Gordon’s eyes narrow, his fingers tightening the rolled-up paper.
Crow shakes himself, which means he has something to say, gets a more secure perch on the beech sculpture’s square head, and out comes his scratchy advisory voice, “It’s Bob. Don’t answer the door. It’s Bob. It’s Bob. Oh, God, it’s Bob. Don’t answer the door.”
The other crows are in the pines many yards west of Claire’s yard. Across the wraithy white-mauve sky darker clouds go scudding along helplessly. Gordon aims the paper like a revolver at the sassy crow. Crow hops, turns to one side, says quite clearly, “Salad. Yuck. I ain’t no friggin’ rabbit. Yuck. I ain’t no friggin’ rabbit.”
Gordon again pictures Claire in the doorway, this time just her round most recent self, the way she would look today, her hair beginning to gray, the spectacles and the vast bustline in a rough-knit sweater. Oh, that for once this afternoon his plans would dead-bolt silkenly into place. She would offer him tea in the cloudy-today sunroom. She would rub the sleeve of his shirt over and over and over.
Crow expands his wings as if to rise, settles again smugly in the same place, then imparts, “Thou art the thing itself: Unaccommodated man is no more than such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.”
Gordon knows this bird has not really spoken this last bit. It’s just absurdity and stark loneliness merging in the frontal lobes of his, Gordon’s, brain. It can happen to anyone, of course. It’s absolutely not a form of insanity.
The right thing and the wrong thing are like two wrestlers you are trying to pull apart, their legs and arms entwined.
My dream for years was that all the children of the world would someday be born into a life of significance and choice and the delights and profundity of great art and great music, and they would be spared of toil, would know only meaningful endeavors, that if America brought its rare luminescence to all the remote and bitter and sad foreign places of this world, to educate . . . yes, educate!!! . . . this dream would unfold. Educate! The secret, I presumed, was education. Show them the better way, bring them technology, medicine, clean habits, birth control, equality, and opportunities for expanding business and trade, and they will rise above their situations.
But my friend, that roaring creature with the raised fist you would eventually see on your television and in so many papers, his face being painted by the shadows of low helicopters, this in the coming months, he who has sat many times in this very room, growled, “You’re bringing them the ruthless US empire and war.”
Oh, sometimes he was energized and hopeful, and then poof! . . . something I would say? . . . or some malignant vision that would cross his ever-so-pale, dark-lashed eyes . . . he was not a movie-star-handsome man but he would draw your eye, and there he’d stand in this room, a raw compelling profile, yes, compelling, a man with no faith but in devils.
No, in those moments he saw no buoyant days ahead with humanity streaming together in peace and educated choices. He saw no safety. No “rare luminescence” on the horizon. He said that nothing in history has ever played out that way, that I’d have to change human nature and nature itself first.
And yet whenever he came calling, he was my friend, as his mother, dear heart Marian Depaolo St. Onge, was my friend.
This morning at 7:30 or so, I sit by the corner windows of the front study, with the newspaper folded on my lap and with a tiny pot of tea, which I have instead of breakfast . . . this major newspaper, not the Record Sun but one from the larger national chain, which my family owns, and yet on any subject of its fresh-smelling pages I do not believe a word of it!
I turn the paper facedown on my knee. And I hear both the sea, which makes the floor tremble, and the humming of my heart’s disappointment. And the sea, smashing on the rocks like many tons of broken glass, tells me it already has no memory of us. I have finally come to see there is no grand flourish I have to offer to save the world, even as I have for so many years been able to force the fates, to exact favors, to MAKE things happen, to FIX certain minutiae that need to be righted if I am to have my way.
No, I did not give him money. And no, we were not lovers. I am nearly twenty-five years older than him, he was but thirty-nine years old then. Though I have touched him, felt the dragonlike mass of his body in mutual embrace, for I always squeeze and squash what I prize most and it will always be said that he did the same.
The sea pounds. Its power is in its lack of wishes and of dreams.
Mickey considers how the dark pounces earlier and earlier in the usual September way, but the weather is fucked up. Most of the guys in Rex’s militia say that global warming is just a lie made up by the environmentalists. But at the last meeting, Rex told how his friends in Alaska have been writing for a few years saying the permafrost is melting. And it’s so bad now that one town has to move because the houses are tipping over and seals, which are usually born on ice, are being born in water due to all the flooding caused by the melting, which is picking up . . . the melting . . . it’s really going fast. So the seals are drowning as they are born. Thousands of them. And then there’s Greenland. Coasties Rex knows say, “Kiss Greenland good-bye.”
Doc, who has combed-special dark hair and small, mean-looking ears and a “Western Mass” accent (which makes words like docks and rocks sound like dahcks and rahcks to Mickey), had said, “Alaska is pretty close to Russia.” He said this with significance.
And Art who is round and smiley had said, “Yeah,” with significance.
And Doc had said, “Commies and environmentalists have the same roots. Most likely Alaska is crawling with some of each. And those types all lie.”
Phil, one of the guys who had been sitting deep in Rex’s old leather couch, was looking from Doc to Rex and back and forth as he said, “So Rex’s buddies are Russians? What kinda names they got, Rex? Any—”
Doc interrupts with a wave of disgust, his wedding ring giving off a dull glow. “I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the Alaskan general public. Their environmentalists lie to them. Their environmentalists caused the weather change so they could get some sort of federal subsidies.”
“HAARP’s** up there,” Art reminds them. “So that could be used on themselves to change the weather.”
Rex just stared at these guys and their words going back and forth.
George Durling, who is very sick from something he got in ’Nam, he’s a red-haired skeleton actually, he says softly that Planet X is approaching. “The earth’s core is heating up due to that.”
This starts them all on the subject of Planet X but Rex has no comment on their news that most of the world’s telescopes are shut down and that there’s been a lot of fishy goings-on involving the Vatican and governments concerning information on the “tenth planet’s” approach.
At most meetings Rex is quiet. Sometimes he is totally quiet, just staring at them all as they get out their maps and survival goodies. Rex’s steely silence and cold eyes are a comfort to Mickey. Predictable. Like his own steely silence.
So Rex didn’t argue about global warming at that meeting.
But tonight as he and Mickey go along in the truck, windows down, T-shirt sleeves flapping in the weird hot watery night, Rex says, “Once the caps are gone, we’ll heat up fast. You know how it is in the spring around here once the snow is off Mount Washington.”
Mickey nods, his eyes on the red-but-not-presently-flashing volunteer firefighter light