says, “Well, it’s—”
Bruce interrupts, “I am proud to be in the midst of a divorce that lacks vengeance. Rare, mind you. Divorces in my world are not usually so.” He is close enough now that he grasps Gordon’s upper arm. “My world, sir . . . is . . . afire with opportunities.” Pause for effect. “And vengeance. Even between dearly beloveds. Your world, my sources tell me, is in an enviable limbo. An enviable failure. Opportunities for you all are just . . . what? . . . bales of hay and buckets of milk?”
Gordon’s Tourette’s-like eye-flinch is getting up some velocity.
“I can tell, Gordon, that you don’t stay abreast of certain kinds of minutiae . . . for instance, the Wall Street Journal, with its little sketched cameo portraits . . . or even television, yes . . . the sound bytes, the artful press conferences starring individuals who . . . have . . . well . . . hey! Hear this. One of my dreams a few nights ago was about you.” In a silky one-piece motion the guy draws a pen from his chest pocket, a ballpoint, slim, silver. He smiles yet again. His smile, like his motions, like his voice, like the costly pen, is his suit of armor, hushy and recondite, made differently than for horseback jousting, made for this grand epoch where killers and the killed seldom meet.
He says to Gordon, “You were on a bridge but it was also inside a room. That’s all. The rest is fuzzy. But hey . . . what a coincidence.” Now a business card materializes. He writes on the back, presses it into Gordon’s hand. The print of the card informs Gordon that Bruce Hummer is Chief Executive Officer of Duotron Lindsey International. What Bruce handwrote on the other side is: Janet’s and Morse’s friend.
Gordon seizes in the dead center of his mind’s eye the word friend exactly written in that silky black ink. He is mulling over how much hope Morse Weymouth had placed in shareholder activism. Morse called it democracy, sickeningly true since pencils and US election ballots are as fairy dust in a four-year-old’s storybook. Gordon holds his breath. The new knowledge that Morse has been chummy with the CEO of Duotron Lindsey, the war weapons manufacturing giant, who no doubt has received those personal phone calls of Janet’s, her hushy wrist-grasping voice calling “Bruce” by name and this man’s velvet-throated devilishly seductive accent answering, sickens Gordon. He has known the Weymouths forever. His mother Marian approves of them, of course, in her lifetime endeavor to wear status like a warm coat against ice and snow. But Gordon has . . . yes . . . has loved the Weymouths . . . as human beings . . . as very special human persons. And now what? Is it that all those in the upper classes just suffer too much from politeness? Or do they see each other across a crowded room and fly to each other’s arms . . . figuratively speaking . . . in order to eat well, drink well, and at times satiate themselves in meaningful pretend combat? For they are all winners in the big picture . . . like lions dining on the bleeding spoils, they cuff one another, but their only true enemy is the great mass of human antelopes that is alive only to lie still while being chewed on. In reality this balance of humanity is kept alive only to serve.
He thinks of Morse’s legislative battles. Tinkering at the edges of the edifice but never raising his voice to the ideology of masters over slaves, never sounding off with too much of the belly and the balls. Okay, not always well-mannered, okay, but not one word ever about even a fleeting wish to end slavery. Oh, they say slavery ended. Horseshit. The world writhes in slavery. And of course it’s the nature of the human species . . . it will always be so. In one shape or another it will go on and on and on.
If only Morse had wept for the slave, keened wetly, held the slave in daily awe, even just spoken aloud of the slave.
Maybe Morse never gave a fuck about slaves. Only the “environment” mattered.
And Janet? Does she privately grieve for those chained to debt, cursed by meekness, swept from their homelands, flash-frozen (figuratively speaking), and packed into computer work cubicles, phone marketing cubicles, fellerbunchers, assembly lines, and cell blocks?
He shivers to see the Weymouths in this new dark light. He swallows hard, hotter and hotter in his wool.
Bruce is right there. His expression is odd, like that of someone who sees a ghost or maybe a flying saucer but knows better than to let on. He, Bruce, holds up a hand, a traffic cop’s Stop! and says, “So, no TV or Internet at your compound?”
Gordon stands soldier-straight and grunts, “If I found a TV on the property, I’d order it to go before the firing squad.”
Bruce laughs, withdrawing his hand, looks down the rows of plastic chairs to the X-ray-equipped entrance of this bright waiting area. He turns to Gordon again. He sucks in his breath, tightens his stomach, a fit-looking man, like Rex, but, yes, different from Rex. “I know you, Gordon . . . your politics, your . . . habits. I’ve been following you in the papers . . . and the Internet has more on you than on George Washington. Oh, these sources screw up but certain essences remain. You’ve moved the masses.” He stares straight as the path of light into Gordon’s eyes. “That’s a dangerous gift.”
Gordon’s eyes don’t flinch Tourette’s-ishly but his dark mustache flickers. He hears the airport announcements, which are staticky. He sees discouraged faces of those fogged-in passengers, sitting, standing, milling. He believes somebody has turned the heat up in the demon furnaces under this temple of sacrifice where people are ferried to and from the skies, to and from other realms, nearer and nearer to civilization’s implosion. His mind bounces. He says to his new friend, “They say it’s another two hours before any planes in Boston will get off the ground. That’s where my people’s connection is. And no flights from here. I’ve got cider in my truck. Let’s go out there and sit awhile in the pretty parking garage and shoot the shit and get shit-faced.”
Bruce, with a grin, snatches up his jacket and follows Gordon on a search to find the other Settlement people so they can be told of this plan, minus the cider part. No introductions are made with these quiet frozen-yogurt–eating people.
Bruce twists around and hangs his sport jacket on the gun rack that is against the cab window behind his head, then, with a hand spread on each thigh of his washed-out jeans, watches Gordon pouring the clear-as-vodka cider from a plastic milk jug into two Settlement-made pottery mugs. Bruce’s mug has pink painted hearts and someone’s initials scratched into the pottery. Gordon’s mug has what might be squid and octopuses, or might be girls with flowing hair. And initials. Very homey. Very well-equipped truck, ha ha. But also the cab smells of the damp day and of greasy tools in tin boxes on the floorboards under his, Bruce’s, feet. And there’s a goaty stink, maybe the striped blanket spread across the whole bench seat, or something under the seat, or maybe it’s Gordon’s plaid vest, which lies now between them. There’s the gray hollow smell of the parking garage floating in at the open windows.
And maybe there is a smell to risk, such as defying the law against riding with an open container of alcohol while you’re not a good pal of the state’s attorney general, for instance. Although Bruce wouldn’t venture many bets on that one, the whole Depaolo clan being pretty well dug in. But there are hazards Guillaume “Gordon” St. Onge is known to mess with; are they worth the consequences, where both roads of the fork lead to ruin? To being roasted?!! And yet some say he is an ultracautious man, stiff with fears and guttering courage, other than his in extremis philosophies. And isn’t there a kind of yellow-gray stink to the end of the universe, where you look at the diagram on the last door and it says, “You are here.”
Risk interests Bruce more these days. Veritable risk. Accelerating personal risk. In his world his job is to stack those sandbags against the storm. Have his people be shoulder to shoulder with the writers of bills, to spurn regulations. Jeopardy
