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.
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!
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.
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