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.
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?