Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald

by Ron Carlson

  “Hello.”

  “Hello,” she said, handing me a picture of a boy dressed as Peter Pan. “Mickey, my oldest. He’ll be six this week.”

  “Great costume. I was always Robin Hood.”

  She looked at me.

  “On Halloween.”

  She kept looking.

  “I always went as Robin Hood. Once I went as Gary Cooper.”

  She finally nodded.

  “Where are the guards?” I asked.

  She looked at me again, saying nothing.

  I backed away. “That Mickey’s a fine-looking boy. You’re lucky.”

  She watched me, so I turned and sauntered back to bed where I discovered sleep, heavy as earth.

  Toward morning I had a dream of escaping from the orphanage. Eldon dumped his porridge on Miss Cranley’s head and I broke the windows and then we jumped the fence and filled our pockets with apples. The horizon was a vast unending ribbon of light.

  52

  The next morning when I awoke the ward was quiet. The only other person moving was mopping the floor at the other end. I found my clothes, laundered and in a nearby locker, so I dressed and walked out into the lobby. There were no policemen, no teachers, no ex-convicts. I read a copy of the Colorado Democrat from cover to cover, including Eldon’s article on the oldest democrat in the Rocky Mountains, and every time an idea seeped into my head, I fought it down with big sticks. Nurses and doctors came and went, ignoring me, which I took as a sign that something dire was about to happen.

  It didn’t.

  I felt the pieces of my past and future all over the floor of my mind like eggshells, and I didn’t want to think their correct reassembly was impossible. I wanted not to touch them with a single thought, until some competent, perfect soul would explain them into their proper places one by one.

  At eleven, Evelyn and Zeke picked me up and I signed some papers for the nurse on duty.

  “Where’s Eldon?” My eyes moved in a dizzy focus and I had to shut them from time to time to stop things. It was like old times when I was up all night two or three nights at the power plant. The October light listed this late in the month, and the sides of everything were white.

  “Salt Lake. He had a checkup and he’s all right. He sent us.”

  “Checkup?” As I walked the blood seemed to be draining out of my head. I went to one knee on the lawn and put my head down.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Sure.” I stood up again, but the blood stayed down and I went lax, doll’s eyelids, into her arms.

  “Larry!” I heard Evelyn say my name, and I smelled the sun in her hair, and then we had lying on the lawn for a while. Zeke ran around kicking things I could not see, coming over every so often.

  “He’s a white one, Mom, isn’t he,” he’d say.

  “Should I get a doctor?” Evelyn asked.

  “No, you stay. I’ll get up occasionally and you catch me. I’ll be all right.” She sat beside me, her legs crossed. I watched her roll up the sleeves of her green plaid shirt. “What is this checkup?”

  “He was bumped when you crashed.”

  “Bumped?”

  “It’s nothing. He’ll tell you that you tried to run over him. One bruise, or something. He’s fine,” Evelyn said. Zeke appeared.

  “You’re white, Larry,” he said. “Want an apple?”

  He went away and came back with some red apples. Evelyn and I ate the apples while Zeke went back over to the front of the hospital and had a conversation with a cab driver. When he returned I felt better, and stood up easily. Evelyn took my arm, and Zeke walked before us explaining that a lot of women were having babies in that building.

  When we reached the parking lot, Evelyn stopped. “I thought you might want to see this.” She pointed at my green truck.

  I couldn’t speak for a moment.

  “I remember this,” I said finally placing my hand on the fender. It was warm from the sun. “I remember this.” I slid in the driver’s seat and every gauge came back. But the soft friction in my head continued, and when Evelyn said she’d drive, I let her.

  Zeke wanted to ride in the back, but Evelyn said no, and so I offered to ride in back with him. “Air,” I said. She smiled again. Zeke and I climbed into the back and he climbed onto my lap.

  “We shined the truck, right Larry?” he said.

  “Right,” I answered. Evelyn drove the truck westward while Zeke and I counted ducks moving in the transparent sky.

  53

  Outside of Heber, she stopped at a roadside fruit and vegetable stand and allowed Zeke to select the pumpkin of his choice. We picked out several large squash and some apples, and I watched Evelyn drink a large glass of cider. When she saw me watching, she laughed and said, “Well, it’s good!” We bought the cider and hoisted Zeke’s pumpkin into the truck. He had chosen an asymmetrical monster, larger than a bushel basket. “Some pumpkin,” he kept saying. Then he wanted to ride in back with it, but we decided instead to ride in the cab. Evelyn began explaining what had happened. Zeke kept leaning on my shoulder, turning back to check his pumpkin and then turning back to look in my ear.

  54

  I was right about the race, Evelyn told me. It was no climax. It wasn’t even an anticlimax. It was a dirty demo-derby spectacular in which undistinguished gentlemen in abused machines chased each other in elliptical circles always returning the way they had come. No one was killed. There were some fair concussions, including my own, however, and Lila had spilled the beans to the officials. Those beans led to an appointment I had in the Metropolitan Hall of Justice to sign six papers and exonerate myself. So in a vague way, I was cleared, though the air still seemed full of dust.

  Nicky and his friends had been filed, as I was, in hospital beds and then asked to leave the county. None of them had even mentioned my name. No one had asked them. They had risen, at intervals, from infirmary beds and walked as American citizens to futures, like my own, not a lot different from their pasts. History teaches us that it does not teach us.

  Nighthorse had claimed the ashes of Eldon’s Valiant and paid the seventy-five dollars damage incurred when the axe that had been in 88’s trunk had severed the grill of a Highway Patrol car. His son, Junior, due to Nicky’s moving, would be unemployed for a while, which was all the time Senior Nighthorse thought he needed to get him an honest career. My eternal friend Eldon, after being bumped by his own car and his own friend, had proceeded to Salt Lake to see about his knee and to free my truck.

  As Evelyn told me all this, the explanations seemed as distant and strange as if reported by a butler three days after a shooting. It was like reading about other people’s woes in the papers.

  So time had passed, regardless of anything I had done, regardless of anything Eldon had done, and I was as guilty or innocent as ever. I just didn’t involve the police anymore. I can believe it.

  I thought about that for a long time: innocence. No, there is no going back to that one, no matter how many circles one races in. I felt, as Evelyn drove over the last hill of Parley’s Canyon and we stared at the urban grid of Salt Lake City, that I should move to a small community in Upstate New York and never be heard from again. I felt as though I should return to the safety of the Midwest where I had never been. I felt as if I had gone to great lengths to recover from my education. I felt as if I had just turned thirty. Actually, I felt that April was over, pretty much. I was just glad to have tasted that fish.

  55

  Yesterday we went to the Veteran’s Hospital to visit Eldon, who is not hurt but is staying there for two weeks “recuperating” from a badly bruised knee and writing his next piece for The Guide to Fishing in Eastern Utah. We found him on the fourth-floor sun deck, wearing his helmet and sunglasses, and my old grey sportcoat over his pajamas. Zeke always greets him with: “Glad to make your acquaintance, I’m sure.” Evelyn always holds his hand, standing by him, and he always shakes his head at me and says, “Junior wants to talk to me, eh?”

 
Then he asks me what my plans are and I tell him something different every visit. Yesterday: sailing. People are supposed to go to sea, I think. He tells me I should go on the stage where aberrant behavior is encouraged. I tell him watch out I might. Then Zeke takes Eldon’s clipboard and tries to read it aloud, and yesterday Evelyn asked Eldon to dinner. He’s coming tonight. Before we leave each time, Eldon calls over one of the other veterans and introduces me as the guy who ran over him.

  56

  Well, I’ve run over a lot of things, I suppose. The best had been the trustee orchard and the worst had been Lenore and portions of myself. I have thought for a long time that it was paramount, essential, to be the best or the worst. Partly out of the superlative viewpoints those extremes offer, the amazing vistas, the thrilling false euphorias, roads not taken, roads that, I guess, should not be taken, and especially because of the distances from crowds. The middleground is so goddamned crowded. To be like everyone else, yikes; that is the cardinal sin. That was what I had thought. Tonight I feel as if I’ve been taking the high ground so long that I am dizzy, fatigued, and in need of a map.

  Nothing should be approached part-time, ordinarily, piecemeal, or sensibly; this is also what I had once thought. I do know that it is not that amusing when we first learn life to be the mile, when we’ve been running the hundred-yard dash. I’m looking now, I guess, for a new stride.

  Perhaps I’ve made the first step. I went out tonight, earlier, and covered the tomato plants with burlap in anticipation of the second frost of the season. It seems a positive motion, even if I did have to have Evelyn show me how to do it correctly.

  Evelyn and Zeke are visiting, and we await Eldon who will join us for charcoaled steaks and liters of red wine which are breathing on the trailer steps right now. My green truck sits patiently beside the trailer, my own home. The river is full and makes a sound like wind in high trees, and I consider time. That things require time is a concept I am just becoming familiar with.

  It is twilight again; the shadows are about to spread and merge into that glowing version of first darkness. My recent past seems the meeting place of two confusing words: touched and touching: crazy and tender. Across the river the city skyline stands like a chess game. The rancherly dooryard is weed-thick, but the garden has been kept to order by Evelyn and Zeke while I spent my summer vacation in prison. Evelyn wears a white sweater tonight, a practical and lovely touch, a thing women do. I am just moving into its appreciation.

  As we stroll around the ranch, I avoid stepping on the weeds and reflect. I’ve been into Fitzgerald and loss for awhile now, and pretty successfully it seems to me as I count my friends. I was the moth and he was the flame, and I can wish forever, which I undoubtedly will do (and plan on in a sense), but I can never reverse it. I would rather have been him than known him. I only wonder now if I can get into “regaining” or even find its advocate. One thing I won’t regain is my degree. Let it go, I think. Having a degree ahead of you all your life implies a future, another concept I might flirt with soon.

  For instance, I’m going to buy a piano which I will lean on and Zeke will learn to play. Evelyn already knows how, a blessing. And I anticipate times will again become sunny, lucky, and every pair of trousers I take off the closet door in the morning will have three dollars in the pocket, and eventually there will be a time when kids come up and drink out of the hose and I squirt the last one so he remembers me, and women I’m related to will bake cakes in the shapes of rabbits and bears and castles to celebrate minor occasions, such as my birth.

  If I have converted my heart into a warehouse, fine. I peek in from time to time and have the pangs. If you challenge my ability to store pang-inspiring material, or think I am kidding, I am disappointed. All my life I have been plagued, which is a serious pestilential verb, by my peers, which is a silly name for folks my own age, who have mistaken my sense of humor as a frivolous quirk. It is, in fact, the central sense in Larry Boosinger’s survival. It is the only sense I know.

  I hadn’t been a great actor, or soldier, or even the only other valid thing, a great criminal. I had been a Dangerous Convict which, as you know, is not quite the same thing. Oh, I blame Nicky and those guys who have not ever been properly squelched and are into some version of automotive crime even now, but as my father noted, my blame won’t fix a lot. And in a way I’m glad I had the quality of trouble I had. Everybody allots thirty-five percent of his time to troubles and worry, heartache in general, and I would have loathed using my thirty-five percent on, say, being refused credit at Sears or not receiving my license plates on time, when I could have had prison. I really mean that.

  And I don’t blame Scott Fitzgerald. That would be wrong. His were simply the most alluring, thrilling lies I’d ever heard. They still are.

  I don’t know about the final test; you know, where I meet Wayne Hardell coming out of the Rialto Theatre in three years and our eyes meet and we stop on the sidewalk and perhaps he puts out his calloused hand. Perhaps he’s forgotten or grown out of his chronic venomous urges, and I will stand in this world, pedestrians flowing by on either side … And I will probably extend my own hand. Why not? Recognition is a compliment, and if it is true that one is known by his enemies, then I should think it proper that Hardell identify me.

  In the kitchen sink hibachi the coals are warming satisfactorily, and Evelyn and I sit in the riverbound Studebaker watching leaves float by in shifting constellations on the river. Zeke trots around the yard waving his grape popsicle like a pistol, singing a melody that he makes up as he goes along.

  A large, misshapen jack-o-lantern guards us all from the top of this old car; the candle glow just becoming visible in the dusk. I have not yet begun to court Evelyn, but I suspect I will in time, taking my time with new care. It is difficult to be perfect in this world, but I think there should still be attempts. If things don’t assemble themselves similarly to the things in old movies, then perhaps they shouldn’t. Zeke has found a horny toad and he brings it over on a leash he’s made from string. “His name is Salt Lake City,” he says. Zeke’s hair is four cowlicks and a part. I’ve started reading again: The Lives of the Great Composers, and Zeke and I have set up an elementary school for one on weekends, and we’re learning about the stars which are not at all the same. One of Zeke’s first paintings is already taped to my refrigerator door. It is a house. You can tell because of a large green square which is a window.

  While Evelyn and I talk about the coming winter, three men I knew in prison approach in a canoe. They are dressed in denim and paddling hard like incensed Dutch sailors late for the discovery of a new world. Their eyes are full of wonder. Their mouths are open. A man who worked with Spike and me on landscape sits in the middle, lower than the other two. They pause a moment from manifest destinies, and, holding their dripping paddles aloft, this October, they wave.

  First published as a Norton Paperback 1984

  COPYRIGHT © 1977 BY RON CARLSON

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Carlson, Ron.

  Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  1. Title.

  PZ4.C2854Bc3 [PS3553.A733] 813’.5’4 77-3320

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 978-0-393-24540-0 (e-book)