tired groan.
“America needs to be divided,” she says. “Divided we fall. That’s it in a nutshell. We . . . the little guys. Meanwhile, these . . . these cops or whatever they are . . . they get paid for being dangerous and . . . and silly.” She flips the top page, lets it drop. “I hate to see people be such suckers. There’s got to be a way to outsmart a bunch of funny cops.” She snorts.
“So,” says he, “I saw where the print shop did up about two hundred more of your Abominable Hairy Patriot flyers. What are you going to do with those?”
She giggles. Guiltily. She’s aware of the ethic of thrift Gordon stands firmly on, so she might be feeling she has wronged him? “Oh . . . like, we’ve been passing them out, around. Bulletin board at the town office and IGA. Telephone poles. Windshield wipers.”
“You and your wicked comrades from the Socrates group, right?”
She hesitates, then says lushly, “Sure. Comrades. Which reminds me . . .” She steps around one of his towers of books, a plastic crate of oak tag files, and a couple of satchels of yet-to-be-answered “fan mail” to the nearest darkening window. She keeps her back presented to him. Always her back (and perfect bottom). Always her profile (within the veil of her long hair). Never, never square on. She will face everybody but him, even though he and she have been together so much this summer, perfecting the three versions of The Recipe for Revolution. Is he wronging her to feel suspicious . . . of . . . something? That she is scheming things that she is too young to realize are too hot to handle?
Some here call her gifted, her art, her welter of calligraphy, her way of leading the other girls around by the nose. But she is not sixteen yet. She still believes that monsters can be tamed by princesses, that the world beyond the Settlement gate can be fixed.
She tells him, “I reached the people I told you about . . . the . . . leftists. The ones with the folk school project, the ones who printed that great brochure on democracy versus corporate power.”
He is suddenly and deeply silent.
“They said it would be their pleasure to come,” she adds.
All at once he slurps and sucks and splutters and slobbers away at the edge of his mug of maple milk, the syrup settled languidly at the bottom, then with a red bandanna from his pants pocket, cleans his heavy dark mustache like a cat, defiantly and precisely. And still he offers no words. Runs his tongue over his teeth, getting more mileage out of the maple.
She steps back and turns toward the corner hutch.
One of his eyes tends to widen when he’s overawed by life, the other eye narrowing and flinching. This is happening now. “You send them our Recipe? I mean your Recipe. You are its mastermind,” says he.
“All three versions, yes, which include the one-page flyer.” She giggles. She is reaching to touch one of the pink cherub’s wings. Now his eyes swipe down over the whole of her. Logger girl. Yes, she really does work in the woods with her father and brothers. Often she has turned up at the Settlement for the East Parlor Socrates nights covered in sawdust, smeared with bar and chain oil and the sour grease of the machinery.
He has seen artwork by her, on her passions: woods, sky, work. Her brush refuses to sit, stay, lie down, and happily throws 8.5-magnitude seismographic cracks in all that’s revered.
Yes, the wide slow sway of her hips makes her, in spite of her face, a sexy girl. And yes, she is only fifteen. And he is more tired by the minute and also curious about her stopping in tonight, almost always another hint for him to save the world, always the romanticized plunge into the chasm, like Malcolm X or Emiliano Zapata or Big Bill Haywood. Oh, to be fifteen and foolish, thinking every landing to be so dreamy, so soft, so green!
“Well,” says he. “Keep me posted on when these new friends of yours plan to ride into town.”
She strokes the cherub’s other wing. She’s a tall girl. Almost six feet. He’s a tall man. Six-five. He realizes how at times when he’s near her, she and he seem of a species apart from most Settlementers . . . except his oldest sons and daughters and then his wife Bonnie Loo, who by virtue of the Bean family legacy, is of rugged and towering stature, too.
He is grateful to be sitting down. He’s been up since four. His headache is there right where it always is and basketball-sized. He leans back in the old dining room chair. He watches Bree carefully.
She speaks in a most dreamy way, “What kind of mind believed in wings?” She has, obviously, no interest in her portion of the maple milk.
Gordon says huskily, “Millions still believe in angels. And pregnant virgins. And kings visiting Bethlehem on camels that must be turbo camels to make such good time from North Africa . . . uh . . . . hours after the babe hit the hay. According to Christmas cards.”
She is a bit more in profile to him now, no response to his camel wisecrack, and withdraws her hand from the rigid pink wing, though her fingers are still in the cherub’s personal space. “I guess you’d need wings to flap up to heaven.” She touches without hesitation the cherub’s bright penis, then declares with a release of held breath, “Heaven is on earth.”
The last gooey swig of what’s in Gordon’s mug goes down. He reaches for her full cup, draws it to himself.
It changed so much about our lives at the Settlement. That Record Sun feature. And all the “wire” pieces and talk-show fervor that came on its heels. We could never hide anything again and we had plenty to hide, all that which made up Gordon’s humanity. He was stood on a stage now. He was cut into “bytes,” a collage for the titillation of America. All of us at the Settlement were part of that collage, like some sort of jokey frat-boy art.
But our gardens wagged in the rains, simmered in the sun, and our children continued to be vivacious. And our elderly elders wore their invisible crowns, chin up. At times we could pretend nothing had changed.
When I get a minute, I’ll tell you a little about the reporter who was the first to crash into our lives . . . the lovely and fox-cunning Ivy Morelli of the Record Sun. Bonnie Loo hissed that she was a bitch and a cunt, but to me she seemed just another vulnerable sticky soul snagged by our towering king of the Settlement hearth.
This glowing growing of free exchange, these acquisitions, accumulations, these deserved accretions, the flow, as unencumbered as the sea, is the rock of civilization. It is immoral not to defend it!
Overlords and overladies of the free world! You rang? I bend. Gladly.
There is no weight to your trillions, once the currency of evergreen and gold, now just the sheen of the scrolling screen, your gains mounting taller than the twin towers, those dispensable giraffes that soon will go down in the hot dust free fall of our ingenious brew of delicacies. You rang? At your service! Proud to serve! Kabooooom!
No need to concern yourselves with that which walks on billions of legs, the restless, enraged, suspicious, unpacific folk of the homeland and
