Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (11 page)

After settling at the ranch, I called Proctor out at the power plant and he arranged for me to be the graveyard fill-in man, when someone needed to skip their shift. “How was Mexico?” he asked.

And I went to work at the Flying W. Nicky gave me two sets of light green work clothes that I really liked, despite the fact that the oval patch above the heart pocket was blank on one, and said “Ernie” on the other. On the back of the shirts in something like the Coors beer script, dark green letters read: The Flying W Garage. At this point in the link of events that I knew as my current life, things became extremely causal. I would have been better to have held on to my hat, so to speak. Like I said, I no longer blame big Nicky solely, but I should have been suspicious when they quickly pulled my only green truck into the garage right away and began the malicious tinkerings.

I was assigned to the pumps which I enjoyed a great deal. When the bells clanged their deafening clangs (it was really a clang!-cla-!, the second clang not quite making it) I knew with a reassuring certainty that they meant me. I learned quickly where the gas tank is on every make of car, front, back, hidden on the expensive cars, blatant on the trucks, hard to reach, convenient, and I took what was becoming pride in this simple knowledge. I bantered with motorists. Oil. Windshields. Water. Mileage. I was fast and friendly. But sitting in the office reading Nicky’s greasy copies of
Bachelor
and
Layton’s Auto Parts Catalogue
, listening to KTNT play truck-driver ballads, I should have been suspicious of Big Nicky and the Waynes as they whispered over my truck out in the garage. Then Paul Harvey came on and reported the news that Pierce and Van Buren the “Nevada Kidnappers” had been caught in Jackpot, and it was a great relief to me because hearing their names on the radio simply served my imagination up with great portions of those desperate Mexican evenings with Dotty. Good riddance to dangerous criminals.

I sat on Nicky’s desk and watched them whisper around my truck. The three of them looked like three carnival ride operators whispering about the black gearbox of the tilt-a-whirl after a seventeen-year-old girl in a dress climbs aboard. From time to time they’d glance my way and I’d look back down at “Aurora,”
Bachelor’s
glandularly disturbed foldout, while the radio played, “Kiss Me at the Wheel,” a morbid song whose point was lost in shattering crescendos of twang. I should have been suspicious. But retrospect, like all weapons a sore loser, brandishes way too late, after the fight is over and all the combatants have gone home tired or injured to eat and rest and the battlefield is strewn with the bodies and innards of the sore loser’s friends, sucks.

I didn’t really like the Waynes from the beginning. They treated me as if pumping gas were very like having scales for skin. They were Nicky’s mechanics. Oh, they came in mornings and would say, “How’s the kid today?” But I got the feeling it was because Nicky had told them to. Besides I overheard Wayne Hardell telling Nicky not to tell me about the bowling team. The other Wayne, Wayne Gunn, asked me dozens of times what my name was again, and when I told him, he’d say, “Okay, Ernie.” and laugh a slim laugh. Actually he was a cheerless soul who, if you asked him if he had a match, would respond, “Who wants to know?”

I couldn’t figure out what Darrel Teeth did or if he worked for Nicky at all. He came around quite often, driving a different car every time. One morning he pulled up and asked to see Nicky.

“He’s right inside.”

Since there was no business at the moment, I went back in with Teeth, whom I remembered seeing at the Black Heron where he hung out with Dr. Philosophy, Riddel. Nicky was inside stirring a load of powdered milk into his coffee as always with his screwdriver while he looked over the credit card slips as if they were marked cards.

“I need two more inspection stickers, Nicky,” Teeth said.

“
Two
more?” Nicky counted to himself: “Two, Three, Five last week. It’s getting tight when you want twenty a month, Darrel.” Nicky looked at me. “Just a minute,” he said to Darrel. “Larry, go out and give Wayne a hand.”

I went out and stood by Wayne Hardell who stooped under a Saab, the only other car I’d seen them working on.

“Nicky told me to give you a hand,” I said when Hardell looked up at my alien presence.

“Give me a hand!” He did a pretty good version of disgusted incredulity, “Why you wouldn’t know pliers from a crescent.” He laughed at his own cleverness. “Go sweep the driveway. That thing over there is a broom.”

“Listen you illiterate greaseball, I’m only interested in doing good honest work and learning what I can. I do not desire to be treated to these simpleminded insults.”

Wayne hit me with the wrench.

There were no more homicidal interludes at the station. Hardell avoided me and I him, and the other Wayne cast hateful glances around the place like jagged pieces of metal. He had the most expressive eyebrows I’ve ever seen.

One day Virgil Benson came in. He didn’t need gas, but I topped off his tank (Volkswagen—in the hood) for forty-one cents. “Eldon told me I could find you out here, I wondered if maybe you want to see a couple of old movies out at the Rainbow.”

“Gee, I don’t know, Virgil. I’ve kind of given up my analytical ways.”

“That’s what Eldon said. But these are great films.”

“What are they?”

They turned out to be
Rhapsody in Blue
with Robert Alda as George Gershwin and
20,000 Years in Sing-Sing
with James Cagney and Bette Davis. They
were
great. I’ll always remember if I ever make a movie to have the credits run across someone’s hands on the keyboard, close up, and blast people out of their seats with beautiful music. In the other film Cagney took the rap for Davis and there was a beautiful, soft black and white scene near the end in which she actually visits his cell. At the very end, as they turn the electricity on, the prisoners file into superimposed view. The number of years each is in for flies off the screen and then the total appears in a crash of dramatic music: 20,000 years! Virgil and I went for beers afterward and it was pleasant for me to be in such clearly good company, but I made a vague resolve anyway, to avoid any other dangling ends of my former life.

Then one day DeLathaway came in. He needed a tire changed, and as I did the work we chewed over the demise of the couplet. He watched me the whole time, looking a little scared at what I had become. What he looked was “appalled.” I understood all his weird behavior, but when he paid me and said, “There you go,” it affected me. It is a fearful thing when people cease relating to you as your potential, and start talking to your actuality; it was too clear DeLathaway had lost any ideas of me being a perfect poet.

Being the rancher that I was I lost touch with Eldon and everybody else for a while, and then I began finding Eldon’s articles in some magazines. There was a review of a Walt Disney movie, and a warm evaluation of Disney in general appeared in
The Utahn
. A lyrical piece on the value of winter appeared in the spring issue of
Mountain Calendar
. I was glad to see him succeed, though finding his writing in the various magazines was mildly distracting, like getting unsuspected mail, or phone calls at 4:00
A.M.
when you try to make your voice clear and claim absurdly to have never been asleep. “Oh no, I was up … working.” Things that send you into emotional U-turns.

Losing one’s life can mean many things. At this stage in the outwardly placid Flying W game, I lost track, control, and significant other portions of my own. I’ve never seen a service station, garage, where more whispering went on than at Nicky’s. I came to think the W stood for whispers. Nicky and Teeth had a little confab every two or three days; the Waynes were always at each other’s ear out in the garage; and nearly every week a patrol car or two would pull in and Nicky would go out and lean on the window of the car and buzz with the cop for half an hour. I became pretty obviously in the way. Nicky was getting as tired of asking me to “check the yard” as I was of strolling around outside with nothing to do. So I called him aside.

“Say Nicky?”

“Yeah, Larry boy?”

“Is there a lot of whispering during the swing shift? I mean do the employees gather in small groups of two and three and, you know, whisper?” Nicky himself thought it a good idea if I could change shifts.

“It’s a promotion. You’ll have your own keys and get to lock up.”

“Oh boy, Nicky, gee whiz.”

“Really, because I trust you so much.”

“Wonderful.”

“I mean it, Larry, honest.”

So I started working alone, four to midnight, locking the joint up. Twice Proctor called and I went out to the power plant and disrupted the log until dawn. But mainly, I’d get off at twelve, go buy the papers and head for the Black Heron and drink beer until two when they closed. Darrel Teeth was there a lot with Riddel, but they ignored me. I think Riddel would have liked to talk with me a couple of times, but Teeth would steer him away. By two I would have formulated some kind of plan. I’d put more money in the juke box, D-7, Barbar Durrant singing “Leave of Absence,” then exit while the music was still playing and hitchhike up to Lenore’s apartment house where I would deposit cards, poems, letters, heads of lettuce, books, once a first edition of
This Side of Paradise
, and occasionally champagne in her car.

Once I procured four jars of poster paint and climbed up her trellis. I already had a vast landscape in mind, and it was looking very promising despite the fact that I had to paint everything backwards on the window, when a lights-out police car pulled up to the curb as Lenore and Alice, an older woman who lived in the building also, came out of the door. Lenore evidently had been able to hear the brush strokes on the window.

“You!” Alice said. She had learned over the past year a reasonable fear of what I might do next. The cop, Officer Sawyer, swaggered up the yard.

“Down here, buddy. Let’s go.” he said. I contemplated a paint spill, but then climbed down. “Oh,” he echoed Alice, “It’s you. Into prowling now, eh?”

“Look Mr. Sawyer,” I said producing the paint and brushes, “I’m no prowler. These girls will vouch for me. Why she’s my fiancee. We’re in love.” I looked at Lenore. She was luminous, standing there arms folded in her robe.

“Is that right?” the officer asked her.

“I know him. He’s not a prowler, sir, sorry.”

“No problem, ma’am.” Sawyer turned to me. “But you, you watch your step. After all, it is two-thirty in the morning.” When he had gone, I turned to the girls. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.” Alice started to go back in. “I really am sorry, Alice.” She closed the door.

“She’s still upset about the tupperware party.”

“I thought they all got kind of a kick out of that.”

“You would.”

“Ah, Lenore, don’t. I’m simply trying …”

“Larry, I’m engaged to Gary. I want you to stop leaving all that stuff in my car, and leave me alone.”

“These are sentiments you don’t mean. Didn’t you get all the cards I sent you before I left for Mexico?” My tennis shoes were soaked from describing arcs in the wet lawn.