to stir scalding stuff stirring away. But the smell is especially now wafting from Bonnie Loo’s two-toned whorish-looking hair and body.
Okay, her eyebrows are comely. One has just arched. Like a question. How gleamy the eyes, contact lenses for certain, and out of those eyes seems to come the mile-wide gusty voice, speaking to Ivy Morelli, “Thirsty from your tour?” No waiting for a reply, just leans over one of the steel sinks, braless, the damp, filled-out green T-shirt a quickening exhibit of obscenity as if it were part of the tour, somewhat literary, somewhat theological, somewhat instructive, like Never look this floozyish or you will be eternally damned. But there’s no stopping Bonnie Loo, the wagging Atlas breasts, if Atlas were a woman, she cuffs at a bulky tin cup that leaps to her other hand. Now dips water from a speckled kettle. That black and harshly orange topknot of hair tosses around from left to right shoulder. She straightens up, cup in hand. This, too, is a demonstration, this one on how to operate the Settlement plumbing? Yes? The cup is held such ’n’ such a way.
The little reporter asserts, “I’m okay. I had plenty of beverage at lunch.”
But Bonnie Loo now throws her shoulders back as humans do who are not expecting blows to the gut from the enemy, but showcasing her vulnerable parts because the enemy izzzz weak.
Again Bonnie Loo’s hot orangey eyes are driven into Ivy’s.
Ivy almost lowers hers, just the merest flicker.
Ah hah! Bonnie Loo the victor!
But I am your friend, Ivy’s inner voice pleads. Well, I am Gordon’s friend. Cringing friend, shuddering friend, I-vow-not-to-write-a-single-word-on-you-guys friend.
But Bonnie Loo stands back reproachfully, some grudge grander than the victim-seeking-mass-media betrayal on the horizon, the seconds ticking away, her upper-body dimensions unclouded by the T-shirt fabric, as thin as paint.
Nobody in the whole crowded room makes a helpful wisecrack or cheerfully scolds in order to end the tension. Everything weird about this flow of seconds is unweird to the onlookers.
Ivy keeps her eyes on the big enamel cup as Bonnie Loo dashes the water from it into the flared opening on top of the tall dark green pump, raising the pump’s impressively long arm and clenching the fingers of her broad hand around it, works it hard. And Bonnie Loo’s own arm, yellowy dark from her Maine mix of bloods, heritage that whispers of peoples stirred and shuffled, blurred and ruffled up together because of ships, because of snowy trails between lodges, jammed ice in big rivers, then jammed logs, the blur of big woods greener than the heart can stand, gray waters, green waters, human heat, and myriad hungers. Then Bonnie Lucretia Bean was someone’s foxy-orange-eyed black-haired infant, chubby little doll arms, but now grown, now a towering brute, now holding not the pump-priming cup but a pretty little ceramic one, maybe nearby is a matching saucer, the Colonial America carriages, ladies and gents, preening blue and mauve.
The cup is ever so suddenly overfull, drizzling. But the great pump’s arm proceeds. The little dainty cup gasps. The lake under earth rises to swallow Bonnie Loo’s golden hand and slim silver wedding ring in a blur. Up, down, water pound-punches, making a cold breeze on Ivy Morelli. The cup, the unending overflow, that terrible abundance from so deep under the Settlement’s granite footings, how can it not be polar?
Now there! The dripping cup is thrust into the mass media’s hand.
“Here. Drink up,” Bonnie Loo commands.
And Ivy Morelli herself overflows with her deepest “HAW! HAW!” but doesn’t draw the cup to her face for she is locked in a pause like the solstice.
Bonnie Loo, now with her hands on the hips of her long skirt, one with intricately embroidered flora and elfin faces around the hem, says low and moltenly, “Good God, it ain’t poison.”
By August, the yearnings of the Record Sun enterprise were grander, less complex, and with more grasp than that friendship notion of little Ivy Morelli. And so her hand was forced. The big-spread feature came with no warning, just pow! It was not hostile. In fact, it was becoming to us. But as my crow says . . . my crow, you know, the one who is different from all the others, the one who comes to my cottage’s sunroom window for cracked corn . . . someone’s abandoned pet, he ducks under the open window or flaps in ahead of me as I open the back door. He has a good view from the Norfolk pine in its tub near my chair and midday coffee, or flaps into my bedroom where the tall bedposts are, ripples his feathers tightly to give his whole self a gloss, checks out my stuff. He loves stuff, a true American. So I had my copy of the Record Sun open in my sunroom on my little carved toadstool table, holding my head, he was there, cocking his head as if to join me in considering the photo of blurred Settlement-made merry-go-round critters surrounding Gordon’s face and upper body. How Gordon could look both benevolent and dangerous was not a trick of the photo but it sure was an opportunistic photo.
Crow’s voice, resembling a tinny cheesy-made boom box, pealed from his seesawing black beak . . . “DING DONG DING DONG. Oh, God. Get the door. DING DONG. Oh, God. Get the door. Oh, God. DING DONG.”
I personally know and truly experience how Gordie’s telephone rings all the time now since the newspaper thing. Lots of people calling about the way you can get your own very nice windmill with help from our crews that teach stuff. And homemade solar buggies. Or CSA¶ farm ideas. Some call to make fart noises or groans. My mother Beth says not to encourage these meatballs, just hang up. But I am very smart in dealing with meatballs and I tell them I am so smart I can find out technologically right where they are and cops are already on the way. This is an exaggeration, of course. Not a lie. Once I kept a meatball talking for a half hour at least about how he knows a million cops and is not worried. I said there aren’t a million cops in Maine.
In case you are reading this a hundred years from now, the phone is in Gordie’s house. No other phones. Settlement is up in the mountain. No phone there.
So one of our mothers who had come down to use the phone says, “Who is that, Montana?”
“A friend,” I said. For you guys reading this installment, I did not lie. It was just an exaggeration.
Also the mail is now like an explosion. Doesn’t all fit in Gordie’s mailbox. That’s the only mailbox. It stands on an old post by the driveway at Gordie’s gray wicked old farmhouse. No mailboxes up in the mountain where I live with everybody at the Settlement.
I sign up for the mail crew now, the part where we sort and deliver to the cubbies in the Cook’s Kitchen and Winter Kitchen. I am, of course, very good at it.
Also nowadays some of the guys like Oz and C.C. (whose name is really Christian Crocker in case you read this a million years from now) and Dane go to the post office in East Egypt riding horseback. Oz never walks on his two only legs. He’s a lost cause. Someday he’ll marry a horse, says Ellen, one of my father’s wives.
Also people drive up the long dirt road to the Settlement these days just to look at us and take pictures. Some use binoculars to make like a doorknob or a button on your shirt look big. My mother calls them assholes, tourists, and rude fuckers. I’m absolutely forbidden to go out to these cars to have my picture taken or to show them how much stuff I’m good at which happens if you get educated here in this supreme best and now totally famous place.
