Driving on the Rim

2

I WAS NEARLY MIDDLE-AGED before I learned that my mother’s hometown in Arkansas was not called, as my father had said, “Crackeropolis.” It was Ayers. Ayers, Arkansas. When I figured this out, I then invested way too much time in analyzing my father’s odd little satire. Was it contempt for my mother’s origins? Probably he was just being funny; but I wasn’t sure. I did a bit of research on Ayers and learned that it was the site of an annual slasher film festival held in a big old Art Deco movie theater that was in the registry of historic buildings. Otherwise, a quiet soybean town peopled by farmers in dashboard overalls.

Unwinding my mother’s pointed remark to my father to the effect that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, I eventually grasped that it referred to his few droplets of Cree blood. My father always pretended to be of French Canadian stock, but I’d heard from other of his relatives that they were originally mixed-race folk who worked the lime kilns after the buffalo disappeared. All those people went back and forth between here and Canada looking for work and so got into the habit of saying they were French Canadians as a way to avoid being called half-breeds. The war and generations of marriage evaporated all that, turning that class of folk into garden-variety Americans with slightly exotic names like mine. My full name, Irving Berlin Pickett, will never find its way into common usage.

When I was in my teens I bought a set of drums: a snare, a bass with a foot pedal, and a broad, handsome Zildjian cymbal. I didn’t go far, much past Gene Krupa’s “Lyonnaise Potatoes and Some Pork Chops,” which I got off a 78 rpm record called Original Drum Battle: Gene Krupa & Buddy Rich and which I blasted for weeks out the window of my parents’ house, exhibiting early and alarming antisocial tendencies aggravated by my rhythmless accompaniment. One day the drum set was gone.

“Where’s the drums at?” I demanded of my parents with a fierceness neither I nor they had ever seen. I was just back from school and close to going off the deep end when they said — and I knew it was a lie — that they didn’t know where the drums “was at.” A neighborhood tipster, one Mrs. Kugel, a member of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church and so an enemy of my parents and their Holy Roller ways, confided that my drums were in the town dump. So they were: I stood on a cold winter day staring at them, crushed among the DeSoto parts, shattered lava lamps, and sundry garbage, paper, and dry-rot wood. I was alone with three crows.

Those drums had enabled me to dominate my household and substantial parts of the neighborhood without resort to ideas or speech. I was practicing, I explained, to join a big band like that of Harry James, he of the screeching trumpet. This last detail was entirely strategic, as Harry James was known to me only as a favorite of my parents, who, with their big black vinyls treasured in original sleeves, sometimes fell into music-induced reminiscence of the war years, even to the point of dancing by candlelight while I presumably slept. Their necking during “You Made Me Love You” grossed me out, as it would have any youngster observing his parents being happy in quite that way. I didn’t want to join a swing band, whatever that was; I wanted to rule by noise, and in that I had entirely succeeded. Until the day the drums vanished.

Certainly my parents had made off with them, and I am in no doubt about the great courage required to cross their only child, but their lives had become unbearable: when I was not drumming, I was playing Drum Battle from my room and down the stairwell. My father read his newspaper in the backyard. I now see with shame that our home was really not habitable.

“I know you pinched ’em,” said I. “The whole kit, to get even.”

“Where’s he come up with this stuff?” my father asked my mother, the fingers of his right hand checking his shirt pocket for his Old Golds. “Can someone please tell me?”

She swung her head, staring at the floor, as she said, “I don’t know.” Dad looked to her for a clue: he was a bit weak in situations like this and fished for a bailout.

I went to my room, returning with a pair of Vic Firth Number 3 maple drumsticks; I then removed a roasting pan from the cupboard over the stove and went at it. Heretofore no one had blinked, but this appalling racket soon brought them around and my father swung an open arm in my mother’s direction, authorizing her to speak. I stopped and awaited her declaration, which can be condensed: they couldn’t take it anymore. I considered this report with substantial silence before I spoke in phrases cribbed from God knows where. I said, “From this blow I foresee no recovery,” and went upstairs to my room.

Ours was a cheaply constructed house, thin-walled, inadequately heated and insulated, with variously missing or inoperable doors to finish off what might have passed for privacy. Thus I was able to hear my mother and father repeat, with various intonations, my exit line, through their snorting and thinly muffled guffaws. Mrs. Kugel could be seen from my bedroom window, hovering on the sidewalk below.

I greatly profited by this lesson.

I didn’t have an idyllic childhood, though it contained enough boyish pleasures, especially hunting and fishing, that in later times I tended to glamorize the Great Plains, especially when I was in medical school and during my internship when describing it to artificially elated mixed groups. We had a rather sardonic professor of neurology, Martin Chenowith, a bachelor who liked to be around younger people on party nights, hoping to meet women, obviously. I recall pouring out my love of the Great Plains to Dr. Chenowith — afterwards wondering where this enthusiasm had come from — and after several drinks challenging him to see past its grim, dusty, oddly featureless expanses, its rutted, exploited visage, to its hidden glory.

He interrupted me, his small face sharp under thin, carefully combed auburn hair, to say, “It sounds like the men’s room at Grand Central.” Appalling and inaccurate as this remark might have been, it put an end to my feckless nostalgia about my place of origin, a place I had endured in a van containing a malodorous steam machine for cleaning rugs, with my shaky, anxious parents staring hopelessly through the windshield for signs of the next town. While most houses in those towns had no rugs, those that did were a long way from professional cleaning services, or so my father’s rueful, after-the-fact theory went. It proved just about the paltriest get-rich-quick scheme known to man, and we chased it for half a million miles, always discouraged and broke and mad at ourselves and unconsoled by my mother’s conviction that “the Lord don’t give us more than we can handle.”

We usually rented well out in the country, where, as my mother put it, “our screams can’t be heard.” Those little towns were always in touch with one another and I think my parents wanted our arrival to be a surprise. I was never to find out what they were running from, but it couldn’t have been much, bad checks too small to justify the gas needed to track us down. My father was a handsome man with a dimple in his chin like Kirk Douglas’s, and I remember at the end of his life my mother asking him, “Where do you think that dimple will get you now, Kirk?” His handsomeness and wandering had long been a problem, and if there was a speech from her with a theme in my memory, it was “Keep it in your pants, Kirk.” His real name was Bob; by calling him Kirk, Mother was invoking his rambling ways with lethal disapproval. In more understanding times, my mother said that the war had given him crazy ideas. They’d both run around when they were young; so, everything was canceled out except the language, which endured with a life of its own until the very end, when she repented and prepared herself for what she called the Great By-and-By. Forgiving my father for everything would only fortify her contentment.

When I was fourteen, we moved into my Aunt Silbie’s large, clean, comfortable manufactured home (trailer) in Orofino, Idaho. Silbie, whose name derived from “Sylvia,” was around forty and divorced, working as a paralegal for a water lawyer who stayed busy defending all the cases arising from the many dams in the Columbia headwaters. Silbie was a good-looking and very shy brunette with wonderful amethyst eyes; she was almost too shy to talk but very intelligent, and so indispensable to her boss that people said he would be ruined if she quit. The most notable thing about Silbie, belied by her meek exterior, was her tigerish sexual appetite. And yet my parents trusted me with her while they were out shampooing rugs. Big mistake.

At first she seemed to be interested only in my finding comfortable accommodation in her house. “I think this room will suit you just fine,” she said, pulling up the blinds and checking the sill for dust with her forefinger. “You’ve got four nice empty drawers here for your things. Fill them in the order you dress. In other words, underwear here, socks here, and so forth. Are these your shorts? Oh my gosh, they’re like little bathing suits. Let me see you, turn around—” I asked if there was a desk I could use. “A what? Oh. We’ll find something. My goodness gracious, it seems five minutes ago you were a child and, and, now look—!”

“Aunt Silbie,” I said, clamping my hand atop my old Samsonite suitcase before she could get at its contents anymore, “I can unpack myself.”

“I want to help you,” she cried. I didn’t really feel I could say “please don’t,” and so I stood by helpless as she flung my clothes out on the bed, inspecting them, pinning things to my shoulders with her thumbs for appraisal. “Don’t move. This is too important! This calls for celebration! You-are-the-first-to-occupy-this-room, my dear, my angel, my pet.” She bustled out, and when she came back she had a bottle of wine in one hand. Her clothes she had left elsewhere. She always called it “disrobing,” though I never saw a robe.

In my first six months in action Aunt Silbie taught me ninety-nine percent of everything I would ever know about sex. By the time I was in the tenth grade I could deliver to the willing, few as they were, a fairly adult performance. Girls my own age thought it sufficient to let me have my way with them, which left me daydreaming about Silbie’s blazing needs, her hot vaginal grip, and the astonishing things she said. Indeed, Aunt Silbie had hung over my sex life until just a short time ago, assuming her ghost has departed me at all. I remember her saying that all the heat was explained by our genetic proximity. I believe that Silbie instilled in me a healthy attitude toward sex: she pumped and I squirted. It was completely lacking in a moral or religious dimension. Unfortunately, my parents caught us, and the fact that they were guests in Aunt Silbie’s double-wide in no way prevented their attempting to chase her outside without her clothes. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a trailer has a gun, and Silbie pulled hers on Mom and Dad; just to make a clean sweep of it, she evicted all three of us. I can still see her with nothing on but a pistol as we left forever, a strange image indeed, as she was such a meek lady and the only member of our extended family who spoke reasonably correct English. Understandably, I was the one object toward which my parents could vent their wrath, and so I was abandoned to the streets of Orofino, Idaho. A possible version is that they were just looking for an excuse; I’ve had some counseling to address this version. I must admit that they only abandoned me for about three hours. Be that as it may, I didn’t see Aunt Silbie again until I paid her a sentimental visit years later. Whether she had lost her attractiveness or not, I couldn’t say, as she had not lost it for me, something she must have detected because her brief look of embarrassment, perhaps at having grown old, quickly gave way to the sly, timid, amethyst-eyed presence I profoundly recognized.

The home in which I was reared, after the rug-cleaning days, was quite normal once my folks had gotten the hang of conventional living and threats of eviction faded. My father got a job at the post office, and there he would remain for the rest of his days, his social life depending entirely on his war buddies. My mother, more solitary by nature, found her church fulfilling enough and required my father to attend once in a while, though he always returned baffled and dazed. In the end she took pity on him and excused him from going. He still went occasionally to please her. My mother and I usually cleared out when the men got together to tell war stories. In fact, “telling war stories” had been a euphemism for rambling, until we were much older or the men had died and we began to comprehend that these backyard chatterers had endured struggle and adventures far beyond anything we would see. My mother was an Arkansas hillbilly woman swept by war and marriage into a life she was slow to accept. She had all the virtues of subsistence living, needed very little — very little food, few material goods — and could make or grow nearly all of it. She medicated herself with things she gathered and cooked up, excepting only her Doan’s Pills, and remained thin and tough until the night she didn’t wake up. I have never known anyone as free of ambivalence as my own mother. What distinguished her from her Northern neighbors was the palpable sense that just on the edge of vision God and the devil were locked in mortal combat for her soul. She knew where she stood.

Gladys and Wiley, as my parents’ best friends, often received us on their ranch, White Bird. My mother occasionally saw Wiley at her church, usually when he was trying to change some habit or another. Church had helped him battle drink but had been no help with the cigarettes, as most of the men at Rock Holy Ghost were contented smokers. I worked at White Bird, though I was bereft of ranching skills. I flatter myself that Wiley and Gladys enjoyed my company, and I did everything I was asked, but I had little ability to find things to do on my own, as I really didn’t understand ranch work. I think they were just trying to inject a few bucks into our hard-pressed family.

Wiley was an excellent horseman and to him I owe my love of horses. He showed me that patience and careful observation of a horse’s ability to learn would be instructive in keeping me out of what he called train wrecks. I saw Wiley ride some cantankerous broncs when all else had failed, and the sight of him in the middle of an exploding outlaw, his treasured cigarette undisturbed, stays with me until this day, even though he told me that riding a bucking horse had as much to do with horsemanship as going over Niagara Falls in a barrel had to do with seamanship. Wiley saved lots of little nuggets like this, but they were all about horses. His favorite was a big claybank gelding named Train, the only horse I ever saw that could jog over sliding shale without losing its footing. I rode Madelyn, a small chestnut mare with snapping black eyes and a clever trot. I suppose she’s dead by now, but what fun we had together. Wiley was raised in the twilight of a world in which the horse was involved with everything. His father had dug the basement of the biggest hotel in Montana with horses. My father was in an army that used horses. I was only a generation away from a thousand years of horse-dependent farming, but horses were still very much on our minds. Cars just weren’t the same. I say that, dedicated as I was in later years to my Oldsmobile 88, and I no longer had a horse but wistfully attended horse auctions in Billings and elsewhere. I was at a dispersal of the Bar J Hat Pin, a hundred-thousand-acre cattle operation near Cohagen that was sold to a man who had made a fortune selling vitamins on television. The cowboys, mostly older men, were all let go, and they brought their saddle horses to the sale. They pooled their mounts in a few thirty-foot gooseneck trailers and followed along in dusty sedans. I never saw such a bunch of heartbroken old men as many of their ponies were consigned to the killer pen because of their age, to be sold for meat. It all reminded me of Wiley, who by that time was long gone.

I admired Gladys and Wiley for the very realistic way they went about their lives. Theirs was a meager operation that sent a hundred calves to market each year; they were obliged to grow some winter feed, mostly non-irrigated wild hay that Wiley harvested with his 9N Ford gas tractor. I got a great lesson in precision by watching Wiley squint through cigarette smoke as he dressed and adjusted the teeth of the sickle bar on his mower when we prepared our annual siege of the meadows. His equipment was old and minimal, but it enabled him to swathe the most beautiful mix of orchard grass and clover, which we made into small sixty-pound square bales that he could ferry around in his truck and throw here and there “without breaking my goddamn back.” His little herd of Hereford cattle always did well in those days before the Angus triumph, and he was expert at the treatment of sunburned udders, pro-lapses, and eye cancers that afflicted this pleasant breed in our part of the world. By contrast, my parents invested in a mail-order shoofly pie business that foundered in a matter of months, extinguishing my mother’s pride in her baking and landing them in yet more financial turmoil, probably at least the twentieth episode since the days of steam-cleaning rugs. I once thought that my father was a willing accomplice to all these gyrations, but I eventually learned that the few years of war had crowded out the rest of his life, and thinking about them, re-imagining them, and finally relating them to some view of life took up much of his time. I expect most of his fellow veterans shared the belief that what they had experienced could never be conveyed but rather was owned as a private matter or, at best, shared with one another. I remember noticing when his war cronies were around a kind of contempt for that vast portion of the world that hadn’t “been there.” I heard one of them say that he had more respect for a German soldier than an American civilian and what a shame it was you could legally shoot only the former. That was the generation that raised me, and in general they were happy enough to watch us piss away our opportunities on cheap amusements because we were a mob of untested ninnies anyway and there was no sense spoiling our fun.

It must have been the last summer I worked on the White Bird that Wiley took me up to his summer pasture to clean moss and slime out of the stock tanks. One was on a sandstone ridge overlooking a shallow draw. Atop the ridge, a tall tree held a nest of prairie falcons, and the newly fledged young were gliding down the draw to another tree full of indignant magpies, lording it over birds that would prey on them by the end of summer. We had a packhorse carrying some war surplus panniers that opened from the bottom, and in those we carried several hundred pounds of salt, which we distributed to the salt troughs arrayed near the springs. We hobbled Train and Madelyn and took a break. Wiley shook a Camel from its pack and captured it with his lips. Striking a match with his thumbnail, he lit the cigarette and drew in the smoke with an air of grateful relief. “We ship in the fall. You need to get out there and be somebody,” he said right out of the blue. I was finished with high school and had done well, though the poor ways of my family and our crackpot religion had made me something of a pariah possessing neither cowboy boots nor penny loafers. The story was always the same: someone would find a reason to be interested in me; then they would hit that little wall which consisted in their detecting my scrutiny of them. They weren’t wrong, but I couldn’t help myself. I perhaps made too much of my enthusiasm for animals, but they did provide me the feeling of being understood, something I badly craved. In my early years of medical practice and as a man about town, I would cultivate an entirely artificial hail-fellow-well-met personality fueled by alcohol, desperation, and my first taste of spending money.

I’d been going out to the ranch almost as Gladys and Wiley’s only family by the time Dr. Olsson turned up asking if he could exercise his bird dog. He was new to the area, having bought himself a little cottage, but he hadn’t yet made any friends, though he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. Far more interested in finding a place to run the dog, he was pretty deft at fishing out information about the local landowners, the location of creeks, who had a grain field, etc. He was certainly not fooling anyone, but Gladys and Wiley liked him and became, for a while, his only friends. Then he met my parents and they hit it off too, because really Dr. Olsson was the kind of solid fellow you couldn’t help but like. He had the look of a onetime football player, which he was, and despite plenty of sore joints he bounded around pretty well. Looking back, I think Dr. Olsson was no more than middle-aged. He first took a shine to me as a way of ingratiating himself with the grown-ups, I think, but maybe he actually liked me. He really seemed to give a damn about how I would turn out.

Gladys and Wiley understood me too, even enjoying my awful timing and geekish silences. They believed I was smart and knew how to work and that I would eventually find myself if I got out of town and away from my parents. While personally fond of my mother and father, they thought they lacked common sense in raising me and considered my mother’s thermal relationship with Jesus to be beyond the pale. “Jesus is your friend,” Gladys once told me, “but let’s leave it at that.” I later had a spell of poetry reading and in the poems of Saint Theresa found a new version of the Savior, who appeared as a sort of demon lover with all the tools of electrifying conquest. Saint Theresa can make Christ sound like a nine-battery Chinese vibrator. After that came Abelard and Heloise with their thrilling menu of mixed messages. I like to think it was otherwise with my poor mother, but God only knows what they taught her in Arkansas. She was certainly fixated and said of her own father, a crooked door-to-door shoe salesman, that he had “gone to hell with a broken back.” I’m pretty well over all this, I say, but there was a day when the flames danced just beyond the next hill.

So Wiley said, “I had several chances to try something else, but the land claimed me and I was grown old before I realized the land didn’t care about me.”

“How about Gladys?”

“Neither one of us. We’re like two ants crawling over it.”

I suppose this made Wiley sound like a pessimist, which maybe he was, but his day-to-day demeanor was that of a cheerful, optimistic man. This seemed to be the case with people who knew the score, even if it was not encouraging, as though encouragement were just a matter of being pressed into the unknown.

Gladys and Wiley assumed correctly that I was headed for college and that our encounters hereafter would be social calls only. Their new friend Dr. Olsson was nudging me in the direction of education too. Therefore, they would need new help, and indeed that had long been the case, though they had made do with tramps and jailbirds and schoolboys like me. As it was well known that ranch work was hard and underpaid, the pickings were slim, and many of the men they interviewed were, if experienced, broken down or, if inexperienced, not able-bodied. The only exception was a lanky, gum-chewing wise guy in a hot-rod Ford named Dale Brewer. A lazy, scheming, no-account ladies’ man, Dale would be the child Gladys and Wiley never had. They took him into their capacious hearts.

Once after school and during a late-spring snow, Dale and I were feeding cows from a wagon, tossing the bales out as we cut the binder twine. One bale had hit the ground still bound, and Dale got down to cut the twine. As he bent over to do this, an old swinging-bag cow butted him onto his face. Dale jumped up in a rage and screamed at the cow, “Someday I’ll be rich and you’ll be a thousand pounds of Sloppy Joes!”

It turned out to be true. Dale ended up with great wealth.

I was simply summer help, but Dale hoped to keep this job forever. I don’t quite know why Wiley and Gladys took to him as they did; he was an absolute menace around machinery, the only thing that interested him on the ranch, and he broke more than he could fix. We had a low-boy trailer that was in constant use hauling farm equipment in to the John Deere dealership for repair, usually on account of Dale’s neglect. The last summer I worked on White Bird, Dale had taken over the irrigation, resulting in terrible friction with the neighbors. Wiley declined to intervene or bank on his years of goodwill because he wanted Dale to learn for himself how the water was shared and apportioned; but Dale just argued with people, and eventually a ditch rider was assigned to us and everyone had to meet his expenses as he adjudicated every drop that came through the head gate. A ditch rider brings shame to the people of a watershed, a public announcement that the neighbors don’t know how to get along with one another. Once Dale had his share of the water, he did almost nothing with it, and the small amount of alfalfa that ought to have been irrigated dried up on the meadows. Wiley and Gladys just let it happen as part of the education of Dale. Instead of attending to the appropriate chores of damming and spreading water, Dale focused all his attention on a badger living in the middle of the alfalfa field that had made a great, unsightly burrow, in the mouth of which his striped face could be seen. One day Dale handed me an old J.C. Higgins rifle with iron sights and told me to shoot the badger. “I’d do it, but I’m nearsighted.”

Well, I tried and failed, both because of the wiliness of the badger, who after a few of my inaccurate shots, grew evasive, and because the old gun had probably never been sighted in; it seemed to me that the shots landed nowhere near where I aimed. It didn’t help my accuracy that the several glimpses I’d got of the badger had induced sort of an attachment to it, giving me the sense of trying to kill something which wished only to live.

Dale was quite furious at my failures and professed to be fed up with this badger ruining the alfalfa, alfalfa that was going nowhere for lack of water. He put poison at the mouth of the burrow without effect. He tried running water from the ditch toward the hole but ended up eroding part of the meadow. This finally came to Wiley’s attention, and he wordlessly shoveled the appropriate repair to the ditch bank, his silence betraying his dissatisfaction with Dale and maybe even with me. He walked off toward the house without speaking.

That night in the bunkhouse, Dale said that if we didn’t do something about the badger we were going to get our asses kicked off the ranch. I was so young and credulous at this time that I thought Dale knew something about badgers I didn’t, but now I still believe the problem was the lack of irrigation. Dale pulled a wooden box containing narrow, waxy red cylinders from under his bunk. He held up a stick of dynamite and said it had the badger’s name on it. “Wiley ain’t going to like this, but he’ll like it after that badger goes to the next world.”

Before breakfast the next day, we’d bundled several sticks around a blasting cap and led the fuse back across the meadow to a boulder we meant to get behind at the right moment. It was hot already and the sun was barely up, throwing white bands of light through the cottonwoods and willows along the ditch bank. We sat behind the boulder with a box of kitchen matches and took a last look around before lighting the fuse, which hissed and sparkled to our satisfaction before disappearing inside itself. It seemed to take such a long time getting to the dynamite that we stood up to see what went wrong just when the blast occurred, sending a wash of soil in every direction and throwing the badger nearly forty feet in the air, where it burst into flame and landed in the desiccated alfalfa, setting the meadow ablaze, a fire that quickly burned out of control. Despite the efforts of our extremely capable volunteer fire department, Gladys and Wiley lost much of their hay crop. In front of the firemen, and with an oddly contemplative expression on his face, Wiley knocked Dale senseless and allowed it was time for me to get ready for school.