The Recipe for Revolution. Carolyn Chute
possibly blue, hard to tell in the flagging light. In his deep big-guy voice, he asks, “You looking for me?”
Her hair isn’t white but an ashy light brown with a neglected perm, the hair jaw-length and listless, but thick and combed with a nice part on the side. She wears a dark button-up sweater, jeans, sneakers. Her nose isn’t small, snoutlike, or curt. Maybe once she was quite handsome. She has been nodding her head to his question, her eyes wide and seeming to show some sense of humor about the moment.
He has a sinking feeling, knowing someone has dumped her off. The way people sometimes dump off boxes of baby rabbits or, once in a while, a pup.
“Well,” says he. “Let’s go up where all the hot corn muffins are and get the world by the tail.”
Once they start up the wooded shortcut, he fumbles for the small flashlight hooked to his belt along with his batch of keys. She isn’t talking. She must be fuzzy of mind. He reaches for her hand as they come upon the rooty part of the trail. He thinks about the aspirin bottle he keeps at all times in a pocket but just keeps on swishing the light through the overbearing purple dusk inside the crackling-underfoot tunnel of old trees.
She stands so erect and easy by the scarred dark table in the farmhouse dining room, the old blue-with-white-polka-dots wallpaper Gordon’s mother herself pasted up once upon a time. How musty-cool this room is but the cherry-pink ceramic cherub in the corner hutch cabinet looks overheated.
Bree spreads her ringless hand on the thick, stapled document lying amid three empty coffee mugs on the long leafed table. She asks, “What is this?”
He is just now entering the room with two more mugs, these with maple milk in them, one for her, one for him. His eyes widen. “Oh that. Well, in this world there’s your Recipe. Then there’s their Recipe.”
Her voice has always had a smoky edge. “Project Megiddo, it says. It’s the FBI. But what are you doing with it?” She giggles.
He positions the two brimming mugs on the table. He glances at her face, which is purposely hidden by squiggles and twists of shining young-girl hair, perfectly orange hair, her face deformed by whatever it was that went wrong when she was the size of a thumb . . . or earlier . . . maybe when she was a mere idea . . . though who could imagine Bree, her honey-color eyes set apart like a funhouse mirror image and her mind that to him once seemed shy, nervous, or something . . . but, no, he is beginning to understand that she is not nervous of anything. He bets that the coil of her brain is radiating far more redly than her hair.
He explains, “Everybody has a copy of that thing. It’s not top secret. It was issued to fire departments, cops, EMTs. Rex‡ . . . you know . . . he’s with the volunteer fire crowd.”
“I figured. Cuz of the red light on the dash in his pickup,” she says in a warm way.
He grunts. “Richard York. He’s just like you. He loves to share. He’s probably churned out half a million copies of that report.”
She giggles.
“Drink some of your ambrosia, Athena,” he chuckles, pushes her mug easy-careful across the table toward her hand, which is, yes, ringless, but speckled and dashed with three shades of muscley purple, one shade of red, one splotch of yellow ocher.
She reads aloud: “The attached analysis, entitled Project Megiddo, is an FBI strategic assessment of the potential for domestic terrorism in the United States undertaken in anticipation of or response to the arrival of the new millennium.” She doesn’t look into his face square-on. She never does. But her eyes drift toward his shoulder, his work shirt, and his Sherpa-lined vest. “Have you read this . . . all of it?” She flips through, pausing, blinking.
Gordon speaks in a cartoony play-voice, “If we is to hassle Mr. York about reading our stuff, it’s only fair we reads his.”
She tsks. “Looks like the FBI wants to scare everybody, huh?”
He says nothing. The expression across his dark-lashed eyes is smirky. His cowlicked hair adds greatly to his appearance of What? Me worry? though “weary” is a more accurate word.
But her voice becomes almost academic and there, see her touch her chin with a musing finger. “I mean . . . their language is . . . well, you know, Poeish. You can hear funereal music in the background. I mean . . . it’s funny . . . but not funny. Cuzzz they are trying to make the militia movement guys into something . . . terrorists.” She giggles. “I mean it’s not funny . . . but they sound so . . . like . . . bad actors in . . . well, like Joe Friday!” She hiccups with laughter.
He pulls out a chair and sits with a tired groan.
“America needs to be divided,” she says. “Divided we fall. That’s it in a nutshell. We . . . the little guys. Meanwhile, these . . . these cops or whatever they are . . . they get paid for being dangerous and . . . and silly.” She flips the top page, lets it drop. “I hate to see people be such suckers. There’s got to be a way to outsmart a bunch of funny cops.” She snorts.
“So,” says he, “I saw where the print shop did up about two hundred more of your Abominable Hairy Patriot flyers. What are you going to do with those?”
She giggles. Guiltily. She’s aware of the ethic of thrift Gordon stands firmly on, so she might be feeling she has wronged him? “Oh . . . like, we’ve been passing them out, around. Bulletin board at the town office and IGA. Telephone poles. Windshield wipers.”
“You and your wicked comrades from the Socrates group, right?”
She hesitates, then says lushly, “Sure. Comrades. Which reminds me . . .” She steps around one of his towers of books, a plastic crate of oak tag files, and a couple of satchels of yet-to-be-answered “fan mail” to the nearest darkening window. She keeps her back presented to him. Always her back (and perfect bottom). Always her profile (within the veil of her long hair). Never, never square on. She will face everybody but him, even though he and she have been together so much this summer, perfecting the three versions of The Recipe for Revolution. Is he wronging her to feel suspicious . . . of . . . something? That she is scheming things that she is too young to realize are too hot to handle?
Some here call her gifted, her art, her welter of calligraphy, her way of leading the other girls around by the nose. But she is not sixteen yet. She still believes that monsters can be tamed by princesses, that the world beyond the Settlement gate can be fixed.
She tells him, “I reached the people I told you about . . . the . . . leftists. The ones with the folk school project, the ones who printed that great brochure on democracy versus corporate power.”
He is suddenly and deeply silent.
“They said it would be their pleasure to come,” she adds.
All at once he slurps and sucks and splutters and slobbers away at the edge of his mug of maple milk, the syrup settled languidly at the bottom, then with a red bandanna from his pants pocket, cleans his heavy dark mustache like a cat, defiantly and precisely. And still he offers no words. Runs his tongue over his teeth, getting more mileage out of the maple.
She steps back and turns toward the corner hutch.
One of his eyes tends to widen when he’s overawed by life, the other eye narrowing and flinching. This is happening now. “You send them our Recipe? I mean your Recipe. You are its mastermind,” says he.
“All three versions, yes, which include the one-page flyer.” She giggles. She is reaching to touch one of the pink cherub’s wings. Now his eyes swipe down over the whole of her. Logger girl. Yes, she really does work in the woods with her father and brothers. Often she has turned up at the Settlement for the East Parlor Socrates nights covered in sawdust, smeared with bar and chain oil and the sour grease of the machinery.
He has seen artwork by her,