Driving on the Rim

14

I HEARD THAT IN YEARS PAST, pigs were drawn into the slaughterhouse of the Chicago Stockyards by hooks attached to their noses. A pig is a smart animal, but this placed the decision elsewhere. It was in this spirit that I headed once more to White Sulphur Springs to pay a call on Jocelyn Boyce. Wasn’t I in a sense a first responder at the scene of the accident? Naturally I had an interest in the outcome. But it was as if a tiny animal living in the corner of my mind, smaller than a mouse, smaller than an ant, and unobtrusive even considering its size, was saying, “Bullshit.” Anyway, it was a nice drive and the 88 seemed to like it as we coursed along a well-kept highway not too wide for its passage across sandstone bluffs, juniper savannahs, and dashing spate streams. A pickup passed me heading south, a dead elk in the bed and small American flags attached to each elevated leg. The sun was just over my left shoulder, warming my neck, and every few miles I glimpsed a herd of antelope in the distance, its movement syncopated with its shadow’s. The dashboard, with its discolored plastics and deep layer of dust, radiated the pleasant warmth it had absorbed from the sun. A small cloudburst darkened the road ahead of me, then vanished. This daydreaming interlude was soon succeeded by anxiety about the visit. What business was this of mine? Was her asking me to come back a pleasantry which acted upon would arouse annoyed surprise? What if she said, “Can’t you see I don’t feel well? I thought you were a doctor!” And was that the risk? Back to the corridor for a squirming session, fuel up, drive home? If so, I decided to accept the risk. Unfortunately, I went off the rails imagining how I might describe myself to someone like Miss Boyce should they wish to know me as I am: irritable, hypercritical, obsessively orderly, claustrophobic, impatient, antisocial, and agoraphobic, filled with objectless dread, pessimistic, and faultfinding. This led to more general reflections of my current state: my dreams at night were populated by strangers ordering me to pay up and threatening to “discard my application,” and the recurrent “Why can’t you remember your password?” A phantom gate agent haunted my dreams as well. He holds my boarding pass to his eyes and says: “Someone has folded this, or has begun to fold it and has had a change of heart. I’m afraid you’ve run out of luck.” In one genuinely appalling dream, which also recurred, I am at a dinner and have selected the wrong condiment, causing my tongue to swell; it overfills my mouth until I can see it, red and horrible, at the edge of my vision. Breathing mulishly through my nose, I begin to smother. This was poor preparation for my visit, and the thoughts fell upon my mood like a ton of bricks. Once at a fund-raiser for our clinic and hospital I had been charged with babysitting a major donor and had somehow thought it wise to have a candid conversation about where I believed the country was headed; we lost the donation. I recall the donor all too well and how I’d misjudged him for an open-minded soul: an old man dressed in a mixture of styles — tight hip-huggers, a blue Oriental silk shirt, and a corncob pipe. He had long hinted, as his own medical needs increased, that he was contemplating coughing up part of his cheese ball, but in the end it was given to the Elks, B.P.O.E. He was hard of hearing and had the TV turned up so loud I couldn’t understand him when he talked. When I quietly reached to lower the volume, he barked, “Don’t fool with that TV!” Somehow I went off on the state of the nation, based on earlier fund-raising experiences that a rising cloud of amiable generalizations was great preparation for the kill. It was an improvement over Jinx’s sardonic suggestion that I begin by saying, “Stand by for the ram.” I think I said something about the military-industrial complex, or something equally well-worn from the lips of Eisenhower, when I first heard the words I feared again now: “Get out.” For him the military-industrial complex was the last hope of mankind. How was I to know? I can still see him, teeth bared around the stem of his pipe, eyes blazing as I backed out of the room with its roaring TV.

She was standing next to the bed folding a blanket, arms outstretched, its middle held between her chin and her chest. She said, “Grab the end.” I helped fold the blanket, which she threw across the foot of the bed before climbing back under the sheet. “Too hot.” She was wearing white pajamas with blue piping, her knee taped and wrapped. A radio next to the bed played at a murmur: a minor ayatollah was explaining to the world that God had not made America; he had made all the other countries but he had not made America.

“I came to see how you were getting along.”

“Did you.” She smiled at me. “Good then, they’re turning me loose.”

“Well, you said stop back.”

“That’s right, I did. And you did. Very nice to have a visitor. And I need a lift to my car, if you’re up for that.” I nodded.

“The eye’s better?”

“Yup. Can you see if you can get the Venetian blind to work?” I got up and sorted out the tangled runners.

“Are you rested?”

“Evidently, I am!”

I found Jocelyn comely but a bit unnerving; she seemed to be one jump ahead of me in conversation. “You can’t watch the news anymore unless you’re a fan of ethnic cleansing. I love the sports channel, but they just had someone named Stone Cold Steve Austin beating someone up. I’m a baseball fan. I love the radio. In fact, when I get to my car the first thing I’ll do is turn on that radio.”

“I love baseball too.” I hated baseball, but I wasn’t ready to close that door. I noticed that the blacks were leaving the sport. Only whitey could stand around all day like that. I don’t have any idea why I said I liked it: I don’t know dick about baseball.

“Was I in a fog when you were last here? Dr. Aldridge told me you were a doctor. I didn’t realize that.” She was gathering her belongings, tossing them into a day pack and a purse.

“I’m a general practitioner at a hospital south of here. I might have been more help where you crashed, but I was afraid to move you by myself.”

“There’s nothing left of the airplane. Nice airplane, too. Beautiful old Piper Pawnee. It’s no excuse, but flying right on the deck in this damn country to avoid chemical drift, well, you’re just going to hit stuff.”

“When you say ‘this country’—I thought you were from around here.”

“I’m based out of Snyder, Texas, or I was. No airplane. Did you hear what the Cubs did yesterday?”

“I didn’t, but why would you be way up here from Snyder, Texas?”

“Well, it’s a job where you have to travel according to the season if you want to make a living at it. Still pays peanuts. My first love was horses. When I was a girl, I went around with two canes pretending I had four legs so I could be more like my horse. Don’t let me forget the radio. A doctor. Has that been a nice life?”

“I had a kind of foster father who was a doctor. I might have been trying to please him. It was a decision I made when I was very immature, but its effects have been long-lasting.” We were really sailing along now! I would have done well to realize that unchecked impulses were not far behind me. Filling in the biographies, it was so good and there was definite excitement in the air. “I gather this is not the easiest country to be a…”

“Ag pilot. That’s what we call ourselves, ag pilots. Well, mostly I’ve sprayed in flatter country. I sprayed peas in Michigan, not too bad if you don’t hit a tree. Cotton in Texas, citrus in Florida and California, rice in Texas, sprayed cotton big time around Snyder. That’s where cotton went to get away from the boll weevil. Then the boll weevil followed it there. But yeah, it’s not the safest job in the world.”

“The risk of crashes…”

“The chemicals. You mix a lot of chemicals. The chemicals get in the cockpit, too. I mean, we’re not really part of the environmental movement, if you know what I mean. That bothers me. I’ve done other kinds of flying. I could go back to that if I got another airplane. You’re lucky. It’s all in your head…”

“I guess. What little there is.”

“The trouble is, most flying jobs are boring. For a long time I towed banners, and that was just awful. South Florida. Flying almost at stall speed pulling a big long one that says BEST BUY or FIND IT IN THE YELLOW PAGES or FLAT LINE SPORTS BAR, that sort of thing. Ten hours sitting an arm’s length from the exhaust pipes relieving yourself in adult diapers. And I’ve pulled some doozies. The worst one was HOT CHICKEN WINGS AT HOOTERS EVERY WEDNESDAY. We had to do it as a combination billboard and letter banner because they wanted to include a girl with large breasts on the billboard portion. When we stacked it on the ATV to launch it, the pile was so big I never believed we’d get the whole thing airborne. Seriously, my choice is to be down in the trees and power poles, jumping hedges, landing and taking off on dirt roads. You could say that’s where the romance is.” I didn’t know what she was supposed to be doing. Now she wanted to go get her car.

Everything about her had a dangerous iridescence, doubtless for me alone; for Jocelyn, a simple question, as for all women, could be sorcery. Thoughts went through my mind like “fumbling for the keys” and “lost highway.” I said, “I’ll wait for you in the lobby.”

“Take this.” She handed me the day pack. “I’ll wind her up here. I’ve already logged out with the staff, but I’ve got to get a move on. I’m meant to be at the Billings Airport by one.” I didn’t get the chance to ask her where she was flying. I supposed back to Texas. I almost got the feeling she was flying the coop, and I wished I’d had a chance to consult first with Dr. Aldridge, who had gazed upon her with inappropriately hungry eyes.

There were two decrepit old fellows waiting for their appointment; no nurse was at the desk and I sat down to wait, and listened. They were having some kind of a disagreement, in high-pitched, annoyed voices.

“I honestly did the best I could to make a happy home.”

“You did like hell. You boozed your way right into the spin dry, you did. Lost your family, you fuckin’ idiot.”

“Now, now, that’s just your slant.”

If one of these men was the older of the two it was the one in the ragged but voluminous coat, from which he extended a hand, like the last days of Pope John Paul, in a gesture of peace. The other took it, and after a pause their conversation resumed about the five-dollar box of Cheerios they’d both seen that morning at IGA. “It was big, I’ll give you that. But still.”

Jocelyn came into the lobby, carrying a battered purse, wearing a baseball cap and gold earrings, jeans and a thin, tailored white blouse that emphasized her pretty figure. She was on a cane and used it with athletic dispatch. “We roll.”

She directed me to the small airfield southwest of town on a road that was almost too much for my Oldsmobile, whose oil pan felt like an extension of my own viscera. Looking around the car, Jocelyn said, “I thought medicine paid better than this.”

“It’s a ride.”

“I guess. Go over that cattle guard and just follow the two-track into the pucker brush and you’ll see it, little flat mesa hangs out over the creek bottom.”

I glanced over and found her eyes, in no hurry to glance away. I reached for her hand, which she put in my lap like something I’d misplaced. “Oh, Doctor.” There were several ways to look at this remark, the first being that I had misjudged the situation. Jocelyn smiled at me, but there was a bit of amusement in it. She raised her cane and gave it a little shake in my direction.

A grass airfield ended at the mesa edge, where a bedraggled windsock hung from an unpainted steel pole. A coyote dug for gophers in the middle of the field and trotted off at our arrival. All that remained was an anonymous rental car glinting in the sun. In other words we had arrived and something would have to change.

Jocelyn asked, “How much time should I allow to get to the Billings airport?”

“Hour and a half, to be safe.” I pulled up next to the sedan.

“Then I’d better keep moving along.”

“Where are you going?”

“Where am I going? I’m going to the Billings airport.”

“I mean where are you flying to?”

“I’m not. I’m picking up my mechanic. He’s going to help me drive to Texas. This is his car.” I had the disquieting sense that she was making this up: she was talking too fast.

“Oh,” I said, as though landing on the heart of the matter. “I thought it was a rental car.”

“No, no, it’s his car. I flew the ag plane up and he was supposed to meet me when I was done. I got done sooner than I thought.”

“I’ll be darned, I thought it was just a rental car.” I couldn’t have been more of a fool. She smiled compassionately at my confusion and slung her pack out of the car. She came around my side and kissed me on the cheek just as I was coming to my senses.

“I’ll call you if my whole life changes,” she said. “Maybe we can have dinner.”

“Please do. I’m crazy about you.” My face was red.

She laughed out loud and got into her car. “Who knows? You in the book?”

“I am.”

I watched her pull away. I offered a wave, but looking at her receding rearview window, I saw no hand raised in my own direction. A sort of twist went through me of something akin to embarrassment, though there was no one there to be embarrassed in front of. I did wonder if several days of unspecified eagerness had contributed to my outbreak of foolhardiness, or if I’d wished for something I really needed. It was no mystery to me, who had seen the various results, some soon after, some decades after, of the unexpected electricity between people. One of my patients was an infantryman who had fought in the Second World War and returned to Seattle to a job cooking in a café. In 1946 the cashier, a young woman from eastern Washington who had come to Seattle during the war, dropped a roll of nickels, which burst on the tile floor. The infantryman and the cashier knelt to gather them up, and fifty years later the old couple were my patients. Surely something of lesser magnitude had happened to me, but there had been some sort of event at the crash site, and I think it was no more than seeing a small curve of forehead between the edge of her helmet and the slight rise of flesh where her ear disappeared inside the gear. In my embarrassment, I tried to come up with something more substantial and barely resurrected the shape of one nostril! I was like a picnic ant on two square inches of anonymous flesh. Fool!

I got called in to stitch up Jasper Carroll, a fireman, for the fourth time in nine years, each due to being stabbed by his wife. I don’t think she intended to kill him and he always offered the same explanation: “We was having a discussion and she come with the blade.” You might say that I had lost all respect for Jasper’s injuries. He always brought his dog, a little Chihuahua named Manolete, for fear his wife would take it out on the dog. He lay on his stomach on the operating table with very little anesthetic, the nice wide but fairly shallow gash extending from just below his left shoulder in a downward angle to his spine. Jasper was an old hippie, and his gray ponytail hung below his black Chevron gimme cap almost far enough to be in the way. I listened to ZZ Top singing “Mexican Blackbird” as I worked and Billy Gibbons’s loping guitar created a nice rhythm for the stitches — poking, yanking, snipping. And Manolete’s occasional howls punctuated the soft-shoe boogie I performed next to the table. Alan Hirsch peeked in to watch me work and said, “Get down with your bad self.” I kept the Chrome, Smoke & BBQ boxed set in the emergency room to lift my spirits when the hours got long. I suppose it hurt my reputation with the rest of the staff. They had had a word with me about what they considered to be an excessively festive atmosphere. I think it just places me on the side of life, where a doctor should be.

The next time Jinx and I had lunch she tried to bring up the subject of my general unseemliness. We had taken pita wraps and beer to the park on an unseasonably warm day. Jinx wore a thick gray-green sweater with a shawl collar and the oddest pillbox hat I’d ever seen. I quite admired her indifference to her appearance and the impatience that caused her to speak through her hand when she was eating. Canada geese were standing at the edge of the park pond, which was so dark and still that their reflections were indistinguishable from themselves, and on a nearby bench an adoring young father rocked and gazed at his baby boy with shining eyes — a kind of Pietà but for the big ears and long black beard. I had spent the morning counseling a meth-head roofer from Walnut Creek, California, who had hit bottom here in town and wanted to talk about it. Surprisingly, he hoped to find a medical approach to maintaining his addiction and seemed strangely unaware that he was on a short straight road to hell. I got him in touch with our addiction counselor from my office phone, and I could tell by the upbeat dialogue he affected that he was not going to do anything for the time being. I told him I could see he wouldn’t even keep his appointment. He was a handsome young fellow of moderate height in jeans, Hush Puppies, and a worn blue suede jacket. He had jet-black hair that stuck out and clear blue eyes. I could see how bright he was, his imperfectly concealed suffering showing just under the surface of his bonhomie.

“No, Doc, honest, I’ll see him today.”

“No, you won’t.”

“You don’t think so?”

“No, but I wish I was wrong. I think you’re young and tough enough to picture that great feeling. I realize it’s like falling in love, but it’s a lie. Wait till you start rotting, it’ll seem like expensive love.” He didn’t like this and his face soured.

“You get this from Nancy Reagan?”

“Uh-huh.”

The young man backed to the door.

He said, “I’m Chad, by the way.”

“See you, Chad.”

Our most pleasant lunch in the park led up to the oddest question from Jinx: “What are you doing here? Have you no pride?” That’s really all I remember. No, not so. I remember the food, or the taste of it, but it disturbs me that I can’t remember who brought the food or why I kept looking at Jinx as though I were seeing her in a book of old photographs. For the moment, I was lost in her heedless sort of antique beauty. It always moved me. The fullness I felt in my heart I mistook for general high spirits.

After lunch with Jinx, I saw numerous patients, but while I may have given them appropriate treatment and advice I believed I did so from afar. Something was stirring, as though someone were standing in an adjoining room, the shadow on the floor the only sign of his existence. To give good medical care you must really see the patient and if possible lay hands upon him or her where convention permits. You must not stand behind the counter as though selling tickets at a shooting gallery. Every patient measured this distance subconsciously and weighed your suggestions against the measurement, and either results were achieved or they were not achieved.

On returning home at about midnight, having sat in a somewhat dumbfounded state on a barstool for several hours, I went to the windowsill on the north side of my bedroom and contemplated the alarm clock. I had owned this clock for several years without fully understanding it. You held one button to set the time, another to set the alarm, one to set the hours, another to set the minutes. AM and PM came and went like the days of my life and I often failed to set them properly. Sometime, hours after midnight, some woman came into my bedroom and asked me to not come to her house ever again. And she handed me a bill for the beer. She must have picked up my bar tab. I remember that it was almost undrinkable Grain Belt and I asked her if she carried any top brands. She slapped me and left. Whatever was disturbing me, it was not this, because I went straight back to sleep and had not a single dream until the alarm went off. I gazed around at the gray early light, arose, turned off the alarm, and went back to bed. I remained there for two days in a state of non-specific, writhing anguish. As it was rising in intensity with no end in sight, I arose and dressed from the pile of clothes at the foot of the bed and fled the house into frightful, fast-growing morning sunlight. I began passing people, some of whom must have recognized me. To allay my desperation, I pictured myself and attempted to arouse a sense of absurdity. The result was a hissing giggle emitted from between flattened lips. Though I was going nowhere, I was making phenomenal progress and passed through one neighborhood after another. When I recall the many automobile horns honking at me I feel very fortunate that I was not harmed. My mother loomed up taller than the ninety-foot Virgin Mary statue in Butte.

It was Sunday.

I stood in front of the old creamery, a concrete-and-stucco edifice with no windows and a remarkably small entrance, a commercial area that had been bypassed by the frontage road to the north where today’s activities centered. During my teenage years and later, this had been my mother’s church, one of several buildings around town where the ministry congregated. When I was a kid, a snake handler from Alabama brought his own rattlers and cottonmouths and offered to join but was turned away. He was told, “We don’t do that anymore.” Seeing it immersed me in pain: I had never gone inside. Why? Because I was embarrassed by my mother. Nothing gives you greater shame. I knew its reputation as a Holy Roller church, and it was infamous around town as a crackpot hotbed. As I stood there trying to connect its shape to my own history, I tried to keep up my well-practiced detachment, but it seemed to have little power in the face of my shame and guilt, all of which had been frozen in time by my mother’s death canceling all possibility of reconciliation. Wait a minute. What reconciliation? My mother and I got along well enough and knew each other’s limitations, but maybe this was different, my being ashamed of her beliefs or ashamed of the widespread view that she was crazy. Was she behind my remorse over Tessa? Behind my guilt over Cody? Anyone would see that I was headed inside.

I didn’t know if I was just late for services or if they were nearing their end, but at first sight it was bedlam, a large, earsplitting crowd pressed between the walls of the old creamery. Most of the men wore cowboy hats. Some of the women did too, but they were attired as though they were at home, some in unpretentious wash dresses and some of the younger women in jeans and halter tops. All had a faraway look and my ability to wander across their lines of sight without being seen was unexpectedly reassuring. Opposite the doorway, shipping pallets and planks had been used to create a stage where a drum machine blasted out a relentless pulse. Only one musician was on the stage, a bass guitar player, an amplifier at his feet, who throbbed along to the drum machine. A fraught woman stepped from the crowd and asked me where my shoes were. Next to the bass player an old man with a white beard and huge belly swayed and threw his arms from one side to the other. There was nothing menacing about this mob, and the further I penetrated it the less anxious I felt, the better I felt. Given that I had left my bed in a state of unbearable anxiety, it was a relief to be in a group so exalted that the eyes of half of them rolled out of sight. Several were clearly in the ecstasy of holy laughter. My mother had done some holy laughing around the house, and now, my seeing so many others at it seemed to absolve her in a way I found cleansing. Leading this pandemonium was the pastor, Rawl Pennington — one of my patients! — who stood a few feet from the bass player with his own amplifier and microphone, a very long cord necessary to his feverish movement. He was an older man, astoundingly active. As he exhorted us, he moonwalked from one end of the platform to the other, or raised one leg repeatedly to the height of his chest, a kind of goose step, as he shouted about the Rapture, the need to meet the Holy Ghost, to read the Book of Acts — I mean, this was beyond shouting — and as he invoked a mighty wind of what he called apostolic witnessing to the end-times, the crowd seemed to rise with him, the youngest skittering off with chattering teeth and faces in a peculiar mask like the last stages of diphtheria. There was much weeping, though it was weeping that expressed relief rather than grieving. I must have been drawn in, because my eyes filled with tears. Groups tottered with raised arms while others ran through the crowd in a low crouch. I joined the latter and was transported in a state of fascination at being able to run blindly without hitting anyone. Shoes and cowboy hats flew. When I leapt straight up, an old woman cried out, “He’s under a special sign!” The pastor stalled out on the shouted word “Unto!” He kept crying, “Unto, unto, unto!” before resuming about false signs and lying wonders and the need to cast out the devil and be anointed now. I very distinctly remember the sense of a pulse, a throbbing, possibly the music, if you could call it that, the exhortations of the pastor or the collective cries and moans as the whole crowd seemed to lose the beat and individuals, jerking in spastic movement, began to fall out. The pastor was down among us then, and to be perfectly clear I stopped racing around in my crouch, and I fell out too. Wonderful! The pastor was standing over me in a state, burning eyes, trembling jowls, hair tumbling over his ears from his bald crown. I was acutely aware of everything and could hear his legs slapping around inside his suit trousers, see the glint off his microphone, the triumph and rapture in his face as he called out to his flock, “He wants his mama! The doctor is calling out to his mama!” A grand affirmative noise filled the room.

They knew who I was. I didn’t care. I was riding along on my interior tumult as on a big wave whose force I hoped would take me far up the beach. It was only at the door to my own house that I noticed the shoes on my sore feet, and the mismatched socks; they were square-toed brogans, quite comfortable, but they weren’t mine.