The School on Heart's Content Road (65 page)

Gordon laughs once, boomingly. “Great advice.”

“No fried fats!” Rob scolds, and dances away, the rest of his gang smiling and nodding at Gordon as they depart.

Glory sighs. “Boy bitches aren't pretty like Glory girl.” And she pouts. “No kisses for my pretty-pretty ear?”

Gordon disengages himself from her fierce embrace, gives her bare shoulder a little quick pat. “I feel protective toward you. I want you safe.”

Hard to read her expression. But what it looks like is that she is deeply touched by these words. Her eyes glide to the left. “My friends are here. But I can't find them now. I'm lost. Wah. Wah.” She giggles, sort of like Bree's giggle: a husky but melodious trill.

“Let's walk,” he says, and switching the physicist's book and papers to his other arm, leads her by the hand through the crowd. He knows she is not like this unless she drinks. As a little tyke hanging out at the Settlement, she was
almost
as practical as Rex.

She laces her arm around his now, in that old-fashioned way of old-fashioned ladies. He is horribly saddened. A few years of savage partying and close-call driving accidents; will that be it? Or will she be a drinker all her life, long after the party's over? Worse even than his own drinking, which he lapses in and out of, somehow never sinking to depths. Will Glory York lose jobs, disgust everyone, repel all relationships, harm the souls of her children, and die at forty-five with a liver that looks like yellow Jell-O? Her arm against his arm is the same temperature as his own, but skin is soft, barely lived in.

He says, “Annie B is a hundred years old today. Imagine.”

Glory laughs. “She's always seemed old to me.”

“But ten years ago she was in better shape. She's pretty frail now.”

“I haven't seen her lately,” she tells him. She still has a white paper in one hand. Gordon can see now that it's one of the True Maine Militia flyers. He touches it with his free fingers.

“Well, Glory. What do you think of the True Maine Militia? Going to join up?”

She gives him a dreamy look. Her eyes too blue. A face much like Rex's except for that mouth . . . Marsha's mouth, he remembers sadly. “Do I need a gun?” she asks. “'Cause I know where I can get about two hundred of them.”

He laughs. “All you need is a burning desire to see the human race survive, and—”

“A burning desire,” she says, in a wonderfully throaty way, and her eyes fall over the buttons of his shirt.

As they leave the crowded area under the big old trees and start up through an open grassy area of sun, they can see Rex, standing on one
of the brick paths that lead up into the village of hillside cottages. He is alone, hands behind his back. He is staring up along the tree line across the fields and gardens toward the northeast.

Reaching Rex now, Gordon lifts Glory's hand from his arm and places it on Rex's arm. “She was lost,” Gordon says. “Now she's found.”

Glory uses her other hand to muckle onto Gordon, pulls him by the shirtfront against her so she is wedged between both men. She laughs happily.

Some of Gordon's papers slip from his arm. And the book.
Plop!
He backs away, squatting down to collect them, and hears Rex's low voice. “Quit it, would ya?”

And Glory to Rex, “Oh, shush, party-pooper Bumpa never know no fun, only most cute soldier so seeerious Captain Pooh.” And she laughs again, her folded flyer fluttering to the brick path by one of her father's boots. In front of Gordon, who is squatted there, she bends over so that her short green dress rises to show off to him her brief,
very
brief, white panties and, more significantly, the lightly tanned perfect cheeks.

Gordon stands straight, organizing his papers fussily, papers from the Navy physicist. He glimpses the book, titled
The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives
, reading that someday might hold his attention.

Now Glory throws her arms around Gordon, buries her face in his bright flannel shirt, faking little sobs. “Proteck Glory girl! Proteck Glory girl! Big mighty Proffit famous everywhere, proteck Glory girl . . . from himself!” She giggles and grabs him roughly between the legs. “Him
want
!”

Rex looks into Gordon's face.

Gordon pushes Glory toward Rex. “Take her home, Richard, and spank her ass.”

Glory laughs. “Bumpa not spank. Bumpa never mean like Profitt. Mighty Sheik Gordie spank and beat and break heads. Famous mean guy. Radio talk-show people
saaaaid
so.”

Rex's Adam's apple jumps. Rex's hands hang useless. Rex's eyes unreadable.

Gordon useless and swallowing.

Glory pouts. “My two favorite daddies just have Militia on the brain, never fun. Everybody thinks you're crazy. Glory just want to rough two daddies, make 'em play, make 'em lighten up.”

Glory's girlfriends soon find her, and after a little more pawing and poking at Gordon, kisses, baby talk, and stroking his beard, she roams off with them, looking for “Selene and Justin.”

Gordon says to Rex, “She's going to get in trouble.”

Rex says, “She's out of high school. She's on her own.”

Gordon looks at him. “Women should
never
be on their own. Not that way.” He sighs. “She . . . is . . . drunk.”

Rex's lips tighten. “I do not have a big concentration camp like this to hold her in.”

Gordon looks pained. “Well, you people in the modern world got goodies like rape crisis centers to fix it all up for you
afterward
. . . and abortion centers . . . and—”

Rex puts up a hand. “She needs her mother. Tell Marsha about this, not me.”

Gordon's eyes twinkle. “Blame it on Marsha, eh?”

Rex moves one foot, shifting his weight.

Gordon sighs and fusses with his papers and book some more. “It's worse than martial law, it's worse than corporate tyranny, it's the whole tangled, desolate culture, the whole hellish mess. But I guarantee you one thing. You do not have to worry about me taking advantage of that little girl. That's
one
thing I can guarantee you, my brother.”

Bunches of people, seeing Rex and Gordon, work their way up to them.

Gordon is engaged first, while Rex stays out of it, doing his thing, looking unfriendly. But then Rex has company too. It's the man who came around on the night of the solar car unveiling. And he went once to the York residence too, a short weird visit. He gives his name again—“Gary Larch”—and thrusts out his hand. Rex doesn't appear to remember, but he really does, of course. Not that he looks puzzled. He just doesn't give any cheery
Hey, good to see ya
s. He just shakes the guy's hand. With his dark glasses, Rex's eyes are shadows. Gary Larch wears sunglasses too, but his voice is friendly and it's clear he wants to talk. To Rex. That he likes Rex. Has a thing for Rex.

No white shirt this time. This time it's a tiger-stripe BDU shirt with the sleeves ripped off, worn over a black T-shirt. Jeans. His billed cap
reads
MERTIE'S HARDWARE
. A wristwatch like Rex's. He has a thick bottom lip, a kind of malocclusion, and that square clean-shaven jaw. Brown hair. Picture a serial-killer-schoolteacher combo and you've got the effect. The guy is a bit tall, so most people wouldn't notice that he's got a little bald spot back on the crown. He jokes with Rex about the chickens pecking around by the smaller Quonset hut. White Leghorns. Spurs on the heels. Hens with spurs. “Liberated women,” he says.

Rex sort of smiles.

The guy points out a woman down there in the crowd with long curly black hair. The Greenville militia woman, just back from the windmills. “Looks like Captain Hook.”

Rex nods.

Now the guy talks about Montana. “Lotta agribusiness.” He tells Rex how between the banks and the government, “those people out there have gotten screwed royal.”

Rex glances over at Gordon's back, Gordon with a small crowd of pretty women. He looks back into this Gary guy's face. He says, “Montana people are well organized. Here it's different.”

Gary makes a face. “You could
get
organized. I've seen it happen. Guys just sitting around trying to decide what color patches they want and whining . . . you know . . . the kitchen militias. But then they get a little more focused. Personalities sometimes stall things. You have to have the right group chemistry. I've seen some guys split up 'cause half of them were only into common law while the other half wanted to stress protection. Fine. Everybody's happy. As long as people don't get stalled. That's no good.”

Rex studies Gary's face and neck, the crescent of his black T-shirt at the unbuttoned top of his BDU shirt.

The guy tells Rex he was into explosives in Montana. “Guys out there are serious. Not that I knew anyone who had any intentions of
using
explosives, we aren't talking about McVeigh here. These are sane men. Smart men. But being prepared means whatever the enemy has, you have. Except maybe the A-bomb. That's ridiculous.” He laughs a kind of Cowardly Lion laugh. A lovable laugh. Infectious.

Rex sort of smiles.

The guy says, “Out there, I was into explosives but I knew, when my father was dying and I was coming back up here, I knew I had to tame
down some. Nothing wrong with common law and”—he points up to the mountain—“windmills.” He laughs the lovable lion laugh again. “And I got a thing. I can't stand fags' rights. Special rights and all that. I know you guys up here have a lotta bullshit with that. I think it's good to keep people posted on when a bunch of homo-liberals are getting ready to sneak legislation through under the guise of
equal rights
.” He makes a face. A little snort of disgust.

Rex says, “You'll be busy.”

The guy glances at Gordon, then back at Rex. “Not as busy as you boys are. Holy shit. You're taking on the whole friggin' population.”

Rex smiles. “Don't blame me.” He laughs. A little. “Kids did this.”

“No shit.”

Down past the trucks of cider, Glory York has her skirt pulled up to show something on the top of her leg (her hip actually) to her boisterous friends. This Gary guy turns and looks. Perhaps he remembers from the solar car night who Glory is. He looks back around, smiling at the elaborate maze of brick paths. “Nice,” he says. “Like the city.”

“It's to make it easy for old folks and wheelchairs and baby buggies,” Rex says evenly.

The guy's face softens. And his voice, very soft. “The last shall be first and the first shall be last. It'll be God's will.”

“That's right,” says Rex.

Before the guy roams off to chat with other people, he gives Rex a piece of paper with his phone number on it and his name. Again. In case Rex misplaced it from when he gave it to him
twice
before. Then he pats the opposite side of his own chest and winks. “Keep your powder dry.”

Rex says, “Yep. You too.”

And then.

A woman with a short version of a Cleopatra cut, graying, steps up onto one of the porches, followed by two other women, one blonde. The first woman wears something purple, and her eyes look from face to face to face, and she smiles. This is the Unitarian Universalist minister. And see that big burning thing sliding off to the west? That is the tired-out sun.

Meanwhile, a procession moves toward the tiny permanent stage.