Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (28 page)

Then he asks me what my plans are and I tell him something different every visit. Yesterday: sailing. People are supposed to go to sea, I think. He tells me I should go on the stage where aberrant behavior is encouraged. I tell him watch out I might. Then Zeke takes Eldon’s clipboard and tries to read it aloud, and yesterday Evelyn asked Eldon to dinner. He’s coming tonight. Before we leave each time, Eldon calls over one of the other veterans and introduces me as the guy who ran over him.

Well, I’ve run over a lot of things, I suppose. The best had been the trustee orchard and the worst had been Lenore and portions of myself. I have thought for a long time that it was paramount, essential, to be the best or the worst. Partly out of the superlative viewpoints those extremes offer, the amazing vistas, the thrilling false euphorias, roads not taken, roads that, I guess, should not be taken, and especially because of the distances from crowds. The middleground is so goddamned crowded. To be like everyone else, yikes; that is the cardinal sin. That was what I had thought. Tonight I feel as if I’ve been taking the high ground so long that I am dizzy, fatigued, and in need of a map.

Nothing should be approached part-time, ordinarily, piecemeal, or sensibly; this is also what I had once thought. I do know that it is not that amusing when we first learn life to be the mile, when we’ve been running the hundred-yard dash. I’m looking now, I guess, for a new stride.

Perhaps I’ve made the first step. I went out tonight, earlier, and covered the tomato plants with burlap in anticipation of the second frost of the season. It seems a positive motion, even if I did have to have Evelyn show me how to do it correctly.

Evelyn and Zeke are visiting, and we await Eldon who will join us for charcoaled steaks and liters of red wine which are breathing on the trailer steps right now. My green truck sits patiently beside the trailer, my own home. The river is full and makes a sound like wind in high trees, and I consider time. That things require time is a concept I am just becoming familiar with.

It is twilight again; the shadows are about to spread and merge into that glowing version of first darkness. My recent past seems the meeting place of two confusing words: touched and touching: crazy and tender. Across the river the city skyline stands like a chess game. The rancherly dooryard is weed-thick, but the garden has been kept to order by Evelyn and Zeke while I spent my summer vacation in prison. Evelyn wears a white sweater tonight, a practical and lovely touch, a thing women do. I am just moving into its appreciation.

As we stroll around the ranch, I avoid stepping on the weeds and reflect. I’ve been into Fitzgerald and loss for awhile now, and pretty successfully it seems to me as I count my friends. I was the moth and he was the flame, and I can wish forever, which I undoubtedly will do (and plan on in a sense), but I can never reverse it. I would rather have been him than known him. I only wonder now if I can get into “regaining” or even find its advocate. One thing I won’t regain is my degree. Let it go, I think. Having a degree ahead of you all your life implies a future, another concept I might flirt with soon.

For instance, I’m going to buy a piano which I will lean on and Zeke will learn to play. Evelyn already knows how, a blessing. And I anticipate times will again become sunny, lucky, and every pair of trousers I take off the closet door in the morning will have three dollars in the pocket, and eventually there will be a time when kids come up and drink out of the hose and I squirt the last one so he remembers me, and women I’m related to will bake cakes in the shapes of rabbits and bears and castles to celebrate minor occasions, such as my birth.

If I have converted my heart into a warehouse, fine. I peek in from time to time and have the pangs. If you challenge my ability to store pang-inspiring material, or think I am kidding, I am disappointed. All my life I have been plagued, which is a serious pestilential verb, by my peers, which is a silly name for folks my own age, who have mistaken my sense of humor as a frivolous quirk. It is, in fact, the central sense in Larry Boosinger’s survival. It is the only sense I know.

I hadn’t been a great actor, or soldier, or even the only other valid thing, a great criminal. I had been a Dangerous Convict which, as you know, is not quite the same thing. Oh, I blame Nicky and those guys who have not ever been properly squelched and are into some version of automotive crime even now, but as my father noted, my blame won’t fix a lot. And in a way I’m glad I had the
quality
of trouble I had. Everybody allots thirty-five percent of
his
time to troubles and worry, heartache in general, and I would have loathed using my thirty-five percent on, say, being refused credit at Sears or not receiving my license plates on time, when I could have had prison. I really mean that.

And I don’t blame Scott Fitzgerald. That would be wrong. His were simply the most alluring, thrilling lies I’d ever heard. They still are.

I don’t know about the final test; you know, where I meet Wayne Hardell coming out of the Rialto Theatre in three years and our eyes meet and we stop on the sidewalk and perhaps he puts out his calloused hand. Perhaps he’s forgotten or grown out of his chronic venomous urges, and I will stand in this world, pedestrians flowing by on either side … And I will probably extend my own hand. Why not? Recognition is a compliment, and if it is true that one is known by his enemies, then I should think it proper that Hardell identify me.

In the kitchen sink hibachi the coals are warming satisfactorily, and Evelyn and I sit in the riverbound Studebaker watching leaves float by in shifting constellations on the river. Zeke trots around the yard waving his grape popsicle like a pistol, singing a melody that he makes up as he goes along.

A large, misshapen jack-o-lantern guards us all from the top of this old car; the candle glow just becoming visible in the dusk. I have not yet begun to court Evelyn, but I suspect I will in time, taking my time with new care. It is difficult to be perfect in this world, but I think there should still be attempts. If things don’t assemble themselves similarly to the things in old movies, then perhaps they shouldn’t. Zeke has found a horny toad and he brings it over on a leash he’s made from string. “His name is Salt Lake City,” he says. Zeke’s hair is four cowlicks and a part. I’ve started reading again:
The Lives of the Great Composers
, and Zeke and I have set up an elementary school for one on weekends, and we’re learning about the stars which are not at all the same. One of Zeke’s first paintings is already taped to my refrigerator door. It is a house. You can tell because of a large green square which is a window.

While Evelyn and I talk about the coming winter, three men I knew in prison approach in a canoe. They are dressed in denim and paddling hard like incensed Dutch sailors late for the discovery of a new world. Their eyes are full of wonder. Their mouths are open. A man who worked with Spike and me on landscape sits in the middle, lower than the other two. They pause a moment from manifest destinies, and, holding their dripping paddles aloft, this October, they wave.

First published as a Norton Paperback 1984