The Portable Veblen

14 THE NUTKINISTAS

Veblen noted, pulling into her father’s town, that Paso Robles, like Palo Alto, Oakland, Encino, Willows, Walnut Creek, Aspen, Cedar Falls, and thousands of other cities and towns the world over, was named for its notable trees, and marked by sprawling, convulsive oaks that were undoubtedly good homes for squirrels. She could release the squirrel on just about any sidewalk near any number of the massive oldies. But as she rolled down Spring Street, passing the town square, which was home to some mighty oaks, she couldn’t bring herself to stop. “I don’t want to let you go,” she said. “Which is very selfish of me.” Now she felt sad again, aware of her greedy feelings for the squirrel, catching herself in the act of trying to hoard him. This motivated her to pull over at once, clamber from the car, stretch her legs, and gather up a handful of acorns scattered beneath a heavy trunk. These she brought back and pushed through the gaps in the cage; the squirrel accepted one and, after turning it around and around in his hands, began to chew it to shreds. “Mr. Squirrel, nice job!” she cried, and was happy again.

It was too late to visit Rudgear tonight, his meds made him conk out right after the evening meal. She stopped at a Mexican restaurant downtown and had cheese enchiladas, rice and beans, and a Corona with a slice of lime shoved down its neck, so that the beer picked up the flavor with every sip. Delicious. She relaxed and watched a family at a table nearby, the parents feeding the children, wiping their mouths, cleaning their hands, a father and mother and two children, the unit of them unsettling to her, though she couldn’t say why. She looked away, at an older man eating by himself, and that unsettled her too. She wasn’t sure how to live.

Then she bought a six-pack of Corona at a liquor store and checked into The Sandman, a cheap, scruffy old motel she stayed in whenever she visited her father, only forty-nine dollars a night, real, not rundown. It offered low weekly rates as well, so many of the rooms had been taken over by families who lived there, stringing up their laundry in the windows. A developer would soon knock the place down and build dentists’ offices and tanning salons, but for now The Sandman stood its ground with free coffee and doughnuts in the morning, reminding her of disappearing times. She brought the cage containing the squirrel inside.

“There you go.” She set him on the bureau beside the television. But maybe the television was emitting sonic shrieks, because the squirrel began to turn in all directions. “Sorry! Here.” She set him on the other double bed. There the squirrel calmed.

She picked up a few earlier texts from Paul. WEIRD PLACE, WYWH, ILY, TALK SOON, he’d written. She texted back: GREAT! U2.

Sooner than she realized. Without knowing it, she had “butt-connected” with an incoming call from Paul, who had just caught his breath in the lobby at DeviceCON.

From the convention center lobby, Paul was crying out, pacing, chewing on his nails. “Veblen? Veb, are you there?”

Through the phone, he heard the voice of Alex Trebek on the television, and he felt warmly for her, that she liked to watch Jeopardy! in motel rooms.

“Veb? I need to talk to you.”

In her room at The Sandman, Veblen heard nothing from the phone, maybe because she had set it down on the flowered bedspread, or because the TV was on, or because she was focused on the squirrel, or because she didn’t expect to hear anything and so she didn’t. “You okay there? You hungry still?” Veblen asked the squirrel.

“Veb, I can’t hear you very well,” Paul said, forcing his voice into the phone. She sounded as sweet as a distant brook, like water over stones. “Listen, this is bad. They’ve manufactured the device, they went ahead, they used a bogus loophole to take advantage of one of their contacts. It’s totally corrupt!”

“I feel like you’re really listening, isn’t that weird?” Veblen said warmly to the squirrel.

“I am, but can you talk a little louder?” Paul said huskily.

“It’s funny how excited I was at first, but now getting married just feels artificial, like a big unnecessary problem people create for themselves,” Veblen mused.

Paul swallowed, pressing the phone to his ear so hard it hurt. “Why?”

“So, are you married?” Veblen said.

All at once he realized she was talking to somebody else, and her tone was undeniably flirtatious. Paul’s mouth opened, emitting an arid croak.

“Veblen?” Paul said, weakly.

“You seem really — smart. And you’re not petty at all. I can tell. But I don’t want to idealize you either.”

Her voice was girlish, almost sultry.

“What are you doing?” Paul murmured.

“If you idealize someone, you have nowhere to go but down.”

He began to squeeze his phone like a rat.

“He already thinks my mother’s weird. Wait till he meets my father. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

Paul, on his end, began to gasp.

“You’re so handsome, did you know that?”

He cried out in anguish and must have thrown his phone hard, because it bounced up in the air like a ball, ending the connection when the battery flew out.

• • •

VEBLEN HAD NOTHING to worry about. She was relaxing on the bed at The Sandman, enjoying a beer with lime. It was heavenly.

“All right. This might sound like a dumb question, but — what stage of life are you in? Are you young, middle-aged? I know you’re not old.”

She checked him out, standing at the back of the cage, spinning an acorn. He was inarguably solid.

She said, “I know already. You’re in your prime.”

• • •

PRIMES CAME in all sizes, and despite popular belief, could come around and around, like trees through the seasons. She remembered Rudgear’s intake at Sunny Hill three years before, when it had been her responsibility as his next of kin to determine he was not, currently, in his prime.

She knew only a little about her father’s youth, spent in Waukegan, Illinois, the son of a Socialist Labor Party milkman with political ambitions who committed suicide when Rudgear was ten. Rudgear joined the army at the age of seventeen, went straight to Vietnam. He lost some of his hearing. He married Melanie later but it seemed like a big mistake to both of them right away. They separated. One night, well after the separation, according to Melanie, he stopped by and they fell into old habits, and thus nine months later, Veblen was born. He sent checks for a while, but stopped. He married and divorced again. He took odd jobs. For a while he worked at a state prison. Then he had a breakdown and retired on disability and began to see hallucinations in his small apartment near the freeway, and started calling Veblen almost every night:

“Why were you looking at me that way?”

“Hi, Dad. What do you mean?”

“You were sitting there staring at me like a dead person. I didn’t do anything!”

“When, Dad? I’m up here, at home.”

“When you were here a minute ago, just staring at me with your mouth open,” he said, losing some steam.

“It’s okay, Dad. You probably dozed off and had a bad dream.”

A few days later he called again, clearly agitated. “I don’t like it,” he yelled.

“What, Dad?”

“I saw an elephant in here.”

“At your apartment?”

“I’m scared!”

“Dad, it’s okay. Let me call Lorenzo, okay? He’ll come over and make sure everything’s okay.”

“I don’t like it when everybody’s staring at me.”

“I don’t either,” said Veblen. “Lorenzo will come and make sure everything’s okay.”

“I don’t want Lorenzo to come.”

“Why not?”

“He’s been acting strange lately. I’d never seen that side of him before. Just looking at you like an assassin.”

“Then sit tight. I’ll be down in a few hours.”

She excused herself from work that day, hit the road, and made it to Paso Robles in under three hours. Though worried about his condition, she couldn’t help but be aware that his new personality, frightened and desperate, came as a relief. What a bully he’d been when she was a kid!

At his building, she’d taken the stale-smelling elevator and followed the sagging walkway around to his door, where she knocked and knocked some more. Then she tried the knob and found it unlocked, so she proceeded into the darkened room.

“Veblen?” he wheezed.

A gray blanket camouflaged him in his recliner. She gave him a kiss on the top of his pink-skinned head.

“Boy, am I thirsty,” he said.

She brought him a tumbler of water, and he siphoned it like a longshoreman.

“I gotta get up and use the men’s room. Help me up,” he said.

At standing, he had shrunk by a hand. His arms were buttoned close like corn husks, and gray crescents bagged beneath his eyes. While he was in the bathroom, she opened the dusty curtains and popped the windows and started some coffee, and when he came out and sat in his recliner again he appeared slightly more at ease. Then she went to use the bathroom herself, and discovered blood smeared all over the sink.

“Dad, what happened? Did you cut yourself shaving?”

Back in the living room, she noticed a towel wrapped around his arm.

“Let me see that.”

He surrendered his arm; she knelt and unraveled the towel to find an eight-inch purple welt with patches of torn, weeping skin.

“Did you fall?”

“Nope. Got in a fight with a lamp.”

He nodded over at the corner and she saw pieces of his former lamp in a heap — a broken shade, the twisted harp, the socket, a cord dangling out of a shard of pottery.

“Ow!”

“I’ll say, ow. I also had a fight with an elephant.”

She laughed, but he wasn’t kidding.

“He was right there staring at me.” He lifted his hand to point to the corner and she saw that he was shaking.

She took his arm and held it warmly between her hands. His face was pale.

“Dad, I want to take you to a doctor to look at your arm, okay?”

“What’s he going to do, put me in a cage?”

“This needs a good bandage on it, it might get infected.”

“All right, daughter.”

He rose and walked unsteadily to the door, gathering nothing to take along. She saw his wallet on the counter and grabbed it. Cards from various doctors were taped to the wall by the phone, including one from a psychiatrist and one from a neurologist, and she plucked them off and shoved them in her purse.

He was docile and followed her to the car. She took him straight to the emergency room at the local hospital. When it came his turn to fill out the admissions forms at the desk in the inner room, and she removed his wallet from her purse, he said:

“What are you doing with that?”

“Dad, they need your Medicare and insurance cards.”

“I’ll take that.”

She handed it over. “I think your cards are inside.”

He drew in his lips. “First I gotta use the men’s room. Fast.”

“Out in front,” said the intake nurse.

“He’s not himself at all,” Veblen said to the woman, though painfully aware that she was still not sure what his self really was.

“No, he doesn’t look right,” remarked the nurse. “You did the right thing.”

They waited some minutes, until Veblen sprang up to check. The nurse followed and stuck her head into the men’s room.

“Nobody here,” she announced. “Anybody see an older gentleman in a stained T-shirt, bald, stooped over, come out of here?”

A public misstep was not without its indignities. A woman in a yellow jogging suit in the waiting room said, “I saw a man like that, running across the parking lot.”

Veblen dashed outside, cupping her hands into a megaphone. “Dad! Dad!” What if he was hit by a car or had a heart attack?

Volunteers who came around to deadhead flower arrangements and read to patients helped in the search, and fanned through neighborhoods near the hospital. The police pitched in. Up and down she combed the streets, returning frequently to his apartment, asking his neighbors to keep watch.

That evening she was sitting in her car outside the Frosty Freeze, sucking with infantile intensity on a shake, when the hospital called. Rudgear had been found at the bus stop right there, in front of the same Frosty Freeze. He had gulped down a jumbo milk shake on the bench and passed out. Someone on the street called an ambulance. His blood glucose levels were at 610, meaning he had gone into a diabetic coma. His mismanaged diabetes, coupled with his psychiatric problems, led to the involvement of Adult Protective Services, whereupon he was sent to a home, which worked for a while until he crushed the fingers of an aide who was helping him into a car for a doctor’s appointment, trying to flee. At that point he was transferred to Sunny Hill for psychiatric care, and in that facility he had stayed for nearly three years, without much incident of late. She sometimes regretted depriving him of his freedom, despite his difficulties caring for himself. But it didn’t have to be forever, did it? There were different kinds of primes, he could have one again.

• • •

“DIDN’T YOU ALWAYS think Trappist monks were trappers?” Veblen asked the squirrel. She was relaxing with a Corona and musing about the mysteries of the ages. “I did. I pictured monks out in the forest setting traps for beavers and minks. But you know what, Trappists aren’t trappers at all. They just like to make and sell stuff, even coffins. Ha! Thomas Merton was a Trappist. Do you know Thomas Merton? He was a wonderful poet. That’s what he made, poems.

“You know, the sad thing about Thomas Merton, he was electrocuted next to his bathtub. At least my mother always said so whenever I went near a bathtub with something electric.

“Want a raspberry?”

She pushed one through the cage, where the squirrel sniffed it and left it alone.

“Sorry you’re in there.” She looked around the cage of the motel room — the proportions were about the same.

The Corona bottle was empty. She popped another.

“Hello in there,” she said. “There’s a song about how you have to say Hello in there to people with hollow, ancient eyes, and I’ve had this superstition ever since I first heard that song, that if I always say Hello in there to people, someday I won’t be lonely when I’m old.

“There’s a lot of potential for being lonely when you’re old. Especially in my family. I’ve been working on that. Don’t want it to happen to me. You don’t think that’s why I’m marrying Paul, do you? Just as insurance against being lonely?”

The squirrel had settled into a corner of the trap, its tail wrapped around its body like a comforter.

“By the way, you don’t have hollow ancient eyes. ‘You know that old trees just grow stronger / and old riverrrrrrrs grow wilder every day…’” she sang out of key, relishing her tipsiness.

There was another part of her life, she told him. She’d had a radio show at her high school called 60 Seconds, uncovering scandals.

She told him about “The Case of the Avenging Drill Team,” when the Drill Team burned a fellow student journalist in effigy for writing that they were automatons. And “Investigation of the Senior Election Irregularities,” which revealed ballot tampering. And the one called “School Is a Chamber of Guts,” about sixteen scary death traps on campus.

In high school, journalism brought her a certain swagger, her hands on the keyboard, where unexpected thoughts poured forth, a way to speak up and get to know herself. To think there was this wealth of activity locked up inside her made her feel hopeful and brave. Hooray, I might be more than I seem.

Remembering her muckraking portfolio put her in excellent spirits, and she began to jump from bed to bed, attempting flips. It was fun. The springs in the beds squeaked like lobster baskets, inviting the guests in the next room to imagine all sorts of things going on that weren’t going on at all.

“‘Ain’t it funny how an old broken bottle / Looks just like a diamond ring…’” she sang. “Hey, you know The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin?” she asked him, midair. “When I was a kid — I thought the message was — that if you act like a pesty — little jerk — you lose your tail.”

The squirrel rose and stretched.

“No, but after a while — I began to look at it — differently. I realized it’s — this,” she huffed. “Nutkin was — a genius — a trickster — a philosopher — and probably a cad. But there he was — putting his life on the line every day. You consider him a hero, don’t you? You know about the movement, don’t you? The followers of Nutkin — the Nutkinistas?” She laughed at herself, out of breath. “Old Brown the owl is the man.”

This was all part of the story of Wobb. There, squirrels had been enslaved in munitions factories in great caverns inside the mountains, but the movement was arming itself. The revolution would not be televised! She was smiling so hard she worried she might look wolfen.

“‘Tear down the waa-aalls! Tearr doown the waalls, motherrfuckerrs! Tear down the waaaaa-aaalls!’” she sang, until someone began to pound the wall, like Paul used to pound at the squirrel. She came down on her knees with a resonant thud.

“Oops.” She laughed and took another gulp. She hadn’t gotten this drunk since high school.

“Let it be known why he taunts that owl. It’s necessary to taunt owls! They’ve been skinning squirrels alive for eons! So have hawks.

“The Nutkinistas believe the more they taunt, the more they break down the old paradigm.

“Which is like realizing you’re not going to take it forever when your family gives you hell.”

A beam of light crossed her face, a car parking in the lot. Guilt trimmed its hooves onto her lap, as she saw herself as complicit in a variety of crimes against childhood, especially her own.

“It’s all very perplexing,” she said, more soberly. She found her cell phone in the folds of the shiny bedspread, called Paul. But he didn’t answer, and she muttered good-nights into his proxy ear.

“But in Latin,” she said to the squirrel, because he still seemed to be listening, “perplexed means thoroughly involved. Entwined and engaged. Totally the opposite of just being confused or out of it. It’s like people got too lazy to think being perplexable was a plus.

“Oh, well. It’s not so bad sleeping in hay,” she remarked, crawling between the sheets. She was growing drowsy, and found herself remembering the time she ran away from home to spend the expanse of a night in a horse barn. It was the same horse farm where she and her class had brought all the rotten apples from her desk, all those years ago. The sensations were indelible: the creaking beams, the sudden rush of air through the cracks, the snorts of the horses, and the rustling hay.

There she was, breathing the warm smell of horses and listening to them snort in the frosty air, and feeling like every heavy thing was off her back, a horse that had bucked its saddle. Kind of like tonight.

She felt an intimation of change. That until now she was a Christmas tree that had been decorated by someone who hated Christmas.

“Tell me more about what’s up in your world,” she said, sleepily. “Tell me more about everything.”