The Portable Veblen (32 page)

“Shhh,” she whispered. Her eyes looked black and velvety too.

“Shit!”

He tore out the back door, where he knocked over a broom, which clattered down the back steps. The broom on the ground in the dirt looked pitiful. He sat with it, and thought about the broom’s existence for the first time in his life. It was the same broom they’d had all his life. A red-handled broom, with blue and orange stitching through the broomcorn. Paint peeling all along the handle. He remembered riding the broom when he was little and pretending it was a donkey named Freedy.

How could he have taken so much for granted? Why did it stay, year after year, to sweep for them?

He looked up in time to see Millie descending the back steps with her blouse unbuttoned, the small mounds of her breasts exposed. Her nipples were small and tender in appearance, and came closer until only inches from his face. She rubbed a bud on his nose. He had planned to tell her about the broom but it was the first nipple of a girl his own age he’d ever seen. Millie kissed him. It was the first kiss he’d had on the lips with his mouth open. Her mouth tasted like root beer.

Then came a fermata, how long they sat on the ground at the bottom of the back steps wrapped up kissing and touching. She kept laughing and tossing her hair. “I’m hot,” she said often, with glassy eyes. “I feel so hot.”

His head felt open at the top, like a chimney that she could pour something into.

“Put your hand here,” he said. She touched his hair. “Is it open?”

She nodded. “Wide open.”

“I think we’re on drugs,” said Paul.

“I’m hot. I feel hot.”

From his father’s forge he heard the maddening drone of “Scarlet Begonias.”

“Everybody’s happy,” said Millie. “I feel like going into the woods.”

“Let’s go into the woods,” said Paul.

“Let’s take a blanket.”

His legs felt like wheels, and they rolled him right into the smithy, where his father’s hearth stood cold. All the tools out on the table. The forge had another room where his father had his office and kept his stock. He saw the back of Justin’s head rolling against the desk.

“Justy?” Paul said. But Justin didn’t hear him, and then Paul saw the bobbing crown of Caddie Fladeboe, who was mouthing the head of Justin’s penis, slipping her lips over a bulb the size of a beet.

“Hey!” screamed Paul.

“Hey!” cried Caddie Fladeboe, lifting her damp, rosy face.

“What the fuck! Get out of here!”

“Leave us alone! We’re joyous beings!” Caddie declared.

“You little shit!” he yelled at Justin. “You can’t do anything but you can do this?”

“Don’t tell Mom and Dad,” Justin cried.

“Ha! We’ll see about that!”

“No! No! No!”
keened Justin. “No, no, no!”

Paul grabbed a blanket off his dad’s chair and Millie followed right behind. He didn’t say another word until he’d taken her back to the house and handed her the telephone.

“Call your father and go home,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“My brother’s a pervert! And now you know it!”

“I didn’t even see. I’m cool with it.”

“He thinks he can do whatever he wants!”

Millie said, “You can do whatever you want too,” and brought his hands to her hips.

•   •   •

“
C
HAINSAWS,”
M
ILLIE WAS
saying to her dad on the phone, holding Paul’s hand.

“Someone’s using a chainsaw?”

“I saw some chainsaws,” Millie said again.

“Honey, you okay? Are you heading back?”

“I could but I started to feel dizzy on the drive. I think I need to lie down.”

“Sure, honey. Take forty winks.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“Call me later, okay?”

“Okay, Dad. Dad, I think I should stay here tonight.”

“Stay there? Hmm. Can I talk to Paul’s parents?”

“We’ll have fun,” she said, smiling at Paul.

“Honey, let me talk to the mother or father. I want to make sure it’s okay.”

“Daddy? There’s a tree outside covered with flags.”

“What kind of flags?”

“Red and white and blue flags. American flags.”

“Really? That’s good. They have a guest room out there for you?”

“Yes. They’re cooking.”

“Barbecue. All right. I’ll tell your mother. It’s probably better than driving that road home alone.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Give me the number out there.”

She gave him the number.

“Call us before you leave in the morning, all right?”

“I will.”

“Hey, great job at the fair today. I was so proud.”

“Was Mom proud?”

“Mom was proud too.”

Millie hung up the phone and led Paul down the steps, into the forest, where she took the blanket from him and spread it on the ground like an expert. Then she kissed him. She ran her tongue over his teeth and his lips. She sucked on his mouth and kissed him harder, and placed his hands in her blouse and then she was pushing herself against him, feeling the solid feeling in his pants right by his zipper, and something was there behind those barriers that was hard and powerful and she pushed against it all, this package she wanted to spring open and unwrap under a tree on a soft bed of duff, and she was pushing him down and trying to
open his package, and that heavy belt came first, that impossible bolt and rivet, that zipper with rusted teeth that wouldn’t budge, and there it was, there it was. A silky-skinned penis so much larger than a dog’s, and so much more colorful! It was purple on one side, with green stripes and red stripes and small black paisleys around the base, and shiny, and shapely, like a tall ride at Tomorrowland.

“Millie?” said Paul. “Should we?”

“Yes.”

“I love you,” said Paul, positioning himself over her.

“I love you too,” said Millie, with a hungry, yearning feeling between her legs.

He pressed but it was a bone and she moved him to a softer spot. “More,” she said, when he felt a slight give.

“There?”

“More!”

Paul had been a virgin until a few seconds ago, so was not exactly sure how to manage
more
. But he tried.

“More,” she cried. She began to giggle, and he felt the vestigial remains of his baby fat in her hands, and saw himself as a master Tillamook Cheddar log, Millie as a pliant grater beneath, a Cheddar who wanted to be grated, a grater who wanted to be Cheddared, and even still he managed it, until he was melting all over her as Cheddar will do, and his eyes were blurry and confused and then he saw in a flash exactly how many heartbeats he had left in this world, and it wasn’t so many really, and Millie thought so too because they cried and said they wished they were one person, and for a while, they really did feel like they were one being fused in flesh.

•   •   •

N
IGHT FELL,
and the sounds in the woods frightened them, and drove them back to the house. Bill and Marion were making a tall vat of curry in the kitchen.

“Paul!” roared Bill. “Where you been?”

Marion dropped her spoon and came over to them and began to pull dried redwood needles from Paul’s hair, and Millie’s too, and then she hugged them as if they were innocent children. “We’re so sorry,” she said to Paul. “We missed it. We took a little detour today, if you get what I mean.”

Bill came over and whispered, “They laced the cider with Mr. Natural. We were on Planet X. We went all the way past Wilson’s to the waterfall. Didn’t remember a thing about real life until we got back.”

“We are so sorry, Paul,” said Marion, back to stirring the spicy yellow curry. “Tell us about the fair.”

“Where’s Justin?” Paul asked.

“In bed,” said Marion.

Paul said, “What’s with Caddie, anyway?”

“What do you mean?” said Bill, who always defended people from Paul’s attacks. “She has a great way with all kinds of people.”

“Yeah, she’s great, all right.”

Millie giggled.

“The fair, Paul, tell us what happened,” asked Marion.

“His was the most creative and interesting of anything there,” said Millie. “Doesn’t matter he didn’t win.”

Paul blushed.

Bill and Marion and Millie got into a conversation about
Millie’s project, and everybody was getting along, because that was his parents’ gift, they became a loveseat and made everybody in the world feel warm and welcome except him.

•   •   •

M
ILLIE AND
P
AUL
enjoyed the status of being boyfriend and girlfriend for two months and four days. And for years Paul would hold the memory guarded and close, sure that no love could ever surpass it. How they got along! How he loved the fuzz on her arms and her hip bones and the root-beery taste of her lips, and how they could fester in their parents’ faults for hours, and plan lives without them. They took long walks every day after school, went to movies and used bookstores in Arcata, ran on the beach, played video games at an arcade and had ice cream cones and, best of all, he kept a blanket in the back of the car for finding special spots in the redwoods, one in particular at the center of a grove of six giants, which reminded them of Stonehenge because they saw how the sunlight created shafts through the trees, which moved a few centimeters every day, and they began to record it on a piece of paper until one day Millie turned to him in the street after school and said, “I think I’m pregnant.”

It stopped him short, and not because he was unhappy about it.

In a mere second he was able to see down a road that had never been open to him before, and from which he now wished to travel and never look back. On that road, all his hopes and dreams and ambitions were left behind like the piles of garbage his parents’ friends had strewn in front of their house, and a new life as a young father with Millie as his wife and their simple hopes and dreams and those of their child flashed before him, infinitely more
inviting. He nearly gasped at the beauty of his vision, and took Millie’s hands.

“That’s great!” he cried.

“No,” she said. “My parents will never speak to me again.”

“No, it’s not true,” said Paul, and he took her backpack off her shoulders, and they sat together on the curb in front of her house. “They’ll be happy after they get used to it.”

“Don’t you want me to get rid of it?”

“I mean, it’s up to you, but if you want to have a baby, I’ll do it. We can get married,” he said, flushed with love.

She looked puzzled by the idea, and he blushed more.

“That’s so, so sweet,” she said, kicking a rock into the road.

“I mean it.”

“Really?”

“More than anything.”

•   •   •

T
HERE THEY WERE,
standing before her parents, proclaiming their innocent desire to marry and have a child.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Millie’s mother, who was looking at Paul with something like disgust, but worse.

“No, Mother, I’m very serious.”

“You’re sixteen years old. You’re going to college. You’re nowhere near ready to marry and raise a child, and even if you were—” Her thin upper lip retracted all the way to her gums, and she gazed at Paul with utter loathing.

“Mr. and Mrs. Cuthbertson, I’m planning to do premed in college and—”

“You think you’re going to be a doctor?” said Millie’s mother.
“Doing projects about screaming snails? Do you know what the judges were saying about your project?”

“Jill, come on,” said Ron.

“Your results were a crock, weren’t they?”

“I resent that remark!” Paul said firmly.

Millie said, “Paul wouldn’t cheat. You wouldn’t cheat, Paul, I know you wouldn’t.”

“Chuck Gielow swore on his mother’s grave for him,” said Mrs. Cuthbertson. “It was pathetic.”

“With all due respect,” Paul said, his voice rising to a squeak, “I plan to become a psychiatrist or a neurologist, and I plan to go to the best schools.”

“Where are the best schools, Paul?”

“Mom, Paul is totally smart and dedicated! Stop talking that way!”

“Millie, the friends you want to make are the friends you make in college. I can’t wait for you to get out of this hellhole of drug dealers and potheads, and I would never approve a marriage to someone whose parents make their living illegally.”

“Mrs. Cuthbertson—”

“
Dr
. Cuthbertson!”

“I beg your pardon, my mother is a county nurse and—”

“I know all about them,” said Millie’s mother. “If I’d been home my daughter would never have gone out there that night.”

“Don’t start that again, Jill,” said Millie’s father.

“You live in your ledgers. I actually go out and see the kind of things going on around here!”

Paul blinked and wished to push her off a cliff, at the bottom of which lay finely sharpened spikes.

“Mom, I love Paul.”

“You’re not having a baby, you’re not marrying this cheat, over my dead body!” screamed her mother.

“He wouldn’t cheat! I know he wouldn’t cheat!”

Millie began to cry, and when Paul put his arms around her, her mother grabbed her, pulling her out of reach, out of the room.

“Ron, I expect him to be on his way,” Millie’s mother said. “He’s going to pay for the procedure, and he won’t come near Millie, or we’ll send the police to pay a visit to his house. Out! Out! Out!”

“Mom!” cried Millie, and Paul tried to go to her, but Millie’s dad put an iron grip on his arm.

Under his breath, Millie’s father said, “I don’t entirely agree with her, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Paul said, “Don’t you have a say? What about me? Don’t I?”

Ron said, “I don’t think so. Not with an underage girl.”

“Underage?” He was five months younger than Millie.

“Now go,” said Ron Cuthbertson.

“But—”

Ron put his hand on Paul’s back, and pushed him to the door.

Then out the door.

The door closed behind him.

Outside he took one look at their prim mailbox with the squirrel on it and punched it with his fist. It hurt more than he expected. Fists were built for punching, weren’t they? Why were his so soft? The mailbox popped open and he grabbed it like a pumpkin and twisted it from its mount and threw it on the ground and stomped on it. The buckling metal tore a hole in his sock at the ankle, and he bled. He looked back at the house but no one was
bothering to watch. He bit his lips and got back into his car and screeched away. He and Millie would work it out. They’d run away! He went around the block in the Dodge, so fast he had to swerve around some kids on bikes, until the car was fishtailing on the greasy wet road, and his brain went to the fishtail file and heard:
Go in the direction of the skid,
and then he heard,
No, go in the opposite direction of the skid,
and they both sounded right so he chose the wrong one and the truck spun and collided with a fire hydrant, then flipped and rolled upside down right in front of the house where the sheriff lived.