The School on Heart's Content Road (42 page)

A couple months ago, he was a fifteen-year-old living with his older brother's family, and he was as free as the breeze. Now he is a different kind of free, though still fifteen.

He stares down into the tops of trees below this ledgy drop-off. He's out of cigarettes now but smoke still comes out of him, the smoke of frozen breath. The way it does outdoors when you work or have fun. And now, when you live outdoors. His gray wild eyes zero in on the hard-looking utility sun picking its way up through the cold and distant red-orange September trees. How prehistoric this silence is, the way nothing makes a sound. Except his lips and the inside walls of his mouth and the frosty smoke ghost-breathing in and out, sailing away in a solid steady clump. He hears his brother's voice in his echoing memory: Go away go away go away . . . you can't live here . . . GO!

That night he was kicked out, Mickey was barefoot and shirtless. Yeah, it was
night
. Like outer space.

No fucking shoes.

Donnie's command just a whisper, like the very last bit of air leaving a flat tire, so slow, not much
whoooosh
:
Go away
. And yet Mickey remembers it in billboard-sized letters: GO AWAY! The words look down at him now from the schoolbus-yellow dawn sky, the big but soundless command.

Mickey hardly ever asks questions. He just waits for answers to bonk down on him like ready coconuts. And that's how he finally heard the full scoop on the Prophet. Real name is Ghee Yome or something. He grew up in that gray farmhouse and still officially lives there. But his wives live up in the valley in the Snow White cottages, which are all colors, and some have little porches. Some are in the fields, some in the woods. Nobody actually lives in the brown-with-green-trim horseshoe building. In the morning, the smell of breakfast in that building reaches his tree house so huge it's like getting a whiff of the Fryeburg Fair.

Yes, wives. Like Waco. Like Arabs. Like weird. Like, imagine it.

Mickey imagines being completely lost inside a solid pile of warm women.

But uphill here, where Mickey is, is where you go when you are in a solid pile of
cold shit
.

Something moves, catches his eye: a crow on one of the windmills. Willie Lancaster says he knew a crow once that talked, one or two words at a time.

Like Mickey.

And also like Mickey, the crow—
this
crow here on the mountain—seems to have no jobs lined up today, nobody to meet.

He sees a finger of fire coming up through the trees beyond East Egypt. Wriggling. Now it leaps, pulls free, ball of fire. The giant old-timey windmill is instantly covered in gold. Except its six walls are painted black. Then there's faces and bodies of spirits and mermaids and woman devils with flying hair. The hair on the mermaids is green. Woman devils have red skin or pink with veins. Eyes dripping. Around to the other side are a couple of guy devils, totally purple, naked, with long peckers shaped like Christmas stockings filled with candy and oranges. One sheep eating grass. Or is it a turtle? Man, oh, man, these are obviously painted by kids on ladders. Some dripping. Some blobs. But some are very artistic. And stirring. Many realistic breasts. Big ones. He nods. He sees the orange wicked eyes of the largest woman devil, eyes of power.

These Settlement people are nothing like he's ever known before. Could you call them students? Mr. Carney would have you in three months of detention if he caught you painting shit like this, for instance on the brick walls of the gym. Mickey chuckles. He kinda likes these St. Onge types. Except mostly he feels like just your regular sick peeping Tom, outside, not inside.

Caw! Caw! Caw! Caw!
Crow takes off, flapping toward the stone wall that zigzags down through the woods to Mickey's tree home. Mickey rubs his cold hands together, shoves them deep in the BDU shirt's pockets. Rex said the next meeting might be here at the Settlement, so the men who live here can give Rex's men a tour. A radio studio and tower, not finished but
ambitious
. An
experimental wheat field
and
alternative energy
projects. Nothing wrong with a sneak preview, Mickey whispers to himself, and marches sort-of-proudly onward.

For the next few hours, he'll just lie on his back at home and aim the service pistol at the tree-house ceiling, the walls, the window.

Uh-oh!

The temperatures around the world are bouncing: rising, falling,
boing! boing! boing!
The earth is now so sporty. A bowling ball. Maybe a game of pool. Something is melting or leaking. Or spreading. Receding. Autumn leaves forget to fall. Lightning strikes twice. Sheep are going blind. Politicians talk in oily ways, like butter or broken thermometers . . . mercury pooling on the porch . . . a silvery eye. Dither is everywhere.

Hey!

Pay no attention whatsoever to the sky. What you need to think about is the way thirty-eight-year-old Mindy Curtis of Gitchy, Nevada, left her four kids in her old junky car and pushed it over a cliff. Think about
that
! And think about the death penalty for the deserving!

Meanwhile, somewhere in a major city in America.

Several thousand mostly collegey professional-type people and a few labor unions march. Raised banners and placards represent numerous discontents and objections, mostly relating to corporate power, government corruption, sicko foreign policy, and questionable law enforcement practices. Huge puppets bow and prance. Buttons, leaflets, flyers, songs: a festive spirit. Dull speeches. City heat. Skin dripping electrolytes. Telephone numbers of legal counsel scribbled on forearms. Civil disobedience, peaceful blockades, singing and drums. Police gas and bash. Many arrests. Charges inflated to felonies for just blocking streets. Young college kids' faces smashed into sidewalks while handcuffed. A few broken teeth. Many broken hearts. “Is this how the system reacts to the sound of the people's voice?” one young man asks.

The screen sneers.

A tiny but irritating incident today. See the
rioters
! See the bad bad bad people bothering the city, which is trying to conduct itself, and
the nice government and cops, who sometimes look like Boy Scouts except when they have to wear their riot gear and padded stuff to protect themselves from these extremist people who just like to start trouble for some reason.

Back in the city.

Another day of noisy but hopefully peaceful protests heats up, but the police are one step ahead, using battering rams on a warehouse door to get at the collegey kids in there who are making giant puppets. The giant puppets are bad. They will tell of police corruption and government policy that is against people. The police say
Death to puppets
and stuff them into Dumpsters. Puppets away! Seal those big puppet mouths! Young puppet makers are dragged out and stuffed into buses. What are the charges on these terrible puppet makers who make puppets that telllll? Nine felonies for this young girl. Ten for this one. Seven for that one. Puppets could be used in a crime, police say. It's
the intent,
say the police.

Concerning the aforementioned particular details, the screen

is blank.

Donnie Locke is late for work again.