The Recipe for Revolution. Carolyn Chute
“I love my job . . . the job. The job. But they don’t call it a job. They call it working hard.” He raises an eyebrow endearingly.
Gordon pretends to toast him with his empty mug.
Bruce wags his head. “Alabama is gone gone gone gone gone.”
Gordon rests a hand on Bruce’s shoulder. “Man, you okay?”
“No.”
Gordon grabs the wheel of the truck. “Today we are in our space capsule, way up over the fucking fog. We don’t give a flying fuck about fog . . . or fucking anything.”
Bruce titters.
Gordon’s hand reaches back for Bruce’s shoulder, the hand that can never get enough touch. With children and women, it’s their ears. With men, shoulder-and-forearm grips, bear hugs. His cousin Aurel (Oh-RELL) tells Gordon, “Mon dieu! You do paw!”
Bruce swigs from his cider. Three noisy swallows.
Gordon says, “Morse. Our friend. If only the stroke had killed him outright. Why this dragging on?”
Bruce agrees it is painful to see Morse this way. Obviously, Bruce has been a recent visitor at Cape Elizabeth, not just relying on the phone calls, e-mails, whatever.
Then Bruce presses Gordon to elaborate on his politics. On that subject Gordon can be explosive and some would be loath to press that button. But following Bruce’s question and the echo of silence after the question, Gordon just noisily sucks on his mug, forgetting it’s empty. He sees that even Bruce Hummer’s profile is Rex’s, the straight nose, the short indignant chin.
And so Gordon sets his empty mug on the dash, places both huge callused work-thickened hands along the bottom of the steering wheel.
Is Bruce waiting for Gordon to reply? To spill all his “political” guts?? Bruce’s listening silence is spiderish. He tips the pink hearts mug to swallow the last of what’s in it. A predator is always keen to weakness and so he can’t miss Gordon’s fatal innocence. But also he sees a simple thing, the powerful mass of the neck, shoulders, fingers, wrists spreading in its desire, its passion, multiplied by myriad future followers . . . it spills over. How does that go? His cup runneth over . . . while, uh . . . you the magnifico will lie down in the valley of the shadow of death. You will fear no evil. But you will fear the innocents!! The cup dribbling, drizzling with refugees, unemployed, underemployed, overemployed, and enraged and enraptured. There is nothing about the St. Onge phenomenon lost on Bruce Hummer.
He snorts. A big grin now, and tells a really bad joke about martians . . . maybe once it was a good joke, but his timing is all off.
Gordon understands that as they drink more, they become more alike. Two sloppy confounded goofballs. Ah, the beauteousness of drunkenness.
Gordon refills Bruce’s mug, then his own. Both men’s eyes are getting red-gray and liquidy, the eyelids thickening.
Gordon is now back to explaining about the bourbon barrels and Red Delicious apples, repeating himself.
Bruce chortles softly, raises his mug. “To our posterity!”
Gordon’s mug is meant to touch Bruce’s gently but clonks it. “Oops!” A good bit sloshes out onto both of their laps like lukewarm piss. Then Gordon says gruffly, “To our future world’s beautiful people!” Takes a long swilling gulp-gulp-gulp from his mug.
Bruce copies him.
“Where’s the john in this godforsaken place anyway?” Gordon snarls.
Bruce points at the hole in the floorboard.
They both laugh like hell.
Bruce’s magnificent wristwatch churns away the moments, the unexcitable tiny hands more exacting than human breathing, human heart, and the march of lymph and blood. Never once in this cab has he glanced at this exquisite instrument.
Gordon again begins to ramble about the apples, the barrels, slurring slightly. “Rrred Delicious. Not delicious to eat ’em. Like a tennis ball and a pear that had a . . . baby. But fermented, they—” Kisses the bunched fingertips of his own right hand.
Bruce burps between his teeth, not softly.
Gordon groans. “I’mmm going to accommodate yourrr request, brother.”
“My request,” repeats Bruce, his eyes searching his inner fog to locate this puzzling phrase.
“My politics,” Gordon reminds him with a sniff. “I neverrrr vote.”
Bruce marvels, “You don’t say.”
“Well . . . I vote for referendums and road commissioner . . . selectmen . . . ah . . . clerk.”
Bruce nods and waves his cup so that the contents dance out onto his hand and somehow splatter the windshield. “Oh’m fuck,” he declares.
Because he’s squinting with laborious effort at a thought, Gordon doesn’t notice Bruce’s bumble. He says, “Last time . . . to vote . . . I waz bee-trayyyed.”
“You don’t say.”
“I voted . . . I wrote him in . . . a write-in, see? He sounded so good. You ever hear of him? Vermin Supreme.”†††††
Bruce’s pupils flare as if darkness has fallen.
Gordon touches Bruce’s upper arm with two fingers. “He promised that if he were elected—” Burps largely. “—he’d see to it that everyone got a pony.”
“You don’t say.”
“Well, he didn’t get elected . . . but . . . rrreliable sources said that there are not enough—” BURP! “—ponies.”
Bruce runs a hand through his hair as if to tidy up but somehow this causes his hair to look like two brown horns.
Gordon cocks his head listening to the yakking inside his own head because outside his head nobody is talking.
Gordon says in a balloony squashy murmur as if another burp were moving into position, “All the people . . . all identities . . . all derms . . . all the issues people . . . all of them who clobber each other . . . it’s a civil war on low heat . . . you know full well what I mean . . . if we all instead looked up in the friggin’ sky at you corporate supremacist guys, you’d all be dead!”
Bruce sits up straight, turns his head to face Gordon’s face full on, and grins ear to ear, “You don’t say.”
Gordon’s pale intense eyes waver, then he seems to find something gorgeous about the dashboard.
His passenger speaks in his tensile drawl, “I know you have a firearm in this truck, Mr. Militia . . . somewhere. Behind the seat maybe?”
Gordon says nothing.
Bruce says, “There is nothing, Mr. Militia, that will stop this high-tech most profoundly complex global grid of power except when someday it hits the big wall. Love will not cure it. Not even your . . . your Recipe.”
Ah, so Janet showed him fifteen-year-old Bree’s “document” flyers. How tender a picture this makes! Those two crowned heads, Janet’s and Duotron Lindsey’s, together over the earnest oh-so-hopeful thrashes and swirls of calligraphy of that one-of-a-kind child.
“No,” Bruce goes on in his hot velvet fashion. “Nothing can stop this matrix. The toothpaste is out of the tube. The mule is out of the barn. The hornets are out of the hive. Our species spreads, blooms, the protons deliver. But just for the beauty of it, the fine art of it, the black and blue of it, you might earn some awfully sweet satisfaction if you’re willing to . . . to one at a time, in rapid succession, supposing you inspire a chain reaction, blast the brains out of every man and woman of the pyramid’s high-water mark, and every one of them who dares replace them, doing it purely for the ripe raw red chef d’oeuvre of it, because it will just regenerate a dozen