The School on Heart's Content Road (71 page)

Next day, Monday, in the early
A.M
.

Long purple shadows and heavy frosty dew. Fat gold sun squeezes up between the mountaintop trees. One of the clean-up crews moves along behind a humming slow-going solar buggy. Cans and paper bags and balled-up tissues and flyers left from the crowds are tossed into the cart. Like the rest of the clean-up crew, Jane Meserve is dressed warm, wearing old sweaters and heavy pants. Jane's old sweater is rust-colored with green fir trees, and it hangs long in a somewhat glamour-ish way. She pauses from stooping and heaving trash to gaze with longing up into the woods, her chin up, big sultry eyes wet from the chill, nose a little bit red, thinking of her true love, Mickey, for whom she has composed a
long
love letter and needs to deliver it in a secret way as soon as possible.

Also Monday morning at the residence of Richard York, the Agency goes for the throat.

Pulling up now is a late-model truck driven by a stranger. Stranger steps out. Big guy. Big blond guy with a tan and—yuh, he looks like a California type, beachy with a square jaw and fastidiously shaved
to imitate eternal youth. But the truck plates say
MAINE
. He is not Marty Lees aka Gary Larch. He is not the fresh-faced agent with the
SEA DOGS
cap. He is yet another one. There are plenty.

He looks tired. His pale eyes are reddened. When he meets Ruth York at the door, he will introduce himself as a friend of Rex's. “I need to see Rex.” And Ruth will allow him entry, just as that wooden hand-shaped wall plaque inside the glassed-in porch reads
ENTER
.

This beachy blond stranger shows Rex snapshots.

Rex's eyes dilate, then slip-slide over the first two pictures. He doesn't study them, just the slip and the slide. He doesn't go to the third, fourth, and fifth picture, simply hands them back, eyes into eyes, maybe wondering who the beachy stranger is but maybe not even that; maybe in some way Rex York is falling through a hole in the floor and in the earth into a hot jungly steam of confusion.

Blood brothers.

Noontime, Denise's Diner in East Egypt. Gordon is meeting with a man named Hal Vorhees about a deal on milled lumber. A big deal. Enough to put the Settlement books in the black for a long while. Gordon does not look well. One of those hangovers that lasts several days. Aspirins have no effect. A thousand cute little hot-cold wires electrocute his skull. He knows he will never drink again. Too many regrets, the ones he can remember and the ones he can't. He listens to what the man has to say. He nods. He clears his throat. He finishes his second glass of water. He wears a black wool jacket, Settlement-made. It feels too tight. Thick bags under his eyes. Beet-colored hickies all over his neck. He remembers her baby talk but not her suck-kiss-biting his neck. He pokes at the pancake in his plate. He is facing the door through which customers mosey in, some taking off their billed caps, most leaving them on. The guy, Hal Vorhees, talks. Words. Gestures. Stuff about sealed bids for building a fire station. Stuff about Marty Cain, a name, a familiar name . . . but Gordon is looking up at the door now, seeing just what he knew he'd eventually see: Rex pushing through that door, his Browning semiauto service pistol in one hand.

Gordon grips the table. His head on fire, part hangover, part terror, arms on fire, feet on fire, he begins to rise, not quite out of the booth by the time Rex arrives at the table and traps Gordon there.

Gordon's face has gone from sick gray to the gray of fight-or-flight, his mouth open stupidly. Rex raises the service pistol, flicks off one of the safeties.

Gordon sees this—the hand with the gun and Rex's eyes—all in one huge picture. Rex does something odd with his mouth, like chewing food . . . and he does something odd with his shoulders, like bracing against cold, then tosses the gun into Gordon's plate with the pancakes in it, and the plate breaks in four almost perfect pieces, and the man, Hal Vorhees, is up very very quick, hollering, “Hey!”

Rex looks worse than Gordon, his pale cold-as-ever eyes lost in bagginess. Not tired, more like a person looks after a long cry. No cap. His hair is flat on one side. In addition to the big mustache, a hobo beard has begun to fill in the rest. Chewing gum. Yes, that's what is going on in his mouth. He is chewing gum as if to pulverize it into nonmatter.
Slisk. Slisk. Slisk.
Breathing hard through his nose. The man who never loses control has crossed a line.

People around the diner have gotten mighty quiet. It's as if the place were empty. Maybe it is. Neither Rex nor Gordon look around much.

Gordon is speechless. In this moment, he knows that any word of excuse or apology from his mouth would be flabby and ridiculous.

Rex speaks low. “I am not going to blow the back of your shirt out, you goddam piece of garbage . . . but I am
not
. . .
your
. . .
brother.
“

Gordon is visibly anguished.

Rex spits his gum into Gordon's water glass, grabs Gordon's shirt in both hands, and knocks him almost onto the table.

A voice from the kitchen yells, “
Out!
” and “
Outside!
”

And somehow Gordon is pushing ahead of Rex, running, and Rex follows, running, with his head down, breathing thickly through his teeth and nose, leaving the gun on the broken plate. And outside the door, a woman in a Disneyland sweatshirt and jogging pants is in the way, trying to step off the porch, as Rex leaps and has Gordon around the throat from behind and Gordon is trying to shake him and get turned around, and the woman hollers, “Jesus God!” and flattens herself to the board-and-batten outside wall of the diner.

Gordon squirms backward out of Rex's reach, and rams the center of his spine—“Unh!”—into the six-by-six post of the small porch entry-way roof. The two men push and shove their way off the porch, among parked cars and trucks, kind of like kids testing each other, checking each other's bulk through the density of shoulder and elbow. Although bulk is not really the question. Gordon is bigger in bulk. But Rex is immense with rage and some weird humid wide-eyed bafflement.

Once they are out into the sandy open lot, Rex drives his fist with perfect eloquence into Gordon's face, seeming to split one eyeball wide, the lid, the brow, made into fissures, and you can almost hear the
gloink
of the blood letting go, and Rex climbs up one side of Gordon now with a baseball-sized rock and smashes up the other side of Gordon's face so fast it's like a hilarious speeded-up old movie, and Gordon drives a fist into Rex's rock-hard middle, but none of his self-defense is anywhere near as mighty as Rex, coming on and on and on in inexhaustible fury.

Gordon is down. Rex goes to kicking yet still hangs on to the slick bloody rock, and Gordon's whole face gleams and streams a surreal paintlike red. Gordon is trying to get up. Once he is actually up on his knees. But Rex comes back again to kick blood from the one remaining unmutilated ear.

More kicking. More rock. More, more, more. Another minute. Another ten minutes.
Another
ten minutes. People shrieking and bellering “Stop it!”

Where are the state police? Where is the sheriff? The game warden? The constable? There's a good crowd of people bunched around, but no one steps in.

Rex hears it in his head, but more real than this parking lot—the explosion. The crumpling dusty
boom!
of the falling wall. Yowls. And
boom! boom! boom!
Rocket City. And he can smell it. But he can't see it. He can only see the singular. The one. The target. But now it is Maine, not Pleiku. Not 1968. No mistake. But there has been . . . a mistake. No. No mistake. The threat walks tall.

The fighting and pummeling are slower. Both men are panting. No cops. The usual wait for law enforcement, Egypt, Maine, not being the hub of anything. Nature prevails. Seems an hour before the first officer's voice is demanding, “Manners! Manners, Mr. York!” By now, Gordon
St. Onge is not recognizable to any who know him. There are the sounds of cop radios and cop feet, the sound of Rex getting handcuffed, though Rex says nothing. There's just his hard raspy gasping for breath.

Gordon can only
imagine
the cold look of Rex's eyes, the squared shoulders and military bearing not in any way diminished by exhaustion or the humiliation of arrest.

Gordon cannot see.

Rex cannot see.

When Rex is pushed into a cruiser, door slammed, somebody asks, “Was the firearm used to threaten anyone's life or threaten bodily injury?”

And someone else asks, “What firearm?”

A woman's voice now: “It was a rock.” Her voice is familiar, someone from around town who always wishes Gordon a chipper “Hello!” in the bank or P.O.

Another siren now, drawing near, another staticky radio and voices that ask questions of other voices.

Gordon is still on his knees, hands between his thighs. He is beginning to forget what that nice thought was. The nice voice. Who was it? Worse than the blaze of pain in his shoulders, face, gums, tongue, lips, eyes, cheekbones, ears, temples, skull, collarbone, wrists, hands, stomach, hips, is the feeling that something is wrong with the way the day is going. What?

And now something odd, something in the tissues of his head letting go.

Too white.

The dust of gold.

He just kind of eases his head down, his forehead on the sand, hands still between his thighs.

Rex.