Driving on the Rim (36 page)

I had known Throckmorton for a long time, since the seventh grade, when he was often in trouble and I was ever on the margins because we had moved quite often; my parents had so little standing in town that the children were only too happy to reproduce these dismal social patterns from kindergarten on. My mother wanted to teach me at home, using the Bible, but my father, strengthened by new friendships at the VFW, put his foot down. I saw now that it was the beginning of our joining a community, and gratitude to the VFW aroused my fascination with my father’s service in WWII. I badly wanted to belong to something, and my father may have felt the same way: as I have so often said, our house was full of old soldiers. On the other hand, my mother’s passions produced
little or no society for us. Those zealots were too focused on their journey for the sort of convivial pleasures enjoyed by my father’s friends and their wives. While my mother complained about the bad language of the former or the recklessness of their wives, she had a surprising capacity for fun, especially if it involved music and dancing. She could dance all night long. I remembered the strange feeling I got when I noticed the electricity she generated at some of our backyard parties, despite—or because of—her fixation on God. I remembered my father’s assertive forefinger in the chest of one of his contemporaries who had let my mother’s allure embolden him in the form of an impulsive kiss.

I was rescued from my life on the margins not just by our burgeoning VFW social normalcy but by the friendship of Throckmorton, the only boy in our class who, though popular, seemed sufficiently immune to peer pressure to anoint me a friend. He was a striking olive-skinned, round-faced boy with a jet-black Mohawk who loved the outdoors and feeling up girls, a pastime I learned from him once I’d achieved a minimal social aptitude. It still surprised me that the girls’ permission to feel them up so readily represented the general opinion of the whole class. Throckmorton and I were entirely focused on breasts, of which we were connoisseurs, commenting on their apparently limitless attributes. This was my first real vocabulary challenge.

Throckmorton and I spent our free time out of doors, in the sagebrush hills north of town with our small falcon, Speed—a kestrel we had taken from its nest, raised, and taught to hunt grasshoppers and mice. Speed rode the handlebars. We fished in the small snowmelt streams we could reach by bicycle. At a cabin far from town, we often observed a border collie on a chain, unsheltered in all weathers. We stole this dog too and named him Pal, lied to our parents about where we found him. Pal lived out his life, alternating between our houses. Throckmorton’s parents said my parents overfed Pal, and my parents said that Throckmorton’s parents spoiled Pal by never asking him to do anything. Pal’s training consisted of “sit” and “shake.”

Throckmorton played football. He was a gritty defensive lineman, the position most suitable for his thick frame, and always had a bloody nose or mouth, which he held aloft as he jogged to the sidelines for treatment. Throckmorton claimed that football enabled one to see more breasts
than any other sport. That seemed to be the case, though I counted on baseball’s superior elegance to serve this end in the long run. Throckmorton thought this was a trifling idea and asserted that women were drawn to violence.

One day when we were hunting grasshoppers in a big alfalfa field, Speed flew away for good. “Ungrateful bird,” said Throckmorton, but his eyes were filled with tears. Mine too. We were about to start high school. Afterwards, Throckmorton and I saw less of each other, though we were still good friends. He dated one cheerleader after another; and as he was now a big aggressive brute and I knew his vividly carnal imagination, I rather felt sorry for these girls he described as “squealing like pigs.”

“Jury selection will be a breeze. I’ve been down the list, bunch of good folk from the tax rolls. I’ll let Numb Nuts fuck around with the jury pool, toss in a few peremptory challenges to make it look like he’s in charge, and then I’ll nip in and winnow those who’ve got it in for doctors. You’re well liked. An admired practitioner. Eccentricities forgiven. Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana. And you, my friend, are a blue-ribbon, bull-goose freak.”

“Don’t get complacent, pardner, I’d like to go back to work.” I wish he hadn’t brought up my trade. I missed it tremendously. Numerous fresh faces walking into my office with their problems, too beautiful, too stirring for words. My mother’s rearing suddenly surfaced as I asked God to let me work.

“I’ll go through them very carefully. The judge has already indicated that the jurors need not be death-qualified. So there’s little for you to sweat beyond the Big House.”

I didn’t like this, joke or not. I feared confinement more than mortality. It was curious that I didn’t seem to fear it more than indelible guiltiness, which felt more like a recurrent cancer in remission. But I could be guilty and still work, whereas I couldn’t work in the Big House.

“Why in God’s name don’t you smoke cigars?” He held up a handful. “Mexican maduro number 3 ring. So darn good.”

“I’ve tried them.”

“You haven’t tried them enough. I wish you’d get off this austerity stuff. You’re missing out altogether unless you’re angling for canonization. You’re not taking your own pills, are you?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I need something to sleep.”

“We’ll talk about it.”

“It’s got to knock me on my ass. No pussyfooting around. Brandy and cigars before bedtime, it takes a Class Three narcotic or you’re counting sheep. Plus, I have worries. I’m not austere. I spend money, I travel, I have a mistress.”

“What say you hold off on the foreseeable heart attack until my trial is over?”

“Plus, something to perk up the love machine?”

“Tons of stuff out there. It all works so long as you feel pretty with a beet-red face.”

“Would you mind if we got off this for a moment and focused on your trial?”

This was classic Throckmorton, one of the most doubt-free people I had ever known. I wished it had rubbed off on me.

The Stands family moved to town my sophomore year when Mr. Stands was transferred by the railroad from Forsyth. They were Crow, real name Stands Ahead, and their daughter, their only child, Debbie, my girlfriend all through high school, raised my prestige—though not with everybody, as there was a residue of prejudice toward Indians and a few thugs began calling me “Chief”—since Debbie was the best-looking girl in school. The family was probably what inclined me to intern at the Indian Health Service, but more important, Debbie taught me how to study. I spent three years believing that our destinies would forever be intertwined; the very chastity of our relationship, excepting only limited familiarity with her breasts, seemed to elevate our love to a mythic plane. Then I went to college in the Midwest, where my gruesome immaturity returned like a virus dormant in my spine, and Debbie married a classmate at Missoula. I still heard from her at Christmas. The family picture on her card, husband and two children, gave me a pang. Her father, Austin Stands Ahead as he latterly styled himself, was my patient until dying of congestive heart failure. He kept me up on Debbie, and I concealed my pain with a congratulatory smile as he detailed her accomplishments: she was a state legislator. I met Debbie once at a high school reunion and with a trembling face. Thereafter, I avoided such things.
Years later, I thought to relent, but even if Debbie had grown big, fat, and old I was afraid it wouldn’t matter.

I seemed to be a bachelor. For years I wondered whenever the phone rang late at night if it might be Debbie. It never was. I realized now that it never would be. There were quite a few things like that.

“Did that fellow ever bring you an airplane?”

“Womack. Yes, a while back actually.”

“To start crop dusting again?”

“This is a different kind of plane. Takes off and lands on small runways. And it can carry quite a load.”

“To do what?”

“Oh, there’s always a call for a plane like that.”

“Mining equipment, I suppose.”

“Sure.”

“So, where is Womack now?”

“He got a room.”

“Where did he get a room?”

“One of those little towns. Over near Rapelje, I think, somewhere in the Golden Triangle.”

“And he looks after the plane?”

“What is this, Twenty Questions?”

So, later, Jinx came over, after doing her grocery shopping, and brought me a few treats, including a pint of Cherry Garcia, a little wedge of artisanal cheddar, and a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé, which I offered to drink with her, but she wouldn’t consider it as she meant to spend her evening reviewing cases. But we did have a cocktail, despite my being briefly low-spirited and envious that she would be working. I hadn’t had a drink in a week, and just one was enough to produce a wave of warmth generally, but especially toward my friend Jinx. Therefore I regaled her with an overly detailed account of my infatuation with Jocelyn, including hints of its erotic aura. It was a masterpiece of thoughtlessness, but Jinx bore it with her usual grace and composure, questioning me attentively about something I cared about, and only because I cared about it. I glimpsed that people at work, like Jinx, must look across a great divide at people like me, atwitter over their love lives, or even people like Jocelyn,
trying to think what their airplane is good for. That was hardly an account of the facts, but Jinx’s world could not be called dull just for its steadiness. Adding to the picture, I years ago met Jinx’s parents: what a surprise, a retired car salesman with a highly visible gold tooth married to an aging but still painted party girl. Though it took thirty years, they finally drank themselves to death in the St. Louis apartment building where Jinx had grown up and launched herself into a real life of real work. I specifically recall the days she took off from the clinic, one year apart, to bury her mother and father and how downcast she was to lose two people who seemed spectacularly negligible to anyone who had ever met them. They had named her after Jinx Falkenburg, whom I could not recall. Jinx remarked ruefully that she was a “sweater girl.”

Ever since Throckmorton and I had our little kestrel, Speed, I’ve been interested in birds. Every bird I learned, if it was a migratory bird, I soon forgot. Didn’t we meet last year? I kept a life list, but its utility as a mnemonic device was quite limited. The spring warblers moved faster than my ability to memorize them, and frankly the sparrows were a nightmare. Anyone interested in birds and living near the Great Plains had to face the sparrow problem, which was that they all looked very similar: rufous, white-crowned, Baird’s, Henslow’s, house sparrows, grasshopper sparrows—all a blur, the bastards. So I switched to raptors, a bit of a copout, as they were more easily differentiated. Priapic male birders all liked raptors because they seemed flatteringly emblematic. Many of the hawk lovers I knew were big-bellied fellows with facial hair and a passion for cocktails. As yet, I didn’t fit this profile. My father, who never claimed bird expertise, remembered every bird he ever saw, even when he was overseas. He liked talking about them, too, but my mother would cut him off with, “Seen one, you’ve seen them all.” He assumed a conspiratorial air when he pointed into the willows and said, “Carolina warbler.” When he rode a tank into Germany, the storks on roofs were the thing that struck him most. He thought that a stork sitting on its eggs and watching an army roll by showed what nature thought about mankind.

With my new leisure following upon my indictment and my failure as a house painter, I had time to walk the woody creek bottoms where I
observed the short-winged woodland hawks, Cooper’s and sharp-shinned, speeding through the trees with uncanny nimbleness. I had several times watched prairie falcons diving into blackbirds when I walked around the uplands, and the chaos they made seemed to briefly fill the sky. These jaunts were hardly adventurous, as I never went more than a few minutes from town, but it was greatly reassuring to find wildlife so close to humanity. In fact, I could still make out the old water tower through the trees where I first came upon the goshawk, a northern goshawk, to be precise. Since I came upon her unawares and she was going about her goshawk business under my eye, it made a tremendous impression on me: almost blue-black on her back with a creamy and precisely barred breast. She was swiveling her head from side to side, broadcasting her oddly relentless screams. Over time, I would see her often, hunting, soaring, sleeping. And she saw me often enough that she no longer fled at my sight, moving me by her acceptance.

I also went birding with Jinx, a genuine expert. She had a beautiful pair of Leitz binoculars whose protective covering she had nearly worn away. My optics were el cheapos from Wal-Mart but good enough for my skill level. I was hardly able to keep up with Jinx, whose bird cognition was Olympian and betrayed my slow-witted tagalong efforts to identify those blurry sparrows which she saw as separate races with little in common beyond their genus. I accepted my inferior status as a birder just to be with her.

However, I knew a lot about my goshawk, had watched her fly, run down songbirds, pluck voles, and dine. I had narrowed the field of vision to the point at which I actually knew what I was talking about. So I invited Jinx to join me, knowing she would have to rise above my recent pariah status to accept. Frankly, she was a bit wary on the phone, but the bird interested her and we made a first-light foray into the creek bottom east of town.

I couldn’t find my goshawk.

“Where’s the bird?” Jinx demanded after we had wallowed along the low-water perimeter of the stream, scanning the treetops.

“She’s always here in the morning.”

“Are you sure about this?”

“That she’s always here?”

“No, that there’s actually a bird.”

“Why would there be no bird?”

“I thought you might want to talk privately.”

“Oh, no, no, no. There’s a bird. I’ve watched her every day. Very beautiful. Very queenly. I thought she was the bird for you.”

We fanned out and moved as quietly as we could in the brush. Bohemian waxwings had gathered in a wild crabapple tree, and some jacksnipe probed around the muddy creek. I was pleased to hear the sounds of children at the grade school a short distance away.