Driving on the Rim

21

HAD I LEARNED ANYTHING? I’d learned that I was remarkably unformed for a man of my age and experience. It wasn’t until I lay in a hospital bed fingering a near fatal wound that I gave any thought to mortality. Then I knew that the spiritual component of my self, while small, was inextinguishable. My mother had instilled in me a longing but populated it with figures I found unbelievable: the omnipotent old man with the white beard, the sad boy with the crown of thorns, the virgin mom, the board of directors called the saints. I never succeeded in differentiating them from the equally compelling characters in my collection of comic books. I confused God with Space Man, whose battles with the robot monster that controlled outer space formed my first cosmology; meanwhile my compassion for Christ caused me to submerge him into Naza the Stone Age Warrior, who returns to kick Herod’s ass and work mayhem on the Philistines.

Another thing occasioned by my close call was a vivid remembrance of childhood friends. I’d built the tree house with Chong Wells. His real name was Don Wells, but his admiration for Cheech and Chong supplied a nickname which followed him all the way to the Persian Gulf, from where he did not return. Dave “Second Hand” Smoke moved to Miles City, where he had a backhoe business. When I get out of here, I thought, I should give Second Hand a call. Childhood friends call me “Hook” for Captain Hook, which was a reference to my love of fishing.

What was left of my rudimentary religiosity? Only my question: What was far-fetched about the continued existence of the human spirit? Why was mankind in all places and all ages convinced of it? Fingering my knife wound, I went on believing that the real me could shoot out of this tiny hole in the event of a shutdown.

But most emotions attending the long hours of daydreaming were occupied with thoughts of Jocelyn, some remarkably impure, but most idealistically pastel and conceived as operatic scenes of reunion and promise. In the encounters I pictured it was only remarkable that the players were not winged. This might have been a reference to Jocelyn’s flying, but I didn’t think so. I pictured her in the cockpit with the headset pulled down over her International Harvester cap, and as I dragged her from the fuel spill at the crash site, then at the hospital in White Sulphur when I was a still-employed caregiver offering diplomatic advice in the bailiwick of another physician. In short, I could hardly wait to get my hands on her.

This grueling need so pervaded my imagination that it encouraged me to think about a long-term relationship with Jocelyn; and here I hit a wall because her air of independence betrayed a smidgeon of aversion directed either at me or, more likely, at any form of predictability. Too, I found her lack of sentimentality over the burning of the old homestead and her generally harsh remarks about home and family to be a tad extreme. Her strictly genital approach to sex could, I dimly supposed, grow thin without a larger view, but I could always supply that — thought I foolishly. As was so often the case, romance was well to the rear of the united front of thighs, breasts, etc. The little twang in her voice had me shivering with ecstasy. My most elevated thoughts were of the clean lines of her cheekbones, her smooth, round forehead, her full and insolent lips. At the moment, I could not picture her nose. Fidgeting under the sheets, I worked away at recalling the nose, then finally left it that she had one, and that was that.

She must not have known I was in the hospital.

Alan Hirsch came in to see me with his athlete’s bounce and sat, one leg on the floor, on the edge of my bed. “I think it’s time you blew this pop stand, Irving.”

“I do too.” I couldn’t mention that I had nowhere in particular to go, or that seeing him and other physicians speeding past my doorway had given me an insurmountable heartache compared to the longing for Jocelyn.

“You look blue.”

“I am blue.”

“Nothing to do with your injury, I hope?”

“I want to work.”

“You want to work? Are you crazy?”

Alan was just trying to cheer me up. He liked to work, I knew that. His needy athleticism had led him down the path of extreme sports, but he was always on the job, always good, and the huge Kodachromes of his rock climbing and of his son on the Miles City football team which adorned his office walls seemed to reassure his cardio patients. He gave me a protracted, considered look and then tapped me with his clipboard. “You’ll get through this. You have my word. I personally don’t think this ever needed to happen, but Wilmot used all his grease to get the law involved.”

“He hates me, but he is my patient.”

So I went home, and I felt fine; but my first thought at entering my house was, “What am I doing here?” There were reentry issues, which I met by housekeeping and replenishing food supplies. A nap helped. I found a baseball game on the radio. Still under a legal cloud, I concentrated on the everyday. I ran the vaccuum. Then for several days I was just lost.

I’d been rattling around there for a day and a half, only occasionally staring at the telephone, when Jocelyn burst in. She filled up the room with her anger. She said, an inch from my face, “They’ve arrested Womack!”

“They… who?”

“Womack! You described him perfectly, thank you very much, down to his pants, his hair, and his boots. You get down there and tell them Womack didn’t stab you.”

“But this is just entirely a—”

“Stop talking and get down there.”

I was just beginning to feel indignant when Jocelyn’s face softened. “I’ll be here waiting,” she said. I gave her my best doofus smile.

Here was addiction. I didn’t seem to care that my soul was shrinking to some meager artifact: I scuttled down to the police station to liberate Womack, I was too late, though. Lieutenant Crosby took me into his office to show me the results of Womack’s background check, which included a raft of unpleasantries that cried out for resolution. Before affirming his innocence of my stabbing I was obliged to view Womack glowering at me from behind bars and declining to return my wink. Back in Crosby’s office, I said, “That’s not him. A lot like him. But not him. The guy that stabbed me is still at large.” Crosby nodded wearily.

“Be that as it may,” he said with exaggerated slowness, “I’m going to extradite Mr. Womack to Texas. He’s got a lot of problems in Texas.” Crosby searched in the desk. He produced a long, thin object and held it aloft. I stared at it. “You like beef jerky? I made this myself. Be my guest.”

I walked out into the street, stunned and carrying my treat. What on earth was Jocelyn doing with this bird? I quickly figured it out: Womack may have had some issues with the law, here and there, but his skill as an aircraft mechanic was indispensable to a pilot doing high-risk work. I admired Jocelyn for keeping such a worrisome yet useful man at arm’s length. Such nuanced and practical talent for management was something I could do no more than admire from afar.

I’m just saying all this.

I went back to my house, and the waiting Jocelyn, on speeding legs that seemed to have a life of their own. I thought it best to manage the information and confine my remarks to a plain statement of vindicating Womack of any responsibility for my injury. I myself would be like O. J. Simpson looking for the real killer. I understood that news of Womack heading south on a rail might reveal itself as glee on my part: my good thing, my love, would go up in smoke.

I tugged Jocelyn down the hall to my bedroom. We undressed quickly and without teasing delays. I noticed for the first time that she had had her breasts enhanced; they were lovely in their gravity-defying shapeliness. I was repressing unwelcome mirth based, I suppose, on some combination of relief and adoration, but also on an old memory of Alan Hirsch dancing around his office, a silicone implant in each hand, doing a terrible rendition of Dean Martin singing, “Mammaries are made of this,” to a kind of muted Latin shuffle. I had to push that one well to the rear. I came from an era when breasts just happened, were not built to suit.

I returned to the matter at hand, which I hoped to prolong, having already pictured a virtual afternoon of foreplay. But Jocelyn seemed to be in a rush — I suppose “eager” might be a better word and throughout my leisurely fondling seemed bent on pulling me atop of her and getting it over with. By forcing her to slow down, I thought I was being provocative, but she expelled air through slightly parted lips in a way unmistakable for anything but impatience. It seemed advisable to get down to business. Jocelyn performed her part with exemplary animation, crying out as I came but falling still abruptly thereafter and staring at the lamp. We lay beside each other without speaking in the dim light of the room. My mind wandered briefly and then I remembered the nose. I remembered that I couldn’t picture Jocelyn’s nose. I turned my head until her profile came into view, and experienced a shock: her nose appeared to be almost, well, less a nose than a… snout. I jumped up and lifted the blinds. Jocelyn had raised herself on her elbows to watch my sudden activity. I came back to bed, where I snuggled up to her warm body and reexamined the nose, which was, in this light, quite normal after all. In my not easily understood relief, I told Jocelyn that I loved her. Without turning her head in my direction, she said, “Puh-leeze.” I was shocked. I waited, hoping there was time for one more erection. I was down to that.

Like I said, I’m only reporting this.

The ancient truism that a stiff prick has no conscience is misleading. It would be better to say that a stiff prick arouses unreasonable hope. Or, as the late Throckmorton once said, “No erection should be allowed to go unattended.” Many a fine man has been led by one into a morass of emotional entanglement, unfulfillable dreams, and unworthy or inglorious fates like bankruptcy. In today’s political climate no one would have the nerve to say that a moist vagina has no conscience, but the case can be made; and in fact a good many candid and enlightened women are prepared to acknowledge as much. It’s not just my hat that’s off to them.

The fact of the matter, the matter of Jocelyn, is that I simply could not be rebuffed. I found her every attempt to lower my expectations just one more thing to find either A. ravishing or B. adorable. That’s love and I freely declared it in the face of “puh-leeze.” Jocelyn was always honest.

Jocelyn was not at her father’s old place and neither was her airplane. I really didn’t know where to start. Meanwhile, Jinx was driving me crazy by arbitrarily booking patients for me to see right in my own disordered house, ones she claimed were not exactly pediatric. I saw them in the front room, which I’d turned into something of an office. These were routine cases, but I was at least back to looking at people, worrying about them and writing a few scripts. I have to admit that I would have been pretty happy if I hadn’t been stewing about Jocelyn and daydreaming about combining our skills in flying and medicine for some sort of wilderness thing or other. Alpine sort of backdrop, lonely rivers, etc.

But then she called me on the telephone. “Is this you, Berl?” I said it was. “Berl, you got my ass in a world of hurt.”

I was somewhat startled by her tone, not exactly creamy with longing. She was snapping at me. I said, “Oh?”

“When you turned Womack in. I know you went down there and talked to those people.”

“I didn’t turn Womack in. Womack got picked up.”

“Thanks to your description of the attacker. You’re a damn fly in the ointment.”

Now I headed for shakier ground. “I was stabbed, understand? I did the best I could to describe the assailant.” I was still wondering what in my consciousness had caused me to describe Womack to a T. Squeamishly clinging to my imaginary attacker wasn’t fortifying the tone of conviction I needed at this moment. “Where are you, anyway?”

“I’m back at my dad’s place with the plane.”

“I know that, but you—”

“Room in Harlo. At the Corral. You could come see me. I mean, the choice is yours. They’ve got Womack locked up in Texas all over again. Mission accomplished, sport.”

Outrageous really, but all I could come up with was, “Well, yes.” Good God. Was this the gruesome tug of my childhood and youth? To what else did I owe my lack of character in the face of such a quandary? I wasn’t working enough; I was not being useful. When hard at work I knew what to do about such things. Maybe that was why Jinx was putting me back to work. She seemed to know what I needed. I was grateful that she couldn’t hear my obsequious “Well, yes.” And really I knew better, but Jocelyn was my vision and my craving; when she spoke to me I watched her lips with rapture and didn’t hear a word. Without her before me — that is, with her on the telephone — I had a chance to take in a certain hardness in her demeanor, but I passed it up. I had only one thing in mind and that thing was laying a cold trail for me, one foot in front of the other. Did anyone ever rise above it?

We met at the Corral Motel in Harlowton and went straight to bed. It was most unsatisfactory. I had so long anticipated this moment that I made something of a fetish of foreplay, and it was clear that Jocelyn got nothing out of it. She said — joking, I assume—“Stick it in. Pull it out. Repeat. Keep it simple.” I found it nearly impossible to rise above this “joke,” but stupefied by adoration, I managed to carry on despite Jocelyn’s finding everything I did funny. I’m quite aware of how abject I must have seemed, but one look at Jocelyn would clear that up for anyone. She was such a gorgeous woman, and the fact that she administered her beauty with coolness and perhaps calculation didn’t seem to detract from it. I don’t think anyone has quite understood the merciless power of women at their apogee. We are reduced to worship — and I do mean reduced. I wasn’t sure brains and character added much at all. Look at Jinx: smart, good, pretty — she just didn’t work it like Jocelyn did. Jinx was a goddess and Jocelyn was a tart — but where did knowing that get me?

“You’ve never been in my plane, have you?”

“No, no, I haven’t. Maybe some—”

“Let’s go now. Let’s crank that baby up. Get dressed.”

I did and watched her do the same. As I observed her flesh disappear into her panties, then her jeans, then her bra, then the bright checkered cowboy shirt I particularly liked, and finally the yellow North Face Windbreaker, I had a fleeting sense of seeing these ravishing objects of my attention for the last time.

In the end, the gooberish demeanor of the supplicant, whether it was someone working me for prescription pills or me trailing Jocelyn to the airplane, was remarkably consistent. Even when angry and demanding, the goober was still an addict. That’s all an addict was, a goober. The long road to terminating exposure to the abused substance was littered with heartbreak. It was part of the training. Oddest of all, it greatly improved the survivors once you acknowledged the many who didn’t make it.

Jocelyn was at the controls, and I sat beside her, cautioned to avoid contact with the parallel set of controls in front of me. The back of the plane was filled with all sorts of things, groceries mostly, but also a big-game rifle and a short-barreled shotgun. I didn’t know she hunted. We both wore headsets and I quickly grew infatuated with the sound of Jocelyn’s voice, slightly distorted as though heard from a faraway place we could both go where our voices would have a slight electronic buzz and all would be renewed. Jocelyn sang into her microphone, “Off we go into the wild blue yonder!” and I felt her excitement at flying even as we rumbled down the rough airfield at her father’s old ranch. I watched her hand with its bright red nail polish on the stick, and it seemed to bespeak her remarkable mix of glamour and ability.

At the end of the field, she pivoted the aircraft, and we looked through the windshield, straight back to where we had just come from. I noticed a strip of surveyor’s tape tied to a tall pole set in the ground. It fluttered in our direction as Jocelyn increased speed, inciting the roar of the engine, the propeller a pale blur in front of us. We’d moved forward slowly at first but accelerated rapidly toward the end of the field. The shuddering of the fuselage abruptly stopped and we were airborne, gaining altitude and sailing toward the line of foothills before us.

“Having fun?”

“Yes! Where are we going?”

Jocelyn turned to me and laughed. I couldn’t see much of her behind the microphone and her aviator’s sunglasses, but she was distinctly laughing, and it seemed more than a little emphatic with the distortion through my headset. She said, “We sure are, honey. We’re going someplace.”

I gazed at the landscape passing beneath us and it seemed to bear an expansive sense of time and of the imperishability of the earth. I had a glimpse of myself as a particularly pathetic exemplar of our race and its fragile gyrations. Never comfortable with this long view, I was grateful when it passed. Only animals really knew how to live.

Airplanes had come to seem quite different machines after the catastrophe in New York. They were overnight turned into projectiles; even if, as now, we used them for something else, they went on being projectiles. I let my gaze drift to Jocelyn’s skillful hands on the controls and could feel the relationship between her floating hands and the movement of the aircraft. Her eyes interrupted their almost robotic scan of the horizon only to flick temporarily to the instruments. The sun coming through the canopy made me sleepy, as did gazing at the wavering shapes that appeared in the blur of the propeller. The inside of the plane smelled entirely of its new upholstery. It was surprising to compare our considerable airspeed to the slowness of the passing landforms below: they came and went as though operating in a different timescape from the one in which the airplane flew. We had stopped talking.

We began to descend after meeting what looked like a wall of mountains; a shadow in one of them slowly opened to reveal a pass into which Jocelyn, still descending, guided the plane. I looked anxiously from side to side as the blue sky in the opening above us seemed to be narrowing. Jocelyn lifted one hand to point through the windshield at a mountain goat grazing at eye level. We were in a canyon that turned slowly to the west between many-hued granite walls and grassy ledges. Below, some trees were scattered on either side of a sparkling creek which, with its regular flashes of white water, must have had a considerable gradient. Teal scattered up from back channels of the creek so far below. The walls on either side confirmed that the only possible direction for the plane to fly was straight forward. I couldn’t picture climbing back out. I was uncomfortable.

We were nearly on the floor of the canyon. There was no possible place to set down, and my attempts to exchange some kind of glance with Jocelyn failed. When I asked her what was going on and got no answer, I could see that she little wished to have her concentration broken. Then the canyon curved quite rapidly to the west, narrowing all the while, and, more quickly than I could quite absorb, a flat meadow rose up before us and we were on the ground, tail wheel down and the windshield elevating as the plane changed its angle and stopped. Jocelyn increased the throttle slightly before slowing the propeller to a pause. The quiet was startling. She swept her headset off with one hand, shook out her hair, then turned to me and said, “Happy?”

“Can we get out of here?”

“We’ll find out!” She laughed. “Isn’t it beautiful?” She pushed open her door, and the cockpit filled with balsamic air and the fragrance of wildflowers. I looked around as best as I could beyond the bright wings of the plane. This was some sort of box canyon, and on either side of the meadow in which the plane sat, aspens grew straight up, protected from winter winds. Here and there water ran down the walls of the canyon, catching the light. I imagined the place quickly filling with shadows later in the day, and this thought came with some apprehension because despite the great natural beauty, my main interest was in getting out, which looked to be something of a feat. It was reassuring to climb from the plane and feel solid ground once more.

But Jocelyn’s cheer was infectious. “Come on,” she said. “I’ve got to show you something.” So I followed along. The only bearing I had was Jocelyn herself, and she moved confidently along the meadow at her persistently lively clip, the same gait she used when walking around her airplane or coming into town and into my room, the same heedless forward motion. With one hand, she gathered up her long hair and twisted it into a knot on top of her head. She tied the Windbreaker around her waist by its sleeves and hopped on one foot as she retied the shoelace on the other. There were many hawks in this canyon, small, rapid short-winged hawks that cried out to one another as they crisscrossed overhead. “You’d never get out of here on foot,” said Jocelyn. It was true, but I couldn’t think why she’d say it. When I asked her where we were going in such a hurry, she only smiled. It seemed to me that we were heading toward a small grove of old cottonwoods at a place where the granite wall receded in a kind of shelter. It could have been an Indian place or a shepherd’s place: I observed some smoke blackening its stone from this distance. When we reached it, I saw that it was indeed habitable — there was a rough lean-to shack apparently thrown together from fallen trees and limbs, enclosed nonetheless with a canvas fly secured against a small opening in front. “You don’t think we’re staying here tonight—”

She said, “We’ll see,” and held the canvas back for me to enter.

The sudden new light into the interior must have been dazzling because it was a moment or two before Womack put the gun down. Or he may simply have been confused, for he was clearly in very bad shape.

Jocelyn said, “I’ve brought the doctor.”

“I didn’t know who it was.”

“Who could it have been?” Jocelyn said, I thought rather sharply, and then to me, “See what you can do. I need Womack.” She bent to sweep a little spot on the floor and sat down. Womack was covered by the sort of light blanket that might have been from the airplane’s supplies.

He said, his tone a slight wail, “My leg is broke.” His speech was impaired by a lip swollen with infection.

“How do you know?”

“I know, I just know.”

Jocelyn said, “He doesn’t know. He’s not a doctor, you’re a doctor.”

I would have to examine Womack. I have examined an infinite number of people old and young, fat and thin, with little other than appropriate objectivity, but I had a strange aversion to examining Womack. His darting and conspicuously dishonest eyes and the fleshy face that seemed at odds with his remarkably skinny body gave me the creeps. I uncovered him and found that he was quite naked under the blanket. Jocelyn burst into laughter and Womack looked over at her, lips pulled back over his crooked teeth in imploring misery. She covered her mouth in a mock attempt to conceal her mirth, then left to get some things from the plane, which turned out to consist of a very nice collection of medical supplies.

“Where did these come from?”

“The nice old doctor in White Sulphur.”

I couldn’t understand that at all, but treating Womack seemed to loom before me. I did quickly think I could see the problem — a swelling and discoloration over the upper tibia quite obviously emanating from within. Just the same, I diligently palpated my way up the dirty leg, well aware of the rising terror in Womack as I approached the injury. “I’m going to have to touch this,” I told him, “but I will be very careful.” The rest was entirely straightforward despite my inability to X-ray him. Womack had an avulsion fracture; a tendon had detached from part of the bone, though from the looks of things, I didn’t believe surgical reattachment would be necessary. I didn’t ask how the injury had occurred; I was confident that it had to do with Womack’s criminal departure from Texas. If I had known how to read the engine hours in Jocelyn’s airplane, I might have learned that she had gotten him out of there. I pulled the blanket back over Womack’s disturbingly gaunt frame, wondering at my own aversion, and explained the injury to him. I was already reflecting upon Jocelyn’s radiant frostiness in assuming that Womack’s whereabouts were safe with me. Finding this offensive was an early symptom of the possible gradual return of my mental health.

This gave rise to a rather distant explanation of what Womack should do to return to good health. First, though, I cast the leg, using the supplies in the duffel bag brought by Jocelyn. She helped as we applied plaster to the gauze and wound it over the stockinet thoughtfully included, Womack whimpering the entire time. Of course his pain was real. At one point, and with an air of annoyance, Jocelyn presented him with a syringe and an impressive array of injectable painkillers, which seemed to feed his hungry eyes with an attractive future. I thought Dr. Aldridge in White Sulphur had shown extraordinary trust in Jocelyn’s correct use of these things. I myself wondered what he thought they were for. Maybe Jocelyn could bring a cooler when she brought food, which I thought would be necessary. She said she already had a lot of food in the plane on the assumption Womack would be staying for a spell. I was enacting my physician persona with remarkable alacrity as I prescribed the range-of-motion exercises needed to avoid joint stiffness and atrophy of the unaffected muscles. I even stretched out on the ground and demonstrated the isometrics that would aid his recovery. I was weirdly excited to be practicing medicine. “Contract the muscle without moving the joint, hold the tension, and release it, again without moving the joint. Let pain and not too much pain be your guide.” I was able to apply myself to this demonstration on the dirt floor because I could foresee that Jocelyn would find ways to get me to treat Womack and I wasn’t going to be through with this duty until he got well. I honestly didn’t know if it was my enthusiasm for justice or my suspicion of Womack as a rival for Jocelyn’s affections, as if that word actually applied to her. However, I rose above all that to concentrate my attention on Womack’s physical well-being. I had a lot of responsibility in seeing that the fracture was not disturbed. If there were contradictions here, I couldn’t see them.

I asked Jocelyn, “Will I be coming here on a regular basis?”

“It looks like you should.”

But it never came up.

I asked Womack, “Does that suit you?”

“Gonna have to.”

“I never really asked — did you do this in leaving Texas?”

“Uh-huh, pretty much of a train wreck.”

I said, “You’ll get through this, and I don’t anticipate any complications. It’s going to hurt for a while. I won’t lie to you. Jocelyn has brought you something for it.”

“Yeah, good. We had some street stuff in the plane, but I’d rather have the real deal.” I didn’t ask about that. Nor did I take issue, much as I might have wanted to, when Womack suggested that keeping my mouth shut was an excellent beauty hint.

As we returned to the plane, I saw that Jocelyn was worried, and I sought to reassure her. I hadn’t seen her worried before, so I lavished attention on this new aspect of my darling. I could hardly wait to see the exhibition of skill it would require to get us airborne again. I had found that every small detail of her being that I could mix with her heedless carnality increased the cocktail’s potency. I suppose I could have seen through the whole thing if I had wanted to. But I didn’t want to. Got it?

We took a different route out of the canyon and it served my purposes very well. Instead of tracking the canyon from its source in the foothills, which must have helped orient Jocelyn to Womack’s hiding place, we climbed as rapidly as Jocelyn could manage, a very steep diagonal along the canyon wall until we topped out in uplands that were familiar to me. We might have been overtaken by dark had we gone out the way we’d come. The departure required Jocelyn’s concentration to the point that beads of perspiration stood out on her face almost as they did during our lovemaking. Pressed into my seat by the angle of ascent and fastened there by my harness, I gazed at Jocelyn and the clouds racing past the windshield, my state one of remarkably foolish transport because this was, as I sensed and she explained, all quite dangerous.

I knew exactly where we were. I could see the ridge of mountains to the southeast where we’d once hunted sheep, my dad and I; and to the north, grasslands managed by the latest husband of Cody’s mother. To the west were the four old grain elevators. We were less than twenty miles from town over some of Dr. Olsson’s favorite hunting places, and most specifically over the country I had followed when I appropriated his dog, Pie. As the yard lights came on in the dusk, I was able to count them back to the place where I had recovered her. All of these things conspired to suggest an atmosphere of divine guidance. The lights on our wingtips popped on in the growing dark.

Jocelyn said, “Womack’s got enemies just like everybody else, but they didn’t have to do that to his leg.” Because the headset obscured her face and the microphone distorted her voice, I couldn’t tell if she was joking. It was as if I had heard a radio broadcast from nowhere.