Читать книгу The Recipe for Revolution - Carolyn Chute - Страница 19

Portland International jetport. Settlement people waiting for Death Row Friendship Committee’s return flight from Texas.

Foggy. Flights out of Boston can’t get off the ground. And none are lifting off from here. Paul and Jacquie Lessard and Rick Crosman trudge off to the airport food vendor by the escalator to buy frozen yogurts. Nathan Knapp has gone to find a men’s room. Gordon St. Onge stands at the big plate-glass window looking out into the dark fog. Arms folded over the chest of his short black-and-red wool Sherpa-lined vest. Plastic billed cap (Bean’s Logging and Pulp) low over his eyes. The graying chin of his short beard looks more electric than the overhead fluorescents. A lot of people have been staring at him. They actually stop in their tracks and gaze, the way some would read graffiti on a turnpike overpass.

A moment ago, someone actually asked, “Are you Gordon St. Onge?” Some whisper and stare. But all in all, they let him be.

He hunches deeper into his vest and layers of shirts. It’s hot as hell in here. Dry heat. He is dripping under his clothes but can’t get the nerve up to take off his wool vest and outer shirt. He feels big and stupid and bare enough. He does not feel like a “prophet” or a “leader,” as some have called him. He feels weird in these kinds of places.

A man steps up beside him at the plate glass, looking out. The man is of average height. A confident man. Ultra confident. Gordon reads this right away. A man, Gordon thinks, who might gauge your value by your financial portfolio, not by the weight of your soul. This guy is not dressed like a politician or an attorney on the go but he does, indeed, move like one. He wears an olive-colored camp shirt with patch pockets and faded and worn but not witheringly ragged jeans. Gordon sees a sport jacket on the plastic seat the man has just been sitting in. No valise. No computer, such as so many carry now. Not even an overnight bag. If you leave your carry-on unattended these days, it will be considered a bomb by airport authorities, and confiscated. Then your valise or satchel will be somewhat detonated. And maybe you will be mercilessly grilled.***** Gordon looks into the guy’s face. He is nearly a Rex York look-alike. Maybe it is not an attorney’s bearing, maybe military. But what is the difference?

The guy looks at his watch. It has a breathless little hairlike gold second hand, sweeping away the moments, unlike Rex’s watch face, which is black and complicated and manly and cluttered with life­saving outdoorsy data.

Gordon looks back out at the fog.

The man speaks. “Gordon St. Onge, we met once. Mutual friends . . . Morse and Janet Weymouth, at their home . . . a few years ago.”

Gordon seriously studies his face, Rex’s face. Rex’s age. Late forties, early fifties. But the mustache is trimmer, doesn’t crawl down along the jaws. And the eyes are not pale and steely like Rex’s but a boggy brown-green. And rather warm. And the voice has a touch of Deep South so that the word “at” is pronounced “ay-hat” and “friends” is “frey-yends,” single syllables made sensuous and sludgy, though Gordon has heard southern accents less diluted than this. This guy’s words are wrenched by so much world travel and so many crowds but still his subtle drawl has its beguilement.

Someone passing by is now staring just as hard at this man as others have been staring at Gordon.

Now he puts his hand out and Gordon puts his hand out and both hands lock hard. “Bruce Hummer,” the man says.

Gordon nods. “I . . . ah—”

“It was a long time ago,” the guy says with a chuckle. “Neither of us was infamous then.”

Gordon squints, blinks. He thinks the guy does seem familiar, but not from any of Janet and Morse’s dinner parties. It’s the name, Bruce Hummer.

The guy offers no more priming of Gordon’s memory, just says, “Fog’s going to keep a lot of people stranded for the day. I’m thinking of renting a car and driving down to beautiful fog-free New York.”

Not just his accent but the disciplined march of his phrases is mesmerizing.

Gordon is starting to really feel the weight of the airport’s overheatedness.

For a couple of minutes they discuss the fog. And they agree that airport architecture does not fall into any category of art. Bruce snickers, “Even a pipe organ booming away on Bach, lighted candles in crystal chandeliers, lovely gals in rustling skirts, gents in capes bowing or clip-clopping by on white stallions couldn’t beef up the ambience in one of these vinyl caverns.” They both chortle grimly.

Bruce Hummer asks Gordon questions. Gordon, not likely to ask a stranger questions, just dutifully answers the questions asked of him. “Family coming back from Texas,” and “I saw her earlier this month.” Then a wink, “She looks great in blue.” He swallows. “But Morse. Not great. Not good.”

Bruce presses his hands to the plate glass, palms flat, fingers spread, a heaviness creeping into his soft drawl. “Morse is mortal, it turns out.”

Gordon runs some fingers preeningly down one side of his own mustache, thinking he needs to be drunk.

The stranger smiles as he also seems to have come three steps closer. “Janet said your kids are all sharp as tacks.”

Gordon groans with the Dumond House memory fluttering and flickering panoramically.

Bruce is now telling of a piece of property he owns up on the coast, near Bar Harbor, oceanfront. His eyes flick down over Gordon’s red-and-black plaid wool vest then back to his face, that kind of peacocky dark and gray beard with the intense, uncertain pale eyes in dark lashes. Not Hollywood handsome nor would Manhattan give the time of day to such a visage. But in a mountain hollow, Bruce doesn’t doubt, this Guillaume St. Onge is the sun, the moon, and the stars to those many and several hearts that rumor has it, and media has it, are all his.

Bruce confides, “Lina and I had a small place built there but we never used it. I mean never. Not together. I just came from there now. It’s my self-inflicted solitary confinement. Just me and the chipmunks. And acorns coming down.” His closed-mouth smile is a long-lasting scribbled line of sorrow. He squeezes his eyes shut. “Lotta acorns.” Opens his eyes in a goggly way. “Why so many?”

Gordon says, “Well, it’s—”

Bruce interrupts, “I am proud to be in the midst of a divorce that lacks vengeance. Rare, mind you. Divorces in my world are not usually so.” He is close enough now that he grasps Gordon’s upper arm. “My world, sir . . . is . . . afire with opportunities.” Pause for effect. “And vengeance. Even between dearly beloveds. Your world, my sources tell me, is in an enviable limbo. An enviable failure. Opportunities for you all are just . . . what? . . . bales of hay and buckets of milk?”

Gordon’s Tourette’s-like eye-flinch is getting up some velocity.

“I can tell, Gordon, that you don’t stay abreast of certain kinds of minutiae . . . for instance, the Wall Street Journal, with its little sketched cameo portraits . . . or even television, yes . . . the sound bytes, the artful press conferences starring individuals who . . . have . . . well . . . hey! Hear this. One of my dreams a few nights ago was about you.” In a silky one-piece motion the guy draws a pen from his chest pocket, a ballpoint, slim, silver. He smiles yet again. His smile, like his motions, like his voice, like the costly pen, is his suit of armor, hushy and recondite, made differently than for horseback jousting, made for this grand epoch where killers and the killed seldom meet.

He says to Gordon, “You were on a bridge but it was also inside a room. That’s all. The rest is fuzzy. But hey . . . what a coincidence.” Now a business card materializes. He writes on the back, presses it into Gordon’s hand. The print of the card informs Gordon that Bruce Hummer is Chief Executive Officer of Duotron Lindsey International. What Bruce handwrote on the other side is: Janet’s and Morse’s friend.

Gordon seizes in the dead center of his mind’s eye the word friend exactly written in that silky black ink. He is mulling over how much hope Morse Weymouth had placed in shareholder activism. Morse called it democracy, sickeningly true since pencils and US election ballots are as fairy dust in a four-year-old’s storybook. Gordon holds his breath. The new knowledge that Morse has been chummy with the CEO of Duotron Lindsey, the war weapons manufacturing giant, who no doubt has received those personal phone calls of Janet’s, her hushy wrist-grasping voice calling “Bruce” by name and this man’s velvet-throated devilishly seductive accent answering, sickens Gordon. He has known the Weymouths forever. His mother Marian approves of them, of course, in her lifetime endeavor to wear status like a warm coat against ice and snow. But Gordon has . . . yes . . . has loved the Weymouths . . . as human beings . . . as very special human persons. And now what? Is it that all those in the upper classes just suffer too much from politeness? Or do they see each other across a crowded room and fly to each other’s arms . . . figuratively speaking . . . in order to eat well, drink well, and at times satiate themselves in meaningful pretend combat? For they are all winners in the big picture . . . like lions dining on the bleeding spoils, they cuff one another, but their only true enemy is the great mass of human antelopes that is alive only to lie still while being chewed on. In reality this balance of humanity is kept alive only to serve.

He thinks of Morse’s legislative battles. Tinkering at the edges of the edifice but never raising his voice to the ideology of masters over slaves, never sounding off with too much of the belly and the balls. Okay, not always well-mannered, okay, but not one word ever about even a fleeting wish to end slavery. Oh, they say slavery ended. Horseshit. The world writhes in slavery. And of course it’s the nature of the human species . . . it will always be so. In one shape or another it will go on and on and on.

If only Morse had wept for the slave, keened wetly, held the slave in daily awe, even just spoken aloud of the slave.

Maybe Morse never gave a fuck about slaves. Only the “environment” mattered.

And Janet? Does she privately grieve for those chained to debt, cursed by meekness, swept from their homelands, flash-frozen (figuratively speaking), and packed into computer work cubicles, phone marketing cubicles, fellerbunchers, assembly lines, and cell blocks?

He shivers to see the Weymouths in this new dark light. He swallows hard, hotter and hotter in his wool.

Bruce is right there. His expression is odd, like that of someone who sees a ghost or maybe a flying saucer but knows better than to let on. He, Bruce, holds up a hand, a traffic cop’s Stop! and says, “So, no TV or Internet at your compound?”

Gordon stands soldier-straight and grunts, “If I found a TV on the property, I’d order it to go before the firing squad.”

Bruce laughs, withdrawing his hand, looks down the rows of plastic chairs to the X-ray-equipped entrance of this bright waiting area. He turns to Gordon again. He sucks in his breath, tightens his stomach, a fit-looking man, like Rex, but, yes, different from Rex. “I know you, Gordon . . . your politics, your . . . habits. I’ve been following you in the papers . . . and the Internet has more on you than on George Washington. Oh, these sources screw up but certain essences remain. You’ve moved the masses.” He stares straight as the path of light into Gordon’s eyes. “That’s a dangerous gift.”

Gordon’s eyes don’t flinch Tourette’s-ishly but his dark mustache flickers. He hears the airport announcements, which are staticky. He sees discouraged faces of those fogged-in passengers, sitting, standing, milling. He believes somebody has turned the heat up in the demon furnaces under this temple of sacrifice where people are ferried to and from the skies, to and from other realms, nearer and nearer to civilization’s implosion. His mind bounces. He says to his new friend, “They say it’s another two hours before any planes in Boston will get off the ground. That’s where my people’s connection is. And no flights from here. I’ve got cider in my truck. Let’s go out there and sit awhile in the pretty parking garage and shoot the shit and get shit-faced.”

Bruce, with a grin, snatches up his jacket and follows Gordon on a search to find the other Settlement people so they can be told of this plan, minus the cider part. No introductions are made with these quiet frozen-yogurt–eating people.

The gray area.

Bruce twists around and hangs his sport jacket on the gun rack that is against the cab window behind his head, then, with a hand spread on each thigh of his washed-out jeans, watches Gordon pouring the clear-as-vodka cider from a plastic milk jug into two Settlement-made pottery mugs. Bruce’s mug has pink painted hearts and someone’s initials scratched into the pottery. Gordon’s mug has what might be squid and octopuses, or might be girls with flowing hair. And initials. Very homey. Very well-equipped truck, ha ha. But also the cab smells of the damp day and of greasy tools in tin boxes on the floorboards under his, Bruce’s, feet. And there’s a goaty stink, maybe the striped blanket spread across the whole bench seat, or something under the seat, or maybe it’s Gordon’s plaid vest, which lies now between them. There’s the gray hollow smell of the parking garage floating in at the open windows.

And maybe there is a smell to risk, such as defying the law against riding with an open container of alcohol while you’re not a good pal of the state’s attorney general, for instance. Although Bruce wouldn’t venture many bets on that one, the whole Depaolo clan being pretty well dug in. But there are hazards Guillaume “Gordon” St. Onge is known to mess with; are they worth the consequences, where both roads of the fork lead to ruin? To being roasted?!! And yet some say he is an ultracautious man, stiff with fears and guttering courage, other than his in extremis philosophies. And isn’t there a kind of yellow-gray stink to the end of the universe, where you look at the diagram on the last door and it says, “You are here.”

Risk interests Bruce more these days. Veritable risk. Accelerating personal risk. In his world his job is to stack those sandbags against the storm. Have his people be shoulder to shoulder with the writers of bills, to spurn regulations. Jeopardy of any stripe, even competition of any species, must be muscled to the ground, fairly or unfairly. Media friends must be whispered to. Handcuff them with treasure. Protesters must be cordoned off into back alleys or shackled and toted away from the awful scene. One can steer one’s perfect corporate ship only under sweet skies and smiling waters.

Yes, the ship is unassailable. But Bruce himself? He has decided that the pills are too girlie a way to go. Now on his shopping list is nylon rope. He is getting closer to the YOU ARE HERE door. This little party with St. Onge is only a hiccup in the velocity, no worse than the fog on the runways and in New England skies. He sighs full-chested deep.

Gordon, meanwhile, has been seeing with glances that Bruce’s hair has started thinning at the temples in the same way Rex York’s hair has. Rex, his “brother.” The same dark brown with very little gray. And the mustache, which erases boyishness from any face, giving canniness and tenor to the eyes.

Sneak-peeks at Bruce’s hands show slim straight fingers, the nails fussed over, trimmed, and pearlescent. Nothing like Rex’s hands, which have wired hundreds of homes, raised and killed and cut up and paper-wrapped dozens of steers, disassembled and reassembled countless guns, smeared on gun oil, grasped and knocked back, squeezed at and flipped over and thrust in lever action, bolt action, rolling block, thirty-shot clips, and then dealt with bad carburetors, spark plugs, radiators, transmissions, and wrastled into position that prized wind turbine, the one that crowns the Settlement’s bald-topped mountain, which Rex’s crushed finger surely remembers on certain rainy days.

Gordon wills himself not to let his eyes keep drifting back to his guest’s hands, as he would try not to stare at deformities of burn victims and people with nose rings, tongue rings, shaved and tattooed heads.

And Bruce is doing the same. Trying to resist the awe.

The truck faces out to the angled cement ramp so people on foot, toting luggage, trudge past, some eyes looking in at Gordon and Bruce fleetingly. Exiting cars flash by.

After the first drink, Gordon observes the horrible truth that there is no men’s room in the parking garage and points to a hole in the floorboards of the truck. “On a dark night on the Maine Turnpike, with somebody else driving, I have used that hole.” Both he and Bruce cackle over this and Gordon buries his head a moment in his arms folded over the wheel, then surfaces to burp.

Bruce glances around the cab of the truck, pokes at the plastic Godzilla dangling from the rearview. Smiles a little. He says something more about the weather. He absently fingers the truck’s slack and rattly door handle. Says a little bit about airline ticketing and flight patterns. Once, turning to glance out the back cab window, he fingers the empty gun rack prong above his jacket, as plastic as the Godzilla. Red cheesy plastic. In his eyes, a warm faraway look, his mouth set, teeth gritted.

Gordon remembers reading about an expensive matchmaking service . . . an article someone had sent him . . . was it in the Wall Street Journal? . . . it was a service where a CEO can get a compatible and trustable friend. Gordon has never been this close to this kind of guy, high-powered, mind like a cat’s, a lotta carcasses in his wake. No, never this close. Morse and Janet, old-money people, like people born from the ash of volcanoes, he would not associate them with the sleazy sociopathic maneuvers people like Bruce Hummer have committed, grasping and stabbing his way to the blood-slippery tip-top accumulation of those take-your-breath-away gadgets of war.

But this is nothing like what Gordon would have expected. Bruce Hummer feels too familiar.

More cider? Sure, sure. More cement smell. Plenty of exhaust from vehicles mumbling past.

Bruce is describing two nearly grown sons by his first wife, a two-year-old by his second wife. “A while back, I brought Kelsie with me to Maine for a couple of weeks. Kelsie was fourteen months then. She was sick to her stomach the whole time and kept asking for Jill. Jill is her au pair. She never once asked for her mother and it was clear she didn’t feel she could trust me. I was essentially a stranger to her. Trust is no longer a thing of this world, brother.”

Gordon’s eyes widen at this word, brother. Rex, he calls brother. Many others, too, in those moments of waxing fraternity over shared large or tiny griefs.

Another refill with the pale burning smooth cider, which Gordon explains was made in old bourbon kegs, and using Red Delicious apples. A Settlement recipe, top secret.

Gordon, in a low register of the voice, confesses some of the parts of Settlement life one might call strife. It just dribbles right out of him. Is Bruce craftily manipulating him to let down his guard? Wouldn’t someone who 24/7 plots dominion over swaths of humanity and natural “resources” turn this moment of buddying into a bit of sport? Like the legend of the scorpion and the frog, isn’t it his nature?

But Bruce now looks away, staring into the cement, at worlds within and beyond. He says, “I hated my teens. I was not—” He laughs, a braying sort of laugh. “—sociable.”

Gordon makes an exaggerated face. Call it shock.

Bruce says, “I’m more of a sniper than a haggler or a hugger. But you train yourself to do what you need to do.”

Gordon wags his empty mug back and forth. “I sympathize.”

Bruce laughs. “Maybe.”

Gordon says, “Well, I do. I’m not . . . social.”

Bruce says, “I’m from Alabama.” He laughs. “Well, I’m still from Alabama.”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t go back.”

“That’s common,” Gordon says with a sigh.

“I can only step out of the space capsule. Can you imagine floating like that? All the . . . all that is unfeasible, unworkable, insuperable, insurmountable, and ludicrous, falling away like chunks of dried mud . . . and off you go.”

Gordon squints. “But you like your job, your life?”

“I love my job . . . the job. The job. But they don’t call it a job. They call it working hard.” He raises an eyebrow endearingly.

Gordon pretends to toast him with his empty mug.

Bruce wags his head. “Alabama is gone gone gone gone gone.”

Gordon rests a hand on Bruce’s shoulder. “Man, you okay?”

“No.”

Gordon grabs the wheel of the truck. “Today we are in our space capsule, way up over the fucking fog. We don’t give a flying fuck about fog . . . or fucking anything.”

Bruce titters.

Gordon’s hand reaches back for Bruce’s shoulder, the hand that can never get enough touch. With children and women, it’s their ears. With men, shoulder-and-forearm grips, bear hugs. His cousin Aurel (Oh-RELL) tells Gordon, “Mon dieu! You do paw!”

Bruce swigs from his cider. Three noisy swallows.

Gordon says, “Morse. Our friend. If only the stroke had killed him outright. Why this dragging on?”

Bruce agrees it is painful to see Morse this way. Obviously, Bruce has been a recent visitor at Cape Elizabeth, not just relying on the phone calls, e-mails, whatever.

Then Bruce presses Gordon to elaborate on his politics. On that subject Gordon can be explosive and some would be loath to press that button. But following Bruce’s question and the echo of silence after the question, Gordon just noisily sucks on his mug, forgetting it’s empty. He sees that even Bruce Hummer’s profile is Rex’s, the straight nose, the short indignant chin.

And so Gordon sets his empty mug on the dash, places both huge callused work-thickened hands along the bottom of the steering wheel.

Is Bruce waiting for Gordon to reply? To spill all his “political” guts?? Bruce’s listening silence is spiderish. He tips the pink hearts mug to swallow the last of what’s in it. A predator is always keen to weakness and so he can’t miss Gordon’s fatal innocence. But also he sees a simple thing, the powerful mass of the neck, shoulders, fingers, wrists spreading in its desire, its passion, multiplied by myriad ­future followers . . . it spills over. How does that go? His cup runneth over . . . while, uh . . . you the magnifico will lie down in the valley of the shadow of death. You will fear no evil. But you will fear the innocents!! The cup dribbling, drizzling with refugees, unemployed, underemployed, overemployed, and enraged and enraptured. There is nothing about the St. Onge phenomenon lost on Bruce Hummer.

He snorts. A big grin now, and tells a really bad joke about martians . . . maybe once it was a good joke, but his timing is all off.

Gordon understands that as they drink more, they become more alike. Two sloppy confounded goofballs. Ah, the beauteousness of drunkenness.

Gordon refills Bruce’s mug, then his own. Both men’s eyes are getting red-gray and liquidy, the eyelids thickening.

Gordon is now back to explaining about the bourbon barrels and Red Delicious apples, repeating himself.

Bruce chortles softly, raises his mug. “To our posterity!”

Gordon’s mug is meant to touch Bruce’s gently but clonks it. “Oops!” A good bit sloshes out onto both of their laps like lukewarm piss. Then Gordon says gruffly, “To our future world’s beautiful people!” Takes a long swilling gulp-gulp-gulp from his mug.

Bruce copies him.

“Where’s the john in this godforsaken place anyway?” Gordon snarls.

Bruce points at the hole in the floorboard.

They both laugh like hell.

Bruce’s magnificent wristwatch churns away the moments, the unexcitable tiny hands more exacting than human breathing, human heart, and the march of lymph and blood. Never once in this cab has he glanced at this exquisite instrument.

Gordon again begins to ramble about the apples, the barrels, slurring slightly. “Rrred Delicious. Not delicious to eat ’em. Like a tennis ball and a pear that had a . . . baby. But fermented, they—” Kisses the bunched fingertips of his own right hand.

Bruce burps between his teeth, not softly.

Gordon groans. “I’mmm going to accommodate yourrr request, brother.”

“My request,” repeats Bruce, his eyes searching his inner fog to locate this puzzling phrase.

“My politics,” Gordon reminds him with a sniff. “I neverrrr vote.”

Bruce marvels, “You don’t say.”

“Well . . . I vote for referendums and road commissioner . . . selectmen . . . ah . . . clerk.”

Bruce nods and waves his cup so that the contents dance out onto his hand and somehow splatter the windshield. “Oh’m fuck,” he declares.

Because he’s squinting with laborious effort at a thought, Gordon doesn’t notice Bruce’s bumble. He says, “Last time . . . to vote . . . I waz bee-trayyyed.”

“You don’t say.”

“I voted . . . I wrote him in . . . a write-in, see? He sounded so good. You ever hear of him? Vermin Supreme.”†††††

Bruce’s pupils flare as if darkness has fallen.

Gordon touches Bruce’s upper arm with two fingers. “He promised that if he were elected—” Burps largely. “—he’d see to it that everyone got a pony.”

“You don’t say.”

“Well, he didn’t get elected . . . but . . . rrreliable sources said that there are not enough—” BURP! “—ponies.”

Bruce runs a hand through his hair as if to tidy up but somehow this causes his hair to look like two brown horns.

Gordon cocks his head listening to the yakking inside his own head because outside his head nobody is talking.

Gordon says in a balloony squashy murmur as if another burp were moving into position, “All the people . . . all identities . . . all derms . . . all the issues people . . . all of them who clobber each other . . . it’s a civil war on low heat . . . you know full well what I mean . . . if we all instead looked up in the friggin’ sky at you corporate supremacist guys, you’d all be dead!”

Bruce sits up straight, turns his head to face Gordon’s face full on, and grins ear to ear, “You don’t say.”

Gordon’s pale intense eyes waver, then he seems to find something gorgeous about the dashboard.

His passenger speaks in his tensile drawl, “I know you have a firearm in this truck, Mr. Militia . . . somewhere. Behind the seat maybe?”

Gordon says nothing.

Bruce says, “There is nothing, Mr. Militia, that will stop this high-tech most profoundly complex global grid of power except when someday it hits the big wall. Love will not cure it. Not even your . . . your Recipe.”

Ah, so Janet showed him fifteen-year-old Bree’s “document” flyers. How tender a picture this makes! Those two crowned heads, Janet’s and Duotron Lindsey’s, together over the earnest oh-so-hopeful thrashes and swirls of calligraphy of that one-of-a-kind child.

“No,” Bruce goes on in his hot velvet fashion. “Nothing can stop this matrix. The toothpaste is out of the tube. The mule is out of the barn. The hornets are out of the hive. Our species spreads, blooms, the protons deliver. But just for the beauty of it, the fine art of it, the black and blue of it, you might earn some awfully sweet satisfaction if you’re willing to . . . to one at a time, in rapid succession, supposing you inspire a chain reaction, blast the brains out of every man and woman of the pyramid’s high-water mark, and every one of them who dares replace them, doing it purely for the ripe raw red chef d’oeuvre of it, because it will just regenerate a dozen new heads for every one that rolls . . . but, oh! For the pageantry! That for a little day or two the muzhiks would be kings. Oh, you can do it! And you can start with me.” He places his thumb between his own eyes matter-of-factly. “Right here.”

Gordon snorts, one syllable of light laughter. Because this is funny. Now a real laugh crashing harshly into Bruce’s silence.

“You chicken?” Bruce wonders. His green-brown eyes, which one could describe as tender, press Gordon all over.

Bruce feels into one of his rear pockets, one haunch raised awkwardly, the storm of alcohol inside him giving him no grace. A large brass key appears in his fingers. He pitches it onto the nearer thigh of Gordon’s work pants. “Find a man who has the guts to do it. My seaside cottage. Real swank, but no security. It’s 17 Island Rock Road. I’ll be there every weekend over the next four weeks. After that, I can’t say. In and out. Take your chances.” With his slim ballpoint pen, he scribbles something on the back of another of his beige-colored business cards, pushes the card into Gordon’s hand. “I’m serious,” he presses on. “Be smart now. Don’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Gordon frowns down at the key. Then closes his eyes. This izzzz symbolic, right?

And now silence between them, and anything but innocence. The key remains on Gordon’s thigh. A boasting, entirely terrestrial, bigger than the space it occupies. Once, when Gordon glances up to scan the face of his passenger, he sees nothing but the brisk perfection of the man’s one visible ear. Yes, perfect. Those stiff swirls and the mysterious dark canal, uniform with all other human ears and yet, from individual to individual sui generis. The mystery of the-one-and-only will never be known.

Then Bruce says, mildly, his eyes more bloodshot than they were the moment before his last spoken word, “A toast.”

Both men now have hair that is at the same time cowlicked and somehow windswept.

Gordon says, “Wait.” He struggles with the cider jug cover, which came off so easily before. Refills Bruce’s mug, overfills his own, splattering his left knee, shin, work boot, clutch pedal.

Bruce laughs, sags against the passenger door. The mugs then come together.

Gordon croaks, “To our future world’s beautiful people.”

Bruce sort of shouts, “To whatever happens!”

Again the mugs come together, crack! And cider shoots everywhere in a loopy silver rain.

Gordon takes a swig, then pushes his mug through the air toward Bruce, who isn’t there but is pissing on the cement wall behind the truck, the celebratory hole in the truck floor forgotten.

“To my brother,” Gordon murmurs deeply to the vacant seat.

Bruce returns, needs to slam the truck door four times to get it shut.

Gordon now visits the cement wall, the broad brass key in one of his chest pockets, its meaning confounding.

Then the talk peters out, their brains furry with alcohol bliss. Three chins-up suited men pass with computer valises gently swinging.

Both Gordon and Bruce burst out into weepy laughter at the sight. Bruce quotes from Carl Sandburg, “The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over the harbor and city on silent haunches and then—”

“Hey! You’ve got a literary bent.”

“I’m good at everything,” Bruce jokes.

“Can you cook?”

“Damn right. I can do, among others, Korean, Persian, Cajun, and I’m a genius at packing lightly for the trail.”

Gordon stares at him. “That’s impressive. Trails?” Then he snickers in cider-awash happiness.

“Up down and all around!” Bruce says in singsong.

Both are taken by ragged guffaws and Bruce slides down in his seat knees up, jerking his head from side to side. And the next hour revolves carousel-like around this silliness, burps, and trips to the cement wall.

Finally there is a sudden silvery brightness at the narrow porticoes of the nearest downward ramp. It is the thinning fog. And they hear a jet arriving. The roads and ramps and sky are swollen with fumes and thunder and hurry.

Big Delta flomps down onto the black wet glassy-looking runway and the Settlement’s Death Row Friendship Committee emerges in straggly single file from the open door marked Gate 6.

The Lessards and Rick Crosman (the Settlement’s finest fiddle maker) and Nathan Knapp (the Settlement’s “Peace Man”) lonnng done with their frozen yogurt stand together with Gordon watching these beloved faces become tangible out of the bleary milky stir-about of stranger faces, metallic walls, carry-on luggage swinging to and fro. The sacredness of THE FACE, the familiar gait. All else is a wash of background gray. Jacquie Lessard opens her arms to crush Margo St. Onge and her own Alyson together, all three talking at once, hopped-up and squeally.

Erin Pinette, dragging a heavy satchel, gives everyone quiet, world-weary hugs.

More and more Settlement kids file out from the Gate 6 door. Here comes Secret Agent Jane, gorgeous and stately, no heart-shaped glasses on her face today, her eyes blacker and more sizzly than ever.

Gordon isn’t smiling. He does not look drunk but, rather, looks nobly exhausted. The only way you’d guess he was sloshed was if you inhaled the air around him. He stands with his hands behind his back in a sort of military fashion, breathing slowly, as in hibernation, eyes on the door even as the Settlement faces have ceased to appear.

Of barely more stature than the kids, five-foot-tall troll-doll-look-alike Stuart Congdon, with great orange flames of hair and beard and a bulge of belly that often shows boldly and baldly and belly-buttonishly between his belt and T-shirt hem (today a vest sweater of feathery mauve and a plaid shirt fit him well), hefts his carry-on backpack and someone else’s satchel of a print of sunflowers, trudges straight past Gordon without a glance, but growls, “Looks like I’m driving.”

On a small private jet out of Portland.

He holds his head cocked sideways, staring with strictured unease at nothing but the weave of the upholstered seat in front of him.

History as it Happens (as recorded by Liddy Soucier).

Everyone says to include my age in the report. Okay, I will be sixteen in two weeks. Rachel says it’s for when people read these books a hundred years from now and FACTS WILL MATTER. Okay, this reminds me. Remember the jillion forms we had to fill out to visit the prison. We all were to be in a form. Each and every one of us had eight forms.

You would think we were the criminals, all the digging into our pasts we had to agree to. Lorraine Martin said don’t take it personal. Del and Stuart laughed and said most of these Death Row Friendship Committeepersons don’t have pasts long enough to dig into.

Then when we got there to Livingston, we had to go through a bazillion doors and archway beeping things and have people frisk us. After they’d already snooped all through our pasts, now you are checked in your pockets, hair, ribs, feet!

Believe it or not this is my first report for History as it Happens. Writing for the record is not my forte. I write mostly poems.

So it was not allowed for more than two people to visit Jeffrey so before we went we had already divided up the list of inmates the pen pal organization sent us.

There was Marco, Jian, Chris, DeMonte, Ben, Michael, Rayvon, Sonya, Jake, Steven, Kristina, Jon, LeDante, Ernesto, and Jeffrey.

Lorraine and I got Ben. When he came into the little wire and glass room he was in handcuffs with a guard.

Visitors don’t have to wear handcuffs. Seems like we would. But for some reason they let it go.

The guard was short, or seemed like it next to Ben, who was like Gordie, very giant, like what Beth always calls Mr. America. But Ben looked African, not African-American but real true African like he had no Indian or Irish ancestors or any of that fooling around and pot melting that goes on here in America. His eyes were like the eyes of God floating in the night.

Side note: Later, Lorraine said Ben had an old face, not old like a great-grandpa but like old people who went way back and had a geography that wasn’t shifting so much but was like a humongous tree with roots going below the earth’s crust and then opened wide and nobody ever had to ask, “Who am I?” and “Where’s my inner child?” Time was a very straight bold line. At least until the 1600s.

I had to laugh at that because I was remembering how when Ben talked to us, he talked wicked soft but it was in a Very Big City, USA accent. So he is us, just plain unromantic USA.

Anyway, so when Ben and the guard guy came in, the little guard guy, he’s taking off Ben’s handcuffs and neither one of them were happy-looking people. It was as if they were all set to murder Ben today and everybody was all braced for it.

We had been sitting there, smiling, before the door opened, me and Lorraine, but then we weren’t.

History as it Happens (as dictated by Jane Meserve, almost age seven, with painstaking assistance by Alyson Lessard, age fourteen).

Before we went to the jet, I said I really really really do not want to see ANYBODY but JEFFREY . . . get it!!! He’s the one. I want ONLY JEFFREY and that’s that.

So Stuart and I went to see Jeffrey. It’s different than visiting Mum. Texas has more cement and stuff and cop guards feel your organs like doctors do.

It was glass between us because Jeffrey is a dangerous killer. I heard that news tells it that Mum is a dangerous drug dealer, which is different than killer . . . even though really Mum is a dental assistant. So maybe Jeffrey is messed up by the news. He is really tall and really skinny for a killer.

We put our hands together on the glass. Me and Jeffrey. And Stuart and Jeffrey. Through the phone that they make you use Jeffrey had a jokey voice and he laughs nervous at everything. Then he asked me if we were Bootists or cathlic workers. I explained to him that where I am staying everybody works till they drop. But not me. I’m just a guest. My Mum is in jail for the drug war, a war in America.

Jeffrey said he knew about the drug war. And he said DEFINITLY there is war IN America.

I told him everyone at the Settlement eats and slurps on horridable foods like fish with SKIN and if you suggest very nicely to go to McDonald’s it is a mortal sin.

Stuart rolled his eyes. He told Jeffrey that I am a drama queen.

Jeffrey laughed.

I said I am a queen in certain ways.

Jeffrey laughed again.

History as it Happens (more by Liddy).

My mother (Josee, for the record) says Gordon’s mother (Marian, for the record), you never see her, she doesn’t like the Settlement or us, she gave Gordon hell because on the radio a caller said how us kids go to visit prisons, that we will pick up uncivilized evil loser low-life ways.

Gordon says you can’t pick up uncivilized evil loser low-life ways in an hour and forty-five minutes.

My father (Aurel, for the record) said Gordon’s mum Marian St. Onge, for the record, is always already calling us all losers. So where is there to go from there?

My Tante Jacquie says kids shouldn’t know about the death penalty till they grow up. It could give them heartache and confusion.

Gordon said maybe that’s true.

Bev and Barbara said there is no recipe in stone for growing up.

Penny says one must always fill up with opportunities for thought even if it provokes moral indignation. One needs to be amazed at how a DOCTOR is hired to poison TO DEATH a RESTRAINED human person and it isn’t called murder by politicians. She said one needs to realize that the whole thing is not a cartoon, not a movie with actors or a video game or a game of checkers.

Claire said Abraham Lincoln hanged dozens of Indian chiefs because they wouldn’t crawl on their hands and knees while Lincoln and other hotshots built their empire. She said the older she gets the uglier American history and American history-making get, that maybe it was wrong to immerse the younger kids in the full truth.

Gordon said, “Baloney. The kids are handling it better than himself.”

Beth said, “Hey, remember when Gordon got so upset about them killing the retarded guy in South Carolina that he, Gordon, threatened to wet himself and he was raving and pulling his hair and those people visiting, the soprano singer and the other one said Gordon ought to see a psychiatrist.”

Leona said, “Oh, well, the kids are back. It’s done. Let’s move on.”

History as it Happens (as dictated by Jane Meserve, almost age seven with assistance by Bree Vandermast, age fifteen).

So I forgot this. Jeffrey said he got the pictures I sent him that I drew. He said they made his day. He asked what kind of church I go to. I said, “Church? You mean the white things?”

He laughed. Then he asked Stuart if he knew Jesus.

Stuart said in a very nice way he guessed he wasn’t ready for that.

Then Jeffrey asked me if I knew Jesus.

I said, “Is he here? Is he a dangerous killer?”

Jeffrey laughed the most over that. He said, “He’s here.”

I said, “Does he work here or is he . . . stuck here?”

Jeffrey laughed so hard and I saw all his missed teeth. I will remember forever him laughing and his sad eyes all drippy with happy laughing tears.

***** Remember this is pre-9/11. Now they’d probably taser you.

††††† Vermin Supreme is a real candidate in New Hampshire elections. He’s yet to run in Maine.