knows Rex hates to be watched. Everybody has their thing. With Mickey’s mother, it’s spiders. She’s quiet all the time until a spider gets on her sweater or pant leg and then she is not quiet. Willie Lancaster hates to be “caged” (and this spring he got to be in the Cumberland County Jail for a few hours). Mickey hates to be surprised. Not even little surprises. Big surprises sort of paralyze him. So of course he hates being around Willie Lancaster who is out-of-control-in-your-face-all-over-the-place. But tonight Rex has a message for Willie.
The message is about the Virginia militia guys coming up to Maine for the Preparedness Expo in Bangor. Rex wants this message to go to Willie in the in-person style. Not that he’s carrying big secret plots or anything. He just does not want “ears” and “eyes” that have not been invited. Rex calls spying on citizens “un-American.”
According to Rex, the mail is okay as far as getting through unsearched but not dependable (in the way of diced and chopped and swallowed by the post office mangling machines). “It’s like taking your letter or package and throwing it in the road.” Everybody has a few P.O.-mangled-their-mail stories.
They pass Gordon St. Onge’s farmplace, which is dimly lighted like some spacecraft. Or the gauges in an old model car. Aways after that, up the hill, they pass the dirt road, which, if they turned in there, goes through some swampy woods, then up through the open fields of the St. Onge Settlement, totally unseen from this road. And somewhere beyond the fields, beyond the Settlement itself, up behind the Quonset huts and pens and sheds, is Mickey’s secret tree house.
All the guys of the Border Mountain Militia think everything for Mickey and his brother is all lovey-dovey and hunky-dory. But Mickey’s secret reality is the tree house, and the spiders that have moved in there with him. And the near frost of certain nights.
Another piece of a mile on this tar road, which nowadays is called Heart’s Content Road, though it was Swett’s Pond Road for years, is the Lancaster place.
Mickey breathes slowly in, slowly out.
The smell of Rex tonight is not just fabric softener but a minty gum smell, and now and then Rex’s jaws work, then for awhile he just holds the gum somewhere in there.
Mickey has his usual unwashed smell. And his ponytail is so yellowy streaky dirty it has the look and texture of a big worm. Tree house accommodations are limited. Not that Mickey had ever been like Rex, who is clean in every way. Clean food. Clean body. Clean ideas. Wedding ring but no wife. Rex’s wife is bad, ran off with some other guy, got a divorce. Rex is good, Rex stays faithful FOREVER.
Rex was in ’Nam. Rex does not talk about ’Nam. Rex doesn’t talk about the wife. Rex is about fifty, Mickey guesses, close to it. Though there’s never been a mention of age by Rex, no birthday cakes with fifty candles or jokey cards around Rex’s house, no “over the hill” black balloons.
Now in the road, standing broadside and staring at the oncoming grille and twilight-time parking lights of Rex’s truck, is a smallish short-haired mostly white rangy mash-faced curl-tailed long-legs-in-back short-legs-in-front no-collar free-as-a-fruit-fly dog on his way back to the Lancasters from another mission of beg-borrow-and-steal at the Settlement.
Rex goes for the brake until the dog steps aside. Rex’s face with the heavy outlaw mustache and pale eyes is as unchanging as a cement wall. And no cusses. Rex never reacts to anything. Almost never. Well, Mickey has seen quivers ghost-thin along Rex’s jaw concerning Willie Lancaster and another militiaman being in the Record Sun, reportage on Willie’s detainment after a disturbance in a bar, no drink involved, “just idiocy,” although Rex has confided at other times to Mickey that Willie is smart. “He’s smart. And he’s a problem.”
And then Rex’s other Willie-related jaw quivering, the bright bird-chirping day when Willie left the militia meeting in Rex’s kitchen to climb up onto Rex’s glassed-in front porch to lie in wait, flat on his belly, for the carload of Jehovah’s Witnesses working their way through that part of town. He landed squarely midships of their little group with a ghoulish shriek.
No one was hurt.
This is a standard Willie Lancaster stunt, often while he is bare naked. But what irked Rex the most in the barroom scene and the leaping among the Bible ladies scene was that Willie was in full Border Mountain Militia uniform, the BDU†† camo jacket with mountain lion patch, the pistol belt and pistol, the works.
Mickey remembers most clearly of all how none of the JW ladies in their dressy shoes and mid-shin skirts and churchy sweaters screamed. They just launched smilingly into their thing and pressed a Watchtower into Willie’s hand and everybody else’s, all the other guys who had burst out from Rex’s kitchen upon hearing Willie’s wounded animal shriek.
But Jehovah’s Witnesses are probably experienced in surprises. One of them especially had that look-you-in-the-eye warmth without a flinch in her posture, though her eyelids batted on each word of her questions as if to make it clear you had nothing to fear, that she was not going to hurt you, heaven forbid. She even reached to touch Willie’s hand once, to maybe steady him as she spoke of the coming times.
Now at the top of a grade, there’s an opening on the left, a treelessness, and there’s a lot of pink light on the garage side of a modern-type house. This is the neighbor across the road from the Lancasters. A retired schoolteacher and her son who pretty regularly call the sheriff on the Lancasters to try to make the Lancasters be quieter, to have less barbecue smoke, less music, less roaring idling engines, less Willie.
There on the Lancaster side of the road are trunks of pine trees, really huge and rising way up into the night. A few of these trees are as big around as small rooms. Looks like just trees at first if you weren’t accustomed. As Rex slows his pickup and eases to a stop behind an old rug-covered snowmobile, the dim purply-green light of a TV flutters over the closed drapes of the Lancasters’ mobile home deep in the trees.
Usually a few more of the short-haired small mongrel pug-faced white-with-spots dogs can be seen hurrying outside through the dog door located at the bottom of the larger human door of this mobile home, three or four of them, dogs with earnest ways. But it’s too dark out there now to tell what is moving around.
Rex steps out, presses the truck door shut.
Mickey gets a cigarette ready in his mouth before he reaches for the truck’s door handle. He’s smart and he’s a problem. Mickey feels those words are skimpy compared with the can’t-be-measured lightning bolt fact of Willie Lancaster.
Rex starts ahead.
Mickey knows that there is a lot more to the Lancaster residence than you can see here at night. More vehicles. More buildings. More stuff.
Rex moves slowly along the path, his military boots scrunching twigs.
Willie’s shop is totally dark. The five-story pink rocket-shaped house a few feet beyond there is where Willie’s daughter Dee Dee and her husband Lou-EE St. Onge live. That place is pitch dark, too. And there’s another mobile home that is “connected” to the lighted one by a little trellis thing. This smaller trailer serves as bedrooms for some of the Lancaster teenagers. Meanwhile, a few small bands of light from the neighbor’s house make it through the Lancasters’ mighty pines.
Mickey sees the recent memory of Willie’s face in his mind’s eye. Willie with his gray eyes, not steely and gray like Rex’s, but sly and gray. And there is Willie’s brown Jack the Ripper beard and his teeth, which are sort of bucked.
Right in front of Mickey now is the vague shape of a portable chipper and a flatbed
