Driving on the Rim

23

I GOT UP EARLY after a broken sleep. The people across the street were arguing again, and the husband’s by-now-familiar voice carried all the way to my bedroom: “I can’t eat any more of these fuckin’ macaroons!” I went downstairs and made myself a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee, taking both out to my porch, where I sat on the glider and watched the street. An old farrier, Charlie Noon, bent from half a century underneath horses, set out each morning, driving past my porch in his old Dodge truck, forge lashed in the bed, tools and kegs of iron shoes rattling like a circus wagon, heading to his customers with the inevitability of the seasons. There must have been something amiss with his defroster, because he always went by wiping the inside of the windshield with a huge rag, which he waved in my direction if I happened to be on the porch. I had the whole house to myself now, and this allowed me to sit out there in front of the living room window in a state of contentment. That living room now stored books, a canoe, a bicycle, and a female manikin wearing a rubber Ronald Reagan mask and hip boots — some forgotten gag. Charlie was often accompanied by Teresa Borski, a retired stewardess from the coffee-tea-or-me era, who held the horses while Charlie shod them. Teresa had a handsome Missouri Foxtrotter, a tall chestnut with the noble head of a Civil War officer’s horse, which Charlie kept well shod with special shoes to emphasize his elegant gaits. I’d seen Teresa ride him right through town, single-footing in a straight line across town and out the other side.

Parnell Swift is the gloomiest man in town and such an obsessive walker that he brings his gloom to every neighborhood. He’s completely bald, and his frowning visage results in a series of pleats that stop only at the crown of his head. He wears a Pendleton shirt at all times and packers’ boots with undershot heels. Parnell was once a fastidious, in fact hard-nosed, livestock inspector who impounded the horse of a young soldier who, killed in Vietnam, never returned to claim it. Community outrage and the intimate politics of Montana assured that Parnell’s days of public service were over. He collected coins at two car washes for their owners and I don’t know what else.

Since I had no patients until the afternoon — and with Jinx fooling around with my appointments I didn’t know who or what they would be — I was carrying a plastic sack of plant food out to the cemetery. I could have driven, but the sun was out, the wind had died, and so many people were walking around, I didn’t want to miss anything. On days like this, I always daydreamed about running for mayor so that I could look after my constituents like an adoring father. Love was in the air. Prolonged bad weather aroused distaste for one’s fellows, but life had taught me that the quality of light could enlarge the heart. Wasn’t that the Gospel of Thomas? That we came from the light? The cosmology of the Plains Indians? All the same.

Roy Sherwood, dressed like an old western movie star, sauntered along and said, “What a day!” He owned a curio shop and was the son of a world champion bronc rider and one of the founders of the Turtles, the first professional rodeo association. Roy was a gay man in a town where they were still called “fairies.” I could never associate big, hearty Roy Sherwood with the word “fairy” but there it was: old geezers at the coffee shop, “Here comes that fairy Roy Sherwood.” I just couldn’t get a handle on it, but Roy embraced it and turned up at New Year’s Eve parties with sparkling wings and a silver wand, a star at its end. I will say, people appreciated his sense of humor. Roy got censured by the state’s Better Business Bureau for making his own “artifacts” and ended up dropping the price on his arrowheads to the point that they were no longer worth the trouble.

Taking in the ordinariness of my town was a kind of anesthetic for the pain I held in abeyance. I took a moment to watch Jay Houston carry a case of Riesling down into his father’s old bomb shelter, and I remembered making out there with Debbie in tenth grade when Jay’s dad had rented the house out to the priest at St. Michael’s. Debbie’s house was next door and we would slip through the hedge and climb down into the shelter for endless kissing. Since kissing was all it ever amounted to, moving our heads around was the only way we could express our rising passion, and we always ended up with sore necks.

It seemed the perfect reminiscence to offset my anguish over Jocelyn and my fatuous identification with her father as though we were brothers in abuse. I thought about changing places with him, letting him walk around my hometown trailing my regrets while I retreated to the rest home and a full platter of resignation. The whole thing was becoming such a long story it baffled me that I hoped to tell it all to Jinx. I really didn’t know anyone else who might understand it. Nor did it seem the best expression of friendship. I did think that if I cared about Jinx I’d want her to hear everything; otherwise, what use would I be to her? My story was nearly all I had.

It began badly. I walked the few blocks to Jinx’s house, knowing that she would be making herself lunch there between appointments. It was a short drive from the clinic, and I was waiting inside as I heard her pull up, the distinctive motor sound of her old Jaguar. She usually rode her bike. She didn’t seem surprised to see me and asked if I would like half of her egg salad sandwich. I declined. I had her kettle boiling and made myself a cup of tea, which I placed before me on her dining room table. The dismay and humiliation of my relations with Jocelyn burned inside me, and I anticipated thoughtful words and relief from my pain once Jinx grasped my situation. Jinx seemed to recognize that something was up, because as she sat down with her sandwich and glass of juice, she neither said anything nor took her eyes off me. I thought I’d go ahead and get started but was surprised by my vehemence once I did.

As I bawled out my forlorn and embittered hopelessness, Jinx listened attentively — I’m really embarrassed by this; I honestly don’t know what inspired me to put it down — and it might have been this quiet attention that encouraged me to lavish my story with details. I told her about Jocelyn’s airplane accident and recovery at the clinic in White Sulphur Springs, and the growth of my infatuation. I described how I missed all the signs of Jocelyn’s exploitative nature and how my adoration kept me from ordinary self-protection. With lugubrious thoroughness, I depicted the heartache and love blindness that led me to overlook such quirks as her burning down her own home and lying about the death of her father. Worse, the recitation had the effect of reawakening Jocelyn’s malign romantic appeal. I may have even smiled as I recounted the passionate adventures with decorative hints as to the erotic attraction. Nevertheless, nothing in the world could have prepared me for Jinx’s response. She told me to go fuck myself. The cat was out of the bag.

“Jinx, what could you possibly mean?”

“I mean, why on earth would you think I’d want to hear about you and your castrating harpie?”

“Have you even met her?” On recollection, this question would appear to be at the heart of my inanity.

“Good God, why would I want to do that? So I could kneecap her?”

“Oh, Jinx.”

“She must have seemed so cuddly in her little airplane.”

“Jinx, please stop.”

“And this Womack, he sounds like a real treat. You’ve got a little Womack in you, too, don’t you, Cuddles. Can all three of you get into the tiny airplane? But let little Jocelyn do the driving or you might crash!” At this, she burst into tears. I attempted to sit quietly holding my teacup, but Jinx’s sobbing didn’t seem to be abating. I got up from my chair and went around to her side of the table. For some reason, my eyes fell on the untouched egg salad sandwich. I put my arms around Jinx’s shoulders and asked her what the problem was. Her answer startled me. She said, “I don’t know why you don’t love me.” In the face of these words, my towering self-absorption stood in a kind of glare, but I didn’t hate myself. I was just tired of myself. I seemed to be an unbearable weight. I seemed quite useless. Somehow, I continued to fan a glimmer of self-worth, possibly in vain.

I thought if I could re-imagine all the forces that had acted upon me in my life — my parents, my nympho aunt, Dr. Olsson and my professors, the lawyers, colleagues, neighbors, Jocelyn, even my patients, my most unreasonable dreams, my love of the earth, roadside hard-ons, experimental churchgoing, and work — I would finally find myself by implication. I had left Jinx off this list because to comprehend her I would have to step out of the shadows of all those things telling me who and what I was and try to emerge as an actual human being. This seemed not unlike twisting in the wind, and it came with a kind of dread. Jinx set out in my direction quite alone; why couldn’t I have had her courage?

She abruptly pulled herself together, wiped her eyes with a napkin, got to her feet, and walked out the door. I went to the window, where I saw her mount her bicycle and ride up Custer Street; she may not have been entirely composed because the two pedestrians she passed stopped and turned to watch her. I hurried out onto the sidewalk to better see her progress, which was steadily to the north and, I supposed, out of town. I ran home and got my lucky 88, but at first I couldn’t find the keys, neither under the seat nor in the ashtray. I went wild. The macaroon-averse neighbor waved from his window and I gave him the finger. I found the keys, after a ripping search, under the porch glider and ran to my car, where I saw the neighbor advancing from his stoop in battle mode; but I was already behind the wheel and on my way to Custer Street and northward progress out of town.

I went out through an informal trailer park, past the packing plant, across the river and into undulant sagebrush hills. I pressed on because she would have had to come back the same way she left, and after a long rise that seemed to end at blue sky and cumulus clouds, I saw her, a speck in the distance. I flattened the accelerator, and the 88 responded with its signature twisting lurch. In less than a mile I overtook her, but by a glance over her shoulder I could tell she did not intend to stop. I blew the horn and immediately understood that the honking seemed to express everything that was the matter with me.

I passed Jinx very slowly, but she never looked in my direction and it was clear a roadblock was my only hope. I pulled ahead twenty yards, swung the 88 across her path, and got out. She rolled to a stop before me and climbed off her bicycle, holding it upright by one handlebar. She asked me if this was necessary. She swept her hair off her face with one hand, letting go of the bicycle with the other. It clattered to the ground. I went to her and put my arms around her. I meant to comfort her, but something else was going on.

Business, if that’s what you want to call it, was picking up. I would have to get some help. I probably needed a nurse, but I didn’t want to move out of my house and I wasn’t sure where I could put her. The battling couple across the way continued to disturb my sleep. I must have been able to stand it because I didn’t think of moving and I was getting more of my former patients, the ones who felt that I had over the years acquired some valuable familiarity with their problems. Patients for whom depression was a component of their condition were loyal to me out of embarrassed reluctance to add to their anxieties by explaining them to someone new. The twins Olan and Darwin Ickes, farmers in their seventies with the biggest hands I had ever seen, fit this description: they had been raised to put their lives into “the place” and had only gradually realized that their grueling existence had resulted in a grudge against both life and “the place.” In short, they were depressed. I knew they wouldn’t see a counselor, so the counselor, a very effective practitioner named Joyce Erikson, and I visited the twins from time to time on “the place” and I think she might have helped them some. Olan and Darwin continued to see me.

A rancher from over near Shawmut, Kurt Merrill, was willing to talk to Joyce and try some medication as well. He was in bad shape. His only son, Terry, had committed suicide over a girl who was not his wife, and since they had always been close, Kurt could not believe that Terry had not communicated with him. Kurt had trained his grief into an obsession with cell phone records and was certain the phone company had lost a final message from Terry. I was very worried about Kurt and so was hugely relieved when he consented to be put into better hands.

I really didn’t know why anyone would want my advice on such things unless they were so needy as to want the inside scoop from a fellow nut. I wasn’t being modest: people in some circumstances will only trust a misfit, and that is where my long life in this town had its uses. My shabby past and the reputation of my family for shiftlessness were assets of which I could finally be proud. My former nurse Scarlett summed it up when she said, “If an idiot like you can be a doctor, anybody can be a doctor.” Even an insult had its uses. Scarlett had left nursing to write a novel and despite her contempt for me, she once asked me to read it. I vividly remember a line introducing the heroine: “Using her ball gown to prop up the toilet seat, Annette turned her thoughts to the evening.” Scarlett never had much in her pretty head. It was only a matter of time before she ran for office.

Well, Jocelyn turned up. By that time, I had some office furniture and she walked in as I was examining the loudmouth from across the street for strep throat. I had just told him that by irritating his throat in shouting matches with his wife he had made it susceptible to bacteria and viruses; there was some truth to this, but the fact was that I had subjective interest in the diagnosis in my hope to get the couple to quiet down. This was the first time I had seen Chaz close up, and I was somewhat surprised to find him such a meager individual — bespectacled, male pattern baldness, a tiny paunch, girlish little hands. His shyness was in contrast to a baritone which he had some difficulty keeping at a low volume. I could see right away that Chaz lived through his voice, that it had a life of its own, even delivering all sorts of messages that might not have been entirely authorized by Chaz. As he sat on my examining table, I had great difficulty imagining this meek fellow bellowing about “the fucking macaroons” or diabolical snow peas. Quite formally, I instructed Jocelyn to have a seat in the waiting room, once the downstairs bedroom where we had fornicated. She looked at me in disbelief, gave a little laugh, and did as I suggested. Then, just to be safe, I cultured Chaz’s throat while he intoned around the swab, “Great tits.” Chaz had a screw loose, but I treated him as I would have any other patient, glad to have the work. Eventually his wife became an occasional patient; she must have been thirty years older than Chaz and twice his size. She bore an authoritarian air, even with me, and having already scoured various medical manuals for some self-diagnosis, she was ready for argument.

To be safe, I locked the front door the minute Chaz was on his way and went into the parlor to see Jocelyn, who was just then running all ten fingers through her thick, streaky hair to retie it with an elastic. Unwillingly, I took note of the beauty of her hands and her shapely forearms. An image of Jinx wobbling up the county road on her bicycle caused a sharp pain in my forehead. Jocelyn hiked up on the library table, sat with hands clasped before her and said, “What’s up, Doc?”

“You tell me.”

“Thought I’d stop by and say thanks. I’m fixing to head on down the line.”

“Sounds like a song.”

“It is to me. Before I breeze out of your life I wanted to clear up a few things that might have bothered you. Womack and I did some stuff with the airplane some people might say we shouldn’t have. I don’t know who those people might be, since the country is run by criminals: read the paper. I just wanted to fly, but when you’re between jobs flying gets expensive. We both got pretty involved with the product at that time and so judgment-wise, things could have been better. I’m afraid I let him take me down some roads that were probably a mistake.” She spilled this all out in a somewhat prepared manner; I shouldn’t have absorbed it quite so easily.

“Like Mexico?”

“Sure, some roads in Mexico. For what Womack had in mind, Mexico is always where it’s at.” She was just tossing these replies at me. “Airplanes make all these little old countries run together. From the air, you just can’t tell one from another.”

“What was the point of coming here?” I liked to think this question suggested my suspicions, but I was flattering myself.

“Well, I had the homeplace and Womack was pretty fascinated with Canada. Canada is one big pharmacy and I guess he saw some opportunity there.”

“There were so many warning signs,” I said. “I wonder what made me fall for you like I did.” The nincompoop within thought that casting doubt on her story would bring her to heel. She laughed heartily, and I felt myself going down that slope all over again.

“You really need to look into that,” she said. “You’ve got a long way to go!” In retrospect, this was her one burst of candor. Even as I felt myself illuminated I was aware of her crazy allure — I think it had to do with a certain feral, almost sovereign amorality disguised as freedom. Jocelyn was also a brilliant liar. I ought to record the best one, whose inner mechanism was not unlocked for a few years. The preliminary deception — after me! — of Dr. Aldridge in White Sulphur Springs, which fell short of his actually leaving his wife, began and ended with his providing a morphine drip pump and enough ingredients to keep Womack comfortable for quite a while. She didn’t tell me this, Dr. Adridge did after I paid one more awkward visit to his clinic. Jocelyn told me that Womack had held so many incriminating things over her head that she was obliged to go along with him if she wanted to keep flying. After I caused him to be arrested, she was threatened with exposure all over again. To keep him from talking she had no choice but to help him escape, or jump bail anyway. I pressed her about the broken leg, which I thought was the result of his escape, but it was only the work of someone to whom Womack owed money. I got a neurotic pleasure going through all this because in my deplorably gaga way I was still buying it. Therefore, she went on feeding me the following: her conscience unexpectedly struck and as much as she loved her freedom, it was time to accept the consequences of her life and actions. She flew Womack back to Texas, persuading him that there he would be safer and it would be easier to get him the medical care he needed; she couldn’t fly me back and forth into the hills because in the end suspicion would fall on all of us. When she got to Texas, she turned Womack in, and either he didn’t know it was she who had fingered him or he too finally accepted his fate, because he never betrayed her. She visited him in jail, she said, and he was remarkably transformed, as though having found a kind of peace he’d never had. The jailer had gotten him a guitar and he was writing songs, even some Christian ones.

All bullshit. I imagined looking back on myself sitting there with a dorky smile on my face, buying the whole thing. Maybe I was being too hard on myself, because when she suggested we make love as a sort of farewell, I declined. She wore a blue tube top which she pulled down to show me her stripper’s breasts. I concealed the abrupt knot in my stomach and said, “Lovely, thanks, maybe another time.” This occasioned, for the last time, a superb laugh and she told me I was finally getting somewhere. All I did was ask her what she was going to do next. She said, “I think I’ll try California. Everyone else has.” She did seem too confident that her old friend Womack would keep his mouth shut. I should have pursued that. It pleased me to think I smelled a rat and saw through her, but probably I didn’t. That’s why we got to tell our stories later.

That season long ago in medical school when I drank and ate so much was instructive in many ways. Watching my body take off on its own was probably the most remarkable experience of those years. The way it commandeered my hands and mouth to get its way was very much like being on a runaway horse. I remembered following the fortunes of Haystack Calhoun, greatly disturbed by his death from diabetes as though even a farm boy who could carry his cows around the pasture or toss hay bales into a high loft could be brought down by the indifference of his own body. Other phenomena had accompanied my new morphology: I several times proposed matrimony to astonished women as though, as a husband, I would be slender. I kept an article about an eight-hundred-pound woman who had to be removed from her Florida apartment: the medical technicians charged with this task reported that they had sought special advice from SeaWorld.

I eventually emerged from this spell of your-body-is-not-your-friend and returned to my schoolwork with new sobriety. A summer job in teeming New York had something to do with the change, as the stark individuality of humans that I had known growing up was swept under the infinite crowd of the great city, and humanity came to seem a substance like air or water. I had to claw my way back to my original vision in which each person was surrounded by space. I knew somewhat abstractly that even New Yorkers had to have space around them; I just didn’t believe it.

I tried explaining all this to Jinx on one of our hikes in the rolling hills north of the Musselshell River where we had found a line of cairns marking an old Indian trail that led us through some wonderfully expansive vistas. I don’t know how Jinx found all these things — buffalo jumps and old wolfers’ campsites — but she did, and I expanded my sense of the earth thanks to her vigilant eye. She found a ruby-crowned kinglet’s nest in the bushes next to my front door — something I had failed to notice — and reproached me by noting that they had nested here for years.

Jinx said, “You got all this from your mother.”

“What d’you mean, ‘I got all this from my mother’?”

“The separation of body and spirit. As though we can be attacked by our bodies while the spirit saddles up for the next world. We are our bodies. That’s it.”

“Are you trying to tell me that the human spirit, which we have believed in for tens of thousands of years, doesn’t exist?”

“It’s a coping tool in response to grief.”

“Jinx, you hold a square foot of air between your hands, and in that piece of air are radio waves, GPS and television signals, microwaves, light waves, sound waves. And the human spirit can’t exist because you can’t see it?”

“You guessed ’er, Chester.”

“I and my millions of forebears, many of whom predate formal religion of any kind, just don’t believe that.”

“Momma’s boy.”

If a difference of opinion could be called pleasant, this was it. We walked for miles, and in a way I thought my point was made by simply following this old human trail toward the distant hills beyond which were more distant hills. We rested under the cottonwoods, and I nearly fell asleep as Jinx read to me from one of the battered paperbacks she carried in her day pack. “ ‘Take a look at the neutrality of this globe that carries us through space like a lifeboat heading for shore.’—Are you listening, Toots?”

“Yes,” I said, “of course.”

“ ‘Today a virtuous couple sleeps on the same ground that once held a sinning couple.’ ” Long pause. She stared at me. “ ‘Tomorrow a churchman may sleep there, then a murderer, then a blacksmith, then a poet.’ And here, my dear, is what I want you to listen to carefully: ‘They will all bless that corner of the earth that gave them a few illusions.’ ”

My life seemed to sweep in a better direction. I didn’t quite know why at first, because I had enough work that there was little time to spin myself into a hole of self-deception. And Jinx was on a mission to replace all those invisible things in the square foot of air between my hands that I insisted contained the human spirit with the earth itself; she led me on day trips up creeks, over the hills, and across the prairie. I don’t really know if it was in this same spirit that she took my Oldsmobile 88 to the wrecking yard and had it reduced to scrap metal. If so, I’m still absorbing it. One trip to the Teton River to watch fledgling prairie falcons required us to take sleeping bags, and I suppose it must be clear what happened and what sort of flood ensued after this particular dam was breached. I’m surprised Jinx didn’t have octuplets.

I don’t believe that I am particular prey to superstition, but Jinx left me a note the other day about some plan she proposed to hike into a little ghost town that existed on a ranch whose owners’ grandchildren were her patients. A grave there belonged to an old mountain man. There was a hanging tree, an old saloon, and a few crumbled houses. Well, of course, this was an interesting idea, but what startled me was that Jinx’s handwriting resembled my mother’s to such a remarkable degree. My residual superstition kicked in and I more or less panicked. Numerology, black cats, hats on the bed, walking under ladders don’t mean anything to me, but I was alarmed by coincidences.

I ransacked my desk at home until I found one of my mother’s crackpot letters from my college years warning me to not lay up treasures but to prepare for the Judgment Day. Then, I still entertained the idea that my medical degree would be the Midas touch, and I recalled the guffaws this letter had occasioned. It would be a long time before I unwound the fact that when my mother died I lost all interest in both God and money; they must have been connected in my mind. I just didn’t know how.

I found a graphologist who invited me to fax my mother’s letter and Jinx’s note for analysis. I pretended to be curious to know whether the handwriting was by the same person. I got a rather snotty reply and a fifty-dollar charge on my credit card. My mother’s writing was described as flamboyant and not the work of someone given to details, while Jinx’s was that of a person with “broad perspectives” and “firm judgment.” My mother’s handwriting was that of someone who would “have great difficulty meeting schedules” despite trying to micromanage anyone in her vicinity. The graphologist could hardly have known that with God on their side, micromanagers could really make it happen. I was pleased though by the graphologist’s last question, as to whether or not I was trying to fool him by suggesting that these were the same person.

I don’t know how much longer Jocelyn’s outlaw aura hung over my mind; I suppose it never went away entirely, but its last real flare-up came in the year Jinx and I had moved out to our house on the river, a sunny spot hung with bird feeders and tucked into a grove of aspens with a view to the south and three big bends of the river. The bench below the house was enclosed by a jackleg fence and there our saddle horses grazed. Jinx was reading the Sunday paper while I watched a thunderstorm forming over the Absaroka Range. Perhaps after forty years in medicine I was trying to decide whether I wanted to be a doctor. I was close to retirement, and I hoped to work it out before then: such was my accustomed style. In a startled voice, Jinx read from the paper: hunters had found in some sort of collapsed brush pile the remains of a man with his leg in a cast. Since no one had come forward with a missing-person report that fit the situation, authorities suggested it would remain a mystery. Like everything else.