Читать книгу The Recipe for Revolution - Carolyn Chute - Страница 21

The voice of Mammon explains.

I am utter power. I am violence that finds no limit, no finish, no regret. Even on an ordinary day in ordinary America, with everyone on the scene smiling and crowing, “Nice day, isn’t it?!” you all are, in the private canyons of your skulls, aware of what noncompliance will get you.

On the ballot of the managed flow, optimism is the one box for you to check. Helplessness is joy. Hopelessness is joy. There is no box for fighting back. You dream of it, maybe brag of its sweet imagined reckoning, but no fellow slave will stand with you. There is only utter terror in the face of utter power. There is only strange strange joy, strange strange frozen obelisks of joy, strange strange howls of joy.

One evening at the old farmplace on Heart’s Content Road.

Gordon alone but for Secret Agent Jane asleep upstairs.

No, he is not the charismatic prophet talk radio has described him as, or the terrorist cult leader the newspapers hint hint hint at. Nor is he the prize of strength many Settlementers would swear to his being, with whom so many here have aligned their hearts.

The smiling old woman’s appearance one night after Jack Holmes drove into this yard with Silverbell and her kids has left Gordon shaken. It’s not as if she and they were the first. He suspects that in time, dozens of cars and trucks will show up outside, doors slamming, engines churning away leaving figure after figure under his big ash tree, refugees of the wheel of progress, faster, faster, faster the wheel rips up lives, spits them out at this address.

Oh, and of course each one is that hot cinder of sorrowing humanity, part of the watching eye of the whole of creation to whom you can never say, “No occupancy” or you shall be damned. And isn’t it this that is pitching so many lives overboard, the very thing he feared back in Mechanic Falls with Claire? So all along it was true! The reason for this tiny Settlement nation carved out from the blackest depths of his fright is given warrant. We killed our child because it was so.

But then he was deceived, raised by his own cleverness out of the chatter of truth to sire a city of innocents who now must face the ha ha! “free world” and its plastic dagger to the heart.

He carries a mug of maple milk into the old parlor, which is even more heaped with books and files and unanswered mail than the dining room and kitchen. And photo albums Marian left behind. He sinks onto the divan that doesn’t squeal but screams, yes, the same one Marian left behind, amid other furnishings Claire left behind. He flips to the last pages of Project Megiddo from the Bureau’s busy hand and reads on from where he left off days ago.

Tock. Tock. Tock. The nice clock that was Marian’s. Its sound trickles over his skin. It’s not about time. It’s about hypnosis. Tock. Tock. Tock. His eyes close. This report is not us. Not Rex his brother, not himself. Not any of the militia movement guys he has heard out (between gusts of his own ranting). His future is being shaped by the hands of strangers in some unknown way. Tock. Tock. Tock. Here comes the past. No nasty surprises. Nasty, yes. But all is known. Thus the past is cold comfort.

Rex York. His “brother.” Yeah, back then Rex drank. Now you can’t even get him to eat a cookie, it’s just a regimen of push-ups and laying out plans for outdoor bivouacs. Winter bivouacs. How to live by eating frozen moss and bark. How to hide. And back home in his attic, he is always at it, collecting “patriot” gossip on the World Wide Web. A fussy, fit, fifty-year-old “captain” of the Border Mountain Militia, one kind of response to the oligarchy’s very cold thin smile, that is, when it’s not grinning steamily and reminding you to “Vote!”

He, Rex, can show you computer communiqués of dates for martial law, though the event never comes to pass, not in the way he imagines it. Meanwhile, acres of so-called antiterror bills in the pipeline, just needing another OK City bombing patsy, therefore more public consent for total surveillance of us all, no, not public consent, the public will beg for it. Speaking thus, Rex seems more military now than when he was still fresh home from Vietnam, so they say. Gordon and Rex became brothers a bit later. Gordon had to reach eighteen before catching Rex’s cautious attention, while Rex’s reputation as a combat vet was always right between your eyes if he was near you, even though he never spoke of it. Never.

Gordon can’t forget that rolling twinkle of good humor in Rex’s eyes after a six-pack and two whiskies. No loud talk. No gooey grins. No irritability or caustic remarks to fire up barroom brawls. Just the eyes, those two wide-open windows of drunkenness giving you that sudden peek into his usually oh-so-private carefully managed self. See his shell-less self, his squishy clam self, like the one we all have but steely people like Rex keep covert.

Oh, how Gordon looked up to Richard York! Gordon eighteen and then nineteen, Rex pushing thirty. Drinking on the iced-over lake; drinking at card games in kitchens or at Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts; drinking at the Cold Spot, so called in summer, Hot Spot in winter . . . they actually change the sign each season . . . though way back then it was still the Lakeview Lounge, though there were no windows then to view anything through, just maybe the trash cans out back through the wee square window in that particular door.

And then on to that special seething summer, parties ripe and raw, hither and yon, and all the fairs, especially the chilly end-season Fryeburg Fair. A Harrison reefer dealer thought Rex and Gordon looked alike, the dark-lashed pale eyes, of course.

Yes, oh, yes, back then Rex and Gordon did reefer. They did it all.

And the crowning episode, in that late 1970s summer, an episode that is legendary and repeated locally as often as Paul Revere’s ride is in Boston, in this case on a night at Old Orchard when even the sea breeze was hot, Gordon and Rex and Big Lucien Letourneau rolling into town, parking on the hill near the OOB Fire Department just as the big trucks swung out in a scream of red lights and horns. Cop cars shrilled. Someone threw a firecracker from a car window . . . bang! . . . too close to Big Lucien’s head.

Unmanned Harleys, some full-dress, others not, all with slanted front wheel in park mode and glittering, with only inches between, shoulder to chrome shoulder, nudged up to the curbs on both sides of the street as far as the eye could see.

Cops were at every corner. Bouncers at all the club doors. Bikers elbow to leathery elbow on sidewalks just arriving, black-gloved, rippling with menace. Pounding music from each doorway, amalgamating sickeningly with the music from near and beyond. Smoke, the legal deadly kind and the illegal munchies-craving kind. Live strippers with what looked like taxidermy eyes. Broken glass. Fights. A knife wound with no visible knife and no Sherlock Holmes to solve the absurdity. A lake of blood. Blood looked more conscious than the guy who was stretched out loosely next to it.

Gordon and Rex and Big Lucien somehow made it out of there alive and somberly found the somewhat dark beach, all three of them toddling with baby legs from whiskey and vodka, bleeding onion rings from every pore.

The beach was like a visit to the dark new moon after what was behind them. Such peace! The sky sputtering with hazy stars, some alive and whipping about, others wobbling. Sand too soft. Gordon couldn’t make his ankles work right. Seaweed crackling and mussel shells and periwinkle shells and some unidentifiable squashy stuff that expelled a dead froggish stench like what dogs love to roll in.

But as precious as all this seemed at the moment, a not-so-good thing was hunchedly moving toward them. Big shapes in the dark. Bikers without bikes. Bikers each with a dozen fists pounded the shit out of Gordon and Rex, although Big Lucien, who, as we may or may not recall, is little, ran like the wind and made it all the way to East Grande Avenue without stopping. He told them this weeks later without shame, at a poker game at “the yard” (the yard being Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts, Big Lucien proprietor . . . when he’s not out drinking and womanizing or in jail or running for his life).

Meanwhile, back at the beach, Gordon lay in what felt like a litter of warm puppies but which really was his bleeding into sand and parts of him that were swollen in uncomely ways. But also cold lips kissing his shirt and kissing his numb-stinging fingers. Cold kisses portend what?

The incoming tide!

Gordon grunted and moaned and mewled his way to his feet. “Rex,” he croaked, his throat like a Salisbury steak from the many punches and hard objects. Nunchucks? A hammer? A cement block? Was Rex underwater? Was Rex even there?

Gordon has such a furry soupy memory of dragging Rex from the passions of the tide, his own four broken fingers and sort-of-popped-out, sealed-shut, crispy eyes, nothing compared with Rex’s transformed identity . . . a man-shaped sculpture made of red-pepper sausage. Oh, yes, all was meat that night.

Gordon dragged Rex and then carried him bridelike back to their truck.

Gordon was painted perfectly with Rex’s blood, the heat of Rex’s livingness, burning down through the weave of his own T-shirt front and down his legs to his work boots and then, alas, inside the truck saw Rex’s fists were worn down nearly to just bare naked bones. How savagely Rex had fought for his own life, how now in this blend of blood they would always be brothers. There would be trust between them even if “America” was plotting to rip the ground out from under them. Oh, yes, especially if it was.

Okay, so with Rex’s militia, though the two men argue to exhaustion over all the specifics, or Gordon raves and Rex becomes coated in frost, Gordon sees what no one else sees, sees that what is past is always bleeding without cease. And like Claire’s abortion, the bad rap militias, those not propelled by the infiltration of G-men but simply of Rex’s sort, prepared, prepared, prepared, in their queer-seeming nervousness, shall be vindicated.

Shutting off the small kitchen lamp, Rex York heads for the attic stairs to bed.

The living room’s front drapes, shimmering and whirling with headlights, make his heart jump at this hour. He freezes.

The brilliance intensifies around the mutter of an engine, the deep boast of eight cylinders.

He moves lightly back through the kitchen to the glassed-in porch without putting on any lights and he just stands there, listening to the slams of the truck doors. He can make out Gordon St. Onge’s silhouette next to the dark bulk of the old Settlement truck and another man behind him. And a swingy-hipped tall female.

Without a word, Rex pushes open the glassy storm door and allows the three visitors to enter. Now in the kitchen, lit only by lamplight from the living-room doorway, Gordon doesn’t swipe off his billed cap, just sits down at the shadowy table and spreads before him a thickness of papers.

Rex tugs the chain of the ship-in-a-bottle lamp on top of the old cluttered dresser by the cellar door, noting that the room has instantly been swollen full of the weird warm grassy swampy smell of Settlement-made soaps and salves. But also the stink of cigarettes.

Gordon says with a whine, “I want a cookie.”

It’s true, Rex himself doesn’t touch sugar. Even without sucking in, he’s awfully muscular in the middle for fifty. Dark blue Dickies shirt and pants. Never short of wiring jobs large and small, his van out in the dooryard reads York Electric and shows a smiling lightbulb on the go. Little work cap on the lightbulb’s head, pliers in one hand. Rex himself never wears a cap when on the job. But always the black military boots with the pants cuffs down over. Unlike the lightbulb, Rex is not a smiler. Because of the clipped, brown down-to-the-jaws mustache and his grainy silences, his eyes have the power to bore into you. Your skin sort of rustles all over under his stare.

Meanwhile, you might notice that the hair at his temples is thinning but his wedding ring is as thick as it ever was even though his wife Marsha is remarried, and living in Massachusetts. Gone. Gone. Gone.

Rex isn’t short but seems so when next to the giant Gordon and Gordon’s giant fifteen-year-old son. And the girl, also taller than Rex, these two youngsters still standing.

In the center of the top page of the stapled papers next to Gordon’s hand, Rex sees the FBI seal, like a wide-open but crusty eye.

Cory St. Onge. Mostly Passamaquoddy in the face like his mother Leona but there’s that Frenchie sparkle to his eyes you’d know instantly was Gordon’s father’s if you’d been around that far back. And yes, Rex was. Meanwhile, Cory doesn’t ask for a cookie.

Rex remembers this kid back when he was Leona St. Onge’s bushy-haired long-armed infant being passed around to be cooed over and bounced, one of the two oldest, whom Gordon managed to plant in two women in what seems like the same moment.

Noticeable is the fact that Cory has started to let his last haircut grow out enough to have it tied back with rawhide. Does not look like a hippie. Looks like a pissed-off Indian warrior, which Rex would never say impresses him because he is not the praise-and-compliments type, but he.izzz.impressed. Mainly because Cory is on his side against that which wants to roast the common man.

Rex “is loath against” the FBI but also academia and TV-radio-print talking heads always blathering to divide the common man by occupation, by “privilege,” by skin, by past horrors, to paralyze the common man’s defenses, to shrink ’em and, yes, divide ’em. But here in this kitchen the common man is a titan, the enemies of the common man are specks.

And the girl. A recent development. Not a stranger though. She was here, for instance, when Gordon brought a bunch of kids around for the CPR-tourniquet-and-fire-safety-tips meeting. Several men from the Border Mountain Militia were on hand, and as tough as they think they are, they all looked weirded out by the girl’s grotesque face. No introduction has ever been made to explain her connection to the St. Onge family. And he’s never heard her name. In true redneck fashion, identities of new visitors will eventually tumble down in bits and dribbles as natural as sunlight and starlight. But one thing is for certain, though she’s not an actual leper, she could, if these were the Jesus of Nazareth days, use upon her face the “laying on of hands” by the son of God. Or by today’s methods, about fourteen surgeons.

Rex also can’t miss that the girl appears to be memorizing everything in his old farmhouse kitchen. He doesn’t trust her. Not that she’s an operative and not that he, Richard York, is overly paranoid. It’s more of a tripled-full-alert cognizance in the back of his brain like when one of his Winchesters is stacked in the back of the attic stairs with a chambered shell and so it is too alive to forget.

Rex reaches amid some plastic and glass clutter next to the ­linoleum- covered drainboard and long sink, then places a foil-covered pan on the table by Gordon’s hands and the stapled papers. And he pulls out a kitchen chair for the girl. Rex, first and foremost a “gentleman.”

Gordon sighs. “Well, the Patriot Movement citizen militias, excitable Christians, and various white types of the anger and violence class, with crazed minds and racist objectives are expected to blow everything up on January 1, 2000, in this coming year of our Lord, A.D.”

Rex’s eyes grow warm with about five rogue twinkles for about five quick seconds. Still he has nothing to say. Nothing yet is necessary to say and, besides, Gordon always does such a stellar job of filling in any silence with vast blobs of unnecessary yak.

Cory now straddles a chair at the table.

The girl is also, at this point, sitting, watching Gordon’s shirtfront from the corners of her wide-span eyes.

Gordon sniffs indignantly. “Well, we citizens’ militias of whatever stripe shouldn’t feel too select. I read where climate-change-worried scientists, tree sitters, and animal cruelty objectors are considered terrorist enemies of America, too. And high school kids who pass out useful facts about the military, their booth too close to the booths of the military recruiters set up in their school . . . these kids are listed as, get this one, a credible threat. Union organizing today in the age of corporate conglomerating . . . watch out! You are an enemy of America! Pissed about poverty? Watch out! Feeding the homeless in parks? That’s against the law. Off in a paddy wagon you go, you un-American scary guy. Terror terror terror. The list is long. The United States bombs away in Panama, Yugoslavia, and Iraq, just to name a few, this is spreading goodness. If you call it spreading vile expansionist shit, if you call it criminal, you’re an enemy of the American people. So, as I say, militia movement folk just gotta stop feeling the specialness of the spotlight.”

Cory murmurs, “I read this Megiddo thing, too,” and stares down at the wonder of the text before his father, stapled and restapled, copied and recopied, worn by the hands of so many Settlement readers . . . including some of the mothers who use it as the reason above all reasons to avoid Rex. So the thing is rubbed, picked, and chafed to softness. Carried about preciously.

Now foil rattles and scrunches as Gordon’s hand finds a cookie. Then he pushes the pan toward Cory. Cory takes a cookie but seems he just wanted it for something to look at while his father yaks on for a good five minutes in his usual circular way.

The girl’s eyes continue to slide around the kitchen of this home Rex and his mother and his daughter share, his daughter Glory whose hair like this guest’s is also red and long and ripply, no, not red . . . Glory’s is dark auburn. And Glory is beautiful, disastrously so.

Standing against the sink, Rex, when he gets a chance, speaks solemnly, “It’s not the intention of any patriot group I’ve been in communication with or read or heard of to attack the US government for religious purposes or otherwise. Except for the common-law guys, the word is ‘stockpile.’ And ‘Be prepared.’ To be prepared for when or if the government makes a move on us . . . to disarm us. Or any illegal force makes such a move on the American people . . . or, as I mentioned other times, martial law for whatever bogus reason. There’ve been rumors—” He pauses significantly. “—that martial law would be declared on January first, following a government-initiated emergency.”

Gordon jumps in. “You know I don’t buy this martial law fretting because of the FBI’s and Pentagon’s and CIA’s place in the permanent state of exception within the American state. We have always a suspension of the juridical order. It’s part of the whole shebang!” He makes a funny face, which Rex refuses to acknowledge, then rattles on. “There are all those folks who think they need a new computer so when the three zeros blink into place on January 1, 2000, the end of the computer-dependent world won’t happen . . . a tale probably initiated by the big computer companies whose sales have stabilized and whose growth is subsiding.”

Cory laughs.

The girl’s eyes, not entirely veiled by her loose and blazing hair, seem to regard Gordon’s hand with obvious (to Rex) worship. So what else is new, Rex thinks to himself.

Cory laughs again. “Gordo, that is just crackpot conspiracy theory. You see scheming behind every closed door.” He winks a long dramatic wink at the girl, his tongue in his cheek.

She laughs like a grown-up.

Rex says nothing.

Cory is now smiling with satisfaction at the bottom side of his cookie.

The girl’s hands are red and yellow and orange in the seams of the knuckles and around her nails. Her smiling mouth is actually pretty, like a pink bow.

Gordon munches and grins at the same time, speaks now with a mouthful, “Well, certainly I am paranoid. FBI said citizens’ militias are paranoid. And I’m not one to question their expertise.” He places his right hand, open-fingered, on the Megiddo report before him. “Actually, all I’ve witnessed face-to-face and via snail mail on the citizens’ militia scene is a preponderance of . . . of normal Republican bullshit.”

Rex directs a refrigerated glare at Gordon’s profile, then raises his chin and looks away toward the door to the glassed-in front porch.

Gordon swallows chewed cookie. “But not as right-wing as what comes out of the big think tanks and certain foundations. And all that Intel spooky shit on the Internet. In fact, those are no doubt the Adams and Eves origin of all right-wing thought.”

Rex does not want to argue tonight. He lets the bait vaporize into the infinite galaxy of Gordon’s opinions, which Rex has always considered to be as red as Mother Russia. He notices the girl has a pack of cigarettes in one pocket of her work shirt as the great bursting jumble of her hair swishes somewhat to the side. In this break in Gordon’s blathering, Rex speaks gravely, “If you were not familiar with the Patriot Movement, and you read that report, you’d be worried about people in the movement. But the FBI is not worried about people in the movement. They are not expecting any bombs—”

“Because,” Cory marvels in his rumbly, cracking fifteen-year-old voice, “they know everything. If something’s in the works, they’re part of it, egging someone on, like McVeigh with OK City.”

Rex tries to continue where he left off. “They are not worried, not expecting—”

Gordon interrupts him. “Think about it. They want to—” and off he goes with a rather up-and-down, over-and-under philosophical speech. Then fetches another cookie, stuffs it into his cheek, and finishes up his rambling with muffing and sluffing, which nobody can understand.

Rex speaks stiffly: “The report is going out to all low-level law enforcement agencies, city, town, county, state . . . and the media and various organizations set up to save the world from the right wing, so they claim. But it is inadvisable to forget that these professional fund-raisers with their broad-brushstroke lists . . . and all the surveillance agencies and politicians know how to make people sweat. I would not be surprised if the fund-raiser outfits helped write this report. No question in my mind that this was written to drum up terror in ordinary Americans of ordinary Americans . . . and that creates terror in general . . . a generalized fear . . . a panic. Public mass hysteria is useful to all those birds.”

Gordon garbles words around another huge cheekful of cookie, “An old frick,” which, translated into English, probably was meant to be An old trick.

Cory laughs. “When they blew up the OK City building, the media announced for several hours that it was right-wing militias or Arabs. One said right-wing militias and Arabs. Midwest farmers and Arab rebels shoulder to shoulder! Call me sentimental but I love it.”

Rex again gets a simmering whiff of cigarettes. Must be the girl smokes no less than a pack a day. All her clothes and that hysterical mane of hair are saturated in the toxic stench.

Gordon pats the report affectionately. “FBI said that the citizens’ militias are paranoid about the UN’s plan to disarm the citizens of the world but they didn’t exactly deny the UN stuff. It was worded as if the UN did want to disarm us . . . but that . . . to be worried about it made us paranoid. They stated that the Gun Owners of America president, what’s-his-name, shouldn’t talk or write about this fact, that it would make people even more paranoid.”

Cory still hasn’t bitten into his cookie, just rocks it on the table. “Gun Owners of America is a newsletter for Democrats with guns, isn’t it? And I’ve got some Earth First! friends who are pro–Second Amendment. One has a shotgun for woodchucks in their collective’s garden. Another an AK for target shooting and so forth.”

Rex’s eyes have narrowed. His arms are now folded across his chest. As usual, this St. Onge bunch has taken the talk into territory where the air seems to have no oxygen and is crowded with distant shadowy characters he does not trust.

Cory chortles. “G-man logic is that to be informed and armed at the same time is to be paranoid.” His chortle turns into a giggle.

Gordon stares into his son’s dark eyes which are wet with giggle-tears.

The girl is staring through the plate of cookies out through the other side.

Suddenly, a harsh ca-chunk! Gordon turns. “What’s that?’

“Refrigerator,” says Rex.

“Sounds like it’s in pain.”

“It still works.”

“I never heard one do that.”

Rex steps to the table, pulls out a chair, finally settles in.

Gordon says, almost in a jolly way, “Law enforcement agencies can get a better position at the congressional trough when they have people shivering in terror.”

Rex senses that “the Prophet” and his “followers” do not really care about building the militia network. They just get high by wallowing in the idea of it. Rex can’t fathom this but does not confront or accuse.

Gordon is still (happily, it seems to Rex) going on: “And there are so-called antiterror . . . ahem, police-state bills lined up waiting for the public to cheerlead them into becoming law. Everybody gets a little something.”

Cory distractedly taps his own nose with his cookie. “That’s where another government-executed act of terror will come in. Like the declassified Operation Northwoods back under Eisenhower, tabled as Kennedy came in . . . where they planned to shoot a plane of college kids down and blame it on Cuba . . . or shoot some people walking around in Miami and blame it on Cuba. But CIA operatives later on really did shoot a plane down somewhere . . . I forget where . . . but it’s common knowledge. And one did a car bomb in New York. Blamed Castro. The US government loves certain kinds of right-wing stuff. As long as it’s a roadblock to socialists, the Red Sandwich, and all that.”

Gordon grins broadly and his wild eye opens so wide that it seems the eyeball would plop out. Rex doesn’t dwell on the whys and wherefores of this almost holiday pleasure in their voices but he has a flash, a three-second accounting, that the real and felt sting of what an enemy can do to you is owned by only one person in this room, Richard York, who was there, with real rockets, real roars and shrieks and crumbling walls, and pounding pounding pounding guns behind and in front of barely human whines, dripping jungle, land mines, and ingenious traps, Kabooom! a slack-mouthed head rolls along in front of you and the solid watery stewing heat and heartbroken feet, fireblazing sticks and bones, chemical wilt of vine and bough, all the many stinks scrambling down your throat. Dying sounds: brays, mewls, moos, sobs, baas, one-syllable cussings, bellers, silences between the Booms! and you are with the weight of another man on your back, your pack, running, hunching, crawling, yeah crawling.

Rex rubs his face, looks at the plate of cookies, “sees” the head and shoulders of his mother, Ruth, pressing each cookie with the cutter, giving shapes to their sweetness just hours ago. Ruth York, not a granny-looking older lady. She’s only sixteen years his elder, her still-black hair held back by a silver clasp, T-shirt snow white with a rearing palomino stallion, a cactus, a prairie dog, and a rattlesnake in striking pose. Heavy medallion of bronze on a chain. It’s a wolf’s head staring out from an aureole of sun. Her usual bracelet, turquoise. She has not one iota of American Indian blood in her veins but she, with his father just before he died and their American Legion friends, flew to the Southwest as a tourist and left her heart there. Well, one of them. She has a lot of hearts. And in some ways she is his best friend due to their mutual rocklike dependability and their mutual silences.

Rex refocuses on the softly lit room as it is now. He does not want to feel riled at Gordon or the boy. They are not the enemy.

But their hands move in the periphery of his sight, churning with their words. His own black-faced compass watch looks readier than ever to do service, ticking away the moments, pointing north, while his hands are folded in a mannerly fashion on the table.

Gordon’s deep wandering voice says, “The guys I’m hearing from via the US mail, patriot groups and so-called Christians, seem only to get launched into action when some rich rancher can’t anoint himself king. And one real estate critter in Massachusetts they were all hopped up to go and defend. The irony is that militia groups being in service to the rich rancher and real estate mogul is probably okay with the Bureau and whatnot. They do it themselves every day!”

Cory says huskily, “At least the Panthers used to arrange free breakfasts for kids. They had something like justice in mind. You know, love and outrage.” Cory’s cookie breaks in half seemingly by itself, a half to each hand. “FBI put the bullets to the Panthers, sent in spies, and did plenty of framing, like of Mumia on death row and the one girl who escaped to Cuba, Assata Shakur. You are not supposed to rise up. The proof is everywhere. So if I think the government wants to control all us little people, then—”

“You bear watching.” Rex states the ominous fact.

“Hey,” says Gordon softly in his run-out-of-steam mode. “Speaking of rising up, my brother, have you finally read The Recipe for Revolution, the short version at least, the one that has the cartoon Abominable Hairy Patriot?”

The girl makes some sound. An abrupt intake of kitchen-sweet air.

Rex’s eyes spring to her face, then to Gordon’s face, which is now struggling with that Tourette’s-like eye thing again.

So this girl is the one, the mastermind of the booklet with the orange cover and of the other writings Gordon has been so proud of. The big one, The Recipe for Revolution, kind of lost him. Not to the point enough. Not that Rex is stupid. It’s just that some minds are fueled by the gorgeousness of life while other minds are more straight on and wound tight like trigger springs.

“I gave them to Todd. I let him borrow them.” Rex feels caught. But it’s true. Todd, one of two teenage members of his group, seemed charmed by the stuff.

Gordon sits up straighter.

Rex adds, “But I skimmed it first. It was pretty good . . . like poetry.”

The girl tips her head in a little thank-you nod.

Cory says, “She’s a swashbuckler. Watch out.”

The girl giggles.

Rex nods at that face that looks like a fantasy movie’s special-effects human-lioness and her sort-of-gold-sort-of-green eyes are on him.

Cory remembering. He speaks.

One night after supper, a bunch of us were sprawled in rockers on the long porch next to the Settlement kitchen doors. I especially remember Rick Crosman and his son Jaime, and John Lungren and Lou-EE St. Onge and Paul Lessard and Jeremy Davis and Butch Martin. And me, of course, heh-heh.

John Lungren was a quiet guy but when he spoke, it was in a measured way and something you’d need to hear. John was a finish carpenter and had that climbing-all-over-everything build, gray hair, steel-rimmed glasses with large lenses just slightly out of fashion . . . heh-heh. He was leaning back in a deep wicker rocker, knees high, but looked full of portent, not foolish.

He said that as we speak hundreds more small factories are grinding to a stop and big ones up up and away, not his exact words. He groaned and said not that labor unions have lost their needfulness but they were losing their stoutness. We knew all this, but it’s like a chant and warriors’ drums. You repeat. You repeat. It empowers the blood. And he was going somewhere with this. “More farms, thousands more, are being auctioned to agribiz.” He said a guy he knew from “home,” Millinocket, a guy named Tiny Tim, told of a guy he’s been in touch with, Steve. Steve and Jeannie, who farm in one of those black dirt states, Michigan maybe. Steve, the farmer, was all set to blow his brains out all over the cab of one of his trucks but just as he was sorting through his ammo boxes his neighbor stopped by, another ruined farmer. The neighbor talked militia. Some of the common-law stuff, which we were all suspicious of, bit of a dead end. Whatever. John said Steve, the depressed farmer, was alive and wearing a thin pissed-off undepressed grin the next morning because he was fervid to see the militia network grow.

Butch Martin remembering back then. He speaks.

Rex York’s militia . . . um . . . it was at first about fifteen guys, not always at once. When a bunch of us from the Settlement got interested the Border Mountain Militia attendance about doubled in size. He had another bunch of . . . um . . . names, who were just names to me. I never saw them.

But I was getting antsy and so was Cory, because even with the winter bivouacs, the Border Mountain Militia was . . . um . . . well, it was like we were all just floating in an oarless rowboat.

All the talk of a national network sounded pretty limp . . . um . . . you know . . . like fantasies. Some of us guys, the under-twenty-fivers, had started spending deep and meaningful time with the anarchists tenting up on Horne Hill at Jaxon Cross’s father’s place. But still something kept us going back to Rex’s kitchen and Rex’s glassed-in porch.

I personally watched how it was, how the more helpless some of Rex’s founding members, older guys, would seem, so helpless-feeling in the face of the total power and limitless violence and LIES of Washington and its satellites, the more they needed to pretend they were not taking it lying down. We were . . . in the way of nature’s way, um . . . you know, like Sitting Bull said about the difference between individual fingers versus a fist . . . um, small scale, yeah . . . but maybe, like Cory says, evolution hasn’t kept up with global dominion over us all, that our brains still get twitterpated over an eensie army of brothers.

So, um, another thought was how these guys twisted their heads to call themselves patriots. Patriots of any country are proud to . . . um . . . you know, be led by a ring in the nose. So for that little while, they weren’t what they thought they were.

Things were becoming more obvious, all this war on the world stuff by scheming advisers, State Department, CIA, Pentagon, Oval Office . . . it was not a nation’s self-defense . . . but most of Rex’s non-Settlement guys were not ready to let go of the glow behind the pledge of allegiance to the flag that they had recited a hundred billion mornings in school, hand over heart, and the belief in the American virtue of saving the world from black hats. You could not get too logical with these guys. But that didn’t make me . . . um . . . want to dismiss them. These guys were scared and Rex’s cookie-smelling kitchen was a safe place to talk big, talk tough, talk mean, talk personal family-sized self-defense, talk a little bit crazy, and to PRETEND you were a man.

So, why did some of us young guys who were pretty snuggly with the anarchists on Horne Hill still turn up dutifully for the Border Mountain Militia meetings? Why? Why? Why? Well, man, think about it; it’s all pretend anyway, isn’t it? Name one single thing you can do to stop the red-white-and-blue boulder from rolling and bouncing toward us all with its intentions of full spectrum dominance. The big rock is on us here in the United States as well as out there, right? “Full spectrum dominance,” the government’s own words, means all little people on this planet look the same to the big cocks on top of the global human pile.

So man, oh, man, I couldn’t let Rex down. That kitchen was the only America, the one that the big cocks thought they had but totally didn’t.

Seavey Road. The flower-shaped night-light breathes out its soulful glow. The open octagon window breathes in the almost lurid sweet night air, overly warm for September.

Bree, the neighbor girl, fifteen, sits on her narrow bed, fully dressed, having just arrived from being out. Her posture is a ready march-forth! square-shoulderedness. Her wide-set honey-green eyes flick in her head in grave study of her innermost strategic maps.

As always, an old green work shirt and jeans. Tall scuffed logging boots, steel-toed, these that she wears while working the woodlots with her father and brothers. The kind of boots so many Settlement girls have turned in their Settlement-made moccasins for, in their delirious admiration of her, she whom they call “our logger girl,” she whom they never knew at all till this summer, now the center of everything.

Yes, tonight, she had again “borrowed” her sleeping brother Poon’s truck, leaving him the usual note on the kitchen table: Be back real soon.

Poon is one of those people that you can easily push around. He holds his heart and his opinions deep as dud depth charges and so his objections to his fifteen-year-old sister with no driver’s license running off with his pickup are always just the slight reshaping of his eyes, a perfect sorrow.

Bree’s room seems so spacious these days since all her “art stuff” is over at the Settlement in the Quonset hut attic “studio” she shares with Claire’s very dear and totally pretty university friend, Professor Catherine Court Downey, who says she is staying at the Settlement “only for a while.” Catherine calls it “some healing time,” which refers to her getting off a bunch of pills and onto a “perfect diet.” Not that she has weight to lose. Just something more impenetrable than flesh.

Her four-year-old Robert is not gregarious but rides easy on the wave of Settlement humanity of various ages. He does his part. His father is Vietnamese-American and is only a figment in most ways. You never see him, not at the Settlement. Does he even know that’s where the professor and Robert are off to? “A businessman on the go,” Catherine has bragged or complained; Bree’s not sure which, for at the oddest times Catherine sings her sentences.

Catherine never works on her watercolor painting in her half of the canvas-tarp-divided studio. On her studio cot, she often rests from her teaching, meetings, and paperwork, her interim-chairmanning. And shopping. She shops a lot, the browsing kind, but also the back-seat-and-trunk-heaped-with-bags kind.

Meanwhile, this little bedroom at the home of the Vandermasts no longer stews with the vapors of turpentine and linseed oil. Its revised purpose (besides a bed to sleep in), its consequence to “a world needing rescue” has been delivered in fabrics of blue and gold.

Take note that in one corner of this room is a roughly carved eagle perching on a hop hornbeam pole and, tautly rolled around it, a flag. And yes, this is top secret. A creation made right there at the Settlement under Gordon St. Onge’s nose, so to speak. Well, really only on evenings when he was off making shingle or lumber deliveries, this urgent mission was accomplished deep in the bowels of the horseshoe of porches, kitchens, and shops, the Clothesmaking Shop to be exact. Over a dozen teen and preteen girls had designed and/or cut and/or stitched this full-sized state of Maine flag look-alike, the sailor, the farmer, the moose, the Christmas tree, the star with rays. And DIRIGO (I lead). Then across the top, applied in tall blocky letters of roadside warning sign yellow-gold, a new declaration: THE TRUE MAINE MILITIA. Oh, yes, all ready to go for when the time is right. Plans are in the works, plans that make Rex York’s militia seem like a bunch of old bulls hunched under a tree watching rain clouds bounce along in a swollen sky of red-white-and-blue hopelessness.

Now the true revolution begins!

The shame of night.

Rex York isn’t whimpering yet but his whole big bed trembles. He sees corpses, all alike, wooden as old baby dolls, arranged quite neatly on cheap orange wall-to-wall shag carpeting, or so it seems. Everything turns washy, then back to stark. The corpses are not death gray but orange, as though their wooden visages have a very bad maple stain. And the corpses’ heads are fanned with decoration like relics of ancient Egyptians. The corpses breathe. Bellies and chests expand, lips flutter, noses hiss. Hissssss.

Rex notices that one corpse is now standing, not threateningly. In fact, the face isn’t clear to Rex so it may not be looking at him. Never­theless, Rex begins to spook.

He wants to get away but he’s lying on the cheap orange carpet and can move only his jaws. His jaws have vigor. “Arrhhh-huh-hh-eeeee-ooooo!”

This is the same sound he always wakes to, the girlie ghosty wail. It shames him that he can’t even scream like a man.

He doesn’t have recurring dreams like those some people tell of. No, his war dreams never repeat. Hundreds of horrors. No repeats.

Ah, life! Ah, New York!

He is crossing Lexington with a crowd of high-school-aged kids, a woman wearing white nurse-like stockings, a woman who looks like a Russian peasant from fifty years ago, and a few homeless mumblers. Mostly his eyes are on the little smoke shop over there, with the newspapers in the racks so fresh they look cold. Cold print, like fresh fruit. Sweet. It has always moved him that way.

He sees the face of Gordon St. Onge. It is the thousandth time—sometimes in this city, sometimes in other cities . . . even Tokyo! . . . the big guy’s face or form, moving toward him menacingly, in that way he would have his hand in his shirt or jacket on the handle of a gun. And in the night, EVERY NIGHT, he hears that tiny click of doorknobs turning, all the doorknobs at once. His apartment like his summer house is full of doors and sharp-edged waiting.

The key. When will it be returned? Oh, this. His fantasy! Like two boys playing in a tree. Does St. Onge, on the other end of this daydream, imagine his role of stalking? This game, not globe-sized but one-on-one, life or death, the ultimate challenge.

A few times a day, every day, Bruce relives that two hours he spent with St. Onge . . . every word, the gray light, the rank coolness of that truck cab, cider and goat and greasy tools and the oddness of his host’s eyes.

He arrives at the racks of fresh newspapers and magazines and looks back over his shoulder at the rush of faces and their rolled-up umbrellas tucked under elbows, sacks, and valises. He can almost hear a larger-than-New-York rustle of voices, St. Onge passing on the word to minimum-wagers, temps, ex-cons, and those millions all over the country and beyond who are sick to death of debt, who steam at yet another lordly lie. And all the little doggie ones who never questioned before now squashed into dinkier and dinkier and colder and colder apartments with three grown kids whose only chance for success is retailing street drugs or dealing in stolen goods, especially handguns, where urban America’s stiff gun control laws have given black-marketing a rainbow with a pot of gold at both ends. And then there are all those in the hemispheres of East and South, their confusing yet simple hell of the West’s Darth Vader foreign policy . . . oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, the beauty of Duotron Lindsey subsidiaries’ cluster bombs and hellfire missiles? And playful “drones,” still in the secretive conspiracy stage.

Oh, yes, they’re speaking the name Bruce Hummer as Gordon St. Onge murmurs to them, “Brothers,” all snapping and clacking the warm action of their large magazine rifles. Like the Vietcong, they could pop up anywhere now. Bruce, Bruce, Bruce, they croon.

Midafternoon of another day, Gordon alone up across the field from the old farmplace.

He settles down tiredly on the edge of the motionless merry-go-round platform, the bright animal figures above him, frozen in frenzy, raised paw, hoof, wide jaws, sludgy eyes. All are monsters made with tools and paint in the hands of kids. And with the assistance of one gasoline generator, these disturbing beasts can come to life, churning in their monsterific colors.

A cat has followed him, a stringy young kitteny cat, solid charcoal gray. Not a hunter. Just a follower. She glides around on the platform, touching things disdainfully with her nose the way cats do.

Then she shoves herself against Gordon’s side, snakelike.

A single-engine plane drones along smartly through the vague-looking insincere sort of clouds, clouds as thin as thoughts, sky being almost the very best blue. Burned-looking goldenrod leans. Viny stuff creeps around. Except for the plane, everything is so quiet. And quite frank. Nothing lies.

Gordon takes something from the pocket of his jacket. A large, almost square brass key.

Now a beige card. He looks at the card awhile, not reading the words and numbers, just staring into it, and then his fingers and a thumb press and prod the card as he stares downhill awhile at the tarred Heart’s Content Road.

Then he holds the key with the slender jagged part upright. And he looks into its sheen.

Cat paw reaches out and gives the key a serious ambush cuff.

“Yeah,” Gordon tells the cat. “That’s the idea.”

From a future time, in her oceanfront home in Cape Elizabeth, Janet Weymouth remembers.

Did I contribute in any small way to the direction he took?

I relive every conversation, reread every letter, hearing my own words, assuring myself that I am in no way to blame, then, a few days later, I find myself anxious again. I see clear as ever his brooding profile one of the last times he stood in our front room, barely hearing anything anyone said to him, something inside him that could not see the positive aspects of that day . . . yesss, more than thirty riveted governors’ wives and such a perfect little coup de théâtre by his exuberant progeny. I wanted to see triumph on his face. But he recoiled.

Maybe there was tension between him and Claire. Or him and the redheaded girl. Age fifteen. They said she was a neighbor. I repeat: age fifteen.

Brianna Vandermast. “Bree.” Writer of The Recipe for Revolution, which he had mailed to me a couple of weeks earlier, two drafts and a flyer version. I repeat: she was age fifteen. It was said he had twenty wives. I wondered if she were one. Is this what decent people do?

Gordon, the child of elegant and proper and sturdy-of-heart Marian St. Onge who, as part of the influencial Depaolo family, often appeared with one of her engaging brothers or uncles at functions, the small private kind and those scintillating fund-raisers in Augusta or Bangor or Portland.

I cannot count the times she honored my invitation to have lunch here, just the two of us in the garden or on the beach, laughing like girls. Or we met at restaurants. Such a tall rawboned young woman with the liquid grace of the sveltest among us, meticulously dressed, her dark hair never curled though curls were the rage in those days. She had what you might call a bob.

She had an unusual marriage. She’d married a heavy-equipment operator from one of her uncle’s crews. When she spoke of him, though it was rarely, her cheeks flushed. I heard from others that her marriage was as deep and meaningful as her friendships were, her friendships always being of the more prominent classes than whence came her darling “Gary,” Guillaume St. Onge Sr., who, it was said, was a head shorter than her and of a slim wiry build.

This is what I’m trying to tell you, this pain for me of the hairpin turn I was about to make away from Gordie, whom I had known since he was a quiet but droll ten-year-old, yes, quiet and watchful and droll. And even from Marian, as virtuous as earth and sky, I would soon consider cutting ties.

No, it was not on account of the red-haired teenager or the wives uncountable. It was a daydream I had begun to have . . . a daymare . . . where the Roman centurion asks, “Are you associated with this thief?”

Present time, before her hairpin turn, a letter arrives at the Settlement.

He can feel her excitement and breathiness, even in her handwriting.

She tells him that eight of the governors’ wives have contacted the committee about HIM. And of course his talented children. Their various women’s clubs and civic groups desire “the honor” of his presence. “You know, tea and crumpets and tall ceilings.”

As kind of an afterthought, Janet explains that one of the “governors’ wives’ husbands” (her little joke) “has invited you to join him and a few others for a semiformal dinner at the governor’s mansion. We are talking South Dakota. Some people from the Commission on Indian Affairs will be there and one of their state senators, Wally Dodge, who is a closet environment man from way back. Wally was told you’re a “tree hugger” but you can straighten that all out when you get there in a way that nobody but you can do. As you once remarked to my friend Marcia that you are not a tree hugger . . . you are a tree. And she hugged you!”

Her PS reads: Gordon, they need to hear your lively message. Fac- to-face. It has power, believe me. Call me if you can. When I call you I only reach three-year-olds.

Gordon writes back.

Dear Janet,

Again I want to thank you for being so welcoming to my family. And all that delicious food.

And it meant a lot to me to hang out with Morse awhile. It’s upsetting to see how fucked up he got by the stroke. I can’t believe the way time evaporates. It’s been six years since the McNelty hearings. I’ve got gray in my beard and yet I know there will always be that Morse-worship in me. He is THE ROCK. There is a forever bond between Egypt and Cape Elizabeth. Whatever happens tomorrow, that will not change. To both of you I pledge my love.

I still keep that 5 × 7 and the clipping of Morse and J.J. and Bob at that first shareholder activism symposium. Here in the kitchen by my desks it is framed. That he can still convince people to press those vital changes in culture on resistant people of the investment class through his past writings, which never lose their voice, including that foot and a half of shelf space here in my hallway, means his voice will always be, as ever, cannon thunder.

About the gracious invitation from his governorship and the eight gals, I must respectfully decline. Will explain later.

Keep in touch. As ever, I invite you and Morse to visit. There are quiet places here where we can be alone but I so wish for you to smell the late summer fields and woods and to lay eyes on these foothills. Our tallest, our “mountain,” has the windmills and when the sun is right they reflect like pure gold so you can see them from the comfort of the East Parlor windows.

Are you tired of me nagging you guys to come visit?

Love, Gordon

Janet writes back in a flash.

My dear old friend. Are you irked at me? I know you really want to get your ideas out THERE. But I’m not surprised by your letter. I knew all the while you were here that something was wrong. You weren’t yourself! Please, let’s talk about that.

Love, Janet

And love from Morse. He can still speak your name.

He reaches her by phone.

He says deeply, “More than anything, I wish you’d come see us here. I want to show you the shops and that view of the mountain. We’ll fill you with country food and good stories. And you can see for yourself where Noof the caterpillar has led the kids.”

“Yes! Yes!” she cries out. Where did her usual soft feathery reserve fall away to?

“I’ve visited your place dozens of times over the years,” says he. “But you’ve never been to Egypt even when you and my mother were so tight. She didn’t do much entertaining here other than croquet with my kid cousins. But today this is a regular convention center!! Why—”

“I know it. I know it. Per—”

“Why don’t you come Sunday? I’ll have a crew down by the road just to open our little gate for you. Just for you. And Morse. I owe you. It would mean a lot to me, and to the others here.”

She sniffles happily. Sighs. Says she would like that very much.

But on Sunday, though the crew of young teens waits by the gate for nearly two hours, letting neighbors pass, the Weymouth car never shows up.

Late evening on one of the big porches, the one off the kitchens, see the flutter of Settlement-made candles in stained-glass holders of blue and lavender and rose.