by Ron Carlson
“When you bend over!” she said.
14
I burned off a good deal of the dross of recent encounters, including smugness, irony, and euphoria by listening to Garner Ted Armstrong all the speeding way to Flagstaff, where I stopped and sent Wesson a postcard: “You were right old Geoffrey; it was not to be. All three reasons. Plus fiction sucks. I have resigned myself, and am happy as a bell-hop here in Seattle. Good luck with the Tales. I know you’ll do a fine work. Cordially, Larry.” The other side of the card showed a man in a red lumberjack shirt being chased up a pine tree by two bears.
15
I continued up through the Navajo reservation’s badlands passing all the chromed trucks full of Indians. The government gave them thousands of acres of poisoned sand, not a weed in sight and said, “Do with this what you will. It’s yours, really.” A person could cast down his bucket a long time in a place like that and get nothing but sparks. Eldon should come down here and write an article; but these landscapes, framed so alkalinely in my windshield would never make the pages of Arizona Highways.
At 2:00 A.M. I pulled my old green pickup into the sage ten miles into Utah, near the Coral Pink Sand Dunes, and rolled my sleeping bag out into the back. Lying there looking up at the same billion stars, I decided to shuck my recent affections. I decided to do things. Rodeos, perhaps. Western music for sure. Find the rungs of the ladder that lead a person to ride a snorting silver stallion into a saloon, things like that. There are things I haven’t seen; some instinctual events, pure from first flicker to final smoke, must, I thought as snakes slithered under the truck, still happen.
Outside Salt Lake the next day, however, more decisions were made for me. The most dangerous driver possible on these roadways, a woman in a bright yellow dress eating a chili dog with onions, and trying to execute, such a right word here, a left turn, turned into open-eyed me, head on. Glass broke.
At first I had been comforted by the fact that I had been standing still when assaulted and that there were a number of witnesses, but when I stepped out of the truck, the witnesses had transformed themselves into an unruly crowd. They were gathered around her since she was crying; everybody thought she was pretty badly hurt seeing all that chili on her yellow dress. When I heard them calling her by name, I realized I was in her neighborhood. I checked the damaged front end of my truck, and talked to her briefly while the mob stood behind her whispering dangerously. She was in incoherent grief for having ruined her dress. The whispering grew louder.
“Please,” I said, “Won’t you all cease casting these glances. This automotive tragedy is not my doing.”
Hearing this the woman in the yellow dress wailed loudly and the crowd took a step forward.
“Okay, halt!” I said scurrying to the truck. “Forget it!” I called to the woman over the heads of the advancing villagers. In my rearview mirror I could see a dozen people noting my license number.
16
Easy access is a source for a major portion of all the grief and regret that blindingly swarm this planet. Even now on the remote edges of all the counted continents and the galaxies of islands surrounding them, human beings, not unlike you or I, sit facing the ice, mud, brick, or leaf walls of their homes, pressing remorseful fists into their eyesockets wondering why they ever allowed themselves close to places full of villains, like the Flying W. I took my truck to the grimy independent station called the Flying W Garage because of its convenient location, right next to the road, five miles from the woman in the yellow dress.
A fat man in a silver knit shirt bounded my way. He bore significant though uneven muttonchop sideburns. “An estimate,” he said. “What is needed here is an estimate.”
“Right you are, my fat brother.” So from moment one, Nicky and I were at odds. He recoiled at my words Oliver Hardy style, then recovered and advanced in the massive swagger I was to see a thousand times in the next month.
“Now wait a minute, you brainless punk!”
“I need an estimate. Who do I see?” I wanted to take him, if I could, aback, talk business and forget my frank slip of tongue. He screwed his big face up in a convincing clench that then resolved softly into Nicky the Estimator.
“Well then, I’m Nicky of the Flying W Garage; I estimate things.”
“Glad to make your acquaintance, brother.” He circled the truck once and settled in front of the damage.
“Nice truck. Too bad.”
“Chili dog.”
“Three hundred and eighty dollars.”
“Oh, you say.”
“Plus any electrical work on this light.”
I went around him and climbed in, closing the door gently but decisively. Click. “No way, Nicky.” The Flying W didn’t look that busy. I started the motor.
“Well there, partner, we could make a deal and fix up your nice truck.”
“Wonderful. That’s exactly what I need: a deal. But,” I patted his fleshy hand which rested on the window frame, “I need a real, genuine deal, old Nick.” He walked around the truck again looking in the rear and came back to the window.
“People who work here get discounts of up to fifty percent.”
“They all must be just happy as little dogs.”
“Two hundred dollars, and you can work here to pay it off. That is a deal, you know.”
“You must be looking for a good man like me.”
“The words from my mouth. What do you say?”
I got back out of the truck. “I say ‘good’ Nicky, when do I start?”
“Tomorrow. Eight in the morning. You can run the pumps. Plan on leaving the truck then too.”
“Fine, partner.”
It really wasn’t any more strange than some of the job interviews I’d had before. When I applied to Blue Star Stamp Redemption Center they wanted to know if I was hypnotized easily. Seems a gang of clerks had hired a hypnotist and they had all the employees walking out in trances with radios and watches. Daily occurrences always strike me dead. But it suited me fine that I was going to be a gas pumper, a little of the old, you know, work. I did not care that my stab at this version of normality might be a little overt.
I arrived back at the apartment after parking my truck two blocks away and walking the rest. It was not your happy stroll; I had new resolves which like New Year’s resolutions are not much comfort and the source of great doubt. I walked by Grinmaster’s Taj Mahal Food Center, and his monstrous sign still rotated. At that time it was proof to me that life goes on. I’d been to Mexico and the grass had not been terrifically greener, but I would still stick to my new plans.
Eldon Robinson-Duff was taken unawares. “What? Here he is in the flesh, not one missive coming before, not a postcard from Nogales, not a telegram from Tucson?”
“Hello. I gave up. Mexico has been annexed.”
“Gave up?”
“Couldn’t settle. Too many things to do. Thousands of parties and no work. Also I ran out of fishing lures.”
“Slow down. What happened?”
“Dotty.”
“Oh no. No kidding?”
“In all actuality. So I’ve given all that up. Writing. I’ve begun a new life running into crazy women in Falcons and pumping gas out at the Flying W. I’m going to be normal, perhaps a cowboy.”
“Really now?”
“Yes. Go ahead tell me. I’ve made worse decisions.”
“Only one: Lenore.”
“You got any beer in this joint?” I said heading for the kitchen.
“Wouldn’t it be in the fridge?”
“Want one?”
“No.”
I opened the can of Rocky Mountain and sat down looking at the idiot on the label. “How is Lenore?”
“Lenore is fine. She is engaged to the lice killer. She stops by from time to time to see me. She wants to know whether or not she should bring children into a world like this.”
“What do you say?”
“She has no choice; this is the only world she’s got. It
looks like an October wedding. He’s graduating, you know, unlike many other clear thinkers, and will be attending the counter with his father at an establishment known as Fair Deal Pharmacy.”
“Good. He’s a solid citizen and will …”
“Good! And you’ll have your dream, the Ideal Lenore, right? You are crazy.”
“Right, uh-huh. How’s the book?”
“You’re letting an amazing thing slip right through your fingers.” He stopped a little pacing he’d gotten into and went to the desk. “The book’s done.”
“Going to publish?”
“No way. But you can look at it if you want.” He threw me two full ream boxes. “It’s the most extended truth I’ve ever told, and now thank god, it’s gone.”
“Too bad I don’t have any war experiences, I might have been a writer too.”
“You can have mine anytime.” he said, scratching his helmet in a habit that had always distracted me. “That’s like saying it’s good we had slavery because we got jazz out of it eventually.”
“Jazz is pretty good.”
We talked for a long time, and though he felt I had made the right decision about school (“Relate it to anything, anything at all”), he wasn’t sure about my future course. However, despite all news and advice, twisted and friendly, objective and acerbic, I could not move back in. Eldon was busy writing a piece on simple exercises to do while golfing for The Sunset Gazette, a weekly publication of Sunset Hills, a retirement community in New Mexico, and my continual awe of his red-helmeted figure sitting at the typewriter brought too much of my old life back home. And he, himself was not aiding my quest for new identity.
“Regardless of accents and that shirt,” he grabbed the collar of a new red and brown cowboy shirt I was wearing, and pulled, snapping it open down the front, “you are not a gas-pumper and you are not a cowboy.” People have a tendency to tell me what I am not.
“You don’t know.”
He grabbed my throat in both hands. “I know about you, yes I do. You need a new plan. One that makes sense, is inexpensive, and will offer you a sense of accomplishment in this world. Not in some twangy underground. Not in drugstores or rodeos. And not at the Flying W. It’s nothing but a runthrough fence for every car stolen this side of Denver anyway.”
“Leave me alone, Robinson-Duff. You’re the one needs help.”
“You,” he pointed, still hopped up, “need guidance from above.”
My philosophy is to believe things said in violence, especially phrases from old songs, but when he let go of my throat, I was still not convinced.
“Possibly later,” was all I said.
17
For the extremely believable price of thirty-five dollars, I rented the ranch from Eddie, the ex-lion tamer who owned the Black Heron. After my revealing encounter with Eldon I stayed down at the Black Heron one night until closing and Eddie, hearing of my plight, fixed me up. It wasn’t your standard ranch. The ranch house was a wheel-less airstream trailer that sat adjacent to the river on one side and the Union Pacific tracks that lead without hesitation to Wendover, Nevada, on the other. The trailer had been rolled, evidently, and consumed by fire, and (it was my conviction despite the relatively complete renovating job) hit by a speeding train. The very isolation of the ranch suited me, as did the spaces in the trailer. My bedroom ceiling rippled with irregularities and curved down toward my head like the sky. The kitchen-living-dining room had the kind of compactness that makes turning around mean entering a new room. Efficiency. The yard surrounding the trailer was knee high in June grass and assorted carnivorous wildflowers and full of horny toads. An old Studebaker was imbedded in the bank, nose in the river, as a monument to some narrow escape. All the doors stood permanently open, the occupants fled, and the whole brown thing looked like a huge flat dragonfly come to drink his fill.
Before moving in, I packed every artifact of my former life into cardboard boxes and took the whole load out to the dump. As I kicked them off into a sunset of smoke, bulldozers, and seagulls, I sang the chorus of a song called “A New Life” which I had composed in the clarity of the ride out. When my saddle oxfords flew out and down through the sun, as the D-12 cat lumbered by the truck, I felt the earth move.
For a while then, we have bucolic bliss. Eldon came by for dinner from time to time usually muttering, “Ranch, blanche!” But one day he came out with a trunk full of tomato plants, and as I helped him plant them near the Studebaker, which we sat inside sometimes, watching the river and talking, he said, “You’ve got to have crops in your stupid, confused Tex Ritter metaphor.” I think he was sick of me referring to the toads as the livestock.
In the evenings as I sat on the metal trailer steps and watched the charcoal turn gray in an old kitchen sink I used for a hibachi, and the 7:50 grated by, spelling Santa Fe, Reno, Northern, Union, and all those other magnificent names, it occurred to me in my solitude that parts of my new life were far better than the strange brand of fretting and stewing that I had previously been engaged in. If the university wouldn’t process me, fine.
18
I did feel bad about Lenore, not because of my investment, the hundreds of antic hours preparing and carrying off barrages of literary and artistic vaudeville, that is, in a way, fun, but because of my deep feeling, the nearest thing to a conviction I had, that you should marry the first person with whom you survive real danger. True, time and again I had created potentially disabling situations, crises, out of the most everyday of fabrics. I had forced her atop a Red Chief cab for a brief champagne spilling trip down a main street disappointingly lacking neon. I had pushed her, and she, me, into the city’s fourteen fountains, including a small elaborate and uncomfortable one near the This is The Place Monument, in a three day campaign which led to exhilarating cleanliness and Lenore’s serious cold. (Subsequently I had received an air mail letter from her parents in Minneapolis.) I had brought us to the brink, heightened picnics into survival training drills, made every stop at the Dairy Queen a turning point for all concerned, refused to settle for anything like your average retail experience, tried to make motoring into the adventure it should be. I had done these things consistently. I admit it. But it was courtship wasn’t it? I had not been able to get us trapped in one of those rooms where suddenly the walls begin closing in vicelike, and one is saved in the ten inches by turning the oriental gong sideways, because, you’ll be saddened to hear, there are no longer any such rooms. You can’t even order one. It had been courtship, and I had tried in my simple ways to cement my relationship with the perfect Lenore solid. But I had failed.
“Why are we doing this?” she would say.
“Don’t you expect us to?” I’d say, averting a forty-ton log with my paddle.
“No.” became her answer more and more. I had failed, and nights as I lay in the bunkhouse underneath a rippled tin-can sky looking across at the diamond not as big as a Ritz cracker, I felt bad about losing Lenore.
But deep inside, deeper than could be spaded by my change of lives, my new immobile home ranch-type environment, my shucking of the adrenal past, I believed she had at moments enjoyed it. I believed I had given her things she would never get again, times, brilliant times that she would, even in a maternal and pharmaceutical future, remember. Perhaps I liked her being engaged to Gary, the graduate, the success, because she would remember going around with me, the bear killer, the saddleshoed, beachcomber midnight lost-and-by-the-wind-grieved poet-motorist, a dream obsessed monster, given to extremes that Gary could not touch with all the pills and potions in the state lined end to end … if I was not Gregory Peck in Beloved Infidel, then surely I was twenty million miles from home, wondering what next. In some ways, I thought then, in a late-night pathetic confidence, I have not failed, or given up on perfection.
19
After settling at the ranch, I called Proctor out at the power plant and he arranged for me to be the graveyard fill-in man, when someone needed to skip their shift. “How was Mexico?”
he asked.
And I went to work at the Flying W. Nicky gave me two sets of light green work clothes that I really liked, despite the fact that the oval patch above the heart pocket was blank on one, and said “Ernie” on the other. On the back of the shirts in something like the Coors beer script, dark green letters read: The Flying W Garage. At this point in the link of events that I knew as my current life, things became extremely causal. I would have been better to have held on to my hat, so to speak. Like I said, I no longer blame big Nicky solely, but I should have been suspicious when they quickly pulled my only green truck into the garage right away and began the malicious tinkerings.
I was assigned to the pumps which I enjoyed a great deal. When the bells clanged their deafening clangs (it was really a clang!-cla-!, the second clang not quite making it) I knew with a reassuring certainty that they meant me. I learned quickly where the gas tank is on every make of car, front, back, hidden on the expensive cars, blatant on the trucks, hard to reach, convenient, and I took what was becoming pride in this simple knowledge. I bantered with motorists. Oil. Windshields. Water. Mileage. I was fast and friendly. But sitting in the office reading Nicky’s greasy copies of Bachelor and Layton’s Auto Parts Catalogue, listening to KTNT play truck-driver ballads, I should have been suspicious of Big Nicky and the Waynes as they whispered over my truck out in the garage. Then Paul Harvey came on and reported the news that Pierce and Van Buren the “Nevada Kidnappers” had been caught in Jackpot, and it was a great relief to me because hearing their names on the radio simply served my imagination up with great portions of those desperate Mexican evenings with Dotty. Good riddance to dangerous criminals.