Driving on the Rim (12 page)

Clarice came to me only occasionally, for allergies at first. When she married, she began to see me more frequently, initially for chronic indigestion and then for various other stress-related ailments, hives and insomnia mostly. She moved around various county situations, and her husband had a dangerous job in a mine that paid quite well, so I didn’t think financial issues were driving her problems. But she was a worried young woman and not candid with me about her marriage. We had become good acquaintances, which was not ideal for objectivity, necessarily, or candor. Worrying about her felt inappropriately parental.

I was told early in the days of my practice that the battered housewife was the bread and butter of the general practitioner. While this may have been an overstatement—sports physicals, pointless reassurances for things caused by viruses, and flock shooting generalized pain were more remunerative—it was disturbing how many women came to me with injuries that did not match the explanations. Clarice appeared the morning after our four-day rodeo with the customary facial contusions and a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. A nosebleed that won’t stop is a serious problem, and a CBC indicated she had lost quite a bit of blood. This necessitated a very discomforting procedure after chemical cold packs and pressure had failed to stop the flow. The abrasions to Clarice’s face made clear the sort of injuries that had led to the bleeding, which she ascribed to the dry mountain air. She was very uneasy about my moving her head around to get a better view of the nasal vestibule, as though flinching from the possibility of further blows. I was able to identify several bleeding sites with the speculum, one requiring cauterization. This, while not pleasant, obviated packing the nasal passages with cotton, which required twisting the material into place at the cost of considerable patient suffering.

I asked who abused her and got a remarkably philosophical reply made more dramatic by the condition of her face. She seemed ashamed of what had happened and may have explained her hostility to me whom she’d known for a long time. She said, “It’s not abuse if you saw it coming.”

“Are you saying you had it coming?”

“No, I said I saw it coming.”

“And you didn’t get out of the way.”

“Right.”

“And since you didn’t get out of the way you share responsibility for what happened to you?”

“Right.”

I said, “I don’t get it.”

She said, “You don’t have to get it. It’s not your life.”

“Clarice! I don’t believe this! I’m trying to help.”

She began to cry. What was most painful was the thought that when I had first known her, when she had problems with the law and was just
another reckless girl having not yet learned to conform and lead a regular life, she would have never put up with this. I had the fleeting idea that her problems arose from being domesticated and that she had been safe as a wild girl but was endangered as a wife.

Our dialogue would grow less formal on her ensuing visits. Some of it was even lighthearted: she reminded me that when she’d first met me I was actually excited to run her hot dog stand. But the comfort was short-lived. I had noticed that as battery went on, the injuries seemed to have migrated to less obvious places, which in my mind aggravated the anger with cruelty. On one visit, Clarice came in almost cheerily and sat down. She had put on weight, though a shadow of former girlishness could still be discerned. I at first mistook it for flirtation, but it was just a part of her self that still survived. In showing me the bruising around her midriff, her modesty seemed touchingly out of place. Once again I made my pitch for counseling, rescue services, restraining orders—and got nowhere. Nevertheless, she continued coming for her injuries, which she showed me with a rueful smile. It was driving me crazy in an abnormal, disorienting way, as though I were falling in love with her. I wished I understood this wild and emotional feeling, which was in some part the wish to protect her, and in another, the queer intimacy engendered by examining and treating this parade of lacerations. There came a point at which I understood that I was not handling this as well as I should, that my rising emotions were inappropriate to the caring detachment proper to a good physician; I had known her as a youngster and she had met me in the twilight of my foolishness. I was losing my objectivity and feeling far too strongly about Clarice’s situation, into which, as she herself had pointed out, I had no business interfering; my job was to provide medical treatment, period. To the turbulence of my emotions, therefore, was added the indignity of rejected friendship. As to the possibility of these matters altering my life forever, the timing could not have been worse.

Clarice now worked at the county courthouse researching titles; she had been there since finishing her probation for something not major, shoplifting I think, making few friends among her coworkers, who found her girlishness unappealing. Clarice’s husband was probably a drug user of some sort, a man who also consoled himself by drinking, consoled
himself for enduring a lousy life in a platinum mine south of Columbus in exchange for high pay. I tried to offer Clarice advice and understanding, all of which was smiled away. I had at that time in my life and career an inadequate idea of what my responsibilities were, and I saw so many people doing things that were not good for them that I had grown quite detached—or at least detached once I had dropped my formulaic, avuncular comments and called it a day. I got rid of the little moustache. My colleagues seemed to know what was going on; in fact, Clarice had seen some of them when she thought I knew too much about her situation. I will say on my behalf that their angry wishes for the husband were unlawful. Clarice’s worst physical problems were not visible as bruises would be but were the less apparent somewhat crippling effects of having limbs twisted. Physical therapy was out of the question because “he” wouldn’t pay for it and besides “it’s nothing I can’t handle.” My attempts to learn anything more just reinstated her sullenness and reminded me that I had gotten too close to her. I had adopted a pleading tone, which only made things worse. She ceased to seem like a friend or even a longtime patient. With a consummate lack of professionalism, I found that my feelings were hurt. I felt rejected.

“Do you have family in the area?”

“No.”

“Where do they live?”

“Harlowton.”

“That’s forty miles.”

“That’s what I said. I don’t have family in the area.”

“Are your parents living?”

“I don’t know.”

That, such as it was, was our last conversation.

Cody and Clarice lived in an old railroader’s house in a ravine crowded with such houses, a high-dollar muscle car in the driveway. I said, “Why the gun?” It was three o’clock in the morning. Cody was the one who had called me; he said there had been an unfortunate development. He sat on the edge of a well-worn brick-red sofa with protective plastic on its back and several cigarette burns on its arms. He wore acid-washed jeans, which were too small for him, and pushed a roll of fat up under his
T-shirt. He was holding a cookie, which he slowly consumed. The pistol he dangled from one hand was chromium plated with a concealed hammer. From time to time, he slid a latch and the cylinder tumbled from the frame, bringing the cartridges and their primers into view. He turned the cylinder slowly with a finger from the other hand and seemed to be counting the bullets. “I told myself she didn’t make it I was going down the same road.” I didn’t say anything. He flipped the cylinder back into place and held the gun more firmly, against his thigh. “I don’t need to live and I got the grit to see I don’t.” I didn’t know why he needed to tell me this, and I took it that he was stalling. I wanted him to get on with it. “But,” he sighed, “it’s not easy. Deserving it don’t make it easier.” My silence seemed to make him indignant. Getting me to talk to him might have been his idea of a way back into the human race, but I meant to help as little as possible.

Cody rested the revolver in his lap and watched me try to save Clarice’s life, a task I had no chance of accomplishing: she was already dead. The poor girl had been dragged up into a chair beneath a lamp, twisted away to keep it from illuminating her battered face, her one arm thrown back as if she had made a last attempt to fling herself clear. There were no signs of the battery that I had not seen during her office visits, but these had been the last, either through accumulation or some cunningly acute new manner of blow. Nothing more could be done for her. I told him she was gone and he pulled the cigarette from behind his ear and lit it. He said, “I told her nobody can live on Chicken McNuggets and popcorn. It’s not like she wasn’t warned.”

“May I ask what you hit her with?”

“Thing over there. Whatever.” He had the cylinder out and was checking the chambers again; then he closed it. This examination of the weapon, the cigarette, something told me he was not going to do away with himself. He didn’t have the balls. What was odd, all this time later, was my ready access to a beautifully performed voice of compassion, one that I would have had a hard time calling up on Clarice’s behalf when she came to me and described in her baby voice what her problems were. I told Cody that no one could tell him what led him to do what he had done and that he owed himself enough understanding to uncover what broken part in him had made him kill his wife. His eyes filled with
tears; he moved the cigarette to the other side of his mouth. I gratefully noted the beginnings of a snivel.

I sat in a chair, a spare that had been pulled over next to the television set, under which was a rack filled with back issues of
TV Guide
and a large can of Glade Floral air freshener. I could not easily look to my right, where Clarice’s corpse lay in its stupendous inertness. Her defeated excuses were too fresh in my mind to accept the impossibility of her ever stirring. I shook my head slightly and said to Cody once more that his wife was dead.

He said, “I told you what I’d do.”

“I know,” I said. “I guess I’m just waiting for you to do it.”

“Are you in a hurry?”

“I’ve got all the time in the world.”

“I mean, Doc, I know what I did. If I have to, I’ll do the time.”

“What time? You were going to kill yourself. Remember?”

“That’s right, I was, but this is my deal and I’ll do it when I’m good and ready.”

“Probably the surest thing would be to put that gun in your mouth.”

“Tha-ank you.”

“And point up.”

“I don’t believe you have a lot of sympathy for me, do you, Doctor? It must be nice looking at this thing from the outside, a regular Monday-morning quarterback. I don’t think you realize what made me do what I did.”

“You mentioned Chicken McNuggets and popcorn. Clarice was my patient. My impression was that she wished to live.”

Cody went on sniveling while giving me a hard stare. I was surprised at my own harsh voice: “Put it in your mouth, Cody. It’s the right thing to do.”

It wasn’t long before he was angry. That was his drug; it was a great way to get lost and I could see what relief it gave him. I was a big shot, I’d had it easy, had no idea what guys like him had to put up with, wouldn’t know a stacked deck if it bit me on the ass. He said all his life he’d given more than he’d gotten just to have sons of bitches like me look down their noses at him. He must have thought starting a fight with me might be an escape from the fate he’d called down on himself. I wasn’t about to
give an inch. He was trying to gnaw his way out of the trap he’d built. Perhaps, in some vastly dark place, some vengeful corner that I would have been happy to never visit again, I even enjoyed this. In short, I grew impatient for him to shoot himself.

With his meager question—“Isn’t it time you called the police, Doctor?”—my contempt boiled over and I smiled at him pleasantly. This bolstered his conviction that he was misunderstood. “You think this is easy?
You think this is easy?
”

He looked down at the gun he was holding in his lap before lifting it up and pointing it at me. A laugh escaped his compressed lips. Now he used the sights as though to get me in just the right spot. He said, “You’ll love this, Doc. Nine-millimeter hollow points get to twelve millimeters and never leave an exit wound. When eight hundred feet per second comes to a complete stop somebody’s got to know about it.”

“Fascinating.”

He shook his head. “You think I’m getting nowhere.”

I watched him closely for a long moment and said, “Pretty much.”

“So, Doctor, what do you think I should do? You’re the doctor.”

“I think you should kill yourself.”

I remembered his pensive look; or maybe it was a look of melancholy, as he put the gun barrel in his mouth. I gazed back at him and raised my hand, right thumb up. I said he was good to go. I at once remembered my father telling me how they lifted the right arms of German prisoners looking for SS tattoos. If they found them, they shot the prisoners on the spot.

A look of sudden innocence crossed his face, something I would forever live with, and he fired. Despite my glamorous view of my father as a deliverer of swift justice and my feeling that Cody had it coming, this was about to become the front parlor of hell. I wouldn’t have felt any different if I had shot him myself. I wondered if I was still a doctor or even a human being.

I called the police and was sufficiently composed to describe the situation and suggest what equipment would be required. The telephone was in the same room as the bodies, a grisly tableau growing in my imagination as the associated personalities began to disappear. Any detachment my medical training had given me was gone, and I hurried from the
house to the sidewalk, where I waited for the authorities. When they arrived, two older officers, I described the situation in such a way that they seemed more focused on my delivery than on what might await them in the house. I excused myself and set out on a walk that took me into the rest of that run-down neighborhood where I sought out signs of normalcy: papers fetched from porches, men with lunch pails, schoolchildren setting out with backpacks, a speckled dog sailing into the back of an old station wagon, a smiling senior pushing her walker down the sidewalk with a purse and a quart of milk in the basket, teenagers with their torsos under a car hood; I seized on everything, wishing I might always be able to seize on everything. In half an hour I found the railroad tracks and followed the cinder pathway toward the country, stopping only to admire the graffiti on a slow train, beautiful mammoth letters in spray-on colors. I walked out of town, the moving train giving me a pleasant illusion of greater speed. In an hour I was resting in the open prairie under a box elder, next to the tracks, the smell of steel and wild grasses, the air filled with the song of meadowlarks, as yet unwilling or unready to face my guilt. In the words of my late mother, I understood I would have to be shriven.