering king of the Settlement hearth.

The voice of Mammon considers.

This glowing growing of free exchange, these acquisitions, accumulations, these deserved accretions, the flow, as unencumbered as the sea, is the rock of civilization. It is immoral not to defend it!

The Apparatus speaks.

Overlords and overladies of the free world! You rang? I bend. Gladly.

There is no weight to your trillions, once the currency of evergreen and gold, now just the sheen of the scrolling screen, your gains mounting taller than the twin towers, those dispensable giraffes that soon will go down in the hot dust free fall of our ingenious brew of delicacies. You rang? At your service! Proud to serve! Kabooooom!

No need to concern yourselves with that which walks on billions of legs, the restless, enraged, suspicious, unpacific folk of the homeland and beyond, such flesh the weight of rubble. At your service! I will stun them, freeze them solid, with precision, the inexhaustible constant constant constant televised flutter of that hot dust and fire and live bodies dropping like apples from a cloud-tall tree. But also I will arrange smaller terrors, these “lone” gunmen and bomb men of and on the busy streets, schools, movie houses, even church! Mosques! Whatever!

Proud to serve you, gods and goddesses of the global exchanges, I give you the full and juicy terror of this nation and more, oh, to keep that terror in high red, a crescendo like Ravel’s Bolero, like a thumping bed, yet one more mass shooting by a dog-toothed depressed non-man “loner,” another bang! bang!, another sprawled child and choking-on-her-tears mother, today and tomorrow, bang! pop! boom! You rang? Oh, yes, I am proud to serve.

But for now, for this warm-up before the truly BIG DAY of box-cutter magic, O lords, O ladies, in my ever-resolute service, I am soon ready to give you this lunatic, armed and dangerous, weird-for-blood spectral signifier of what all good Americans abhor, that god of a little dot on the map of Maine: Guillaume St. Onge. Take him from my palm.

† Don’t forget the character list at the back of the book.

‡ Don’t forget the character list at the back of the book.