Driving on the Rim

16

IN RETROSPECT, I realized that the tone of my working world had changed with Wilmot’s installation on our small board of directors. At first it was hard for me to see how this could have happened. Wilmot had money in ample supply, which often proved a cipher for personal capacity. It mattered little if you found it under a rock: it was yours and it spoke volumes about your merit. Moreover, he’d quickly risen among his fellow directors to the chairmanship. That was when he’d begun to call in efficiency experts and to insist on more-stringent board oversight, down to the appointment of nurses. We doctors also saw to the small rest home, which relied on minimally qualified but mostly competent caregivers. Wilmot got his mitts on this too, and we had a lot of devastating resignations as he called on various employees, including impoverished older women, to supply professional bona fides. For a short time, the old folks were virtually abandoned to the whims of family members and doctors like me who found time to enter their exceedingly gloomy world and provide what minimal help we could while the draconian fallout that showered down from Wilmot settled. I think that seeing our cardiologist, Alan Hirsch, operate a waffle iron at daybreak in that shadow world made us realize how far off course things had drifted.

A special meeting was called and it stopped just short of acrimony. We doctors politely informed the board that a certain flexibility was required in a small town where the employment pool contained not just the niche-ready, trained personnel but ordinary citizens willing to adapt to things that were as new to them as they might be to us. Wilmot seemed to listen politely from where he sat at the end of the board table in blazer and perky spotted bow tie embedded in his ruddy neck. Only his eyebrows, oddly antic, gave any indication that he heard us at all. The board members — salesman, dentist, and housewife — especially seemed uneasily deferential to Wilmot, who had not spoken; even the usually argumentative rodeo clown, a middle-aged cowboy in tight jeans, large belt buckle, and snap-button shirt who had been a scourge for our lackadaisical bill collecting, kept his trap shut today. Doctors are reliable guardians of their own cheese balls, but the divagations of human nature led them to occasionally notice the straitened circumstances of some fellow humans. I later assumed that this reticence of the board had been a prearranged stage setting for what followed: a blistering call for the members of the clinic to raise our standards of efficiency and expertise. It was an astonishing performance, since Wilmot to all appearances hardly knew what he was talking about, a fact that had little effect on his rant. Gripping one wing of his bow tie between thumb and forefinger while he shook the forefinger of the other hand at us, he demanded that we act… like grown-ups!

I had to hand it to my colleagues: we all learned to look forward to these meetings, which we viewed with barely suppressed hilarity. Over time, Wilmot delivered sermons based on a loose group he called “the founding fathers,” whose nature became more Nietzschean with every meeting. Our clinic did have problems, mostly financial, and these drove the looniness of our board with unfailing regularity. The rodeo clown blamed everything on falling cattle prices, out-of-staters, and ethanol. The car salesman saw the Japanese titrating unhappiness into the American economy. In this context, the housewife seemed quite sensible, seeing men behind everything. The dentist played his cards close to the chest and cringed when we congratulated him on avoiding weekend emergencies. In reply, he pantomimed his golf swing.

Dr. McAllister said, “Thank God they’re clueless.”

I retrieved with wan hope the sheaf of bills in my mailbox and met my old nurse Scarlett as she walked home with a rake she had just purchased jauntily balanced over her shoulder. I did not feel whimsical or ironic but meant to speed her into my home. I said, “Put down that rake.”

“My goodness,” said Scarlett, switching the rake from one shoulder to the other, “you’re leading an exciting life.” She wore a tattered, man’s crewneck sweater, cranberry red, with her wristwatch over one sleeve, and open-back clogs that revealed her pretty ankles. I don’t think I’d ever seen her out of her nurse’s uniform. She looked far better this way.

“Yuh,” said I dully, “I am.”

“Is all this true?”

“No,” I said, but the ambivalence came spearing back.

“Are they letting you work?”

“Er, not really.”

“Bummer. So what do you do?”

“Well, I’ve been catching up on my thinking. Can you come in?”

“Ho, ho, ho. The answer is ‘no.’ ”

As though this reply was of the greatest indifference to me, I said, “Well, then, let me just stroll along with you, if that’s all right.”

“You know, it’s not all right. I realize you’re innocent until proven guilty, but I don’t need a lot of people watching me socialize with you.”

“I understand.”

“Probably you don’t, but that’s just how it is.” She went on her way, the rake over her shoulder. Without looking back, she said, “Call me if you’re acquitted.”

I doubt that Jinx was being formal with me so much as practical. I must not have been ready for practicality. I asked her, “Do you have a minute to talk about this?”

“Talk about what?”

“Oh, come on. I’m in trouble.”

“Sure, I’ll talk about it. What do you want to talk about?”

“I want to know if you had a hand in it.”

“Why would I have had a hand in it?”

“You tell me.”

“I think it’s more important that you think about what you have done and what should be done to you as a consequence. I’m not asking you to tell me: that’s between you and your god.”

“Excellent. We spend a lot of time together. We’ll work it out.”

“When you do, get some advice about operating on a somewhat different plane. Neither I nor anyone else in town can figure out where the hell you’re coming from.” I found this tone of Jinx’s alarming: she had never talked to me like this.

I think that medical school, where I found myself by way of a painless knack for academics and some democratic scheme by which poor boys from hick towns received modest preference, was where I first felt the gust of fear that if I didn’t straighten out and fly right I might well end up a flop and an idiot. Therefore, I got my head down and my butt up, and bent to the work at hand. As a consequence, I had few personal memories of medical school, which had all the charm of a Soviet assembly line. If we drank, it was in pursuit of oblivion; if we fornicated, it was to relieve discomfort. At length, we found without jubilation that we were doctors. I lurched home to celebrate and did my best to enjoy the gruesome party my parents had arranged in my honor.

There was much alcohol. My father had set up a huge barbecue pit in the backyard, and some animal was turning on a spit. A few of the fancier folk in town were back there quietly disputing what sort of beast it might be. A sober and extraordinarily energetic knot of Pentecostal boors organized square dancing for themselves — no one else seemed to feel welcome to participate — and an authoritarian lout in blue coveralls called out the moves to the blank-faced revelers. They had brought their own tape deck and speakers, and it was only when Mayor Kavanagh with his 1890s moustache told them to “turn that goddamn thing off” before jerking the cord out himself that we were able to resume speaking in normal tones. Thereafter, the fundamentalists kept to themselves and watched the party warily. My mother, for all the strangeness of her thinking, was a lively and sociable person; I don’t know how she had tolerated these people for so many years. I guess it just goes to the genuineness of her convictions.

My father stood on a chair and tapped his glass with a spoon. I realized with dread that he was about to make a speech. The gist was that he was a nobody, my mother was a nobody, and I was a great man, a doctor. It went over like a lead balloon. My mother was furious. People stared at my father in dismay. He began to sob. I took him by the elbow and helped him down from the chair. To ease the crisis, I said a few formulaic words about how I stood humbly in the shadow of their sacrifices. The guests absorbed this with varying degrees of relief, all except Tessa, who covered her mouth in helpless laughter. At any rate, the moment had come and gone. We went to the dead animal turning on the spit.

Fate headed me to Tessa. She uncovered her mouth and said, “I couldn’t help it.” I knew it was funny but thought indignation fitted the situation better. Her hand went back over her mouth. I told her, “Those are my parents.” She snorted through her nose and said she was sorry.

I may have only on the occasion of that barbecue really noticed what a dump my folks’ place was. I had never been there before in a coat and tie. All those people standing around with beers and other drinks to welcome me home, including the usual suspects — Mrs. Voorheis who owned the secondhand store on the frontage road; an alcoholic horseshoer named Hooty Cox who was there for the drinks; Don Funk who ran a pawn operation out of his house; Elvin Bird in Ground who was a Crow Indian diesel mechanic; Sister Calista from the Catholic grade school who never missed a party with spicy food; cabinetmaker Cal Schreiner and wife; Conoco station owner Bus Clancy, a widower, and his two grown daughters; big-game outfitter Riley Cash in full cowboy regalia and trailing moustache; our two most popular backhoe operators, Jack and Jerry; renowned snowmobile mechanic Tim Varian, soon to be punched by Hooty Cox, himself to be swiftly subdued by Don Funk while Elvin Bird in Ground rudely ogled Bus Clancy’s two large daughters — as well as the medical staff of the clinic to which I would be attached, the small group of doctors who stood to one side and smiled… faintly. My mother and father wore themselves out in solicitous darting between the two groups. I thought the senior internist, Dr. Laird McAllister, was a little abrupt in declining the plate of food my mother brought him, raising the palm of his hand in her direction and saying, “No way!” Under the single shade tree stood the two old brothers Eggs and Bugs Ackley, wheat farmers from the Cottonwood Bench, in matching red-white-and-blue suspenders. Their real names were Elvin and Darwin Farquahar. Long ago, because of their enthusiastic manner of affirmation—“Exactly!” and “But exactly” oddly pronounced — they came to be know as Eggs and Bugs Ackley. I drifted into my accustomed out-of-body state, absentmindedly popping the unfamiliar necktie between thumb and forefinger and musing that the life ahead might prove complicated. The mild malaise I experienced I trained upon the rusty Ford Fairlane on blocks that defined the backyard and which I employed as an object of meditation while I allowed the various waves of my story to wash over me.

Dr. McAllister stepped over to welcome me. I guess it was a welcome. Coming from such a tall, patrician Anglo-Saxon, it was not easy to tell, and his speaking style — launching the words without seeming to care whether they landed — contributed to the abstract atmosphere. Dr. McAllister wore a beautiful gray and brown houndstooth sport jacket, broad soft lapels meeting at the top of two buttons. The red silk tie seemed to disappear at just the right point. He had a highball in hand, and he delicately bobbed an ice cube with the tip of his finger.

“I led the review committee, Doctor, that looked over your qualifications, and it wouldn’t be wrong to suggest that I led the effort to see you land in our clinic. You’re a very well-prepared physician, and we especially liked that you’re a general practitioner.”

“Oh, good.” I smiled.

“General practitioners have become the redheaded stepchildren of our profession, and we’re thrilled that the role claimed your ambition. Welcome!”

“Thank you.”

He tipped his highball toward my beer: clink.

Slowly surveying the guests in my parents backyard, he said, “I hope you’re prepared for the changes coming to your social life.” This I liked less.

I said, “I don’t think it will be a problem. I’ve always lived here. Where are you from?”

He didn’t say a word. He only gave me a wintry smile and returned to his companions.

I got a turn in the emergency room right early on, and one of the first patients I saw was a gas station robber shot by the police; I saw that he would survive the.38 Special hollow-point round that went right through his thorax and out the back without expanding. As time went by, I chatted less with the people who came through the door on gurneys and otherwise, but this fellow looked like a recent college graduate in his slacks and blue Windbreaker, his Seattle Seahawks cap, his loafers. When I asked what’d inspired him to stick up a gas station, he told me with peculiar sincerity, “You’re only young once.” I guess I had to accept that, but it became an enduring enigma.

I was not an excitement-oriented person. I liked what they call on TV “a slow news day.” I may not have been as interested or informed about the big wide world as I should have been, and what news I got of war, disease, and famine did not inspire in me a cascade of solutions. I wished it were otherwise, but this was hardly my worst inadequacy.

When I was in high school, my father kept some horses on a patch of stock farm he owned for the few years he could afford it. Among them were my saddle horse and a government mule he’d acquired from the park service, which, when he tried to shoe it, put him in the hospital. This big wary mule with its suspicious ears and sloped muscular build was the only animal with smooth enough gaits for my father’s old bones. So he put up with him — named him John Lee. I don’t remember why. I helped Dad shoe John Lee by giving him a generous injection of sedative, then laying him on his side so we could shoe him horizontally while the comatose brute snored and blew bubbles out his nose. I nailed on the big, iron, strangely narrow keg shoes, and Dad, crouched and wheezing, clinched behind me. When we’d finished, we leaned up against the old cottonwood that shaded the pole pen in the middle of the rented ground and waited for John Lee to wake up. Dad seemed to think John Lee had died, but wake up he did. My father was so pleased to see him restored to life on earth that he promptly saddled him and rode off.

After my problems began, I found myself riding more often too. My horse, Errol, not only was easy to catch but actually seemed eager to be ridden. Errol began life as a mustang. I bought him at a BLM auction at the Red Desert corrals in Wyoming. Like others in the band, he was bigger than a pure mustang, having acquired some genetic advantages from the draft horses turned onto the desert during the Boer War.

Now that my medical career was suspended, I rediscovered Errol. I felt guilty about having paid so little attention to him while I worked at building my earthly cheese ball. In some abstract way, I hoped to make it up to him. I remembered when I’d acquired him, a stout yearling that we roped and loaded into my trailer, a pretty grulla colt, frightened and sweating with anguish over his lost freedom. He grew into a big, happy horse, and when he was three I rather timidly tried to break him to ride. It was my first year in practice, and I imagined I had a responsibility to my career at odds with risking my bones on a horse. The fact is, I was a bit scared of Errol, who now weighed over a thousand pounds and was not entirely predictable. I led him around on a halter rope, backed him up, shoved him all over the place — and he accepted it. I longed him with a saddle on his back, stirrups slapping his flanks, and he never objected. His complacent acceptance of all I threw at him encouraged me and beat back my fears until the day came to mount him. I even felt that Errol was telling me the same thing, that the time had come. And so I mounted Errol confidently.

I never had a chance. Errol bucked with four feet off the ground, lit on his front end, fired out behind, then bucked me straight over his head into the dirt like a lawn dart. There I could observe his leisurely grazing on the scanty orchard grass at the edge of the corral. I watched as he wandered over to my father’s house and looked in the front window.

I was not hurt and walked over to Errol. He looked at me as though wondering what my problem was. I unsaddled him and called a man in Clyde Park who broke horses. I explained that as a busy doctor I just didn’t have time to break him myself. I got him back a few months later, ready to be used. The cowboy said he “tried to tear me up” and asked if Errol was by any chance a mustang. I said, “Absolutely not.”

So, I had time on my hands. I wanted to continue to live under the questions that had befallen me and resist the rising sensation that here lay opportunity. Treating the disentanglement from my career as an opportunity would be the way to some badly needed enlightenment. But I failed that test: I started to be happy contemplating my guilt like some obscure marine creature recently dredged from lightless seas.

I began to wander around town, watching people, visiting construction projects, school recesses, and so on. One day I found a small parade celebrating something or other and was impressed by the look of joyless fatalism in the faces of the marchers. I speculated that they had been ordered to this event by their superiors but later learned it was some sort of sweethearts’ club with the mission of rekindling first love. On a cool afternoon with arrested white clouds hanging over the town, I loaded the push mower into the trunk of the 88 and drove to the cemetery, where I did, I must say, a fine job of clearing my parents’ graves, virtually primping them, feeling not sadness but remarking the peculiarity of our funerary habits as though I were a visitor from another planet. The word I have most often associated with death—“Poof!”—appeared nowhere in this humble memorial park. A good many folks strolled the cemetery while I tidied things up — the young visibly anxious to get it over with; the old mindful and gloomy, thinking perhaps of what my mother called the Great By-and-By.

The real reason for my coming to the cemetery dawned on me but slowly. It was only when I had finished the job and should have been loading the hand mower into the trunk of my car that it began to surface. I pushed it back and forth while I thought, enjoying the whir of its oiled blades and the subtle knock of its ball bearings. In the end, I left it right where it was, while I sought the grave of the man I had urged to oblivion. I might have remembered where it was since I had attended his funeral, but there had been a surprising number of mourners and I remembered only the outpouring of grief for someone I saw as not worth mourning. I must have simply been drawn to the gathering without reference to where it was taking place. Of course, my unique role in the proceedings, known only to me, must have focused my thoughts in such a way as to obscure awareness of my physical surroundings. This was a working cemetery, hardly one of the antique jobs so old they spared the onlooker any of humanity’s burdens. I had to go from grave to grave until something rang a bell. I keenly looked forward to being inspired on such a beautiful fall day. I left my father’s well-cared-for lawn mower right where it was and set out.

In taking exceedingly good care of my parents’ graves, I had begun to expand my territory. I don’t think I realized what I was up to as I made my way from burial site to burial site. Everyone, myself included, looked for headstones with a relationship to some war. They were so plentiful! I found a little nest of them for WWI members of the Balloon Corps. What exactly were the “Woodmen of the World”? Civil War veterans who had served in Michigan or Ohio companies, landed here. Even some Confederate soldiers. I noticed that the urge to place flowers is not terribly long-lasting and that the preponderance of stone and grass with no further commentary in the form of posies, messages, or whiskey bottles suggested that the facts were eventually faced. The immigrant names like Stefan, Wolfgang, Ulrica, Sven, and so forth faded with the newer interments. Even Esther and Gladys weren’t quite making it anymore. On the other hand, it was a fine place to be a tree. I should have recognized what I or my subconscious was up to when I came upon Tessa’s headstone, which I seemed to know a lot about, i.e., Georgia Gray granite polished on one side — no urn, vase, cross, wing, book, diamond, or favorite pet — just name and date. But a weird shape. I should have known all this because I bought the fucking thing! Good God, I must have suffered some sort of blackout. The salesman talked me into an ogee. I was feeling like a cheapskate after fending off Botticelli’s Venus, the Greek Winged Victory, Christ the Redeemer, an unbelievably ghastly Pietà, and various other high-dollar giant knickknacks; so I succumbed to the ogee. I didn’t want an ogee; I wanted a rectangle, but I was weak from the whole experience and ended up with an ogee. For a moment I was furious, seeing that ogee. Of course I was, egged on by sadness, remorse, guilt, and the recurrent surprise that you can’t turn back the clock.

It was a sunny day with a light breeze from the southwest, beautiful clouds, a rustle of leaves, the smell of newly mown grass and even of the flowers surrounding a grave or two. I liked seeing people walk so slowly. It seemed to have a balletic quality, just a few people moving quietly through the trees like deer. I found that I enjoyed coming here, and having more than the graves of my own dead to visit seemed to enrich the experience. With my garden shears, I was able to nip away some of the stray weeds around the base of Tessa’s stone, tidy it up a bit.

At St.-Lô, Hagenau, and the fights at the Saar Bridge, I gathered, my father had staved off battle fatigue with alcohol. Drinking water was not always in reliable supply, and so various forms of “stupor juice” and “Kickapoo joy juice” were kept on hand by tankers from captured stores, but eventually all went back on water, the liquid courage draining from their systems, and there were breakdowns. My father was among those whom medics tried to restore with Blue 88s, high-dose amobarbital tablets; the idea was the pills would return you to combat, but when he came to, he walked out of the war. He told me that with large armies of young men all rushing to the same massacre, it was surprising how quiet the countryside was after you’d traveled a couple of days. He remembered when he started seeing the clouds again as an extraordinary epiphany. Once he was gone I sometimes felt I was seeing clouds again through my father’s eyes.

Jocelyn had fallen out of the sky into my life, literally. Fortunately, I’d made enough visits to her bedside, sparking sufficient electricity that when she returned to home base in Snyder, Texas, to learn that nothing awaited her at the spray plane base and reluctant to return south and fly sun lotion banners over bathing beaches, she called me on the phone, and I her.

“Do you remember me?” she asked.

“I do. How’s the eye? The knee?”

“They’re fine. I thought I’d hear from you by now.”

“You did?”

“I sure did.”

I had certainly had Jocelyn on my mind, but reason had kept me from pursuing it. I thought that our encounter was too insubstantial for me to pursue anything beyond state lines. Certainly, I remembered feeling something when in Jocelyn’s hospital room, even imagining that it was reciprocated — all dismissed. By me but not, evidently, by Jocelyn. How exciting!

I told her I was pleased to have her call me, and we arranged to meet for dinner. I was distracted during my few appointments by my anticipation of the evening. Enough so that I spent some time wondering what I could possibly be expecting and even feeling some alarm at my own enthusiasm as some new form of instability. I suppose I had a glimpse of the advantages of my complacency and feared anything I couldn’t predict. As soon as I had made a dinner reservation, I found myself daydreaming about exotic travel — that is, escape. It was pathetic. How about the honeymoon, you damn fool? All this while palpating a half-naked fat man on my table, trying to find his liver behind two feet of blubber. I must have gotten a bit avid in my exam, imagining myself flying into the Seychelles with Jocelyn, because Tubby let out a cry, “Go easy, for Christ’s sake.” I should have been more careful, as the corpulent figure I was examining was Throckmorton, my lawyer. Throckmorton had been my patient for a long time and had frequently shown up for sometimes frivolous examinations. Each of them an ongoing search for an enlarged liver.

There were several reasons the community or its minions thought me guilty of negligence or even manslaughter. The first proposed was that I was reckless, which I gather faded in the face of tepid protest from my colleagues to the effect that I was a good and circumspect physician. A couple of things had come out in the paper exciting the credulous that it was murder; but after that, calmer heads prevailed, supported by the hearsay of several homeless people who attested to Tessa’s wish to end her life. Nonetheless, I was charged with assisting in her suicide and planting the knife to avert prosecution. What I was offered was the chance to reduce deliberate homicide to negligent homicide, unless we could dismiss the case.

Overnight I became a hero of the local Hemlock Society and its right-to-die sympathizers. One old woman called and said that if I beat the rap, she’d like to have me euthanize her. There were demonstrations of support around town, increasing my joyless ambivalence, yet another out-of-body spell as I felt that by my silence I was misleading these well-meaning people, some of whom already faced terminal illnesses. Maybe this was where I first thought up my nolo contendere posture, which my lawyer translated as throwing myself under the bus.

“Over my dead body you’re pleading no contest,” said Attorney Throckmorton in a most inapposite turn of phrase. Throckmorton beyond being a victim of chronic obesity also suffered from a belligerent crew cut and the loudest sport jackets since the death of Liberace. He was a controversial lawyer who traveled his bailiwick in a garnet-red Audi A8 über-sedan with fitted leather seats holding coolers of fancy food. Some of our conferences took place in this car, and I accepted these arrangements because he had taken my case “out of the goodness of my heart.” Nevertheless, as we tooled down the interstate at or around 100 mph, his eye on the state-of-the-art radar detector, a hunk of cheddar and a stout length of boudin sausage carelessly wrapped in pita bread and clamped in one hand, I felt it might be better to pay Throckmorton for his hours rather than endure these death-defying sagas in a fog of food smells on the American highway. As this went on over days, I found myself — while for example parked in front of his burly mistress’s condo listening to the radio in the big German car — poking through the delicacies and finding various items that appealed to a finicky appetite now allied with the real need for escape: smoked oysters, emperor figs, potted meats, pâtés, duck liver in oil, and commoner things: Pop-Tarts, Hostess Twinkies, and so on. It was always the same fight: my refusal to plead not guilty. But Throckmorton didn’t really know the whole story, and he never would. Nor would he realize the profound feeling of one’s relationship to one’s community that can be learned by declining to claim innocence. I’m not a masochist, but from the earliest days of growing up in a crazy family I have wanted to throw myself upon this town to see what they would do with me.

When Throckmorton lumbered off the examining table, he said, “If changing my habits would add a decade to my life, I wouldn’t consider it. I don’t think people like you, looking from on high, quite realize how much I enjoy my life. Every time I pass inspection as I have done today I feel the gods have approved my habit of living. Tonight, when you put your head on the pillow or on some fair maiden’s bosom, say this to yourself: ‘Not guilty.’ ”