The School on Heart's Content Road (69 page)

Girl voices yell from the piazza their good-natured objections.

“But you had fun, right?” he yells back.

Voices in the affirmative.

“FORGET THEMMMMMM! Forget EVILE!!!!” he screams, holding up a fist. “Shut off the TV! Rescue your kids from the schools! Hurry! Now! Let's build our own cooperatives, local sane
agri-culture,
energy co-ops, trade co-ops, slower, more intelligent travel, neighborly travel, stalwart citizens' militias and more.” He is huffing hard now, dripping on neck and nose and down through the beard, sparkles of his
passion. Closes his eyes again as if dreaming, head going from side to side. “They want your kids for the armies of corporatism's empire! To murder the planet. You want your kids working with you and your neighbors in
survival
. The public schools are about to be privatized like the prisons. Then
no
oversight! They will be an arm of the army, mark my words, brothers and sisters!
Get your babies,
your beautiful sons and daughters, out of that fucking dangerous place!”

Crowd makes an ugly sound.

Gordon's head is boiling. His fears at last are shared, thus transformed from fear into muscle.

“All those years we spend in their six-million-dollar-a-year schools, and not one peep about these
emergency
skills we need! Where was that and all the other stuff we needed to learn? Real education is like the sun! It's always been there, all these basic principles, but groups of people hoard those principles so they can fleece us . . . so they can bleed our asses and
control
us, the goddam motherfucking fuckers!”

Gordon is feeling like the twenty-foot-tall guy on the vegetable can.

His heart is hot, blood hot. Lava is cracking his skull, both painful and pleasant. He
loves
these people.
Don't hurt these people
is his prayer. The blackening night above: pure space. Below: them, him, them, him, in tandem.

Claire watches from the open screen door of another piazza of the horseshoe of shops. From here, Gordon looks so small and wavery, candles around the stage playing tricks. She is thinking.

Once, during a knitting spree back when the world was only young Gordon and young Claire, colt and filly, I made him a pair of hunting mittens with variegated yarn: red, orange, and a wild yellow. With this style, you have a thumb and a separate trigger finger to the right hand (if the wearer is right-handed). But the rest is just mitten, so the other fingers can snug up to each other. He used those mittens for years.

Tonight, his bare hands gesticulate emergency. Like scrambling to get that perfect shot in fast. That perfect buck, perfectly in his sights. Life with Gordon has always been the emergency. There is nothing strange about tonight. As I watch his hands now, thumbs hooking his belt, trying to look casual and intimate, I remember every single time his hands were on me. Some people say, “How on earth can you share your husband with other wives?” But they don't understand. To love Gordon is to share him with everybody. So maybe that makes what he feels for me thinner and what I feel for him somewhat bitter. But beyond all that, I could not expect you to understand.

Out! In! Out!

The crowd seems bigger now. Not just louder, more voices. Closer. Tighter.

And now more leaves are letting go from the maple and oak boughs overhead, some descending in a pale eerily lighted veil around the Prophet, settling thickest on and around his scuffed work boots, as if by choreography. And the air chills another notch.

But Gordon's face is as polished as a new car. He is swelling his chest, puffing up. He gulps on the first word but recovers—“And never kid ourselves. The system, the great cold steel and paper and oily mother, is
not
too kind or too moral to commit extermination: germ warfare on innocents, guns and bombs on innocents, false flag terror attacks on innocents, sneaky intelligence operations on innocents, plane loads of mean narcotics for innocents. Mono crops and forced debt. Like a mummy or a vampire in a bad movie, it is especially fond of the taste of innocents.”

The crowd moves in closer, tighter.

Jane Meserve wiggles her flag a little, dark eyes sultry. And soldierly.

Kirky Martin, with the other flag, stands stiffer,
more
soldierly.

Gordon lifts the mike, stand and all. Beer bottle falls over, rolls away. He steps to the edge of the tall stage, wipes his forearm across his mouth and beard. “Each and every one of you has a wise word, a little something we all need to hear. We need to hear each other. And to listen. Especially me. I need to listen more. Talk less.” He hangs his head. There are chuckles.

He rubs the back of his sweaty head hard, causing some hair to stand up in cowlicks. Now he hunches into the mike, speaks in a clear moderate voice, ascending to loud and louder. “We need to prepare. We need to prepare! WE NEED TO PREPARE! The exterminators are moving over the earth—Africa, the Middle East, Panama, Colombia, and on—coming,
coming, coming!
Not for certain
nations
but for certain
types
. Are you useful enough as you are? Or more useful to them
dead
or
incarcerated
? Or maybe something weirder, even. We need to prepare! We need to LIVE!!!!”

Again the crowd makes much noise and then applause, which splatters away to a single person clapping, then stops.

Gordon stands with his head cocked. Then he raises a hand. “Okay. Do that again. Clap your hands.”

The applause resumes. Then again splatters away. People turn their heads to smile at each other, enjoying this game.

Gordon says, “Okay. Now let's clap together, all at the same time.” And he brings his hands together for one clap and then space, one clap and then space, and all over the Quad and out across the lot and edges of the fields, the people clap, hands in sync—SMACK! . . . SMACK! . . . SMACK! . . . SMACK!—and you feel each SMACK! in your chest, in your jaws. It is as if all the people here are one animal, connected through one heart, a body as big as the Quad, open parking lot, gravel road, and field.

Fifteen minutes of this clapping before some youthful voice screams, “Tyrants
out
! People
in
! Tyrants
out
! People
in
!”

And off to the left another voice. “Kill the fuckers. Gun 'em down!”

But meanwhile, many voices have joined in with “Tyrants
out
!” and then just “
Out,!
” the word
out
paired with the unified single clap, and this takes off: OUT! . . . OUT! . . . OUT! . . . OUT! And the unified big CLAP, overlaid with the unified thunderous word OUT! comes faster and faster and closer together and louder and louder.

Another ten minutes filled with this building crescendo, aching hands, dripping faces, thunder in the bones, human-caused sound salvos, aimed and ready, the sky thick with stars, and—except for the faces in the fore, lighted by flickering green and rose and yellow—this devilish beast like the other beast—the globalized one that now rules—
this
beast too, is faceless.

But now a light sweeps over the crowd. Then light from another direction, painting an even broader light. And then another. And now these lights all come together on Gordon and the two flag bearers. Gordon stops clapping and crosses his arms over his chest, staring down into the closest of these white blazing TV eyes.

For another few minutes, the monster crowd booms on and on—OUT! . . . OUT! . . . OUT! . . . OUT! . . . OUT!—and Gordon just stands there and the flag bearers just stand there and the expensive, not usually patient, white TV light bores upon the stage.

When the crowd's chanting and clapping grows softer, Gordon speaks deeply into the mike, his head cocked, eyes straight into the nearest white glare. “Need a sound bite, huh?”

Chuckles, cheers, mingled hard-to-make-out suggestions shouted from every direction and one low bray: “
Kill 'em! Mash 'em! TV scum!
”

When the crowd gets sort of quiet, Gordon still stares at the nearest white light. Then he whispers into the mike, “You gonna do one of them nice
big
insurance company ads right after you play my sound bite?”

The crowd shrieks, laughs, and claps, and there is a small start-up chant of
Truth! Truth! Truth!

Gordon draws an arm back, swinging a leg forward as if to throw a fabulous fast ball, then pitches the imaginary ball to the nearest TV light, and the crowd howls and resumes its clapping and chanting of OUT! OUT! OUT! OUT! OUT! Into this chant, Gordon screams the scream of a ghoul—“DISMANTLE THE GLOBAL BEAST!” and “TAKE OUR HUMANITY BACK!”—and then throws up his fist—“GOD SAVE THE REPUBLIC!” and then shakes his fist, his massive calloused fist—“OF MAINE!”

As if the crowd size had doubled in half a moment, its voice a colossal spasm of agreement, it repeats GOD SAVE THE REPUBLIC OF MAINE! (And see, these six words will become the TV networks' sound bite, the only thing Gordon St. Onge said tonight, along with a stranger's yell of
Kill 'em!
These will run all day tomorrow all across this great big anxious nation.)

One of the distant TV lights goes dark. Either it has gotten all it wants or it has been trampled by the compressed and agitated crowd. Another light draws back slowly, zigzagging, then shrinks away.

And now, as if the Lord God's (or Mother Nature's) fist pounds the nearest mountain down, a reverberating BOOOOM! shakes the night. Six hundred grains of black powder and a wad of toilet paper in one Dixie Gun Works deck cannon, the saintly patience of Gordon's cousin, Louis St. Onge (a gentle man), and real good timing.

Operative Marty Lees still hovering at Rex's elbow in the crowded foody-smelling greenly lit piazza, thinking with disgust (though his face remains gently pleasant).

Maine secede from America? Is this what the big puppy is suggesting so publicly?

And now.