Free Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald by Ron Carlson Page A

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.

13

    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