by Ron Carlson
I sat on Nicky’s desk and watched them whisper around my truck. The three of them looked like three carnival ride operators whispering about the black gearbox of the tilt-a-whirl after a seventeen-year-old girl in a dress climbs aboard. From time to time they’d glance my way and I’d look back down at “Aurora,” Bachelor’s glandularly disturbed foldout, while the radio played, “Kiss Me at the Wheel,” a morbid song whose point was lost in shattering crescendos of twang. I should have been suspicious. But retrospect, like all weapons a sore loser, brandishes way too late, after the fight is over and all the combatants have gone home tired or injured to eat and rest and the battlefield is strewn with the bodies and innards of the sore loser’s friends, sucks.
I didn’t really like the Waynes from the beginning. They treated me as if pumping gas were very like having scales for skin. They were Nicky’s mechanics. Oh, they came in mornings and would say, “How’s the kid today?” But I got the feeling it was because Nicky had told them to. Besides I overheard Wayne Hardell telling Nicky not to tell me about the bowling team. The other Wayne, Wayne Gunn, asked me dozens of times what my name was again, and when I told him, he’d say, “Okay, Ernie.” and laugh a slim laugh. Actually he was a cheerless soul who, if you asked him if he had a match, would respond, “Who wants to know?”
I couldn’t figure out what Darrel Teeth did or if he worked for Nicky at all. He came around quite often, driving a different car every time. One morning he pulled up and asked to see Nicky.
“He’s right inside.”
Since there was no business at the moment, I went back in with Teeth, whom I remembered seeing at the Black Heron where he hung out with Dr. Philosophy, Riddel. Nicky was inside stirring a load of powdered milk into his coffee as always with his screwdriver while he looked over the credit card slips as if they were marked cards.
“I need two more inspection stickers, Nicky,” Teeth said.
“Two more?” Nicky counted to himself: “Two, Three, Five last week. It’s getting tight when you want twenty a month, Darrel.” Nicky looked at me. “Just a minute,” he said to Darrel. “Larry, go out and give Wayne a hand.”
I went out and stood by Wayne Hardell who stooped under a Saab, the only other car I’d seen them working on.
“Nicky told me to give you a hand,” I said when Hardell looked up at my alien presence.
“Give me a hand!” He did a pretty good version of disgusted incredulity, “Why you wouldn’t know pliers from a crescent.” He laughed at his own cleverness. “Go sweep the driveway. That thing over there is a broom.”
“Listen you illiterate greaseball, I’m only interested in doing good honest work and learning what I can. I do not desire to be treated to these simpleminded insults.”
Wayne hit me with the wrench.
I awoke from a dream of gasoline fires with a headache like a vice-grips on my head, and a full cauliflower ear. “Don’t worry,” Nicky was saying to me, “we’ve got workmen’s compensation.” I was experiencing difficulty in seeing straight. As far as I could tell I was lying in a pool of oil. I saw Nicky make a face to an apparition above me and Wayne Hardell loomed down.
“Sorry, big boy.” He looked back at Nicky; then to me, “I lost my head.” My head, full as an egg, was trying to hatch. “No hard feelings?”
I said nothing. Then Wayne was gone.
“Don’t blame him.” Nicky was talking fast. “His temper is crazy. Why he was in prison. You must consider this an unfortunate accident, like I said, the workmen’s compensation. You’re not mad are you, Larry boy? Your truck will be as good as new soon. We want you to like working here … why, you’re doing a fine job.”
Oh Nicky, you big fat bad man, if that were the worst, a short sleep and an ear full of blood, I could forgive and forget instantaneously, however that concussive event was only midstream in our struggles.
20
There were no more homicidal interludes at the station. Hardell avoided me and I him, and the other Wayne cast hateful glances around the place like jagged pieces of metal. He had the most expressive eyebrows I’ve ever seen.
One day Virgil Benson came in. He didn’t need gas, but I topped off his tank (Volkswagen—in the hood) for forty-one cents. “Eldon told me I could find you out here, I wondered if maybe you want to see a couple of old movies out at the Rainbow.”
“Gee, I don’t know, Virgil. I’ve kind of given up my analytical ways.”
“That’s what Eldon said. But these are great films.”
“What are they?”
They turned out to be Rhapsody in Blue with Robert Alda as George Gershwin and 20,000 Years in Sing-Sing with James Cagney and Bette Davis. They were great. I’ll always remember if I ever make a movie to have the credits run across someone’s hands on the keyboard, close up, and blast people out of their seats with beautiful music. In the other film Cagney took the rap for Davis and there was a beautiful, soft black and white scene near the end in which she actually visits his cell. At the very end, as they turn the electricity on, the prisoners file into superimposed view. The number of years each is in for flies off the screen and then the total appears in a crash of dramatic music: 20,000 years! Virgil and I went for beers afterward and it was pleasant for me to be in such clearly good company, but I made a vague resolve anyway, to avoid any other dangling ends of my former life.
Then one day DeLathaway came in. He needed a tire changed, and as I did the work we chewed over the demise of the couplet. He watched me the whole time, looking a little scared at what I had become. What he looked was “appalled.” I understood all his weird behavior, but when he paid me and said, “There you go,” it affected me. It is a fearful thing when people cease relating to you as your potential, and start talking to your actuality; it was too clear DeLathaway had lost any ideas of me being a perfect poet.
Being the rancher that I was I lost touch with Eldon and everybody else for a while, and then I began finding Eldon’s articles in some magazines. There was a review of a Walt Disney movie, and a warm evaluation of Disney in general appeared in The Utahn. A lyrical piece on the value of winter appeared in the spring issue of Mountain Calendar. I was glad to see him succeed, though finding his writing in the various magazines was mildly distracting, like getting unsuspected mail, or phone calls at 4:00 A.M. when you try to make your voice clear and claim absurdly to have never been asleep. “Oh no, I was up … working.” Things that send you into emotional U-turns.
Losing one’s life can mean many things. At this stage in the outwardly placid Flying W game, I lost track, control, and significant other portions of my own. I’ve never seen a service station, garage, where more whispering went on than at Nicky’s. I came to think the W stood for whispers. Nicky and Teeth had a little confab every two or three days; the Waynes were always at each other’s ear out in the garage; and nearly every week a patrol car or two would pull in and Nicky would go out and lean on the window of the car and buzz with the cop for half an hour. I became pretty obviously in the way. Nicky was getting as tired of asking me to “check the yard” as I was of strolling around outside with nothing to do. So I called him aside.
“Say Nicky?”
“Yeah, Larry boy?”
“Is there a lot of whispering during the swing shift? I mean do the employees gather in small groups of two and three and, you know, whisper?” Nicky himself thought it a good idea if I could change shifts.
“It’s a promotion. You’ll have your own keys and get to lock up.”
“Oh boy, Nicky, gee whiz.”
“Really, because I trust you so much.”
“Wonderful.”
“I mean it, Larry, honest.”
So I started working alone, four to midnight, locking the joint up. Twice Proctor called and I went out to the power plant and disrupted the log until dawn. But mainly, I’d get off at twelve, go buy the papers and head for the Black Heron and drink beer until two when they closed. Darrel Teeth was there a lot with Riddel, but they ignored
me. I think Riddel would have liked to talk with me a couple of times, but Teeth would steer him away. By two I would have formulated some kind of plan. I’d put more money in the juke box, D-7, Barbar Durrant singing “Leave of Absence,” then exit while the music was still playing and hitchhike up to Lenore’s apartment house where I would deposit cards, poems, letters, heads of lettuce, books, once a first edition of This Side of Paradise, and occasionally champagne in her car.
Once I procured four jars of poster paint and climbed up her trellis. I already had a vast landscape in mind, and it was looking very promising despite the fact that I had to paint everything backwards on the window, when a lights-out police car pulled up to the curb as Lenore and Alice, an older woman who lived in the building also, came out of the door. Lenore evidently had been able to hear the brush strokes on the window.
“You!” Alice said. She had learned over the past year a reasonable fear of what I might do next. The cop, Officer Sawyer, swaggered up the yard.
“Down here, buddy. Let’s go.” he said. I contemplated a paint spill, but then climbed down. “Oh,” he echoed Alice, “It’s you. Into prowling now, eh?”
“Look Mr. Sawyer,” I said producing the paint and brushes, “I’m no prowler. These girls will vouch for me. Why she’s my fiancee. We’re in love.” I looked at Lenore. She was luminous, standing there arms folded in her robe.
“Is that right?” the officer asked her.
“I know him. He’s not a prowler, sir, sorry.”
“No problem, ma’am.” Sawyer turned to me. “But you, you watch your step. After all, it is two-thirty in the morning.” When he had gone, I turned to the girls. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.” Alice started to go back in. “I really am sorry, Alice.” She closed the door.
“She’s still upset about the tupperware party.”
“I thought they all got kind of a kick out of that.”
“You would.”
“Ah, Lenore, don’t. I’m simply trying …”
“Larry, I’m engaged to Gary. I want you to stop leaving all that stuff in my car, and leave me alone.”
“These are sentiments you don’t mean. Didn’t you get all the cards I sent you before I left for Mexico?” My tennis shoes were soaked from describing arcs in the wet lawn.
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“I couldn’t make sense of them.” Her face was stern but showed that I had gained some ground.
“Well, you see, they …” She turned and gathering her robe with one hand ran into the house. The finality of such an act was viewed differently by the people involved.
21
I pumped gas at the Flying W for two weeks, when one late April night full of lilacs and gasoline, Nicky asked me the question that resulted in my literal incarceration, my one-year sentence. He came in one night about seven. Lila was driving. He was wearing his maroon doubleknits, broad white belt, white alligator shoes.
“Say, Boss Nicky, you’re looking sharp.”
“Nice, eh?”
“Yes, sir, need gas?”
“Hi Ernie!” Lila cried out across the seat to me.
“Naw,” he said getting out. “Say, Larry, boy, can I borrow your truck? We’re nearly finished with it.”
“Sure, Nicky.” I said looking down at the driver’s legs. “Fine.” That was my mistake. Maybe in a way what happened is my fault. Maybe. But blame is not the thing. It is not the thingee either, as Lila would say.
Lila was Nicky’s sinuous girlfriend. Moll is a better word, and she came in the station all the time. I could tell her because she’d back and forth clang-clanga all over the bell cord, and I came to look forward to Lila’s distracting visits.
One of the best aspects of working at the W, in general, was that I cleared my head. I began, as the university topsoil eroded from my mind, to think about one immediate thing: females. They drove by continually. Behind smokey windshields they adjusted the radio, lighted cigarettes, checked their hair in the mirror. Should I tell you I fantasized? Sitting in the office, up on the desk so I could see out, listening to KTNT broadcast the wrestling matches live from the fairgrounds, I composed an intricate series of dialogues. On bicycles, girls rode by wearing cut-off levis and red halter tops.
People it seemed, women specifically, were coming unsheathed. Older women, an odd concept, drove by in Fairlanes (gas tank, left rear) scratching themselves. Girls, unimaginably young cruised about, all windows down, jaws bucking on several generous portions of Doublemint. Kissing breath. The top forty a philosophy of life. They whizzed by bareback on the rear of motorcycles hugging their shirtless boyfriends, a Siamese attraction. One day a lone girl in a loose yellow halter came into the station for air in her bike tires. I did not know how old she was, just that she probably didn’t look that way last year. She taught me in a brief inflating minute that those handkerchief blouses were restructuring a girl-watcher’s entire checklist. As she rode away, those long legs furious to be gone, breaking one of the state’s longest ogles, I experienced a deep and pleasurable confusion. I developed the kind of imagination that could leap from an image of a young nubile pedestrian to the way her cut-off levis would look on the back of a chair. Mine, then, were simple concerns.
Also, in this connection, Wayne Gunn had a Marvin Auto Part calendar on the garage wall. It was one of those calendars showing a kind of hard-looking gal kneeling in an orange bathing suit. Of course, the bathing suit was only printed on the covering piece of transparent plastic, so when in a moment of chronological bewilderment, a person lifted the calendar’s plastic (whoosh!), up went the orange suit, both parts, leaving the girl-woman who looked like a roller derby veteran anyway, in what can rightly be described as the raw. During slow periods you can already tell by my description of her, I’d stroll out in the empty garage and check the date. The calendar was for 1958.
So, I was clearing my mind. Monomania, really, is a simple disorder; the mind is pared and edited until only one superimportant thing remains. However, I was not obsessed, simply a very avid student of distaff humanity.
This is part of the reason Lila was such a thing. She’d ring all the bells and I’d run out. She would be sitting there, her short skirt barely reaching over. Sometimes not quite. Not quite. Then, while the gas was pumping, I’d do the windows and Lila would slump, sliding down and out of her skirt just enough, kind of bobbing to Sylvester True or somebody singing on KTNT. And there’d be triangles. That’s what I’d see through the windshield: triangles down there. I always did a good job on the windshield.
So, a little dizzy from polishing glass and smelling gasoline, I looked up on the night in question, and there was dressed-up Nicky, nearly pinning me up against the turquoise T-Bird (gas tank under the rear license). He looked past me down through the reflections. “Can I borrow the truck, Larry boy? Couple of us are going fishing and I’d hate to take the Volks.”
“Sure, Nicky.” I said. “Fine.” And I spun out of the vice against the car, still a little disoriented by Lila bopping now to Barbar Durrant’s full blast version of “I Said Yes, Yes, Yes to Yesterday” which because of prior affinities was my favorite tune. I came to admire Durrant beyond reason which was where most of the other elements of my life resided.
“Where y’all going so duded up, Nick?” I said trying to reestablish a keel.
“To a lecture.” he pronounced.
“On philosophy!” Lila yelled out the window.
“A lecture on Work by Professor H. A. Riddel, Ph.D. Ever heard of him?” Nicky reentered the automobile.
“No.”
“Well, he’s big, and we got special invites.”
22
Lila always bothered me. One time she came in, you’ve already guessed this part, and bopped, riding her thighs down beneath her mini, until the triangle began to emerge, but instead of the little white soft high school pennant I was used to seeing, there was a good chance this time that she was … well. I can’t be sure. Because at that m
oment, the gas overfilled, as it always did, and I rushed back. She was still laughing slightly when I returned, leaning left, right, left, in tune with Wayward Jonas Kline’s “Truck and Trailer Mama.” Oh Lila, sweet geometric baby of mine. Nicky’s really. I began to form my own triangular philosophy of life on earth. She kept saying, “Ernie! Ernie!” Then when I’d come around, she’d point up to a spot on the window which I could never see, and say, “Get that nasty bug, oh get him now Ernie!” Then she’d point somewhere else, all the time bouncing in the seat like a woman on a spotted circus horse, everything around smelling warm and fragrant, hay and popcorn near the ring. But here, there was Lila, the rainbows of oil underfoot, triangles, invisible bugs, and the universal, sweet-acrid smell of gasoline.
And round Nicky borrowed my newly renovated truck and went south, fishing, with Darrel Teeth and the Waynes, which at the time I considered absolutely glowing, since Lila had been coming in a lot after four when she knew darn well Nicky was home.
And she never needed that much gas. Seems she’d put up her hair in these big rollers, and then go out for a drive to dry her hair and end up at the Flying W. So I’d rub her car, rocking it gently, and she’d slide down. Of course I got into the habit of teasing her, which is forward, I know, but when a guy gets himself an honest job, a new life, and a ranch by the river, he should be a little forward and make some opportunities happen for himself. It’s like Barbar Durrant sings in “Classified Advertisement: Help Wanted Female,” about how if there’s a chance you better not fake it, grab it at the moment, get up and take it, and if there’s not a chance make one before time (he says “tarn”) comes undone. I thought this was keen advice, especially in light of Wesson, Roachfield, and Royal and general skeptics revisited and what they’d put into my failing head. It also was close, in idea only, to what F. S. Fitzgerald had said at times. So I’d tease Lila when she’d pull up. She’d roll down her window and I’d say “white” or “blue,” some color, and she’d smile out of her small face and say, “Ernie! Ernie! There’s a big black bug on my window, Ernie!” I’d lean over and pretend to wipe the window, and she’d unsheath some pink ones. Looked like a little fire down there. I was going to offer to call the fire department, but my forwardness was still in the building stages.