The School on Heart's Content Road (10 page)

Mickey knows the way to this house by heart now. He even knows the shortcut through the rest area off the highway, through a narrow stand of planted white pines called “research area” by a paper company, and then another quarter mile across a lumpy, flowery fallow field. He knows Rex has been called Rex all his life.
Rex
means
king,
so of course the guy likes it. Unlike
Mickey,
which Mickey sometimes despairs over, it being the name of a mouse.

With each visit, Mickey knows more about the Border Mountain Militia and other militias across the country. And yet, so much isn't told. Somehow it doesn't seem secret, as in
top secret,
but more or less things Rex can't or won't express, things to do with fear and anger and shame, things to do with the ways evil power can be something else besides a foreign army, something you can't kill.

Rex has told him that the Border Mountain Militia is composed of four hundred members, although Mickey has met only fifteen and heard mention of the names of six or so more. Rex's computer, in the corner of a small bedless bedroom upstairs, glows an agitated bright blue.

Rex has said Mickey can be a full member after he checks him out a little more. This is something above and beyond the already seeand-record-everything gaze of Rex's eyes. Mickey once asked, “You mean
school
records?” and Rex said, without a hitch, “I do not mean school records.”

Mickey knows he doesn't mean credit check, and Mickey doubts there's a Michael Daniel Gammon FBI file, and how would Rex have access to it anyway? He keeps trying to figure what Rex could be checking out. Whatever it is, it feels kind of nice.

This meeting has only drawn a few members, which Rex says is due to its being summer. Although today is another dark and steamy downpour. The ceilings are low here, and in the kitchen a coil of flypaper has one fly on it. It is Saturday, so Rex's brother's kids are in and out. Rex's brother Bob lives in a ranch house on the other side of the field. Rex says his brother is
not
into the Patriot Movement. Rex hints that his brother is a weird character, not to be trusted. Over time this summer, it is revealed to Mickey that Rex's brother is, yes, a
schoolteacher
. Mickey feels a bond with Rex in their common disaffection for brother Bob.

At today's meeting, they are talking about the terrain of the White Mountain foothills here as compared with Aroostook and Bangor area highlands and the relatively flat southern Maine coast. Topographical maps are in a loose floppy pile on the foot hassock and much of the rug. Then somebody brings up the subject of radio transmitters, and a guy named Dave goes out to his vehicle for lists of data he keeps on shortwave frequencies and installation and everything one needs to know about shortwave.

There is some mention of Willie Lancaster at this point, a member who was in jail last week for an hour or so. Rex is
grim
about the subject of Willie Lancaster, even though Willie Lancaster has a pretty good shortwave setup and is planning big things with it. So the conversation about Willie Lancaster begins to trickle off under the weight of Rex's steely, pale, disapproving eyes.

Rex's La-Z-Boy is not in its TV-news-watching position. He is sitting on the edge, footrest folded down, his boots flat on the floor, a palm on one thigh, forearm on the other, squinting at the nearest map. He wears a short-sleeved camo shirt with an embroidered patch on the left sleeve that features the snarling mountain lion and around it the crescent
of letters,
BORDER MOUNTAIN MILITIA
. The rest of his uniform is a pair of newish jeans and, of course, his military boots. No cap.

Meanwhile, Rex's daughter. Mickey's only seen her once, except for her graduation picture, which he glances at from time to time. The time he actually saw her, she had been taking a nap and came out the door from the closed attic stairs, her face puffy and blinky. She was wearing a big loose flannel shirt with no pants, maybe short shorts or a bathing suit, but you couldn't really tell. The shirt was just a dumb red and blue and cream plaid. She was hugging herself, acting goose bumpy and looking around at the faces of the gathered militiamen like they were all a little bit funny. She didn't look much at Mickey. But she tossed a scrunched-up Kleenex in the face of a young guy with a soft mustache who was almost asleep on the couch. She didn't turn to look at Rex when she asked, “Dad, where's the phone book?”

And Rex said, “Must be upstairs. In the computer room.”

And then she rolled her eyes in exaggerated despair, and
tsk
ed and said, “Jeepers, Bumpa. Nooga putee-way, you bad again, Bumpa.” This a special baby language she and her old man share? Mickey doesn't dare look at any of the militiamen's faces now. He looks at his hands. He is thinking how he has heard her name spoken a few times but can never be sure if it's Glory or Gloria. Her hair is long enough to reach the backs of her pretty, nice knees. Auburn. Thick. Ripply. And . . . and . . . awesome. She is frighteningly beautiful, even without makeup, even though her brows and lashes are light and she's freckled thickly. Worse than just beautiful. She's teasy. Mickey supposes that Glory (or Gloria) doesn't lose much sleep over Special Forces, United Nations, and “Socialists in the White House.”

No sign of her today.

Whenever Mickey stands up, to get one of Rex's mother's cookies, or to head for the bathroom again to piss out his black coffee, or to smoke on the glassed-in porch, he will see through this or that window two Herefords standing thickset in the downpour, chewing cud, eyes shut. These are the cattle Rex and his brother, Bob, share the raising of and then they share the meat. This leads Mickey to believe that Rex and Bob are at least on speaking terms, if not politically attuned.

Mickey is not the only teenager at this meeting. There's Ben, maybe eighteen or nineteen, the guy Rex's daughter bopped with the balled-up
Kleenex, there in the deep fake-leather couch again, looking sleepy, like he does at every meeting. This time he sits between two big guys. One wears a tank-type muscle shirt and his trucking company advertisement cap; the other wears summer-weight biker regalia, denim sleeveless vest, tattoos, and a small earring. The sleepy boy's mustache is nothing like theirs, just a little red-blond splutter. But he wears a camo shirt with an arm patch just like Rex's.

Also, there's a kid named Thad who is a six-foot-one fourteen-year-old with a massive chest, massive in breadth and frame, and massive in extra flesh. Breasts point against his pearl gray knit shirt as he stands slouched against the kitchen doorway. So studious-looking, with his tortoiseshell glasses and feathered hair. Thad has a relationship with Rex's mother's masterpiece cookie pile. His crunching and chomping demolishes the stack in his hand within the time it takes Dave to unfold another map.

Mickey has a seat, a kitchen chair, set between the fake leather couch and a long blond table with a sewing machine on it. But several guys are squatted or leaning against other doorframes or walls. Not enough chairs. And now a couple of late arrivals, so there's more standing and squatting.

Not many guys here are in their twenties, and not many are geezers. Mostly Vietnam-age guys, late forties, early fifties. One of them is skin and bones and wheezing loudly, seems to be dying. His eyes, with no eyebrows above, are ghosty and deep. Then there is the hefty, high-voiced, cheerful sea-captain-beard guy, Artie, whom Mickey also met that day at the pit. His white hair is in a monkish ring around a bald spot, quite pink. Red suspenders over a white T-shirt. And like the boy Thad, he has breasts.

One guy Mickey can never warm to is Doc, a really hard-assed guy who also wears a camo shirt with an arm patch. Although the word
God
comes up at all meetings in a rather rote fashion, this guy speaks the word
God
like you or I would say the words
club
or
guillotine
. Mickey fears this guy worse than Mr. Carney and his henchmen at the high school. Probably because back last spring Mickey had surmised it was only a matter of time before he'd walk out of that school scene forever. But here, he can't imagine his future without the militia. It is everything.

The inevitably leaky press.

Gordon is working here in the largest Quonset hut with his son Cory. Tall, imperious-looking Cory St. Onge (although he is not in actual spirit imperious). A lament in his black eyes (though he is a fairly contented sort), Cory of the immense shoulders and back (like Gordon), is noticeably Passamaquoddy. Almost fifteen years old. Nothing like his father in the need to blab, no crooked smile, no twitching eye and cheek, no awkward charisma. Just a boy, ordinary as winter.

The rest of the furniture-cabinet-making crew are all and about as well.

In through the hum of lathes, the screech of saws, and drifting sweet light, and sweet dusty air strides a messenger. None of his children call him Dad or Father or Papa or any of that. Like all the rest, she—the messenger—calls him Gordie. She is his child by Claire's cousin Leona, and a sister to Cory. Her name is Andrea St. Onge, the only one who has turned out to look so completely Passamaquoddy, not so much like a Frenchman, an Italian, or a folk of the shamrock (Gordon's side). No, nothing like Gordon—except her stature, long arms, long body, and easy gait. And
some
of her squinty smiles. She is accompanied by two small spotty white dogs who often hang out here and now waste no time in wetting down the legs of the equipment and lower shelves. Three angry men chase the dogs out.

Andrea is not quite seven. Yes, tall. Short china-doll haircut, like her mother's; long Settlement-made skirt of red. Baggy black Settlement-made
T-shirt. Settlement-made moccasin sneakers. She is graceful and tiptoeish, bringing this “message.” Just back from visiting an old Settlement man in the hospital, some doctor appointments, windshield leafleting, and other Settlement-style gang-style missions, all made possible by one van trip out into the world.

Gordon is slipping off his safety glasses, sees in her hands a newspaper folded in a careful odd way. She places it in his hands. She doesn't leave until she's nuzzled into his shirt, found the solidness of his ribs, and patted his back comfortingly. “It's the lady in there who wrote something . . . about us. See the folded part? That's where it is. Okay?”

“Yep.”

She leaves, looking neither left nor right, having important business elsewhere.

He walks quickly to the passageway that leads to the other half of the building, a narrow passageway with deep shelves and cardboard boxes and tools and “cultch” and not much light. He squats there under the little dim yellow bulb like a wounded animal, safety glasses still on his head, and reads what Ivy Morelli has written, although she had sworn she would not go ahead with the Settlement story. Quite a spread. Pictures. A lot of pictures. And, yes, a lot of words. He reads each word and the punctuation and the spaces between and the shapes of the columns and the feel of the newsprint against his thumbs.

“Betrayed,” he says to himself with a little snort, and holds his face awhile, lids shut, seeing Ivy's blue eyes, the set of her small pointy-lipped clover-color mouth, the stalwart shape of her body, and, of course, her raffish laugh. How is it that when you do right by some it feels wrong to others? What now? What will this media “coverage” bring to his beloved family?

Mickey at Bean's Variety.

He came in for the Eskimo Pie, which is frosty cold in his hand. He is too young by law to buy cigarettes, even though he's low on them. He gets
them
through Matt Ackers, part of the Mr. Carney fan club he met at school here in Maine. Ha-ha. Like Mickey was Mr. Carney's total
biggest fan
. Ha-ha. In Mass there'd been
three
friends who kept him in supply. Now there is only Matt, through Matt's brother, the all-powerful Dom,
who is at least thirty. Lots of cracks in the face, like the north side of a house. Fortunately, no chain of people is needed to buy an Eskimo Pie.