Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (12 page)

“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.

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.”

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 moment, 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.

“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.

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.