Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (4 page)

My mother used to say, “Well there buddy, you’ve got another brand-new day. What are you going to do, blow it?” And I never see the dawn without thinking of her words. I’d been blowing the days lately. In a while, then, the pink would turn gold and the black-purple facade of the mountains would almost vibrate because of the nearness of the sun, and I would go outside and lean against the warm bricks of the building that faintly hummed from the boilers’ work, and I’d talk to the sun. “Just a second there, you unruly fool, I’m making my plans for the day …” But it would fly up anyway right into my eyes, as I said to myself, “Now, go ahead, make a plan, yes, for a plan, well …” Then I’d get the first adrenalin of the day rising like light through my blood. The birds, once spring started showing any faint interest, went absolutely wild during these sunrise moments.

Proctor, keeper of the morning shift, arrived at seven, and I got in my pickup and drove home.

Driving has always, for me, erased things. Thoughts blur like the view out the side window, and are soon, don’t you know, far behind. When I arrived home, for a moment I was fresh and untroubled, then some of my latter day confusions caught up. The bigger the problem the faster it arrived. Like a horny toad turned into a dinosaur by the vile radiation of my thinking, these problems were difficult to ditch. The larger ones, as I said, were never far behind; they took monstrous steps. It seemed that there in the fresh blue-grey light of dawn some of them had beat me home, perhaps because the first thing I saw when I got out of the truck once again was the orange croquet mallet in the back. I picked it up and pressed the flat mallet end to my forehead as Godzilla, the scaled question mark, pushed over buildings in my mind looking for a place to park: What, in the most mammoth sense of the interrogative, am I going to do? All I could gather together was the image of Raymond Burr on that island pointing at a crater, saying, “Look at the size of that footprint!”

Upstairs I found Eldon asleep, his helmeted-self slumped over like the last motorcyclist, one hand on the handlebar of the carriage return. He was wearing one of my shirts. I went to the fridge as ritual more than anything else, as inside there was still only a jar of Houbigant Mustard, a six pack of Rocky Mountain Beer, and the hammer that we used to defrost. Well there buddy you’ve got another brand-new day … I selected a beer and went back into the front room and sat down. Outside the birds were impersonating insanity or immortality, one of those significances, by singing a simultaneous medley of the history of all music. It would be hard to die on such a morning, I thought. In the other room I could hear the refrigerator coming in for a landing. I sipped and looked at the Rocky Mountain label: a lumberjack sitting on a log, smiling in those mountains, listening to the birds. He’s on drugs, I thought. Rocky Mountain will always be the worst, most tin-can-chemical beer in this solar system.

My watch, the cockeyed precision, dragging me around four hours ahead of time announced: noon. I had a class at 8:50; less than an hour away Banks waited for me in 209 Yates Hall. What would be his choice of weapons? Would he slap me with his handball glove?

I took another drink of the liquid alkali, and put my feet up on the coffee table. Across the room, my disabled American veteran roommate, the only genius besides Riddel I’d ever known, slept on the last page of his book. He’d been maniacally writing the book about his experiences in Viet Nam. Two publishers already wanted it, but they were not in his plans. He said he was only writing it to get all of that shit out of his goddamned way so he could start writing what he called simple expressions of warm enthusiasm for regional magazines, like
Connecticut Yankee
and
Arizona Highways
. He had a convicted disdain for book publishers and academic types. “They’d publish anything, and if it depressed people and made them sick so that they had to run in circles puking, good, as long as the money rolls in. Well, not my sickening book, they won’t!” He had nearly been killed in Saigon. He had been an apprentice mechanic; and one day while he was loading a B-52 with bombs, a crane pulley snapped, one fat metal bomb swung out of the hold gently, and touched Eldon upon the forehead like a magician’s wand. That’s not what he had written about, but he had told me it all in pieces over the year we’d shared our apartment. He had been in a coma for seven months and three operations. He awoke during the fourth to hear someone say they’d taken a cup of blood out of his brain. Then, left unable to talk he had had to relearn the whole messy thing. Now he received fourteen dollars every month and wrote his book, wearing the red football helmet most of the time because half of his skull was gone. I had felt his scalp where only skin lined each magic thought he had. Soft.

Robinson-Duff stirred from his hunchback dreams. He sat up, stretching, delicately withdrew his glasses from his face in the helmet, and rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”

“Twelve-twenty.”

“Less grief, what time?”

“Eight-twenty.”

“Good. Do you remember about the film?”

“Yeah, I still have to pick it and the projector up.”

“Well I told Ribbo and his pals, so we should have a nice crowd.”

“Did you tell them a dollar this time?”

“Yeah, they seemed to think it was okay. Is Lenore coming?”

“I don’t know.” I held up the beer. “Want a beer?”

“You could tell her she can bring druggy.”

“Gary, the pharmacist. No that’s not a good idea.” These thoughts are piling up, it seemed to me.

He got up and went for the bedroom, pulling off the red hat carefully. His head looked pale, delicate.

“You get off work tonight?” he asked, rubbing his head.

“Yes, Proctor’s son is filling in.”

“Good, but try and be back early will you, my sister, Evelyn is coming up from Nephi with her son. I want you to meet them.”

“Right. I will.”

“Well, don’t you have a class now or something?” Eldon said. He went into the bedroom.

“We’ll see,” I hollered, leaving, “Be sure to put up the movies sign!” As I crossed the front lawn, Eldon yelled down from the bedroom window: “Watch out for Mrs. Ellis. She’s prowling around with her cowboy son-in-law for the rent. I told her we’d have it tomorrow and she said she didn’t like it and was going to see you—since you ‘work.’”

“Wonderful.”

Mrs. Ellis, our landlady who lived one house down from ours, was sitting on the back bumper of my truck, while her son-in-law, one foot up on the fender, noted my license number. Approaching them, I thought there was a good chance I might be in the L’il Abner comic strip.

“Hi, Mrs. Ellis, how are you?”

“Got the license number on your truck, buster,” son-in-law said, pushing his cowboy hat back with his thumb as if he’d just done a day’s work.

“Been up to see that other one,” Mrs. Ellis interrupted. She always called Eldon the other one, because she thought he was strange in the helmet. “And he ain’t got it. You got the rent?”

“Why yes, ma’am. I’m on my way now to make a massive withdrawal from my resourceful bank account, but I have some other errands to run so why don’t I bring it over tomorrow, bright and early.”

“She means, have you got the rent now? I got the license plate of this truck, buddy.” Son-in-law, who only made appearances around rent day, always spoke as if he were chewing something.

“Buster, to you big boy.” I said. He took a step toward me and I skirted around the corner of the truck snatching the orange mallet in the process.

“Hey! Watch out!” he threatened, and Mrs. Ellis jumped up and started shaking her pointed fingers at me: hissing. For a while it was one of those scenes where every move he made I made the mirror move, keeping the truck squarely between us. I waved the mallet like the man on the tightrope that I was.

“Come on, boy.” Mrs. Ellis finally said after all three of us had gone around the truck twice and I had yelled “Tomorrow, bright and early!” six or seven times. She grabbed her son-in-law by the shirt and walked him away a piece before turning, and shaking both hands like six-shooters in my direction rattled, “We’re goin’ get the law on you no-goods.”

As they marched back to their house, I couldn’t help myself. “Tomorrow, bright and early!”

“Shut up, you.” he screamed back.

“Get yourself a hobby horse you black-hearted malevolency, you twerp!” That brought him back out the door and my way, but again I threw her into gear and backed out the driveway throwing gravel like intended buckshot under my truck in his direction. Why do things take these turns? I hadn’t thought a bad thought about Mrs. Ellis in weeks. When we first moved in she had taken a liking to me, and when I paid the rent would invite me in to read her J. Edgar Hoover letters, and ask me questions about “the other one.” She had a file full of letters from J. Edgar Hoover and John Philip Sousa. She had been born on the same day in the same year as Mr. Hoover, as she called him, and when she discovered creation’s design, she had begun sending him homemade socks every year on their birthdays. He sent her back letters of thanks saying how unique her actions were in a world like this. She knew Sousa from when he was a soda jerk, and always talked as though they had been lovers, but his letters, responses to her praise for his music, sounded awfully formal to me. Anyway I found all that stuff interesting, and never dreamed that this woman, who had even said once she’d make a pair of socks for me, would be relating to me in a law enforcement manner. I knew she was concerned about me and “the other one,” because she’d always ask, “What does he do all day up there?” And when I’d say, “Write,” she’d snap, “What do you mean?”

Once after towing Eldon’s car to a garage, she intercepted me as I carried the rope up to the apartment, and said, “Oh no you don’t. Just put that back in your truck.”

It was the only rope I had and I didn’t want it to get stolen, but she went on, “Three years ago Isson shot himself in that place and it cost me sixty-five dollars to clean the rug. I don’t know what you’re up to but just leave the rope in the truck.” So I expected some things, but never that it would be the form of war we now enacted.

With troubles sitting like illegal migrant workers in the back of the truck, no losing any of them, more getting on at every stop, I drove up to the university. I went to Yates Hall, but there were not many ways I could’ve entered Banks’s class. I stood there listening at the door, and I couldn’t go in. It was as unintelligible out there as inside. Poor deformed and misunderstood
Richard III
. Personal appearance plays a role in political and social success, the play tells us. Banks had me. At least our schism was the result of a tangible, real-world occurrence. Splitting over an idea, say whether or not the puns in
Lear
are worth writing about would have been too inconclusive, too abstract. Now, acts had been committed and there was no going back. The difficulty arose from the fact that there was also no going forward. While in diminishing quantities I do believe you can repeat the past, or at least say I do, I knew Banks wasn’t going to erase one backseat image from his photographic memory for several lifetimes. One of them mine. So after thirty minutes of standing by that vibrating door, I exited the building having made a permanent decision about Shakespeare’s tragedies: I wouldn’t be able to study them under Banks. Perhaps I wouldn’t study them at all. As I saw it I was walking down the last corridor of the university, but down there just a ways I could see Banks, like any three-headed dog, guarding the gate. I couldn’t get out, and the old Godzillian question: What now?

I found my course evaluation card and wrote, “This guy lives what he teaches!!!!” across the front and dropped it into the campus mail on my way, as I saw it, out.

This was a period in my life when all hitchhikers seemed to be Dotty Everest. I sometimes think she sat on the curb outside the driveway waiting for me to go somewhere. Oh I had paid her certain attentions, but that had been before I really knew her. We’d met, naturally, in the cafeteria line one Thursday during my Zelda period, which I am reminded is still enduring, and after a brief dialogue about the meatloaf, we spent the remainder of the weekend in Park City mining for gold and throwing smokey wine glasses against handy granite surfaces. I had initially been attracted to her by her plum leotards which she wore, I came to know, absolutely everywhere, trussed in some kind of athletic bra that made artillery shells out of what could have been pleasant breasts. Her ambitions toward dance I found agreeable, not knowing that to her it may as well have been tennis or weightlifting. And she thought it was her duty to be regarded as the “nut” her sorority sisters had named her, so she went around being dutifully zany, yet always, in the end, pulling down straight A’s. Is this to say a flirt? I’m not sure. Regardless, there she was again, thumb out, plum leotards and a loose red skirt. She did
look
like a dancer.