The School on Heart's Content Road (21 page)

Rex says gruffly, “Like I say, this guy's a lot more focused than he will
seem
to be. He's smart, and he's a problem.”

Mickey has spent his entire life with
quiet
people. He is used to quiet people, the quieter the better.

Now, as they step up on the low stone step, a white flat-faced dog from inside pushes up the dog door, which is rigged in the aluminum combination screen-storm human door. He doesn't bark. He just stands there, panting miserably, the little door resting on his back in its flipped-up position. He gazes past Rex's black military boots toward the other dogs, who are cruising casually around the yard.

Now inside the trailer, a wild thumping and a squeally but hoarse totally sickening laughter. Refrigerator door sucks shut. The little dog jerks backward, letting the flap swing closed.

Mickey looks down directly at his own feet as he crushes the last of his cigarette with his fingers, sees the doorstep is pretty jazzy. Cement with all kinds of stuff set in it. Pieces of flagstone, tiny colored tiles, the sides of old-style painted heavy glass soda bottles that say
CASCO
and have a ship scene in red and white. Rex pulls off his sunglasses and folds them meticulously, into the pocket. He looks into Mickey's eyes. Anyone might think these two were father and son. Maybe even Mickey has begun to think this.

Saving the republic.

Mickey stoops to pat one of the dogs. He thinks how it is, when a dog is panting like this, it looks like a nice smile.

Rex doesn't knock. He just holds the door wide open for Mickey to step ahead of him.

The place has lost its vinyl new-mobile-home smell. It smells like life.

Kitchen of this trailer is central. Living room on the right is raised with a little wrought-iron rail as a partial partition. Linoleum down in the kitchen is made to look like bricks. Carpet up there in the living room. Yellow-gold. Dirty. Not filthy, just dirty: walked on. A guy stands
on this higher level against the wrought-iron rail, nice and high above everyone else down here in the kitchen. He stares in the other direction from the kitchen, however, because he is watching the TV, which shows an old black-and-white movie tinged green. He's a guy in his midsixties, very thin hair, only three or four teeth in front, small head but large thick-lobed ears, red T-shirt faded to splotchy pink, rugged arms, dark work pants splotched with the pine pitch and grease of his life's work. He doesn't look as hot as everyone else. He looks cool. He makes a foolish face at one of the dogs who runs up to him now. Says “
Wuf
” to this dog. This is not Willie Lancaster, this is Dick O'Brien . . . guest.

Two small brown-haired girls, who have just come in behind Rex and Mickey, are now pulling folded-up paper grocery bags from where they've been stuffed behind the refrigerator. They handle the bags in a dainty way, some mission of great honor under way.

“
Three
for you,” one tells the other.

Judy Lancaster, Willie's wife, comes in from outside carrying a plastic mustard bottle. She wears a curly frizzy perm. A short, square, firm-looking gal with a T-shirt that reads
GIVE ME ALL THE CHOCOLATE I WANT AND NOBODY GETS HURT
. She wears polka-dot shorts. Her feet are bare. Her legs are smooth and very white. Her eyes are round, sleepy-looking, and nearly lashless. This might be considered unattractive elsewhere, but in Egypt at least a hundred people have these eyes. The Gallant eyes.

A very young, very tall skinny guy, not even twenty yet, standing with slumped narrow shoulders, arms folded across his narrow chest in a protective manner, steps away from the cupboard Judy needs to get to. His plastic-billed cap reads
OXFORD COUNTY POWDER BURNERS
. His small face goes perfectly with his small shoulders, the head and shoulders of a little five-foot-two guy with a body stretched to give him the height of six-foot-three. His black hair is parted in the middle and held back in a slim ponytail with a red elastic. He has really nice hair. But all you can see from the trailer doorway is the billed cap, which is enormous and basketlike on top of that small face. His eyes are large and green-gold-brown with dark lashes and dark, perfectly formed eyebrows. Long neck, like actresses all wish they had, but for the Adam's apple, which you can't see because of the long scraggly thin beard that touches the front of his mostly unbuttoned scarlet chamois shirt. His chest is
knotty-looking and not much for hair. One dark nipple shows. This, too, is not Willie Lancaster. This is Louis St. Onge, Willie's son-in-law. He is from Aroostook County and lives in the tall pink rocket-shaped house a few yards away. He often wears a cowboy-looking holstered revolver. As you may have guessed, he is a distant cousin of Gordon St. Onge, founding father of the St. Onge Settlement. And he's a Settlement regular, as a few others from around town are, but also a Lancaster regular . . . so, yuh, he stays busy.

Wearing a limp black Harley Davidson T-shirt with sleeves
ripped
off is a stout six-foot-four guy with a clean shave and double chins, jeans and engineer boots. This is Artie Bean, not Artie from the militia; there's a lot of Arties in Egypt. He and a shorter somewhat younger guy drink from returnable cans, one beer, one orange soda. Side by side, they both lean back against the stove and counter. The younger guy is also rather heavyset, with breasts and a plenteous girth, wearing a baby-blue muscle shirt with dark blue piping, red sport shorts with white trim, dirty sneakers, no socks. This short guy is not Willie Lancaster. This is Willie's son, Danny. Danny works with his father in the landscaping and tree-work biz. Danny hates tree work and fixing cute yards, that kinda thing. He loves computers. And movies. And games. And reading. And eating. And people. And fun.

Meanwhile, a medium-built man, small-hipped, with gray eyes, narrow face, and sweaty hair a little long on the back of his neck, a trim, very pointed, Jack-the-Ripper brown beard, a short top lip that causes his lighter-brown mustache to seem insincere, and slightly protruding spaced front teeth—this man stands next to the refrigerator between Louis St. Onge and Artie Bean. He is naked. But he is wearing a handgun in a leather holster strap, like the kind you'd wear under a jacket or shirt if you were wearing a jacket or shirt. And around his neck a long silvery chain. With exaggeratedly narrowed eyes, he is watching Artie Bean tell about yet another law “against the property owner.”

“Commies! All of 'em Commies!” the naked man screams, pretending to tear his hair out. Then he covers his head with his forearms and, with uncanny agility, kicks the refrigerator, which woggles from side to side. A few of the remaining folded paper bags behind it slide to the floor.
This
is Willie Lancaster.

Rex glances into Mickey's eyes. Mickey, as usual, is pale and has no expression and won't look directly at anyone except Rex—Rex, a kind of lighthouse in the fog of Mickey's life.

Willie Lancaster makes a short lunge at Mickey for a close-up view of Mickey's face. “Hey!” he screams. “Take your hat off!” Then backs away.

Mickey has no hat.

Most of the men cackle over this.

The TV has some sort of big-music-type drama now, but nobody here cares.

Willie puffs up his chest, something that looks like a dog tag sliding sideways on the silver chain there, toward and away from the holster's shoulder strap.

Rex just stands there looking around at everything except Mickey and Willie Lancaster.

Suddenly Willie is looking intently at Rex. “What's up, Cap'n?”

Rex now looks him in the eye, then shifts to the son, Danny.

Willie asks, “Is this your new member?” He narrows his eyes once again on Mickey. “I heard all about you!” he tells Mickey. “You armed?”

“No,” Mickey replies.

“No?” Willie turns his head slowly and stiffly, like Godzilla. Then his gray invasive eyes are back on Mickey. “Never go anywhere without your gun and your Bible. You hear me? That's all you gotta remember!”

Rex says, “There's one more thing. To remember. Never act like a blooming idiot in public with firearms. The jail time, the possibility of a record, the newspapers, the whole mess—it's called bad publicity.” Rex doesn't mention the new so-called antiterror law, where all associated people get arrested for one man's crime. No, Rex is not feeling long-winded enough at the moment.

Willie hangs his head. Then, turning away, he slips off the shoulder holster, swings around, and starts to put it on Mickey.

Mickey jerks back: reflex.

And Willie says, “Afraid? Afraid of guns, boy? Be a real man now.”

Mickey would say,
No, I'm not afraid of guns,
but his timing is off. He can't keep up with Willie; Willie is already yakking again, and Mickey stands arrow-straight like some virginal human sacrifice while Willie
arranges the holster and heavy Ruger over Mickey's billowy orange T-shirt, and Willie says, “Okay, George. If anyone bothers you, you got ten shots all ready to go. You just whip that out and plug hell out of 'em.”

A teen girl, dressed in a short terry beach cover-up, with thick but smooth and golden legs, passes by to the refrigerator and says, “Dad, put your clothes on. The neighbors are going to call the constable again.”

Almost as quick as the speed of light, Willie runs to the screened front door with the little dog door in the bottom of it and kicks it open. He screams out toward the little sunny and shrubberied ranch house across the road, where two schoolteachers live, “HEY, NEIGHBOR! IT'S FUCKING NINETY-SIX DEGREES, HUMIDITY NINETY-NINNNNNNNE PERCENT!” His body is smooth, not especially hairy. His ass is almost the only part of his body that has a thick dark pattern of hair, and now, strutting back into the kitchen, his whole body shines and wetness drips off the end of his nose.

The kitchen is now cracking with ugly laughter. Six-foot-four Artie Bean mops his face. The aging logger, high on the elevated gold living-room carpet, continues to be the only unsticky-looking person around.

Even Rex and Mickey suffer flushes, a hot rose to each cheekbone.

The young daughter has gotten herself two cold orange sodas. The refrigerator is full of orange sodas. As the girl passes Willie, she pushes one of the cold sodas into his hand.

“Thank you, dear,” he says, gripping her hand, to nuzzle her fingertips against his thin mustache. She has rings on every finger. She wrenches her hand back, waves him away dismissively, and pushes out through the screen door. It whooshes shut. Instantly, the dog door flaps open and a very fat, pregnant-looking, pushed-face, curled-tail spotted white dog steps in, looks around with a bored expression, and sashays off down the hallway to one of the small but quiet bedrooms.

From the window over the sink, the barbecue festivities out back are heard—shrill kids, shrill women, the idling but rising and falling engine of a four-wheeler ATV, a batch of firecrackers followed by the remarks of dogs, the scoldings of women, the murmur of men, and chicken parts hissing over the briquettes.

“So,” says Willie. “Cap'n Rex is going to have me court-martialed.” He grins his slightly buck-toothed grin at Rex. Then looks away, wiping the palm of a hand across his soft mustache. “I already been dehumanized
in the treasoners' court of law and their jail. What a buncha monkeys!” He makes a face like something bitter on his tongue. “But I showed 'em the common law is the higher court. They can ignore it all they want;
they're
the criminals, not Willy Nilly.” He gives a sprightly little hop which makes his dog tag and plump genitals shake frantically. He holds the soda can up high, glugs hard, then says deeply, secretively, “Portland Police Chief Shitwood knows he don't mess with me now. He's probably got a hundred locks on his door now.” He chortles, mostly to himself. “
And
”—he holds up a finger—“the judge, he would've paid dear. Well, his brother would pay. They'd all be wonderin' how the brother's business got shut down. He didn't know—this Judge Bob didn't know I knew about that plumbing and wiring, way back with Jansons, I had it all to myself, the whole layout, and nuthin's changed since. He'd've been sorry he ever messed with the militia. Fortunately, he threw the whole thing out. They didn't have
anything
on ol' Willie. Good thing for the judge's baby brother. The whole works was illegal: plumbing, wiring, and septic. If I had to do what I didn't turn out havin' to do, that little brother would've been stuck with a two hundred thou' fine. It would've been in the works within hours. He didn't know we had people in there.”