The School on Heart's Content Road by Carolyn Chute Page B

saw her, she had been taking a nap and came out the door from the closed attic stairs, her face puffy and blinky. She was wearing a big loose flannel shirt with no pants, maybe short shorts or a bathing suit, but you couldn’t really tell. The shirt was just a dumb red and blue and cream plaid. She was hugging herself, acting goose bumpy and looking around at the faces of the gathered militiamen like they were all a little bit funny. She didn’t look much at Mickey. But she tossed a scrunched-up Kleenex in the face of a young guy with a soft mustache who was almost asleep on the couch. She didn’t turn to look at Rex when she asked, “Dad, where’s the phone book?”
    And Rex said, “Must be upstairs. In the computer room.”
    And then she rolled her eyes in exaggerated despair, and
tsk
ed and said, “Jeepers, Bumpa. Nooga putee-way, you bad again, Bumpa.” This a special baby language she and her old man share? Mickey doesn’t dare look at any of the militiamen’s faces now. He looks at his hands. He is thinking how he has heard her name spoken a few times but can never be sure if it’s Glory or Gloria. Her hair is long enough to reach the backs of her pretty, nice knees. Auburn. Thick. Ripply. And . . . and . . . awesome. She is frighteningly beautiful, even without makeup, even though her brows and lashes are light and she’s freckled thickly. Worse than just beautiful. She’s teasy. Mickey supposes that Glory (or Gloria) doesn’t lose much sleep over Special Forces, United Nations, and “Socialists in the White House.”
    No sign of her today.
    Whenever Mickey stands up, to get one of Rex’s mother’s cookies, or to head for the bathroom again to piss out his black coffee, or to smoke on the glassed-in porch, he will see through this or that window two Herefords standing thickset in the downpour, chewing cud, eyes shut. These are the cattle Rex and his brother, Bob, share the raising of and then they share the meat. This leads Mickey to believe that Rex and Bob are at least on speaking terms, if not politically attuned.
    Mickey is not the only teenager at this meeting. There’s Ben, maybe eighteen or nineteen, the guy Rex’s daughter bopped with the balled-upKleenex, there in the deep fake-leather couch again, looking sleepy, like he does at every meeting. This time he sits between two big guys. One wears a tank-type muscle shirt and his trucking company advertisement cap; the other wears summer-weight biker regalia, denim sleeveless vest, tattoos, and a small earring. The sleepy boy’s mustache is nothing like theirs, just a little red-blond splutter. But he wears a camo shirt with an arm patch just like Rex’s.
    Also, there’s a kid named Thad who is a six-foot-one fourteen-year-old with a massive chest, massive in breadth and frame, and massive in extra flesh. Breasts point against his pearl gray knit shirt as he stands slouched against the kitchen doorway. So studious-looking, with his tortoiseshell glasses and feathered hair. Thad has a relationship with Rex’s mother’s masterpiece cookie pile. His crunching and chomping demolishes the stack in his hand within the time it takes Dave to unfold another map.
    Mickey has a seat, a kitchen chair, set between the fake leather couch and a long blond table with a sewing machine on it. But several guys are squatted or leaning against other doorframes or walls. Not enough chairs. And now a couple of late arrivals, so there’s more standing and squatting.
    Not many guys here are in their twenties, and not many are geezers. Mostly Vietnam-age guys, late forties, early fifties. One of them is skin and bones and wheezing loudly, seems to be dying. His eyes, with no eyebrows above, are ghosty and deep. Then there is the hefty, high-voiced, cheerful sea-captain-beard guy, Artie, whom Mickey also met that day at the pit. His white hair is in a monkish ring around a bald spot,