Yes, the wide slow sway of her hips makes her, in spite of her face, a sexy girl. And yes, she is only fifteen. And he is more tired by the minute and also curious about her stopping in tonight, almost always another hint for him to save the world, always the romanticized plunge into the chasm, like Malcolm X or Emiliano Zapata or Big Bill Haywood. Oh, to be fifteen and foolish, thinking every landing to be so dreamy, so soft, so green!
“Well,” says he. “Keep me posted on when these new friends of yours plan to ride into town.”
She strokes the cherub’s other wing. She’s a tall girl. Almost six feet. He’s a tall man. Six-five. He realizes how at times when he’s near her, she and he seem of a species apart from most Settlementers . . . except his oldest sons and daughters and then his wife Bonnie Loo, who by virtue of the Bean family legacy, is of rugged and towering stature, too.
He is grateful to be sitting down. He’s been up since four. His headache is there right where it always is and basketball-sized. He leans back in the old dining room chair. He watches Bree carefully.
She speaks in a most dreamy way, “What kind of mind believed in wings?” She has, obviously, no interest in her portion of the maple milk.
Gordon says huskily, “Millions still believe in angels. And pregnant virgins. And kings visiting Bethlehem on camels that must be turbo camels to make such good time from North Africa . . . uh . . . . hours after the babe hit the hay. According to Christmas cards.”
She is a bit more in profile to him now, no response to his camel wisecrack, and withdraws her hand from the rigid pink wing, though her fingers are still in the cherub’s personal space. “I guess you’d need wings to flap up to heaven.” She touches without hesitation the cherub’s bright penis, then declares with a release of held breath, “Heaven is on earth.”
The last gooey swig of what’s in Gordon’s mug goes down. He reaches for her full cup, draws it to himself.
It changed so much about our lives at the Settlement. That Record Sun feature. And all the “wire” pieces and talk-show fervor that came on its heels. We could never hide anything again and we had plenty to hide, all that which made up Gordon’s humanity. He was stood on a stage now. He was cut into “bytes,” a collage for the titillation of America. All of us at the Settlement were part of that collage, like some sort of jokey frat-boy art.
But our gardens wagged in the rains, simmered in the sun, and our children continued to be vivacious. And our elderly elders wore their invisible crowns, chin up. At times we could pretend nothing had changed.
When I get a minute, I’ll tell you a little about the reporter who was the first to crash into our lives . . . the lovely and fox-cunning Ivy Morelli of the Record Sun. Bonnie Loo hissed that she was a bitch and a cunt, but to me she seemed just another vulnerable sticky soul snagged by our towering king of the Settlement hearth.
This glowing growing of free exchange, these acquisitions, accumulations, these deserved accretions, the flow, as unencumbered as the sea, is the rock of civilization. It is immoral not to defend it!
Overlords and overladies of the free world! You rang? I bend. Gladly.
There is no weight to your trillions, once the currency of evergreen and gold, now just the sheen of the scrolling screen, your gains mounting taller than the twin towers, those dispensable giraffes that soon will go down in the hot dust free fall of our ingenious brew of delicacies. You rang? At your service! Proud to serve! Kabooooom!
No need to concern yourselves with that which walks on billions of legs, the restless, enraged, suspicious, unpacific folk of the homeland and beyond, such flesh the weight of rubble. At your service! I will stun them, freeze them solid, with precision, the inexhaustible constant constant constant televised flutter of that hot dust and fire and live bodies dropping like apples from a cloud-tall tree. But also I will arrange smaller terrors, these “lone” gunmen and bomb men of and on the busy streets, schools, movie houses, even church! Mosques! Whatever!
Proud to serve you, gods and goddesses of the global exchanges, I give you the full and juicy terror of this nation and more, oh, to keep that terror in high red, a crescendo like Ravel’s Bolero, like a thumping bed, yet one more mass shooting by a dog-toothed depressed non-man “loner,” another bang! bang!, another sprawled child and choking-on-her-tears mother, today and tomorrow, bang! pop! boom! You rang? Oh, yes, I am proud to serve.
But for now, for this warm-up before the truly BIG DAY of box-cutter magic, O lords, O ladies, in my ever-resolute service, I am soon ready to give you this lunatic, armed and dangerous, weird-for-blood spectral signifier of what all good Americans abhor, that god of a little dot on the map of Maine: Guillaume St. Onge. Take him from my palm.
† Don’t forget the character list at the back of the book.
‡ Don’t forget the character list at the back of the book.
A Brief Flashback to June
So this, of course, was before her Record Sun feature changed everything. It was the morning of the solstice march and one of the biggest breakfasts of the year, where we’d be joined by good-sport neighbors and friends out there on our big screened porches, after the sun rose—the sun, the god of all life, according to many peoples of this world. And to us, significant.
The mountains that cradled us were blue-green that day, and wobbly due to the steam being so full and lustrous.
Gordon got shit-faced drunk on cider, then drunker and drunker, then you’d know a big stupid gorilla when you see one. He made a bad impression on the reporter. We weren’t feeling proud, either. He would only once in a while fall off the wagon like that but why’d he always pick the awfullest times to do it?
The reporter, whose hair was tinted purple and who wore a yellow dress, very short, and striped socks with black, buttoned-up shoes like out of a junk store . . . and tattoos of pink and turquoise kissing fish going around her thin upper arm, you couldn’t miss them . . . she seemed about to call out the marines when Gordon got to teasing little Michel Soucier, holding him down and letting out a dangly hot icicle of drool over the kid’s face, Michel screaming, then Gordon sucked the spit back in, a rare talent.
Ivy Morelli had told Gordon the night before that she had decided against doing a piece for the paper. She said to him, “I’m your friend.” But some people use that word loosely.
Before she left, Ivy Morelli agreed to come back another day, when we’d have a tour crew ready and the Brazilian heat would be gone and normal Maine weather back. But when she returned in a fresh dress of moons and stars it was almost a hundred degrees, according to the first piazza’s six thermometers which