The School on Heart's Content Road Read Free Page A

membership.”
    Mickey looks down at the flyers in his hands. Mickey is very, very, very quiet. Mickey, whose pale eyes are just as unrevealing and steely as this man’s eyes are. The crescent of lettering around the mountain lion reads BORDER MOUNTAIN MILITIA .
    On the back fold of the flyer:
Richard York, Captain/Vaughan Hill Road/Box 350, RR2/Egypt, Maine 04047
.
    The guy explains that most people call him Rex.
    The rain really pummels the hood and cab roof now, and the windshield looks like a thousand dark and silver wrinkles.
    Mickey says nothing. His streaky blond ponytail is so thin and silky and without substance, it turns up a little to the right. Sweet. And now his unwashed smell is casually seeping through the humidity of the cab. This guy Rex smells like his T-shirt has had a real dousing of fabric softener. Mickey figures this is because there is a woman in Rex’s life. He glances at the hand that’s now kind of fisted on the left thigh of Rex’s jeans. Yes, a wedding band.
    Outside, after the storm, the air is as heavy as a rubber tire. But it smells wonderful. Rex invites Mickey to shoot his own service pistol, which he pulls from behind the truck seat. “Never go anywhere without your Bible and your gun,” Rex says, at least three times. The tall soft-voiced second-in-command, John Stratham, gives Mickey some good pointers. For the first time, Mickey notices that John has an embroidered patch on the sleeve of his long-sleeved BDU shirt, the mountain lion and crescent of lettering, black on olive green: BORDER MOUNTAIN MILITIA . Striking to look at.
    The target, like most of the others, is of a human shape and is placed at fifty yards for this particular gun. Mickey mostly misses the chest and head. In fact, he mostly misses the black targeted shape. From where they all stand, the spots of his hits show plainly and painfully against the white. He feels this is goofus, but these guys seem impressed. The hefty white-haired sea-captain guy, Artie, says “Good goin’!” and thunksMickey’s shoulder. The hunched guy with the mean ears growls, “Got ’im runnin’.” The big quiet John nods. And Rex, with his sunglasses back on, says nothing, but his chin is up and he is feeling his dark, full, sprawling mustache carefully.
    In a small American city in the Midwest.
    A station wagon waits to make a left turn in snarling, fumy, carbon-poofing traffic. It exhibits a bumper sticker that reads MY CHILD IS A PLONTOOKI HIGH SCHOOL HONOR STUDENT.
    From frozen Pluto, tiny microscopic Plutonian observatory observers observe the brown daytime spotting and pink nighttime hazing of what we have come to think of as life here on Earth. Tiny microscopic Plutonian officials speak.
    wjox blup sssssooop £G jrigip bot wjp st wjpt xt! *
    Six-and-a-half-year-old Jane Meserve speaks from a room at the St. Onge Settlement.
    It is bad for my Mum. Someone help her! Someone with power. Help her! Help me! And my dog Cherish. Gone. Nobody tells me what happened.
    Donnie Locke at home.
    This old and loyal house! Belongs to Donnie Locke. No mortgage. Donnie Locke, Mickey Gammon’s half brother. It is home for Mickey and Britta too. Britta is the mother the two brothers have in common. Different fathers, same mother. Yes, Britta lives here too since she returned from Massachusetts, because Massachusetts
didn’t work out
.
    Donnie Locke watches Mickey hard from his chair at the table. There’s a TV here in the kitchen. TV in the living room. Other TVsin other parts of the house. Not great TVs, but something to make do with. Both the kitchen TV and the one in the living room as seen through the two open doors of the little entry hall show a one-half-minute musical spectacle of the generic modern woman in the shower with water beading up on the skin of her shoulder, the ecstasy of huge teeth and violent water, America’s message, BE CLEAN, BUY DETERGENT BARS, and BODY