The School on Heart's Content Road (7 page)

It is Sunday, early evening.

Two days of rain: warm rain, cold rain, a lotta rain. The culverts hiss and giggle with road runoff from the higher hills.

Mickey moves along the road's crown, light-footed as ever, the rain punching his eyes, punching him all over.

Richard “Rex” York's home welcomes you. When Mickey raps on the door inside the little glassed-in porch, a voice hollers from somewhere, “
In here!
” And beside the door is a varnished plaque shaped like a hand with a pointing finger that reads
ENTER
.

And so Mickey steps into the kitchen. There is a smell. Something supperish, a supper already eaten. But something else too, something
besides meat and potatoes. He thinks it is hot cookies or cake, you know, cookies or cake still baking away. The gray Formica-topped table and the counters are wiped clean. Mickey glances to his right, through an open pantry door that shows a red and green metal Christmas tree stand on top of a small barbecue grill with a laundry basket on top, and other pantry-shedway-type stuff stacked or standing.

This house is an old farm place that rural people yearned to modernize and fulfilled their yearnings with avocado indoor-outdoor carpeting in the pantry and all the walls of the whole house done in cheesy sixteenth-inch paneling that doesn't look at all like wood but just a picture of wood. Funny about fads. Probably in many of these old farmhouses, there is gorgeous golden real knotty pine board paneling completely plastered over with this 1970s plasticky latest-thing-gotta-have-it brown-black plywood sheet paneling.

Also, here at the York residence, those tall, narrow, handsome, many-paned, good-for-the-soul, low-to-the-floor windows, the original ones, have been
ripped out
and replaced with small windows with cranks, set high like rectangular portholes, and, of course, in the living room, a bay picture window covered with glossy fiberglass drapes thick as a fort fence.

In similar homes, you'll find sliding glass doors, always with the accompanying dog-nose prints, splats and smears of ice cream or ordinary baby goo, pollen, woodstove smoke in filmy gray-green streaks with a view of the “deck,” where the barbecue and laundry basket and stuffed gray trash bags are kept, and maybe a cat is out there on the rail, licking her paw or eating a live mouse. But here at Rex's home, fad has not gotten that far. The place still feels a
little
farmlike. Coats and jackets hang on hooks on the kitchen side of the thick old cellar door. The old white-painted corner cabinet top is heaped with papers and hats and tools and the innards of a broken lamp.

Again the voice, calling “In here!” from the living room, where Mickey can see feet raised up on the footrest of a La-Z-Boy, feet dressed in black military boots. Mickey heads toward these feet.

Yes, it is
him,
the one Mickey is looking for.

Rex's eyes fall on the rifle Mickey has in his hands, and he nods into Mickey's eyes. Rex seems different. No army cap. No metal-frame sunglasses. No red T-shirt, just a stiff dark-blue work shirt. The shirt makes
him seem older, like a father or grandfather, just a regular age-fifty-looking guy. So bare in the face and head, more exposed. His hair is dark brown like the mustache, not much gray. But thinning a bit at the temples. And he doesn't comb his hair funny to hide it.

Mickey speaks an almost inaudible “Hi.” Mickey is sopping wet and the rifle is shining.

The man's deep La-Z-Boy is facing the TV, but the TV is blank-faced and silent. The TV remote control is still in his hand.

Mickey says, “Sorry to bother you, but I have something. . . .”

Rex York snorts and leans forward, his booted feet come down with a single thump, and he says, “What
really
bothers me was what was going on before you came in.” He aims the remote flicker, makes the TV burst to life, then kills it quick. He narrows his steely eyes. “Six o'clock news.” He sneers. “Next they'll be telling us there's a Santa Claus.” He tosses the remote onto a pile of newspapers on the floor beside him. “Whatcha got there?”

Mickey says, “This is mine, Marlin Twenty-two Magnum. I wanted to see if you'd be interested in buying it.”

“Not interested,” says Rex, as he pulls on his nose, eyes on Mickey's face. “I'm not in need of one.”

Mickey is frozen in place, standing with legs apart, the rifle loose in his hands, muzzle down, his little wet worm of a ponytail especially pitiful-looking, his small frame especially small. He says, low and soft, “I need to sell it for medicine. It's for a sick baby.”

Rex York's eyes are direct, eyes that make you feel as though a permanent picture of you is being taken, the whole picture; your face, body, blood count, shoe size. He moves these eyes over Mickey as if to gauge the truth of this sick baby story. He says, “Whose gun
is
that?”

Mickey replies, “Mine.”

Rex says, “I don't know you.”

Mickey turns slightly, looks to the heavily draped picture window, beyond which he knows rain is smashing down onto yard and field and winding paved road. “I just thought I'd check.”

The man stands, steps over to Mickey, grasps the rifle around the forearm, turns it sideways, jerks back the bolt, checks the breech, then deftly, with one hand, uncocks it, working the trigger and bolt. He feels over all the rain-darkened wood, studies the serial numbers. “You took all-right
care of it. But”—his eyes fix again on Mickey's unreadable face—“I got no more use for this thing than a zucchini, 'cept to trade it. But you can leave it with me as collateral, and I'll loan you what you need.”

“That would be good, yuh.”

And so there's an exchange.

And then a little chitchat, mostly Rex leading the conversation. Talk of the government and the United Nations and the Constitution and the way money is no longer backed by gold and the impending declaration of martial law by the president, of the New World Order and the liberals and the socialists, and then some about jury rights and separation of powers, the Federalist Papers, and on to Waco and Ruby Ridge.

Rex's somewhat young-looking mother appears quietly, from some cool part of the house. There seems to be cool air following her. She gives Mickey cookies, big nice vanilla sugar cookies, her hand cool, the cookies piping hot. She watches Mickey eat them. She stares openly at his hands and mouth, just like his own mother does.

When Mickey stands to leave, Rex pulls keys from his pocket and commands, “Go get in the truck. I'll take you home. You don't love rain
that
much, do you?”

The prince.

Erika lies on the bed that is hers and Donnie's. It is covered with a cheap yellow computerized crazy-quilt-print synthetic-fleece blanket that makes the skin on Erika's bare legs and feet look a bright cheap yellow. The rain has left the air as thick and solid and tinted as green Jell-O. There under the blanket, close to Erika, is her shrinking child. On a small metal and wooden trunk at the foot of the bed is a television turned down very low. Erika's eyes are even more fiercely deep and ringed than yesterday. These eyes are watching filmed excerpts of a trial. The TV has the sound turned nearly off. All the TVs in this house have the sound turned down these days. But no blank TVs. No pressing the
OFF
button. There is, to so many of us, something frightening about being totally cut off from “society,” from our “culture,” from the faceless mind that instructs and defines us.

A big bee drones at the screen of the open window, tapping over and over and over, seeming to ask,
Is this it? Is this it? Is this it?

With the excerpts of the trial over and a blast of jolly commercials, there is now a TV talk show host wheedling a guest, and Erika's eyes watch this dully and she hears footsteps in the hall and knows it's her brother-in-law, Mickey, whose room is on the third floor above her in that uninsulated blistering-hot attic space. She hears him stop. At
this
door. She had left the door cracked open. He hits it with his palm so it flies wide. Erika jumps, pushes herself up off the pillows.

The old part-golden retriever, Boy, raises his head from his paws where he lies on the floor, and his tail thumps to see Mickey. Mickey steps over him. Mickey comes right over to the bed and stands there looking at Erika, stretched out there in her shorts and bare feet and Persian cat T-shirt, which he likes a lot, and she is scooting herself up to sit, then folds one knee up to brace herself for this unexpected moment and she sees that Mickey has a fistful of twenty-dollar bills that he is raising over her. She grabs his wrist. Much strength in her fingers. He laughs.

She works to pry this money out of his fist. His cigarettish and carelessly unwashed smell is enormous. Her eyes are now bright on the money, on the fist, on Mickey's face, on all of him, his thin little, ratlike self, ragged and untended and suddenly now quite princelike.

Out in the world.

Providence, Rhode Island, a rain-drenched evening, the setting sun, a perfect yellow, glitters on chemically velvet lawns and on pavements, glass, and stone, everything green made greener and more urgent. The shopping center parking lot is packed. Most of the empty spaces are on the farthest outer edges. A muted copper-colored two-door car slips into a tight space close to the buildings. Tinted glass hides the occupants, but the bumper speaks loudly: MY CHILD IS A NATHAN BISHOP MIDDLE SCHOOL HONOR STUDENT. (Yes, another one.)

Claire St. Onge speaks.

Gordon has never wanted anything to do with the media. When the call came last night, I was there in his kitchen with a few others. As he held the phone, he listened very hard, with his shoulders, with his neck, with his face. When he hung up and said it was a reporter with the
Record
Sun,
I knew all our lives were crossing a line. What was he doing!!, agreeing to this “little” interview?!

You, crow, so bright-eyed there on top of the silvery limbless die-back beech, are the only witness when Ivy Morelli,
Record Sun
reporter, shows up for her first interview.