them, freeze them solid, with precision, the inexhaustible constant constant constant televised flutter of that hot dust and fire and live bodies dropping like apples from a cloud-tall tree. But also I will arrange smaller terrors, these “lone” gunmen and bomb men of and on the busy streets, schools, movie houses, even church! Mosques! Whatever!
Proud to serve you, gods and goddesses of the global exchanges, I give you the full and juicy terror of this nation and more, oh, to keep that terror in high red, a crescendo like Ravel’s Bolero, like a thumping bed, yet one more mass shooting by a dog-toothed depressed non-man “loner,” another bang! bang!, another sprawled child and choking-on-her-tears mother, today and tomorrow, bang! pop! boom! You rang? Oh, yes, I am proud to serve.
But for now, for this warm-up before the truly BIG DAY of box-cutter magic, O lords, O ladies, in my ever-resolute service, I am soon ready to give you this lunatic, armed and dangerous, weird-for-blood spectral signifier of what all good Americans abhor, that god of a little dot on the map of Maine: Guillaume St. Onge. Take him from my palm.
† Don’t forget the character list at the back of the book.
‡ Don’t forget the character list at the back of the book.
A Brief Flashback to June
So this, of course, was before her Record Sun feature changed everything. It was the morning of the solstice march and one of the biggest breakfasts of the year, where we’d be joined by good-sport neighbors and friends out there on our big screened porches, after the sun rose—the sun, the god of all life, according to many peoples of this world. And to us, significant.
The mountains that cradled us were blue-green that day, and wobbly due to the steam being so full and lustrous.
Gordon got shit-faced drunk on cider, then drunker and drunker, then you’d know a big stupid gorilla when you see one. He made a bad impression on the reporter. We weren’t feeling proud, either. He would only once in a while fall off the wagon like that but why’d he always pick the awfullest times to do it?
The reporter, whose hair was tinted purple and who wore a yellow dress, very short, and striped socks with black, buttoned-up shoes like out of a junk store . . . and tattoos of pink and turquoise kissing fish going around her thin upper arm, you couldn’t miss them . . . she seemed about to call out the marines when Gordon got to teasing little Michel Soucier, holding him down and letting out a dangly hot icicle of drool over the kid’s face, Michel screaming, then Gordon sucked the spit back in, a rare talent.
Ivy Morelli had told Gordon the night before that she had decided against doing a piece for the paper. She said to him, “I’m your friend.” But some people use that word loosely.
Before she left, Ivy Morelli agreed to come back another day, when we’d have a tour crew ready and the Brazilian heat would be gone and normal Maine weather back. But when she returned in a fresh dress of moons and stars it was almost a hundred degrees, according to the first piazza’s six thermometers which usually all read different.
My cigarette tasted like insecticide. My stomach shot to my ears. Me in the shade of the trees in the Quad, saw them herding her along through the suns of hell, between Quonset huts and mills, Ms. Media, who I knew would fuck with us. Her cute little artsy outfits and tropical fish tattoos circling her little upper arm. Her laugh was a foghorn, which was tricky because you’d assume here’s a person who is just one of us, not the smooth snooty type, but then you see the permafrost blue eyes.
I scraped the ash off my cig on the underside of the picnic table. I rose. I was going to cut her off at the pass.
I look back with shame. For here was mass media’s great ruthless blue eye inside the very heartbeat of our home and I was being some showtime master of ceremonies, throwing out an arm and an open hand, oh, view this fortress of cookstoves and kettles and bubbling stuff!!
Admire the canning crew and supper crew, svelte teens in shorts and aprons, soft shoulders. And the tykes on stools, half naked, burned and nicked and bruised. Feeling the food with grubby appendages, wagging their heads like inchworms, watching, mimicking, feeling their futures in their palms. Many with that nose, those cheekbones, the likeness, a species particular to this location, this altitude, cradled by these certain surly hills and the arms of too many mothers.
We worked nearly a dozen hardwood-topped tables in that summer kitchen. Acres of glinting still-hot canning jars, the quart kind, the sixty-four-ounce kind, and the widemouthed, twelve-ounce kind, bulging with deep green leafy, or seedy red. June’s harvest.
The reporter curled a small hand around the handle of one of the tall green hand pumps at the end of one of the slate sinks. When she looked up her mouth was smiling. Her cold-blistering eyes studied everything.
Gordon has always fussed over the danger of the media. So of course, some of us here asked, “Why did he invite her here?” For he had agreed to an interview alone with her at the farmhouse, but then he panicked and talked in riddles and . . . well, none of that matters. The question is: Why did he say yes in the first place? Was it the sound of her hearty wiseacre-yet-letdown voice on the phone?
Had his spine of resolve, usually thick like one of the monster tree supports of our summer kitchen, buckled under the weight of something so nimble and invasive as yet another fertile female?
Ivy Morelli turns away from some chitchat with a small doleful little boy named Rhett. She stares in resplendent wide-eyed discomfort at the hulkingly too close voluptuous Bonnie Loo.
Ivy’s small clover-pink mouth flattens against her teeth, an attempted but fizzled smile.
Bonnie Loo smells like cigarette smoke. And that queasy weedy ointmenty smell of all the Settlement candles and soaps and salves that Ivy’s tour has highlighted,
