“This new schedule isn’t working. What is this? Some new kind of Catholic torture?”
“Trust me, I don’t like it, either, but keep it together, George. Meet me tomorrow morning at the park and we’ll hook up before school.”
“What about now? What I am supposed to do right now?”
“Write me a poem. Or a song.”
“Write you a what? Or a what?”
“A poem or a song.”
“WhaddayouthinkI’msomekindasicko? I want to kiss your lips. I’m not a singer and I’m sure as hell not interested in pervy poetry. I respect you a lot more than that.”
“Thank you.”
“And maybe I want to brush my hands against your breasts, with the outside of my hands. That way I won’t really be able to feel anything, but you will. Let’s not rush things. But I want to say that pretty soon these things won’t be pervy at all, and you’ll want me to use the front of my hands.”
“I agree,” she said, completely serious. “These things are not pervy, but it’s a good idea to start with only the backs of our hands and the bottoms of our feet.”
“Exactly.”
“Good.”
“Great.”
“See you in the morning,” she said, which turned out a bright quiet morning rocking gently on a swing set getting to know the lips I’d longed for from every angle. Emily didn’t kiss at all like a prude. Her mouth fell open soft and supple as her neck heated up. She was graceful in her tender desire but urgent to be held, recognized, understood in every way. Her proud girlish body was a kettle quaking at a near boil. We raised up and tasted each other’s tongues, biting the tips, slowly searching along the ridges of teeth, really tasting and feeling until our mouths were synchronized in pliability, wetness, temperature, and coiling movement, our pressing bodies bursting beneath corduroys and thick schoolgirl bras, the blossoming fire below her belt, my own sex seeking out that heat, reaching desperately to be smothered by it. We drove to school together, then entered the building from opposite wings, enjoying the secret that we knew would only last for so long.
It came as no surprise that our stealthy new demeanor only drew more attention from Smitty and the rest of our friends, who kept bugging us for details about our big night in Winterset. Emily told them we got towed after double-parking and blocking in Clint Eastwood, who gave us the finger. I returned all Smitty’s questions by whistling old Irish tunes taught to me by my sly grandpa George. I refused to say anything to jinx my sensuous new life that swelled as big as the Mississippi River, spilling muddy brown east and west to both seas. Emily and I made excuses to leave an hour earlier for school, then met up at the rear parking lots of strip malls, on covered dugout benches, and in any number of woodsy settings along the greenbelt bike trail between Urbandale and Clive. Each time we advanced our romantic cause and hardly marked the same territory twice. Several times that week she pulled me into the courtyard with its tall wrought-iron fence, rusty and grand, still preaching the days of clerics and caged puberty that we now felt destined to destroy. Her hair fell in front of her face like a nymphet veil and I brushed it back while we kissed, not caring at all about the grumpy hags judging us from the attendance office window. As we had been warned all along that it would, the last few weeks of high school blurred by trancelike, well flavored by expectations of newborn independence. With every touch and word passed between the inch of space from my lips to hers, Emily and I celebrated our own graduation into adulthood by way of a secret romance lorded over by larger events that had yet to articulate their imminence. I was never so restless or so sated by such little sleep. In the hours of her absence the Emily Schell of my imagination became braver, more charming, as wise as a black diva princess on dusty vinyl belting out the whole beautiful, decrepit truth.
Seventeen
The last weeks of school were marked by several dramatic episodes worth mentioning as a means of painting a more holistic portrait of our budding affair and the many emotions in its near periphery. Around this time Des Moines was introduced to its first group of resettled Sudanese who’d spent most of their lives in refugee camps in Kenya. There was talk of a major banking merger that would result in twenty thousand Wells Fargo workers’ losing their jobs, though in the end the deal didn’t go through. Mr. Schell was busy making arrangements on a second Schell’s Shirtworks store in Iowa City. Emily committed to attending Northwestern in Chicago. Katie’s symptoms were beginning to act up again, but she hadn’t spent a night in the hospital in months and was now memorizing “Song of Myself” just for kicks. As far as school was concerned, in our final few days of secondary education my fellow classmates succumbed to hysterical farewells, overdue apologies, breakups, reunions, and raw attempts at last-minute hookups. Sam Traxler and Jacob Evans, who’d been rivals their whole lives, decided to finally duke it out in the cafeteria. It was an epic brawl featuring smashed tables, ancillary injuries, and nose blood splattered on potatoes and pork cutlets. (The lunch ladies who were being replaced by a cheaper food service company did nothing to stop it.) On the last day of high school, according to tradition, all the seniors skipped.
It seemed our entire student careers had led to that moment of careening down a wooded country road in the back of Hadley’s truck with four kegs and a dozen classmates, laughing and shouting and holding on for dear life. Speakers blared and kegs tipped over and rolled and attacked. We gathered smoke and dust on our tongues as our eyes rattled and our faces blurred. Frightened bullfrogs leapt into a mangy stream, splashing in sequence as we blew past. The gravel road dead-ended somewhere out in Adel. Hadley slammed the brakes and Nat Fry fell out the side and landed in a bush with his beer can still upright in his hand. The ensuing caravan of seniors made the forest make room.
It was a long day of sport drinking and all the games that end in painful drunkenness. By noon Hadley found out that Tino went skinny-dipping with his younger sister, which Tino attempted to rationalize as “legitimate campsite bathing.” This was followed by a shoving match and several Mexican insinuations, then a rollicking old-boy wrestling match that Smitty and I felt it our drunken duty to complicate. Around sunset I witnessed our valedictorian puke on her bare feet and wash them while dancing in the stream. The bonfire was burning out of control, its sparks a constant threat to forest and drunkard alike. Caught making out behind the picnic pavilion, Emily and I were outed, cheered, and finally designated the royal couple of the day.
“Can you do me a favor?” she asked, tugging at the purple string of Mardi Gras beads around her neck.
“Anything. You want my shoes? I got them on sale, direct from the warehouse.”
“Shut up, George. I’m going to walk over to that bonfire and I want you to shove me backward into the middle where it’s good and hot.”
“Are you drunk, finally? I’m a little drunk, but not nearly as bad as I was at noon.”
“I’m bored. Is college going to be like this? All blood and puke?”
“Looks like it,” I said, as Tino swerved his way over waving a lighter that he thought was still lit. When I clinked his cup it fell out of his hand and spilled. After staring at the confounding sight of foam melting into dirt, he sadly stumbled away.
“Let’s go,” Emily said, taking my hand. She led the way through the zigzag parking lot of cars and trucks, toward the bike path and the darkness on the other side of the road. A group of classmates with hoarse voices stumbled onto the path farther down, pissing and lighting cigarettes. We started the three or four miles back to West Des Moines as if answering the far-off call of traffic barreling down Interstate 80. A few times I fell a half step behind, just enough to view the back of Emily’s legs, her neck, the sideways sway of her breasts. We hadn’t exactly been taking things slow, but I’d yet to see her fully naked and still had a hard time believing this was all really happening. The increasing noise of motors and speeding cars against the wind sounded somehow pleasant and sparkling with life. Emily finally grabbed my hand and pulled me along.
“Katie says you’re taking us fishing. Apparently you promised her.”
“I was thinking Sunday at Saylorville.”
“All right. I’ll tell her.”
“Think she knows?”
“There’s very little Katie doesn’t know,” she said, like it wasn’t as big a deal as I was making it out to be. “Excited about all the girls you’re going to meet in Iowa City?”
“I don’t think she knows,” I said.
“That was evasive.”
“I’m not sure about Iowa City girls. If I meet one with cute little feet just like yours, maybe I’ll want to photograph those feet. But I wouldn’t go any further than that.”
Emily smirked and slightly swerved. At this pace it would’ve taken all night to get home. There were geographical dilemmas to overcome and pressing decisions to make, but we were content walking and putting them off for another night. Emily was my girlfriend and for the moment that’s all that mattered. We were more or less sober by the time we hopped the fence into her neighborhood, setting off motion detectors that triggered security lights yard by yard as we strolled up her street. We plopped down in the driveway by the side of her garage and laughed off alcoholic classmates, bitter wrestling coaches, lazy French teachers, and unsolved stranglings. When the security lights had all clicked off we started kissing. For the last kiss Emily held my face and licked a slow line up my neck. We whispered our good nights and I watched her hurry across the lawn to the front door. She waved before covering her mouth and smelling her breath and slipping inside. Hiking the rest of the way home took almost two hours but she was with me and still there on my lips when I fell into bed, believing she was mine.
Eighteen
I overslept the Sunday morning of our fishing jaunt to Saylorville Lake, waking to the slow groan of the garage door as my parents returned from my mom’s bell choir performance at the seven-o’clock Mass. This implied not only a partially broken promise to Katie Schell, who’d insisted we set out like professionals at the crack of dawn, but also a reduced probability of stealing away in Zach’s car, which was already outfitted with rods and reels after his trip to Petoka the day before. But it turns out Zach had the day off at Gordo’s and had therefore spent the previous night drinking himself authoritatively retarded among a group of bartenders and servers behind the locked doors of any number of closed-for-the-night restaurants or bars in the greater Urbandale-Windsor Heights areas. He didn’t bat an eye when I entered his room to search every floor-strewn pair of pants for his keys. I returned upstairs to find my dad attending to a spitting slab of bacon whose prolific grease would soon be put to the task of frying eggs (this was five or six years before his first heart attack, which would prevent any such indulgences thereafter). “If you catch anything impressive,” he advised, “throw it back. Shows respect. And keep your shirt on, all right? Girls don’t like a show-off.”
It was still only eight-fifteen when I set off for the Schells’ house with the wind dragging my hair, grooving side to side on hot vinyl seats as I constructed the colors and smells of a summer love affair at an isolated cabin up north. Ours would be a laissez-faire love with speed options, each yearning squelched in a fleshy performance designed specifically to fit the need. I arrived at the Schells’ doorstep bursting with a potency that felt like knowledge. This feeling was somewhat diminished when Mrs. Schell arrived covered in sweat with an unsheathed tennis racquet in her right hand, displaying the sort of disbelief of a national champ who’d just been cheated on a line call. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out she’d dashed off the court in the middle of league play, outsprinting the cars on the highway just to give me the third degree before I took her daughters out fishing.
“It’s Sunday, George. Kind of early, don’t you think?”
I mumbled an apology, even knowing this was all an act. Katie assured me she’d covered all the bases, leaving nothing to chance—her mom had been aware of our plan for at least a week. “Actually, I’m late. Katie wanted me here at seven. Today’s our big day out at Saylorville Lake.”
Mrs. Schell smirked, unhappily, offering nothing more than a prolonged gaze of disapproval, apparently expecting that under its influence I might confess whatever perverted scheme I’d expected to disguise by throwing a few fishing rods in the backseat. Our stare-down ended with a phone call that prompted Mrs. Schell to withdraw, but not before closing the door in order to remind me that her air-conditioning system wasn’t designed for strays hanging out on the front porch. In her absence I entertained myself with the notion of swinging her onto the lawn for an impromptu tango, which would have ended with me dashing for the front door to lock her out of her own house.
A minute later Mr. Schell appeared in Hitchcockian distortion through the panels of his leaded-glass windows. A sip of coffee splashed onto his slipper as he stepped outside in a thick white robe with oversized pockets that made him look like some kind of Beverly Hills imp. Even the gray in his hair was babyish against the thick white cotton.
“Well, shoot,” he said, casting me and the coffee stain equally inquisitive grins. He patted my shoulder, careful to avoid spilling any more coffee but clearly attempting a masculine exchange that would allow me to understand something he was feeling. “Sunday is THE DAY,” he said. “The DAY of the week. So how goes it, George? Katie’s been up since cock-a-doodle-doo. Where’re the big dogs bitin’ today?”
“Hopefully at Saylorville Lake.”
“What are you going after?”
“Northern, mostly. Walleye, too, if we can find the right spot.” Mr. Schell nodded, centering the welcome mat with his foot. “Don’t know if you’ve heard, but Emily’s girlfriend Mel, from the volleyball team, she’s moving into the ranch at the end of the block. She’s a real sweet gal. Single, too.”