Driving on the Rim

19

WE YOUNGER DOCTORS had been substantially democratized by comparison with our older colleagues. The senior doctors seemed to bask in their original status as small-town aristocrats, content in their golf, cocktails, and domestic architecture, their thin but emblematic connoisseurship, and their eccentricities. Dr. Gallagher — now gone — wore his kilt to dinner parties, GP Boland Mercer exercised his wolfhound by tying bacon to the end of its tail, and dermatologist Joe Mariani tried year after year to interest the town in building a bocce court. When I first arrived, nearly all of them were former smokers who had greeted the surgeon general’s warning about tobacco use with unified astonishment.

We of the next generation have been all over the map and at one point indistinguishable from the rising tide of hippies. We prided ourselves on unexpected remarks and enthusiasms. At the first dinner party including most of us, I especially recall Jinx holding up an empty highball glass and declaring, “One more of these and somebody’s going to put out.” We occasionally partook of controlled medications by way of inducing artificial elation and when work prevented sleep, we might well have turned to pills for stimulation too. Generally, this was dispensed on an as-needed basis, but before Alan Hirsch took up cycling with such passion the pharmaceuticals rather got away from him and soon he had a child in Miles City. This produced if not pain for Alan, at best inconvenience, but he met his obligations and when the child grew up and led Miles City to the Class A football play-offs, Alan made no secret of being the father. He even showed some conviction about his own work by expressing his wish that Jared (“I didn’t name him, for Christ’s sakes”) go to medical school, while Jared taught his father how to ride a horse. Our lessons in the ways in which one generation succeedeth another were exceptionally diagrammatic.

I wasn’t sure what I had done to annoy Jocelyn, but whatever it was she seemed to have forgotten it. She was preoccupied with selling her father’s ranch. I took her around to the Realtors’ offices trying to get a sense of its value. It was too small to provide a living for a family and it had no recreational potential short of stargazing such as might have made it a vacation property. The land booms of the Rockies were in a down cycle; it was too far from the airport; the house was in disrepair. In the general national gloom, fewer people were investing in faraway follies in the West; it was enough to keep the roof on back in Westchester. When the last Realtor that Jocelyn approached suggested a test drill for coal bed methane, she decided to lease the grazing to a neighbor. We talked about bulldozing a landing strip for her airplane but decided against keeping fuel or building a small hangar. Facilities at White Sulphur and Harlowton were adequate. As it turned out, Womack was not a boyfriend, or no longer one, but an airplane mechanic. Hence his annoyance. I still didn’t understand why she needed her own mechanic, unless it was one per airplane. But then, I didn’t understand airplanes and flying. I didn’t even like going up a ladder to paint. Womack got a room in Martinsdale over a retired schoolteacher’s house, and we rarely saw him. I don’t know whether they were just talking about the flying facilities elsewhere for my benefit, at any rate Womack soon rented some equipment and bulldozed an airfield a quarter mile west of the old homestead.

Jocelyn said that since the place was going to be uninhabited and she didn’t want the expense of insurance, she thought she ought to get rid of the house. I suggested she insure it for a year to be certain, since this was where she had grown up, after all, the scene of her childhood. Maybe that was the point. On her instructions, Womack burned it to the ground, dug a hole with a backhoe, pushed all the wire, pipe, and ashes into it, and covered it up. I expected something valedictory from Jocelyn, but all she offered was “Womack can do anything he sets his mind to.” Pictures of the blaze made the paper with commentary about the loss of pioneer structures including a cavalry bunkhouse from the days of the Indian Wars. “Another reason not to join the cavalry,” said Jocelyn. It was a real inferno and left a very strong impression on people. I heard from Throckmorton, the all-knowing, that the Meagher County sheriff was so offended he tried to make an issue of it but Womack’s permits were entirely in order and none of the accelerants were illegal. Word had it, however, that the encounter left a bit of bad blood between the two.

“How do you know these people?” Throckmorton asked me. I was in his office for a much-avoided consultation. I told him it was a long story. I didn’t have the will to describe the plane crash, and I particularly didn’t want Throckmorton’s opinion on these matters. Throckmorton was in one of his comedic moods, despite the fact that my future hung in the balance, the present reason for my being there. “I’m giving up the law,” he said, “to become a forensic barber. ‘What your ’do says about you.’ Forget DNA, dental records. Look at the coif. You’ll know.” His secretary rang into his office, and Throckmorton said there was water on the receiver. “Are you pissing in the other end?” Then after a long silence, “Stop blubbering!” He put the phone down. “Jesus H. Christ. Has no one a sense of humor anymore? I’ll be right back.” He went out to comfort his secretary. When he returned, he said, “She’s in love with me. She says I have no respect. There’s no object. What ever happened to grammar? I have no respect? For what? She didn’t say. Perhaps it’s for the best. I have no respect for her, something she has yet to learn. An excellent secretary, lucky to have her. I just wish she had a little respect for me.”

I had known Throckmorton for a long time, since the seventh grade, when he was often in trouble and I was ever on the margins because we had moved quite often; my parents had so little standing in town that the children were only too happy to reproduce these dismal social patterns from kindergarten on. My mother wanted to teach me at home, using the Bible, but my father, strengthened by new friendships at the VFW, put his foot down. I saw now that it was the beginning of our joining a community, and gratitude to the VFW aroused my fascination with my father’s service in WWII. I badly wanted to belong to something, and my father may have felt the same way: as I have so often said, our house was full of old soldiers. On the other hand, my mother’s passions produced little or no society for us. Those zealots were too focused on their journey for the sort of convivial pleasures enjoyed by my father’s friends and their wives. While my mother complained about the bad language of the former or the recklessness of their wives, she had a surprising capacity for fun, especially if it involved music and dancing. She could dance all night long. I remembered the strange feeling I got when I noticed the electricity she generated at some of our backyard parties, despite — or because of — her fixation on God. I remembered my father’s assertive forefinger in the chest of one of his contemporaries who had let my mother’s allure embolden him in the form of an impulsive kiss.

I was rescued from my life on the margins not just by our burgeoning VFW social normalcy but by the friendship of Throckmorton, the only boy in our class who, though popular, seemed sufficiently immune to peer pressure to anoint me a friend. He was a striking olive-skinned, round-faced boy with a jet-black Mohawk who loved the outdoors and feeling up girls, a pastime I learned from him once I’d achieved a minimal social aptitude. It still surprised me that the girls’ permission to feel them up so readily represented the general opinion of the whole class. Throckmorton and I were entirely focused on breasts, of which we were connoisseurs, commenting on their apparently limitless attributes. This was my first real vocabulary challenge.

Throckmorton and I spent our free time out of doors, in the sagebrush hills north of town with our small falcon, Speed — a kestrel we had taken from its nest, raised, and taught to hunt grasshoppers and mice. Speed rode the handlebars. We fished in the small snowmelt streams we could reach by bicycle. At a cabin far from town, we often observed a border collie on a chain, unsheltered in all weathers. We stole this dog too and named him Pal, lied to our parents about where we found him. Pal lived out his life, alternating between our houses. Throckmorton’s parents said my parents overfed Pal, and my parents said that Throckmorton’s parents spoiled Pal by never asking him to do anything. Pal’s training consisted of “sit” and “shake.”

Throckmorton played football. He was a gritty defensive lineman, the position most suitable for his thick frame, and always had a bloody nose or mouth, which he held aloft as he jogged to the sidelines for treatment. Throckmorton claimed that football enabled one to see more breasts than any other sport. That seemed to be the case, though I counted on baseball’s superior elegance to serve this end in the long run. Throckmorton thought this was a trifling idea and asserted that women were drawn to violence.

One day when we were hunting grasshoppers in a big alfalfa field, Speed flew away for good. “Ungrateful bird,” said Throckmorton, but his eyes were filled with tears. Mine too. We were about to start high school. Afterwards, Throckmorton and I saw less of each other, though we were still good friends. He dated one cheerleader after another; and as he was now a big aggressive brute and I knew his vividly carnal imagination, I rather felt sorry for these girls he described as “squealing like pigs.”

“Jury selection will be a breeze. I’ve been down the list, bunch of good folk from the tax rolls. I’ll let Numb Nuts fuck around with the jury pool, toss in a few peremptory challenges to make it look like he’s in charge, and then I’ll nip in and winnow those who’ve got it in for doctors. You’re well liked. An admired practitioner. Eccentricities forgiven. Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana. And you, my friend, are a blue-ribbon, bull-goose freak.”

“Don’t get complacent, pardner, I’d like to go back to work.” I wish he hadn’t brought up my trade. I missed it tremendously. Numerous fresh faces walking into my office with their problems, too beautiful, too stirring for words. My mother’s rearing suddenly surfaced as I asked God to let me work.

“I’ll go through them very carefully. The judge has already indicated that the jurors need not be death-qualified. So there’s little for you to sweat beyond the Big House.”

I didn’t like this, joke or not. I feared confinement more than mortality. It was curious that I didn’t seem to fear it more than indelible guiltiness, which felt more like a recurrent cancer in remission. But I could be guilty and still work, whereas I couldn’t work in the Big House.

“Why in God’s name don’t you smoke cigars?” He held up a handful. “Mexican maduro number 3 ring. So darn good.”

“I’ve tried them.”

“You haven’t tried them enough. I wish you’d get off this austerity stuff. You’re missing out altogether unless you’re angling for canonization. You’re not taking your own pills, are you?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I need something to sleep.”

“We’ll talk about it.”

“It’s got to knock me on my ass. No pussyfooting around. Brandy and cigars before bedtime, it takes a Class Three narcotic or you’re counting sheep. Plus, I have worries. I’m not austere. I spend money, I travel, I have a mistress.”

“What say you hold off on the foreseeable heart attack until my trial is over?”

“Plus, something to perk up the love machine?”

“Tons of stuff out there. It all works so long as you feel pretty with a beet-red face.”

“Would you mind if we got off this for a moment and focused on your trial?”

This was classic Throckmorton, one of the most doubt-free people I had ever known. I wished it had rubbed off on me.

The Stands family moved to town my sophomore year when Mr. Stands was transferred by the railroad from Forsyth. They were Crow, real name Stands Ahead, and their daughter, their only child, Debbie, my girlfriend all through high school, raised my prestige — though not with everybody, as there was a residue of prejudice toward Indians and a few thugs began calling me “Chief”—since Debbie was the best-looking girl in school. The family was probably what inclined me to intern at the Indian Health Service, but more important, Debbie taught me how to study. I spent three years believing that our destinies would forever be intertwined; the very chastity of our relationship, excepting only limited familiarity with her breasts, seemed to elevate our love to a mythic plane. Then I went to college in the Midwest, where my gruesome immaturity returned like a virus dormant in my spine, and Debbie married a classmate at Missoula. I still heard from her at Christmas. The family picture on her card, husband and two children, gave me a pang. Her father, Austin Stands Ahead as he latterly styled himself, was my patient until dying of congestive heart failure. He kept me up on Debbie, and I concealed my pain with a congratulatory smile as he detailed her accomplishments: she was a state legislator. I met Debbie once at a high school reunion and with a trembling face. Thereafter, I avoided such things. Years later, I thought to relent, but even if Debbie had grown big, fat, and old I was afraid it wouldn’t matter.

I seemed to be a bachelor. For years I wondered whenever the phone rang late at night if it might be Debbie. It never was. I realized now that it never would be. There were quite a few things like that.

“Did that fellow ever bring you an airplane?”

“Womack. Yes, a while back actually.”

“To start crop dusting again?”

“This is a different kind of plane. Takes off and lands on small runways. And it can carry quite a load.”

“To do what?”

“Oh, there’s always a call for a plane like that.”

“Mining equipment, I suppose.”

“Sure.”

“So, where is Womack now?”

“He got a room.”

“Where did he get a room?”

“One of those little towns. Over near Rapelje, I think, somewhere in the Golden Triangle.”

“And he looks after the plane?”

“What is this, Twenty Questions?”

So, later, Jinx came over, after doing her grocery shopping, and brought me a few treats, including a pint of Cherry Garcia, a little wedge of artisanal cheddar, and a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé, which I offered to drink with her, but she wouldn’t consider it as she meant to spend her evening reviewing cases. But we did have a cocktail, despite my being briefly low-spirited and envious that she would be working. I hadn’t had a drink in a week, and just one was enough to produce a wave of warmth generally, but especially toward my friend Jinx. Therefore I regaled her with an overly detailed account of my infatuation with Jocelyn, including hints of its erotic aura. It was a masterpiece of thoughtlessness, but Jinx bore it with her usual grace and composure, questioning me attentively about something I cared about, and only because I cared about it. I glimpsed that people at work, like Jinx, must look across a great divide at people like me, atwitter over their love lives, or even people like Jocelyn, trying to think what their airplane is good for. That was hardly an account of the facts, but Jinx’s world could not be called dull just for its steadiness. Adding to the picture, I years ago met Jinx’s parents: what a surprise, a retired car salesman with a highly visible gold tooth married to an aging but still painted party girl. Though it took thirty years, they finally drank themselves to death in the St. Louis apartment building where Jinx had grown up and launched herself into a real life of real work. I specifically recall the days she took off from the clinic, one year apart, to bury her mother and father and how downcast she was to lose two people who seemed spectacularly negligible to anyone who had ever met them. They had named her after Jinx Falkenburg, whom I could not recall. Jinx remarked ruefully that she was a “sweater girl.”

Ever since Throckmorton and I had our little kestrel, Speed, I’ve been interested in birds. Every bird I learned, if it was a migratory bird, I soon forgot. Didn’t we meet last year? I kept a life list, but its utility as a mnemonic device was quite limited. The spring warblers moved faster than my ability to memorize them, and frankly the sparrows were a nightmare. Anyone interested in birds and living near the Great Plains had to face the sparrow problem, which was that they all looked very similar: rufous, white-crowned, Baird’s, Henslow’s, house sparrows, grasshopper sparrows — all a blur, the bastards. So I switched to raptors, a bit of a copout, as they were more easily differentiated. Priapic male birders all liked raptors because they seemed flatteringly emblematic. Many of the hawk lovers I knew were big-bellied fellows with facial hair and a passion for cocktails. As yet, I didn’t fit this profile. My father, who never claimed bird expertise, remembered every bird he ever saw, even when he was overseas. He liked talking about them, too, but my mother would cut him off with, “Seen one, you’ve seen them all.” He assumed a conspiratorial air when he pointed into the willows and said, “Carolina warbler.” When he rode a tank into Germany, the storks on roofs were the thing that struck him most. He thought that a stork sitting on its eggs and watching an army roll by showed what nature thought about mankind.

With my new leisure following upon my indictment and my failure as a house painter, I had time to walk the woody creek bottoms where I observed the short-winged woodland hawks, Cooper’s and sharp-shinned, speeding through the trees with uncanny nimbleness. I had several times watched prairie falcons diving into blackbirds when I walked around the uplands, and the chaos they made seemed to briefly fill the sky. These jaunts were hardly adventurous, as I never went more than a few minutes from town, but it was greatly reassuring to find wildlife so close to humanity. In fact, I could still make out the old water tower through the trees where I first came upon the goshawk, a northern goshawk, to be precise. Since I came upon her unawares and she was going about her goshawk business under my eye, it made a tremendous impression on me: almost blue-black on her back with a creamy and precisely barred breast. She was swiveling her head from side to side, broadcasting her oddly relentless screams. Over time, I would see her often, hunting, soaring, sleeping. And she saw me often enough that she no longer fled at my sight, moving me by her acceptance.

I also went birding with Jinx, a genuine expert. She had a beautiful pair of Leitz binoculars whose protective covering she had nearly worn away. My optics were el cheapos from Wal-Mart but good enough for my skill level. I was hardly able to keep up with Jinx, whose bird cognition was Olympian and betrayed my slow-witted tagalong efforts to identify those blurry sparrows which she saw as separate races with little in common beyond their genus. I accepted my inferior status as a birder just to be with her.

However, I knew a lot about my goshawk, had watched her fly, run down songbirds, pluck voles, and dine. I had narrowed the field of vision to the point at which I actually knew what I was talking about. So I invited Jinx to join me, knowing she would have to rise above my recent pariah status to accept. Frankly, she was a bit wary on the phone, but the bird interested her and we made a first-light foray into the creek bottom east of town.

I couldn’t find my goshawk.

“Where’s the bird?” Jinx demanded after we had wallowed along the low-water perimeter of the stream, scanning the treetops.

“She’s always here in the morning.”

“Are you sure about this?”

“That she’s always here?”

“No, that there’s actually a bird.”

“Why would there be no bird?”

“I thought you might want to talk privately.”

“Oh, no, no, no. There’s a bird. I’ve watched her every day. Very beautiful. Very queenly. I thought she was the bird for you.”

We fanned out and moved as quietly as we could in the brush. Bohemian waxwings had gathered in a wild crabapple tree, and some jacksnipe probed around the muddy creek. I was pleased to hear the sounds of children at the grade school a short distance away.

“Come here,” called Jinx. I had to look carefully to see her about twenty yards away in her nearly camouflaged clothes. I started that way. “I’ve got her.” When I reached Jinx, she was holding the goshawk by the corners of her wings. She had been shot.

Jinx said, “You’re just bad luck.” I felt, and must have looked, quite crestfallen because she put her arm around my waist and said she was sorry about my hawk.

We went to breakfast at a café by the switching yard, thinking we’d beat the morning crowd, but we didn’t and had to wait for a table. The ambient noise, a miasma of voices and silverware, was substantial. Desperate-looking waitresses navigated the crowd with plates aloft. I got a few stares but had been getting used to that. Quite soon, four ranchers rose and walked past us to the cash register picking their teeth, and we took their table. They wore the big Stetsons they would replace with billed caps as soon as they got home. Three of the ranchers faced the cashier, but one had turned to look at me. “A splendid bird like that,” said Jinx. “Someone just couldn’t stand the pressure. I’m glad I don’t know who it was. It might be someone I delivered and I’d just hate myself for missing my chance.” I compulsively did the math: Jinx was a bit over forty, with enough years of practice in the community to have delivered someone now armed.

When she was indignant, her eyes flashed; she had beautiful eyes. Even when we had both grown old I was fascinated by them. She once said, “My eyes and my ass are my long suits. I’m no sweater girl and without emphatic breasts life in the U.S. can seem quite proscribed.” That had been at one of our wine-soaked dinners at my house at which I grew so alarmed at Jinx’s intimations and proximity. I’m not sure why. She might have been too smart for me at that stage of my life. Now that I was somewhat shriven by circumstances and Jinx had begun to accept me as an unadulterated friend — someone to go birding with or share a ride to racquetball — I saw more in her. My mistakes seemed to accumulate like channel markers behind a boat. But at least I had a friend; I was sure of that.

Jocelyn came into town a couple of times a week, and we usually slept together after I’d taken her to dinner or helped her stock an odd array of supplies: hose clamps, fuel bladder, energy bars, distilled water, anti-icing spray, electrician’s tape, multipurpose tools. I wasn’t much interested in what these things were for, and my casual inquiries were waved away wearily. I had always been wary of sex as something which imposed a not always welcome bonding; it reminded me of those old movies in which a storm strands a group in a bus station or some likewise unpleasant place and they all slip through layers of unearned intimacy, like it or not. I actually fell in love with my aunt, who shooed me away after getting what she wanted. But this was different. I had not bonded with Jocelyn. I was not at all sure I liked her. And while I realized it was irrational to make the connection, the more I saw Jocelyn, the more trouble I had with the 88. At first it wouldn’t start, because power was only intermittently getting from the ignition to the solenoid. I had to change a headlight, which was unreasonably difficult as there was no room to get a hand or tools in there. Once I had it running, it smoked too much and I drove through town followed by a white cloud. Otherwise, it went along okay until the following Saturday, when having made love to Jocelyn again, I began getting alarming noises from the water pump and idler pulley, which, combined with the smoking exhaust and unreliable starting, made me think my car was about three fucks from the wrecking yard. I didn’t actually believe this; it was just a feeling, an association. If we could have made love just once without my car going haywire I believe that feeling would have gone away. It was disquieting. I had gotten used to the non-working dome light, the malfunctioning passenger-side window, and the water trapped in the trunk lid, but the correlation of these new failures to my sex life was unusually troubling. My car had run beautifully for five days when I ran into Jocelyn behind the IGA store and we had a bit of a grope. Jocelyn went on her way and I went on mine, but for the first time in over a hundred thousand miles there was a screeching knock in the steering column which was never resolved, while the heater blew only cold air. I realize that this was some sort of automotive route to erectile dysfunction, and I enjoyed all the attendant irony, but what else was I to conclude?

At some point I said to the old man, “Tell me, Pop, what made you desert?” We had just brought a load of well-weathered cow manure from Gladys’s ranch for him to spread around the raised beds of his cherished vegetable garden. I couldn’t have gotten a bigger rise if I had shot a big-game arrow through his thorax. He stiffened, lowered the handles of the wheelbarrow, and turned to me very slowly.

Everyone must look back over their lives and consider what the big mistakes were. This surely was one of mine. If this spell of forced leisure had a mission, it seemed to be this review as to how I got to this place. It was dawning on me that only while working did I focus on what was under my nose.

My father made me see how demoralizing hedge warfare was, a lethal enterprise on a sort of chessboard, where the terrifying art of ambush became a cerebral exercise. My father’s longing for his native plains became more emphatic as woodlands became death traps. Months of digging in had given him a fear of daylight and transformed him into something of a homebody once he had a choice. Night had been a friend, and the terror of German flares had altered his diurnal habits stateside; my mother told me it was a long time before walking around in broad daylight gave him much pleasure. He had befriended a Mormon officer from Idaho early on and stood near him on a sunny afternoon when the officer’s map board flashing in the sun gave him away to a German sniper; a distant crack and his new friend fell at his feet. A bout with scabies had made him, once home, a fervent bather: even when we were on the road cleaning rugs, wherever we stopped he sought out the water source, the tubs and showers. My father was not a particularly reflective man, but watching prisoners transported to the rear perplexed him; late in the war young Wehrmacht grenadiers were packed in trucks like the ones used to haul cattle, though in this case far more crowded than would be considered acceptable for livestock. The only signs of the penned humanity were the streams of urine and vomit seeping from between the planks on the sides of the lorries. In circumstances where he had been advised to “eat every chance you get and piss every chance you get” this dismal image never left him. The ethnicity of the truck’s contents faded in the mind of a man who had once thought of killing the enemy as life’s greatest pleasure. A word or two from comrades might have had a similar effect, for in every unit there were thoughtful individuals who doubted that war made any sense in the first place. He was given profound pause as he watched a captured German medical team ordered to treat Allied wounded: his description of their care and efficiency might have had something to do with my early enthusiasm for medicine, as it was the first war story I ever heard from him but it was about making people well.

He disclosed a substantial litany of experiences that inclined toward dismantling a human mind: the silence of incoming mortars, the endless hover of flares, the scream of rockets, the otherworldly burp of the Schmeisser machine pistols. And of course, the 88s. Because of my impertinent question, I heard this, if not for the first time, in greater detail than ever before. My father’s gaze remained level, his eyes fixed on mine as he answered my question.

My father loved horses all his life, and toward the end of the war, when the enemy could be located by the sound of their horses, he realized the end was in sight. The Germans were running out of everything, including fuel and transportation machinery, so farm horses were being commandeered to move their guns. The Allies were pouring a firestorm upon them, and increasingly the POWs were walleyed lunatics indifferent to what their captors had in mind for them.

As they approached Aachen and Germany itself, my father’s unit captured a group of German soldiers: frightened children in rags. Taken to the rear, one of the boys pulled out an antiquated pistol and shot the sergeant. The escort threw the boy up onto a roll of barbed wire and machine-gunned him. That night my father deserted. The Luger he carried to Paris he had found on a fully dressed skeleton under a tree in the Hürtgen Forest.

“Had enough?” he asked me. I said that I had.

* * *

I rarely heard about the war after that, until right at the end of my father’s life. I remember visiting him after my mother had died and I was his sole medical care, though he needed little assistance and was remarkably independent. VFW friends of his vintage were starting to fade away, mostly grateful for having lived so long. But when I visited him that day he was agitated. Radio personality Rush Limbaugh was being interviewed on television and my father was certain that it was Hermann Göring. “I thought he committed suicide at Nuremberg!” he cried. After this, my poor father began to assume he had been lied to about nearly all other things and that he could never be sure which ones they were. I can’t say his last days were good ones, for he increasingly suffered from an abstract sense of betrayal until the day that he greeted my arrival with a wry look of miserable resignation: he had begun to suspect me as well. But even as dementia swept over him, he was able to putter around in his garden and refill the hummingbird feeder. Here, shovel in hand, seated on the railroad ties that supported the earthen beds, he died. I buried him beside my mother on a beautiful June day, cottonwood seeds filling the air and new perennials popping up from some of the earliest graves. Several old soldiers attended and a veteran of the Iraq War played taps on the bugle. Seeing the headstones paired at last, I was unable to conclude that I knew these two people very well, or understood them. I would quite painfully miss them, but only as people I once knew. Religion had surrounded my mother with an impenetrable reality, and war had done something quite similar to my father. I had the sense that I had been alone since birth.