Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald

by Ron Carlson

  “Nicky’s going this weekend,” she said one day. “Is he taking your truck?”

  “Yes, they need it to go fishing. There’s not enough room for Nicky alone in his Volks.” Nicky bore an amusing resemblance to his own automobile.

  “Well, you’ll need a ride Friday night, won’t you Ernie?”

  “Sure, I suppose so.” I had been hitchhiking without too many problems. “Aren’t you going with our friend and counselor, Nicky?”

  “No.”

  So, I was a little anticipatory, as they say, about the weekend’s triangular possibilities, and let my truck drive away willingly. Perhaps, then, that moment of affected volition means the resultant mess was my fault. I don’t know.

  23

  At twelve, Friday night, I closed the station and scrubbed up in the washroom, feet included, and put on my clean light greens. I selected the blank oval shirt, deciding perhaps tonight I would tell Lila my real name. The shirt was pressed hard the way uniforms are, almost like paper, but it smelled good, like baked soap, and my arms with their mild tan looked fine in it.

  Lila came by and honked, because the bell was turned off and I locked the door and left. “Hi, Lila.”

  She didn’t even ask me where I lived; she just swerved out into the midnight traffic and started passing cars headed out of town. Dale Henny was crying out, “Have You Lied?” at a sincere volume, so I waited until he finished, to ask skirt-straining Lila if she wanted to know where I lived.

  “Oh! Can’t we go to the movies, Ernie? I wanted to see the movies.” She turned left in front of a frowning set of headlights, and tires graveling, slipped under a marquee that spelled out in multi-colored letters: TEN HORRORIFIC, FIENDISH FILMS—ALL NIGHT SCARE SHOW. Smaller underneath that, it said: DOCTOR ON DUTY.

  Lila paid the man and we coasted in, lights out, mound over mound, creeping up to the second row where we parked alone. The movie was in progress, that is, a man ran across the screen with both hands up where his head should have been, and then, headless, fell down. A woman came out of the shack behind him with a bloody axe and one hand behind her back. We all knew it was the guy’s head. Everybody knew. “It’s the guy’s head,” I pointed out to Lila. Then the camera stared a slow zoom in on the woman, while some violinists tortured their fiddles to a heightened screech. They were getting ready to show the head. The camera was still moving in slowly as if we were all in it. The woman held the head up.

  We all screamed. From some of us there were multiple screams. Then the movie settled back into mindless boredom.

  You must know that during our entire relationship, Lila’s and mine, which can be called in the pure sense of the word, a charade, Scott Fitzgerald’s advice on keeping one’s distance was filtering in phrases down on me. He had said to watch out and not get too close to the carnival, regardless of how pretty it appears from the distance. If you get too close you will feel the heat and the sweat and lose the glitter of your illusions. Perhaps, however, I told myself there, sitting inside that spotless windshield on the seat next to Lila, that’s what I am in it for this time. I had no trouble thinking of Scott’s advice as solely literary; that is, pretty, but not applicable in this case.

  The second feature was a short documentary on the recent evidence of werewolves in a suburb of Detroit. It consisted mainly of women like the one on Wayne Gunn’s see-through calendar lifting their skirts and revealing a variety of red and purple bites, while a breathy interviewer (off camera) asked them leading questions. The film had a certain way of supporting my budding monomania.

  So just as they finished the credits which came down like a Venetian blind across a still of a bitten thigh, I decided to make many of my most desperate imaginary service station dialogues into fact …

  “Okay, Lila, let’s get down to it, shall we?” It was a line out of one of Barbar Durrant’s songs.

  “Down to what?”

  “It, baby, do not plead incredulity.”

  “Huh?”

  “Come on, Lila, you know: white, blue, pink. And less than that.”

  “Ernie,” she said warily, shifting farther away by the driver’s door. “You behave yourself.”

  “Oh, yes ma’am,” I said in pursuit. We were both behind the steering wheel now. “Like me to wipe your windows, ma’am?”

  “Ernie!” I deftly probed pennant city. Her legs were very cool. “Ernie!” She slapped my cauliflower ear. Soundly. Seventy thousand popcorn kernels marched down the screen, left-right-left, singing: “We are fresh! We are hot! Come and get us! Don’t stop!”, in cadence count, as blood swam hissingly over to the left side of my whirling head. Fifty hotdogs followed the popcorn, dancing a waggling chorus line to “Eat us! Eat us!” Above their heads, a Powerhouse candy bar flew over trailing a banner that read “Tasty Treats!”, as the rainbow regiment of Dot-brand gum drops parachuted down: red, blue, green, black, yellow. For a horrific, fiendish moment, I thought I might be in a car with Wayne Hardell. I looked over at Lila. She was mesmerized by the jamboree of colors and sweet treats on the screen.

  “Ernie? Ernie?” she said sounding quite sincere, almost using her old get-that-bug voice. “Ernie, can I have some popcorn? I want some popcorn.” I was trying to inhale and align my eyes.

  They zoomed in to the green nodes of a talking pickle next. He was dressed as a professor in a cap and gown, and he was reasoning with us to really take a chance, buy a pickle and have an astounding taste delight.

  “Ernie?”

  “Lawrence. My name is not Ernie, it’s Lawrence, and I want you to call me Lawrence from this moment unto eternity, which I suspect may arrive presently. Lawrence. Lawrence. Got it, babe?”

  “Yes,” she said with satisfying meekness.

  “Okay, I’ll proceed to get the popcorn. Perhaps it will elevate you onto the sexual plateau that matches my expectations, or if not perhaps you will throttle on one of the cute little kernels.”

  “Huh?” she said. It is times like that that assure me I have unadmirable qualities. While I was attempting to stand erect outside her Thunderbird and a pizza loomed large on the screen like a pocked moon, pepperoni and green peppers to go, Lila leaned over conciliatorily and patted my hand. “Gee I didn’t mean to hurt you, but I didn’t think you’d be a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Nicky’s my main man.”

  “Right.” I started to walk back to the snack bar.

  Came the voice: “Butter!”

  “What?”

  “Get buttered popcorn, Ernie!”

  Naturally, it was at the snack bar where I felt the heat and smelled the sweat, and really, much more than that, amid the malevolent faces of the general public. Several women bore the pale, tired expressions and wrinkled blouses of the recently assaulted, and they filed resignedly in and out of the Ladies. I selected a fistfight with a huge man who thought I had crowded in line, which I had, but I growled and sighed my way out of it as if it were my third or fourth for the evening. And I bought popcorn and, logically, a pickle.

  The checkout girl, a fifteen-year-old blonde in a dirty white dress, sat on a small stool so that her legs led into a not so mysterious triangular shadow. I asked her where the doctor was.

  “Doctor?”

  “Yes. The Doctor on Duty.”

  “Oh. Well, you better see the manager. Back around this building, in the booth.”

  “Fine. Thanks.”

  The manager was also the projectionist. He was hoisting reels onto a table and sweating to extremes. “Shit!” he said after the last load of reels was stacked up. Above his head, the monstrous projector ground out a massive, intense beam, and the film clacked.

  “You’re going to be up late,” I said.

  “You’re goddamned right I am.”

  “Listen, I need to see the Doctor on Duty.”

  “Who?”

  “The Doctor on Duty. Don’t tell me you’re also the Doctor on Duty.” He finally looked at me.

  “Why do you need to see the Doctor on Duty?”

 
“Well,” I started using my breath more and speaking up and down, “that horrid second feature. You know, the one about Detroit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I used to live there, and that third girl’s story scared me so much … well, I passed out and fell out of my car.”

  “Listen, Mac, are you putting me on?” He took a step toward me.

  “Look.” I thrust my ear up at his sweating face.

  “Holy hell!”

  “And if I can just see the Doctor on Duty I’d feel a lot better …” I was near tears.

  “Sure, Mac, sure. Well he’s not here right now. Called away. But what we do is give you your money back, and you can call your own doctor from your own phone, eh?”

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE DOCTOR ON DUTY IS NOT ON DUTY!” I screamed. “I’ll sue this run-down gravel quarry! Waahhh!” I started wailing. Just then the reel ended and started whipping itself to shreds in the big machine, and the car horns started erupting throughout the drive-in.

  “Holy hell!” he cried running back to the projector, cutting his hand on the berserk spinning wheel. Outside it sounded like 5:00 P.M. in New York City. He got the next reel running on projector two, but couldn’t stop big number one, and finally while it spit splinters of film up and down the room like sharp rain, he turned back to me. He glared and slapped a ten in my hand.

  “What!” I said over all growling machines, “Ten bucks? For my head!”

  “Quiet will ya, Mac?” He handed me ten more and I left him as that hot room filled with filmic confetti. From all I can ascertain, people in this world relate that way: striking from the lashes of bad faith and threatening each other with legal action.

  On the way back to the car I stumbled into Dotty’s Mercedes. Back in town already. I could tell it was hers by the mashed back fender. Someone sat up in the back seat, but I hurried away. I could see the fourth feature was nearly over. It consisted predominantly of people breathing quite heavily, leaning on doors they’d just slammed.

  “Where have you been with my popcorn?”

  “Pipe down. No interrogatives, please. Slide over, we’re going home.”

  “Nooooo. No! I want to see the show!”

  “You’ve seen it, sister.”

  “You just be nice to me, or I’ll tell Nicky.” It was an effective thing to say.

  “Fine, I’ll be nice, but we’re going home.”

  “Oh look, Ernie, the previews!”

  It was true, the multi-colored spotlights and swirling letters congealed to spell out COMING ATTRACTIONS, and though my whole thinking was desperate to flee, there is something about previews that will always hold me, perhaps a drowning hope that the future actually does hold something in store. I don’t know. So I sat still for a minute, eating professor pickle.

  The previews were for next week’s SKIN-FEST—A PORNUCOPIA OF FLESHLY DELIGHTS.” The future. A naked man chased two naked women through a meadow while a bass-voiced announcer suggested, “Love can be natural.” An interior shot disclosed four naked people on a bed aggravating each other. Then, in an office cut, two secretaries ripped each other’s clothes off, tearing away blouses like newspaper, strangling each other with their bras. Then two bank robbers made everyone in a bank strip, and while they looted the cash drawers, the customers started in on each other. The fundamental theme of the pornucopia seemed to be that if you could get the secretary, bank teller, or schoolteacher to remove her glasses, she suddenly would become a voluptuous nymphomaniac, shaking her hair down from its prudent bun into a sensuous mane, and generally bumping and grinding all over the place. This bit of optometric psychology interested me only so far: Lila didn’t wear glasses in the first place. Maybe I could have gone and borrowed a pair.

  After that steamy bit of the shape of things to come, I once again renewed my interest in my old friend, Lila, but only half-heartedly. Seeing Dotty’s car had sat on me heavily; you know, mistakes you’ve made and would like to erase, and besides Lila smelled strongly like a regiment of popcorn by now. The previews had been right in one respect: they accurately predicted a sad, sordid, confusing future that was at that moment, as Nicky and the hoods clambered over my truck in the troubled abdomen of southern Utah, laying undisputed claim to me.

  So I gave up on Lila; it wasn’t a very noble dream to begin with. As Son of Dr. Jekyll started, I turned on the highbeams and roared out, taking the speaker and cord with me, cutting off the manager-projectionist’s voice, “The snack bar will close in …”

  I had Lila drop me off three blocks from the ranch, because I didn’t want anyone but Eldon to know where I lived.

  “Why here, Ernie?”

  “I’m going, my dear, to throw myself in yonder river. Goodbye.” As she drove off, a relief swept me that made the idea of seeing her again, of searching for her first among all the world’s citizenry, of risking my fissile neck in order to talk to her once more, absurd. I obviously did not know that she would be the key to the impending quagmire, or that I’d be in jail by dawn.

  24

  There was a note on the bunkhouse door:

  Power Plant. Larry, where are you? E.

  I checked my watch: 8:00 A.M. Holy smoke. Hitching out to the plant was slow business, but I got there an hour later, at five, met the boiler roar, and found Eldon tapping ashes into Popular Mechanics.

  “Do you know that a guy from St. George named Figg has patented a one-man boat made out of discarded car hoods?”

  “Gee, really?” What was he talking about?

  “Listen!” He showed me the page with the photo and diagram. “But according to a fellow name of Thomas Deerfly, a Uinta chief who runs the package store in Duchesne, and who I interviewed yesterday, he invented the damn thing.”

  “Amazing, this copyright interest in Indians you have.”

  “I’ve been interviewing them for two weeks on a thing for the Bridgerland News, and there’s a lot of shit going on like this. I’d like to meet this Figg guy.”

  “You becoming an investigative reporter? Humphrey Bogart in …”

  “Deadline U.S.A. Maybe. I don’t know.” He looked up and closed his magazine, pressing ashes for eternity. “Where have you been? When Proctor called I went over and waited at the ranch.”

  “Seeing a doctor about my ear.”

  “Fine, but send me a check when you get paid, all right?”

  After he left I circled the boilers for an hour awash in the deafening blast, feeling bad about the typical angle my new life had taken. I did not want things to get complicated. Face it, I did not want them to get in the least bit hard. I think I was ready for a few hobgoblins to enter my little mind. Then I went downstairs but all the ginger ale was gone. A few coins rattled in the white plastic drawer. Upstairs I vitriolically noted in the log that this consistent and demoralizing pilfering of other’s ginger ale was surely going to lead to the break up of society as we know it. I didn’t note that that would probably be a good thing. Then I turned to the back of the huge log and tore out the page labeled October 12, Columbus Day. On it I scrawled in my most florid hand:

  Dearest Lenore,

  On this day, staffed with seventy diseased dangerous convicts and general do-badders, I touched upon the fresh green breast of what is called the New World. It was a rough trip, what with all the spoiled apples et cetera, but now I have done it, and I dedicate my discovery of the world being round to you. I knew it all along. Soon all kinds of people will be able to travel this short cut to Dubuque and Albuquerque, just to name two full of u’s. Also Utah. You know, I wasn’t really looking for India after all, just you. The continent is populated now with cutthroats and escapees, won’t you marry me? You are the gem of the oceans. Cordially.

  Larry Columbus.

  After sealing that for mailing, I checked the big board. This is when the single orange light of my blighted fate blinked amid a sea of blue. I double-checked. Reset and checked again. The light was Beaver, Utah, and I called Proctor at home at six-thirty in the morn
ing, not knowing that the orange light meant that Big Nicky and the Waynes and Darrel Teeth had not gone fishing at all. Instead they had gone to steal copper wire in southern Utah with my truck. They had cut down one live wire with three miles of valuable copper wire they were clipping from an abandoned line in that county, and in this nocturnal process they had shot a watchman right through his pickup truck. In effect then, I was turning myself in, and would be in the hands of the proper authorities in less than two hours. I should have known Nicky wasn’t going fishing; he couldn’t stand handling worms.

  25

  Nicky had left the Waynes and Teeth off in Gunnison where they had the Saab waiting. Nicky had continued north in my truck full of copper wire. When the highway patrol pulled him over in American Fork and charged him with grand larceny and attempted homicide, he quietly listed me as his accomplice. The man he shot, Hatcher Kinnel, was in the hospital in fair condition with a bullet hole entirely through his shoulder. “Why, they tried to assassinate me!”, the papers reported him repeatedly saying.

  Nicky, being used to this lifestyle of shabby illegality, acquired Darrel Teeth’s lawyer, bail, and a suspended sentence in that order and in a hurry. They’d been through this six times before for various felonious endeavors and they knew the cops, the judge, the ropes.

  Then it was me.

  26

  It wasn’t at all like the movies, and I, myself, it turns out, was nothing like James Cagney, except I did learn, waiting through all the black boredom of my trial, to smoke cigarettes like food, like a deep blood need. It seemed that Lila was in Elko, Nevada, indefinitely and Nicky’s “Sure it’s his truck,” didn’t aid matters. After I’d told what there was of my tale to what there was of a judge, my incredulity slowly congealed into an unmagnificent indifference. I mean how could I understand dozens of human beings pointing things at me as I came and went from the courthouse? Fists, fingers, cameras, microphones, and I suspect somewhere, a sharp pointed stick or two.