Driving on the Rim (45 page)

It began badly. I walked the few blocks to Jinx’s house, knowing that she would be making herself lunch there between appointments. It was a short drive from the clinic, and I was waiting inside as I heard her pull up, the distinctive motor sound of her old Jaguar. She usually rode her bike. She didn’t seem surprised to see me and asked if I would like half of her egg salad sandwich. I declined. I had her kettle boiling and made myself a cup of tea, which I placed before me on her dining room table. The dismay and humiliation of my relations with Jocelyn burned inside me, and I anticipated thoughtful words and relief from my pain once Jinx grasped my situation. Jinx seemed to recognize that something was up, because as she sat down with her sandwich and glass of juice, she neither said anything nor took her eyes off me. I thought I’d go ahead and get started but was surprised by my vehemence once I did.

As I bawled out my forlorn and embittered hopelessness, Jinx listened attentively—I’m really embarrassed by this; I honestly don’t know what inspired me to put it down—and it might have been this quiet attention that encouraged me to lavish my story with details. I told her about Jocelyn’s airplane accident and recovery at the clinic in White Sulphur Springs, and the growth of my infatuation. I described how I missed all the signs of Jocelyn’s exploitative nature and how my adoration kept me from ordinary self-protection. With lugubrious thoroughness, I depicted the heartache and love blindness that led me to overlook such quirks as her burning down her own home and lying about the death of her father. Worse, the recitation had the effect of reawakening Jocelyn’s malign
romantic appeal. I may have even smiled as I recounted the passionate adventures with decorative hints as to the erotic attraction. Nevertheless, nothing in the world could have prepared me for Jinx’s response. She told me to go fuck myself. The cat was out of the bag.

“Jinx, what could you possibly mean?”

“I mean, why on earth would you think I’d want to hear about you and your castrating harpie?”

“Have you even met her?” On recollection, this question would appear to be at the heart of my inanity.

“Good God, why would I want to do that? So I could kneecap her?”

“Oh, Jinx.”

“She must have seemed so cuddly in her little airplane.”

“Jinx, please stop.”

“And this Womack, he sounds like a real treat. You’ve got a little Womack in you, too, don’t you, Cuddles. Can all three of you get into the tiny airplane? But let little Jocelyn do the driving or you might crash!” At this, she burst into tears. I attempted to sit quietly holding my teacup, but Jinx’s sobbing didn’t seem to be abating. I got up from my chair and went around to her side of the table. For some reason, my eyes fell on the untouched egg salad sandwich. I put my arms around Jinx’s shoulders and asked her what the problem was. Her answer startled me. She said, “I don’t know why you don’t love me.” In the face of these words, my towering self-absorption stood in a kind of glare, but I didn’t hate myself. I was just tired of myself. I seemed to be an unbearable weight. I seemed quite useless. Somehow, I continued to fan a glimmer of self-worth, possibly in vain.

I thought if I could re-imagine all the forces that had acted upon me in my life—my parents, my nympho aunt, Dr. Olsson and my professors, the lawyers, colleagues, neighbors, Jocelyn, even my patients, my most unreasonable dreams, my love of the earth, roadside hard-ons, experimental churchgoing, and work—I would finally find myself by implication. I had left Jinx off this list because to comprehend her I would have to step out of the shadows of all those things telling me who and what I was and try to emerge as an actual human being. This seemed not unlike twisting in the wind, and it came with a kind of dread. Jinx set out in my direction quite alone; why couldn’t I have had her courage?

She abruptly pulled herself together, wiped her eyes with a napkin,
got to her feet, and walked out the door. I went to the window, where I saw her mount her bicycle and ride up Custer Street; she may not have been entirely composed because the two pedestrians she passed stopped and turned to watch her. I hurried out onto the sidewalk to better see her progress, which was steadily to the north and, I supposed, out of town. I ran home and got my lucky 88, but at first I couldn’t find the keys, neither under the seat nor in the ashtray. I went wild. The macaroon-averse neighbor waved from his window and I gave him the finger. I found the keys, after a ripping search, under the porch glider and ran to my car, where I saw the neighbor advancing from his stoop in battle mode; but I was already behind the wheel and on my way to Custer Street and northward progress out of town.

I went out through an informal trailer park, past the packing plant, across the river and into undulant sagebrush hills. I pressed on because she would have had to come back the same way she left, and after a long rise that seemed to end at blue sky and cumulus clouds, I saw her, a speck in the distance. I flattened the accelerator, and the 88 responded with its signature twisting lurch. In less than a mile I overtook her, but by a glance over her shoulder I could tell she did not intend to stop. I blew the horn and immediately understood that the honking seemed to express everything that was the matter with me.

I passed Jinx very slowly, but she never looked in my direction and it was clear a roadblock was my only hope. I pulled ahead twenty yards, swung the 88 across her path, and got out. She rolled to a stop before me and climbed off her bicycle, holding it upright by one handlebar. She asked me if this was necessary. She swept her hair off her face with one hand, letting go of the bicycle with the other. It clattered to the ground. I went to her and put my arms around her. I meant to comfort her, but something else was going on.

Business, if that’s what you want to call it, was picking up. I would have to get some help. I probably needed a nurse, but I didn’t want to move out of my house and I wasn’t sure where I could put her. The battling couple across the way continued to disturb my sleep. I must have been able to stand it because I didn’t think of moving and I was getting more of my former patients, the ones who felt that I had over the years acquired some
valuable familiarity with their problems. Patients for whom depression was a component of their condition were loyal to me out of embarrassed reluctance to add to their anxieties by explaining them to someone new. The twins Olan and Darwin Ickes, farmers in their seventies with the biggest hands I had ever seen, fit this description: they had been raised to put their lives into “the place” and had only gradually realized that their grueling existence had resulted in a grudge against both life and “the place.” In short, they were depressed. I knew they wouldn’t see a counselor, so the counselor, a very effective practitioner named Joyce Erikson, and I visited the twins from time to time on “the place” and I think she might have helped them some. Olan and Darwin continued to see me.

A rancher from over near Shawmut, Kurt Merrill, was willing to talk to Joyce and try some medication as well. He was in bad shape. His only son, Terry, had committed suicide over a girl who was not his wife, and since they had always been close, Kurt could not believe that Terry had not communicated with him. Kurt had trained his grief into an obsession with cell phone records and was certain the phone company had lost a final message from Terry. I was very worried about Kurt and so was hugely relieved when he consented to be put into better hands.

I really didn’t know why anyone would want my advice on such things unless they were so needy as to want the inside scoop from a fellow nut. I wasn’t being modest: people in some circumstances will only trust a misfit, and that is where my long life in this town had its uses. My shabby past and the reputation of my family for shiftlessness were assets of which I could finally be proud. My former nurse Scarlett summed it up when she said, “If an idiot like you can be a doctor, anybody can be a doctor.” Even an insult had its uses. Scarlett had left nursing to write a novel and despite her contempt for me, she once asked me to read it. I vividly remember a line introducing the heroine: “Using her ball gown to prop up the toilet seat, Annette turned her thoughts to the evening.” Scarlett never had much in her pretty head. It was only a matter of time before she ran for office.

Well, Jocelyn turned up. By that time, I had some office furniture and she walked in as I was examining the loudmouth from across the street for strep throat. I had just told him that by irritating his throat in shouting
matches with his wife he had made it susceptible to bacteria and viruses; there was some truth to this, but the fact was that I had subjective interest in the diagnosis in my hope to get the couple to quiet down. This was the first time I had seen Chaz close up, and I was somewhat surprised to find him such a meager individual—bespectacled, male pattern baldness, a tiny paunch, girlish little hands. His shyness was in contrast to a baritone which he had some difficulty keeping at a low volume. I could see right away that Chaz lived through his voice, that it had a life of its own, even delivering all sorts of messages that might not have been entirely authorized by Chaz. As he sat on my examining table, I had great difficulty imagining this meek fellow bellowing about “the fucking macaroons” or diabolical snow peas. Quite formally, I instructed Jocelyn to have a seat in the waiting room, once the downstairs bedroom where we had fornicated. She looked at me in disbelief, gave a little laugh, and did as I suggested. Then, just to be safe, I cultured Chaz’s throat while he intoned around the swab, “Great tits.” Chaz had a screw loose, but I treated him as I would have any other patient, glad to have the work. Eventually his wife became an occasional patient; she must have been thirty years older than Chaz and twice his size. She bore an authoritarian air, even with me, and having already scoured various medical manuals for some self-diagnosis, she was ready for argument.

To be safe, I locked the front door the minute Chaz was on his way and went into the parlor to see Jocelyn, who was just then running all ten fingers through her thick, streaky hair to retie it with an elastic. Unwillingly, I took note of the beauty of her hands and her shapely forearms. An image of Jinx wobbling up the county road on her bicycle caused a sharp pain in my forehead. Jocelyn hiked up on the library table, sat with hands clasped before her and said, “What’s up, Doc?”

“You tell me.”

“Thought I’d stop by and say thanks. I’m fixing to head on down the line.”

“Sounds like a song.”

“It is to me. Before I breeze out of your life I wanted to clear up a few things that might have bothered you. Womack and I did some stuff with the airplane some people might say we shouldn’t have. I don’t know who those people might be, since the country is run by criminals: read
the paper. I just wanted to fly, but when you’re between jobs flying gets expensive. We both got pretty involved with the product at that time and so judgment-wise, things could have been better. I’m afraid I let him take me down some roads that were probably a mistake.” She spilled this all out in a somewhat prepared manner; I shouldn’t have absorbed it quite so easily.

“Like Mexico?”

“Sure, some roads in Mexico. For what Womack had in mind, Mexico is always where it’s at.” She was just tossing these replies at me. “Airplanes make all these little old countries run together. From the air, you just can’t tell one from another.”

“What was the point of coming here?” I liked to think this question suggested my suspicions, but I was flattering myself.

“Well, I had the homeplace and Womack was pretty fascinated with Canada. Canada is one big pharmacy and I guess he saw some opportunity there.”

“There were so many warning signs,” I said. “I wonder what made me fall for you like I did.” The nincompoop within thought that casting doubt on her story would bring her to heel. She laughed heartily, and I felt myself going down that slope all over again.

“You really need to look into that,” she said. “You’ve got a long way to go!” In retrospect, this was her one burst of candor. Even as I felt myself illuminated I was aware of her crazy allure—I think it had to do with a certain feral, almost sovereign amorality disguised as freedom. Jocelyn was also a brilliant liar. I ought to record the best one, whose inner mechanism was not unlocked for a few years. The preliminary deception—after me!—of Dr. Aldridge in White Sulphur Springs, which fell short of his actually leaving his wife, began and ended with his providing a morphine drip pump and enough ingredients to keep Womack comfortable for quite a while. She didn’t tell me this, Dr. Adridge did after I paid one more awkward visit to his clinic. Jocelyn told me that Womack had held so many incriminating things over her head that she was obliged to go along with him if she wanted to keep flying. After I caused him to be arrested, she was threatened with exposure all over again. To keep him from talking she had no choice but to help him escape, or jump bail anyway. I pressed her about the broken leg, which I thought was the result of
his escape, but it was only the work of someone to whom Womack owed money. I got a neurotic pleasure going through all this because in my deplorably gaga way I was still buying it. Therefore, she went on feeding me the following: her conscience unexpectedly struck and as much as she loved her freedom, it was time to accept the consequences of her life and actions. She flew Womack back to Texas, persuading him that there he would be safer and it would be easier to get him the medical care he needed; she couldn’t fly me back and forth into the hills because in the end suspicion would fall on all of us. When she got to Texas, she turned Womack in, and either he didn’t know it was she who had fingered him or he too finally accepted his fate, because he never betrayed her. She visited him in jail, she said, and he was remarkably transformed, as though having found a kind of peace he’d never had. The jailer had gotten him a guitar and he was writing songs, even some Christian ones.

All bullshit. I imagined looking back on myself sitting there with a dorky smile on my face, buying the whole thing. Maybe I was being too hard on myself, because when she suggested we make love as a sort of farewell, I declined. She wore a blue tube top which she pulled down to show me her stripper’s breasts. I concealed the abrupt knot in my stomach and said, “Lovely, thanks, maybe another time.” This occasioned, for the last time, a superb laugh and she told me I was finally getting somewhere. All I did was ask her what she was going to do next. She said, “I think I’ll try California. Everyone else has.” She did seem too confident that her old friend Womack would keep his mouth shut. I should have pursued that. It pleased me to think I smelled a rat and saw through her, but probably I didn’t. That’s why we got to tell our stories later.