The School on Heart's Content Road (59 page)

“I agree with you one hundred percent.”

Secret Agent Jane, almost seven, tells us about her heart-to-heart talk with scarlet-haired fifteen-year-old Bree St. Onge.

Bree is sometimes my best friend. You would think it would be hard to have a horror-faced person for a best friend, but it's not. I feel sorry for Bree because she will probably not ever get men and she'll never be famous. But if you look at her face a certain way, you can see she looks just like a kitty.

I say, “I still love him. It's worse now.”

Bree and I always talk about men. She doesn't mind. But probably inside she minds. She asks me, “What did you two talk about on your starlight ride?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Well, we had a flashlight and fixed the chart thing.”

“But nothing else?”

I shrug. Bree and I are doing the copy machine for the song things people will sing about scary stuff at Annie B's party. The stuff of the horridable world. She flaps the paper funny before she pushes it in the tray. She says, “Maybe you need to love a guy who talks.”

“No, I still love Mickey. I always will.”

“You loved him at first sight.”

“Yes.” I sigh. “But he smokes.”

“He'll be sorry someday. It's yukky,” Bree says. She herself smokes. Everybody knows it.

“Cigarettes make you have chemotherapy.”

“Yes,” she says. She presses the button, and the papers start to print. She turns and smiles, her cat face happy. “I have a test for you.”

“Oh, no.”

“About Mickey,” she says, big smile.

I laugh.

“What color are his eyes?
Exactly,
now. Let's see how good your powers of observation are.”

“I can't remember.”

“Notice next time.”

“I notice mostly his clothes.” I wrinkle my nose. “He should really fix his clothes better.”

“Well, when you get married in a few years, you can fix him the way you like.” She kind of laughs funny.

I say, “I will.”

“And kissing,” she says. “You can kiss for hours.”

I get embarrassed just a little.

“Jane and Mickey, sitting in a tree,
K.I.S.S.I.N.G.
”

“Shut up or I'll die.”

Bree makes a
smeeerch!
kissing noise with her lips.

“Stop it, Bree! I mean it!”

When we are done with the paper stuff, we both squash our faces on the glass. You do this and push the button and the light slides by your eyes and you get a picture of your face. We also do hands. Once we tried doing a leaf and a flower but they didn't come out. Bree says, “Watch this.” She takes off this pretty red sash thing she wears and puts it on the glass. It comes out weird and black. “Well,
that
didn't work.” Bree sighs. “But experimenting is fun, isn't it?”

Now we do our faces
shrunk,
which there is a button for. And now some tiny shrunk hands. And now
huge
hands. We laugh and laugh.

Rex afraid.

It is
that
dream again. The one he's had once or twice a month for a couple years now, various variations on the theme where his home is covered with ants. All the exterior of his home—roof, walls, windows—is a carpet of ants, ants the size of squirrels. He keeps his eyes closed and doesn't move because if he moves, the
worst,
the
unspeakable,
will happen.

Click click click click click;
he hears the thousands of shell-like feet scurrying all over the clapboards.

Tonight he, in his dream, opens his eyes and sees through a window at least forty of them staring in at him, their heads floating on stick necks but their eyes more human than bug.

He howls, a metal-to-metal sound, climbing his throat and dead tongue, a siren of the night, warning the others.
What
others? He is alone, the only survivor.

Late evening, just before the Big Day.

Hearing voices behind him, Gordon turns on the path between the St. Onge farm place and the Settlement, snaps off his flashlight, waits. He yanks his bandanna from his pocket, works it around in his nose, looks up at the stars through the leaves. It is his cousin-in-law Ray Pinette's voice he hears coming closer, the voice of a big thick-necked man, though Ray is a short guy but, yes, thick-necked, broad-shouldered, bulky. Ray is beaming his flashlight over the rooty path, and there is a young woman trudging along with him, who speaks a few soft words.

When they discover Gordon standing there, Ray complains predictably. “Jesus, you are harder to find than a dollar.”

Gordon tries to make out the woman's face in the dark, lit only in outlines by the flashlights pointed at the ground. She is young. A little familiar. Somebody from town.

“She's looking for Mickey,” Ray says. “She was parked down by the gate when I was coming in. I could tell she wasn't a TV crew.” He chuckles. “So where
is
Mickey?”

The young woman wears a T-shirt with the face of a Persian cat on the chest, sweater under one arm, little shoulder bag there. She is a plump pink-cheeked brown-haired girl no more than twenty-three or twenty-four.

Gordon sees in her face
the look
. Fear. Surrender.
Help me
. He reaches out a hand. She reaches out her hand. Her fingers fold around his thumb. He says, “You're Donnie Locke's wife.”

Her reply is a sob, eyes squeezed shut, still gripping his thumb. He takes her into his arms, doing the possible thing, in lieu of all that can never be possible, his desire to erase all suffering.

From a future time, Glennice St. Onge, devoted churchgoer, remembers.

Gordon was a pure saint.

Rex's dream crescendo.

The
click click click
of ant feet is almost like crackles of fire. Yes! Like fire. And the smell of it, fire dry, sky weedy-humid. Thousands of stiff
feet, marching all over his home, now soft feet, slippered feet, sneaking, whispering past, up and all over his home.

But also, yes, fire, just fire, the ants lost in the incredible past. And now explosions, a thousand explosions inside a thousand more. He hears wailing, the squalls of infants, smells blood and more burning.

He crawls ever so slowly from where he lies, the heavy humidity dripping while he, Rex, feels heavy as ice. Another crisp body, left behind in its entirety, or was it just a hand, just a burger-dried black bone of the leg? All humans here small as children. Tiny cries. Tiny terror. Tiny grief. But replacing themselves. A hundred-hundred more. And why? They are not invincible, he was advised.
Boom!
Another rocket.
Boom!
A collapsing wall.

He is not hurt. He is perfectly perfect, crawling through the doorway into a safer zone of the universe, less humid, dearly dry, and yet a prenatal place large enough for a medium-sized man.

Suddenly he can see his home from a mile away. Why is it so dinky? Is it so small maybe because of distance? But also because Gordon is standing beside it and he is so huge, his head is up there with the sun! And he is waving his arms in goofball fashion, and Rex is trying so so so hard to yell
quit it!!!!!
but Rex can't get out any voice at all, just a miserable little moan, like a wooden ball in his neck. Gordon is now stumbling, falling. His million tons of flesh are falling. Rex screams. He's actually and really sitting up in bed when he is finally awake, heart pounding, his mother Ruth in the hall, “Ricky? You okay?”

FBI operative Marty Lees is up before dawn.

He munches on Cheerios. Cheerios in the bowl. Picture of Cheerios on the box, and there's two boxes of other stuff. Flakes and chocolate puffs. He reads one box, ingredients, daily minimum requirements, bar code, and things you can send away for. Outer-space killers with guns that kill with light. Don't hurt so much. Ain't that cute?

Checks clock. Thinks of the day ahead. The whole St. Onge dog-and-pony show. Birthday party and kiddies' militia. Cute girlies in army boots. Speeches. Singing. A country-rock-folksy band with a buncha Frenchmen. Whatever.