Driving on the Rim (11 page)

I
HAD BEEN BACK FOR ALMOST A YEAR
, a practicing physician in my hometown, without making it clear to the community that I had entirely escaped my formerly anarchic ways. I don’t think anyone doubted my skills or my commitment as a doctor, but I continued to demonstrate social deficiency and poor judgment. I guess I wasn’t quite ready for rules-and-regulations just yet. Twice one week, I had gone out to the reserved parking lot to see an almost familiar figure standing there irresolutely, not looking my way, not occupied with anything, but somehow giving the impression that I was why she was there. I was startled by a voice at my window. “I wonder if I could trouble you for a ride. My sister left without me.” I turned to face a young woman, attractive but for the anomaly of penciled-in eyebrows, unusual on someone this age. There was a familiarity about the way she grasped the window of my car. I would have known her if she’d worked at the clinic. Her pleasant smile playfully suggested that she saw right through me, promising preliminary banter, something I noticed once she was in the car and I could see her tanned, shapely arms. She wore bib-front overalls and a T-shirt that said,
DO NOT RESUSCITATE
. Her dark hair was cut short. She said, “Clarice.”

“Hi, Clarice. Where can I drop you?”

“How ’bout taking me before you drop me?” she said with a wheezy laugh. “You allow ciggies in your world?”

“Sorry.” I was too old for Clarice, but I fretted that disallowing the cigarette emphasized that fact. I wanted to start smoking again.

She pushed the cigarette back in its pack and the pack in the purse that seemed too small to be hung from shoulder straps: it was hardly bigger
than a wallet. I looked away as I always did when women’s purses were opened. I always felt they contained things it would be improper to see. The contents were so baffling as to be sometimes downright scary, as was the witchlike way their owners found things in the chaos.

“Head straight for the wrong side of the tracks.”

I took her to mean the underpass to the north. It used to be the wrong side of the tracks, but that had changed. It had elevated its tone, though the cars at the curb that would never run again, the plastic toys of children who’d grown up and left ten years before, were still there. I noted a tiny ruby on Clarice’s finger. At least I thought it was a ruby; there was some sort of stone they once put in mood rings, and on the chance this was the same mineral I wondered what dark red could mean. Whatever it was or meant, I no longer saw the things passing my windshield, not even the woman out in her yard, waving bemusedly and looking more at Clarice than at me. I guess I must have noticed her, though. Enough to feel uncomfortable.

A kind of stillness settled in the car; whatever passed beyond its windows had lost its sound track. The first indication I had that Clarice was aware of the change was when she ran the end of her finger around the top edge of her pants where it met her belly. She said, “It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s on your mind.”

I prided myself on the big sincere sigh I heaved. “Probably not.”

She flashed a brilliant smile, full of heedless youth, followed quite abruptly by an indifferent gaze out the window on her side. She said, “Cross your fingers.”

“I certainly will!”

What a fool.

She evidently took a rain check on putting me away for keeps and said, “But first you need to give me a hand. Turn here.” We wound off toward a grade school, a railroad repair shop, a transmission rebuilder, and an electricians’ warehouse. Two more turns and we parked next to a hot dog stand. We got out and walked over to it; a man and his daughter were being served by a girl Clarice’s age, and when they had paid and gone, the girl, hands plunged into thick, silvery hair, began arguing with Clarice about Clarice showing up late. She shoved the cash box at Clarice, grabbed her purse, and said she was never coming back. Clarice
flashed me a smile and said you couldn’t get good help anymore. I saw the girl trying to overhear the remark, still spoiling for a fight. Clarice noticed and said, “I got it: never coming back. Bye.”

Clarice had missed an appointment with her parole officer and was going to see him now. “He’ll let me in. It’s a formality.” If I could just man the stand for an hour and a half, she assured me, one of my dreams would come true. To a person of my age, a physician, this should have been little more than a charming anomaly. At least common sense should have overruled my quite natural instinct, but it didn’t. Clarice, tall and well shaped, was only too happy to let this sink in. I took in several ghostly images from my erotic future while running down my afternoon appointments: psoriasis, I could blow that off; the tenth visit about the same heart murmur as against Clarice splayed beneath me—the eagle has landed!—and so when I got to Jerome Bugue’s tennis elbow, I knew it had no chance against Clarice’s cervix, the gorgeously flushed perineum stretched taut by elevated thighs. God knows, I could sell a few hot dogs for that! I’m not a saint!

Next thing I knew she had my car and I had a customer. I forked up a glistening wiener from the steamer and placing it firmly in the bun I had wedged open in my left hand. I reached it to my customer, a mechanic in blue coveralls, name over the pocket, with no unease at taking his snack into an oil-blackened hand. I pointed to the condiments while he counted out exact change. As he walked off, I said, “I hope you enjoy that hot dog!” He stopped walking, back to me, and slowly turned.

“I intend to,” he said.

A number of people seemed to be leaving their workplaces at three o’clock, and a significant number of those wanted hot dogs. I got a few tips. Only one, a teen with an anachronistic flattop, ran off without paying, and it seemed to me that all the planning—get-away-car and so forth was hardly justified by the savings. Generally, the hot dogs aroused enthusiasm, and finally they aroused mine. I hadn’t eaten a real meat by-product junk hot dog in a decade, but this time I had two of them, oozing with sweet relish and mustard, some of which ended up on my clothes. My dentist, Ted Conroy, parked his Audi right in front of the stand, stuck his red head out the window, shut off the engine, and as he came to the stand I thought fast.

“What’s this?”

“I’m helping out a friend.”

“I didn’t know you had such friends.”

“You want a hot dog?”

“And tear up my Swiss electric toothbrush?”

“It was just a thought.”

“You stay away from them too. They’re nothing but lips, hoofs, and noses.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“I don’t know who your friends are, but this is not in the best interest of our community.”

“Ted, give it a rest. They’re hot dogs. They predate our community by a century.” I was defensive about my little afternoon rebellion. As Conroy got back into the low-anthracite Audi, he said, “Distal erosion number twenty-seven crown. You’re a year late.”

After Ted, no one came and I was alone. I held absurdity at bay as I stood behind the open-air counter, a colonnade of old ash and burr oak trees ending at a distant Stop sign. A dog slept in the street. A yellow fish-and-wildlife-service helicopter passed overhead carrying fingerlings to high country lakes. The westerly breeze that had stirred leaves all day long was visible now only in the highest treetops.

I was still there at dark. I had eleven dollars and fifty-four cents in small change, which I’d put in my pants pocket for safekeeping, and then had trouble keeping my pants up from the weight of all that metal. And I had no car. An indeterminate countdown ensued while I held off facing the music. I began to tell the story to myself as I would have to tell it to the authorities. The raw facts—I cancel medical appointments to run a hot dog stand in hopes of being compensated by a dissolute young woman—were unpromising. Very often when one is out of line entirely, invoking the Good Samaritan is advantageous. Good Samaritans are associated with failed foresight, and it seems to belong to most people’s embedded memory that anything beginning with “I was just trying to help” with its undertones of grievance is liable to lead to unintended consequences, of which ours is the golden age.

A streetlamp came on and shortly after the moths, the bats arrived. She needed a ride, then remembered missing an appointment and if I
would just step temporarily out of my role as a misguided town physician and be a Good Samaritan I would understand she had no resources to offer save her humble thanks. “You want to spend time with me? Sell some hot dogs.” I suppose I thought I’d heard what appeared to be an opportunity.

I started to walk, the leaden cluster of coins pressing against my leg.

To this day, I don’t know why my car seemed, when I first found it, like a death ship. It was moving slowly with the lights out under a canopy of trees. In good light it was green, but in the late dusk it was black. It was an ordinary car, but watching its quiet passage aroused all my sorrows at once—the death of my mother, my father’s amiable despair and vigil of mortality, and the suspicion that I was losing faith in my own work. I say “my work,” but perhaps I mean myself. I understood it was only a car, but there was something unnatural to my impulse to just let it go that frightened me. I knew I couldn’t do so without consequences, and they were more than was explained by the inappropriate desire the present driver had occasioned. Even this lacked candor as the scene flashed before me: my recriminations, the car reclaimed, remorse, the payoff as the minor fault was made flesh. Such inner conflict caused the hesitation during which the darkened vehicle drifted from view several blocks ahead. I began to stalk it. I began to stalk my own car!

There were times when I felt a sourceless smile forming on my lips, and these times could last for weeks. I mention this only because it is this faint, amiable smile that has always involuntarily formed when I was about to say or do something with a high element of risk. Why the fleeting glimpses of my own automobile in the dark should produce this rictus is no clearer to me than the elation I felt years ago during the tango fiasco. I suppose going over Niagara Falls in a barrel had some of this mysterious glory—the slap of river on the staves, the magnificent silence as the barrel falls through air, the prospect of catastrophe with its great plunging sound, the final gurgle inaudible to the many spectators, the honeyed ease beyond.

It crossed a few hundred yards away, and then crossed again. I waited several minutes, my eyes riveted on the empty intersection. Here it came: she was driving in circles or around a block, a block of interest, an air of waiting. The next time it went through, I hurried to the corner
where she had passed and leaned against the trunk of a splendid amur maple, an ancient thing from the day of the horse; indeed, I rather formed my body to it until I felt myself becoming part of its deep shadow. I opened my mouth to soften the sound of my breathing and felt a zephyr in the branches scatter dark camouflage overhead. Just then I spotted a garbage can, still on the sidewalk from the last collection. I rushed out and rolled it into the intersection, then retreated to my maple.

As I waited, I thought of tomorrow’s patients. What had happened to me today? I desperately wanted to see my patients. Harelipped Eleanor with repetitive stress injuries from her three decades of washing dishes at an interstate truck stop: I may have given her too many cortisone shots, but what relief they provided! Onetime jockey Dan Devlin, a near midget, had a tiny nursery that produced nice perennials—emphysema. A couple of pre-football physicals and then lunch. Couldn’t remember the p.m. sched.

Here came my car. Proximity had not dispelled its lightless mystery, its frictionless deathship glide. I watched it slow down as if it were driving itself, approach the garbage can, and stop. I waited until I heard the creak of the driver’s door, then moved quickly to the passenger’s side and let myself in. The noise of rolling the can out of the way must have muffled my entrance because Clarice climbed behind the wheel and shut her door. It was a moment before she saw me in the shadows and screamed. Seeing who it was, she calmed down and told me I could keep all the hot dog money and wouldn’t have to pay for any I’d eaten. I think that when I heard the indignation while turgidly explaining that I was capable of paying for my own hot dogs, I realized who I was for the first time—a feckless professional drawn from absurdity to absurdity by bad impulses. I thought of the small red tugboats that towed the great liners into port, the solitary tugboat skipper, the ship filled with a thousand voices.

Nevertheless—I love this—all had been set in motion. Clarice said, “I just needed a ride. I didn’t know the other girl would quit. I was enjoying my freedom while you sold the hot dogs. You went for it! Do you think I’m a grifter? What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a private detective.”

“Really! Well, I hope you don’t charge people. You’re not a private detective, are you? What are you? You look like a lawyer. Maybe you are. Or a senator.”

I had a burst of near candor: “I’m a house painter.” This reply swept me with happiness. The once dreaded color wheel appeared before me like a galaxy of cheerful stars.

She said, “You’re not going to ask me to do anything, are you?”

“Hardly.” I really surprised myself. Maybe I wasn’t so bad after all.

I drove Clarice to her house. It saddened me to see so inventive a young woman walk into such a shack. I could only think of what I might have felt dropping her off had I managed to exploit her imagined debt. She didn’t see the nobility. I could tell by the way she looked at me and shook her head that she thought I was a sucker. In a way, she was right. I do know that by the time I got home, there was something about myself, based on this extremely foolish episode, that I was sick of.

I would be embarrassed by my private detective charade when, three years later, Clarice appeared in my office as a patient. I remembered my lie immediately and took it as a benchmark of what I hoped I had left behind. Deluded again. Clarice had grown up, was out of trouble and holding a good job. I first hoped she wouldn’t recognize me, but I realized as she studied me with surprise what folly that was: still, the discovery of my real identity seemed to humanize me in her eyes. She looked back on our episode of the hot dog stand with humor and affection, and I found myself caring for Clarice in the way I wished I cared for everybody. I was about to comment that she had finally grown up when she said more or less the same thing to me.