The School on Heart's Content Road (60 page)

Special Agent Kevin Moore prepares.

This is a different person from Marty Lees, aka Gary Larch. He leans toward the mirror to inspect the bleeding nick on his chin and sees how wide and expressionless his eyes look in this dim light, this bedroom where his new wife, Tara, still sleeps. His baseball cap reads
SEA DOGS
, the Maine team. He smiles a big smile.

See, I'm a nice guy. I'm one of you. A neighbor—sort of—give or take a hundred miles. Well, you know, Maine is big. But see, I'm just a guy. I talk like you.

Just a young feller with fresh blond honest looks. Probably
A
s in school. Probably wouldn't hurt a fly. Probably loves his new bride. Probably remembers his mother on Mother's Day. Sure! This is all true! There is nothing really to pretend, except his name and his game. Today should be easy. Fun, in fact. Just his eyes. Eyes open. Just instincts. Just charting the course.

Lyn Potter. Yet another agent?

Actually, he's just an operative, no bennies, no recognition, no face, a nonexistent sort of guy, you might say. Just a black line in the text of your dossier.

Wheaties. You eat 'em fast and they don't get soggy. Supposed to be a lotta really good food at the St. Onge thing. Good. Eat their food, then see 'em in court. Good food doesn't make 'em good Americans.

Glory.

Daddy screamed in the night. One of his nightmares. And that got Gram up
.

Glory's hangover screamed too. Not a scream of the mouth, just a scream of one's total existence.

But then all was again quiet and she dozed. Now again, a scream. Not his but hers. Yeah, all of her cells ripping free of the 80-proof vodka.

She opens one eye. The clock isn't there. Where is it? On the floor. She can tell by the dimness of the room it is nowhere near time to get up anyway.

Secret Agent Jane.

Everyone says, “Put on your best dress.”

Okay. And now I practice in the mirror the look for my face. Special and sexy. But now I try my secret heart-shapes glasses, which maybe look a little geeky—which I heard Kirky actually say,
Jane's glasses are so geeky
. But they have power. Okay. I think maybe I need to see what's really going on. I can't tell what's really going on. Maybe
nobody
knows what's really going on. Everybody is acting crazy. But with these glasses, I will be able to see what no one else sees. It is important to know people's thoughts.

Early Saturday
A.M
. Settlement parking lot.

Mickey slows the solar buggy and drops his feet to the dirt, his sneaker toes dragging. Waves the other guys on. He is looking through the frizzy dawn light at a car he does not recognize, at a face he does recognize. Car backseat heaped with stuff, hard to make out what. Looks like a small mountain chain. The face is his mother's.

He snaps off his headlight and kills the motor, the funny weak refrigerator sound, the source that causes so much here at the Settlement to move, beam, or make toast.

In the silence her soft voice is everything. “Mickey.” Her false teeth show. Not a smile.

There are feet running, hopping. He turns on the seat, lifting one leg off the machine as Erika and his sister Elizabeth arrive, huffing and exclaiming.

“See, Mum, he's not dead!” This is Elizabeth.

“I knew he wasn't dead,” Britta says simply. He sees she is wearing her old-lady blue sweater but has a girlish barrette in her hair. She has changed her hairdo to be more like Erika's.

“She acted like you were dead,” Erika says, smiling.

Britta is looking at the solar buggy.

Erika is pulling at Mickey's sleeve. “Hey, little brother. You're older.”

Sounds like a flock of going-south birds, honking back and forth in the sky. But it's coming through the parked cars from the quad of trees.

Erika has wrapped both arms around him. “Not even a little bit dead,” she whispers, like a secret in his ear. A choky whisper filled
with the sorrow of other losses. He sees, over around her ear and her brown wing of hair, that the honking, hooting flock is his nieces, Donnie's girls, the girl gang.

Still hanging on to him, Erika says, “We can't keep the house. Mr. St. Onge says they'll make us a cottage here. It's been real bad, Mickey.”

Micky says, “I'm sorry.”

Erika is smiling at him in a funny way. “For what?”

He shrugs.

Britta's eyes rise up to his face again in that sneaking-up-on-you way she has. He believes her if she says she knew he wasn't dead. His mother never lies. But wasn't he dead there for a while, even to himself?

She steals another glance right into his eyes. She has this really mushy look. Like she just found him out, all his worst crimes and fuckups, then erased them totally. Some type of Mother Power. Even a mother like her has it. It's like now he's just all pudgy and little and new. A perfect baby. Clean. It's embarrassing. But an old and tired piece of him likes it.

Before noon on a perfect October day. The True Maine Militia prevails once again.

Three hundred cars and trucks, it is said.

Leona St. Onge and Claire St. Onge are side by side in the doorway to the kitchens. Leona (yes, a wife of Gordon's
and
a cousin to Claire) says with a snort, “You're not surprised, are you?”

Claire answers gravely, “No, I'm not surprised. I only pray that our system for keeping track of the kids works.”

Both Leona and Claire wear the red sashes embroidered with flowers and suns. The power of the red sashes, like the warmth of a sisterly embrace. The power of their shared beliefs.

Behind them on a narrow table are several thirty-cup coffeemakers, their red and amber lights glowing. Eddie Martin (married to one of Gordon's cousins) squats there, fiddling with the plug of one of those borrowed from Glennice's church, or it might be the one borrowed from the Mason hall, Crosman Lodge. Eddie is all spiffed up, wearing his jazzy belt of studs and coins and fake jewels. His T-shirt reads
WHITE
STAR LINE TITANIC CREW
on front and, on the back,
MAIDEN VOYAGE HMS TITANIC 1912
. And, though you might not notice with his pant legs out over them, new black military boots.

People are everywhere, streaming across the Settlement parking lot, bunched around on the grassy quadrangle and on the porches, still coming up the sloping gravel road. Each minute brings another batch of new faces, and more food, six-packs, or plastic liters of soda. Tables are set up on porches all the way around the horseshoe, out under the trees in the spotty shade and occasionally cascading yellowy leaves, and out in that wide-open sunshine.

Remember Bree, red hair and deformed face? The Vandermasts are her family. They fill up one table: the older brother, married with a big batch of kids and stepkids—all tall, handsomely dressed children, some visiting friends at other tables, relations of their mother's—and Bree's father's girlfriend's people, some of whom visit the Vandermasts' table; and Bree's father sits under a tree with a cup of cider, watching everything. See his raised proud chin and tiredly pleased blue eyes? By the way, where is Bree? Last seen whispering to some of the other officers of the True Maine Militia.

Strangers are taking photos of the sign that now hangs over the door to one of the parlors, a Mark Twain quote:
I never let my schooling interfere with my education
.

Gordon is loud. There is no music yet, but he is dancing the Highland Fling, the cancan, the twist, the Charleston, and a few hold-'em-close waltzes with everybody in sight. And, of course, as Swamp Monster he has devoured a few small screaming tender children. Gordon has only started to drink, so it can't all be blamed on drink. Maybe overtiredness. Gordon, like most of the Settlement people, was up late with preparations, then rose at quarter to four
A.M
.

Inside a shady porch, a smiling group of retirement-age visitors, men and women, dressed in schoolteacheresque leisure outfits, are comfortably seated and munching. One asks, “What is this green leafy veggie? Tastes like peanuts, only kind of bitter.”