You dream of it, maybe brag of its sweet imagined reckoning, but no fellow slave will stand with you. There is only utter terror in the face of utter power. There is only strange strange joy, strange strange frozen obelisks of joy, strange strange howls of joy.
Gordon alone but for Secret Agent Jane asleep upstairs.
No, he is not the charismatic prophet talk radio has described him as, or the terrorist cult leader the newspapers hint hint hint at. Nor is he the prize of strength many Settlementers would swear to his being, with whom so many here have aligned their hearts.
The smiling old woman’s appearance one night after Jack Holmes drove into this yard with Silverbell and her kids has left Gordon shaken. It’s not as if she and they were the first. He suspects that in time, dozens of cars and trucks will show up outside, doors slamming, engines churning away leaving figure after figure under his big ash tree, refugees of the wheel of progress, faster, faster, faster the wheel rips up lives, spits them out at this address.
Oh, and of course each one is that hot cinder of sorrowing humanity, part of the watching eye of the whole of creation to whom you can never say, “No occupancy” or you shall be damned. And isn’t it this that is pitching so many lives overboard, the very thing he feared back in Mechanic Falls with Claire? So all along it was true! The reason for this tiny Settlement nation carved out from the blackest depths of his fright is given warrant. We killed our child because it was so.
But then he was deceived, raised by his own cleverness out of the chatter of truth to sire a city of innocents who now must face the ha ha! “free world” and its plastic dagger to the heart.
He carries a mug of maple milk into the old parlor, which is even more heaped with books and files and unanswered mail than the dining room and kitchen. And photo albums Marian left behind. He sinks onto the divan that doesn’t squeal but screams, yes, the same one Marian left behind, amid other furnishings Claire left behind. He flips to the last pages of Project Megiddo from the Bureau’s busy hand and reads on from where he left off days ago.
Tock. Tock. Tock. The nice clock that was Marian’s. Its sound trickles over his skin. It’s not about time. It’s about hypnosis. Tock. Tock. Tock. His eyes close. This report is not us. Not Rex his brother, not himself. Not any of the militia movement guys he has heard out (between gusts of his own ranting). His future is being shaped by the hands of strangers in some unknown way. Tock. Tock. Tock. Here comes the past. No nasty surprises. Nasty, yes. But all is known. Thus the past is cold comfort.
Rex York. His “brother.” Yeah, back then Rex drank. Now you can’t even get him to eat a cookie, it’s just a regimen of push-ups and laying out plans for outdoor bivouacs. Winter bivouacs. How to live by eating frozen moss and bark. How to hide. And back home in his attic, he is always at it, collecting “patriot” gossip on the World Wide Web. A fussy, fit, fifty-year-old “captain” of the Border Mountain Militia, one kind of response to the oligarchy’s very cold thin smile, that is, when it’s not grinning steamily and reminding you to “Vote!”
He, Rex, can show you computer communiqués of dates for martial law, though the event never comes to pass, not in the way he imagines it. Meanwhile, acres of so-called antiterror bills in the pipeline, just needing another OK City bombing patsy, therefore more public consent for total surveillance of us all, no, not public consent, the public will beg for it. Speaking thus, Rex seems more military now than when he was still fresh home from Vietnam, so they say. Gordon and Rex became brothers a bit later. Gordon had to reach eighteen before catching Rex’s cautious attention, while Rex’s reputation as a combat vet was always right between your eyes if he was near you, even though he never spoke of it. Never.
Gordon can’t forget that rolling twinkle of good humor in Rex’s eyes after a six-pack and two whiskies. No loud talk. No gooey grins. No irritability or caustic remarks to fire up barroom brawls. Just the eyes, those two wide-open windows of drunkenness giving you that sudden peek into his usually oh-so-private carefully managed self. See his shell-less self, his squishy clam self, like the one we all have but steely people like Rex keep covert.
Oh, how Gordon looked up to Richard York! Gordon eighteen and then nineteen, Rex pushing thirty. Drinking on the iced-over lake; drinking at card games in kitchens or at Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts; drinking at the Cold Spot, so called in summer, Hot Spot in winter . . . they actually change the sign each season . . . though way back then it was still the Lakeview Lounge, though there were no windows then to view anything through, just maybe the trash cans out back through the wee square window in that particular door.
And then on to that special seething summer, parties ripe and raw, hither and yon, and all the fairs, especially the chilly end-season Fryeburg Fair. A Harrison reefer dealer thought Rex and Gordon looked alike, the dark-lashed pale eyes, of course.
Yes, oh, yes, back then Rex and Gordon did reefer. They did it all.
And the crowning episode, in that late 1970s summer, an episode that is legendary and repeated locally as often as Paul Revere’s ride is in Boston, in this case on a night at Old Orchard when even the sea breeze was hot, Gordon and Rex and Big Lucien Letourneau rolling into town, parking on the hill near the OOB Fire Department just as the big trucks swung out in a scream of red lights and horns. Cop cars shrilled. Someone threw a firecracker from a car window . . . bang! . . . too close to Big Lucien’s head.
Unmanned Harleys, some full-dress, others not, all with slanted front wheel in park mode and glittering, with only inches between, shoulder to chrome shoulder, nudged up to the curbs on both sides of the street as far as the eye could see.
Cops were at every corner. Bouncers at all the club doors. Bikers elbow to leathery elbow on sidewalks just arriving, black-gloved, rippling with menace. Pounding music from each doorway, amalgamating sickeningly with the music from near and beyond. Smoke, the legal deadly kind and the illegal munchies-craving kind. Live strippers with what looked like taxidermy eyes. Broken glass. Fights. A knife wound with no visible knife and no Sherlock Holmes to solve the absurdity. A lake of blood. Blood looked more conscious than the guy who was stretched out loosely next to it.
Gordon and Rex and Big Lucien somehow made it out of there alive and somberly found the somewhat dark beach, all three of them toddling with baby legs from whiskey and vodka, bleeding onion rings from every pore.
The beach was like a visit to the dark new moon after what was behind them. Such peace! The sky sputtering with hazy stars, some alive and whipping about, others wobbling. Sand too soft. Gordon couldn’t make his ankles work right. Seaweed crackling and mussel shells and periwinkle shells and some unidentifiable squashy stuff that expelled a dead froggish stench like what dogs love to roll in.
But as precious as all this seemed at the moment, a not-so-good thing was hunchedly moving toward them. Big shapes in the dark. Bikers without bikes. Bikers each with a dozen fists pounded the shit out of Gordon and Rex, although Big Lucien, who, as we may or may not recall, is little, ran like the wind and made it all the way to East Grande Avenue without stopping. He told them this weeks later without shame, at a poker game at “the yard” (the yard being Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts, Big Lucien proprietor . . . when he’s not out drinking and womanizing or in jail or running for his life).
Meanwhile, back at the beach, Gordon lay in what felt like a litter of warm puppies but which really was his bleeding into sand and parts of him that were swollen in uncomely ways. But also cold lips kissing his shirt and kissing his numb-stinging fingers. Cold kisses portend what?
The incoming tide!
Gordon
