Free Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald by Ron Carlson

two days, using the breaks to escape to the rocks and fling an assortment of the most unlikely, gaudy steel and plastic lures onto mussel snags, pretending all the time that this actually had some relationship to stream fishing which is a lot to pretend. Stream fishing had made me whole more than once and would again. I hated losing those lures in this gulf. When the tide would go out, I’d rush onto the furthest slick stone and flop about in the foam searching for glimpses of the fluorescent orange gimmicks. I never found a one.
    Then the fifth start took, and nine hours later I had a long chapter. It meant more in terms of momentum than storyline. The next day I worked all day, and was feeling so good about our universe and the fatigued exhilaration it offers, that I only got up from the machine occasionally to stride around the room raising my arms and roaring like a lion.

12

    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