looks inside. A woman about forty with straight white-blond hair and dark roots, haggard face, her gray eyes on him. Neither eye looks very “loose” but she has an expression like a dog that wants to rip out his throat, like a dog that’s been poked and poked and kicked and kicked and kicked again. Her face is the color of ice. Her shoulders are small. She’s bunched up in a big sweater but she still looks cold, even with the heater blasting away and the engine running.
Two preteen or early teen kids. Painfully beautiful faces. Thick blond brushy haircuts, deep Jewish eyes, both sitting up perfectly straight like two bright mushrooms that have appeared under a dark damp porch. He remembers Aaron so well now, ever alert. Aaron, always joking. The kind of jokes that tried to be funny but his sense of irony was usually poorly timed. But you laughed because Aaron was sometimes a little too sad. You wanted to stand between him and that blue-tinged zone. Maybe he did beat himself to death.
“Hey,” Gordon says to the woman.
She stares at him, looks him over. Her mouth opens as if to snarl. She’s missing a tooth. She says, “Hey.”
Jack whispers, “You want them, don’t you?”
Gordon looks again into the fierce weary eyes of the woman and then backs out of the van doorway, then nudges a finger along down one side of his mustache. “For how long?”
“Forever, I guess.”
Gordon steps off the porch of the old gray farmplace with intentions of heading up to the Settlement along the woodsy path, a shortcut with a little bridge and large, sort of fantasy trees leaning in. Tonight is his night with Misty in her cottage with her cats who all despise him, his body usually occupying the best of Misty’s sunporch chairs as he and she gab about their day. And then he of course always takes up most of the bed. For the cats he doesn’t even make an effort. No invitations to his lap. No stroking them to set off purrs. Also he groans in his sleep and sleepwalks corpselike, which causes all the tails to flick in disdain.
Now, just as he takes a deep breath of the evening, he sees someone standing by the monster ash tree in the sandy lot next to the road, a small elderly person with a two-fisted grip on a leatherlike pocketbook bigger than a bread box. He veers in her direction. There is no parked car and he only vaguely recalls a vehicle slowing down a half hour ago, maybe stopping on the tar road, maybe a thump that would be a slammed door, but he was upstairs washing up.
He can see that the old person is smiling up at him and that she wears no glasses. Her eyes are possibly blue, hard to tell in the flagging light. In his deep big-guy voice, he asks, “You looking for me?”
Her hair isn’t white but an ashy light brown with a neglected perm, the hair jaw-length and listless, but thick and combed with a nice part on the side. She wears a dark button-up sweater, jeans, sneakers. Her nose isn’t small, snoutlike, or curt. Maybe once she was quite handsome. She has been nodding her head to his question, her eyes wide and seeming to show some sense of humor about the moment.
He has a sinking feeling, knowing someone has dumped her off. The way people sometimes dump off boxes of baby rabbits or, once in a while, a pup.
“Well,” says he. “Let’s go up where all the hot corn muffins are and get the world by the tail.”
Once they start up the wooded shortcut, he fumbles for the small flashlight hooked to his belt along with his batch of keys. She isn’t talking. She must be fuzzy of mind. He reaches for her hand as they come upon the rooty part of the trail. He thinks about the aspirin bottle he keeps at all times in a pocket but just keeps on swishing the light through the overbearing purple dusk inside the crackling-underfoot tunnel of old trees.
She stands so erect and easy by the scarred dark table in the farmhouse dining room, the old blue-with-white-polka-dots wallpaper Gordon’s mother herself pasted up once upon a time. How musty-cool this room is but the cherry-pink ceramic cherub in the corner hutch cabinet looks overheated.
Bree spreads her ringless hand on the thick, stapled document lying amid three empty coffee mugs on the long leafed table. She asks, “What is this?”
He is just now entering the room with two more mugs, these with maple milk in them, one for her, one for him. His eyes widen. “Oh that. Well, in this world there’s your Recipe. Then there’s their Recipe.”
Her voice has always had a smoky edge. “Project Megiddo, it says. It’s the FBI. But what are you doing with it?” She giggles.
He positions the two brimming mugs on the table. He glances at her face, which is purposely hidden by squiggles and twists of shining young-girl hair, perfectly orange hair, her face deformed by whatever it was that went wrong when she was the size of a thumb . . . or earlier . . . maybe when she was a mere idea . . . though who could imagine Bree, her honey-color eyes set apart like a funhouse mirror image and her mind that to him once seemed shy, nervous, or something . . . but, no, he is beginning to understand that she is not nervous of anything. He bets that the coil of her brain is radiating far more redly than her hair.
He explains, “Everybody has a copy of that thing. It’s not top secret. It was issued to fire departments, cops, EMTs. Rex‡ . . . you know . . . he’s with the volunteer fire crowd.”
“I figured. Cuz of the red light on the dash in his pickup,” she says in a warm way.
He grunts. “Richard York. He’s just like you. He loves to share. He’s probably churned out half a million copies of that report.”
She giggles.
“Drink some of your ambrosia, Athena,” he chuckles, pushes her mug easy-careful across the table toward her hand, which is, yes, ringless, but speckled and dashed with three shades of muscley purple, one shade of red, one splotch of yellow ocher.
She reads aloud: “The attached analysis, entitled Project Megiddo, is an FBI strategic assessment of the potential for domestic terrorism in the United States undertaken in anticipation of or response to the arrival of the new millennium.” She doesn’t look into his face square-on. She never does. But her eyes drift toward his shoulder, his work shirt, and his Sherpa-lined vest. “Have you read this . . . all of it?” She flips through, pausing, blinking.
Gordon speaks in a cartoony play-voice, “If we is to hassle Mr. York about reading our stuff, it’s only fair we reads his.”
She tsks. “Looks like the FBI wants to scare everybody, huh?”
He says nothing. The expression across his dark-lashed eyes is smirky. His cowlicked hair adds greatly to his appearance of What? Me worry? though “weary” is a more accurate word.
But her voice becomes almost academic and there, see her touch her chin with a musing finger. “I mean . . . their language is . . . well, you know, Poeish. You can hear funereal music in the background. I mean . . . it’s funny . . . but not funny. Cuzzz they are trying to make the militia movement guys into something . . . terrorists.” She giggles. “I mean it’s not funny . . . but they sound so . . . like . . . bad actors in . . . well, like Joe Friday!” She hiccups
