The School on Heart's Content Road (37 page)

Rex's earphone-type hearing protectors are gray. Gordon stares dead center of Rex's dark head as Rex fires again and again, working the paper heart into oblivion.

Gordon speaks, assuming Rex cannot hear him. “You goddam right-wing fucker.”

Rex turns smoothly, kind of a pivot. Rifle loaded with ammunition that costs an arm and a leg, not nice cheap SKS ammunition. Rifle lowered, finger now flipping the safety up, he looks at Gordon's mouth. His pale eyes are wide. “What?” he demands.

Gordon wags his head apologetically. “I called you a right-wing fucker.”

Rex raises his chin. His chest fills with a deep carefully taken breath. He says quietly, “I'd call you a name too, but I do not know what you are.” He doesn't smile, but his eyes crinkle a bit at the edges. He pulls off the ear protectors and puts a hand through his thinning dark hair. “So I'll just call you a fucker.”

Gordon dwells so much lately on the past, that which was between himself and Rex, some memories silky and thin and shredded, others clear.

He came to know Rex in the years after the war. After the
conflict,
that is. Yeah, the
conflict.
Like the difference between a little argument and a punch in the face? No, rather like the difference between a story and a lie. Because it wasn't even a war. It was a barbeque. And the hotdogs were alive. So he has heard.

Rex wasn't married any too quickly after Vietnam. He once put his cold gray-blue eyes on Gordon's face and said, “You don't go from the three-legged sack race to the tea-and-dolls party in the same day.” He was talking about something else at the time, not the war. But Rex
never
talked about the war. Vietnam War knowledge wasn't a thing you could just store neatly, like gardening hints or small-engine repair. It was a thing that would blister and pimple and seep from life in general when you least expected it.

So instead of getting a girl, Rex joined the “volunteer fire” and sported a special volunteer license-plate holder and, on the dash of his new truck, a red light to flash when he was on his way to a fire. And during most of his after-work hours (he worked in a lumberyard and box shop before getting his electrician's license), he hung out at Gin-Tom's Lake View, which is now what they call the Cold Spot or Hot Spot, depending on the season. When Gordon was old enough to drink legally, Rex had already been situated awhile in that bar.

So there they were, Gordon eighteen. Rex twenty-eight. Rex drank moderately most of the time. He just liked that dark, crampy, smoky, noisy place, which had, despite its name, no view. No windows, in fact.

Sometimes Rex
did
get drunk. And he was
fun
. A dry weird humor, not noisy, almost on the edge of playfulness. Like if you gave a mountain lion a catnip toy, who would then roll quietly onto his back and chew on his own tail or the bars of his cage. And his eyes would be different.

Across the road from the barroom, throughout the winter months, Promise Lake (then called Swett's Pond) was the hub of the male social wheel of Egypt and other nearby towns. Twenty to forty ice shacks. Snowmobiles. Trucks. Bonfires. And bass and trout the size of small men. This was the years before mercury poisoning. (Or before the
public discovered it). Though these fishermen, even now, have never believed in such scares. Rex and Gordon and half a dozen Beans and Sonny Ballanger and Donnie Rowe and Russ Pelter, Tim Cash and any number of Verrills (different ones at different times), and guys from the salvage yard (different ones at different times), and that biker bunch from Brownfield, all fished and laughed and argued and drank and pissed, fished and laughed and argued and drank and pissed. . . .

Over the years since then, even after Gordon settled in with Claire over in Mechanic Falls and Rex married Marsha and their little girl, Glory, was born, all those years, Gordon and Rex would stop in on one another. And keep track. And neither forgets the past, though, like war, it's not really mentioned. Not a lot of this “remember the time” like you hear some people do.

But surely Rex must hear the boot steps of the past following him, as Gordon does. That part of the past following that other past, and preceding the more recent past . . . and now the Gordon and Rex present.

My brother
.

How did Gordon start to think this way of Rex? Rex as brother. What was the moment? For there was, indeed, a moment.

Somebody—he thinks he remembers it was Paul Gregs, another vet, dead since then in a paper-mill lab chemical “accident”—Paul and Rex and Gordon all piled into Paul's car . . . maybe there was another guy, he can't remember who.

Paul wanted reefer, so they went to fetch it.

Paul's dealer came to the door and said he was out of stuff, but if they drove to Harrison and went to the bar there, they'd find plenty. Gold. All bud. “Ask for the Fly,” the dealer said.

So they got to the bar and people were in the parking lot smoking stuff, and when they asked for the Fly they were told
inside,
and the air outside was all smoky and herbish and nice, right up to the door of the bar, and inside the door they asked for the Fly and a thumb was jerked toward the bar, so they all herded over to the bar and got beers and looked around, and there up on the stool was the Fly, no need to ask.

A woman with short legs. A kind of hefty woman. Dressed in a leather jacket, with Harley wings across her back and a little chain zipper on each pocket. And an aviator cap liner, a soft olive thing that fit her head perfectly, and a dangling strap from this cap. And, yes, goggles, pushed up
on top of the aviator cap. And her face was round and flushy and she wore a nice big ear-to-ear smile, not to show her teeth, just a big smile of the lips, like a smiley-face Have a Nice Day button. She wore black pants and boots, all black. Paul asked her if she was the Fly, and she eased off her stool and headed out.

All the men followed. Out into the cold parking lot, the deal was made. But the Fly also sent a free fat lighted joint around the circle, and they talked about people they all knew in common. And they discussed movies and reloading shotgun shells and rifle cartridges, and then some relating of disasters around raising turkeys, and the Fly, Gordon remembers, was so nice . . . so funny . . . so motherly. And suddenly her very small blue eyes fixed on Gordon's face and then Rex's face and she said, “You guys are brothers, aren'tcha? You're Gary Cram's cousins, aren'tcha?”

And they, of course, said they weren't.

But she kept looking at them, from one face to the other, then shook her head and said, “Shit. I coulda sworn.”

After that, Gordon would say it: “My brother.” And Rex never dismissed it.

Okay, the Fly. That was fun. But there was pain too. And one of those occasions of pain had to do with the old graveyard over on Seavey Road and Rex's aunt, who lived over in New Hampshire (which is the next town, Egypt being on the state line of the western border). There was something fishy and weird about Rex's behavior that Saturday morning. He just said that if Gordon met him at that cemetery, they had a job. And Gordon agreed to meet him there, but what the hell was going on? Rex added that his aunt had made him promise he wouldn't divulge where she lived, her name, or
anything,
and that he, Rex, would have to go over to her place
alone;
she would pick him up at his house and he could get a guy to help him, but the guy had to wait at the graveyard and not ask any questions.

Gordon knew the graveyard, though it was overgrown and you couldn't see it real well from the road. There were eleven graves, Mortons and people married into Mortons. All dead for, if not a century and a half, the next thing to it.

So that morning while Gordon waited, listening to his radio and eating potato chips or something, a car came along the road. It was a
great big ark, a Chevy, white, and its ass end about dragging. And it was driven with a foot that would ram the gas, then let up, then ram it again, so it lurched ahead over and over—
rummmmm
-slack,
rummmmm
-slack,
rummmmm
-slack,
rummmmm
-slack—and Gordon could see that Rex was the passenger in this vehicle, straight-shouldered and dignified as ever, and that the driver had a small white head.

The driver got out much faster than Rex and within seconds was at the back of the car. Gordon got out and stood by his own truck, hesitant to approach. He nodded to Rex, as Rex shut the big ol' car door behind him, but Rex would hardly look at him. The driver was a woman, Rex's aunt by marriage. She was skinny and little. She wore dungarees with a plain white very snowy T-shirt tucked in, gold frame glasses with scalding black eyes inside them. And a brown More cigarette pouring smoke. Hair a perfect helmet of white frizz.

“So where is this fucking graveyard! I don't see it!” her scratchy voice demanded.

Rex answered quietly.

Gordon stepped close just as this aunt person popped open the trunk: two full-sized very old elegant slate gravestones inside there. The top one read:
Anna Morton, wife of Charles Morton 1801–1844
.

The woman's scratchy voice commanded, “Okay, now . . . get these damn things out of my sight!”

Gordon and Rex worked to lift the first stone out. It was, after all, a
stone:
heavy. The woman was right at Rex's shoulder, twitching her brown cigarette and commenting on ways to improve the carrying of the stone.

The graveyard was up a short but
steep
hill. Big trees. Dark. Sweet and mossy. A stone wall, wrought-iron gate. Inside, Gordon saw a stone standing which read
Anna Morton, wife of Charles Morton 1801–1844,
which was identical to the writing on the stone they were gaspingly lugging. Gordon pointed this out. Rex looked at him and made a face that said,
Shut up
. But Gordon couldn't help himself. He said it again as they lowered their stone flat in front of the standing stone.

The aunt narrowed her black fiery eyes, not on Gordon, who had spoken, but on Rex, and replied, “I don't give a shit! These stones belong
here
!”

Rex said to Gordon, quietly and with no expression in his voice, “There's nine more of these back at her barn.”

Gordon insisted, “But
this
one—”

Rex quietly interrupted. “Yes. It's a double. The others are too.” And he made another face at Gordon to
say no more
.

The aunt looked at Rex, not Gordon, and said commandingly, “That stealin' shit. Don't that burn my ass. I hate that fuckin' stealin'!”

Rex quietly and expressionlessly said to Gordon, “These stones have been in her barn . . .
huff-huff
”—like Gordon, he was winded—“for a
long time
.”

Gordon raised an eyebrow, looked wildly around. “Ah . . . they musta been stolen—
huff-huff
—a hundred years ago—
huff-huff
—then replaced . . . not long after. They're the same style. Everything's—
huff-huff
—the same.”

The aunt's smoke was filling all the outdoors, billowing up through the heavy hemlock limbs. She screeched, “I hate that fuckin' stealin' shit. Nothin' burns my ass more than stealin'!”

“But—”

“These stones belong here, and they shall
be
here!” the aunt fired into Rex's eyes.

And so there were more trips with the Chevy, Rex passenger, the aunt driving—
rummmmm
-slack,
rummmmm
-slack,
rummmmm
-slack—away down around the curvy road while Gordon waited at the graveyard for the stone of Forest Morton and the stone for Lottie Morton Granger, these also dead for more than a hundred years. And this was true of all the rest, each stone gruntingly deposited alongside its replica but out flat, sort of over the dead person's face.

Through all this, young Gordon wore his wildest expression. But Rex was gravely polite, trying to please the aunt, even as she bullied him in ways painful to see. And Gordon knew that back at the aunt's barn, wherever it was, Rex was loading these stones all by himself.

When all eleven stones were finally in their final resting places, the woman did not thank. She only turned as she was leaving and gave them each a sharp look and screeched, “Both you boys go cut them Christly whiskas off. Looks like hell. Deputy oughta have you arrested for exhibitionism and indecent exposure!”

“Okay,” said Rex quietly.

And away she went in her big ol' white Chevy—
rummmmm
-slack,
rummmmm
-slack,
rummmmm
-slack—down around the curving grade, and the two young men stood there with their hands hanging at their sides, both feeling emotionally bruised.

That was summer. Then fall, maybe the same year, maybe the year before, maybe after. Memory, like God, likes to play with you. But it was for certain, October. The Fryeburg Fair.