The Blue Pen

CHAPTER SIX

  Patrick always made an effort to say hello to me when I’d see him outside school. “Beautiful,” he’d say, and nod like it was a how-do. He had a collection of friends as varied as a spice rack within a week of starting school. Everybody loved him. Only he could get away with calling a girl beautiful and make it sound like a friendly nickname, although I never heard him say it to anyone but me.

  He’d smoke cigarettes and listen to people talk. That’s what I’d see him do when I passed him on the street on my way to the clinic after school.

  He caught me once out on the sidewalk.

  He said, “Hey, Beautiful,” and tapped my arm. “Hang out with me.”

  I said, “I have a boyfriend.”

  Before I could finish saying “friend,” he said, “I don’t care.”

  I put my shaking hands in my armpits and said, “I have to go.”

  He asked me, “Why does he make you work all the time?”

  I told him that I wanted to.

  “Doesn’t it make you sad,” he said, and he dropped his voice as soft as a dove with bread crumbs, “To see all those animals die?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s natural. Death is natural.”

  As he lit a cigarette, he said, “Think so?”

  “You don’t?” I asked him.

  “I think God is cheating us,” he said.

  I’d never had this kind of conversation before, and the only times I’d talked about God was with my father or Cecil, and then I always listened. I said to him, “How is he cheating us?”

  He took a deep drag and blew it out as he squinted at a nearby storefront, as though the deity in question were watching him from the other side of the glass. His explanation was, “He doesn’t give us enough time to get it all done. We die before we can completely understand why we should want forgiveness.”

  I looked at the storefront, then back at him. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  He asked, “What do you think, Beautiful?”

  I said, “Stop calling me that.”

  “Never,” he said.

  I told him that I didn’t know what I thought about it.

  He told me, “Sure you do. You’re just too afraid to say.”

  I said that I had to go, said something about a cow in labor. My ears and cheeks got hotter as I thought about him and our conversation. My father looked at me longer than usual when I came in, and when he went back into the lab, I put my icy hands to my face and felt where all the blood had gone. I was in love.

  I talked to Cecil on the phone some nights, but I mostly saw him in school. He was a farmer’s son, but his hands didn’t have a single callous. He said he was going to be a lawyer. One night in October, he told me that the Downes - that’s Patrick’s family - had no furniture. They had moved into a farmhouse that had been empty for two years before they came. The gossip about the lack of tables and chairs and whatnot came from a plumber named Joseph Ketty who had done some fix-up work out at their house. I told Cecil that it was possible that their furniture hadn’t arrived from Philadelphia yet, that perhaps something had gone wrong with the shipping.

  I really loved saying the word “Philadelphia.” It was like talking about him without anyone knowing I was.

  Cecil answered with, “Why are you always defending them?”

  I said, “Why are you so quick to believe everything you hear and expect the worst?” I held the phone away from my mouth as I yawned. “It doesn’t seem like that would make you a good lawyer.”

  “Expecting the worst to be true is what will make me an excellent lawyer. Then I will see everything that could come my way in a trial,” he said.

  As much as I liked to talk about Philadelphia, I felt almost obligated to bring up a comfortable old shoe of a discussion. “You’d seriously defend an evil person, someone you knew was guilty, wouldn’t you? You just as much as admitted it.”

  “Seeing ahead and expecting anything from an adversary, in this case, a D.A., is different from defending evil.”

  “You twist your words so well,” I said. “You could open wine bottles with your tongue.”

  He laughed with delight and said, “I only mean exactly the words I choose to mean, Cleo,” sounding like he was delivering terms of endearment. We had no fancy titles, we never touched each other except the one time he put his arm around me on the tractor when we were twelve. We were like sausage and pancakes, comfortable on the same plate.

  In my silence, he had the chance to add, “And you still haven’t explained why you defend them so much.”

  I said, “They all seem so nice to me.”

  I could hear him slap his head from my end of the phone. He said, “Don’t tell me you’re one of those girls.”

  I said, “What girls?” but I knew what he was talking about.

  “The ones who have fallen for those big, blue eyes and hippie haircuts. The one in our class looks like he’s on his way to a peace rally every time I see him,” Cecil replied.

  I said, “They don’t all look like hippies. Charlie has a crew cut. And I heard there’s an even older brother in the army serving in Vietnam.”

  He laughed like a geek sniffing markers and said, “You are! You are one of those girls. But who am I kidding? What girl at school isn’t? I bet the women in college aren’t so easily blinded.”

  I bounced my fingertips off each of my freshly-painted pink toenails. They were dry.

  “Well, Cecil,” I said, “I’ll let you stew in your jealousy. Mom wanted me to help her with something.”

  He ignored me at first. “Even my sisters, who know better, get giggly around them. What is it, that they are in a herd?” Then he heard me. “Jealousy?” He blew in the phone receiver. “Jealous of what? Teamwork good-looks and drunk Catholic parents?”

  He continued on like this until he took a breath, and I said, “Can’t we talk about this some other time?”

  “Well, if your mother needs you.” He paused. “Tell her I said hello.”

  “Yes, I will. Bye,” and I hung up.

  Destiny isn’t a romantic boat ride where the water lilies dance in the moonlight. It isn’t mysterious. Destiny decides things for you, tortures you with obsessions and compulsions to follow its direction. It’s a child with a matchbook crouching near a dead tree stump. I can’t ever forget it’s out there, calculating with every move I make how it can fry me right along where it wants me to go.

  Next time I saw Patrick, he was waiting for me at the clinic doors when I arrived after school. Barbie had lagged behind at school with a few of her friends.

  He said, “Door’s locked. Your dad went on a call.” He handed me a piece of paper. It read that the Shanders’ pony had hurt herself on the barbed wire fence and he’d be gone for a couple of hours.

  I asked Patrick, “What are you doing here?” His hair was getting longer. It hung over the rims of his ears now.

  “I got my dad’s car. I want to take you somewhere.” He smiled like he was offering milk and cookies.

  I wished I had worn something more feminine. I wished I could breathe. “Where?” I asked him.

  “It’s a surprise.”

  I thought of things I should say, but instead I said, “Lead the way.”

  We rode in an old, gold Plymouth on a country highway, heading toward Lincoln, which was an hour’s drive east of our town and almost two hours from my home. It isn’t a big city by big city standards, and certainly wasn’t then, but to me it was television life and newness. I thought for sure he was taking me to the city. I begged him to at least tell me how far we’d be going.

  He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll have you back by supper.”

  The illogical possibility of my getting home at a reasonable hour didn’t seem strange at the time. It was as if nothing but chilly fall air and crop fields and late afternoon sun existed outside the Plymouth. His hair blew around him from the draft of the open windows, and he squinted in the sunlight. He looked like a man.

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p; The radio didn’t work, but the car engine hummed a mellow rhythm with the whipping wind. He only spoke to tell me he had a leather jacket in the back seat if I was cold. I was as warm as a campfire, but I wore the coat like I would a blanket on Christmas Eve, and I sneaked glances at him all along the ride. He would catch me and smile out at the sun, then tap the steering wheel a couple of times.

  The suburbs of Lincoln rose up as the sunshine faded. “Good,” he said, “You’ll be able to see the lights.”

  I said, “The city lights?”

  “No, Lincoln’s not quite a city.” he said, and pointed out my window.

  I had never been to a fair. Mother said they were too dangerous. And seeing it from a mile away, all yellow and orange and sparkly and shiny, I ran my hands to cover my red cheeks. “Oh!” I yelled. “Are you really?”

  I didn’t know where he got the money for it all, but it didn’t matter. I could smell the caramel apples at the entrance gate, and it was like he read my eyes as I stared at the vendors. I only finished half an apple before he bought me a funnel cake. That thing was sweeter than any pumpkin pie Mother made. I only finished half of that when he insisted we jump on a ride. It was a wide, flat disk loaded with booth-sized teacups. The disk spun and the teacups spun on top of it. He twirled us around and around and I felt the sugar rise up in my throat before I swallowed it back. It still tasted yummy the second time around. I hadn’t laughed like that since I was a child, since before work and school.

  He watched me that night, not saying much. He didn’t even smoke a cigarette the whole time.

  The lights were no match for the smell of the air. Dust and sweets and sweat and some other odor that was like the kitchen two hours after a big meal. I told him I wanted to run away and join the traveling fair.

  He said I wouldn’t like it, that fun things aren’t fun anymore when you had to do them.

  I said I didn’t like heights when he wanted to take me up on the Ferris wheel. It spun red and yellow lights like a comet lazily trying to scorch the earth. He brushed hair off my cheek and told me, “I’ll take care of you.”

  “How?” I asked.

  He told me, “I can fly.”

  We rode the Ferris wheel. He held my hand with my fingers lying together against his palm as the basket spun upward into the dark sky. He said my hands were cold, and that he liked that, and I realized I couldn’t see the stars. All of the fair lights had shied them away.

  I squeezed his hand as we descended. As we whipped back around for another turn upward, I cried out, “I love it!”

  Our cab paused along the ride to let more people on board. He said we were lucky to stop so high in the sky. I could see the lights lining the streets of the city a little ways off.

  “It’s so big.”

  He told me he wished he could show me Philadelphia from some building whose name I didn’t know. He said his hometown “Philly” like it was an older cousin. Still looking at the ground, he said, “Do you really have a boyfriend?”

  I said, “Not really.”

  When I was a girl, my thoughts were so simple, and my ideas had only two tones. I wanted to both talk to no end and never open my mouth again except to kiss him.

  It was very late and we stayed until the park closed. We only cracked the windows on the ride home. I made excuses to my parents in my mind, and my imagination let them find me innocent.

  He asked me why I was so quiet.

  “You are, too,” I said.

  “I like to listen,” he told me.

  I asked him what he was listening for.

  The headlights from occasional passing cars lit his dark skin so that he looked like a ghost. “I listen to hear what other people think about. What are you thinking?”

  I said, “How I should get out of trouble for being out so late.”

  He nodded as though I was telling a secret, and he didn’t look at me for a few minutes. Then he said, “I think you have a lot of things that you think about, but you just don’t say.”

  “What do you think about?” I asked.

  “Not much,” he said.

  I said, “Of course you do. You just don’t say.”

  “Alright.” He nodded and started to tap the steering wheel with one finger. “My brother went to Vietnam. I think he’s an idiot.”

  I asked if he went on his own, without the draft.

  “Yeah, on his own. He’s in the military for a reason.”

  We were quiet, and then he asked what I thought about Vietnam. I told him I didn’t know.

  “I spilled, now you,” he said.

  “I haven’t thought about it too much.” Why should I? I lived in a field and was surrounded by animals half the day. Nobody my age would be drafted. Only a few farmers’ sons had joined up around us, but I hadn’t known them well enough to do more than nod as I passed them on the roads. I had heard Cecil talk about it for hours uncounted, but that wasn’t the same thing as thinking about it. Mother would change the television channel any time war talk came on. So I just said, “I don’t think I like war.”

  He told me, “I think it’s wrong. All of it. I don’t think my brother should be over there.”

  I said, “What do your parents think?”

  His shoulders hunched and dropped. “Mom doesn’t think. Dad says my brother’s a hero.” His finger tapping stopped and he said, “I don’t care what they say about it.”

  Had I said something wrong? Nothing in the car had changed; the windows were cracked and the radio silent, but the air seemed full of dirty soap foam. I huddled down into the brown leather of his jacket and felt cold.

  But then he changed yet again. He pushed his hair back from his forehead and looked at me. “Alright, so what do you think about Janis Joplin?”

  I didn’t listen to music much, but I knew who she was and how she had died.

  He asked me what I thought of her death.

  I said it must be a shame. I said, “She must have loved music and it’s so sad she couldn’t control herself.”

  He said, “You’ve never tried any?”

  “Drugs?”

  He nodded and watched my face. The car slid over into the other lane, but it was nothing to worry about. There was only starlight to pass.

  I said, “They might have drugs in Philadelphia, but there’s nothing but a little homegrown grass around here. At least that I’ve heard of. I’ve never even seen it before.”

  He said, “You don’t need to see it. You need to smell it.”

  I giggled. Actually, I had never talked to anyone who had so much as smelled it before. “What does it smell like?”

  The car smoothed out into its own lane. “Like springtime, seasoned.”

  “Seasoned with what?” I asked.

  He said, “It’s different every time.”

  I remembered we were talking about a singer who had died because of such things. “But they killed her.”

  “No, I don’t know if they did,” he said. “A little grass won’t kill you, or other drugs in moderation. Other things do, like the way the world is.”

  I fiddled with the jacket’s zipper, but I felt still so excited by the night’s ride that death and the way the world is could not bother me.

  We pulled up to the crossroads of the country highway and the little road that was my street. They didn’t even have stop signs out that way back then. People just knew to look where they were going. He took my hand from my lap and kissed the back of it. “Little cold hands,” he said as he looked down at my hand like it was a sleeping newborn kitten. Then he said, “You need to get in a little trouble,” and he looked at me with his fair ride eyes. He took a right turn and dropped me off at my home, a quarter of a mile up the road.

  I didn’t say goodbye or thank you, I only looked at him and he was smiling like he’d thrown a hound dog in a hen house at midnight.

  All of the lights in the house were on.

  Barbie watched from the stairwell as Mother and Dad lectured me in the livi
ng room. I was to be safe. I was to tell them where I was and when I’d be home and who I was with. They didn’t yell, but my mother’s eyes were swollen and red like she’d been boxing rather than crying. I could have been hit by a car and dead, for all they knew. I felt guilt as deep as my evening’s pleasure as Mother said boys like that boy were trouble. I didn’t ask what they meant, but by the time I was washed up and in bed, I’d forgotten their hard-voiced wrath and I rolled in my sheets in the light of the moon coming from my window.

  Later that night, when Barbie crept into my room past three A.M. and got into the bed with me, I told her about my evening. I could feel her toes curling against my leg when I told her how he held my hand on the Ferris wheel ride. The last of my guilt slipped away like a quilt tossed to the floor on a summer night.

  She asked, “Were his hands soft or rough?”

  I told her I was too numb to notice.

  “Did you really see Lincoln?” she said.

  I told her the lights must have been as bright as daylight from my view on top of the Ferris wheel.

  She said I was so lucky and that she would do anything to have a boy hold her hand.

  Barbie fell asleep soon, but I could not give up my memory to the brainwash of unconsciousness. I bypassed waking before dawn to just staying awake until I saw the highlights of Barbie’s blonde hair on my pillow. It was such a pretty color, like the silk in a corn husk. I heard my father’s alarm and I slipped out of the covers feeling completely rested.

 

  CHAPTER SEVEN