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

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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Easy access is a source for a major portion of all the grief and regret that blindingly swarm this planet. Even now on the remote edges of all