Driving on the Rim (4 page)

“I know you pinched ’em,” said I. “The whole kit, to get even.”

“Where’s he come up with this stuff?” my father asked my mother, the fingers of his right hand checking his shirt pocket for his Old Golds. “Can someone please tell me?”

She swung her head, staring at the floor, as she said, “I don’t know.” Dad looked to her for a clue: he was a bit weak in situations like this and fished for a bailout.

I went to my room, returning with a pair of Vic Firth Number 3 maple drumsticks; I then removed a roasting pan from the cupboard over the stove and went at it. Heretofore no one had blinked, but this appalling racket soon brought them around and my father swung an open arm in my mother’s direction, authorizing her to speak. I stopped and awaited her declaration, which can be condensed: they couldn’t take it anymore. I considered this report with substantial silence before I spoke in phrases cribbed from God knows where. I said, “From this blow I foresee no recovery,” and went upstairs to my room.

Ours was a cheaply constructed house, thin-walled, inadequately heated and insulated, with variously missing or inoperable doors to finish off what might have passed for privacy. Thus I was able to hear my mother and father repeat, with various intonations, my exit line, through their snorting and thinly muffled guffaws. Mrs. Kugel could be seen from my bedroom window, hovering on the sidewalk below.

I greatly profited by this lesson.

I didn’t have an idyllic childhood, though it contained enough boyish pleasures, especially hunting and fishing, that in later times I tended to glamorize the Great Plains, especially when I was in medical school and during my internship when describing it to artificially elated mixed groups. We had a rather sardonic professor of neurology, Martin Chenowith, a bachelor who liked to be around younger people on party nights, hoping to meet women, obviously. I recall pouring out my love of the Great Plains to Dr. Chenowith—afterwards wondering where this enthusiasm had come from—and after several drinks challenging him to see past its grim, dusty, oddly featureless expanses, its rutted, exploited visage, to its hidden glory.

He interrupted me, his small face sharp under thin, carefully combed auburn hair, to say, “It sounds like the men’s room at Grand Central.” Appalling and inaccurate as this remark might have been, it put an end to my feckless nostalgia about my place of origin, a place I had endured in a van containing a malodorous steam machine for cleaning rugs, with my shaky, anxious parents staring hopelessly through the windshield for signs of the next town. While most houses in those towns had no rugs, those that did were a long way from professional cleaning services, or so my father’s rueful, after-the-fact theory went. It proved just about the
paltriest get-rich-quick scheme known to man, and we chased it for half a million miles, always discouraged and broke and mad at ourselves and unconsoled by my mother’s conviction that “the Lord don’t give us more than we can handle.”

We usually rented well out in the country, where, as my mother put it, “our screams can’t be heard.” Those little towns were always in touch with one another and I think my parents wanted our arrival to be a surprise. I was never to find out what they were running from, but it couldn’t have been much, bad checks too small to justify the gas needed to track us down. My father was a handsome man with a dimple in his chin like Kirk Douglas’s, and I remember at the end of his life my mother asking him, “Where do you think that dimple will get you now, Kirk?” His handsomeness and wandering had long been a problem, and if there was a speech from her with a theme in my memory, it was “Keep it in your pants, Kirk.” His real name was Bob; by calling him Kirk, Mother was invoking his rambling ways with lethal disapproval. In more understanding times, my mother said that the war had given him crazy ideas. They’d both run around when they were young; so, everything was canceled out except the language, which endured with a life of its own until the very end, when she repented and prepared herself for what she called the Great By-and-By. Forgiving my father for everything would only fortify her contentment.

When I was fourteen, we moved into my Aunt Silbie’s large, clean, comfortable manufactured home (trailer) in Orofino, Idaho. Silbie, whose name derived from “Sylvia,” was around forty and divorced, working as a paralegal for a water lawyer who stayed busy defending all the cases arising from the many dams in the Columbia headwaters. Silbie was a good-looking and very shy brunette with wonderful amethyst eyes; she was almost too shy to talk but very intelligent, and so indispensable to her boss that people said he would be ruined if she quit. The most notable thing about Silbie, belied by her meek exterior, was her tigerish sexual appetite. And yet my parents trusted me with her while they were out shampooing rugs. Big mistake.

At first she seemed to be interested only in my finding comfortable accommodation in her house. “I think this room will suit you just fine,” she said, pulling up the blinds and checking the sill for dust with her forefinger. “You’ve got four nice empty drawers here for your things. Fill
them in the order you dress. In other words, underwear here, socks here, and so forth. Are these your shorts? Oh my gosh, they’re like little bathing suits. Let me see you, turn around—” I asked if there was a desk I could use. “A what? Oh. We’ll find something. My goodness gracious, it seems five minutes ago you were a child and, and, now look—!”

“Aunt Silbie,” I said, clamping my hand atop my old Samsonite suitcase before she could get at its contents anymore, “I can unpack myself.”

“I want to help you,” she cried. I didn’t really feel I could say “please don’t,” and so I stood by helpless as she flung my clothes out on the bed, inspecting them, pinning things to my shoulders with her thumbs for appraisal. “Don’t move. This is too important! This calls for celebration! You-are-the-first-to-occupy-this-room, my dear, my angel, my pet.” She bustled out, and when she came back she had a bottle of wine in one hand. Her clothes she had left elsewhere. She always called it “disrobing,” though I never saw a robe.

In my first six months in action Aunt Silbie taught me ninety-nine percent of everything I would ever know about sex. By the time I was in the tenth grade I could deliver to the willing, few as they were, a fairly adult performance. Girls my own age thought it sufficient to let me have my way with them, which left me daydreaming about Silbie’s blazing needs, her hot vaginal grip, and the astonishing things she said. Indeed, Aunt Silbie had hung over my sex life until just a short time ago, assuming her ghost has departed me at all. I remember her saying that all the heat was explained by our genetic proximity. I believe that Silbie instilled in me a healthy attitude toward sex: she pumped and I squirted. It was completely lacking in a moral or religious dimension. Unfortunately, my parents caught us, and the fact that they were guests in Aunt Silbie’s double-wide in no way prevented their attempting to chase her outside without her clothes. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a trailer has a gun, and Silbie pulled hers on Mom and Dad; just to make a clean sweep of it, she evicted all three of us. I can still see her with nothing on but a pistol as we left forever, a strange image indeed, as she was such a meek lady and the only member of our extended family who spoke reasonably correct English. Understandably, I was the one object toward which my parents could vent their wrath, and so I was abandoned to the streets of Orofino, Idaho. A
possible version is that they were just looking for an excuse; I’ve had some counseling to address this version. I must admit that they only abandoned me for about three hours. Be that as it may, I didn’t see Aunt Silbie again until I paid her a sentimental visit years later. Whether she had lost her attractiveness or not, I couldn’t say, as she had not lost it for me, something she must have detected because her brief look of embarrassment, perhaps at having grown old, quickly gave way to the sly, timid, amethyst-eyed presence I profoundly recognized.

The home in which I was reared, after the rug-cleaning days, was quite normal once my folks had gotten the hang of conventional living and threats of eviction faded. My father got a job at the post office, and there he would remain for the rest of his days, his social life depending entirely on his war buddies. My mother, more solitary by nature, found her church fulfilling enough and required my father to attend once in a while, though he always returned baffled and dazed. In the end she took pity on him and excused him from going. He still went occasionally to please her. My mother and I usually cleared out when the men got together to tell war stories. In fact, “telling war stories” had been a euphemism for rambling, until we were much older or the men had died and we began to comprehend that these backyard chatterers had endured struggle and adventures far beyond anything we would see. My mother was an Arkansas hillbilly woman swept by war and marriage into a life she was slow to accept. She had all the virtues of subsistence living, needed very little—very little food, few material goods—and could make or grow nearly all of it. She medicated herself with things she gathered and cooked up, excepting only her Doan’s Pills, and remained thin and tough until the night she didn’t wake up. I have never known anyone as free of ambivalence as my own mother. What distinguished her from her Northern neighbors was the palpable sense that just on the edge of vision God and the devil were locked in mortal combat for her soul. She knew where she stood.

Gladys and Wiley, as my parents’ best friends, often received us on their ranch, White Bird. My mother occasionally saw Wiley at her church, usually when he was trying to change some habit or another. Church had helped him battle drink but had been no help with the cigarettes, as most of the men at Rock Holy Ghost were contented smokers.
I worked at White Bird, though I was bereft of ranching skills. I flatter myself that Wiley and Gladys enjoyed my company, and I did everything I was asked, but I had little ability to find things to do on my own, as I really didn’t understand ranch work. I think they were just trying to inject a few bucks into our hard-pressed family.

Wiley was an excellent horseman and to him I owe my love of horses. He showed me that patience and careful observation of a horse’s ability to learn would be instructive in keeping me out of what he called train wrecks. I saw Wiley ride some cantankerous broncs when all else had failed, and the sight of him in the middle of an exploding outlaw, his treasured cigarette undisturbed, stays with me until this day, even though he told me that riding a bucking horse had as much to do with horsemanship as going over Niagara Falls in a barrel had to do with seamanship. Wiley saved lots of little nuggets like this, but they were all about horses. His favorite was a big claybank gelding named Train, the only horse I ever saw that could jog over sliding shale without losing its footing. I rode Madelyn, a small chestnut mare with snapping black eyes and a clever trot. I suppose she’s dead by now, but what fun we had together. Wiley was raised in the twilight of a world in which the horse was involved with everything. His father had dug the basement of the biggest hotel in Montana with horses. My father was in an army that used horses. I was only a generation away from a thousand years of horse-dependent farming, but horses were still very much on our minds. Cars just weren’t the same. I say that, dedicated as I was in later years to my Oldsmobile 88, and I no longer had a horse but wistfully attended horse auctions in Billings and elsewhere. I was at a dispersal of the Bar J Hat Pin, a hundred-thousand-acre cattle operation near Cohagen that was sold to a man who had made a fortune selling vitamins on television. The cowboys, mostly older men, were all let go, and they brought their saddle horses to the sale. They pooled their mounts in a few thirty-foot gooseneck trailers and followed along in dusty sedans. I never saw such a bunch of heartbroken old men as many of their ponies were consigned to the killer pen because of their age, to be sold for meat. It all reminded me of Wiley, who by that time was long gone.

I admired Gladys and Wiley for the very realistic way they went about their lives. Theirs was a meager operation that sent a hundred calves to
market each year; they were obliged to grow some winter feed, mostly non-irrigated wild hay that Wiley harvested with his 9N Ford gas tractor. I got a great lesson in precision by watching Wiley squint through cigarette smoke as he dressed and adjusted the teeth of the sickle bar on his mower when we prepared our annual siege of the meadows. His equipment was old and minimal, but it enabled him to swathe the most beautiful mix of orchard grass and clover, which we made into small sixty-pound square bales that he could ferry around in his truck and throw here and there “without breaking my goddamn back.” His little herd of Hereford cattle always did well in those days before the Angus triumph, and he was expert at the treatment of sunburned udders, pro-lapses, and eye cancers that afflicted this pleasant breed in our part of the world. By contrast, my parents invested in a mail-order shoofly pie business that foundered in a matter of months, extinguishing my mother’s pride in her baking and landing them in yet more financial turmoil, probably at least the twentieth episode since the days of steam-cleaning rugs. I once thought that my father was a willing accomplice to all these gyrations, but I eventually learned that the few years of war had crowded out the rest of his life, and thinking about them, re-imagining them, and finally relating them to some view of life took up much of his time. I expect most of his fellow veterans shared the belief that what they had experienced could never be conveyed but rather was owned as a private matter or, at best, shared with one another. I remember noticing when his war cronies were around a kind of contempt for that vast portion of the world that hadn’t “been there.” I heard one of them say that he had more respect for a German soldier than an American civilian and what a shame it was you could legally shoot only the former. That was the generation that raised me, and in general they were happy enough to watch us piss away our opportunities on cheap amusements because we were a mob of untested ninnies anyway and there was no sense spoiling our fun.