Driving on the Rim (33 page)

I’d had an aquarium which I stocked by investing my savings in tropical fish that I carried home from the pet shop in Billings on the Greyhound bus in plastic bags. It was a thrill to hold those bags to the flashing light of the highway and watch the aquatic denizens within, the tetras, guppies, swordtails, gouramis, and the little catfish that was guaranteed to keep the sides of the aquarium clean. Eventually I just wanted to go fishing, to see the native fish of my world, and since this fervor coincided with my rapidly declining interest in religion, my mother concluded that unseen and possibly malign principles were at play. One Sunday as I headed out the door with my fishing rod, she confronted me about going to church. Addressing her in the elevated diction I affected at the time, I said, “An hour with those fanatics would seem like a lifetime.” She gazed at me, tears in her eyes and, calling me her angel, asked if I was able to remember that she was one of them. This was the first time that I found you could go fishing while feeling blue. I didn’t forgive myself for speaking so to the only mother I would ever have, but in the small zigzag stream that traversed a bird-filled swamp at the edge of town I seemed to dissolve into a larger reality in which acts of meanness could be isolated, examined, then joined to plans for not repeating them. It’s possible that my association of church and fishing, though admittedly unoriginal, began there and that on Sundays I still felt upon awakening the need to be fishing. I don’t think I ever imagined when crossing the cemetery with my fishing rod that I would one day find my mother and father there.

I walked to my house, discarded my paint clothes and the stupid hat, picked up my rod, and went back to fish that small creek burbling through a woodlot that, entangled in an absentee estate, had for generations avoided being turned into tract houses. It was almost as if I were addressing my late parents: “Look, I’m still doing this.” With my rod, a pillbox of flies, and shoes I didn’t mind soaking, I loved the deceit of this little waterway, presenting itself along the sidewalk as a trickle, no more than runoff, then expanding to something you could jump across but carrying enough spring water to undercut its own banks. Only a single pool formed, turning slowly in the roots of old spruce trees, before the stream resumed its deception by emerging from the woodlot alongside a grocery store parking lot, on its way out of town.

I backed into the brush beside the pool and pulled line from the reel, holding the small gray fly between thumb and forefinger. I stood motionless as a heron and watched the dark surface of the pool. It moved, quite slowly, as part of the stream. Perhaps it was an hour before the first mayflies popped on the surface and drifted away. There were never many, but in the end a trout appeared to dine, making small drifting rings on the surface—at first opportunistically, then when the flies became more numerous, the fish fed in a regular rhythm. I cast and caught it, and held the beautiful trout with the delight I once felt holding my plastic bag of fish to the lights speeding past the Greyhound. I let it go. Then in sloshing shoes, I headed for my parents’ graves but never quite arrived there: a woman was arranging flowers at the graves of Cody and Clarice, and I stopped to watch her.

M
Y MOTHER DID NOT CARE TO HEAR
war stories. She thought they were bad luck, and I suppose they were. For all my father had been through, she was really the tougher individual and she had the backing of her Big Ally. She thought that God worked in mysterious ways and if He said the War was Over, the War was Over. She saw impiety in ongoing talk about the War. After she died, my father began to have a few fellow soldiers over for drinks or meals. There was a substantial stream of them through his VFW membership, only recently revived, and as I heard the stories of their experiences and tried to relate them to the humble civilians retailing them, I experienced a profound suspicion of appearances. When mild Johnny Markovitch who worked for the rural electric company described how, when taking prisoners to the rear, an officer’s command to “hurry back” meant execute the prisoners, I could never again see Johnny—who had been so kind to me when I was a little boy—in the same way. Albert Cassidy served under Theodore Roosevelt III in North Africa and described him as just a fellow infantryman, dirty, unshaven, and reliable. Out went my views of Hudson River aristocrats. The most peculiar was Arthur Boyle, who had gleefully watched the massacre of Germans at Falaise Gap. He later joined my father’s unit at St.-Lô and was with him on a day of deep snow when the first German King Tiger—the dreaded Königstiger—burst from the woodlands. With all the pine trees falling before this monster, Arthur Boyle lost his mind and, again according to my father, never got it back. My father, sharing my genetic predisposition to detachment, had been transfixed until the seventy-ton behemoth wheeled forward under the roar of its gasoline engines, locked down, and began firing the 88. His fascination lasted
until long after the war, when he drove to the Patton museum at Fort Knox to view a captured King Tiger on display there, surrounded on a hot day by schoolchildren in short pants. After explaining his past, he was allowed to sit at the controls. He enjoyed telling me it was built by Porsche. Arthur Boyle blew up when my father told him of his adventure with the Königstiger and ruined a nice barbecue. This proved to be the occasion for my mother’s outlawing war stories; she had been dragged along on the Fort Knox trip and then had to endure Arthur going nuts in her house on what she described with accusatory inflection as “a perfectly lovely summer day.” Fortunately Arthur and Johnny Markovitch had enough interest in sports, especially baseball, to successfully circumvent the war in my mother’s presence and continue to visit.

Arthur was the custodian in a grade school in Helena, and he’d had that job since coming home. He had never married and was an anxious person, institutionalized more than once at Warm Springs State Mental Hospital, where he got, in his words, “a much-needed rest.” My mother got a few nice rests there too. For my part, listening to too many veterans’ stories was liable in peacetime to give a boy the feeling of worthlessness.

We had just had supper in the backyard in the shade of the old burr oak. My father was helping my mother clear the dishes, and that left me alone with Arthur Boyle, who was looking at me fixedly. From household hearsay I knew that “poor Arthur” was crazy, but at this moment he looked as if he had something urgent on his mind. He kept rebuttoning the shiny suit coat that stretched across his narrow chest and sliding his pale plastic eyeglasses back up his nose. His meager hair was combed over a high round dome, and he was nervously vigilant about stragglers. He leaned close to me and said, “Someday you’ll see through your father and his happy stories about over there. He was a deserter. Did he ever tell you that?”

From the back door, my father heard him and said, “Not yet, Arthur. I will in time.” And helping Arthur to the door with a firm grip on the back of his suit coat, he added, “It’s an interesting tale, Arthur. When he’s older he’ll enjoy it.”

After Arthur Boyle was helped into the night, I heard him wail, “But where will I go?”

•  •  •

I went to see Niles Throckmorton at his office on Calender Street, right around the corner from the post office. A broad flight of steps led to the porch of what had once been, in the 1920s, a manorial home but which now served as home and office to Niles, the first floor given over to the latter. I had no sooner caught the eye of his receptionist than I heard Niles explode in his office behind her desk. She waved me in with the faintest possible rolling of her eyes before an indifferent return to papers in front of her. Niles was behind his desk, rooting through a cardboard box and throwing handfuls of excelsior onto the floor. “I just don’t believe these bastards,” he said, addressing the box. “I ordered a wheel of very expensive Canadian cheddar and they forgot to put it in the box. Instead, they send a CD explaining all the things you can do with the cheese. What a country.” He held up the CD. “Give this to Maida and have her put it on her computer. Have her tell me if there’s anything on it I need to see. And have her get online and track the cheese.”

Maida wrapped one hand around her forehead as she received the CD and said, “I heard.” I went back to the room.

“Close the door,” said Niles, and I did. “You’ll be pleased I got you reduced to negligent manslaughter.” I started to open my mouth. “Oh, not too interested? No death penalty for manslaughter. Most people in your position would see that as a good thing.”

He made up a small plate of cold cuts from the mini-fridge alongside his desk. They were welcome, as I had not had a substantial meal all day. We went through most of it before our discussion even began. Finally, Niles looked squarely at me, holding my gaze for a long moment. I was anxious to know what might come. Slowly and deliberately, his hand drifted my way, stopping over the nearly empty plate between us; his forefinger opened and pointed to a piece of ham rolled around a black olive. He said, “You gonna eat that?” I shook my head. I guess that was it.

Presently he wiped his lips and began: “I don’t think these charges are likely to be reduced below where they’re at, i.e., negligent manslaughter, and if you abandoned yourself to jubilation over this news I’d be the first to understand.” I remained impassive. He stared at me, awaiting an answer. I didn’t want to let him down.

“Niles, remember, I’m pleading ‘no contest.’ ”

“I see. Well, in that case you, sir, are an idiot.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Some jurors will see that as a guilty plea. In any case, nolo contendere has the same standing as a guilty plea for sentencing purposes.”

“But it’s not a guilty plea,” I said. “The jury will decide if I am guilty.”

“The jury will note that you are not putting up a fight.”

I said, “This is my fight, Niles.”

Throckmorton stood up from his desk, eyes gleaming, and told me he was still famished, adding, “But I won’t be able to eat until you’re gone.”

I was reluctantly fond of Niles and admiring of his intemperate love of life. He ate too much, lived with more than one woman at a time, cynically asserting that one or the other was his housekeeper. At one time, he had smoked a lot of marijuana, and not too covertly, so it was more than local legend that illegal smoke poured almost continuously from his office. He would take on any case at all—murders, divorces, business malfeasance. His best-known case was his pro bono defense of a family of Assiniboine Indians who had lived for more than a century over the last resting place of a dinosaur which a well-funded group of archaeologists wished to excavate. By encouraging the family to hang tough, he was able to milk a wide array of society dinosaur buffs and sufficiently enrich the family that they could depart for Phoenix in their new motorhome. Niles knew the law with rare erudition, and the many judges who despised him knew him to be their unwelcome transportation to appeals court, where they were likely to end up with egg on their faces.

Their faculties notwithstanding, my reasons for pleading no contest were, I knew, well outside his ability to understand them; therefore I spared him the explanations, especially since I was still devising them. With all my regrets, I saw this as an opportunity for equitable review: I would accept the consequences. Niles said that even though I had tied one hand behind his back and we would probably draw a judge who hated him, he would, per usual, fight like a junkyard dog. I said, “Thank you.”

When I explained all this to Jocelyn, she said I just didn’t want to be a doctor anymore. My mouth fell open. “What do you think I want to be?” I demanded. I had, as requested, put on a clean shirt and taken her someplace nice—to wit, the Grand Hotel in Big Timber, where remarkably good wine and cigars could be had by anyone knowing enough to ask for them.

She said, “A house painter.”

“A
house painter
. I needed to find something to do. I’m not going to twiddle my thumbs.”

“As you wish.”

“So let’s just get the waitress over here and order something.”

“I’m for that.” Jocelyn said, pretending sudden interest in the other diners. I needed to start over.

“I’ve spoiled things, haven’t I?”

Jocelyn smiled and said, “You may have a bit of work to do.”

I could see that I was attracting some attention. I caught a few eyes, forcing them to get back to their food. Possibly some jurors there: we’d see. I didn’t think they could be disqualified for seeing me eating. It would be otherwise if I brandished a bottle or displayed my privates, but just dining, I didn’t think so. And why did I think there would be jurors, anyway?

Whatever problems we might have had were gone by the second bottle of nice red wine, a Medoc I’d never heard of but which the waiter assured me was from the Commune de Pauillac and had appeared in Napoleon’s 1855 Classification. Jocelyn wanted to know what that was all about, and I told her in the form of song that I mistakenly thought only she could hear:

She said, “You’ve had enough. Shall we?” She waved for the bill, which I paid with my head down, and we went out the door into the cold air with a nearly full white moon lighting up the mountains to the north. When we shortcut through the alley to my parked car, Jocelyn detained me, and leaning against the old brick wall of the hotel, we kissed for a long time. I slid my hands down her lower back, feeling the heat from her face against mine. She began panting and said, “Let’s go to your house. I want you to see me.”

We were hardly through the door before Jocelyn undressed. I
wouldn’t say that I was taken aback, but this was no striptease: she just wanted to show me something. She was lean and fit and well made, but it was hardly erotic. She seemed proud of herself in a guileless way. “Where’s the bedroom?” she asked. I pointed, without saying anything. “We go there,” she said.