Driving on the Rim (32 page)

Jocelyn said in a low voice, “That’d be your average Womack. If I’d taken better care of Womack, he might not be so whiney, but that’s water under the bridge now. And of course he’s got a point: you can’t do much with peanut butter and an egg.” Now Womack was among us.

Womack said to me, not altogether warmly, “You must be the doctor.”

“I must be.”

He extended a limp but calloused hand and said, “I hadn’t had the pleasure.”

Jocelyn said, “There’s groceries in the back, Crybaby. You want to get them?”

I followed Jocelyn into the house. I believe this was the first house I’d ever seen with standing ashtrays like those of an old-time hotel lobby. On the floor was a large parti-colored hide rug, which Jocelyn explained was Rags, her father’s boyhood horse. Newspapers and magazines were stacked nearly to the sill of the window that looked into the yard and through which I could see Womack coming in with the groceries.

Jocelyn bade me follow her into a room whose door was shut. She
held it for me and I went into a small space with a pipe-frame bed, walls covered with children’s drawings of flowers, horses, deer, dogs, and cats—in a kind of evolution that included posters for Kiss, Guns N’ Roses and the big red lips of the Rolling Stones. I said, “This was your room?”

Jocelyn pulled open the closet door, and on its inside was a collection of aircraft pictures. I thought of the picture my father kept of him standing next to a captured ME-109 just inside the Westwall. You could see the Dragon’s Teeth of the Siegfried Line in the background. My father often got it out to look at, which caused him to drift off and sort of glaze over. Jocelyn’s pictures were all domestic aircraft, including several like the spray plane she had crashed.

Womack was looking me over from the doorway; I never heard him arrive.

From the window of Jocelyn’s bedroom, as I learned of other rooms in the house, the view was entirely given to abandoned machinery and deer hides of various vintage. The wind was a continuous background sound, never steady but punctuated by the slap of rope against the iron flagpole in the front yard. I had noticed that nothing was designated as a place to park; rather, you kept driving until you got as close to the front door as possible, maybe in deference to weather, but it was surprising to see the front grille of the truck so close to the glass of the living-room window.

When Jocelyn went into the kitchen to put the groceries away, Womack stayed close to me. With one finger, he moved his hair behind an ear and said, “Where you from?”

I said, “Around here.”

“I guess you got room to roam. I could do without the winter myself.”

“You get used to it.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“How about you, Womack?”

“Hobbs, New Mexico, but south of the border is my main deal. Only place I know where you can do what the hell you want.”

“What business are you in exactly?”

“Import export.”

Womack’s tone was annoying me, and I asked him rather sharply. “Importing and exporting what?”

“Anything needs importing and anything needs exporting.”

Jocelyn came back into the room—our conversation was going nowhere anyway except to begin to disclose a mutual dislike. She was taking Womack to the airport and would come straight back—which assertion produced a faint smile on Womack’s archetypally Anglo-Saxon face, his first expression of the day, at least that I had seen: he could have been grinning like a monkey before I met him. I was calculating the time in my head for the round-trip to the airport, and it looked like I was stuck for a couple of hours. I found myself at the front of the truck shaking Womack’s horny hand all over again and reciting formulaic wishes for safe travel. He waited until I’d finished and said, “Pleasure,” like a poker player saying “Fold.” Jocelyn was already at the wheel, and I walked to her side of the truck in the hapless manner I couldn’t seem to shake. She smiled and said, “Womack’s going to Denver to get me an airplane. Don’t you agree that’s thoughtful?” Staring through the windshield, Womack seemed to hear none of this. The several hours that lay before me seemed a very long time. Who were these people? I had the disquieting sense that my being left here was no accident.

I watched them drive off, even giving them an irresolute wave, before turning to my surroundings. I was stuck and forced to make do with mild curiosity about the property and its accumulated detritus. Occupancy of the place was long-standing, I concluded, because a horse-drawn harrow was among the discarded machinery and bundles of rusty barbed wire, broken posts, feed sacks, as well as a small brown plastic TV and an early washing machine. I suspected that the wind blowing over this mess probably never stopped, and I thought about the rural people I had seen in my practice who wanted something to help them with the wind of the Great Plains, a superb marketplace for sedatives.

I couldn’t fathom being left here. It had happened with such routine that its inconvenience dawned on me only after it was too late to do anything about it. I had a house half painted back in town that I wanted to finish. At the moment, I was surprised at how urgently I wanted to paint that house and even paint many more houses. In this isolation, I daydreamed about all the pleasant colors of the houses I could possibly paint. I had tried to get my father to agree to paint our house, but he didn’t think it made any difference whether his house was painted or
not. War had greatly reduced the number of things he cared about and home improvement didn’t make the cut. I remembered feeling that my wish to paint the house only revealed how trivial were the values of those of us who hadn’t been to war. I may have been ashamed of wanting to paint our house. I recalled revisiting the colors it could possibly have been and assigning inappropriate attributes to them: cowardly gray, immoral yellow, and so on. Almost all of my father’s stories were war stories, and it wasn’t until I emerged into a wider world—later than most—that war occupied a more usual place in the array of human experiences. Nothing absorbed him so much as unrolling the old silk invasion map of Europe and tracing the roads where he and other infantrymen had followed the tanks east. I did notice during the Vietnam days that returning veterans had a separate society, but not quite like my father’s because they felt unwelcome. I saw some in my practice who seemed almost unreachably forlorn. My father and I were close, and he told me about his life sort of in secret since my mother was sick of the whole thing and generally focused on her spiritual education, which consisted mostly of fires, floods, perdition, and inestimable glory.

The only room that had a clean bed was Jocelyn’s childhood room. The old man’s bed was stripped of its clothes and mice had nested right in the middle of it. It appeared that Jocelyn and Womack had stayed in her old room. I thought that after a walk I might nap there and think about that. I wasn’t in so deep I couldn’t be objective.

I took a walk up the coulee that led south from the ranch and kept me out of the west wind sweeping the prairie and the juniper savannah. At a muddy spring surrounded by willows I surprised a brood of wild turkeys, camouflaged young pullets, which left the spring in no great hurry and even continued feeding as they ascended. A grove of chokecherries made a nice protected place to rest and so I stretched out and watched the clouds. Today was a day of high-traveling altocumulus: they were crossing the earth, and watching their departure to the east pleased me. I understood that meeting different ground conditions might cause them to halt their travels and simply disappear—they were not like trains leaving the station. My mother believed that heaven was overhead, and imperfectly understood even by the faithful. When I was a child I stared into the blue sky trying to see it, believing—since it provided
so many rewards to the saved—that it must have a few nice facilities, but I could never quite see them. My mother hadn’t conveyed enough of her cosmology to make me see that the Rapture was a state that didn’t require furnishing. At some remote place I was a man of faith. “Creation” was as good a word for what mattered as any other.

I returned to the house and immediately looked for something to eat. The refrigerator contained a discouraging collection of energy drinks and snack foods, none of which appealed to me. This must have been the crap brought in by Womack. Next to a well-worn armchair a stack of magazines rose several feet from the floor,
Drovers’ Journal, American Rifleman
, and an ancient copy of the
Playboy
with centerfold of Bettie Page, the pinup girl with the geometric black bangs. The
American Rifleman
profiled one Elmer Keith, a sourpuss in a ten-gallon hat and a meerschaum pipe who tested his guns on horses. I flopped them all back on the pile, went into Jocelyn’s room, stretched out, and fell asleep. I didn’t mean to fall asleep, but I started replaying some of the better clouds—I realized I was still ranking them—and drifted off. Probably I dreamed. I don’t know.

I woke up very briefly disoriented because Jocelyn was sitting on the edge of the bed smiling at me. My first feeling, that this was a bit awkward, left me perplexed, as though sleep had transported me to someplace unfamiliar. I resorted to a banality: “You just get back?”

“Womack’s plane was late. I didn’t want to leave until I was sure he was on his way. You were in a deep sleep. Have any dreams?”

“One. Painting a house.”

“That’s not much of a dream.”

“No?”

“No. A dream should be about hope.”

“Well, I hope to paint this house.” I immediately regretted saying this, since I had no interest in explaining why I was painting a house or my enthusiasm for the task, which I inadequately comprehended anyway. In fact, with Jocelyn sitting so close, the idea of spending the day rolling enamel on clapboard had lost much of its romance. “I suppose I ought to get up.”

“You in a hurry to get someplace?” I said I was in no hurry to get someplace. “Good, then stay where you are.”

I thought it had become obvious what was going to happen. With the slightest tug on the edge of her blouse, I encouraged her to recline next to me. With my face in her hair I found I was not wrong about the smell. Probably it was nothing but shampoo but I was swept away by this cosmetic product. I ruefully considered that I could have gone into a grocery store, opened a bottle of the stuff, and saved myself a lot of trouble. Jocelyn wiggled amiably, sighed, and said this was nice; but before we got off on some sibling nap, I slid my hand over the gentle curve of her belly, then held one of her breasts, firm as a chalice. Jocelyn turned around sharply and stared straight into my eyes.

“What’s going on here?”

She didn’t say anything. We were very still for a long period of thought, at the end of which she abruptly got up and announced she was taking me home. I sat on the edge of the bed, running both hands through my hair, trying to revive the thrill of house painting. But as we retraced the road back through Harlowton and turned south toward the Absaroka Mountains, she talked about her life growing up, the early departure of her mother, her dislike of her father, and finally of the place itself. I found hope: maybe the house was the problem! But in this too I was mistaken. She dropped me at my door and said, “You’ve got my number. Put on a clean shirt and take me someplace nice.”

I resumed work on the nice old folks’ house. I bought a few things—a couple of scrapers in different sizes, some paper dust masks, a pair of coveralls—but everything else, starting with the ladder, I had to rent. I was more than a little aware of the escapism of my house painting endeavor: I didn’t need the money, I didn’t need the job. But what was wrong with escapism? I was in a situation that made escape in every form entirely attractive.

The ladder, an aluminum extension type, I raised to its full length and rested between the two upper windows on the sunlit clapboard of a cool, sunny morning. Ascending the first two rungs revealed the old couple gazing into my face; I freed one hand and gave them a friendly wave before climbing past their window. With each rung I had a new view of the sun making its way through the lawns and alleys of the town. Higher and higher I climbed, until an intimation of eternity infused my survey
of rooftops. The chimneys were wonderfully individualized: some straight and tall, some listing to one side, some brick and wrapped in silvery flashing. A pair of schoolchildren stopped at the base of the ladder and gazed rung by rung until they found me and gave uncertain waves before moving on, occasionally punching each other or trying to grab each other’s hat. As the sun rose, I could smell the wood warming before my face, a pleasant smell that intensified as I scraped the curled old paint away until it showered and fluttered to the ground.

By the end of the day I had prepared the front of the house and started on the north side, which was less forgiving: the wood was damp from shade and the paint clung to it, requiring more diligent scraping that sometimes sent the tool astray and gouging into the soft material underneath. When it started to cool and I felt too tired to continue, I descended the ladder and made a neat array of my tools, masks, and gloves, which I covered with a plastic sheet weighted down with rocks.

Then, still in my rumpled white coveralls, I walked to the cemetery, pruning shears in my pocket and wearing a paper hat I had picked up at the paint store from a bin of promotional paper hats. I chose one with a Rottweiler on the front (I liked dogs) without realizing that it advertised a condom popular with the hip-hop culture and urged the viewer, “Don’t be slippin’ in yo pimpin’” on one side and “Get yo freak on” on the other. In fact, I was oblivious until I noticed the excitement it created among young people along my way to the cemetery. I went on wearing it out of defiance despite the great urge to throw it away. I wished I had picked the “Do yo thang” hat I’d first spotted, but it lacked the dog picture.

The summer annuals at my parents’ graves were still managing better than any of the others I saw, and I reflected on the proprietary smugness I had acquired since first looking after this small place. In fact, it had attained something of the quality of home ground through my care, and it was hard to avoid thinking of how it might be improved. I was sure that anyone visiting family burial places looked back on their own lives as set against the time when the now dead were living. Surely that was what such visits did. At the edge of this cemetery was a small stream where I’d once fished, almost militantly, when I was expected to be doing something else.