Driving on the Rim

10

SOMETIMES AFTER LUNCH, I climbed the sandstone bluff behind the clinic, which, after the first ascent, opened onto vast rolling grassland that seemed to extend forever. I did this for my health, of course, but the great vista, which changed continuously with the light and the seasons, was something I found heartening. Shadowed in places, lifted here and there by breeze, the grassland that afternoon looked silken; about halfway across were small circular shapes, of several colors, bobbing and drifting in the summer air like ectoplasms. I stopped to stare: I couldn’t account for them. I’d been up here often but this was new. It was a long walk until I could confront the mystery: five colored balloons, JUST MARRIED on their sides, bobbing on zephyrs.

On these walks, I always expected to have some small experience of the sacred, something to help me become not so much a doctor as a shaman who sets out on his flight through home skies. I walked toward the wedding balloons with that hope. I had observed my mother speaking in tongues, but her attempts to indoctrinate me went in one ear and out the other. Still the longing remained.

Seneca said, “Each of us is sufficient audience for the other.” I tried to live up to this, but I was well aware of my frequent failures as the recitations of others embedded in their sufferings only reminded me of my own. I did plan to rise above this but hadn’t arrived at that station, and so I went on grinding at my own story without much satisfaction.

One of my patients, an old Harvard man, had come west with a private income when very young, bringing his bride. For the last thirty years the two had tried most of the barstools of our town, first out of fascination with the ways of a region not familiar to them, then out of a fascination with alcohol and the inability to go home together until obliged to do so, for they were famous battlers whose shouts could be heard all over town. Roger was known as “Old Yeller” for his share of the bellowing; Diana, the wife, died of cirrhosis of the liver and Roger was not far behind. But he went on seeing me and in fact all the doctors, and inevitably I served as listener to his various salutations to the late Diana, intoned in his remarkable diction. A small and finely wrinkled man with a high forehead showing thin blue veins, he began to speak as though others besides me awaited his remarks. “Nothing ever quite picked Diana up like a libation presented at an unexpected hour. She had such marvelous blood.” I was working on my listening, but the visuals that ran through my mind over Roger’s sound track of their falling in and out of low bars made the story harder to follow than plausible conversation might have been. He had told me over and over that he and Diana had met at dance class: “She caught my eye while I attended a pair of lissome suffragettes.” Roger’s hands were shaking, and as he rambled on I gradually fought off my daydreaming to note that he was headed somewhere, and indeed he was: Roger wanted me to help him die. “I’ve read everything under the sun on the subject, and the bottom line is I won’t feel a thing.”

“Roger, it would be highly inappropriate. You’re the picture of health.” That was a lie, but I was trying to encourage him. At least he wasn’t fat. “In this state, assisted suicide is murder. Roger, I wouldn’t murder you under any circumstances.” That wasn’t true. I don’t think there was a doctor in our clinic who hadn’t dispatched someone to the happy hunting ground. Roger was weeping.

“Send me to Diana.”

“I can’t, Roger, and I won’t.”

“What about that woman you took care of? You seem to be able to help your old girlfriends, don’t you? Well, Doctor, I’m afraid I’m not one of those.” Roger got to his feet and, plucking a tissue from the box beside my examining table, turned to me with a transformed face, an expression of lofty annoyance. “You tin-pot sawbones. I’ll find someone who will do as I ask.”

“I’m terribly sorry…”

“Oh, no, you’re not. Let’s not part on that note.”

As he left, I heard him addressing people out in the hall. He would no longer support the clinic, he would put in a call to Washington, he would yield to the pressure of his lawyers, and so on. He was furious and probably knew that his wish for assisted suicide was wholly focused on the potions I might use to bring it about. He had really ruined his little wife, who was not a bad sort. She had a gesture of slinging her shoulders to get her hair off her face, something preserved from girlhood no doubt, since her hair had grown light as air. She arrived in our town, according to my father, full of gentle cultivation, only to be transformed into a dazed barfly by her husband, whom my father called “a vicious nonentity.” For good reason, Roger was friendless. “When he dies,” said my father, “they’ll have to screw him into the ground.”

Many of the problems I treated were related to overeating. Almost everyone these days was wholly focused on his or her stomach, what Dante called “that miserable sack that makes shit of what we eat.” I also got a good many women complaining of stress, and the stress often turned out to be the thug they’d married. Some of the women put up a good fight, but the effort took it out of them. The wife of a big-game hunter who came home from a bear hunt in Canada two months late, bringing by way of propitiation a Canadian souvenir, was told by this spunky woman to “take the little Mounty and shove it where the monkey hid the peanut.” This precipitated a battle wherein the bear hunter offered to cut off her head and defecate down her neck. After reciting each of these tales, she smiled, upper teeth resting on lower lip as if the smile had to lean on something to stay upright. She withstood these barrages, but in a matter of days she came in to see me, asking me for tranquilizers. I prescribed an SSRI instead and, as they are slow to work, gave her a pile of Xanax samples and advised her to stay half gaga until the SSRIs elevated her serotonin level. “I don’t suppose you’d consider dumping Big Boy, which would be best, so we’ll just medicate you so you can go on until the next catastrophe.” She said it was a beautiful bear and they were having it mounted.

On days like that, I saw this as a town spoiled by God’s displeasure.

But that never lasted and I came to love the sight of ordinary activity once again, the thing that had sustained me most of my life. When I had the Oldsmobile serviced, I spent time with the mechanics. I began to frequent the breakfast cafés again, even the clubby ones where the farmers and ranchers huddled like conspirators. In the happy years between the steam-cleaning service and the post office — that is, before my father lost his dream ground to foreclosure — we would make the short drive into town on our winding road through walls of chokecherry and hawthorn past bounding deer and the occasional bear to arrive just as the bicycles were wheeled out in front of their shop and awnings were cranked out, or the aged were taking their constitutionals and the flags were being raised and groggy children were heading out to their schools and the train could be heard down in the valley. Nowadays, experiences came at me like bugs hitting the windshield. I wasn’t sure I could keep up. Of all the mysteries of life, nothing was more mysterious than the return of happiness. I was willing to wait.

I drove a little over a mile outside town to the place my parents had lost. It may have been absorbed into larger property around it, but in any case the house was long abandoned. I pulled into the yard and got out of the car. Then I walked across the footbridge that replaced the creek ford of a century ago, carrying my drink and making a desultory effort to recognize the birds around me. I followed the trail through a small forest of aspens, the dense canopy only here and there revealing the bright clouds and blue sky just then taking on the scrim of evening. I finished my drink and left the glass beside the trail.

The creek turned sharply toward the north as I left the aspens and they followed its bank. This created a tiny meadow protected from all normal winds, and in this meadow stood the oldest cottonwood I knew of. I’d been visiting this tree all my life. I didn’t think it was unusual for children to hit upon a favorite tree, and I believed that this early affinity came from a memory of a time when trees could be sacred; I felt no need to shake off this conception. Perhaps it sheltered Crow people. There was something too about this tree as an aerial being held from beneath the ground by the grand starburst of roots, life and death, with the earth as the threshold between worlds. I’ve courted this state at times all my life — comparing bones to the stones around the tree, breath to the wind, eyes to sunlight, head to the moon, and so on. I’m not sure what I got out of it, but I have always found in nature something of a cosmic liturgy.

The old tree stood alone, but to the east a few strides away its seed-bearing flowers dispersed by insects and wind had created a forest of smaller trees. I sat at the base of the cottonwood, my back against its deeply furrowed gray bark, and looked up into the world of its branches toward its top, which might have been a hundred fifty feet away. The clouds of leaves and catkins blocked my view not far above my head; I knew that by midsummer fledgling birds would venture to the ends of its branches to begin their first attempts at flight, a skill that would take some to the sea, some to the pampas. Then all the leaves would float to earth and against a darker sky the somber outline of the great cottonwood would emerge and brace itself for the long winter; a willful crookedness of its limbs, defiant and imploring, suggested the long fight ahead. Here and there on our old place, one of these giants lay on its side, several tons of earth reared up around the tangled root ball, a few branches half a story high trying to live on. I used to hear them go down in windstorms all the way from the house and the abrupt subsidence, a welter of sounds, spoke certainly of the surrender of a great soul. It had been a long time since any of this was ours. I guess we couldn’t afford it.

The dispute with the board was finally resolved when Wilmot suddenly found other interests, something about a ski resort he’d invested in, and without his egging them on, the rest of the board slipped back into their customary status as airheads and boobs. Still, I found myself in bad odor with some of my colleagues for having continued to go to work as though there was no problem. That there turned out to be in fact no problem seemed to have little bearing on my situation, and so my discomfort was not alleviated. There was to be a staff meeting in the morning, and I think it was my dread of it that encouraged me to hook up with some old school chums and go on a bit of a bender at Pine Creek Lake. It was wonderfully just like high school. We had girls and a campfire, s’mores and an old M1 rifle to fire tracer shells into the night. One of my friends, a chiropractor from Miles City, was rolling blunts of high-octane BC bud, and I ended up sleeping in my Oldsmobile. Sad to say, I had to go straight to the dreaded staff meeting at the clinic, still half asleep, though not sleepy enough to relieve my apprehension at the sight of the reserve parking entirely occupied by the cars of doctors. My hair was filled with excelsior or some other packing material from a box of Christmas lights that had been in the backseat of the Olds for a couple of years, and it was clear that a number of the fastenings to my clothing had not made the trip back to town. I was late but I was also a doctor.

Before entering the building, I took a long look around the outdoors — the blue sky, the lenticular clouds, the treetops encircling the pretty houses. What reluctance I felt, and what disinclination to enter. I was the last to arrive and far from reassured to see those assembled. Gary Haack, the orthopedic surgeon, was the first to remark on my arrival. Gary is a compact, youthfully muscular man, a tennis player and bachelor who takes his vacations in places such as East Timor. He sprawls in his chair like a highly paid linebacker bored at a team meeting, flipping the lid of his cell phone. He cried, “What happened to you?” I turned to the other jackals, who gazed at me with elevated eyebrows.

“Changing a tire on a dirt road. Ever try it?”

“After you changed the tire,” Gary asked, “did you spend the night under the car?” I ignored him.

“What’s the state of play here? Are we getting anything done? I see I’m late.”

Laird McAllister, the cold-blooded old family-practice guy, tented his hands and said, “Little to report, Berl. Lots of administration, not much medicine.” Laird had once famously remarked to a woman patient, “Cosmetic surgery being what it is today, there’s no reason in the world for you to go on living with a nose like that.” Jinx Mayhall looked like she was asleep, though she covertly watched me with a worried gaze. Alan Hirsch seemed pained by Haack’s aggressive tone.

Then Haack said, “I just wish I could walk in and know what my day would be like without the detective work.” I think he was addressing me, but he didn’t seem to want to look my way.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“It’s not that complicated: appointments, billing, patient history, easy retrieval of diagnostic data.” He seemed to be lecturing me.

“Buy the software.”

“Hell, no, I’m not buying the software.”

“Who did you have in mind to buy you the software?”

“Berl, you need sleep.”

Jinx Mayhall said, “I have no trouble keeping track of my patients’ history, but I don’t have hobbies and it pleases me to have the well-being of my patients fully in mind at all times. We have a clinic manager and he sees to the billing. I hope it’s fair and appropriate, but I don’t worry about it much. I’m comfortable in my house and my car runs. I don’t change my own tires, I have Triple A. I like my figure, but I avoid being seen in a bathing suit. I look after children, period, full stop.”

Unseen by Jinx Mayhall, Dr. Gary Haack rolled his eyes for the benefit of Dr. McAllister, as they were in cahoots, two well-bred, cut-to-the-chase doctors. Unheard from until now, Dr. Elvis Wong, our eagle-eyed radiologist, asked, “Who sets the information parameters and where is the database? Is it here?” Wong was always the most up-to-date of all of us, and he turned out to be right about the needs of the clinic more often than anybody else because his individualism and ego were under control. I was having a terrible time caring, but that might have been my state. I mean, of course it was my state.

I didn’t want to get politicized in our claustrophobic group, but I did say, “As I understand it, we’d set the parameters according to specializations, exams, blood groups — all that stuff. The database is elsewhere. I’m not recommending this. We may be too small. I’m just responding to Gary wanting this from elsewhere.”

“That’s right, blame me,” said Dr. Haack.

“No,” I said, patiently, “but my caseload is too diverse for this sort of thing. You’re just looking at bones.”

Haack said, “How about a shower?”

“In due time.”

This was all fairly good-natured, but I was tired. We had a clinic manager and he seemed to be doing all right, despite being a Wilmot appointee. Once in a while we’d get annoyed and fire the manager, but this wasn’t one of those times. And we used to have better control of our board. We often excluded the manager from our meetings in case the impulse to fire him overtook us unexpectedly, and with Wilmot elsewhere surveying lift sites, we’d leap to do so just because the opportunity was there. Things were moving along. Mostly, I noticed the air of contentment among these doctors, hardworking men and women all. This was their life. I alone seemed to have missed this accommodation, though I’d had it once until several blows uprooted my certainty. I wondered whether I might be over-crediting my particular subjectivity, whether, in fact, all the other doctors were likewise seething with doubt, though they didn’t look it. They looked bored and anxious to go back to work they enjoyed. I think they believed themselves to be necessary. I wasn’t sure I did. Not today anyway. I was just beginning to feel if not ashamed about the binge at least baffled at my own behavior. But I was mistaken: they were not anxious to get back to work; only I rose to leave. A conspicuous pause ensued and I knew it was about me.

“Yes?”

“I wonder if you’d stay for a minute,” said Laird McAllister. He was the only one looking up; the others seemed to have found something in their laps to be interested in. I was most worried by the look of compassion on McAllister’s lined old face. I knew he was just acting.

I said, “Of course.” This brought the heads up, newly adorned with concern, anger, and inquiry. By this point, however, Laird McAllister was swept by awkwardness and inauthentic embarrassment. It was terribly quiet and I thought for a moment of getting them out of this, but I refrained. At length Jinx addressed me.

“Berl,” she said, “is everything all right?”

I said that it was. I should have reflected on the somber state of things. Instead, I reacted to Jinx’s earnest concern by staring at her lips. Nice lips. I didn’t dare subject Jinx to my primitive wooing under so many prying eyes, but I did want to give her at least a little smile. I caught her trying not to return it.

Laird McAllister, animated once again, suddenly threw his head back and bayed, “Nothing whatsoever has been normal about your behavior, Berl, for a very long time.” Laird, from New Hampshire, our sole Yale man, had a declamatory style that defied contradiction: lofty and blunt. I had known this was coming even during his theatrical run-up.

“All in the eye of the beholder, Laird. I’ve never found you normal. But it’s a great country and we accept one another.”

It was true that I was a little indisposed as I appeared before them; it had been a long day and night. I saw no advantage in this roadshow assassination of Saint Stephen and so I went to my nurse for the day’s schedule, which was promptly obliterated by an emergency which looked to be entirely open-ended. McAllister’s accusation rang in my ears. I thought that my nurse was a bit cavalier as she informed me, and I concluded that my deteriorated standing was showing up everywhere. Now she stood before me with a gift box of Dole pineapples acquired on her vacation in Hawaii and I couldn’t remember her fucking name, which caused me to enthusiastically celebrate the pineapples.

Gladys was now a very old widow living out in the tall uncut practically by herself — she had a hired man, Dale, equally if prematurely decrepit, a hundred cows, eleven bulls, and three swaybacked horses. Dale, my sort-of-moronic playmate when I had worked for Gladys and Wiley, was the one who had called the clinic to say that he thought she might be dying. She had spent eighty-three years under the south-facing rimrock that formed the edge of her grazing land, a great plateau of native grass where ravens built nests in low trees. She was a clever old woman whom I was always ready to serve, on house calls and otherwise; she was canny about what would become of her ranch after she was gone, but all alone and, from the drift of today’s report, dying. Gladys had seemed to be quite old the whole time I’d known her; I think she was older than my mother and father, whom she outlived. But now she was genuinely very old.

I was standing in the corridor trying to puzzle out my day, gauging just how much caffeine it would take to get through it, when Alan Hirsch sidled up and accorded me a long gaze in which I thought I saw some affection. “I hope the detachment you exhibited at this morning’s meeting was simulated.”

“It comes and goes.”

“Because if it wasn’t, your problems are even bigger than I feared.”

I was having a hard time following this. We had, between how I was perceived by my colleagues and the ways in which I saw myself, true cognitive dissonance. That was enough to piss anybody off. Of course I understood what he meant, but I had to occupy some middle ground as a strategic matter. Groups that are of one mind, like the gathering this morning, are really only content with weeping confessions. It was time to throw Alan off the trail, and so I told him about a crow that had turned up on my flagpole several times this past month and addressed me in various combinations of caw-caw-caw in a way that made me understand it was an invitation for me to become a crow too. “Obviously I’d love to turn into a crow. Wouldn’t you, Alan?”

“No, Berl, I feel no need to become a crow. Cardiologist seems to work at the moment.” Alan had in fairness always been on my side, but I was unwilling to take on one more disturbing bit of self-knowledge.

Gladys was unable to come to the hospital. We’d been through this before — it was clear that she understood death was near, and her ranch was the place she intended to meet it. We’d had a couple of years of close calls, but each year’s calf crop reinvigorated her. Nevertheless, I’d had to make several diving catches to keep her on the planet a bit longer. Her neighbors, me included, branded for her, and as she looked out on the massed pairs in the drifting smoke, the horsemen moving slowly among them with the loops of rope pinned under their elbows, she always seemed to find enough life for another season. But today when I talked to Dale, I got the impression that this was it. “I doubt you’ll get here in time, Doc.” I started to put together a kit, but in the end just brought the electronic stethoscope. It was amplified and I could hear a pin drop anywhere in the body. I really trusted it to hunt down the faintest murmur, and auscultation was my personal juju: heart, lungs, intestines — just let me listen! Those turds at this morning’s meeting couldn’t hear a diesel backfire through their stethoscopes. I seemed to know that I was bringing it along for the moment when I heard nothing. You name it, Gladys had it. As to the clinical information, the on-site stuff I had just gotten from Dale: Gladys was a goner. In the long run, and without unwarranted credulity, you need an eyewitness. Dale had been studying Gladys for a quarter century and Dale thought she was about out of here.

Gary Haack caught me just as I left the building. I had farmed out all my afternoon patients and was ready to go. I was tired of his hyper little performance already, but it looked like I was in for more as he bounced around in his high-tops. “What’s this you’ve left me with? A twenty-five-year-old anorexic potter?” Sherry was not an easy case. I was glad he stopped me.

“Talk to her, Gary. I don’t know what to do with her. She needs counseling, really inpatient would be best. She thinks she has a tapeworm.”

“And you want me to talk to her about her tapeworm?”

“Yeah, talk her out of it. Get her some help. You’d be a new voice.”

“Here’s the only thing I know to do for tapeworms: You bring a candy apple every day for three days and shove it up the patient’s backside. On the fourth day you bring a hammer and no candy apple. When the tapeworm comes out of the patient’s behind and hollers, ‘Where’s my candy apple!’ you hit him over the head with the hammer. That’s the only cure I’m aware of.” I stared at him.

“Gary, the tapeworm is imaginary. If you start believing in the tapeworm, we can’t help this girl.”

I departed before Haack could object, leaving him, I hoped, with the impression that I thought he was as deluded as the patient. In any case, he’d have plenty on his hands: Sherry claimed to know all she needed to know about her body. When I told her she should get a little counseling about the tapeworm, to which I thereby lent inescapable credence, she snarled that she wasn’t about to walk into that trap. She placed one hand on her throat and the other on her buttocks to indicate the home of the parasite, and said, “He’s there. It has to be dealt with.” Since Sherry was an utterly beautiful young woman, I was sure plenty of people had bought into the worm.

Anyway, off to see dying Gladys at last, I took the road northeast over Tin Can Hill, off toward all those coarse and evocative features, “Dead Man,” “Hangman,” “Lone Indian,” “Sourdough,” gulches, draws, benches, coulees in a rangeland that on first look seemed tortured and on second, vigorous, confronting sky and grass and threadbare human occupation. Here, Gladys Bokma, child of settlers who cooked over buffalo dung, stood it all off in the little kingdom she called White Bird, which she herself had named in childhood, generating a persistent mystery to everyone, including her late husband, Wiley, who with a nicotine-stained hand always waved away the White Bird question and said it was something “she don’t share.” But inside the ranch gate, a hanging sign said “White Bird,” and I of all people who wished to be a crow had no intention of asking her about it.

The road to the house followed a dashing creek, and the sun shone down through the streamside brush, igniting parts of the running water and small pools where clouds of gnats danced in the shadows. Just shy of the ranch yard, the stream had hollowed a sandstone face into a tall, deep shell, its roof layered with the nests of cliff swallows.

Dale waited for me in the stand of windblown hollyhocks that surrounded the doorway. A straw hat shaded his gaunt face and concealed his ever shifty eyes. I could note that he still wore Wiley’s shirts, as they were a good deal too big for him. A sprinkler made its weak attempt to keep twenty square feet of lawn green, but it was in a bad fight with the west wind. Dale had started here so long ago, an incongruous figure in a ducktail haircut, Lucky Strikes rolled in the sleeve of his T-shirt and a hot-rod Ford coupe. He wasn’t worth a shit then and he’d gone downhill ever since, but Gladys liked him. He had grown children in town with various mothers from the hot-rod Ford days. Right up there with White Bird as a mystery was the fact that Gladys and Wiley had never run Dale off. They acknowledged that he didn’t do much but answered all queries with, “Where would he go?” He’d try at the brandings, all right, but he always got knocked down and Gladys would have to make him a poultice of some hallowed if useless sort. When I thought about Dale post-Gladys, I foresaw my ending up with him in some way. I kind of hated that.

Dale had a resonant baritone that over the years had more than once forestalled discovery of his shiftless nature. No one hearing that deep timbre say, “We’ve got a day’s work ahead of us!” would ever suspect that Dale had no intention of doing much of it. My mother was taken with his voice too and made him sing in the choir at her crazy church. She had him all dressed up and booming out of the loft before Wiley demanded he give it up. It broke Dale’s heart to be back on the manure spreader Sunday mornings. Strangely enough, his deep voice and sauntering gait encouraged Wiley to believe that Dale’s problem was that people undervalued him; so Wiley stole him away from a neighboring rancher named Grey Gaitskill. Many’s the time I saw Gaitskill beat the dust out of the back of Wiley coat, shouting, “He’s yours, Wiley! Not ’til death do you part!”

“I’ll just go in and see her,” I said to Dale.

“I’ll go in with you.”

I declined his offer mildly enough, but Dale appeared to have received a gallon of ice water in the face. I just couldn’t take the time to explain why I thought it best to quietly enter without introduction or surprise and assess Gladys’s state without introductory remarks by Dale. So I left him where he stood, seemingly staggered by rejection. His arms hung at his sides, and in his face indignation and grievance were at war. Out of the sun his unfortunate eyes were visible.

I knew my way around the house well enough that, having left my pathologist’s hat behind, so to speak, I was able to stride straight to the bedroom — there was only one — and open the door slightly but enough to look in: a dresser, a bed, a photograph of Wiley at the Big Timber rodeo — I recognized the grandstand — and making a small mound under her comforter, Gladys, at the extent of her life span as one of earth’s longest-living mammals. She seemed asleep — a tremendously different appearance than the airless gray look of the dead — and a pitcher of water on the stand at her bedside still had a few ice cubes floating. Good on Dale. I entered and sat at the foot of the bed.

Gladys opened her eyes and said, “It’s the end of me.”

“I don’t know if it is or it isn’t,” I said, “but you’ve lived a long time.”

It was a while before she answered. She said, “I suppose.” I think she must have drifted off. She seemed peaceful and even comfortable. This was looking like a fairly jolly segué considering the options of which as a physician I was aware, especially the brutal fights to live I had seen waged by accident and shooting victims during my ER days. Mortality and the sense of unfairness were poor bed companions.

Gladys dying made a modest bump. Nothing there to claim admiration for the thousands of miles she’d ridden through her herds, the horses, dogs, and husband she’d outlived, the thousand pies baked, the cattle cars she’d helped crowd, and the hours she’d listened to the radio wondering about the world. The Stetson hats it took a decade to rot out, the britches that went first in the seat, the war-surplus sunglasses she wore, the Ford tractor that after a quarter century could take no more of her abuse and died. The little flower bed in her front yard never got better; in fact, after Wiley died, it got worse.

She didn’t regain consciousness right away, and I could see that her respiration had declined markedly since she’d spoken her few words. I reached over and found her pulse at the carotid and, without trying very hard to count, got the impression it was down around forty. Gladys had every right to fade away and I had every intention of permitting it. If her throat muscles began to fail and the dreaded rattle began, there would be no intubation, which I felt violated the old. If she failed to wake up, we wouldn’t haul her to town and introduce isotopes to her system to determine whether or not there was blood flow to her brain, though that was just what a couple of the turkeys back at my clinic would do, especially if they were trying out some new machine. By keeping her right here on home ground, I would see to it that no one turned to hopeless ventilation out of some bogus respect for life, or moved her around strange places, for fear she would awaken at the end and not know where she was.

I was tired and struggled against objectless inertia, relieved only by lending my car to the still moping Dale and sending him to town for a pizza.

“Plain pizza,” he said, barely moving his lips.

“Surely not. With everything.”

“Even pineapple?”

“Yes, which reminds me: go by the Dairy Queen and pick up a Tropical Freeze. What d’you want?”

“Beer.” Then he cried out for emphasis, “Beer!”

“Get that too, but go to DQ last so the Tropical Freeze doesn’t melt.” I could see Dale bridle at this bit of micromanagement, but he said nothing before heading for my car, wavering off like a windblown rag.

When Dale was gone, I was free to sit on the porch, on an old church pew, and look out at the land. The base of ledge rock was deep in shadow, but the crown of grass was luminous gold in the late-evening sun. I’d had old ranchers tell me that the day always came when they realized the land didn’t care about them; I think it was a moment of despair. I don’t think Gladys had ever had such a moment: this was White Bird. The wild grass no more needed to care about anybody than the doorway to the house needed to remember Gladys and Wiley’s honeymoon. They were an unlikely couple: Gladys part horse and Wiley part cigarette.

I went back inside and gazed at her. I believed I saw great fading, but distrusted myself and got out my stethoscope. Her bowels were silent, her lungs were torpid, and her heart was lagging its own meter. I’d be lucky to finish my pizza before Gladys went through the pearly gates. While I insulated myself with such whimsy, I knew all along that when the moment arrived it would be impossible to remain unmoved. While the changes might be microscopic, the difference between life and death always communicated itself with terrible solemnity. A dead person looked nothing whatsoever like a living one. In anatomy class, we greeted our first corpse with unholy terror until the absence of its original owner sank in and we went to work on “it.” We had a well-muscled old six-footer and felt frightened only when someone put an R. G. Dun commemorative cigar in his lips: “It’s a boy!”

Dale arrived with the pizza and we sat out at the picnic table under the spreading ash with the great complicated disk before us to be eaten by hand. I tested my Tropical Freeze for firmness and concluded I could eat the pizza first. Dale ostentatiously picked the pineapple off his side of the pie, and then separated a wedge to eat, indenting it skillfully in the middle with his forefinger so that the mozzarella wouldn’t run off. Dale had good pizza technique and I was not above copying it as we fell to. When he talked, he gobbled with his mouth full and, suddenly touched by the precariousness of his future, I was inclined to talk with my mouth full too.

“She’s all done, ain’t she?”

“All done.”

“Comfortable?”

“Out like a light.”

“When someone had a great life and don’t suffer, do you think it’s sad, Doc, when they go?”

“It will be when it happens. I don’t know why.”

“Big difference between here and gone?”

“Huge.”

Our pizza eating came to a stop. Deep thoughts. Everyone was implicated by every departure. As I looked at Dale, and heard his inappropriately profound voice, I realized that after Gladys was gone, he would face what to him would be a terrible emptiness.

“So what happens to the place?” There was something wild in his eyes when he asked.

“The lawyer will tell us or the State of Montana will tell us. I’ve been through this before and they never let the bodies cool.”

“She asked to be buried right here. Have the service sometime later.”

“Where’s ‘right here’?”

“In them trees. Right opposite Wiley. You were here.”

“I was?”

“Wait till you see how hard that ground is.”

I’d have to have a nap first, let all these pizza proteins restore my vitality. I didn’t even want to think about reorganizing my patient schedule. I was somewhat impatient this last time checking Gladys’s vital signs before returning to the Tropical Freeze, which Dale stared at after eating two-thirds of the pizza. “I’m not sharing,” I told him firmly.

Talking to Dale about Gladys’s long decline, I was pleased to notice how closely he had observed her. I did think that things at present were going about as they should: his account suggested a blood deficit to the brain, with the usual neurological decline, a cruel scenario without hope of revision. There had been no big events, but the increasing recurrence of transient ischemia episodes was chipping away at her humanity and, as she had already beaten the odds, I was content with the present situation. If I dreaded anything, it was her revival. My stethoscope had already told me that the renewal of blood was hardly coursing, and all things considered, the end was at hand, as Gladys had herself seemed to know. I gathered from Dale that organized thought for Gladys was already slipping away. She’d been sputtering along until something happened that occasioned Dale’s summoning me; I supposed it had been a stroke, infarction of brain tissue, the oxygen cycle winding down toward the waiting stillness. Basically, it ends in a riddle. Meanwhile, Dale and I had not only pizza but sunshine and oxygen, those delicious metabolic elements of the ongoing. I suddenly felt joyous, with no doubts about intervening in Gladys’s situation. This above all things branded me a country doctor, and I fancied myself part of the countryside, a sort of pizza and Dairy Queen shaman.

“Doc, I don’t feel so good myself.”

“You’ve eaten too much.”

“I’m low-spirited.”

“You’ll have to work on that.”

This didn’t satisfy Dale, and it was time to check on Gladys, who was awake again, but barely. I leaned very close to her face so that she could see me. I thought she looked quite serene; she muttered something unintelligible about going to White Bird and closed her eyes. Something told me that they wouldn’t open again and she wouldn’t again speak. Dale slept in the bunkhouse and I slept on the sofa in the front room. I got up, washed my face at the kitchen sink with cold water, went into Gladys’s room and confirmed her death. She hadn’t moved since I’d seen her last, but whatever it was, was gone.

She left Dale the ranch, and in time Dale saw to converting it into real estate.