Driving on the Rim

9

WHEN YOU IRRADIATED A PLACE as we did Nagasaki it didn’t come back in quite the same way as a failed homestead, whose proprietors could move on to other hopes — unlike the pedestrians of that Asian city, who perhaps melted. I faced up to this being a different world and to the fact that we were ill equipped to absorb some of the newer differences. The New York catastrophe that greeted my return from fishing was one such alteration to our view of life. As a doctor, I had been kept aware of the changing threats to our health, which seemed to be macro adjustments to our environment — greenhouse gases, holes in the ozone layer — to which we made reasoned response — use sunblock, turn down the thermostat, etc. The destruction of the World Trade Center seemed akin to this; it was an environmental change of the kind that few understood but most could not stop talking about. Our exemption from the cyclone of world forces was over. As they said in Mexico, “We have seen the tips of the wolf’s ears.”

Awareness of larger themes was something we didn’t much go in for where I lived. We tampered with ignorance to keep our lives miniaturized; the Internet made us feel like ants. We worried that we would no longer care about weather. I treasured my most rural and ignorant patients for the way other humans loomed for them. When someone died, they never said, “Poof!” It was always a good-sized tree that fell.

Jinx said that a special meeting of our board of directors had been convened in the wake of the attacks, and that our board chairman had made some remarkably inane remarks. “He told us it was a day that would live in infamy.” Al Hirsch had said, “That rings a bell, Mr. Wilmot.”

I asked her, “Is this like Pearl Harbor?” Jinx’s hot water tank had failed and help from the plumber was several days off, so she was using my bathtub and if she couldn’t get to it until late in the day, she stayed over in my downstairs guest room. It was probably not the best arrangement, as it fueled gossip, but more importantly it kept either of us from getting a good night’s sleep because we talked late into the night. She sat at my kitchen table, a towel wound around her thick, damp hair, her face scrubbed clean of any makeup so that her green eyes seemed brighter.

“Pearl Harbor was the beginning of a war we knew was coming,” she said. “We didn’t know this was coming.”

“I don’t think we knew Pearl Harbor was coming.”

“We knew war was coming. I think we knew that war would require a great effort but that it would be elsewhere.”

“But is ‘war’ the right word? My father was in a war, but it wasn’t consciously directed against civilians.”

“I think in religious warfare differentiating between soldiers and noncombatants is considered a nicety, something superfluous. Look how the Christians went at it in the Thirty Years’ War.”

“The victims in New York were well outside the zone of conflict. It’s hard for me to understand why anyone would do something like this. I hope you’re not making excuses for these people.”

“No, I’m just trying to picture the advantage they might see in waging war this way.”

“Which is what?”

“It’s cheap.”

I was at once impressed by her objectivity and disturbed by her detachment, a perception that faded as we watched television and observed terrible scenes of suffering. We saw older, seasoned firefighters in a sheltered area shudder violently at the sounds of bodies falling on the pavement outside. Jinx covered her face, and when she uncovered it I saw that all her detachment had dissolved into terror. I didn’t question it when she crawled into bed beside me that night, shaking, and I held her in my arms until morning, when we arose with averted eyes, dressed, made coffee, and went to work. She didn’t come back, and though she must have had to make do with cold water at her place, I didn’t ask. But when I saw her around the clinic I was aware of some slight new tension. It wasn’t much, but there it was, and quite mysterious too. It was everywhere.

Mortality is something people in medicine accept more readily than the general population, just through familiarity. I have, however, known doctors who have been diagnosed with fatal diseases and they didn’t do much better than everyone else. Between every individual and the rest of the world is a stupendous firewall breached only by saints. For example, my mother’s antic and superficial style, which I miss. When I say “superficial” I don’t intend it in its usual belittling way; my mother’s gift was to absorb the details and uproar of an ordinary day for what they were and no more — from boiling oatmeal to returning phone calls, from assaulting cobwebs with her broom to humoring my father, talking to her sisters with the phone tucked in her shoulder as she adjusted the curtains over the sink, telling my dad to jump-start her car because she’d left the key on, running out in summer, palms up, to greet a rain shower, doing her taxes, or feeding the cat who never hunted mice because of all the food she gave him — everything was exactly as it seemed, and nothing annoyed her more than the search for hidden meaning.

Her simple belief in God relieved her of a good deal of agitation, and I realized I’d missed an opportunity when I failed to quiz her about the nature of Him, Her, or It. My own conviction that life is somehow purposeful could have stood a little specificity, and my father’s “God is crazy” was not what I had in mind. I’ve tried imagining it: a deity who fails to understand the consequence of His own actions and is unable to understand the difference between right and wrong. Unfortunately this smacks of a criminal defense. Or “crazy” like Patsy Cline, a concerned deity: “Worry. Why do I let myself worry?” There’s a God I could understand. But my mother’s God was a witch doctor; you could talk to Him only in tongues. And you crossed her God at your peril. Over a decade ago, my father renounced religion and promptly had a heart attack which looked like it might be fatal. Sitting next to him in his hospital room, my mother, worried but objective, said, “Soon you’ll be with the devil.” He recovered, though her failed prophecy did nothing to weaken her belief. And my father went obediently back to his imitation of faith.

The attack in New York felt more like a death in the family. A death in the family was something rarely experienced as an event. It was experienced as a change of seasons like the end of summer, or a spell of weather. A death in the family moved us closer to death ourselves. Religion had not made death less ominous: it remained a world we preferred not to enter. My mother’s death not long after I began my career had the effect of removing a sort of white noise from my father’s life and mine, a very pleasant white noise that I thought maybe only women could provide. It was the sound of life, unlike the logic of silence that appealed to men: women sought God while men sought Euclid. I wished they were the same.

I went over these things this way because I realized I’d been making myself out to be a solid citizen with the customary remorse and job weariness of anyone of my age and occupation. That was actually misleading. The temptation to claim common cause with the secret lives of everyone had its basis in fear.

My mailman, Spenser Hooper, had always taken an interest in me. Walking around and delivering mail in all weather had aged Spenser, who having been a couple of grades behind me in school had watched my transformation from nincompoop to physician with kindly fascination. He was very much aware of my troubles at the clinic and, standing in my doorway with a wad of mostly junk mail, he brought it up. “Well, Berl, this is awful, isn’t it? You can’t work, can you? How will you survive? You didn’t actually do that to the lady, did you?” Never mind the assault of Al Qaeda on America.

“Why, that’s the question, isn’t it?” I said. Spenser found this as unsatisfactory as everyone else did, but he merely raised one eyebrow in exaggerated skepticism and handed me the letters. The bafflement of my mailman and onetime schoolmate sharpened my solitude. I saw it as something of a hardened position, neither willfulness nor indifference; and it combined a profound need to learn how I was judged with a disinclination to glorify the proceedings against me. I’m not sure why I was uncomfortable confusing my mailman.

I could tell that Spenser was out of ideas as to how he might continue with me when he said, “I’ll still bring your mail” when he left, “unless your address changes.”

I found this bland remark to be curiously ominous. It reminded me of my earliest school days when teachers would order me to “pay attention” and I would gaze all around the room looking for a suitable object for attention, which the teachers mistook for insolence.

I have always believed that it was my great good fortune to spend the first part of my life as a nitwit, and to have stayed in my hometown, where my limitations and peculiarities would always be in the air. The feeling you got by such persistence, of enlargement and occupying space, greatly outweighed the disadvantages of whatever you were known for. I could tell when I ran into my old teachers that they still viewed me as a dunce. Though I had become a good student by the end of my high school years, you never get a second chance to make first impressions.

Jinx was clearly more grounded than I. I didn’t mind this discrepancy because I seemed comfortable at my own particular altitude believing as I did that a certain lack of attachment to the world yielded its own benefits. For example, sometimes Jinx and I cooked for each other: I got out a cookbook and followed the dotted line; Jinx looked into her refrigerator and winged it. She didn’t know why I made a federal case out of cooking a meal; I didn’t know why she set out on a course prone to failure, or at least lacking the authority of a cookbook. In short, Jinx was a real cook and I was not. Also, human beings were less mysterious to Jinx. When she found one of them up to no good, she simply took note without surprise. Injecting drama into the everyday was not her thing. As my mother’s son, I felt that we are always swept by a mighty wind.

We were taking our lunch in the city park. Jinx ate a sandwich with one hand, holding her binoculars in the other to watch some hawks that in turn were studying the pigeons collected around the waterworks. I sat at the base of a tree, carefully prying open my sandwich to study its contents. It bothered me that I couldn’t remember what I had put in there that very morning. It turned out to be some kind of processed ham and Swiss cheese, also processed, with Miracle Whip and a piece of iceberg lettuce.

She said that this internal investigation of possible malpractice had been instigated by the board of directors.

“Wilmot?” I asked.

“What’s his problem with you?” Jinx asked.

“I wish I knew.”

“Wasn’t he your patient?”

“Yes. He still is. He was married to a wonderful girl, Adrienne.”

“Is that it?”

“Well, sure.”

“I get it,” said Jinx. “He’s embarrassed.”

“You think?”

“I do. He’s extremely vain. With your usual shirker’s style, you rarely come to the board meetings. Wilmot is really onstage. One time he had a pince-nez and a hankie in his sleeve. The other board members are somewhat afraid of him: he’s quite vindictive. Wilmot has little to do, and what little there is he finds beneath him. Perhaps you are his project.”

Wilmot knew of Adrienne’s indiscretion with me. It was hardly an accident and came out of strong feeling on both our parts. I really wish it hadn’t happened, but it occured at a time when their marriage seemed to be ending. I was besotted with Adrienne for good reason, and if they had divorced at the moment it looked likely they would, our relationship, which was based at the very least on tremendous affection, might have ripened into something quite significant. But they patched things up, and even though Wilmot knew what had occurred between us, he didn’t appear to mind; in fact it seemed to point toward a friendship. But two years later when they did divorce, our very brief affair became public knowledge, and from then on, Raymond Wilmot had it in for me. He took a very traditional view of his situation and by all reports threw himself into a cuckold’s rage. After the divorce, when I’d see him, I knew what was on his mind, but the way he kept his distance and theatrically projected a burning gaze, made me think of of Rudolph Valentino in eye makeup.

“And now Niles Throckmorton is calling me up and telling me I need to be ready for trial.”

“What? I think Niles is well ahead of himself. No one goes to trial out of someone’s ill will unless it’s the Khmer Rouge. I hope you’re not taking this seriously.”

There was no point in telling Jinx that I had done enough in my life to acquire all the culpability I’d ever need and that, at least in low moments, it didn’t really matter what I was accused of as long as I was accused. She wouldn’t have gotten that: she wouldn’t have tried to get it.

I knew most of our local law enforcement, some of whom I had gone to school with. People ending up in law enforcement were not likely to take a warm view of anyone as weird as I was when I was young. Curtis Seaver and I had an especially awkward relationship because his family went to the same church as my parents and he knew that I told anyone who would listen that they were all crazy. In school, Curtis was the scourge of immorality and reported anyone he suspected of wrongdoing, whether it was shoplifting candy, smoking dope, or engaging in heavy petting. He was known to make citizen’s arrests in traffic matters. The police department at that time and the local judge considered him at best tiresome and at worst a pain in the ass. Curtis Seaver was over six feet tall by the time he got to high school and never weighed less than two hundred pounds. Always prepared to enforce his judgments, he stalked the corridors solemnly, the archetypal frowning Christian. Twenty years had changed him little, though the uniform, the straps and badges, made him seem only more intractable. Unfortunately, Curtis also had a Realtor’s license and was a shirttail associate of Wilmot’s. Surely that was behind his paying me a visit and questioning me with surprising aggression.

“When did you first meet Miss Larionov?”

“Miss Larionov? What does she have to do with it?”

“Answer the question, please.”

“I don’t know, twenty years ago.”

“And you’ve known her all this time?”

“I did know her. She’s dead.”

“But you knew her all that time?”

“No. We’d lost touch.”

“Are you aware that Miss Larionov kept a diary?”

“No. I don’t think she kept one when I knew her.”

“I’m afraid you’re not correct about that.”

“Okay, she kept a diary when I knew her. Who gives a shit?”

“It may be important.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“It may be you will know in the future.”

“Thank you, Officer Seaver. And, as a courtesy, can you tell me what this is all about?”

“In due course. Shall we continue?”

“Go for it.”

“When you were with Miss Larionov, were there relations?”

“I believe she had an aunt and uncle in Great Falls.”

“I don’t think this is any time to be clever, if you understand your situation. Our records indicate you made obscene phone calls to Miss Larionov.”

“Are you serious? I was cleared of that a long time ago.”

“Really? It’s right here in the records. I’ve never known them to lie, but let’s just let that pass for a moment. Now once more, did you have relations with Miss Larionov?”

“None of your business, cocksucker. And give Wilmot my fondest regards.”

“You clearly have no idea what effect such replies may have on your future.”

“A fair wind to your ass, Curtis. By the way, which hole do you shit out of?”

He just smiled.

I went on working. I treated a farm wife for gonorrhea. She was a plain young woman carrying a leather purse with rodeo scenes carved into it. She sat before me in utter defeat once she’d had the diagnosis but seemed to cling to the hope that if this wasn’t the same thing they called the clap she could live with it. I didn’t tell her it was the same thing they called the clap. Initially, she had presented asymptomatic pelvic pain only, no bleeding, no discharge. I had her in twice because it took a couple of days to culture the cervical smear, and looking for bacteria on a stained slide was inconclusive, as it usually is. I told her I should see her husband as well, since he had every chance of contracting it. This threw her into further panic. “He’ll kill me!” “Well, we don’t want that,” said I in the tones of the medical detachment that had contributed to my going nuts. As I wrote out a prescription for one of the third-generation antibiotics, telling her that I expected good results from them, I questioned her a bit to find out how she had managed to come down with this disorder. Her husband, she told me, was a fanatic about controlling weeds on the farm. Outbreaks of spurge, spotted knapweed, star thistle, and water hemlock had defeated his efforts to control them, and the only hope lay in buying expensive herbicides, which they couldn’t afford. Therefore, he enlisted her in a Billings escort service, and by the end of the first year the weeds were gone but his wife was fighting several sexually transmitted diseases. She did seem to fear violence from him but thought that so long as it wasn’t “the clap” she might have a bit of leeway. Rather than level with her — I’m not proud of this — I told her how she could secretly add antibiotics to his everyday food and drink, thereby preventing him from getting this “ailment”—she couldn’t remember the word “gonorrhea”—and things could go on as before. “Thank God,” she said. “After all, there’s no good reason to upset our happy marriage.”

“All the same, I think you should give up your other occupation in the interest of your health.”

“I told you the weeds were under control. You weren’t listening.”

I did not let this sort of thing make me cynical because then I would have been the casualty of these disorders that I treated, and I had strong survival instincts. Many of the people any doctor sees do not have strong survival instincts; in fact, when I look at their smoking, drinking, obesity, and trauma-prone ways I’m inclined to think they scarcely cling to life. And when I poke around for positive things I could emphasize for them, I often find that they have good reason for submitting to gradual painless suicide. At first glance, there’s nothing really terrifying about a half a million doughnuts or cigarettes, and the exhilaration of driving fast on black ice is anesthesia enough for the casualty waiting in the wings. What I may be cynical about is my wonderment at how all of us are dealt such different hands. This is, of course, religious cynicism, and though for thousands of years mankind has tried to unwind it, it remains as obdurate a conundrum as it was in the beginning. Being a doctor keeps one closer to it than some other jobs do. When I worked in the emergency room it was rare to hear stories beyond the immediate circumstances of the injury. “I missed a turn and hit a tree,” not “My husband made me turn tricks to buy weed spray.”

At the end of the day, I saw Alan Hirsch in the parking lot, scrutinizing my car. “Is this an 88?”

“Good for you. Yes, it is. Bought it in Canada.”

“The Hitler car.”

“The what?”

“88. HH in the alphabet. Stands for Heil Hitler.”

“Oh, my God.”

After resuming conventional duties at the clinic, I made a bit of a sortie. One of the nurses. I suppose that wasn’t smart. Her name was Scarlett and things went well, but not at first.

“So you go to work and then you go home.”

“Yeah, that’s about it. I look after my dad.”

“Well, that’s not so different from my M.O. I go to the movies…”

“I don’t go to the movies.”

“You don’t like movies?”

“No, I don’t go to the movies.”

“I go to the movies, by myself, with friends. I like movies.”

“I like the good ones. You have to go through too many to get to the good ones.”

“You probably think it’s a lot of germs.”

“Not really…”

“A public place. It’s like an airplane, people mushed in. Here come the germs!”

“Well, I’m in germs all day. I spend the day with sick people.”

“I guess it’s the same case with me, all around me. But it’s rare I get anything.”

“You just draw blood all day. Half those people are in for a lipid profile, they’re not sick.”

“Sure, I suppose.”

“Mine, half of them cough in my face, sneeze all over my shirt. But I don’t get sick. It isn’t germs we need to fear. It’s something going haywire.”

“Well, maybe if we went to a movie, or for a meal. Maybe this is a little abrupt, don’t you imagine?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m not suggesting performance issues or anything; I’m just saying ‘sudden.’ ”

“I’m with you there.”

“So, what now? Shall I put my clothes back on?”

“I think so, don’t you?”

“I do, I do. I just feel a bit odd I got into this situation.”

“Of course you do, but there you have it.”

The deaths of my parents were the stepping-stones by which I’d crossed the latest river. They spoke in tongues, righteous Holy Rollers to the end. At least my mother was; my father acted his part and may have occasionally believed it. He once told me he actually enjoyed speaking in tongues. Because of what they had been promised, they couldn’t wait to be dead and soon they were. My mother had no last-minute adjustments to make from this life to the next, and though she saw death coming, she crossed over peacefully. I was present, and my mixing grief with the apprehension that a loved one was getting her way has baffled me ever since. My father, on the other hand, had several things in mind, and I’m pleased I got to hear about them. I owed to them my occasionally sporadic social skills, as was often the case in Holy Roller families, and this despite never believing a speck of their doctrine from the very beginning. I was just a natural-born, but not stupid, oaf. I grew out of most of it.

I treated my father in the last days of his life, all geriatric stuff, nothing special. I was sure he missed my mother, but widowhood was easier than marriage and he was generally lighthearted. He came in readily, but the real mission was unpacking the parts of his life that were most on his mind. You would have thought this had happened long ago, but the setting made all the difference: sitting in my examining room with me in my white coat gave things just the formality he required.

He wanted to talk about war. He was close to the end of his life and had quit going to church. “Everything all right?” I asked him, not quite out of the blue. He didn’t look so hot.

“About half the time.”

He began to muse again about his experience in the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge. He seemed to feel fortunate to have been part of it, even though he saw many of his comrades killed or wounded. His reasons were interesting: it was the biggest war of all time; it starred the most evil regime of all time; the desperate German breakout, “Watch on the Rhine,” was the one Nazi offensive conceived entirely by Adolf Hitler, the most evil man of all time, etc., etc. The Panzers, Tigers, and King Tigers, were the best tanks with the most tactically sophisticated tank crews and with air cover by the Luftwaffe, which had sixty jets in the hunt. In some ways, the experience seemed to justify a life otherwise uneventful and even less accomplished. My father led a platoon of infantry right into the first onslaught south of the Losheim Gap; and at Manderfeld and Krewinkel, using the skills he had learned in the woods of America and imparted to his men, my father and his comrades killed twenty-one Volksgrenadiers, experienced soldiers from the Eastern Front in snow camouflage. “In the year 1944, our world offered no greater thrill than shooting Germans.” His group crept up close enough to German transport to shower with lead an armored personnel carrier bearing SS Panzer Commander Jochen Peiper, “a blond fellow handsome even in the binoculars, guilty of many atrocities in Russia, especially Kursk, retired to France after the war, a pleasant life until the village communists burned him alive in his own house. After the fire was out they found Peiper, winner of Hitler’s Knight’s Cross. He weighed three pounds.” Thumbs-up to this, still happy about the roasting of Peiper. He hated Germans. When they dispersed after firing on Peiper, four of his men were killed; one lingered badly wounded and, after a long night of listening to his groans, a trooper from New Jersey tried to go to his aid, whereupon both GIs went up in the same bomb: the Germans had booby-trapped the wounded man’s body.

“Right after the surrender at Schnee Eifel, we ran into a splinter of the Fuhrer Escort Brigade, who drove us into a farmhouse and then overran it. Then while we fought from the back of the cellar, the Germans got overrun by our infantry and we sat in the dark listening to the firefight all night long. When it was over, we climbed to the first floor and saw the dead Germans piled halfway up the walls. Don’t get me wrong, I loved killing Germans, but when I saw all these bodies, they didn’t seem to be Germans particularly. Some of them were too young to be in this at all. It wasn’t like you could ask for someone’s driver’s license before you shot them. I guess the whole logic that kept us all there became less and less clear to me. I watched our men cutting off fingers with wedding rings and I knew I was going to leave the war. I headed downstream as the battles were subsiding and as the Germans retreated to slow the Russians to the east. I crossed the Meuse and kept going west, staying in the countryside because of the snipers still hiding in the rubble. I don’t remember the towns, I remember the bodies. There were seventy-five thousand of them and no route could keep you out of them for long. But guess what? I got to Paris. And in Paris, absent without leave, I began to live again!”

I hadn’t heard this before. And I didn’t understand it. His own father had deserted in the First World War, and that story, told over and over, had functioned as an original stain, even one which in fraught moments my mother would disinter. I was getting the feeling that it was merely tangential to what I was hearing now, as having long been given to understand that my father’s valor had at its heart my grandfather’s desertion and the need to redeem our blood, ordinary as it was.

“I ran into another AWOL, Donald Boyes from Garden City, Kansas, and we found a taxicab with an English-speaking driver. We wanted to hit the nightclubs and told the driver where to go, but it became obvious he was taking us to the MPs. When the driver took a shortcut to where we knew perfectly well the MPs were headquartered, up between tall dark walls just wide enough for the cab, Don Boyes shot him with a Walther he was very proud of. It had SS proof marks and a real clear swastika, a great souvenir. From then on, we were on the run and soon fell in with a group of men also AWOL. Some of them were even Germans who were living in rat holes all over Paris, stealing gasoline and selling it on the black market, hijacking vehicles, counterfeiting three-day passes, and so on. Do you want to hear this?”

“You bet I do.” I wondered if patients were piling up at my door.

“I’m not taking anything with me. I want to be light as a feather.” After a very long silence, he said, “Your mother forbade me to tell you any of this while she was alive.” He looked at his hands in thought. “My group were all from out west, some of them crooked, some of them shell-shocked, some of them defected from Patton after he lost men trying to rescue his son-in-law. We turned into gasoline pirates and I was their king. When the Krauts surrendered, we just drifted back into our units and said we escaped from POW camps. We had a couple of months in occupied Germany.” The Fräuleins were available. Though the men were undeterred by army rules against fraternization, they had a motto: “Copulation without conversation is not fraternization.” They whistled “Lili Marlene” just like the Boche and were disappointed when they could no longer listen to jazz on Axis Sally’s radio show. Don Boyes and my dad demobbed like all the others and went home. “After the war, I joined Boyes in Kansas. We had a lot of money and we spent it all on big, well-fed strong American whores and whiskey. When it was gone, I thought I better go into the hospital, but Donald took me to a Pentecostal church. He was anxious to repent, and that’s where I met your mother. I don’t know whether she cured me or God did, but I was in a bad way. It took me over two years to stop shaking and get a job.”

Whenever my old man went to the VFW he indulged his sole dandyism by wearing the parachute-silk scarf he’d worn all through the war. It was German silk.

I hardly knew what to do with my father after the death of my mother. A big plank bridge built on the skeleton of a railroad car, right where the cattle ford was a hundred years ago, spanned the racing green creek. On hot days, we took lawn chairs there and the breeze from the creek kept us cool. And birds — there were always so many birds there, goldfinches and juncos, warblers and magpies. In a dry landscape, this small, persistent water gave life to an eternally busy community of creatures. I could see some water hemlock and an ancient cottonwood that had abruptly died that spring, already colonized by sapsuckers in its metropolis of leafless branches. He was still baffled by religion and felt there must be something or other he could go by. Instead I could tell by the way he gazed upon this lively scene that it would at least do until something better came along. A Socrates man myself, I never felt that human spiritual development prior to the birth of Christ was canceled by his arrival. Still, I was very anxious for my father to have whatever consolation was available, despite my usual harkening to Harry Truman’s remark “When I hear them praying in the amen corner, I head home and lock the chicken house.”

A raucous kingfisher dove from the willows, heedlessly hunting tiny trout in the rushing surface of the stream. From my vantage at some elevation in my lawn chair there was something boyish about my father dangling his legs from the bridge. “Very strange thing about living,” he mused. “You start out by yourself but head for the crowds. The infantry, that was a fine crowd. But then the crowd dispersed and kept on getting smaller, and in the end, I’ve wound up almost by myself again. I think it’s pretty normal.”

“Sure.”

“Your mother and I, we got old. No surprises. I’m still hanging around. That’s about it. Hey, relax! I like it. What I’m headed for, it’s a mystery. Mysteries are good. Let me at ’em.”

We just lay low the next several days. My dad had checked out a best seller from the lending library; I couldn’t believe he’d ever get through it, eight hundred pages about a straying but remorseful husband, set in the Hamptons during the Civil War. And we rented a movie: Bruce Willis dynamites the sewers of Chicago to rescue an autistic Navajo boy. I had to get him away from this sort of thing. We built a fire. I read him some poetry, Saint-John Perse, Seamarks, John Donne, The Eve of St. Agnes, and an epic that had been appearing serially in our local paper, Love Slaves of the Upper Yellowstone. He fell asleep and I had to wake him and lead him, groggy, to his bed. I tucked him in, opened his window a crack, and set a glass of water on the side table. I laced my fingers over the top of one of the bedposts and just kind of hung there watching him sleep, unable to tell why my heart ached. I’d gotten into the habit of sailing through moments like this and I thought if I could get it right, I wouldn’t do that anymore; I’d stay right there with it until it was clear.