Driving on the Rim (27 page)

It was Sunday.

I stood in front of the old creamery, a concrete-and-stucco edifice with no windows and a remarkably small entrance, a commercial area that had been bypassed by the frontage road to the north where today’s activities centered. During my teenage years and later, this had been my mother’s church, one of several buildings around town where the ministry congregated. When I was a kid, a snake handler from Alabama brought his own rattlers and cottonmouths and offered to join but was turned away. He was told, “We don’t do that anymore.” Seeing it immersed me in pain: I had never gone inside. Why? Because I was embarrassed by my mother. Nothing gives you greater shame. I knew its reputation as a Holy Roller church, and it was infamous around town as a crackpot hotbed. As I stood there trying to connect its shape to my own history, I tried to keep up my well-practiced detachment, but it seemed to have little power in the face of my shame and guilt, all of which had been frozen in time by my mother’s death canceling all possibility of reconciliation. Wait a minute. What reconciliation? My mother and I got along well enough and knew each other’s limitations, but maybe this was different, my being ashamed of her beliefs or ashamed of
the widespread view that she was crazy. Was she behind my remorse over Tessa? Behind my guilt over Cody? Anyone would see that I was headed inside.

I didn’t know if I was just late for services or if they were nearing their end, but at first sight it was bedlam, a large, earsplitting crowd pressed between the walls of the old creamery. Most of the men wore cowboy hats. Some of the women did too, but they were attired as though they were at home, some in unpretentious wash dresses and some of the younger women in jeans and halter tops. All had a faraway look and my ability to wander across their lines of sight without being seen was unexpectedly reassuring. Opposite the doorway, shipping pallets and planks had been used to create a stage where a drum machine blasted out a relentless pulse. Only one musician was on the stage, a bass guitar player, an amplifier at his feet, who throbbed along to the drum machine. A fraught woman stepped from the crowd and asked me where my shoes were. Next to the bass player an old man with a white beard and huge belly swayed and threw his arms from one side to the other. There was nothing menacing about this mob, and the further I penetrated it the less anxious I felt, the better I felt. Given that I had left my bed in a state of unbearable anxiety, it was a relief to be in a group so exalted that the eyes of half of them rolled out of sight. Several were clearly in the ecstasy of holy laughter. My mother had done some holy laughing around the house, and now, my seeing so many others at it seemed to absolve her in a way I found cleansing. Leading this pandemonium was the pastor, Rawl Pennington—one of my patients!—who stood a few feet from the bass player with his own amplifier and microphone, a very long cord necessary to his feverish movement. He was an older man, astoundingly active. As he exhorted us, he moonwalked from one end of the platform to the other, or raised one leg repeatedly to the height of his chest, a kind of goose step, as he shouted about the Rapture, the need to meet the Holy Ghost, to read the Book of Acts—I mean, this was beyond shouting—and as he invoked a mighty wind of what he called apostolic witnessing to the end-times, the crowd seemed to rise with him, the youngest skittering off with chattering teeth and faces in a peculiar mask like the last stages of diphtheria. There was much weeping, though it was weeping that expressed relief rather than grieving. I must have been
drawn in, because my eyes filled with tears. Groups tottered with raised arms while others ran through the crowd in a low crouch. I joined the latter and was transported in a state of fascination at being able to run blindly without hitting anyone. Shoes and cowboy hats flew. When I leapt straight up, an old woman cried out, “He’s under a special sign!” The pastor stalled out on the shouted word “Unto!” He kept crying, “Unto, unto, unto!” before resuming about false signs and lying wonders and the need to cast out the devil and be anointed
now
. I very distinctly remember the sense of a pulse, a throbbing, possibly the music, if you could call it that, the exhortations of the pastor or the collective cries and moans as the whole crowd seemed to lose the beat and individuals, jerking in spastic movement, began to fall out. The pastor was down among us then, and to be perfectly clear I stopped racing around in my crouch, and I fell out too. Wonderful! The pastor was standing over me in a state, burning eyes, trembling jowls, hair tumbling over his ears from his bald crown. I was acutely aware of everything and could hear his legs slapping around inside his suit trousers, see the glint off his microphone, the triumph and rapture in his face as he called out to his flock, “He wants his mama! The doctor is calling out to his mama!” A grand affirmative noise filled the room.

They knew who I was. I didn’t care. I was riding along on my interior tumult as on a big wave whose force I hoped would take me far up the beach. It was only at the door to my own house that I noticed the shoes on my sore feet, and the mismatched socks; they were square-toed brogans, quite comfortable, but they weren’t mine.

I
HAD A NORMAL REST OF THE WEEK
at work. I ignored Jinx with a smile when she said, “Go.” I had a cancellation Friday afternoon and it was taken by Pastor Rawl Pennington—he who had fed the pandemonium!—who had a sore throat and the beginnings of an infection. My sense was he had grabbed a cancellation to take my temperature on matters of the spirit. As I somewhat rigidly greeted him, my first thought was that he would try to initiate some sort of revival meeting in my office, shredding what little remained of my reputation. Rawl operated a mobile welding service subcontracted to the Burlington Northern Railroad and lived at the south end of H Street near the rodeo grounds. I swabbed the white spots in his throat to have them cultured and wrote him a prescription for antibiotics. I don’t think church would ever have come into this had I not tried to relate all the shouting on Sunday to the poor condition of his throat. He agreed with me. “Should have been toughened up by this time, don’t you think?” This was the first acknowledgment, if a bit off the wall, of my attendance at his services.

“Well, I don’t know how much of that you do.”

“Ever’ week. Say, did you get anything out of it?”

“I don’t know, I might have. I have to be honest, it wasn’t exactly a religious experience.”

“Did you feel any better?”

“I felt way better.”

“Good enough. Maybe you just need to see folks more.” At the door, I shook his powerful hand and thanked him for the advice. “Don’t worry if you can’t make it again,” he said. “It’s not for everybody.”

Before I left for home that day, I prayed at my desk. It was hardly the
first time I’ve prayed, because my mother embedded that in my habits from the beginning. But I just kind of launch these petitions into the unknown, as I am hardly a person of faith. You could say I believe in that vast entirety that is not me and I find it a suitable destination for prayer. I also pray to those manifestations of the natural world that catch my eye. I have prayed to clouds, canyons, springs, at least one landslide, birds, Swimming Woman Creek, the town of Martinsdale, the Jefferson River, and so on. I’ve prayed to my old 88. After a rain, I prayed to a mud puddle. Today a pair of teal flew past the window of my office, and I directed a really heartfelt prayer to them for the people of my mother’s church. This has given me great consolation. I will go on praying. However, when McAllister’s nurse came in with a stack of Medicare forms, she wanted to know why I was kneeling by the window. I felt there was no reason to back away from my new understanding and I told her simply that I was praying to ducks. She dropped the papers on my desk and left without saying anything.

As far as patients, I was just taking what came through the door. Something was afoot with me, and no pattern of regulars had emerged recently, old regulars being notably absent. I had ranchers reluctant to come to town because they considered all towns parasites on the ranching community. I had railroaders anxious to acquire workmen’s compensation looking for someone to verify their claims of disability. It was the age of hard-to-specify complaints of the spine and neck. At least once a week, someone came to me hoping for prescription opiates, sometimes the spine-and-neck folk hunting early retirement and sometimes unemployed night owls. Every one of these small western towns had a nocturnal population, people you never saw during daylight. Generally, they were up to no good. A prairie town usually had a dense grove of trees somewhere, often a cemetery, to which the night people resorted. And most were no strangers to the legal system. One of the biggest problems was the indiscriminate making of babies, and I handed out birth control pills with the feeling of pounding sand down a rat hole. I even tried arousing a sense of responsibility in the young fathers. Of course they all professed to want nothing more than the coming child, but these young men were easily bored and the poor girls who took
them at their word were soon left holding the bag. I recall one young man, a baby-faced cowboy with a baritone voice and vaguely arrogant air, who was the father of three of my patients’ babies. I may have been less diplomatic with him than was my custom, but his reply has stayed with me to this day: “I only screws them what needs screwin’.” I was so entirely flummoxed by this remark, delivered as it was with obstinacy and challenge, that I could only tell him to keep up the good work, and I saw him to the door. I failed to understand how innocent he was of irony, for he walked away in triumph, determined, I now admit, to do as I directed, and now with my blessing.

Being a doctor in a small town was a strange experience indeed because “doctor” implied affluence, though it had come to seem nothing exceptional now that the easiest money came to those who didn’t work. Still, the title retained some of its old value, and you often heard that such and such ranch was closed to hunting because it was rented to “a bunch of doctors,” even though no doctors were actually involved. Napoleon said that if it weren’t for religion the poor would kill the rich. This may be all you needed to know about any human community. The churches were the real police stations, the real keepers of law and order.

Todd Clancy visited me at home on Thursday night, bringing a couple of beers which he managed to dangle between the fingers of one large hand. He had a cigarette between his lips, his suit coat flared over his substantial belly, and his tie pulled loose from an unbuttoned shirt collar. Todd had the broad, substantial, and florid face that I somewhat unfairly associated with the name Clancy. “May I come in?” His high voice was as incongruous as Mike Tyson’s.

“You may.”

Todd followed me into my kitchen, where he unceremoniously deposited the beer.

“Mind if I sit?”

“Nope. Is this an occasion?”

“Uh-huh.”

That made me nervous. Moreover, whatever was on Todd’s mind, he didn’t seem in any hurry to speak. He appeared to think I could guess what was on his mind. I could not. It came to his attention. He said, “Do you have any idea why I’m here?”

“You needed company?”

“You really don’t know?”

“I really don’t know.”

“That makes my job tougher.”

“Todd. Rise above it.”

Todd gripped his beer, and then embedded the tip of his forefinger in the opening. He was the county prosecutor and a pretty tough guy, used to all sorts of unpleasantness, but he had a very painful time telling me that it was possible I’d be charged for negligence in the death of Tessa Larionov. I really had no reply to make but stupidly asked anyway, “Why would I do that?”

He went into his prosecutor’s number. “Why does anyone commit a crime? I only know that my job has to do with whether or not they did it, not why they did it.” I found this irritating.

He settled down a bit. “I’ve been given a job to do.”

“I have to say, I’m having trouble getting my mind around this one. I did everything I could to keep Tessa alive. Who has suggested otherwise?”

“Are you going to drink that one?”

“No, I don’t want it.”

Clancy took the other beer and immediately drank from it. “I would say that your board of directors aren’t your friends. It’s none of my business, but coming in I noticed that you’ve let all your bird feeders get empty.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t buy mine from the bird store. Just go to the elevator. Get millet, sunflower, whatever you want, at ag prices.”

“You say my colleagues at the clinic supported this?”

“Let me put it this way: they were unwilling to go up against the board. And they said you didn’t support them when they had the slowdown. They’re not too happy with you. Except that Dr. Mayhall, but I understand she’s a loose cannon.”

“That hurts.”

“Sure it does. No matter what you may have done, you’re still a human being. You have your hopes and dreams no matter what.”

“Todd, do stop.”

“You need a lawyer.”

“I have a lawyer. Niles Throckmorton.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Good luck.”

Todd’s expression changed and he seemed cold as charity. It was really then that I began to take this whole thing seriously. “It’s almost eight. You want to grab something to eat? I started the day drawing up charges for the owner of the Trails End Hotel. Had a window give way and this salesman fell seven stories to the sidewalk. I don’t know why it’s supposed to be on my desk. The only applicable statute was the law of gravity, which is no respecter of persons.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Nothing tempting? A nice chop?”

“No.”

“So, then, guess I dine alone. I have only myself to blame, bringing this news. See you in court.”

And, of course, back to work! I got very odd looks from my colleagues, however, and my remark, “No one to murder, I shall turn to healing,” produced hardly a smile. I’m accustomed to making people smile and have a complacent faith in my wit; therefore, this failure to gain a response produced a shift in my mood.