by Ron Carlson
The next morning we had gone to the stream with her for the first fish. She stepped out onto two stones in the water and let her line down where Eldon instructed in the shadow of the bank. As I watched her hold the pole in her teeth while she rolled up the sleeves of my plaid overshirt which she wore, it crowbarred at the foundations of this heart. Girls roll up their sleeves. She took a fish directly from the hollow, and I watched her face move from surety to surprise. A photographic memory, as you know, is no comfort in this world.
At that time Eldon had still been sensitive about his injury and carried it around awkwardly, obviously, like an old suitcase; he let us fish alone that day. Lenore netted nine to my six, handling them competently, showing me the particularly brilliantly spotted rainbows, and noting what they’d been eating when she cleaned them. That night, as was ritual, we had sat around watching Eldon’s characteristically tiny campfire fall into itself and reading aloud from Robert Service. Lenore was more at ease than we were, and I think it scared us a little finally to have a partner who was up for the every detail of a fishing trip.
By the time we came down from fishing in the early evening and stood in the dusty streets of Duchesne, and went into the Commercial Club to douse our throats with glasses of cold beer, my heart was unmoored and bumping against the dock of my ribs. My tendency now, as then, is to heed cardiac responses, and as we stood at the bar, I was what they call a goner.
When I saw Lenore on campus four days later, she asked when we could go again. I could only interpret that “we” one way. I left Eldon a note as to my plans, but didn’t tell him she was going. I couldn’t tell him. Do you see? I left him the note, the best incomplete sentence in English: “Gone Fishing.” When I returned on Tuesday, he said, “Courting, eh?”
That seemed so long ago.
I stood and stretched in a room where I’d shown a dozen movies. I remembered that tentacle in It Came from Beneath the Sea crushing twenty pedestrians in San Francisco. In the near dark, the pages of Gatsby, the wallpaper in the kitchen seemed more suffocating than ever. I went down the stairs and out into the October air. I wouldn’t need a disguise; no one knew what I looked like in the first place.
37
Outside it was twilight and everybody was going home. Up and down the block girls were getting into cars. Birds flew over in threes, nestward. Cars were just beginning to turn on their lights, and the marquees of theatres beckoned with their lines of flickering bulbs. The air was warm again and huge doses of the smell of leaves blew past. I passed two kids on the sidewalk hurrying along. One said, “Hurry up before it gets dark.” Now there’s a credo. For a confusing minute I listened for my mother’s voice calling my name on the tactile air, calling me for dinner. Twilight, it still works, I thought.
I passed a group of citizens picketing an X-rated cinema. They walked in a tiny circle with their signs: DECENCY! and AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL? The breeze moved the skirts of the girls, and in the luminosity of the fading sky and the street lights and neon, I realized that I didn’t understand sex either.
Perhaps the biggest lie we’re told as we enter the inferno of adolescence is that it will pass. The people who say this, obviously, don’t know they’re lying; they love us and are desperate to say something that might offer us the kernel of hope as we enter that violent region from whose bourne no traveler returns. Oh, sure, it ends: when we fall to the carpet in some doctor’s waiting room or rush open-armed onto the front-end of a moving automobile, but otherwise it’s a permanent affliction. My own glands have driven me around quite a bit on roads at hours I might not otherwise have seen.
I kept walking, step by step, avoiding collisions with fixed objects, trees, parking meters, even though I realized this kind of thinking is always muddying the waters. Perhaps I should interview somebody on it. As I thought of talking to Lenore, a person on this planet whom I knew how to cherish, and that’s a word, thinking of sex seemed even more distracting, which I guess is a soft term for the chronic natural schizophrenia which for me was the result of living in a body. The trees were all changing at the fringes to red and yellow, and I took the hollering I heard from behind the houses I passed to be the scrimmage instructions of kids playing backyard football. The earth, I understood, was tilting on its axis. Final darkness came as a relief and I thought of nothing, just breathing, not even of rehearsing what I should say to Lenore.
Alice, Lenore’s neighbor, met me in the entry. She screamed and ran back indoors. At last, I thought, relieved: I’ve been recognized.
As I knocked on Lenore’s door, I saw Alice move her curtains to see if in fact it was me.
“Oh come on, Alice!” I screamed. “You crazy bitch. You’ve got secrets in your heart like the rest of us!”
Lenore opened her door while I was still yelling. She was brushing her hair and, seeing me, stopped mid-stroke and sneezed: “Larry!”
“Free again. I’m innocent, you know.” At this point if I wore a hat, I would have taken it off and swept it before her. She motioned me in and resumed brushing her hair, not taking her eyes off me. “Freedom is such a precious thing,” I continued. She put the brush down and we looked at one another. “Hello, Lenore. Can we talk?”
“Gary’s coming by in an hour; we’re going out.”
“Want to talk for an hour?”
“Larry, I’m getting married in nine days …”
“I know. Congratulations. Where shall we sit, in here?”
“No. Come on.” She led me out onto the small terrace. Her backyard opened onto the apartments’ communal green. In the center of the green was a set of swings and monkeybars. We could hear kids out there saying “Watch this!” to each other. The porch light from next door just clipped the top of her hair in white, and we sat in the dark. It was obvious that I was talking to an angel. Soon, I thought, I must cease taking everything as a sign.
“What have you been doing?” she asked.
“Nothing. Making errors. Growing up, I guess.”
“It takes a long time, doesn’t it.” This wasn’t a question.
“For some of us.” Everything I say lives very near the glib, and I added sincerely: “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t say anything, just held her chin poised.
“Eldon says that letting you go was my major mistake.”
“How is Eldon? I like him so much.”
“Fine. The best person I know, I guess. He’s aiding and abetting me. He says letting you go was …”
“I know. I went to see him while you were … Do you want to talk about prison?”
“I want to talk about us.” Again she said nothing. Two radios were playing across the courtyard or one radio between stations, some distant noise in October.
“I always liked it, Larry. I want you to know that. I liked going around with you. But you live like you’re in a barrel going over Niagara Falls every minute.”
“I know,” I said, considering, “I am.” It always backs me up to find that others consider my prime strengths to be my greatest weaknesses. She had me; I had to counter: “I find it cozy and exciting. Oh Christ, Lenore, isn’t it better than living above the pharmacy and going down at intervals to sell bromides, ointments, laxa …”
“Larry.” Spoken firmly. “Gary is a good person, a very good person, and I won’t …”
“I know. I know.” I did know. “But does he give you, well, a thrill, honestly? I mean, there’s room in my barrel.”
Her sigh was more like a cough; she was very close to asking me to leave. One of the kids fell off the monkeybars and began to wail. It was a reprieve for me.
“Larry.” Her voice was the voice of reason. She sounded like Eric Sevareid. Why couldn’t her voice be full of love or money or anything else beside reason, that dread killer. “You make my every gesture a symbol, some big deal.”
“It is.”
“It is not. It is not. You want too much. I don’t mean a thing by any of it. If I brush my hair it means I want my hair neat, out of
my eyes and ears. You think it’s heavy, romantic. You think it’s some romantic ancient motion. It’s tiring.”
“Sometimes you don’t intend anything, but nevertheless, these things transcend your instincts.” The kid’s wailing had broken into the deep gasps of the recently saved.
“You’re crazy. Look; what does this mean?” She put her perfect finger in her nostril.
“Don’t do that.”
“I am, I am. What does it mean, Larry, come on. What does this mean?” She looked at me with her finger in her nose and I looked back at her dark face, her light hair.
“You’re beautiful with your finger in your nose.”
“Paugh!” She stood up and walked to the edge of her patio looking out to where children risked falling in the dark. It wasn’t a whole lot different from what I was up to here. I stood and went to her.
“Does he honestly give you a thrill?” I waited.
“Yes.”
“Come on! You can’t think that it’s going to be a keen life. I’ll bet you never laugh with him.”
“Is laughter all there is for you?”
“No, but it helps the rest.”
“We laugh a lot.”
“Sure you do. When? What do you laugh at?”
“Things.” She was moving a bit from foot to foot now; that was good.
“Pharmacy jokes?”
“Books! Movies! People in restaurants. Gary can guess their names and occupations. He’s clever, you know. We have a hundred games. I shouldn’t—I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
I nearly said, “I don’t either.” I was in the corner again, overhearing my friends bet against me; it was late in the fight.
“A hundred games,” echoed. I didn’t need to hear that. Suddenly my head hurt. I touched the lump with my fingers.
“I don’t believe you,” I said. “Come on, Lenore, say you never laugh.”
“Larry, I’m going to marry him.” She had me on the mat now, and lying there I could see the round, glaring faces of those in the ringside seats.
My wind was gone. I should have avoided any tactics in which logic could enter. “A hundred games …” Common sense is my achilles heel.
“Then tell me you don’t want to go to Duchesne with me tonight,” I said desperately.
“Larry, I remember Duchesne. I remember all of it; it was good. I loved you even though I didn’t know what you meant. It was fun.” We stood for a couple of minutes not talking. She turned. “I’m going to get ready now.” I needed a gold hat, I thought, I should have worn a gold hat.
“Do you mind if I sit here? Eldon’s going to pick me up in a while; we’re going fishing.”
“Not at all.” She left and I lit a Pall Mall. There, Fitzgerald; there you go. The moment is over and all its romantic freight has spilled into a cowfield in the Midwest of night. Out on the monkeybars one kid called to another: “Jump!” I yelled: “Hey, don’t jump! It’s late. Climb down and go home. Your mother just called me, she’s got a prize for you.” I could hear them run away.
I dislike smoking in the dark, and I put the cigarette out. Behind me, in the apartment a girl who would always be mine dressed herself to go out with her fiance. It made me feel a little better that this doesn’t happen to everybody.
She came back out in a while and I tried to avoid looking at her apricot-colored skirt and brown tweed jacket. “Gary’s here. I have to go, but you stay as long as you like. Just shut the door; it will lock.”
“Thanks, Lenore. Goodbye.”
She left. I considered going out and doing a one-half off the monkeybars. A minute later she came back in.
“Larry, I just want you to know that your friendship has meant a lot to me.”
“Did you tell Gary I was here?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t he coming in to shoot me?”
“No. We want you to come to the wedding if you can.”
“Let’s not talk this way; I liked it better when we were arguing.”
“I have to go. Will you come to the wedding?”
“Maybe, Lenore. I’ll try.”
“Thanks, bye bye.”
I am not going to any weddings. It would be too much like Huck Finn at his own funeral, and besides, I didn’t like it at all that Gary didn’t consider me dangerous.
38
Eldon picked me up at nine-thirty, and he maneuvered the Valiant out of town. “How’d it go?”
“You get the vermouth?”
“Right. Five bottles. Three Cinzano and two Tribuno. The better brands end in o you know. And I purchased the papers. So, how’d it go?”
“Well we’ve waited long enough.” I said reaching over the backseat for a bottle. The backseat was strewn now with fishing gear, the papers, books, hardback novels, his and mine. I liked that: always ready fiction, trying for other worlds. “Want some?” I measured the vermouth into one of the glasses he kept in the glove compartment.
“No way. Too sweet. I think you’re supposed to eat that stuff on pancakes, regardless of anything they did in Paris. Are you going to tell me how Lenore was?”
I sipped the sweet warm vermouth. “Mummm. Well, it was okay. I’ve been invited to the wedding, and not as the groom.”
“Best man?”
“Worst. It doesn’t matter; I’m not going.”
Before we left the city I asked Eldon to drive me out to the Rodeo Drive-In. It wasn’t the scene of the crime, exactly. I just needed to see it again.
As we drove, leaves were loose. They were moving everywhere in low skittering groups. They crossed the road in front of us as though magnetized to the pavement, then, once across, the leaves would flare upward in a dervish spiral and collapse. They were trying. The wind sucked and whistled in the windows. It was a lonely night, the lonely night, perhaps, our headlights full of leaves, and I was glad to be simply in a car, with the green glow of the dashboard light on my glass of vermouth and my friend driving.
There were no lights at the Rodeo Drive-In. We drove past it once and had to go back. Eldon eased into the gravel driveway and up to the abandoned ticket booth. Glass was broken and lay like splinters of ice on the ground. Several large plastic letters from the marquee also littered the area. Abandoned. Leaves blew through gaps in the fence.
“Wait here a minute,” I walked away into the deserted parking lot. Hands in pockets against the chill, I walked over the rippled ground. The little valleys were full of leaves and old popcorn boxes. The screen was still standing, but I could see stars through several holes in it. The snack bar was a dark lean-to now. I walked around to the projection room anyway. When I peered in, a horse showed me its sudden teeth in a laugh, reared, and kicked against the back wall. I jumped back involuntarily, and walked in a broad circle around the shack until my heart subsided. All right. Maybe this was the scene of the crime. I was having difficulty, as I ran my toe through the gravel and litter in the dark, remembering what the crime had been.
I jogged back to the car.
“Nobody home?” Eldon asked.
“Nobody we know. Let’s have a little of this fishing, eh?”
Eldon backed out and we began our trip into the mountains. He rolled his window down and signaled the last left turn onto the highway that would take us through Heber, across the plateau of Strawberry Reservoir, past Currant Creek, to Duchesne where we would camp for the night on the edge of the superior Uinta Mountains. Eldon signaled with his arm, despite the Valiant’s blinkers. “I prefer hand signals, it indicates an involvement.” He smiled. “People believe you if your arm is out the window.”
We climbed in the dark up the sinuous highway of Parley’s Canyon past the huge gash called “Runaway Truck Lane” finally past the summit, a deer waiting in every bush, a hunter in every tree, then onto the broad Mountain Meadow below Park City. It was good to be moving. Lenore’s face was reflected in the windshield. Eldon assured me that our plans for meeting Nicky and his friends, whom I referred to now correctly as “the
assholes,” would work out. Calling them that made me feel better.
We listened to Herb Jepko soothe a caller from Ontario who had recently had heart surgery. Jepko runs an all-night talk show for lonely hearts, that is, people in general, and his soft baritone voice is always laden with benevolence. Most of his callers just can’t sleep, an affliction that I know as the nation’s worst crippler. People weren’t able to sleep from Guam to New Zealand, but we were the only car on the road. The vermouth was warming things easily.
39
Stopping in Heber was part of our ritual. The waitresses at the Wagon Wheel Cafe were always farm girls out to earn some money so they could attend Utah State or B.Y.U. next year where their boyfriends already went. Eldon and I drew great solace from being around such wholesome individuals, and we always ordered oyster stew and toast, and asked the girls about their futures. We’d been in often enough to be remembered, especially with Eldon’s helmet, which he removed and set in the booth beside him.
When our waitress came over Eldon looked in her face a moment. She was incredibly clean, her white uniform crisp even at this late hour, and her complexion signaled her affinity for fresh air and quantities of milk. Eldon rubbed his eyes. “Lord,” he said.
I ordered.
“Yeah,” he said, “this is why we came. It’s starting, right?”
“Yes it is. This is one of the places that still works.”
When she returned with the stew and toast, Eldon brought up Lenore again.
“So, I missed the top girl. Think.” I looked at the clock. “They’re parked in his car outside her apartment right now.”
“Engaged people get invited in.”
“Shut up, Eldon. Is that possible? Shut up. Do not interrupt what I think of fondly as musing. I am only musing.”
“Does your musing include further plans?”
“I’m going to bind all the letters she’s given me and send her all my books as a wedding present with instructions to have her babies read them.”