Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (22 page)

Every drugstore window in Roosevelt was covered with the dynamite posters about the Drag Race-Demo Derby Spectacular.

At the Day-Night Market we went in to purchase our reservation permits as always and stood in line behind eleven deer hunters dressed for Viet Nam in green and brown camouflage fatigues. A couple had added the fillip of shoe-polish to their faces. Eldon asked me if we should tell them the war was over, and I asked him back if he was sure it was. The hunters looked at his helmet, and I could see them wonder if perhaps he had found some new deer-lure. One guy looked, through his shoe-polish, strongly like Salvatore from the prison laundry. We exchanged glances like pointed fingers, but since he didn’t extend five, I didn’t say anything. I was pretty sure it was he, but when we came out, the hunters were all gone.

We gassed next door to the Day-Night. A kid came out, his blond hair shooting from under his greasy green John Deere hat.

“What you got there?” Eldon pointed to a lowered, window-less ’59 Chevy parked aside the garage. It was obviously the car whose tailfins had inspired the SST. On the side was a huge hand-painted numeral: 12.

“You ever heard of a stock car?” The kid swiped across the windshield with a rag.

“What do you think this is, friend?” Eldon continued to surpass himself. The kid was walking around the Valiant now, appraising it, wiping the windows occasionally. I winced in memory of my own self-destructive window-washing days, when Lila would moan and rock in her auto.

“Hell, this ain’t bad.” He looked at Eldon’s hat.

“Correct.” Eldon walked the kid over to the Chevy. “Who do you drive for?”

“What do you mean?”

“Good. I work for Nicky too.” Eldon went back deep into the garage and emerged shaking up a spray-paint can. He kneeled outside the faded red Valiant and began spraying. I stepped out to see this.

“You drive for Nick, too?” The kid was amazed.

“Sure. Only this time (just between me and you) I might be going for the win.” Eldon stood up from his artwork. It was a slanted “88.” “He’s not quite paying me enough to ditch this sweet mother.” He opened his arms as if to embrace the rusted car. “Name’s Rocky; what’s yours?”

“Russ. Russell Case. Glad to meet you.”

Eldon circled the car like a pool player figuring his next shot. He sprayed an “88” on the trunk and another on the passenger side. “I like the number, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

Eldon came back around and punched the kid playfully. “I like it because it reads the same upside down which is how I finish a lot of these here drag-race demo spectacles. Ha. Ha. Eh, Russell Case? But this time,” Eldon handed the kid the paint can and we entered the car, “I’m going for the win! See you day after tomorrow!”

Eldon floored it and threw just enough gravel to anchor Russ’s eyebrows in doubt. He turned to me. “The seeds of dissension. Did you see him check my helmet?”

“Upside down, eh?”

“Sometimes.”

We passed the Jug Hollow Resort, a large tourist inn run by the Utes, one of the few Indian-owned businesses. It was shaped like a mountainous wigwam and featured a pool and a golf course. A gigantic Indian statue stood out front holding a tomahawk aloft. The Indian would have been a good rival for Allison Hayes, who played in
Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman
, a film which no teenage boy should be allowed to witness. Across the face of the tomahawk it said:
WELCOME ENGLISH DEPARTMENT RETREAT.
I slumped in the seat and moaned. It was a valid moan, sounding evidence to the fact that there were some emotional powers I had not yet lost.

Five miles further Eldon stuck his arm out and turned left onto a dirt road which we followed for ten miles, raising a rolling trail of dust behind us. Another left turn put us on a two-rut road that ascended through a forest of aspens, green and gold with October. After fording a stream that washed the hubcaps, Eldon pulled up in front of a series of shacks annexed like spokes on a wheel. The air here was green and gold too. It was openly a fall afternoon, the sun soft and warm in the hills, the trees whispering, trading shadows right up the side of the mountains, into the high pines and the dark ravines and canyons, and then back down again under the aspens. Five thousand feet above us, north, I could see the new snow mixed with old on the talus running to the peaks of Gilbert and Emory mountains.

When we got out of the car we could hear piano notes coming from inside one of the shacks. “Mr. and Mrs. Night-horse took care of me during the summer,” Eldon said. “And now we’re going to do them one favor.” He went on to tell me about William Nighthorse who owned the only baby grand piano on the reservation. He had been a musician all his life, learning piano tuning from an old man named Levitre in Salt Lake, and as a teenager Nighthorse had played the piano and violin along with silent movies in Rexburg, Idaho. Mrs. Nighthorse taught piano to Indian children.

Eldon and I leaned against trusty old 88 for a moment listening to the piano notes falling around us. He removed his helmet and put it on the seat and replaced his glasses. His ears, ultrapale, white, bothered me as do most small porcelain objects, things that if you drop, you must purchase. The fringe of his hair was darkened by sweat. The music focused for a minute as Nighthorse, himself, stepped out of his shanty looking like Basil Rathbone. He was the first seventy-year-old man I’ve ever met who was six foot six.

“Writerman!” Nighthorse laughed and shook Eldon’s hand. “And this must be Larry.”

I shook his large hand. “My wife has a student right now. In awhile we’ll go in for refreshment. Would you like the tour?” He had a scar from his left eye to the corner of his mouth.

“Larry needs to see the fish,” Eldon said.

Nighthorse put his fatherly arm around Eldon and they led me around the house, on a dirt path, through a flourishing garden. Nighthorse paused and pulled three apple-sized radishes from the end of a row. He rinsed them in a narrow clear bypass stream and handed us each one. We continued through an aspen grove and up the path across a meadow. I could hear running water. We hiked up a short incline under the first pines and stood at the edge of a small pool. Nighthorse pointed at the middle and I could see the teeming backs of a thousand trout climbing into air.

“What?”

“This is the Nighthorse Hatchery.” Eldon said. “Come over here.”

Below the green pond, Nighthorse had three basins the size of bathtubs and in each, one monstrous trout. Lunkers. They lay in the bottom, not moving as has always been the prerogative of the monsters in any species. I guessed each at about eighteen pounds.

“Red. Buster. Sammy.” Nighthorse named each. “They stay. Pets. Buster has been photographed eleven times.”

“He was on the cover of last year’s
Guide
,” Eldon added. “He’s a beauty all right.”

“Check Sammy’s lip,” Nighthorse said.

I kneeled and looked the big fish in the face. His lower jaw was separated in three places, testimony of his ability to avoid the frying pan.

“Handsome fish.”

Bill Nighthorse did not comment. He was watching dust that was circling and rising and circling again above his empty corral. The whine of an engine flapped up to us, and through the dust we could see a fenderless hot rod sliding around the corners of the fence. The driver was making a reasonable attempt to catch his own tail. We watched him make four more furious laps, then dizzy, spin out, reverse, back out of the dust ring, jump up on the roof of the car, down to the ground and bury his head in the hood.

“Junior?” Eldon ran his hand through his fragile hair.

“Yes.”

Junior resumed his racing, zooming this time the other way, to unwind, I suppose.

On the way back to the house, Eldon tossed the last bit of radish into the fish pond and there was a suitable uproar, trout climbing on each other like seals on a rock.

Eldon explained that Junior was Nicky’s newest protége, reconditioning used cars with the Waynes, and now he was one of Nicky’s drivers. Bill Nighthorse himself said that he never interfered in the lives of his sons, but he was a little concerned about Junior, his youngest. Eldon promised the senior Nighthorse that we would woo Junior back to common sense, a domain I hoped we too would arrive at soon.

As we entered the dooryard Mrs. Nighthorse’s student, a young girl with dominating braids, was leaving on the back of her brother’s motorcycle. Mrs. Nighthorse came onto the porch and greeted us. Eldon fetched his gift copy of
Architecture West
out of our cluttered backseat and presented it to her.

“Hello, La.”

We went into the manifold shanty to a sitting room adjacent the grand piano, as was everything else in the clean residence. The walls were all bookshelves, and the furniture modern. There were no antlers on the wall, no wagon-wheel coffee tables. These Indians are letting me down, I thought over my glass of vermouth. Nighthorse and Eldon had martinis and we chatted about Junior’s new enthusiasms until Junior himself came home. La asked him to sit and play “An American in Paris” for us as the afternoon failed.

After dinner, La’s quiche and asparagus, we all had a pleasant roundtable in the den, another annex. Junior, his black hair still bearing the furrows from his comb, spoke animatedly about his “career” as Nicky’s employee and the driving opportunities it afforded. Bill Nighthorse sat arms-folded in his leather chair smoking Riordan cigarettes from France.

“He’s part Indian himself,” Junior said.

“Who said?” Eldon asked.

“He did.” Junior was hooked.

“Can you tell people you drive for him?”

“I’m supposed to be an independent.”

“Suppose it’s crooked?”

“It’s a stock-car race,” he said, standing up. “Nick helps me out.” He went outside and we heard his car, wheels and a throttle, in a seizing cough that grew wider, ate the house and, swallowing, was gone, narrowing as he moved to the highway and the bright lights of Roosevelt. This vibrating show of fidelity added to my awe of Nicky. I was beginning to think of him as I think of the federal government: large, amorphous, and everybody I was meeting worked for him.

“Don’t worry, La; Bill,” Eldon said. “This boy can be made right. He’ll be present at Nick’s demise.”

“I hope so,” she said. “I hope so. It is not the purpose of my home to be a place where my son and husband can argue.” Bill Nighthorse sat calmly, smoking.

La played the piano and sang a long song about wind and vistas. I liked being reminded of these larger distances, the broad basin of eastern Utah, the Uinta Mountains, the only range in the United States of America that runs east and west, a genuine Continental Divide spoiler. The only thing about La’s song that nagged at me was the reference to the future in every chorus. The future; life goes on and we get an opportunity to make the same mistakes twice.

When Eldon and I rose to leave, it was dark. Nighthorse came out to the car and handed Eldon and me white envelopes. There were four flies in each. They looked like pheasant feathers. “Thanks,” he said. He sealed my fingers shut again with his handshake.

Eldon put his helmet back on. We’ll see you at the races. We’ll be the men with the moustaches in number eighty-eight.”

Like any stock car, Eldon’s Valiant high-centered three times on the high switch-backs of the logging road that led us finally into a clearing about midnight. On the way up we listened to a radio drama which was about marriage and embezzlement, and to the news of circus animals biting people in the Denver airport. It is hard to believe there are no more circus trains to derail, allowing people to run from lions in the streets of their neighborhoods. Now it all happens at airports. It was fitting that we should high-center; we were cruising around the Uinta Mountains at about twelve thousand feet. I’d get out and rock the car while Eldon gunned it on the forward tilt, and the Valiant would slough off the center hump in the old road leaving a scar and a smear of oil.

Finally Eldon stopped the car in an opening in the trees. The clearing was an old log-loading station. A tremendous ancient scaffold leaned to the moon, and the whole area was cushioned by sawdust. The trees here were all new, about seven-feet tall. Eldon built one of his small fires—“Not enough light to get shot by, hell, this is Indian country”—and we had a camp. I erected a clothesline, and hung a towel on it. It looked good hanging there in firelight. The air was cold as stars, but I knew I had to sit up awhile and read the papers and have vermouth. Some things have to be done right.