by Ron Carlson
“Oh hell.”
“I’ll settle for the affection she still bears me,” I went on, “which is the same general love girls have for their former teachers.”
“I’m glad I’m hearing this shit in person.”
“But first I’ll fish and nail Nicky.”
“There’s one sensible item anyway,” he said.
After so much alcohol, I was lulled into a sense of well-being. When we paid, the waitress said, “Thanks, and be good.” I loved that. They always told us to be good.
We walked out into the main street of Heber, Utah. It was midnight in the broad valley, and behind the one- and two-story shops of the street, I could sense cattle sleeping in every field.
Eldon pointed at a poster in the cafe window. It advertised the Demo-Drag Race Spectacular. The posters showed two cars resembling sticks of dynamite about to collide. Oh boy.
“You still think this will work?” I asked him.
“If we have the police there and perhaps a notary public or two. Nicky’s ripe. He’s been fixing the races all summer. He pours enough sawdust into fifteen old junks to clear the gears and hires disenchanted farmboys and Indians to drive them around for a few minutes in the race. He pays each one about ten bucks, and when the Lone Racer, Teeth, is the last car running, Nicky collects the prize money. Teeth, Hardell, and Gunn take turns winning. It’s especially nice because the Bureau of Indian Affairs sponsors the races. The track is half on the reservation.”
Eldon handed me six postcards he’d bought in the Wagon Wheel. “Why don’t you write invitations to the authorities?”
I sat in the car, fluent on vermouth, and drafted the cards.
Dear Highway Patrol: This is the wronged and innocent Larry Boosinger speaking. Please be at the Uinta Raceway at noon on Thursday since there are some criminals in need of apprehension. I didn’t know about the wire, honest, Larry Boosinger. P.S. Bring your large guns and tear gas.
Dear Roosevelt Sheriff, Deputies, and Posse in general, etcetera: Don’t you want to be at the races Thursday when you find out that I am innocent and that Nicky is a crook in your own community? Think of it, you can nab him! No trouble at all, Larry Boosinger.
Dear F.B.I. and Supreme Court: Please don’t hold any grudges because I escaped from your facilities. You are invited to meet me in person and swap stories on Thursday at noon at the Uinta Raceway. Please bring an eraser to clear my name. For truth, justice and the American way, Larry Boosinger.
I wrote three others to various Justices of the Peace, a title I like, and we posted the cards. Slipping them into the mailbox, I saw that on the reverse side was a color cartoon of a deer driving a convertible down the highway with a hunter strapped to each fender.
40
We drove up through Daniel’s Canyon, and across Strawberry in the dark, onward. At four in the morning, we pulled off the road north of Duchesne and parked by some other tents. Throwing our sleeping bags out on the ground, we bedded down.
There was some noise from the nearest tent, a small two-man nylon job. “Come on, Mary.” Then again, “Mary, come on.” The pro side of some sad little debate. This continued, as it evidently had all night: “Come on, come on.” Finally Eldon arose and walked over above the tent and said directly down to it: “Either Mary you come on, or bub, you shut up!”
“Hey!” There was a shuffle. “You’re asking for trouble, buddy!” the voice came back.
“Shhh. I want you to shut up now. Molest each other quietly or I’ll step on your tent. My partner is on his first deer hunt since being released from the home, and he is fragile and needs his sleep.” That ended it, and we slept for two hours until dawn and the chill rain.
It rained for a good while before I woke up and then for another long while before I really woke up and then even more before I considered moving.
“Eldon. Hey, Eldon. It’s raining.”
“Absolutely. It’s good for the fishing. Keeps them down.” My bag was much heavier with the water and I could feel the damp on my leg and a part of my back; it was starting to come through. Eldon said: “Relax. Now we will move in orderly procession to the car.” He began to get up. I jumped out of my bag into the prickling rain, gathered my gear in an armload mess and sprinted barefoot to the car. It was locked. Wincing, I watched Eldon rise leisurely, adjust his helmet, put on his glasses and stand up in only his underwear. He spoke across to me: “Go with dignity.” He folded his bag and clothes and strode majestically over to where I waited. “When it rains,” he advised me as he unlocked the door, “go with dignity.”
He started the car, turned on the heater which was cold but smelled like dust which was at least something, and steered carefully over to the nylon tent. When the tent was grazing the bumper, he looked at me and pressed the horn. A guy stood bolt upright through the tent, trying it on as a hat, jumping around bare-legged in a checked hunting shirt. His face clearly showed that he had heard the final clarion, and he bellowed crazily, not quite awake. Mary, we supposed, ran out the other end of the tent in a snaggled pair of bikinis, her hands awake enough to cup her breasts. She ran in a short circle, and then over to a camper and snuggled pathetically onto the running board like a calf under its mother. Eldon was still on the horn. Finally he let up and backed away. By this time the guy had unlocked the truck and he and the girl had relocked themselves in. We could see their faces against the steaming glass.
“Dignity,” Robinson-Duff said. “Go with dignity.” Eldon waved at them, and rolled down his window in the rain. They lowered theirs an inch. “Didn’t mean to wake you. Just got out of the home.” Then he wailed and flapped his tongue. They were staring at his helmet. “Soorrrry!” he shouted as he drove back onto the road toward Duchesne.
This is a lesson I had already mastered: dignity dwindles. And I also know Eldon’s attempts to stem this tide are exactly based on the same heartsick logic which has caused others to place their thumbs in dikes. It only works in stories.
The lesson I had not mastered at all was that young women running around confused in the rain without dignity, clothes, or the sense to swear at tormentors, start the Lenore machinery in me. Just the old vast pangery; these are pangs, I thought, trying to breathe them off. I am always the person looking into other cars.
I turned the radio up to full volume. Dust bounced from the dashboard speaker in time to the Hollywood Strings’ version of “Hey Jude”; I watched the fenceline all the rainy way back to Duchesne.
There I made Eldon accompany me over to the old Commercial Club.
“Come on, we’re supposed to,” I said. We avoided trouble by being the only customers that early in the morning. We’d had a couple of near scrapes in that room. The time we’d tried to educate Ribbo about fishing, he had insulted a ranch hand, and we had been forced into a three-man exit.
Eldon and I had two sticks of jerky and some pickled eggs for breakfast, along with glasses of beer the barkeep drew for us. We stood down the bar, as always, and made him slide us the glasses. Then he went back to mopping the floor, stooping occasionally to pick up coins or teeth from last night’s festivities. The beer was the top of a new keg and effervescent; it eased my stomach and opened my head. There was a new sign behind the bar and it nailed me: WHEN THINGS GO WRONG, DON’T GO WITH THEM. We had two each, enough to bring back a colossal Lenore memory, and to open our eyes in the new sunlight outside the joint.
We turned north for the reservation and Nighthorse’s house, where Eldon had spent a good deal of the summer.
41
Every drugstore window in Roosevelt was covered with the dynamite posters about the Drag Race-Demo Derby Spectacular.
At the Day-Night Market we went in to purchase our reservation permits as always and stood in line behind eleven deer hunters dressed for Viet Nam in green and brown camouflage fatigues. A couple had added the fillip of shoe-polish to their faces. Eldon asked me if we should tell them the war was over, and I asked him back if he was sure it was. The hunters looked
at his helmet, and I could see them wonder if perhaps he had found some new deer-lure. One guy looked, through his shoe-polish, strongly like Salvatore from the prison laundry. We exchanged glances like pointed fingers, but since he didn’t extend five, I didn’t say anything. I was pretty sure it was he, but when we came out, the hunters were all gone.
We gassed next door to the Day-Night. A kid came out, his blond hair shooting from under his greasy green John Deere hat.
“What you got there?” Eldon pointed to a lowered, window-less ’59 Chevy parked aside the garage. It was obviously the car whose tailfins had inspired the SST. On the side was a huge hand-painted numeral: 12.
“You ever heard of a stock car?” The kid swiped across the windshield with a rag.
“What do you think this is, friend?” Eldon continued to surpass himself. The kid was walking around the Valiant now, appraising it, wiping the windows occasionally. I winced in memory of my own self-destructive window-washing days, when Lila would moan and rock in her auto.
“Hell, this ain’t bad.” He looked at Eldon’s hat.
“Correct.” Eldon walked the kid over to the Chevy. “Who do you drive for?”
“What do you mean?”
“Good. I work for Nicky too.” Eldon went back deep into the garage and emerged shaking up a spray-paint can. He kneeled outside the faded red Valiant and began spraying. I stepped out to see this.
“You drive for Nick, too?” The kid was amazed.
“Sure. Only this time (just between me and you) I might be going for the win.” Eldon stood up from his artwork. It was a slanted “88.” “He’s not quite paying me enough to ditch this sweet mother.” He opened his arms as if to embrace the rusted car. “Name’s Rocky; what’s yours?”
“Russ. Russell Case. Glad to meet you.”
Eldon circled the car like a pool player figuring his next shot. He sprayed an “88” on the trunk and another on the passenger side. “I like the number, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
Eldon came back around and punched the kid playfully. “I like it because it reads the same upside down which is how I finish a lot of these here drag-race demo spectacles. Ha. Ha. Eh, Russell Case? But this time,” Eldon handed the kid the paint can and we entered the car, “I’m going for the win! See you day after tomorrow!”
Eldon floored it and threw just enough gravel to anchor Russ’s eyebrows in doubt. He turned to me. “The seeds of dissension. Did you see him check my helmet?”
“Upside down, eh?”
“Sometimes.”
We passed the Jug Hollow Resort, a large tourist inn run by the Utes, one of the few Indian-owned businesses. It was shaped like a mountainous wigwam and featured a pool and a golf course. A gigantic Indian statue stood out front holding a tomahawk aloft. The Indian would have been a good rival for Allison Hayes, who played in Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman, a film which no teenage boy should be allowed to witness. Across the face of the tomahawk it said: WELCOME ENGLISH DEPARTMENT RETREAT. I slumped in the seat and moaned. It was a valid moan, sounding evidence to the fact that there were some emotional powers I had not yet lost.
Five miles further Eldon stuck his arm out and turned left onto a dirt road which we followed for ten miles, raising a rolling trail of dust behind us. Another left turn put us on a two-rut road that ascended through a forest of aspens, green and gold with October. After fording a stream that washed the hubcaps, Eldon pulled up in front of a series of shacks annexed like spokes on a wheel. The air here was green and gold too. It was openly a fall afternoon, the sun soft and warm in the hills, the trees whispering, trading shadows right up the side of the mountains, into the high pines and the dark ravines and canyons, and then back down again under the aspens. Five thousand feet above us, north, I could see the new snow mixed with old on the talus running to the peaks of Gilbert and Emory mountains.
42
When we got out of the car we could hear piano notes coming from inside one of the shacks. “Mr. and Mrs. Night-horse took care of me during the summer,” Eldon said. “And now we’re going to do them one favor.” He went on to tell me about William Nighthorse who owned the only baby grand piano on the reservation. He had been a musician all his life, learning piano tuning from an old man named Levitre in Salt Lake, and as a teenager Nighthorse had played the piano and violin along with silent movies in Rexburg, Idaho. Mrs. Nighthorse taught piano to Indian children.
Eldon and I leaned against trusty old 88 for a moment listening to the piano notes falling around us. He removed his helmet and put it on the seat and replaced his glasses. His ears, ultrapale, white, bothered me as do most small porcelain objects, things that if you drop, you must purchase. The fringe of his hair was darkened by sweat. The music focused for a minute as Nighthorse, himself, stepped out of his shanty looking like Basil Rathbone. He was the first seventy-year-old man I’ve ever met who was six foot six.
“Writerman!” Nighthorse laughed and shook Eldon’s hand. “And this must be Larry.”
I shook his large hand. “My wife has a student right now. In awhile we’ll go in for refreshment. Would you like the tour?” He had a scar from his left eye to the corner of his mouth.
“Larry needs to see the fish,” Eldon said.
Nighthorse put his fatherly arm around Eldon and they led me around the house, on a dirt path, through a flourishing garden. Nighthorse paused and pulled three apple-sized radishes from the end of a row. He rinsed them in a narrow clear bypass stream and handed us each one. We continued through an aspen grove and up the path across a meadow. I could hear running water. We hiked up a short incline under the first pines and stood at the edge of a small pool. Nighthorse pointed at the middle and I could see the teeming backs of a thousand trout climbing into air.
“What?”
“This is the Nighthorse Hatchery.” Eldon said. “Come over here.”
Below the green pond, Nighthorse had three basins the size of bathtubs and in each, one monstrous trout. Lunkers. They lay in the bottom, not moving as has always been the prerogative of the monsters in any species. I guessed each at about eighteen pounds.
“Red. Buster. Sammy.” Nighthorse named each. “They stay. Pets. Buster has been photographed eleven times.”
“He was on the cover of last year’s Guide,” Eldon added. “He’s a beauty all right.”
“Check Sammy’s lip,” Nighthorse said.
I kneeled and looked the big fish in the face. His lower jaw was separated in three places, testimony of his ability to avoid the frying pan.
“Handsome fish.”
Bill Nighthorse did not comment. He was watching dust that was circling and rising and circling again above his empty corral. The whine of an engine flapped up to us, and through the dust we could see a fenderless hot rod sliding around the corners of the fence. The driver was making a reasonable attempt to catch his own tail. We watched him make four more furious laps, then dizzy, spin out, reverse, back out of the dust ring, jump up on the roof of the car, down to the ground and bury his head in the hood.
“Junior?” Eldon ran his hand through his fragile hair.
“Yes.”
Junior resumed his racing, zooming this time the other way, to unwind, I suppose.
On the way back to the house, Eldon tossed the last bit of radish into the fish pond and there was a suitable uproar, trout climbing on each other like seals on a rock.
Eldon explained that Junior was Nicky’s newest protége, reconditioning used cars with the Waynes, and now he was one of Nicky’s drivers. Bill Nighthorse himself said that he never interfered in the lives of his sons, but he was a little concerned about Junior, his youngest. Eldon promised the senior Nighthorse that we would woo Junior back to common sense, a domain I hoped we too would arrive at soon.
As we entered the dooryard Mrs. Nighthorse’s student, a young girl with dominating braids, was leaving on the back of her brother’s motorcycle. Mrs. Nighthorse came onto the porch and greeted us. Eldon fetched hi
s gift copy of Architecture West out of our cluttered backseat and presented it to her.
“Hello, La.”
We went into the manifold shanty to a sitting room adjacent the grand piano, as was everything else in the clean residence. The walls were all bookshelves, and the furniture modern. There were no antlers on the wall, no wagon-wheel coffee tables. These Indians are letting me down, I thought over my glass of vermouth. Nighthorse and Eldon had martinis and we chatted about Junior’s new enthusiasms until Junior himself came home. La asked him to sit and play “An American in Paris” for us as the afternoon failed.
After dinner, La’s quiche and asparagus, we all had a pleasant roundtable in the den, another annex. Junior, his black hair still bearing the furrows from his comb, spoke animatedly about his “career” as Nicky’s employee and the driving opportunities it afforded. Bill Nighthorse sat arms-folded in his leather chair smoking Riordan cigarettes from France.
“He’s part Indian himself,” Junior said.
“Who said?” Eldon asked.
“He did.” Junior was hooked.
“Can you tell people you drive for him?”
“I’m supposed to be an independent.”
“Suppose it’s crooked?”
“It’s a stock-car race,” he said, standing up. “Nick helps me out.” He went outside and we heard his car, wheels and a throttle, in a seizing cough that grew wider, ate the house and, swallowing, was gone, narrowing as he moved to the highway and the bright lights of Roosevelt. This vibrating show of fidelity added to my awe of Nicky. I was beginning to think of him as I think of the federal government: large, amorphous, and everybody I was meeting worked for him.
“Don’t worry, La; Bill,” Eldon said. “This boy can be made right. He’ll be present at Nick’s demise.”
“I hope so,” she said. “I hope so. It is not the purpose of my home to be a place where my son and husband can argue.” Bill Nighthorse sat calmly, smoking.