quite neatly on cheap orange wall-to-wall shag carpeting, or so it seems. Everything turns washy, then back to stark. The corpses are not death gray but orange, as though their wooden visages have a very bad maple stain. And the corpses’ heads are fanned with decoration like relics of ancient Egyptians. The corpses breathe. Bellies and chests expand, lips flutter, noses hiss. Hissssss.
Rex notices that one corpse is now standing, not threateningly. In fact, the face isn’t clear to Rex so it may not be looking at him. Nevertheless, Rex begins to spook.
He wants to get away but he’s lying on the cheap orange carpet and can move only his jaws. His jaws have vigor. “Arrhhh-huh-hh-eeeee-ooooo!”
This is the same sound he always wakes to, the girlie ghosty wail. It shames him that he can’t even scream like a man.
He doesn’t have recurring dreams like those some people tell of. No, his war dreams never repeat. Hundreds of horrors. No repeats.
He is crossing Lexington with a crowd of high-school-aged kids, a woman wearing white nurse-like stockings, a woman who looks like a Russian peasant from fifty years ago, and a few homeless mumblers. Mostly his eyes are on the little smoke shop over there, with the newspapers in the racks so fresh they look cold. Cold print, like fresh fruit. Sweet. It has always moved him that way.
He sees the face of Gordon St. Onge. It is the thousandth time—sometimes in this city, sometimes in other cities . . . even Tokyo! . . . the big guy’s face or form, moving toward him menacingly, in that way he would have his hand in his shirt or jacket on the handle of a gun. And in the night, EVERY NIGHT, he hears that tiny click of doorknobs turning, all the doorknobs at once. His apartment like his summer house is full of doors and sharp-edged waiting.
The key. When will it be returned? Oh, this. His fantasy! Like two boys playing in a tree. Does St. Onge, on the other end of this daydream, imagine his role of stalking? This game, not globe-sized but one-on-one, life or death, the ultimate challenge.
A few times a day, every day, Bruce relives that two hours he spent with St. Onge . . . every word, the gray light, the rank coolness of that truck cab, cider and goat and greasy tools and the oddness of his host’s eyes.
He arrives at the racks of fresh newspapers and magazines and looks back over his shoulder at the rush of faces and their rolled-up umbrellas tucked under elbows, sacks, and valises. He can almost hear a larger-than-New-York rustle of voices, St. Onge passing on the word to minimum-wagers, temps, ex-cons, and those millions all over the country and beyond who are sick to death of debt, who steam at yet another lordly lie. And all the little doggie ones who never questioned before now squashed into dinkier and dinkier and colder and colder apartments with three grown kids whose only chance for success is retailing street drugs or dealing in stolen goods, especially handguns, where urban America’s stiff gun control laws have given black-marketing a rainbow with a pot of gold at both ends. And then there are all those in the hemispheres of East and South, their confusing yet simple hell of the West’s Darth Vader foreign policy . . . oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, the beauty of Duotron Lindsey subsidiaries’ cluster bombs and hellfire missiles? And playful “drones,” still in the secretive conspiracy stage.
Oh, yes, they’re speaking the name Bruce Hummer as Gordon St. Onge murmurs to them, “Brothers,” all snapping and clacking the warm action of their large magazine rifles. Like the Vietcong, they could pop up anywhere now. Bruce, Bruce, Bruce, they croon.
He settles down tiredly on the edge of the motionless merry-go-round platform, the bright animal figures above him, frozen in frenzy, raised paw, hoof, wide jaws, sludgy eyes. All are monsters made with tools and paint in the hands of kids. And with the assistance of one gasoline generator, these disturbing beasts can come to life, churning in their monsterific colors.
A cat has followed him, a stringy young kitteny cat, solid charcoal gray. Not a hunter. Just a follower. She glides around on the platform, touching things disdainfully with her nose the way cats do.
Then she shoves herself against Gordon’s side, snakelike.
A single-engine plane drones along smartly through the vague-looking insincere sort of clouds, clouds as thin as thoughts, sky being almost the very best blue. Burned-looking goldenrod leans. Viny stuff creeps around. Except for the plane, everything is so quiet. And quite frank. Nothing lies.
Gordon takes something from the pocket of his jacket. A large, almost square brass key.
Now a beige card. He looks at the card awhile, not reading the words and numbers, just staring into it, and then his fingers and a thumb press and prod the card as he stares downhill awhile at the tarred Heart’s Content Road.
Then he holds the key with the slender jagged part upright. And he looks into its sheen.
Cat paw reaches out and gives the key a serious ambush cuff.
“Yeah,” Gordon tells the cat. “That’s the idea.”
Did I contribute in any small way to the direction he took?
I relive every conversation, reread every letter, hearing my own words, assuring myself that I am in no way to blame, then, a few days later, I find myself anxious again. I see clear as ever his brooding profile one of the last times he stood in our front room, barely hearing anything anyone said to him, something inside him that could not see the positive aspects of that day . . . yesss, more than thirty riveted governors’ wives and such a perfect little coup de théâtre by his exuberant progeny. I wanted to see triumph on his face. But he recoiled.
Maybe there was tension between him and Claire. Or him and the redheaded girl. Age fifteen. They said she was a neighbor. I repeat: age fifteen.
Brianna Vandermast. “Bree.” Writer of The Recipe for Revolution, which he had mailed to me a couple of weeks earlier, two drafts and a flyer version. I repeat: she was age fifteen. It was said he had twenty wives. I wondered if she were one. Is this what decent people do?
Gordon, the child of elegant and proper and sturdy-of-heart Marian St. Onge who, as part of the influencial Depaolo family, often appeared with one of her engaging brothers or uncles at functions, the small private kind and those scintillating fund-raisers in Augusta or Bangor or Portland.
I cannot count the times she honored my invitation to have lunch here, just the two of us in the garden or on the beach, laughing like girls. Or we met at restaurants. Such a tall rawboned young woman with the liquid grace of the sveltest among us, meticulously dressed, her dark hair never curled though curls were the rage in those days. She had what you might call a bob.
She had an unusual marriage. She’d married a heavy-equipment operator from one of her uncle’s crews. When she spoke of him, though it was rarely, her cheeks flushed. I heard from others that her marriage was as deep and meaningful as her friendships were, her friendships always being of the more prominent classes than whence came her darling “Gary,” Guillaume St. Onge Sr., who, it was said, was a head shorter than her and of a slim wiry build.
This
