The School on Heart's Content Road (23 page)

Out here on the ledge, he feels like a stewing carrot. He looks down around his feet at many busy party-faced purple flowers on runners of
small thick leaves moving at an unseeable speed around the shady edge of the big opening.

Puff, puff. More smoke. He raises his eyes. Through a triangular swatch of “view” he can see, down there way below, the place called the Settlement where the St. Onge people live or are
kept,
depending on who you talk to.

Big U-shaped building. Like a cowboy town in the old movies. In the yard of the U-shaped building is a grassy square. Tall trees. But also homemade-looking things, made of wood, painted in colors like green and purple and
OSHA
yellow. These are gigantic creatures with kids going inside them and on them and underneath. For instance, a dinosaur, a cow, a spaceship.

Some boys about Mickey's age, some younger, go along a brick path, behind them a brown dog. Sort of a shepherd.

But, man, hard not to notice, there are enough little squirts . . . age four, age five, whatever . . . enough to feed the big dinosaur there, all it takes to feed Tyrannosaurus rex . . . tall as a barn. Some of the kids are in the head now, looking out through the tall teeth.

A whole line of women come out of one screen door of the U-shaped building, and most of them have got a chubby-legged baby kid, carried on a hip or neck.

On the part of the square U that looks into the grassy dinosaur area are screened porches and boardwalks with a ton of screen doors. Shadows of people—or, rather, light face or arm shapes—move inside the dark screeny shadows in there.

Some call this a “home school.” Mickey wonders which ones of the mean-ass-looking guys over by the Quonset huts—three big Quonset huts—are the teachers. And principal. And vice principal.

People trotting and trudging in and out of the big bay doors, arriving in trucks, and there are two sawmills and a sawdust blower, all quiet but no way abandoned-looking.

A radio tower. Door now opens in the small building. Some people leaving, and people leaving the big sandy parking area. Very busy. Like a town. Like maybe even busier. Also cattle and sheep. Mooing and baaing.

He notices a lot of black chickens, free as the breeze, walking chicken-leggedly along, diving between people, taking dust baths in the parking lot, scratching weeds, poking cow flaps.

Now he sees some girls his own age.
Real
chicks. Not as free as the chickens. They seem weighted by thoughts and thrust forward by missions. Some wiggling at the hips, probably hot for sex. One wears a soft-looking shirt of an April-sky blue. Another a soft creamy orange. Mickey loves soft girls the best. Soft in all ways. He studies the blue and orange one hard. And smokes hard.

Off to the right, up a hill higher than his, some guys on ATVs are pulling small loads. They are cruising as quiet as spaceships at least from this far it seems like that. He studies them hard and again puffs the dry calming smoke.

Now going up a rough dirt road running parallel with rough-looking electric wires are more silent ATVs driven by girls. Three girls. Three ATVs. Three wagons. Wagons with black boxes. Big batteries?

One girl is wearing a bathing suit top of yellow. Very small cups. Too small for her breasts. She is dark. Maybe she is an Indian. He can't really see her face. But the black hair is in a braid as mighty as a ship's rope, thick as her own arm. Something tough about her, the way she handles that ATV, jerking the handlebars around rocks and roots. Not really a soft girl. Mickey decides he is not limited to soft girls, only that soft and sweet are easier to be with. But for purposes of feeling crazy in the jaws, hands, and dick, there are no dividing lines.

This does not seem like a school with rows. And no buzzers and intercoms. This might just be life.
Puff puff puff
.

Secret Agent Jane reports from inside.

This is not a school of officialness and for real. NO! NO! NO! NO, it is NOT! No small desks. No giant halls. No bell-buzzing thing to make you stand up or sit down. Nobody here knows the time! No principal to make you scared of talking or not standing or sitting down in the exact right way. No
DARE
man in a police suit.

Here is just shops with big porches and Quonsets, which are big round-roof things. And sawmills. And a radio house, very small. Everybody is someplace here—inside, outside, either sitting and TALKING or making stuff or reading WEIRD stuff like books of history of a very fat kind, some thin—but NO TESTS. NO REPORT CARDS. So what are these history books for, to hurt your arm?

Crow.

At this hot saggy time of day, you, crow, have so little to report. Trees are filled with your kind, all in pensive attitudes. Perhaps it is prayer. Your prayer might be that you are never as lonely as the boy human, Mickey Gammon, standing on the ledge, his gray wolfy eyes stealing over the sun-bright and shady mysteries of Settlement life.

Secret Agent Jane tells more from inside.

I am exhausted. Too many people here, as you know. They are all exhausted. Big sizes and little sizes. No time for TV—if you can find a TV. I have looked everywhere. Instead it is just things you DO.

You make boards at the sawmill, screaming noise.

You also make fiddles. Tamya put a color on hers of iodine, a color like out-of-space at night.

Also you make flutes and whistles and kazoos. This is a special shop with a pretty window.

Furniture-making shop is messy and heapy and wood dust goes up your nose. Also it makes screaming noise.

Also some people make
roads!

Also food, which nobody here buys. They do all these jobs, like seeds, weeds, pick, jars, cellars, cook, just for
one
thing. Ol' food.

Maple syrup starts in pails here.

Also, they do Christmas trees to
sell
.

In real school you do not
sell
.

Back at the tree house, swatting tidal waves of biting bugs, Mickey tells us.

Rex says he'll pick me up on the way to the pit Saturday. So I says I'll meet him down by the transformers. So he thinks I still live over there with
them,
Mr. King Shit Locke and his televisions. Well . . . I
think
Rex thinks I live there. Actually, he said that at Bean's—the Variety—they said a woman called, probably Erika. I can't picture it to be Mum. Erika, I picture. The store guys said I'd been in and told her I looked alive.

So then Rex says to me, “You must have missed supper or something so she was calling around. Someone at the Convenience Cubical said there was a call there too. But they hadn't seen you up that way.”

Man, I do not lie to Rex. His eyes read you. Maybe something in his head beeps . . . you know, if you lie or feed him a line. I've seen him look
into
Willie like this when Willie is making up shit, like how he had to shoot an agent once to defend himself. But I knew that was made up and nothing beeped in my head.

So Rex is looking at me, waiting for an answer, truth or lie, pick one. So, me, I just don't say anything. I just stare at the rug we're standing on.

More from Secret Agent Jane on the learning situation at the Settlement.

There's actually one of the shops which is a newsroom. For doing news. It's where you collect what's going on so we can make the History as It Happens books. There is a printing press, loud, smelly. Copy machines, but “too many drawbacks,” one of the mothers said. Typewriters. Not computers. I say typewriters are too old. And one broke, but they just went and fixed it. I asked why not get computers. A boy named Rawn said, “'Cuz they're the devil.” So the history news books are made with glue and pens and too much work.

People actually talk about history while they eat and walk around, about hydris and commons and slaves and galleys and poppists and robin barons. And they talk about world-wise news which they find out in altrinite news. They have medical education, and natomies studies, kromo zones, and stuff on munny sipal law.

Also fruit flies. And haircuts in the beauty shop. I did one hairdo on Margo. She said thank you very much. Also people learn arki teckture. But not much for sports or any flying balls. And nobody goes home on a bus. They just stay and stay, stuck here like I am, only mostly there are mothers here too, and fathers and grandpeople. In a
real
school you have only kids who are all alike, all one size and clothes-perfect. No mothers or grandpeople allowed.

But in real school at least when you get home your mum is there, but always very tired from helping the dentist with millions of rotten teeth.

Mickey in his tree house, arms around his head to protect his face from the bugs.