Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (9 page)

The next night Dotty showed up out of a dusty nowhere to punctuate what I still consider to be one of the most important periods in a life.

“How’d you get here?”

“Hitchhiked.”

“Why?”

“Rumor is you’re not engaged anymore and have reentered life. Do you know they don’t speak English down here?”

That is to say, this is when I began acting like a demented tourist (probably a redundancy), worrying about nothing but my suntan and Dotty’s suntan line. If we sat three minutes after breakfast, while I drank coffee and contemplated writing, the quick slip into fiction, Dotty became stricken with a virulent form of cabin fever.

“Let’s do something,” the line went.

“Try the dishes, Dot.”

“No. I mean
some
thing.”

We did things.

She hated to fish, so we swam and got into what is called serious drinking. We drank tequila until Dotty loved it. I didn’t mind it much myself, to be honest, because for the first little while I thought it helped my perspective. My perspective being exactly that of a man on a plane to a strange city who after his second cocktail looks out his first-class window and sees the green and gold grid of South Dakota arcanely cocked at eighty-five degrees. I remembered, as century plant alcohol escorted brain cells out of rooms in my head, Wesson teaching all those freshman comp sections: the Environment, Religious Dilemma, American Metaphor (a class about cars and baseball), and studying Chaucer. Yes, Wesson would make it. He was writing a creative piece, “The Unwritten Canterbury Tales,” for Royal. Wesson had even in a clever stroke started spelling Jeff, Geoff, which Royal took as pretty much a divine sign of his student’s genius and right to study Chaucer.

During these interludes of self-abuse, Dotty, as far as I could discern, thought of nothing. This isn’t fair I know, and sounds vindictive, which at this point, it is. The most intellectual of pursuits she had exhibited, thus far had been spelling words on my back at the beach. She’d describe the letters with her finger, and then say, “Well, what is it?” or “You’ll never get it.”

“Hamburger.”

“How’d you know?”

“Do me a favor from now on, say if you spell cheeseburger, or fries or something.”

“What?”

“Stick with all capitals or lower case and no script, all right?”

“Oh all right.”

Then I’d spell words on her back: heartburn, malaria, cirrhosis. Her back would go rosy through the tan as my fingers traced the letters.

She got “heartburn” and “cirrhosis” and said, “If you’re going to be morbid, I’m going swimming.”

I took her into town one day to eat my favorite Mexican dish: Chimi-chongas. It was right after her first day of sun so she covered herself generously with Noxema, and as she walked into the small Sombrero Cafe her smell sent every American tourist in the place back to the first lotion days of his childhood. It was a memorable Noxema moment, the entire place lost in reverie. To this day, the smell of that stuff brings that plum leotard into view, and, worse, I can no longer face the once beautiful fried face of Chimi-chongas.

Nights I could tell when she’d get drunk, because she’d forget the salt with her drink, and every once in a while she’d jam the lemon up to her face and munch on it for several minutes. The nights were hard on her because there was no electricity, and I’d tune in the radio drama from Albuquerque on my transistor, as soon as the sun set. During the day we only got one station from Penasco which we listened to compulsively, memorizing several of the hyperthyroid disc jockey’s favorite phrases. I think it unnerved Dotty a bit further that he only spoke Spanish, even the news, and then when it got dark the radio stations came out like stars: Omaha, Denver, Albuquerque, Salt Lake (which I refused to listen to), Phoenix, San Francisco, L.A., and they spoke English into our candlelight (which Dotty described as scary, not romantic), amid the boilerlike rush of the tide.

After the eight o’clock news which was mostly about three families that were kidnapped from Wells, Nevada by two dangerous convicts named Pierce and VanBuren, the radio drama came on and I’d rest my forehead on the tabletop looking at the floor, listening to whatever form the supernatural had taken that night.

Before the first commercial, Dotty would say nervously from her wicker chair, “Let’s do something.”

After only two days she had an amazingly sharp tan line.

The next evening as I stood again on the farthest wet stone surf casting, Dotty came down from the shanty and stood nearby. I don’t think she liked being alone. I was hurling my favorite spinner, a Mepps Sure-fire, the only trinket on which I’d snagged any fish at all, a couple of sand-trout and one small sea bass, and it got snagged. Picture me there, bending my rod backward, in some attempt I guess to haul in the entire bottom of this portion of the Gulf of California, my lips pursed, my eyes a larger conflagration than the reflected setting sun, at the end of my line. Finally after several back-racking jerks I threw the pole back on the rocks shattering my reel and entered the churning sea, following the fish line. My leg brushed against a rock and I felt the salty bite take flesh. Up to my neck then, and only feet from where the spinner leeched into the center of a rock-adhered mussel, I heard Dotty scream: “Larry! Larry!”

She was pointing at me as far as I could tell. Then thirty feet beyond me I saw the two fins up and down like the last grey merry-go-round. Holy Moly. I clambered out stumbling, leaving skin against every rock, emerging in a wash of wet clothes and stinging weeping lesions. Blood ran down my legs. We watched the two fins, as if at play, roll by. They might have been porpoises.

“Dotty,” I said snapping the fishline in my teeth, “This is not going to work.”

“Huh?”

“Your being here.”

“You don’t know how to live.”

My kindness extended itself into a vast, border-crossing silence.

The next morning we reentered the country, and in a red sunlight stopped when Why presented itself.

“Why are we stopping?” I got out. She followed. “It doesn’t bother me if you’ve stopped talking, Mr. Strange.”

The woman behind the counter answered, “Yes, this is Why.” as she had ten thousand times before and gave me a postcard. There has got to be a better reason I thought. Dotty bought a fudgesicle.

“You really are strange, mister,” she said as she got back in the truck.

At her request I dropped Dotty off in Phoenix with a friend of her brother’s. This young friend of her brother’s came to the door of his trailer and the most wizened version of deja vu came across his face that I’ve ever seen.

“Hello, Dorothy,” he said softly.

Dotty started to introduce me as playing some part in a fictional romance entitled “The International Affair.”

“We were fishing.” I explained. “They weren’t biting.”

Regardless, poor trailer-bound brother’s friend receded into a swampy state of mind not distant from my own. He had some stake in Dorothy.

It was when she said, “Larry here is just the neatest writer,” that I confirmed my incipient decision to change my life. Dot was pouring it on heavily in the air-conditioned trailer’s front room. I kept feeling the transiency of the walls, their flimsiness, one driver berserk on his own lost dreams could erase our little tinlike parlor drama entirely. I hadn’t heard her talk so antically before; our Mexican fiasco sounded like a beach party movie staring Richard Burton and Elizabeth, his former spouse, so finally, and probably because of my growing claustrophobic nausea for fiction, I interjected, “No way, Dotty, see you around.”

“When you bend over!” she said.

I burned off a good deal of the dross of recent encounters, including smugness, irony, and euphoria by listening to Garner Ted Armstrong all the speeding way to Flagstaff, where I stopped and sent Wesson a postcard: “You were right old Geoffrey; it was not to be. All three reasons. Plus fiction sucks. I have resigned myself, and am happy as a bell-hop here in Seattle. Good luck with the Tales. I know you’ll do a fine work. Cordially, Larry.” The other side of the card showed a man in a red lumberjack shirt being chased up a pine tree by two bears.

I continued up through the Navajo reservation’s badlands passing all the chromed trucks full of Indians. The government gave them thousands of acres of poisoned sand, not a weed in sight and said, “Do with this what you will. It’s yours, really.” A person could cast down his bucket a long time in a place like that and get nothing but sparks. Eldon should come down here and write an article; but these landscapes, framed so alkalinely in my windshield would never make the pages of
Arizona Highways
.

At 2:00
A.M.
I pulled my old green pickup into the sage ten miles into Utah, near the Coral Pink Sand Dunes, and rolled my sleeping bag out into the back. Lying there looking up at the same billion stars, I decided to shuck my recent affections. I decided to
do
things. Rodeos, perhaps. Western music for sure. Find the rungs of the ladder that lead a person to ride a snorting silver stallion into a saloon, things like that. There are things I haven’t seen; some instinctual events, pure from first flicker to final smoke, must, I thought as snakes slithered under the truck, still happen.

Outside Salt Lake the next day, however, more decisions were made for me. The most dangerous driver possible on these roadways, a woman in a bright yellow dress eating a chili dog with onions, and trying to execute, such a right word here, a left turn, turned into open-eyed me, head on. Glass broke.

At first I had been comforted by the fact that I had been standing still when assaulted and that there were a number of witnesses, but when I stepped out of the truck, the witnesses had transformed themselves into an unruly crowd. They were gathered around her since she was crying; everybody thought she was pretty badly hurt seeing all that chili on her yellow dress. When I heard them calling her by name, I realized I was in her neighborhood. I checked the damaged front end of my truck, and talked to her briefly while the mob stood behind her whispering dangerously. She was in incoherent grief for having ruined her dress. The whispering grew louder.

“Please,” I said, “Won’t you all cease casting these glances. This automotive tragedy is not my doing.”

Hearing this the woman in the yellow dress wailed loudly and the crowd took a step forward.

“Okay, halt!” I said scurrying to the truck. “Forget it!” I called to the woman over the heads of the advancing villagers. In my rearview mirror I could see a dozen people noting my license number.