Driving on the Rim (29 page)

I had to hand it to my colleagues: we all learned to look forward to these meetings, which we viewed with barely suppressed hilarity. Over time, Wilmot delivered sermons based on a loose group he called “the founding fathers,” whose nature became more Nietzschean with every meeting. Our clinic did have problems, mostly financial, and these drove the looniness of our board with unfailing regularity. The rodeo clown blamed everything on falling cattle prices, out-of-staters, and ethanol. The car salesman saw the Japanese titrating unhappiness into the American economy. In this context, the housewife seemed quite sensible, seeing men behind everything. The dentist played his cards close to the chest and cringed when we congratulated him on avoiding weekend emergencies. In reply, he pantomimed his golf swing.

Dr. McAllister said, “Thank God they’re clueless.”

I retrieved with wan hope the sheaf of bills in my mailbox and met my old nurse Scarlett as she walked home with a rake she had just purchased jauntily balanced over her shoulder. I did not feel whimsical or ironic but meant to speed her into my home. I said, “Put down that rake.”

“My goodness,” said Scarlett, switching the rake from one shoulder
to the other, “you’re leading an exciting life.” She wore a tattered, man’s crewneck sweater, cranberry red, with her wristwatch over one sleeve, and open-back clogs that revealed her pretty ankles. I don’t think I’d ever seen her out of her nurse’s uniform. She looked far better this way.

“Yuh,” said I dully, “I am.”

“Is all this true?”

“No,” I said, but the ambivalence came spearing back.

“Are they letting you work?”

“Er, not really.”

“Bummer. So what do you do?”

“Well, I’ve been catching up on my thinking. Can you come in?”

“Ho, ho, ho. The answer is ‘no.’ ”

As though this reply was of the greatest indifference to me, I said, “Well, then, let me just stroll along with you, if that’s all right.”

“You know, it’s not all right. I realize you’re innocent until proven guilty, but I don’t need a lot of people watching me socialize with you.”

“I understand.”

“Probably you don’t, but that’s just how it is.” She went on her way, the rake over her shoulder. Without looking back, she said, “Call me if you’re acquitted.”

I doubt that Jinx was being formal with me so much as practical. I must not have been ready for practicality. I asked her, “Do you have a minute to talk about this?”

“Talk about what?”

“Oh, come on. I’m in trouble.”

“Sure, I’ll talk about it. What do you want to talk about?”

“I want to know if you had a hand in it.”

“Why would I have had a hand in it?”

“You tell me.”

“I think it’s more important that you think about what you have done and what should be done to you as a consequence. I’m not asking you to tell me: that’s between you and your god.”

“Excellent. We spend a lot of time together. We’ll work it out.”

“When you do, get some advice about operating on a somewhat different plane. Neither I nor anyone else in town can figure out where the
hell you’re coming from.” I found this tone of Jinx’s alarming: she had never talked to me like this.

I think that medical school, where I found myself by way of a painless knack for academics and some democratic scheme by which poor boys from hick towns received modest preference, was where I first felt the gust of fear that if I didn’t straighten out and fly right I might well end up a flop and an idiot. Therefore, I got my head down and my butt up, and bent to the work at hand. As a consequence, I had few personal memories of medical school, which had all the charm of a Soviet assembly line. If we drank, it was in pursuit of oblivion; if we fornicated, it was to relieve discomfort. At length, we found without jubilation that we were doctors. I lurched home to celebrate and did my best to enjoy the gruesome party my parents had arranged in my honor.

There was much alcohol. My father had set up a huge barbecue pit in the backyard, and some animal was turning on a spit. A few of the fancier folk in town were back there quietly disputing what sort of beast it might be. A sober and extraordinarily energetic knot of Pentecostal boors organized square dancing for themselves—no one else seemed to feel welcome to participate—and an authoritarian lout in blue coveralls called out the moves to the blank-faced revelers. They had brought their own tape deck and speakers, and it was only when Mayor Kavanagh with his 1890s moustache told them to “turn that goddamn thing off” before jerking the cord out himself that we were able to resume speaking in normal tones. Thereafter, the fundamentalists kept to themselves and watched the party warily. My mother, for all the strangeness of her thinking, was a lively and sociable person; I don’t know how she had tolerated these people for so many years. I guess it just goes to the genuineness of her convictions.

My father stood on a chair and tapped his glass with a spoon. I realized with dread that he was about to make a speech. The gist was that he was a nobody, my mother was a nobody, and I was a great man, a doctor. It went over like a lead balloon. My mother was furious. People stared at my father in dismay. He began to sob. I took him by the elbow and helped him down from the chair. To ease the crisis, I said a few formulaic words about how I stood humbly in the shadow of their sacrifices.
The guests absorbed this with varying degrees of relief, all except Tessa, who covered her mouth in helpless laughter. At any rate, the moment had come and gone. We went to the dead animal turning on the spit.

Fate headed me to Tessa. She uncovered her mouth and said, “I couldn’t help it.” I knew it was funny but thought indignation fitted the situation better. Her hand went back over her mouth. I told her, “Those are my parents.” She snorted through her nose and said she was sorry.

I may have only on the occasion of that barbecue really noticed what a dump my folks’ place was. I had never been there before in a coat and tie. All those people standing around with beers and other drinks to welcome me home, including the usual suspects—Mrs. Voorheis who owned the secondhand store on the frontage road; an alcoholic horseshoer named Hooty Cox who was there for the drinks; Don Funk who ran a pawn operation out of his house; Elvin Bird in Ground who was a Crow Indian diesel mechanic; Sister Calista from the Catholic grade school who never missed a party with spicy food; cabinetmaker Cal Schreiner and wife; Conoco station owner Bus Clancy, a widower, and his two grown daughters; big-game outfitter Riley Cash in full cowboy regalia and trailing moustache; our two most popular backhoe operators, Jack and Jerry; renowned snowmobile mechanic Tim Varian, soon to be punched by Hooty Cox, himself to be swiftly subdued by Don Funk while Elvin Bird in Ground rudely ogled Bus Clancy’s two large daughters—as well as the medical staff of the clinic to which I would be attached, the small group of doctors who stood to one side and smiled … faintly. My mother and father wore themselves out in solicitous darting between the two groups. I thought the senior internist, Dr. Laird McAllister, was a little abrupt in declining the plate of food my mother brought him, raising the palm of his hand in her direction and saying, “No way!” Under the single shade tree stood the two old brothers Eggs and Bugs Ackley, wheat farmers from the Cottonwood Bench, in matching red-white-and-blue suspenders. Their real names were Elvin and Darwin Farquahar. Long ago, because of their enthusiastic manner of affirmation—“Exactly!” and “But exactly” oddly pronounced—they came to be know as Eggs and Bugs Ackley. I drifted into my accustomed out-of-body state, absentmindedly popping the unfamiliar necktie between thumb and forefinger and musing that the life ahead
might prove complicated. The mild malaise I experienced I trained upon the rusty Ford Fairlane on blocks that defined the backyard and which I employed as an object of meditation while I allowed the various waves of my story to wash over me.

Dr. McAllister stepped over to welcome me. I guess it was a welcome. Coming from such a tall, patrician Anglo-Saxon, it was not easy to tell, and his speaking style—launching the words without seeming to care whether they landed—contributed to the abstract atmosphere. Dr. McAllister wore a beautiful gray and brown houndstooth sport jacket, broad soft lapels meeting at the top of two buttons. The red silk tie seemed to disappear at just the right point. He had a highball in hand, and he delicately bobbed an ice cube with the tip of his finger.

“I led the review committee, Doctor, that looked over your qualifications, and it wouldn’t be wrong to suggest that I led the effort to see you land in our clinic. You’re a very well-prepared physician, and we especially liked that you’re a general practitioner.”

“Oh, good.” I smiled.

“General practitioners have become the redheaded stepchildren of our profession, and we’re thrilled that the role claimed your ambition. Welcome!”

“Thank you.”

He tipped his highball toward my beer: clink.

Slowly surveying the guests in my parents backyard, he said, “I hope you’re prepared for the changes coming to your social life.” This I liked less.

I said, “I don’t think it will be a problem. I’ve always lived here. Where are you from?”

He didn’t say a word. He only gave me a wintry smile and returned to his companions.

I got a turn in the emergency room right early on, and one of the first patients I saw was a gas station robber shot by the police; I saw that he would survive the .38 Special hollow-point round that went right through his thorax and out the back without expanding. As time went by, I chatted less with the people who came through the door on gurneys and otherwise, but this fellow looked like a recent college graduate in his
slacks and blue Windbreaker, his Seattle Seahawks cap, his loafers. When I asked what’d inspired him to stick up a gas station, he told me with peculiar sincerity, “You’re only young once.” I guess I had to accept that, but it became an enduring enigma.

I was not an excitement-oriented person. I liked what they call on TV “a slow news day.” I may not have been as interested or informed about the big wide world as I should have been, and what news I got of war, disease, and famine did not inspire in me a cascade of solutions. I wished it were otherwise, but this was hardly my worst inadequacy.

When I was in high school, my father kept some horses on a patch of stock farm he owned for the few years he could afford it. Among them were my saddle horse and a government mule he’d acquired from the park service, which, when he tried to shoe it, put him in the hospital. This big wary mule with its suspicious ears and sloped muscular build was the only animal with smooth enough gaits for my father’s old bones. So he put up with him—named him John Lee. I don’t remember why. I helped Dad shoe John Lee by giving him a generous injection of sedative, then laying him on his side so we could shoe him horizontally while the comatose brute snored and blew bubbles out his nose. I nailed on the big, iron, strangely narrow keg shoes, and Dad, crouched and wheezing, clinched behind me. When we’d finished, we leaned up against the old cottonwood that shaded the pole pen in the middle of the rented ground and waited for John Lee to wake up. Dad seemed to think John Lee had died, but wake up he did. My father was so pleased to see him restored to life on earth that he promptly saddled him and rode off.

After my problems began, I found myself riding more often too. My horse, Errol, not only was easy to catch but actually seemed eager to be ridden. Errol began life as a mustang. I bought him at a BLM auction at the Red Desert corrals in Wyoming. Like others in the band, he was bigger than a pure mustang, having acquired some genetic advantages from the draft horses turned onto the desert during the Boer War.

Now that my medical career was suspended, I rediscovered Errol. I felt guilty about having paid so little attention to him while I worked at building my earthly cheese ball. In some abstract way, I hoped to make it up to him. I remembered when I’d acquired him, a stout yearling that we
roped and loaded into my trailer, a pretty grulla colt, frightened and sweating with anguish over his lost freedom. He grew into a big, happy horse, and when he was three I rather timidly tried to break him to ride. It was my first year in practice, and I imagined I had a responsibility to my career at odds with risking my bones on a horse. The fact is, I was a bit scared of Errol, who now weighed over a thousand pounds and was not entirely predictable. I led him around on a halter rope, backed him up, shoved him all over the place—and he accepted it. I longed him with a saddle on his back, stirrups slapping his flanks, and he never objected. His complacent acceptance of all I threw at him encouraged me and beat back my fears until the day came to mount him. I even felt that Errol was telling me the same thing, that the time had come. And so I mounted Errol confidently.

I never had a chance. Errol bucked with four feet off the ground, lit on his front end, fired out behind, then bucked me straight over his head into the dirt like a lawn dart. There I could observe his leisurely grazing on the scanty orchard grass at the edge of the corral. I watched as he wandered over to my father’s house and looked in the front window.

I was not hurt and walked over to Errol. He looked at me as though wondering what my problem was. I unsaddled him and called a man in Clyde Park who broke horses. I explained that as a busy doctor I just didn’t have time to break him myself. I got him back a few months later, ready to be used. The cowboy said he “tried to tear me up” and asked if Errol was by any chance a mustang. I said, “Absolutely not.”

So, I had time on my hands. I wanted to continue to live under the questions that had befallen me and resist the rising sensation that here lay opportunity. Treating the disentanglement from my career as an opportunity would be the way to some badly needed enlightenment. But I failed that test: I started to be happy contemplating my guilt like some obscure marine creature recently dredged from lightless seas.

I began to wander around town, watching people, visiting construction projects, school recesses, and so on. One day I found a small parade celebrating something or other and was impressed by the look of joyless fatalism in the faces of the marchers. I speculated that they had been ordered to this event by their superiors but later learned it was some sort of sweethearts’ club with the mission of rekindling first love. On a cool
afternoon with arrested white clouds hanging over the town, I loaded the push mower into the trunk of the 88 and drove to the cemetery, where I did, I must say, a fine job of clearing my parents’ graves, virtually primping them, feeling not sadness but remarking the peculiarity of our funerary habits as though I were a visitor from another planet. The word I have most often associated with death—“
Poof!
”—appeared nowhere in this humble memorial park. A good many folks strolled the cemetery while I tidied things up—the young visibly anxious to get it over with; the old mindful and gloomy, thinking perhaps of what my mother called the Great By-and-By.