Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (19 page)

“That doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun,” I said. “And besides, I had a lawyer before, I think. No, no lawyers. We’ll get Lila to corroborate that I did not know what Nicky intended for my truck. Without her, it’s my word against Nicky’s, and that has had a tendency to fail. In addition, I have freshly escaped from a prison, and my credibility is full of dents.”

As we talked I slumped in the car still pretending someone might be looking for me. I was confused at being ignored by the police. I must be lost, I thought, if they can’t find me. I was sore from the attention the Waynes had paid me. I was impatient to have my name cleared. I wanted to see Lenore. Then these races. I envisioned Nicky and his crooked apprentices corraled at the drag races while the proper authorities patted me on the back, and shook my hand and the crowd applauded.

“Yes,” I said finally, “we need to do this. Gather them together and wrap them up at the races or wherever we can have the police and an intelligent witness or two and make things clear.”

Decisions are not my forte, but as I said it I knew I was right.

Eldon laughed the old laugh now, the helpless agreement that implied he was with me. I told him to call me if he ever escaped from prison.

As I changed clothes, the excitement returned. This was not your average experience. I had escaped from prison and was driving around town with my best friend. I wanted more people to know about it though, so I could whisper to someone, “Keep your mouth shut and you won’t get hurt.”

“We have two days before doomsday,” Eldon said, driving past the university, “and you,” he pointed at my nose, “need mountain air and fresh fish.”

“Need?” I said. I had heard his line before, but never spoken to me.

“Yes: need. The season’s nearly over, but you are traveling with one of the contributing editors of
The Guide to Fishing in Eastern Utah
, and I know a few places where you can reach out and hook a few large trout who have never seen anything but the underside of their own loggy neighborhoods. This activity will firm your body and clear your head. Succor.”

“Does this mean you’re aiding and abetting me?”

“Haven’t I always?”

He always had, but it was odd hearing him offer me “succor,” a word we always had used when talking someone into a fishing trip. We’d been accomplices on those missions, selecting one of our friends in need of a vital lesson in aesthetics and trying to save him with the fishing.

We’d load my truck, and follow the rituals: oyster stew at the Wagon Wheel in Heber, beer at the Commercial Club in Duchesne, Indian reservation permits at the Day-Night Market in Roosevelt, and then we’d make our victim, our student, catch the first fish.

Well, succor seemed an attractive concept, and I hadn’t seen a live trout for a while, and we did have the time, and the races were out that way,
so
I agreed to the fishing which is a need and makes life possible in the modern world. I told Eldon I had a few things to do first. I had to see Lenore and visit a few other primal spots before departing for fishing and the clearing of my head and name.

Eldon’s automobile was an automatic with a cluster of push buttons as a transmission left of the steering wheel. The body was an off-white, well, red, I suppose, festooned with carbuncles of rust. Rust in fact, was the theme. “You know what they call this car?”

“A Barracuda?”

“A Valiant!” He laughed.

Eldon conducted the Valiant to the apartment and pulled up into the alley in the rear. “Stay here.”

“Stay here?”

“Yes. The police might be around.”

I got out of my side. “The police will not be around. They are not interested.” I wadded my prison clothes up and threw them out on the alley.

“What are you doing?” He said.

“Clues. I am leaving clues. The police need help, and besides, I think there should be some clues.”

I followed him around and up to the apartment. It was eerie going up the steps. This place, I thought. This old place. His typewriter was on the table, a page rolled in the carriage. I read a few lines of dialogue: two people on a ski lift.

“What is this?”

“Fiction.” He smiled. “I’m getting back into fiction. A beer?”

“Sure.” He handed me a Rocky Mountain. They hadn’t changed the label. The freak still sat on the log.

We sat on that old furniture and Eldon told me about his fishing adventures, and about old Nighthorse, his new Indian friend, and I told him about Spike, and the morning lapsed.

“Where’s Kenny?”

“At class. You two have got to meet.”

“What do you mean?”

“Check the kitchen.”

I went in and was stricken by the walls. They were papered with book pages, even the ceiling and the shelves. “You mean he’s a freak?”

“Look closer,” he hollered in.

I went to the wall and read:

“Oh my god,” I said.

“That’s right. He bought six old copies of
Gatsby
, took them apart and did the kitchen. He wants to do this room with
Tender Is the Night
.”

“What?”

“He already has three copies.”

I heard the door open, a sound I remembered, the loose knob and latch, and a voice said: “Hey, Eldon!”

A light-haired kid appeared in the doorway. He gave the impression of standing effortlessly on his toes.

“Hey. Kenny this is Larry; Larry, Kenny. He’s a Fitzgerald scholar.” Eldon rose. “Well, I’ll load this stuff in the car and be right up.” I watched him go.

“You like Fitzgerald, eh?” I asked Kenny. On the desk I noticed all the books I had had on the subject, plus ten or twelve others. I hated seeing those new books.

“Yeah, Eldon tells me you like his stuff too.”

“What’s his best story?”

“The best,” he said waving his hand, “is ‘Winter Dreams’; the worst is ‘Family in the Wind’; the most underrated is ‘Babylon Revisited’; the most overrated is ‘Bernice Bobs Her …”

“Enough, Kenny, good show.” I put down my beer. “When was Zelda killed?”

“March. Nineteen-forty-eight.”

“What was Scott reading when he died?”

“The
Princeton Alumni Magazine
. I have a copy of the issue that fell from his hands. Want to see it?”

“Christ.” I looked at Kenny’s blond hair cut above his ears the way Scott had his. It was all too much. He looked like David Bowie. “Why are you interested in him, Ken?” I really at this point wanted to know. He faced me openly and with that twisted, ephemeral, ultraconfident, optimistic, mistaken, and secret smile I’d seen last in the mirror, said:

“I don’t know. It’s all beautiful. His life intrigues me; the romantic egoist, all of it. And besides, I want to be the greatest writer that ever lived, like he did, don’t you?” He went on a minute before Eldon came back and sat beside me, and we watched and listened. Kenny retrieved a scrapbook and journal he was keeping, and held it before us turning the pages like a teacher. I could barely look.

“Do you want to see these?” Kenny held up a packet of letters. They were from the woman who had been the switchboard operator at the inn in Asheville, North Carolina, where Fitzgerald had stayed once in the late thirties. The handwriting on the envelopes was uneven, as if they’d been written while riding in a car. I realized the woman was very old.

“Sure,” Eldon said. “Larry wants to see all of it.”

“No, Kenny. Thanks. We have some errands to run,” I said. I had to get out. I took Eldon’s arm. “Don’t we?”

I escorted him out into the foyer. “Thanks, Eldon; quite edifying.”

“Yeah, isn’t Kenny a nice kid? It’s too bad to think that in a few short years he’ll ruin his life by walking away from his perfect fiancee and fleeing into a living version of a grade B movie.”

I didn’t reply. Kenny’s eyes stayed before me, bright, vulnerable, hooked.

“Let’s have no more lessons, Eldon. All right?”

“Fine,” he said, shrugging. “I just thought you two should meet.”

Eldon and I went down to the Valiant and packed, mostly slopping things in the backseat and trunk the way we’d always done. The major element in leaving for a fishing trip is
leaving
. Eldon had a rod for me and extra socks.

“Okay,” Eldon said shutting the trunk. “I’m going to pick up nightcrawlers. Want to come?”

“No.” As I said this Kenny came running towards us.

“Hey. I was afraid you guys had left.” He handed me a book. “I have an extra copy of this, and since you’re interested, I thought you might like to have it.” It was an annotated copy of
Save Me the Waltz
, Zelda’s book.

I sat on the fender of Eldon’s car. “Thanks, Kenny.” Eldon raised his eyebrows as if to indicate he had no hand in this.

“Sure. Well, I’ve got a date,” Kenny said. “Good luck with the fish!” And he bounced away like a person about to own the world, his stride a flight. I knew his kind.

“Kenny,” I yelled, “read the biographies backward, chapter by chapter, he gets younger and younger and richer and richer!”

He waved from the corner and said, “I’ll do it!” with such urgency that I was sure he would, probably later that day.

“Coming?” Eldon said from the driver’s seat.

“No. I’ll stay here. Pick up the papers and some vermouth, will you? Let’s do this right.”

“When do you want to leave?”

“I’ll be waiting for you at Lenore’s at ten,” I said.

“Still bent on repeating the past, eh?”

“What else is there? Not repeating anyway. Just get the stuff and be there at ten.”

As he left he said, “Don’t get hurt, Larry.”

So I went back upstairs and sat through the afternoon. The sun whitened the columns in front of the Sorenson building up at the university, then turned the windows golden, as I smoked and thought about the first time we took Lenore fishing.

She had been a primary friend of ours for a long time, coming to the readings and movies at the apartment for months before Eldon found out that she had never been fishing. In our eyes that was the perfect ticket. The next day we packed and picked her up near the Hub telling her we were going to Roberto’s House of Omelettes for coffee. When we had driven past Roberto’s without a glance, Eldon told her: “You need to go fishing.” Her response was quite different from Ribbo’s. When we took him fishing he had informed us that kidnaping was a federal offense and he hated fish. Ribbo had stayed in the tent both days eating Hershey bars. He ate them carefully, looking up from time to time to see if we were going to steal them from him. Lenore, when informed of her Uinta destination, had said: “Come on, really, Eldon? Fishing! Great!”

We had had an extra fishing license made out in the name of Blanche DuBois (a fact Ribbo had not liked at all), and when we pinned it to Lenore’s shirt, she climbed into the metaphor so quickly I wondered for a minute who the guides were here. “Why, boys,” she’d said, her accent gone in Mississippi, “Ah caint wait.”

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.