Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (21 page)

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.

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.”

“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 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.

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.

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.