Driving on the Rim

22

I HAD ALWAYS ENVIED THOSE who held a steady course in life — were raised conventionally, set their sights on a goal lasting a lifetime, found a partner to raise a second wave for when they and the partner had gone on to meet… God. Yes, God! For they had a well-carpentered cosmology that aligned them with time, for all time, including the big kahuna, Eternity. I remembered thinking when I lost Tessa that she was just as dead as King Tut. Death was remarkable in that it did not admit of degrees. What you saw was what you got. Hasta la vista.

I labored under the barrage of malarkey that was the messages I got from what is currently known as the family of origin — the chronically unhappy God of my mother, the sly cynicism of my father, which seemed common among his veteran friends, the goat-like bucking of my aunt, which made the world of procreation something of a barnyard. I sometimes wondered why we kept fixing up these bodies that came to us; I could only conclude that they wished to live and we wished to avoid suffering. But the natural world restored my hope by its capacity for renewal. Renewal alone should have been my religion.

When I hunted and came upon the old homesteads that had failed, I thought briefly of the people who had moved on, but more pointedly of the myriad things nature was doing to reclaim these scenes of disturbance — the grass, the hawthorns, the chokecherries, the sagebrush that took thriving homes and made them into tumuli. Not so bad. A litter of coyotes in the old parlor. Of course they sang.

I had learned much of this love of nature from Dr. Olsson and what I had believed to be the great sustenance he drew from the natural world. But because of the way Olsson wound up, I was somewhat on my own with the earth. Olsson had a dog or two after the great Pie died of old age, none quite as good as she. He was without a dog for a year — big mistake — when Lawyer Hanson left for China, his new life, and his new bride.

To my astonishment, this opened a long-sealed door between Shirley Hanson, my old squeeze, and Dr. Olsson, who had been in love with Shirley his entire life. He moved back to Ohio and married her. He spent the rest of his life as a henpecked homebody but surprised Shirley on his death by leaving part of his worldly goods to an animal shelter in honor of Pie, or “Eskimo Pie,” as it appears on the plaque, and the remainder to a society for the protection of shorebirds, provoking Shirley to famously cry out, “I should have been a pelican!” Shirley moved to a rest home where, I have reason to assume, she survived. When I went to Olsson’s funeral, my first visit to the town since my college days, there was the formidable Shirley, a little old lady who cut her eyes at me once before sitting through the ceremony as though neither I nor anyone else existed.

The apartments across the street from my house were more animated than ever, and the life within them was entirely nocturnal. I knew there were couples living there, as well as the sort of single people you would associate with night noise. I lay awake that night thinking about my mailman and the thread into my own past which he seemed to represent. But because I was awake later than was normal for me, I began to hear fragments of excited commentary from the open windows across the way, and they disoriented me entirely. “You call that a hat?” Someone, a man, was clearly disapproving of this article and he wished the hat to be replaced by another hat or no hat at all.

The next voice I heard, and it may have been an hour later, was a rich and expressive contralto. “I don’t care how it smells!” I got the feeling she was starting an argument, but it didn’t go anywhere. Then suddenly from the voice that had complained about the smell, “Hold the snow peas!” So I guessed the first outcry was about food. Anyway, I managed to drift off.

I confronted the idea that I might have time on my hands and was pulling together my fishing tackle, my prized fly rod, the fly box given to me by Dr. Olsson long ago and made, as he said, of “airplane metal” or aluminum. I had begun to speculate as to which creek might have which bugs — a rumination that got me to imagine the loop of line suspending the imitation insect slowly descending toward the speckled beauty feeding below. I was really getting in the mood when the phone rang and one Thad Pelletier, unknown to me, wished to bring in his eight-year-old boy, who had stepped on a broken bottle. Another Jinx referral, and with no warning I was startled, but agreed. I then ran around like a madman to make sure I had everything I needed — that is, I seemed propelled by joy. In a very short time, father and son were at my door, and I admitted them to the former parlor of this old house. I already loved this pair, but now meant to get to know them. I had hastily pushed a few items of furniture into the parlor, chairs for both Pelletiers. Thad Pelletier came in the front door cautiously leading his son, who even with a small towel duct-taped around his foot was managing to hobble. The father was quite young, in his twenties, I thought, a city maintenance man, and his son, Cory, seemed frightened, not of his injury but of me. I rubbed my hands together as though we were about to have a wonderful time and asked them to sit. The father, wearing heavy work boots that seemed to embarrass him as he drew them back under his chair, apologized for calling me at home, and I joked that that was the only place to get me these days. I turned to Cory, who was making himself as small as possible in his chair, a pink-cheeked boy whose sandy hair stuck out in every direction. I could see blood seeping through the towel. “Cory, what happened here?”

“I stepped on some glass.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Were you scared?”

“Yes, sir, when I saw the blood.”

“Did it bleed a long time?”

“I was home,” said Thad. “I don’t think it was too long.”

“Cory, may I look at it?” I asked and Cory nodded rapidly.

I lifted Cory’s foot into my lap; it was trembling. He had a deep cut in the ball behind his big toe, the length of which I was slowly converting into millimeters as I calculated the anesthetic, which I decided would be topical. Cleaning the wound was quite straightforward, as there seemed to be no foreign material in it. Cory several times involuntarily pulled the foot away from me, which I continued to treat as a joke until he could see it was funny and laughed through helpless tears. Next I applied a mixture of tetracaine, adrenaline, and cocaine — TAC — great stuff for kids as it doesn’t scare them quite like other anesthetic approaches, but we had to wait for it to work. With Thad I discussed the removal of trees compromised by pine bark beetles in the city park, and flag football with Cory, who was a wide receiver. Once I determined sufficient numbness had set in, I had Cory rest his foot on his father’s thigh — I didn’t have the appropriate table in my parlor — so that I could close up the wound. My emergency room days made me quite expert at this sort of thing and I gripped the suture needle with a needle driver — actually an ordinary hemostat I was using for this purpose in the face of short supplies — and began quickly stitching, making certain the needle penetrated below the base of the wound before rotating it out, reaching through to pull up the loops and tying the square knot. I was frankly a bit mesmerized at how reliably this skill was embedded in my muscle memory and I seemed to watch from afar as the elegant stitches marched to the end of the wound. When I looked up I could see that Thad was close to fainting, his face pale. I said to Cory, “Dude, we’re done. Let’s put something over this and you can head out.” And before the smile had faded from his face, I had the tetanus booster in his arm and they were free to go. Thad wanted to pay me and my explanation that I was going fishing anyway seemed not to satisfy him. So I accepted twenty bucks and saw the two on their way. I then sat down, fingers laced behind my head, and gave in to thoughts of office furniture. Holding the twenty-dollar bill up to view, I smiled.

Less pleasantly, my thoughts turned to Womack and his broken leg — that is, to the leg first and then to Womack, who was undoubtedly suffering in his brush shelter. I supposed that Jocelyn had been in to visit him, bring him things, and that soon I would hear from her. But I hoped I would also hear from her in some context other than the health and well-being of Womack, who, despite his somewhat stark affect, I had some trouble picturing in other than the select occasions we had shared. I tried to imagine an ordinary Womack day and failed. If I had turned on reruns of the Grand Ole Opry and there was Womack in a spangled cowboy suit I wouldn’t have been surprised. He had a little Porter Waggoner to his rubber-lipped but skinny I-see-right-through-you gaze. And cruel eyes that stood out, unflinching predator eyes. It was mostly what you saw. It abruptly occurred to me that he was certainly not an airplane mechanic. I was a little slow in reaching this conclusion, even though Lieutenant Crosby had let me glimpse the rap sheet. Someone more alert than I at that moment would have had a hard time connecting its details to his purported profession.

I had not seen Jocelyn in a while, though she was so often in my thoughts that encountering her corporeal self might have been beside the point. Her absence was acutely on my mind for the most irrational of reasons: it was daylight savings, time to adjust my clock. I went through my customary confusion over the spring-forward-fall-back business, something I could never quite understand — which gave rise to a reflection, based first on the non-sighting of Jocelyn, on the tyranny of time, feeling it as a sort of bully pushing me down a corridor where family members, acquaintances, and companions were regularly picked off into rooms along the way, never to be seen again. At the moment I could not think of a single instance in which time was my friend. My temporary inability to sort out the spring-forward-fall-back business seemed to emphasize that the rules were made elsewhere.

Furthermore, my infatuation, which had formerly produced a nice demarcation between Jocelyn and her circumstances, including the persistence of Womack, had begun to sag. Something so unexpectedly disturbing had come along that I seemed to have lost focus, if losing focus on an obsession is technically possible.

Jinx and I went on one of our nature walks, well, more than that because we had made a foray of several miles into the hills before we took our surroundings seriously: Jinx was on a mission. I didn’t bring my field glasses and so we shared her nice old Leitz binoculars. It was one of the first genuine spring days; some of the earliest wildflowers, the ground-hugging phlox and violets that seemed to creep right in behind the receding snow, were already appearing in the sagebrush openings amid the bunchgrass and needle grass stands. We were high above the Yellowstone River, and in its broad valley the new warmth had raised a sun-shot fog. I had suppressed an impulse to ask Jinx where we were going simply because it was more interesting to tag along and guess.

By following a game trail in a small grove of junipers, we found ourselves on an elevated wooded point that looked out on a small valley between the ridges. I was increasingly cautioned to be quiet, to walk softly, to slow down — and finally to sit in a horseshoe of stacked stones, which I recognized as a hunting blind built by Indians. This gave us a protected view of the small valley and would have been an ideal place for its builders to launch an arrow at animals grazing toward them. We sat here for a long time; at first I thought I was supposed to stay silent, and after a while I was disinclined to talk at all. I wondered if this was meant to be some exercise in meditation, but whatever it was, I seemed quite happy to sit next to Jinx on a sunny spring day and to, in effect, enjoy her breathing. I even had a brief erotic impulse flit past like some bird, which caused me to smile. Jinx was quite resolute in scanning with her binoculars, and I found myself waiting for the steady sweep to come to a stop. When finally it did, she put a hand on my knee and handed me the glasses. She whispered, “Look right above the rock outcrop.”

At first I could not find the outcrop at all and even once I did, it was another moment before I saw the wolf. I went through the same experience shared by everyone else who sees a wolf: surprise that a wolf doesn’t look like anything else on earth.

She seemed to stare right at us from across the grass and sage, then elevated her nose in the beginning of a long and luxurious stretch, after which she looked carefully around the basin, then disappeared behind the rock, to emerge moments later carrying a pup by the scruff of its neck. She carried it a good distance and deposited it amid the sagebrush. Then she went back for another, squirming and dangling in her teeth, and placed it in a new place. After six were hidden here and there, she rested on the rock, lying on her belly with forelegs dangling. Jinx let me have the binoculars more than my share of the time: this was not her first visit to the wolves. We spent the entire morning in the old Indian blind watching as the wolf went from one hidden baby to another, nursing each. It was almost high noon before the wind came up behind us and the wolf knew of our presence. In an instant, she simply was no longer there. She seemed to evaporate.

On our way back to the trailhead where we had left Jinx’s car, she no more than responded to my various questions. I found her indifferent even to my excitement at what we had seen. At her car, she mentioned that she was leaving town to practice elsewhere. She rather tossed that off, but I didn’t take it well. She was the only real friend I had. She had hinted at it before, but now it seemed like a plan. Where would I go?

I made several trips to Jocelyn’s old homeplace and found nothing. The airplane was gone and in fact the runway looked unused. Because word had gotten out that I was available for basic medical services — and was cheap! — I found myself with several patients a day who simply showed up. I had no one to manage appointments, and no inclination to turn anyone away if I could treat them without special equipment. Several who needed other kinds of help I hustled over to the clinic, recommending whichever of my old colleagues best fit the case. Therefore, it was nightfall before I could turn my thoughts first to Jocelyn and my seemingly abiding love of her, and then to Jinx, whose move threatened to leave me friendless. It was not easy to see why these two appeared in my imagination roughly at the same time. Jinx and I were not lovers; our compatibility had gotten in the way. How weird was that? The very sight of Jinx filled me with delight, and our forays in the outdoors were perfect little idylls. I thought she was pretty, even physically attractive, for crying out loud. But we were friends! We loved each other, in some way. And we found in the earth, the land of our beautiful West, what others had found in religion or some world elsewhere. The land and its wildlife were our miracles, and our gratitude did not extend to prying questions about how these came to be: they were enough. And we both liked patching people up! There was some connection between being useful and loving the place where we lived that made a nice circle for us. Why, then, were the forces driving me toward Jocelyn so irresistible?

As would be, I was seeing an old gent, Carl Tate, for his rheumatoid arthritis, which had been caught too late because of Carl’s stoicism, with the result that cartilage damage and bone erosion could no longer be averted by some anti-rheumatoid strategies, though I was still following them to lesser effect while averting pain with the usual stuff — when Wilmot appeared, and said with some mystification, “Still seeing patients?” And I had Ellen Coopersmith waiting for me in the parlor. I was determined to finish what I was doing.

I asked him to wait. I finished with Carl shortly and he sort of bowed out with a wordless glance at Wilmot, stuffing a few bills in the blue glass flower vase Jinx had given me, into which I had failed to put flowers, letting it now serve as repository for my fees, such as they were. When Jinx saw what I was doing with it, she said, “Oh, boy,” since she went on performing the ministrations of a bookkeeper despite the claims of her own busy practice.

I was not looking forward to seeing Wilmot, or to doubtless polished explanations for my situation, to which I had no doubt he had contributed generously. I was not sure why, but I sensed that he thought I wasn’t playing the game as it should be played, that the puzzle pieces of the hierarchy were not well served if doctors went around being undignified. Perhaps he had learned of my brief service at the hot dog stand, or my indiscretions with nurses and others — all commonplace among bachelors in such a setting. My association with Tessa, during her happier days, was not viewed positively, and the latest event seemed to spread the stain. There was an awful time when Tessa was living in a homeless shelter and telling tall tales in which I sometimes figured unfavorably. She had long been displeased with me and even wrote letters to the editor about certain persons who had “grown too big for their britches,” widely viewed as a reference to me.

I think Wilmot had expected me to stop what I was doing, but I had to see Ellen Coopersmith, age fifty-one, who believed she had pneumonia, though she did not. She had bought an old rock house near her job teaching school in the country, and on a very cold morning discovered there was no water in the kitchen sink, so she went to the downstairs bathroom for water to make coffee. The next day the water in the bathroom was gone too, and she had to go to the second floor for water to make coffee. The following day, also cold, there was no water on the second floor and teaching school without coffee had seemed an impossibility. But Ellen forbore this inconvenience, and the weather abruptly warmed up that night, as it does in this country, letting Ellen know why she’d had no water for her coffee: every pipe in the house had burst and in the thaw Ellen was now showered in falling ice water while each room in the house flooded. Still, she did not have pneumonia, she had a cold; and I showered her with samples and placebos while declining payment, though she stuffed something in the vase anyway. Then I turned to Wilmot, who had elevated his chin a degree or two with every delay, and smiled coolly to Ellen Coopersmith as I saw her to the door.

“Not missing a beat?” asked Wilmot. I was jubilant just from having seen a couple of patients.

“Pecking along as best I can.”

“But you look quite pleased.”

“It’s a living,” I said.

“Well, good then. I say, in fact, ‘Marvellous.’ ”

I was sorry I had to hear that. “So, Raymond, what’s up?”

“A courtesy call, really, just a courtesy call. We are working on the status of your situation, which is many-layered.”

“Like a cake?”

“Well, sure. Could be. I did want you to understand that it wasn’t only the staff and board that are the voices being heard. There is always an unseen presence in the room whenever we go through a bad patch like this, and that presence is the community.”

“I’m anxious to know about that,” I said sincerely, even though I knew that “the community” was a bogus concept generally invoked in the service of self-righteousness.

“Oh, rest assured, they’ll be heard. Would you like to be kept in the loop?”

“Not really.”

“Oh?”

“Just tell me how it turns out.”

Wilmot was already backing to the door, having assumed a look of bafflement. “I will. I promise.” I thought about Wilmot’s style of communication: speaking to you in supposedly transparent earnestness while his face grimaced faintly as though from acid reflux. It was a form of snobbery that looked like it could be cured with Pepto-Bismol.

“Adrienne sends her best regards. She was always very fond of you.”

“It’s good you’re still in touch.”

“Adrienne really landed on her feet. I still feel challenged. She married a guy retired from some boutique bank in New York. He needed something besides issuing letters of credit to occupy his time. So he bought a sawmill and a forest. He’s almost ninety, no prenup. I’d love to have her back. Always wanted a forest.”

He was backing out the door as he glanced around the room, looking for medical equipment, I suppose. I meant to get a catalog, but as there were still a few home doctors I thought I could just as well wait for one to die. I realized I was drifting toward this obsolete category, but it seemed to fit. Maybe I had resigned myself to being a square peg in a round hole and welcomed a setting where I could spend less time on explanations.

Perhaps I had gotten ahead of myself, though, because no one called for my services the rest of that day, and by the end of it the little respite I’d enjoyed from obsessing over Jocelyn was gone and I was frantic. I was so uncomfortable that I had to act. I fired up the 88, relieved not just to be doing something about my torment but to find that the car was willing to start, as was not always the case when it had been parked for more than a day. When the Oldsmobile had not been used, the steady press of sunlight on its plastic upholstery produced the smell of obsolescence reminiscent of my pleasant rides with Throckmorton in his giant Audi with its radar and satellite uplinks, the silent highway rushing under its hood. Perhaps in imagining a time when I might stop pushing this old boat down the road, I foresaw days of great change. Nice!

I left town on Highway 12 and soon passed Two Dot, where I once had a patient, a superstitious old lady who described suicides in the distant past and several local ghosts, including a girl on Alkali Creek guzzling blood from a bottle, a cowboy ghost with a hole in his chest, and a woman on fire holding a jug of gasoline. After Mrs. Tierney told me of these things, she always looked me dead in the eye and said, “I’m of sound mind.” And I’d say something like, “Of course you are, but if you don’t measure your glucose regularly and write it down I’m not going to be able to help you.” These phantoms seemed to haunt the benign but lonely landscape as I drove.

Perhaps I was starting to calm down, because as I passed the Hutterite colony at Martinsdale I thought fondly of the beautiful vegetables they brought to our farm markets. When I reached Checkerboard, I spotted the bar among a number of trailers. The sign just said BAR. If it had said EXCELSIOR TAVERN or something I wouldn’t have stopped. I was alone with the bartender under a low ceiling covered with dollar bills. Not much light in there. A jukebox. I drank a shell of draft without a word from the bartender and left. The phone booth outside with its bifold door ajar and phone hanging at the end of its metallic cord seemed to taunt my increasingly forlorn state of mind. I hurried on to White Sulphur Springs, reviewing how I had enhanced the concept of “bar” into some kind of cow-town Brigadoon with fiddle music, two-steppers, and irrepressible ranch hands throwing their hats in the air.

At the medical facility in White Sulphur Springs, I identified myself at the desk and went straight to the office of the physician who had treated Jocelyn, Dr. Aldridge. He did not seem pleased to see me, but I launched a wave of cordiality his way. “I understand that you and Miss Boyce have gotten very close.” He just stared at me.

He said, “Yes, we have. I don’t think that needs to get out, do you?”

“Not because of me, Doctor!” I said.

“How did you find out?”

“I guess she had to share it with someone. Feelings are running pretty strong. She realizes it’s not a simple situation.”

Holding his head in his hands, Dr. Aldridge stared down at the papers on his desk. “I just don’t know what to do.”

“It’s not often that true love opens its arms to us, Doctor. What do you have to lose? Jocelyn is a beautiful young woman and she has such marvelous skills.” This last brought Aldridge’s head up; perhaps he smelled a rat. What skills? I let him marinate this bit of psychic mildew for just a moment before I eased the silly bastard down. “It’s as if she and the airplane were one.”

Relief spread across Aldridge’s face: I knew a fellow nincompoop when I saw one.

“But how I wish she wouldn’t fly! Remember, it was I who first treated her after that accident.”

“I do remember. And I have to confess, I was jealous of the gaze that greeted you whenever you entered her room. Well, there’s medicine and there’s life. We know that, don’t we, Doctor? Isn’t that the burden we share on behalf of humanity?” I surprised myself at the level of poison and spite infusing my remarks. And shame. I suppose I got a bit of relief watching another sucker head out on the sleigh ride, but it was cold comfort against the nausea and cross-purposes and lovelorn anger that were making me squirm. To add to my shame, I was well aware of the dramatization involved as I pictured myself crawling up into a culvert like a wounded coyote.

I didn’t really know what Jocelyn and Womack had in mind, for themselves or the airplane, but I was beginning to think that Jocelyn had foreseen the heat that seemed to follow Womack. It might be that she thought she could do better on her own.

Still, I sat in my old 88 chewing the top of the steering wheel, which I grasped in both hands, squirting salty tears. Fearing that in this sunny parking lot I might soon be making noises the average pedestrian would have trouble understanding, I turned on the radio, one of Paul Harvey’s last broadcasts, and was pleased to drift off into his cheerful anecdotes of a more wholesome world.

But I had not lost focus. I drove back the way I had come and turned off once more toward Jocelyn’s old ranch. A lot of effort had gone into making it something of an airfield, and I was sure it would be used again. As soon as I crossed the cattle guard, I saw a vehicle and felt a helpless surge of excitement, “helpless” because I was determined not to give in to any sort of happiness at seeing Jocelyn until I found out what her game was. I was sure she had an excellent explanation for the various anomalies I was uncovering, but I wanted to hear it from her. I don’t think I doubted that we would soon enjoy our accustomed affection again.

It was not Jocelyn. Two very old men in short-brimmed Stetsons stood by a battered green sedan with Jordan plates, watching me come up the road. I stopped and introduced myself. The stocky man with bushy white eyebrows was Harley Collingwood, a retired roundup cook. Next to him, somehow bravely erect despite touching frailty and leaning on a diamond willow cane, was Con Boyce, Jocelyn’s father. I was nearly certain she’d said he was dead, so I questioned him. He was in a state of acute dismay because someone had burned down his house. Collingwood barked, “Maybe you just forgot, Con. Maybe you can’t remember.”

“Where are you living, Mr. Boyce?”

“She put me in a home.”

“He didn’t want to go,” explained Collingwood. “She just got herself appointed and that was that.”

Boyce looked around and said, almost to himself, “I liked it here. I wanted to wind up here. She didn’t give me a choice.”

“He thinks there was a house here,” said Collingwood.

“I know damn well my house was here,” said Boyce with surprising authority. The three of us walked over to the house site. It was easy to see where the backhoe and bulldozer had covered the location. Boyce pointed at the disturbed ground and looked significantly at Collingwood, then at me. “You a friend of hers?”

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

“You see Jocelyn, tell her I found out about this.”

“Sure will.”

“Next time you pick your friends be more careful.”

By the way Boyce returned to the old green car, I could see he was the leader of this expedition. Collingwood glanced back at me with a shrug, twirling a forefinger alongside his temple. At the car door, Con Boyce was abruptly less sure of himself. He said he had a rug made when his old horse Rags died. As he looked toward the disturbed ground, he said it was in the house.