Driving on the Rim

13

IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE of the long northern evening; the dust devils had died in the fallow fields and off to the west a small island range of mountains floated in shadow. I had a tall bourbon and water with lots of ice tinkling in a handy holder between the seats, and as I passed the empty old country schools, grain elevators on abandoned spurs and glimpses of creeks running through brush that slowly reclaimed homesteads, I thought I could feel the lives of the missing population like so many sad, if amiable, ghosts. As usual when faced with troubling things I seemed unable to understand, I resorted to fishing. I had a favorite fly rod with me, a nice, leisurely old glass Winston, and Dr. Olsson’s English aluminum case that had gone on so many trips. My plan was working: I was in a very good mood.

I took a two-track road used by irrigators and crossed a cattle guard, culverts, and a wire gap before getting into the field I intended, at the far edge of which was a slow mountain creek that held lots of cutthroat trout, vigorous spotted beauties with orange slash marks at their throats. A crop duster was flying in the distance, just at the ledge of mountain where yellow panels of grain extended toward the valley bottom. As it pulled up at the end of each run, clouds streaming behind it, the changing pitch of its engine carried all the way down to where I could clearly hear its whine. I parked under a power line that angled off toward the town of Wilsall and heard the dense murmur of summertime insects as I got out of the car. I saw clouds in the hood of the Olds in the late light, the crop duster rising and falling in the distance. The plane was treating wheat fields right at the edge where the foothills broke elevation, reversing direction by a dangerous maneuver called a hammerhead stall, sending the plane straight up at the end of each field right in the face of the hills for a falling turn down the next row. Suddenly one wingtip caught a juniper ridge and the plane tumbled.

I wasn’t absorbing the scene quite as I should. What seemed implausible was the complete lack of movement from this so recently dashing machine, which at the slightest contact with the earth had turned into junk. I got back into my car and drove recklessly until I was close to the accident. I got out and ran the rest of the way to the wreck. I smelled fuel and heard a voice—“Get away before this thing catches fire!”—a woman’s voice. With the smell of gasoline and the word “fire,” I admit that I nearly bolted. Instead, I approached the cockpit — the propeller was wrapped back around the nose and fuel was running onto the ground — and discerned the torso of the pilot somewhat pinned under the plane. I began to pull her out, expecting screams, but I was met with only a weird silence, made even more inexplicable when I finally had her clear and saw that one foot was pointing in the exact opposite direction from the other. “Keep moving. Get farther from the plane.” There was such urgency in this command that overcoming my aversion to moving her at all I kept pulling until we were both many yards from the wreck. The plane went up in flames and a rush of air. She said, “Was that the plane?”

The burning airplane spewed a column of ugly smoke into the clear, windless air. Whatever chemicals that were aboard in addition to its fuel combined with the wiring plastics and other petrochemical elements in the craft to lend the smoke a greasy industrial quality that soon towered against the foothills.

The pilot lay faceup on the grass in front of me. She wore the sort of crash helmet you’d associate with motorcycles, and since one foot was still headed the wrong way, I declined to move her any more than I’d had to in order to get her clear of the coming fire, now a small throbbing inferno that made an X-ray of the airframe. With great delicacy I removed the crash helmet. A surprising mass of auburn hair spilled out. Physical anguish had transformed her features, and so I had no idea what she looked like. I knew she mustn’t be moved. I had seen results of accidents like this before, and I was well aware that the internal injuries could be anywhere and anything. There was always a list of things you hoped not to find, and the sometimes mad process of elimination during a race against the clock of declining vital signs was life’s most awful rush.

A ranch hand on an ATV arrived first, turned straight around and headed back downhill for a telephone. I wedged my coat and sweater on either side of her head to immobilize it; the worst things I knew were when the victim was vomiting or choking on blood and it was impossible to move the head without knowing if the neck or spine had been injured; you could only lift the jaw forward and with your fingers try to clear the airway. But no signs of head injury presented; the woman was not losing consciousness nor had she lost control of her bowels or limbs, the familiar signs. If she expressed anything, it was exasperation, but her discomfort prevented much of that. In a spell shortened by my obsessively checking vitals with squeamish glances directed at the upside-down foot, a compact four-wheel-drive ambulance from the small med center nearby arrived, and the pilot was lashed in place and rolled inside it. This whole while, though clearly conscious, she made no sound. I watched the ambulance ease its way down the two-track, before hitting the pavement, when its emergency light popped on and it was gone, heading west.

Thus my fishing, the vaunted evening rise, went right out the window.

Not a week after I saw Enid at the car wash I saw her again. I had paid a visit to one of my elders — mature folks in my first practice who had grown old — up the Shields River valley, and I’d stayed late, deciding to stop off at the Wilsall Bar for a drink before boarding the Oldsmobile for home. The only other customer was Enid, who this time saw me before I saw her. She motioned me over to the table, and I called my drink out to the bartender to save him the trip. Enid must have had a few drinks already, for she wore a mellow look I’d never seen on her face before, and it was quite becoming; one drink and one drink only was what I had in mind, but Enid’s demeanor suggested we were both headed for last call.

“Doctor, how nice to see you. I don’t like drinking alone but that’s what I’ve been doing. It certainly beats not drinking at all.”

“I was looking in on some of my old patients.”

“God’s little waiting rooms, all over the county.”

“I suppose so.”

“I’ve been doing much the same thing, and now I’m treating the pain. I always thought agricultural banking suited me. Times have changed. Now they call me the Grim Reaper.”

“It must hurt.”

“What about your old car? Did you ever get it clean?”

“I did. How are your ranchers? Some of them doing okay?”

“Very few. The ones that stayed away from machinery on credit. On the other hand, their backs are gone.”

“What’ll they do?” I had some of these people on my customer list too.

“In some cases they’ll face the fact that ranching doesn’t pay, take someone’s ten million for the spread, and move to Scottsdale. The rest just dry up and blow away.”

This was where her posture changed and she started sizing me up. “But for the moment anyway, we’re not so different from everyone else who’s got no place better to be.”

We ended up using her car because it had four-wheel drive and I could take it out into a CRP field no one ever visited. There were wires running all over the ground for a methane exploration project and I tried not to drive over them until I found the creek bed I knew from my hunting, followed it into a grove of junipers, and turned off the engine. I’m still surprised at how tenderly we made love. This sort of car-borne episode is associated in everyone’s minds with something feral, but it was as if we had met in ideal circumstances and this was the result of substantial courtship. Partly, it was the warm air and the smell of prairie flowers and the remnants of grain farming really sort of caressing us, and the odd light coming from the dashboard instruments was quite becoming to her flesh. It struck me as grown-up, knowledgeable sex — you might say respectful sex, unsentimental, detached from any larger context. I wished all need could be addressed so directly. We didn’t stare at each other with theatrical grimaces at the familiar crescendos but struggled around in a grateful knot, welcoming all the fluids as we went. When we were finished, Enid sat straight up, thrust her hands into her hair, and stared through the windshield in thought. Then she turned to me with a mischievous wordless look. We gathered our clothes and dressed under the stars as though at public baths, as though merely acquaintances, which of course we were. It had been such a big success that there was not the smallest chance we’d try it again.

* * *

I was not always comfortable seeing patients at the office, and so I’d find excuses to see them in their homes or to run into them in the street. One old patient, Frank Kelly, entertained me with tales of his youth while I examined him. We sat on his enclosed porch with its view of the west side of the Crazy Mountains while his wife puttered around behind us in the living room. He grew up near the Missouri Breaks, the son of a renowned cowboy and an Indian woman, in the years when the small ranches, theirs among them, were condemned to make way for the Fort Peck Reservoir, a federal project of the New Deal years. Some ranchers resisted, but accusations in local papers that they were unpatriotic soon had them moving off the land, barely recompensed. Frank always had stories of his family’s years adrift, usually a new one on each of my visits to keep me coming back. It worked. Today’s had to do with his father’s job riding cattle in a huge circle on one of the big ranches south of the dam near the town of Jordan, still vast and now empty. Frank was a very young boy when his father would take him out and leave him at an abandoned sod house, ride all day, then come back for him at nightfall. Frank described these as extremely boring, lonely days of rock throwing and daydreaming. One day while he was playing atop the old sod house, the roof collapsed and he descended into its interior in an avalanche of dry dirt. “When I landed inside, on my feet, I had an old buffalo rifle in my arms that had been hidden in the ceiling. I went into the navy in ’42 and the neighbors stole it.”

Since various and sundry had given me to think that I had some hand in poor Tessa’s departure, I began to brood about my instance of actual guilt, that of avenging the beaten wife who was my patient. Was I gloomy? Hardly. Perhaps I was simply entertaining this recollection as an exercise in irony. Of course that was not true. I had attended the funerals of this poor couple, and I remembered thinking that it was tragic for her life to end as it had but that my helping Junior make his way to the next world had given the family closure — as we now say — that they might not have otherwise had if he had been punished more conventionally. In this, too, I was delusional. There were, I suppose, even then, signs that the situation could get out of hand; the first sign was my desire, not felt in decades, to revisit the scene of the “crime” or crime. I listened to a retrospective of a favorite band as I drove along, getting into an admittedly inappropriate merry frame of mind. Listening to “Plastic Seat Sweat” and “Girl Fight” really got me bouncing in my seat, and when I arrived at the murder locale with “Too Much Pork for Just One Fork” on at the loudest setting, I found myself dancing beside the open car door as I tried to evoke guilt for the demise of that wicked husband. I was really on a tear, and it was only a matter of time before things went sideways. Actually, I did feel a little guilty, and I was sorry that it dampened my inclination to boogie in broad daylight. It quickly came back, though, as I remembered happy hours with the great Tessa and was overwhelmed by my own adrenaline. With “Too Much Pork for Just One Fork” booming from my car door, I began to do my own version of break dancing, spinning on the lawn with one hand while attempting to shout out a rhyme on “pork.” Presently the homeowner emerged from his front door, and it was as though his gaze slowly extracted Tessa from my arms. I felt a storm cloud arise in my chest. The owner was a small man somewhat older than me, wearing a cardigan sweater over a white T-shirt and laceless shoes serving as slippers. He turned a pitying gaze on me. “It can’t be that bad,” he said, and I could see Tessa — obnoxious, deluded, life-filled Tessa — receding into nothingness as she was replaced by Cody Worrell. I needed to explain myself.

“There was a double suicide here some years ago.”

“I’d heard.”

“I was the first on the scene. I hope the place has seen better days since.”

“It has. It’s been a happy house. I wouldn’t give it up for the world. We raised a boy and a girl here. They moved away, but they’re doing fine. They always call.”

“Oh, very nice.”

“On Sundays.”

“Ah, good, catch everyone in.”

“At exactly one o’clock.”

“Mm.”

My growing impatience with this levelheaded old man was instructive, and I drove home in silence, as nothing could have been more annoying at that moment than music. I wondered whether that family had emptied that house of any bad spirits; it seemed they had. I certainly never entertained the idea of myself as a murderer, at least not until recently when the idea was put into my head by people unfamiliar with the facts. If I had done wrong, would my instinct have been to dance on the lawn, to exult at the music pouring from the door of my Oldsmobile? I didn’t think so. Not if Tessa was who they had in mind.

John O. Danowicz, an old railroader, came to see me this morning at my office. I gave him several goings-over each year under the terms of his pension. He was almost eighty years old and showing a bit of dementia, that awkward stage at which one is uncomfortably aware of these troubling changes. I suppose we could have tested him for Alzheimer’s, but I didn’t think it necessary as he was so well adjusted and living at home with his old wife. He was a thin, immaculate man with the big hands of a machinist, tidy and organized, and very interested in the operations of his body. He knew what his weight, blood pressure, heart rate, and lipids should be, having made his health his hobby. He played checkers with his wife and did crosswords, the latter having provided signs that his memory was failing. He felt that he had lived a very long time and looked forward to stealing as many days from mortality as possible. His philosophy had always interested me, as he saw himself the reification of an infinite number of chance events, starting with his parents’ meeting on a steamer in Puget Sound. His recurrent line—“I just want to see how far I can get”—intrigued me as proper to an adventurous spirit like John O. Danowicz. He would have made an encouraging centenarian, and I took his well-being most seriously.

After John left, I had a cancellation, so I idled in the hallway and made small talk with the nurses, and the occasional colleague, none of whom seemed anxious to speak to me. Perhaps I began to smell a rat. I don’t remember. We at the clinic, like everyone else around here, were spending most of our time reacting to the sudden growth of our world as retired people and amenity migrants of all sorts began to settle around us. They’d fetishized our terrible weather and made us locals feel like sissies for ever having complained about the wind and cold. They were a virtual LL Bean — Patagonia road show, and what we complained about I suppose had never gotten to them except in a bracing secondhand way. Our town now had so many people who did not seem to exactly need anything we offered — employment, supplies, fellowship. I suppose it might have been a good thing to have had a significant cohort of people who did not feel threatened, since most of us had always felt under siege, if only in our minds, and probably as a consequence of the root-hog-or-die ethos of the region. What had happened to the Indian was happening to us. My father told me that we ruined the American Indian. “We won the Indian Wars. We should have made every Indian an American citizen and then let them tough it out with the micks, the wops, the kikes, the Japs, the krauts, and the spics. They would have done just fine.” Well, okay. But what of us broken-down old conquerors?

So many times, my father told me that we get along by going along. This prescription seemed somewhat at odds with his real nature, especially that of the old warrior whose proud past surfaced now and again, but my mother had talked him into her blustering God, an array of obsequious saints, an earthly existence in which the roof was ever ready to fall in until time came to an end. In ten years he had gone from an M1 Garand to a steam cleaner and from the bleak agnosticism of an infantryman in winter to a thrice-dunked primitive Christian twisting like a rag and speaking in tongues in churches that rented space in failed strip malls. I think he was just doing his best, getting along by going along with my mother, whose piety and evangelical fever had preoccupied her family since the last century. She knew no other world — God the Tyrant and a supplicant humanity crawling on its belly to be forgiven for sins they never knew they’d committed. “It’s no sense defying the Lord,” she told me. “He’s got all the coons up one tree.”

There was some reason I remembered all this and it had to do with my somewhat intense focus on the pilot. It might have been the way she, like Audra, like Tessa, flew into our lives — Tessa in the aftermath of California, Jocelyn in the aftermath of an accident. I began wondering if she would live. I supposed they had taken her to the medical facility in White Sulphur Springs, a little thirty-seven bed facility whose staff I knew cycled between the hospital and clinic, the nursing home, home health care, and so on. It was in technical parlance a “frontier” facility. I would go there. I was drawn to White Sulphur Springs as though by some winch fastened to the town and attached to my Oldsmobile, and I found myself at the counter asking to be directed to the patient’s room, a request that only met with hesitation from the young girl at the desk with the severely plucked eyebrows and the tribal tattoo on her neck — until I explained that I was a physician.

The pilot was in the first room down a very short corridor. Her arms were bandaged, her face badly bruised; someone had secured her hair atop her head with an elastic, and under one slate gray eye hung a swollen blue-green bruise. “You’re the guy at the crash?” I said I was. I was skimming her chart: her name was Jocelyn Boyce and she was forty years old. She was from Two Dot, Montana, and listed as next of kin was her father. The ER summary indicated blowout fracture of the left eye socket, broken ribs, probably torn rotator cuff. She seemed fairly pert in view of these pain producers. The crow’s-feet I had already found attractive as suggesting someone not going to give in easily to hurt, but I didn’t know what sort of medication she had on board.

She did not seem dispirited by her condition. She said, “I thought I had the rookie errors out of my system.”

“I can’t comment,” I said. “I don’t know anything about flying.”

“It’ll be a long time before I live it down.”

Her physician came in about ten minutes after I got there. We knew each other vaguely, and he returned my greeting with reserve. He must have thought I’d been called in until I told him that I was at the accident. At that point, he cheered up and went into bonhomie so abruptly that I was startled and caught the glimpse of an ironic half smile from Jocelyn Boyce. He was Dr. Aldridge and had practiced here and there as he dodged the effects of his drinking, which he had finally controlled, though he was now trailed by his obsolete reputation. He was a good physician and looked the part with his neatly trimmed gray moustache and clear gray eyes. He said, “You can see Miss Boyce has quite a shiner.” He turned an infatuated gaze on his patient.

“I do see that.”

“She has a blowout fracture of the eye socket.” I knew that, but I thought it best for him to tell me. As Jocelyn Boyce and I kept glancing at each other, something odd was going on between us.

“The whole thing?” I asked.

“Just the floor, I think. She doesn’t have double vision and I’ve ruled out surgical repair. And no one wants us going in for that, do they, Miss Boyce?”

“It sounds creepy,” she said. “I’ll give you that.”

“There’s really no sign of muscle entrapment. If Miss Boyce gets bored with us she can roll her eyes whenever she wishes.” In fact, she did so, either at the banality of Dr. Aldridge’s remark or merely as a demonstration.

“You see?” said Dr. Aldridge. “No sign of spinal injury, thank the Lord, but the jury is still out on head trauma for as long as that eye tells us something about the blow she received.”

“Is that the worst of it?”

“The worst of it might be the knee. We’ve got it secured, but it was near disarticulation when she arrived.”

“It’s a long way from my heart,” said Jocelyn.

“You’ll be in the hands of a smart orthopod for that. We’re just the nuts-and-bolts guys, aren’t we, Dr. Pickett?” I smiled at this. “So, this is me going home to feed the cat—” His eyes glanced off mine; I knew his wife had left him during the bad years. “Miss Boyce, I’ll be looking in. I don’t live far and if you need me before my next visit, just call. I’ve left my cell number here—” He pointed to the papers on the bedside table. He was more than interested in Miss Boyce; it was almost embarrassing.

After Aldridge left, it was quiet in the room. Finally, I said, “It looks like you’ll get better.”

“So they say.”

“It’s time for you to rest. I’ll be on my way.”

“I wonder if you might think of stopping again.”

I looked down suddenly. “Yes,” I said, “I’d like to.”

At least once a week, my travels took me past the old strip mall where my parents’ Pentecostal church formerly met. It was now a Radio Shack outlet, and the electronics buffs and various tech weenies going in and out the door obviously felt no residual vibrations from its Holy Roller days. But I did: I painfully remembered when my mother began taking her raptures to the street, accosting pedestrians in tongues. My mother was a small woman, unthreatening in physical presence or demeanor, so she was no more than a curiosity at these passionate displays, with my father, abashed and meek, trailing at a safe distance. I, too, was influenced by my mother’s activity at this time: I started to look for signs of craziness in myself, and I found plenty. People with a crazy parent will be unsure of their own mental health all their lives. My grade school classmate Roscoe Tate often remarked when my mother made a public nuisance of herself that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Facing such things definitely budged me out of a childhood in many ways pleasantly prolonged by my mother’s peculiarities. It also occasioned the deepening of my friendship with our family doctor, Eldon Olsson.

We met in his chaotic office, bird dog sleeping on an old and overstuffed armchair, a well-worn sixteen-gauge pump gun standing in the corner. Dr. Olsson leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. I thought that it must have seemed unlucky to Dr. Olsson to have stumbled on Wiley and Gladys in his partridge-hunting forays and ending up with my family as his patients. I suppose he realized we didn’t have the money for a more regular arrangement.

“Your mother needs some help.”

“What kind of help?”

“Inpatient psychiatric help.”

“Because of her religion?”

“I don’t know because of what. I only know that Health and Human Services won’t allow her to do what she does much longer without stepping in.”

I was growing up fast. “What can we do?”

“We can head it off through a voluntary commitment, which would allow us to specify the date of release. That way we hold the cards. But you’re going to have to sell it. She’s got your father under her thumb, and he may be a nut too.” This hurt, but I withheld reaction. “Your task is to make your mother see the light on this one. Good luck.”

I sold it, and on a winter day we drove my mother to the Warm Springs State Mental Hospital, old buildings under bare trees by the Clark Fork River. She hardly seemed defeated by her situation, and dressed in her wool coat with the rabbit fur collar and unbuckled galoshes, she strode into her room, looked around, and pronounced it wonderful to see that Jesus was there too. I could hear the cold river through the window. It was clear that in her odd kindheartedness she was doing this to make my father and me feel better.

My mother’s spirits helped me a bit with the guilt I felt at talking her into this arrangement. As we drove home my father found much to marvel at in the winter landscape, especially the colossal statue of Our Lady of the Rockies outside Butte, a ninety-footer sitting atop the Continental Divide; the vast mine diggings around the city which I found such an assault on nature, he saw as a tribute to the determination of men. “That Berkeley Pit filled a lot of lunch pails. Crying shame it got so big they had to tear down the Columbia Gardens, but people got to eat.” As we passed the great wheat farms west of Three Forks, he averred that Americans fed the world. I may have been a bit offended on my mother’s behalf at his very high spirits. I was brooding over the fact, which I recalled from publicity at the time it was raised, that Our Lady of the Rockies was dedicated to all the mothers in the world. The Army National Guard supplied a sky crane to install the Virgin’s head. I don’t know what I had supplied on behalf of motherhood. Not much.

We followed a snowplow into Bozeman Pass, spewing a great falling wing of snow on the roadside. My father turned to me to give me another boost out of my youth. “There’s something I’d like to tell you,” he said. I glanced quickly his way, fearful of taking my eyes off the slippery road. “I became an atheist the first time I saw a German tank and I’ve been one ever since. So never think I’m not devoted to your mother.”

In arranging my mother’s voluntary commitment, the hospital required us to accept that she could be held for five days after the requested release. On the occasion of her emptying a tub of Tuna Surprise on the dietician’s head, the facility exercised this option and used the time to request that the court convert her deal to an involuntary commitment. Thanks to what I would long view as my betrayal, my mother was often institutionalized until she died. Since going somewhat AWOL from the clinic, I have been trying to forgive myself for this sin, and several others. That’s right, sins. What else could I have called them? On one long drunken night in February I found myself at 8,500 feet gazing up at the illuminated Our Lady of the Rockies towering over the forlorn town of Butte, waiting for something that would lift the weight of my mother’s life from my shoulders.