Driving on the Rim (46 page)

That season long ago in medical school when I drank and ate so much was instructive in many ways. Watching my body take off on its own was probably the most remarkable experience of those years. The way it commandeered my hands and mouth to get its way was very much like being on a runaway horse. I remembered following the fortunes of Haystack Calhoun, greatly disturbed by his death from diabetes as though even a farm boy who could carry his cows around the pasture or toss hay bales into a high loft could be brought down by the indifference of his own body. Other phenomena had accompanied my new morphology:
I several times proposed matrimony to astonished women as though, as a husband, I would be slender. I kept an article about an eight-hundred-pound woman who had to be removed from her Florida apartment: the medical technicians charged with this task reported that they had sought special advice from SeaWorld.

I eventually emerged from this spell of your-body-is-not-your-friend and returned to my schoolwork with new sobriety. A summer job in teeming New York had something to do with the change, as the stark individuality of humans that I had known growing up was swept under the infinite crowd of the great city, and humanity came to seem a substance like air or water. I had to claw my way back to my original vision in which each person was surrounded by space. I knew somewhat abstractly that even New Yorkers had to have space around them; I just didn’t believe it.

I tried explaining all this to Jinx on one of our hikes in the rolling hills north of the Musselshell River where we had found a line of cairns marking an old Indian trail that led us through some wonderfully expansive vistas. I don’t know how Jinx found all these things—buffalo jumps and old wolfers’ campsites—but she did, and I expanded my sense of the earth thanks to her vigilant eye. She found a ruby-crowned kinglet’s nest in the bushes next to my front door—something I had failed to notice—and reproached me by noting that they had nested here for years.

Jinx said, “You got all this from your mother.”

“What d’you mean, ‘I got all this from my mother’?”

“The separation of body and spirit. As though we can be attacked by our bodies while the spirit saddles up for the next world. We are our bodies. That’s it.”

“Are you trying to tell me that the human spirit, which we have believed in for tens of thousands of years, doesn’t exist?”

“It’s a coping tool in response to grief.”

“Jinx, you hold a square foot of air between your hands, and in that piece of air are radio waves, GPS and television signals, microwaves, light waves, sound waves. And the human spirit can’t exist because you can’t see it?”

“You guessed ’er, Chester.”

“I and my millions of forebears, many of whom predate formal religion of any kind, just don’t believe that.”

“Momma’s boy.”

If a difference of opinion could be called pleasant, this was it. We walked for miles, and in a way I thought my point was made by simply following this old human trail toward the distant hills beyond which were more distant hills. We rested under the cottonwoods, and I nearly fell asleep as Jinx read to me from one of the battered paperbacks she carried in her day pack. “ ‘Take a look at the neutrality of this globe that carries us through space like a lifeboat heading for shore.’—Are you listening, Toots?”

“Yes,” I said, “of course.”

“ ‘Today a virtuous couple sleeps on the same ground that once held a sinning couple.’ ” Long pause. She stared at me. “ ‘Tomorrow a churchman may sleep there, then a murderer, then a blacksmith, then a poet.’ And here, my dear, is what I want you to listen to carefully: ‘They will all bless that corner of the earth that gave them a few illusions.’ ”

My life seemed to sweep in a better direction. I didn’t quite know why at first, because I had enough work that there was little time to spin myself into a hole of self-deception. And Jinx was on a mission to replace all those invisible things in the square foot of air between my hands that I insisted contained the human spirit with the earth itself; she led me on day trips up creeks, over the hills, and across the prairie. I don’t really know if it was in this same spirit that she took my Oldsmobile 88 to the wrecking yard and had it reduced to scrap metal. If so, I’m still absorbing it. One trip to the Teton River to watch fledgling prairie falcons required us to take sleeping bags, and I suppose it must be clear what happened and what sort of flood ensued after this particular dam was breached. I’m surprised Jinx didn’t have octuplets.

I don’t believe that I am particular prey to superstition, but Jinx left me a note the other day about some plan she proposed to hike into a little ghost town that existed on a ranch whose owners’ grandchildren were her patients. A grave there belonged to an old mountain man. There was a hanging tree, an old saloon, and a few crumbled houses. Well, of course, this was an interesting idea, but what startled me was that Jinx’s handwriting resembled my mother’s to such a remarkable degree. My residual superstition kicked in and I more or less panicked. Numerology, black cats, hats on the bed, walking under ladders don’t mean anything to me, but I was alarmed by coincidences.

I ransacked my desk at home until I found one of my mother’s crackpot
letters from my college years warning me to not lay up treasures but to prepare for the Judgment Day. Then, I still entertained the idea that my medical degree would be the Midas touch, and I recalled the guffaws this letter had occasioned. It would be a long time before I unwound the fact that when my mother died I lost all interest in both God and money; they must have been connected in my mind. I just didn’t know how.

I found a graphologist who invited me to fax my mother’s letter and Jinx’s note for analysis. I pretended to be curious to know whether the handwriting was by the same person. I got a rather snotty reply and a fifty-dollar charge on my credit card. My mother’s writing was described as flamboyant and not the work of someone given to details, while Jinx’s was that of a person with “broad perspectives” and “firm judgment.” My mother’s handwriting was that of someone who would “have great difficulty meeting schedules” despite trying to micromanage anyone in her vicinity. The graphologist could hardly have known that with God on their side, micromanagers could really make it happen. I was pleased though by the graphologist’s last question, as to whether or not I was trying to fool him by suggesting that these were the same person.

I don’t know how much longer Jocelyn’s outlaw aura hung over my mind; I suppose it never went away entirely, but its last real flare-up came in the year Jinx and I had moved out to our house on the river, a sunny spot hung with bird feeders and tucked into a grove of aspens with a view to the south and three big bends of the river. The bench below the house was enclosed by a jackleg fence and there our saddle horses grazed. Jinx was reading the Sunday paper while I watched a thunderstorm forming over the Absaroka Range. Perhaps after forty years in medicine I was trying to decide whether I wanted to be a doctor. I was close to retirement, and I hoped to work it out before then: such was my accustomed style. In a startled voice, Jinx read from the paper: hunters had found in some sort of collapsed brush pile the remains of a man with his leg in a cast. Since no one had come forward with a missing-person report that fit the situation, authorities suggested it would remain a mystery. Like everything else.

Thomas McGuane lives in Sweet Grass County, Montana. He is the author of nine novels, three works of nonfiction, and two collections of stories.