Driving on the Rim

12

NILES THROCKMORTON HAD BEEN CALLING frantically, and I guessed someone had advised him — before advising me! — that I was about to have a problem. Up until then, I’d thought Jinx was off her rocker. I didn’t even try to understand it. I felt that would just be complicity. Nor did I expect to see Officer Seaver again, and I told him so. He smiled in a way that let me understand he saw right through me. Meanwhile, Throckmorton just couldn’t seem to get enough of my problem. The first thing he said to me was, “I called and left a message on your chickenshit answering machine. Turn that thing in to the county museum. Fucking sprocket noise is off the charts.”

In fact, I was disconcerted by his enthusiasm for a couple of reasons: I had known Niles most of my life, and while he certainly respected my modest rise from abject stupidity, I remained a somewhat indelible dunce to everyone who had known me since my boyhood; furthermore, Throckmorton was considered by some to be more or less crazy.

Everything changed. What once seemed absorbing society for such a small place was replaced by a queer sense of thinness. I felt isolated. I reviewed all the responses from my colleagues after the death of Tessa, asking myself if I now saw in their condolences something else, and of course I began to think that indeed I did see something else, less accusatory than slyly knowing. That was worse, doubly so because I wasn’t sure I had seen it at all.

Looking back as I now could, I noticed first my inexplicable concern with the pressure of my tires. As I drove along on perfectly good pavement, I would sense imbalances in all four wheels. I sometimes pulled over to have a look, but could find nothing amiss. So I bought a tire gauge and checked the respective pressures, sometimes more than once a day, and if I found them uneven, sometimes by only a pound or two, I headed for a gas station immediately.

Also, if the moon was more than half full and the tree shadows around the house too sharp, I had to sleep with a mask over my eyes but woke up at every coyote or owl. At one particularly low point I awakened to imagine that coyotes and owls were in cahoots, calling across my darkened yard and laying plans for me which I might not have enjoyed. It didn’t help when one of the horned devils fluttered to rest on the outside windowsill.

My first inkling of the general view in town that Tessa had died of foul play and that she had died in my hands and on my watch and that there was a connect which, for the nonce, would not be formally made, arrived at the coin-operated car wash where I lovingly bathed my Oldsmobile; in the next bay a blue Lexus pulled out as I deposited my quarters and parked by the vacuum cleaner, and from it emerged the vice president of our local agricultural lender, Enid Lawlor. She was tall, a former basketball player, and groomed in the style of an old Hollywood pinup, with blatantly bleached blond hair in a long pageboy and a slightly mannish blue suit with pants that flared over spike heels. She kept her fingernails long, bloodred and perfect. She stood her purse on the roof of the car as she vacuumed the inside and didn’t notice me until she saw me through the rear window of her own car while she vacuumed the backseat. She stopped everything. I kept my wand moving the spray over my Oldsmobile and wondered what Enid had in store for me. Her swinging gait in those high-heeled shoes seemed to convey a lively menace.

“You’ve been making yourself scarce!” she cried. I said that I didn’t think I had, but I had been working hard and at the expense of some objectivity about my patients so that their lives were becoming entirely too much a part of mine.

“Enid, I don’t even see you at the clinic. You still use us, don’t you?”

“I’m never sick.”

“Well, good. I hope it stays that way.”

I happened to know something about Enid’s bawdy sense of humor, which I saluted without having been its beneficiary. Jerry Kagy, one of our general practitioners, had taken a crash course in sigmoidoscopy, which he abandoned because his rough and unpracticed technique was producing complaints for the whole clinic; we had to ask him to stop. Enid was one of his earliest attempts as part of her annual physical; I gather that she was essentially naked on some sort of examining table while Jerry, like a student driver, awkwardly manipulated the flexible sigmoidoscope in her rectum, intermittently inflating the lower bowel to better examine its lining. Lacking much experience, Jerry, a heavyset, redheaded, and rather monstrous-looking man, repeatedly overinflated the bowel, causing Enid to loudly break wind. In response to her gruesome situation, Enid looked over her shoulder at the sweating Jerry Kagy and said, “Doctor, have I ever told you that I love you?” Kagy, entirely lacking a sense of humor, abruptly ended the exam and left Enid to dress in the empty room. Kagy told us the story himself, and we marveled that he had no idea Enid was trying to be funny. He thought she was in love with him. Well aware of the shortcomings of his technique, we found her heroic.

“It’s so sad,” Enid said to me, “that poor Tessa is gone, don’t you think? Don’t you think she had a place here?”

“She must not have thought so.”

“Oh?”

“Why else would she have done away with herself?”

“Is that what she did?” Enid asked carefully, looking at me the while. I saw where this was headed. It was headed for an old issue that had nothing to do with Tessa, but if it arrived there, I felt, the consequences would be bad. I immediately attempted to quell its progress.

“That’s what she did.”

Enid gazed at me for a moment, then, without a word, she got in her car and left.

At the clinic, I was routinely cheerful, a mad if mechanical greeter by name of all I saw, but since the rumors, I looked on myself doing this — the same as I had always done — as though I were watching a busker at some street fair addressing the monkeys. While I knew what had happened to Tessa and felt sufficiently guilty in a maddeningly nonspecific way, it seemed I was even guiltier because others thought that I had done away with her. That it was not true seemed to make little difference. If I failed to find my way out of this mess I was very liable to become a murderer in my own eyes, because when I went over Tessa’s last hours to reassure myself, Cody would suddenly appear. I recognized an emergency: something which could ruin me in my own eyes, despite the fact that “ruin” was a word that came with a faint romantic whiff. The sensation of being trailed by false rumor was its own lure, a costume drama, just behind which lurked something far worse. At my lowest point, not many days after my latest dinner with Jinx, I admitted cultivating an enigmatic smile, even, for instance, while checking my tire pressure. Anyone electing to be touched by my plight will recognize that I was merely holding the wolf at bay with what feeble means were at hand, though I had nightmares in which my struggle to save Tessa in all its visceral detail was converted into something ghoulish and horrible, the face of a dying Tessa replaced by Cody’s innocent gaze. It was not hard to see that something awaited me from which no good could come.

I crossed the bridge behind the clinic and sat over the rapid seam of river that curved in there, making a small back eddy for ducks and other swimmers. Here I could view the clinic, all the bustle, and the occasional faces of daydreaming staff gazing at the water. Often there was a single contemplative raven working along the current edge, sometimes finding something with a gay pounce, but I didn’t know what. Something to eat, I supposed, though I knew that corvids are no slaves to their stomachs or to anything less than schemes for the future of the world.

I had begun grieving unreasonably over the death of Tessa, imagining her young and old, big and bigger, loud and louder, crookeder and crookeder still — all pictured in loving detail just as a man mourns a dog that had bitten three paperboys. I stared at the poor raven as though he could answer my disquiet. I wondered why I had neglected Tessa.

When I returned to my house, I had a message, a returned call, from Vicky Speiser, a very beautiful girl who has cleaned my teeth numerous times. We had a rather awkward conversation when I tried to get her off dental things and invite her out to dinner. I succeeded and we found ourselves across a candlelit table at nine that night. I basked in the observation that Vicky seemed unaware of my problems.

“This is the sixteenth anniversary of Nike’s Air Jordan tennis shoe,” she told me, luscious red lips forming each word lovingly. “Nike says, ‘It’s the last year for that shoe.’ Michael Jordan says, ‘Let’s wait and see.’ Who d’you think will win?”

“Nike.”

“How unromantic! Michael Jordan’s going to win! He’s Superman. He’s from Krypton!”

Escapism caused me to think about Superman and how he was described as leaping “tall buildings in a single bound.” Wasn’t it enough to simply say that he leapt tall buildings? “In a single bound” really gilded the lily, and gave the whole thing a corny, retro feel, as well as suggesting that Superman was a sort of ape.

I think that by the time our meals came, I had already asked myself, “Where is this going?” And the answer was, “Nowhere.” That was when I started to enjoy myself. It was barely raining outside, about like a cow pissing on a flat rock; this was a good time to stay indoors, eat, talk. I thought I had only to strike something up and the rest would take care of itself; but Vicky was making eyes at the county attorney, a dilettante politician with great landholdings along the Big Horn River; and the county attorney was responding by taking in the ghastly artwork around the walls, eyes swooping unpredictably to meet Vicky’s. I sensed that some sort of delectable situation was at hand, during which I could turn my attention to the handsome cutlet adorning my plate while the eye play went on without any effort from me. As I dined and made perfunctory conversation, watching the lovebirds exchange glances, I began to notice that the county attorney’s wife, who would have been a beauty but for the prominent bags under her eyes, was aware of the situation existing between her husband and my date, the very beautiful Vicky. When I had the chance, I gave her a co-conspirator’s wink, to which she nodded grimly. I realized that it was the food that interested her, too. At the end of the meal, I made a cordial stop at their table. “Why, Earl,” I said, for that was his name, “you’ve hardly eaten a thing.”

Earl said, “New cook.” I introduced Vicky and said that she too had eaten like a bird. Earl’s wife, Edna, bragged that she had cleaned her plate while I claimed that not enough was left of my cutlet to attract an ant. When Vicky returned to the table, I had a sort of out-of-body experience in which I raved on about the dessert cart and aperitifs. This dyspeptic display went nowhere: Vicky said she’d had enough, and I took her home in a remorseful mood despite my real attempt to be charming and funny. She was stone-faced all the way to her door.

Well, I couldn’t really say how I felt, nor why I went to the clinic after hours, let myself in, and walked along the examination room doorways, glancing in at the scales and wall-mounted blood pressure cuffs as though they could tell me something. Seeing from the clock at the end of the corridor that it was almost midnight did no wonders for my mental orientation either. I went into my own room and stretched out on the paper-covered exam table, fingers laced behind my head, with the intention of thinking — but I fell asleep. However, I quickly awakened, the idea of being found snoozing on my own table feeding worries of seeming even stranger than I already did in the eyes of my colleagues. So I got up and, looking into a few case folders, came up with “you’re born and you die,” with the rest an avalanche of minor footnotes — no attitude for a doctor.

I left my office and went down the hall to the waiting room, which in a medical facility is an inherently unhappy place. At the check-in desk, there is usually a staff of lady cannibals inured to the suffering and anxieties of the patients registering their stories, their fears, and their Social Security numbers. No matter what happens to them, their stories will be digitalized, and no previous human fear of inconsequentiality can compare to the reduction of mankind by such frontline operators as those of us in medicine. Heading our group was the traditional explosive fat nurse, who raised hell with the fretful while applying order to the huddled masses assembled at her desk.

I sat among these ghosts in the waiting room. A television hung on a wall bracket in one corner of the room. I remember voting for this item as a way of softening the effect of the inevitably delayed appointments, but a squabble broke out once too often between patients and the nurses who controlled the channel changer, and it became necessary to turn the thing off. I went behind the appointment desk, found the remote embedded in a box of Kleenex, and turned the television set on: great moments from the NFL including Vince Lombardi with those terrible teeth carried from the field by the men he had tortured. A Bette Davis movie. She wore a kind of ruffled collar in this one, and she just pitched her head back and went to throwing spit. I was on the edge of my seat. When that was over, I found an extraordinarily peaceful story of migrating penguins, even more peaceful with the sound muted, so that I could watch the ballet of these little persons in arctic seas. This is when I fell asleep, and where I was found by the staff.

I spoke to no one but headed to my office, locked the door, and resumed sleeping on the examining table. I slept much of the day, tormented by dreams that vanished as soon as I awakened, as though from amnesia. And it was quite an unnatural sleep too, based on need not for rest but for escape from the consequences of my strange behavior.

Eventually, I stirred. I went to the washbasin and tidied up, drying myself with tissues, then grimacing by way of an examination of my teeth. Perhaps I was noisier than I realized — when I stepped into the hallway, it was filled with gazing doctors and their gazing patients. Head high, I walked through them, through the lobby where I had first dozed off and which was now bright with sunlight and disordered magazines, noting only the resumption of murmuring as I made my way through the front door.

There was a steady turnover of nurses in our practice, a bit above the general turnover of residents, which was plenty. Some nurses had been in the clinic long enough to know much of what we doctors knew, but there was an unspoken agreement that they wouldn’t use the knowledge, as though their hard-won comprehension could infringe on our relationship with the patients. I did once see Laird McAllister blister his poor nurse in front of a lot of people for telling a patient his resting pulse rate, just after she’d taken it. “I tell them that. That’s what I tell them.” Some of the older nurses serving older doctors began to resemble priests’ housekeepers. We had good doctors and mediocre doctors and only one like me: well trained, with exceptional medical instincts in an emergency, but lacking conviction. It may have been that some of my mother’s evangelism had persuaded me that life on earth was trivial.

I thought the best thing would be to meet with my friend Dr. Jinx, knowing full well the jokes headed my way for seeking counsel from a baby doctor. As it was, when I asked to speak to her — she was standing by her desk in her office and straightened slightly when she heard my voice behind her — she replied, “Gladly, but not where we can be seen.”

We sat on a bench by the old waterworks, the damp, weathered bricks giving pungency to the balsamic air arising from the shrubs around the duck pond. The very high white clouds over the Absaroka Mountains seemed to demand attention. We could hear children playing over by the soccer field. In my present mood I reflected that decade after decade you heard the same quality of noise from that direction, as though the group of children never changed, always seeming to be the same group. This thought merely deepened my disconsolate inner weather suggesting that of all the people on earth, only I stood still, serenaded by the zombie children beyond the duck pond. Were they calling me? At that time I’d have believed anything. I’d have believed the children were calling me to oblivion.

Jinx said, “Give me the headlines and please don’t set it to music.”

“I guess it was extreme reluctance to enter the salt mine.”

“If you think it’s a salt mine.”

“Evidently I do. It comes as a surprise.”

Jinx looked at me for such a long time that I felt scrutinized, almost as though I was meant to cough something up. At first, I worried that I was expected to admit to something about Tessa, as though I had anything to admit, just acknowledging that the question was in the air. And I was not willing to do that, but she read my mind. She said, “I have no interest and no suspicions about that poor woman, but you seem to have dropped a stitch right in the middle of your life and it is time for you to do something else.” I was well aware of the owlish look on my face as I failed to comment, knowing it was no use when Jinx was in launch mode. “Perhaps,” she said, “you find it difficult living in a morally bankrupt and hate-filled nation, and it’s not for me to say. But you go around like a cat ruining a blanket trying to find a place to lie down.”

Jinx had long harbored somewhat radical notions, ignored by her colleagues as the frustrations of an unmarried woman. They found them cute. I sometimes considered her views more eccentric than convincing. In the context of what seemed about to turn into a lecture, however, they had the sting of authority. As my rage grew over the next few days, I finally had to accept that I was its only object. Something would have to be done: I was burning up. “What about my skills, such as they are, my experience?”

Jinx told me they no longer applied. “Do you mean my life?” I asked.

“You tell me. You’re going nowhere.”

By the end of the week, that was no longer true. What had come to an absolute head in the aftermath of Tessa’s death was not my acceptance of responsibility for it but my beginning to understand my guilt for her neglect, and that one day I would have to work out what we had owed each other with greater clarity than I had so far. This was at considerable odds with the planktonic drift that had marked my days to date, punctuated by the gruesome pop-up figure of the late Cody Worrell.