Driving on the Rim (2 page)

I was not much of a drinker; water would have served as well. That summer I’d made an experimental foray into a local bar, feeling that I needed to learn to be more social. I struck up a conversation with a somber middle-aged fellow in a rumpled suit. He looked so gloomy that I regaled him with what I felt were uplifting accounts of my struggles at school. He stared at me for a while, until I sensed that all the timing was disappearing from my delivery. Finally he said, “Hey, boss, I got to go. You’re creeping me out.”

“Now,” Tessa said, “let’s start at the beginning: what do you think being a doctor will do for you?”

“I don’t know.” My answer came out so quickly it startled her. She leaned back into the sofa—she was at one end, I at the other—with her elbow propped on the back of it and her fingers parting the hair on the side of her head.

“You don’t know?”

“I wish I did. Sorry.” Involuntarily singing out this last word.

“No, that’s all right. That’s fine. If you don’t want to talk about it, I’m okay with that.”

I didn’t share the image that I had of myself, still dark-haired but with a graying moustache, going up the gangplank of a yacht. I kept sipping my drink, looking into it as if it were a teleprompter and I were the president of the United States. The colorful liquid seemed like something I had found. I don’t know why I made people so uncomfortable. As a kind of icebreaker, I thought to ask her a question.

“When people use the expression ‘rest in peace’ do you think they have some basis for saying it, or is it just wishful thinking?”

I can’t imagine what made me believe that she’d have the answer to this doleful conundrum. But surely my mother’s poor health was on my mind.

“You mean, about
the dead?
”

“Sure.”

Tessa looked at me for a very long time before saying anything.

“You know, let’s try this another time. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s me, but at this point in time and space it’s just not happening.”

I backed out of there like a crab. I felt sorry for Tessa; she probably had trouble sleeping after this weird visit from the new neighbor. I just
didn’t know what to do about it—an apology would have made it seem even stranger.

Thereafter, we sometimes ran into each other in the hallway adjoining our apartments, and it did not get any less awkward. I made increasingly maladroit attempts to be cordial, these being received with growing skepticism, even revulsion, until upon seeing me Tessa would dart into her apartment and slam her door. What was strange was that if I lingered in the hallway after she’d gone inside, I would always, moments later, hear her phone ring.

Once she said to me, “I know you’re tracking my movements.” And another time, “Don’t think you’re fooling me.” And another, a cry,

“Please stop!”

“Stop
what
?”

A mirthless laugh followed and a slammed door.

I made every effort to avoid these encounters. Indeed, I did start tracking her movements, if only to avoid her. She headed upstairs to work for Hoxey at exactly nine, out for the mail at ten thirty, lunch with Hoxey in his apartment Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, catered by Mountain Foodstuff, out to lunch Tuesday and Thursday, but always back by one thirty, dispatching UPS and FedEx and other outbound packages at four o’clock, at which point her workday was over. I really didn’t have a bead on her activities and so came and went from my apartment nervously. When she had men over, they seemed to linger around my door as if on the lookout for me. One strapping fellow with a shiny black goatee positioned himself as though to actually block my way. I gave him a big smile and pushed past. He smelled like motor oil. He said, “Hello, Doc.” Tessa must have told him that I was in pre-med. I said hello. I was glad to get inside, and when I looked through the little spy hole in the door, I saw into his ear.

Concentrating on the Help Wanted ads calmed me down. I had discovered that I needed to look for work elsewhere, as people in town knew who I was and—this really is very funny—held my studies against me. “You can’t paint my house,” Mrs. Taliaferro said. “You’re going to be a doctor!”

“Not necessarily!” I said in my warmest tones, while hers cooled
markedly. I have no idea why I answered her that way. I was sure I was going to be a doctor, but when I was under pressure to make conversation, it was as if all my life’s plans went up in smoke. I felt the need to persuade Mrs. Taliaferro that I would be a lifelong house painter.

I kept studying the paper. I recognized that real opportunities existed for those who would sell cars or apply siding, but given the trouble I was having with my communication skills, I thought those occupations might not be up my alley. Still, I really felt that once I got my timing back—and it was a timing issue—I’d be able to look into a different set of prospects. I was very much focused on the chance to be unexceptional; if I had the opportunity to keep my head down, I meant to take it.

I got a job working for a very nice guy, or so I thought, named Dan Lauderdale. He was an attorney in Billings who specialized in whiplash and owned a cute little turn-of-the-century cottage in Harlowton, which he used as a weekend place—or, rather, somewhere to vacation with his secretary, who did not enjoy the same legal standing as his wife. “Lawyers like me make doctors leave the profession every day!” he joked. “Stick to painting houses.” But he was an amiable fellow with a big laugh that drew one’s attention away from his shrewd, close-set eyes. His dark brown curls were so uniform and regular as to suggest the work of a beautician. When I asked him if they were natural, he told me to mind my own business with such vituperation that I actually flinched. The previous owner of his cottage had used stolen Forest Service paint for the trim and shutters, and Dan now wanted it to be all yellow, “like sunshine, get it?” I was basically rehearsing what I thought to be the style of my current position when I said, “
No problema,
” but he must have sensed something wrong with my delivery, for his eyes grew narrow and he just said, “Right.” Many years later, Dan Lauderdale would become a well-known judge and part of my life.

I rented a pressure washer, masked everything, used a quality primer, and picked my weather for the final coat. It looked much better, but Lauderdale never responded to the bill I sent, nor the second or third. Live and learn. I wasn’t much interested in exploring my remedies, and since other revenues were unassured, I sold my car and went on a grocery binge. Also, in celebration of two months in the apartment, I bought a bed, which I put out in the middle of the living room, where I
could luxuriate in all that space and gaze east, west, and south, but not north, at fine window views that were better than any painting, in that they were full of those moving, changing parts known as “Life.”

I heard a timid knock on my door and called, “Enter!” I was stretched out on my new bed in my shorts reading a newspaper I’d found in the doorway to the bank. My visitor was the chief of police. I was really pleased to see him, so pleased that I easily set aside any worries over the reason for his visit. I suppose I was lonely. In a decent society, the chief of police is the one stranger you should be able to welcome into your home without reservation. In this case the first thing he told me was that I’d better get dressed, as I was going to jail. He gazed at me with sad knowingness. He had a big, warm face; it shouldn’t be misunderstood if I declare that he looked like Porky Pig, with all that guileless amiability, the same pink complexion.

“Tessa Larionov”—he gestured with his head in the direction of Tessa’s abode—“has charged you with making obscene phone calls to her.”

“Oh?” I said. “I don’t have a phone.” For one miraculous moment, there were people passing all three windows, and the chief remarked that I needed curtains. “How bad were they supposed to be?” I tried to picture myself as the twisted man placing these calls. In a weird way, it seemed plausible.

“They were not nice.”

It comes as a great surprise to anyone jailed in a small town that it is a remarkably stress-free environment. If your reputation is of no concern, your troubles are behind you. The local jail was as good a place as any I’ve found to unravel all the causes for the state I was in. In a rare moment of lucidity, I suggested a wiretap. The chief didn’t take my idea seriously, but tomorrow was a new day because Tessa informed him that the calls had continued while I was in custody. So the wiretap was tried after all, and it soon paid off.

Hoxey was making the calls. Tessa declined to press charges, and it all went down as a lovers’ quarrel, once you swallowed the fifty-one-year difference in their ages. Tessa’s routine continued unaltered, except that her phone no longer rang so much after her workday was done. I
finally ran into her in the hallway just as she was coming down with the packages one afternoon. She stopped in her tracks, arms loaded, and regarded me quizzically. “Hello,” she said. I waited before replying. I wanted her to think about what she had done to me. But she didn’t seem troubled, and the longer I waited the less troubled she looked.

“Hello,” I said.

“You look like you’ve been painting.”

“Yes, I’ve been painting a house.”

“Here in town?”

“Yes, a doctor’s house on Third.”

“How funny. Since you’re going to be a doctor.”

“Yes, I’m going to be a doctor.” Riches danced before me like sugarplums.

“I don’t suppose we’ll ever get to the bottom of that.”

“No, probably not.”

“If you were sick, would you go to a doctor or treat yourself?”

“Oh, I’d go to a doctor. I’m not a doctor yet.”

“I mean if you already were … Oh, never mind. Can you help me with these?”

We took the packages to the post office and I stood outside on the steps while she mailed them. I watched a grackle walk between parked cars, one of which had an American flag on its antenna. A strong young man was wheeling a cart of pies into the back of a restaurant. He looked too powerful to wheel pies. My mother drove past, blowing her horn, her colossal agitation visible through the windshield. People in town enjoyed such scenes.

Once the packages were sent, Tessa and I stood in front of the building and had a delightful conversation. She commended me for having taken the jailing episode with such good grace. I told her that I didn’t know how I could have done otherwise, which she mistook for some form of chivalry. I used both speech and body language to indicate that I mostly understood and what I didn’t, I forgave.

I had been raised to believe that time delivers our dreams and quietly carries our nightmares away, and that most of what lies ahead is welcoming and serene. It was part of the strange but cozy world of my home with God in the role of Mr. Goodwrench. Or at least that’s how I saw it,
peering out from the cocoon of my oddly sheltered Pentecostal household, where there was nothing to worry about but the flames of eternal damnation, which didn’t seem like all that much. I saw Satan as just another person who could be bought after my career took off. My mother was always telling me how deceitful the devil was, but that only made me think that I could handle him.

My parents lived on a small piece of ground north of town where there was no hiding from prevailing winds and the desolate ground-hugging plants offered no shade. My father soldiered on at jobs he disliked while my mother was busy with her evangelical splinter group. While my father’s religious convictions were mostly an attempt to get along with her, both of them awaited the Rapture with a complacency that in my father’s case was mostly the hope of getting out of the wind. They were aware of my impractical nature but proud that I had somehow got myself into a small college, even though they must have realized that my bizarre if loving upbringing had not fitted me well for life in the world. Schoolwork had been my anchor in all our wanderings, and having had an aunt who saw to my ardor and venery, I was able in my airhead way to satisfy the odd lonely girl during my school years. I called it “pollinating coeds” and thought I was funny.

Having heard of my godless ways in town, my parents moved me out to a friend’s ranch, where I helped with chores until it was time to resume my studies. Gladys and Wiley were subsistence ranchers on an old place called White Bird. I had known them all my life. Wiley and Gladys liked my mother, whom my father had met at a USO facility in Arkansas, and they could tolerate her religious enthusiasm without sharing it. I don’t think they believed my dad shared it either, and later, when he told me he believed in God but also believed that God was crazy, I began to realize that Gladys and Wiley might have been right. I have a thoroughly secular mind, and despite all the sessions I endured at churches in storefronts and old gymnasiums I never believed any of it. Still, I am content to have had this background, as it acquainted me with the fabulous range of hope entertained by humanity.

Wiley had fought in the Pacific, some very nasty places like Peleliu and New Guinea, hand-to-hand stuff. He had brought home a Japanese suicide sword, a
wakizashi
, which he used for all sorts of things around
the ranch until it wore down and ended up in Gladys’s kitchen drawer. After the war he had worked at many jobs trying to hang on to his land. He and Gladys spent three winters south of Billings feeding Cheyenne steers on beet tops and treating septicemia outdoors in winter conditions that included regular blizzards. Wiley was another VFW guy with my dad, along with a relatively new friend, Dr. Eldon Olsson, who had been a battlefield surgeon in Italy and North Africa. Dr. Olsson left a family practice in the Midwest, and then came to Montana to hunt partridges, practicing only enough to support his austere lifestyle. He confided in my parents that he had never married because his true love had married his best friend. He took up with my parents after he’d joined the VFW, and with Gladys and Wiley because they had nice creek fishing and a spring pond.

Dr. Olsson took me fishing quite often as he awaited the opening of bird season, and made me carry all his gear while he addressed himself to my future. At a time when I was universally regarded as an idiot, Dr. Olsson was sure I had great potential, though in need of a more substantial education that would involve getting out of my house. He was very fond of my parents but thought my mother was fanatical. I was flattered that he was so interested in me. We fished and hunted, he gave me books to read, he corrected my English. I still have a vivid picture of him looking as I thought a doctor should: medium height, thick white hair in a brush cut, a carefully trimmed military moustache. You would take advice from a man who looked like this, and I readily succumbed to his authority, though it led me on one of the strangest missions of my life.