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