Driving on the Rim (35 page)

Staring at the words “Cody” and “Clarice” cut in stone as I sat with Deanne felt like entrapment, not helped by Deanne’s saying, “I know you.”

“Do you? Maybe you’ve seen me come to look after my folks’ graves.”

“I’ve seen you when you come over here for a look.” Deanne was quite tall, as tall as me, and had becoming gray streaks in her thick dark hair. She might have been fifty. She wore some kind of insulated jacket over a black turtleneck shirt and Carhartt work pants with a loop for a hammer above her right thigh. She lit a cigarette and left it hanging from her mouth as she talked. “Naw, there’s more to it. You were at Cody’s funeral. You’re the doctor?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You were there.”

“I was.”

She took away the cigarette. “I don’t want details.”

“Of course not.”

“My only child. My boy. I don’t know what the matter with him was. Do you?”

“I wish I knew.” I promised myself to give no hint of what a vicious little bastard Cody was. “There’s nothing stranger than our own children.”

“Do you have kids?”

“No.”

“Then why did you say that?”

“Well, I—”

“That’s a doctor’s job, isn’t it? To have some half-assed comment on every aspect of life.”

Since it was she who was suffering, I simply agreed. “That does seem to end up being part of our job. I’m not surprised you’ve seen right through it.”

“I wish I hadn’t. I wouldn’t mind being comforted. Even if it’s phony. I’ve got a great big hole right in the middle of me. Smoke?”

“No. Thanks.”

“I didn’t mean to show bad manners.” She gestured weakly toward her son’s headstone with the cigarette. “Deal like this doesn’t help your manners. To have good manners, you have to give a shit, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, sometimes I do. Depends. Obviously I didn’t do the greatest job in the world with Cody, but I didn’t mean for it to be like that. I loved him with all my heart. He didn’t know who his dad was, that didn’t help. I wasn’t a whore, I was single. It’s not the same thing. But them other kids, their moms, it might have been they was jealous.” She ground the cigarette out in the dirt and ran her finger around the inside of the turtleneck.

“Crazy.”

“I mean, I know who was starting it. I went to PTA and read their attitudes. Once I figured it out, I went after the husbands, and believe me they was ready. I only did it for the boy. I was on a mission. Those moms, they brought it on themselves. Which I should of never did. Everything got worse for Cody. I guess the facts show he had it in for women. Wise commentary, please.”

“I think you’ve already said it.”

“I ain’t said shit. Why don’t you fill in the blanks? You’re the doctor. Where’s the bullshit when you need it?”

I could have skipped the bullshit, also known as wise counsel, and told her how I urged her son on. I could have said, “Good riddance,” but I didn’t have the guts. Furthermore, this conversation had acquired a squeamish intimacy. But I was at the scene, and she knew that: couldn’t change it. I did try asking her where she worked. She said, “I don’t.”

“Oh.”

“I’m a homemaker.” With this, she began to laugh, loudly and at length. “I married one of the husbands. The ex lives alone. My husband thinks it’s a good deal. He writes ‘thank you’ on every alimony check.”

It began to dawn on me that it was possible Deanne could handle the truth. If I told her the truth, maybe I could change my plea to not guilty, yet I was unsure that I could do it. When she found out my part in her son’s death, I would face her at last: I would be shriven. I would begin to pay for my sins.

I tried the idea four days later. I had a meeting with Throckmorton scheduled for late afternoon, and I was milling around doing errands, paying bills, walking to the post office. I spent an hour reading magazines while a chip was removed from the windshield of my increasingly unreliable Oldsmobile 88. Jays and pigeons were getting all the bird food I put out, so I bought a special feeder for thistle seed that would serve the smaller birds, the finches, titmice, white- and rufous-crowned sparrows, wrens, and nuthatches that had been run off by the bruisers who sprayed sunflower shells around my lawn. I installed a bracket intended for hanging plants above deer level but in sight of my bedroom, hung the feeder, went over to Boyer Street and knocked on Deanne’s door. Her husband answered, and I was surprised to see that it was the owner of the grain elevator, Jerry Perkins, who I knew slightly but cordially. “Jerry,” I said, making no secret of my surprise. He smiled and drew the door back invitingly.

“Come in, come in,” he said. “Deanne said she’d seen you.”

I was in the hallway, the door closed behind me, before I learned Deanne was out. Jerry was a warm and forceful guy and before I could arrange to come back, he had me out on his enclosed back porch drinking coffee and admiring his own arrangements for feeding birds and his heated birdbath for winter. “That sucks them in more than the feed ’long about January.” Jerry was such a big, powerful brute, bulging in his blue dashboard overalls, that his enthusiasm for birds seemed remarkable. His widow’s peak of close-cropped red hair and his big hands made everything he said emphatic.

“What a coincidence,” I said. “I’ve just bought a hundred pounds of Nijer seed. It’s in the backseat of my car.”

“They’ll go right through it. That’s about all the company you have, isn’t it?”

“Pretty quiet.”

“Think you’ll get off?”

“I don’t know.”

“I assume you’re innocent.”

I laughed mirthlessly. “I’m waiting to find out.”

“You’re waiting to find out?”

“I mean, they’ll let me know, I guess.”

“I’m not sure I’m following this,” said Jerry.

“I mean it’s anybody’s guess how these things turn out.”

“What I’m trying to say,” said Jerry, “is I hope you know the facts here, because they’re going to bang you around in court and you need to be ready.” I had the sense Jerry was lecturing me.

“I’m ready.”

“Well, good.” He got up and opened the glass louvers to let more air in. “Just be careful. There’s always bad shit waiting to get a guy. Deanne said she seen you,” he said again. I wondered if he meant to emphasize it particularly.

“That’s right, I—”

“I don’t suppose she’ll ever get over that punk.”

I thought for a minute, then said, “It’s tough.”

“He wasn’t but eight or nine when me and Deanne got together. He was a mean little punk then. I swear before God I did my best to knock it out of him.”

I was stumped but struggled to reply. “Not much luck?”

“I made him work at the elevator when he wasn’t at school. Had him load grain, cake, salt, whatever, in trucks. He could work like two men, I’ll give him that. He was just a little kid, but he worked like a Georgia mule. I don’t know what he wanted. I couldn’t stand the sight of him. Had to go. Can I get you something?”

“I’m fine, thanks. What do you mean he had to go? I thought he was a hard worker.”

“I told you: I couldn’t stand the sight of him. How did we get on this?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You seen Deanne at the boneyard. That was it. I knew you discovered the situation there with Clarice. What a mess. And she was a good kid. One of them kids gets beat up by every man she meets. You could just feel it around her. Spend an hour with Clarice and you’d want to boot her in the ass and never know why. It was something about her.”

I saw Clarice a lot and never felt any such thing, but I thought not to mention it. It was clear by now that my connection to the deaths was provoking Jerry to fill me in on the background, though I was growing less inclined to hear it, something he didn’t notice.

“What about a beer?”

“No.”

“Suit yourself. The deal is, I give up a lot for Deanne. I was married to a Callagy from up the Shields. They had ten sections of grass and a thousand acres under sprinklers. It was a money deal and I walked away from it because Deanne was good-looking and a ton of fun, but Cody come with the package. My ex had a good income at the courthouse and even though she weighed over two hundred she carried it well. Carried that suet like a champ. Everyone agreed she carried it well. Since Deanne married me she hadn’t done shit-all, but she’s exciting and keeps a great house and, hey, I love her to death, but the Cody years was an inch short of a deal breaker. I’d be lying if I told you I was sorry he’s gone. It’s too damn bad he took Clarice with him, but if it hadn’t been him it would’ve been someone else. She was that kind.”

This was making me sick. I was able to suppress an outburst because I knew I had business with Deanne. What business was that? I only knew it was connected to my own survival.

“I don’t want you to think I have any regrets about the ex, whatever that Callagy deal is. She was too serious. She was serious as lip cancer. A guy needs to have some fun every now and then. Which leads him to whatever bar where all the man-eaters live. And believe you me, I’m not bitter. I just wish Deanne would quit smoking and writing ‘thank you’ on my alimony checks. No need to be rubbing it in.”

W
E YOUNGER DOCTORS
had been substantially democratized by comparison with our older colleagues. The senior doctors seemed to bask in their original status as small-town aristocrats, content in their golf, cocktails, and domestic architecture, their thin but emblematic connoisseurship, and their eccentricities. Dr. Gallagher—now gone—wore his kilt to dinner parties, GP Boland Mercer exercised his wolfhound by tying bacon to the end of its tail, and dermatologist Joe Mariani tried year after year to interest the town in building a bocce court. When I first arrived, nearly all of them were former smokers who had greeted the surgeon general’s warning about tobacco use with unified astonishment.

We of the next generation have been all over the map and at one point indistinguishable from the rising tide of hippies. We prided ourselves on unexpected remarks and enthusiasms. At the first dinner party including most of us, I especially recall Jinx holding up an empty highball glass and declaring, “One more of these and somebody’s going to put out.” We occasionally partook of controlled medications by way of inducing artificial elation and when work prevented sleep, we might well have turned to pills for stimulation too. Generally, this was dispensed on an as-needed basis, but before Alan Hirsch took up cycling with such passion the pharmaceuticals rather got away from him and soon he had a child in Miles City. This produced if not pain for Alan, at best inconvenience, but he met his obligations and when the child grew up and led Miles City to the Class A football play-offs, Alan made no secret of being the father. He even showed some conviction about his own work by expressing his wish that Jared (“I didn’t name him, for Christ’s sakes”) go to medical school, while Jared taught his father how to ride a horse.
Our lessons in the ways in which one generation succeedeth another were exceptionally diagrammatic.

I wasn’t sure what I had done to annoy Jocelyn, but whatever it was she seemed to have forgotten it. She was preoccupied with selling her father’s ranch. I took her around to the Realtors’ offices trying to get a sense of its value. It was too small to provide a living for a family and it had no recreational potential short of stargazing such as might have made it a vacation property. The land booms of the Rockies were in a down cycle; it was too far from the airport; the house was in disrepair. In the general national gloom, fewer people were investing in faraway follies in the West; it was enough to keep the roof on back in Westchester. When the last Realtor that Jocelyn approached suggested a test drill for coal bed methane, she decided to lease the grazing to a neighbor. We talked about bulldozing a landing strip for her airplane but decided against keeping fuel or building a small hangar. Facilities at White Sulphur and Harlowton were adequate. As it turned out, Womack was not a boyfriend, or no longer one, but an airplane mechanic. Hence his annoyance. I still didn’t understand why she needed her own mechanic, unless it was one per airplane. But then, I didn’t understand airplanes and flying. I didn’t even like going up a ladder to paint. Womack got a room in Martinsdale over a retired schoolteacher’s house, and we rarely saw him. I don’t know whether they were just talking about the flying facilities elsewhere for my benefit, at any rate Womack soon rented some equipment and bulldozed an airfield a quarter mile west of the old homestead.

Jocelyn said that since the place was going to be uninhabited and she didn’t want the expense of insurance, she thought she ought to get rid of the house. I suggested she insure it for a year to be certain, since this was where she had grown up, after all, the scene of her childhood. Maybe that was the point. On her instructions, Womack burned it to the ground, dug a hole with a backhoe, pushed all the wire, pipe, and ashes into it, and covered it up. I expected something valedictory from Jocelyn, but all she offered was “Womack can do anything he sets his mind to.” Pictures of the blaze made the paper with commentary about the loss of pioneer structures including a cavalry bunkhouse from the days
of the Indian Wars. “Another reason not to join the cavalry,” said Jocelyn. It was a real inferno and left a very strong impression on people. I heard from Throckmorton, the all-knowing, that the Meagher County sheriff was so offended he tried to make an issue of it but Womack’s permits were entirely in order and none of the accelerants were illegal. Word had it, however, that the encounter left a bit of bad blood between the two.

“How do you know these people?” Throckmorton asked me. I was in his office for a much-avoided consultation. I told him it was a long story. I didn’t have the will to describe the plane crash, and I particularly didn’t want Throckmorton’s opinion on these matters. Throckmorton was in one of his comedic moods, despite the fact that my future hung in the balance, the present reason for my being there. “I’m giving up the law,” he said, “to become a forensic barber. ‘What your ’do says about you.’ Forget DNA, dental records. Look at the coif. You’ll know.” His secretary rang into his office, and Throckmorton said there was water on the receiver. “Are you pissing in the other end?” Then after a long silence, “Stop blubbering!” He put the phone down. “Jesus H. Christ. Has no one a sense of humor anymore? I’ll be right back.” He went out to comfort his secretary. When he returned, he said, “She’s in love with me. She says I have no respect. There’s no object. What ever happened to grammar? I have no respect? For what? She didn’t say. Perhaps it’s for the best. I have no respect for her, something she has yet to learn. An excellent secretary, lucky to have her. I just wish she had a little respect for me.”