Driving on the Rim (41 page)

“You look blue.”

“I am blue.”

“Nothing to do with your injury, I hope?”

“I want to work.”

“You want to work? Are you crazy?”

Alan was just trying to cheer me up. He liked to work, I knew that. His needy athleticism had led him down the path of extreme sports, but he was always on the job, always good, and the huge Kodachromes of his rock climbing and of his son on the Miles City football team which adorned his office walls seemed to reassure his cardio patients. He gave me a protracted, considered look and then tapped me with his clipboard. “You’ll get through this. You have my word. I personally don’t think this ever needed to happen, but Wilmot used all his grease to get the law involved.”

“He hates me, but he is my patient.”

So I went home, and I felt fine; but my first thought at entering my house was, “What am I doing here?” There were reentry issues, which I met by housekeeping and replenishing food supplies. A nap helped. I found a baseball game on the radio. Still under a legal cloud, I concentrated on the everyday. I ran the vaccuum. Then for several days I was just lost.

I’d been rattling around there for a day and a half, only occasionally staring at the telephone, when Jocelyn burst in. She filled up the room with her anger. She said, an inch from my face, “They’ve arrested Womack!”

“They … who?”

“Womack! You described him perfectly, thank you very much, down to his pants, his hair, and his boots. You get down there and tell them Womack didn’t stab you.”

“But this is just entirely a—”

“Stop talking and get down there.”

I was just beginning to feel indignant when Jocelyn’s face softened. “I’ll be here waiting,” she said. I gave her my best doofus smile.

Here was addiction. I didn’t seem to care that my soul was shrinking to some meager artifact: I scuttled down to the police station to liberate Womack, I was too late, though. Lieutenant Crosby took me into his office to show me the results of Womack’s background check, which included a raft of unpleasantries that cried out for resolution. Before affirming his innocence of my stabbing I was obliged to view Womack glowering at me from behind bars and declining to return my wink. Back
in Crosby’s office, I said, “That’s not him. A lot like him. But not him. The guy that stabbed me is still at large.” Crosby nodded wearily.

“Be that as it may,” he said with exaggerated slowness, “I’m going to extradite Mr. Womack to Texas. He’s got a lot of problems in Texas.” Crosby searched in the desk. He produced a long, thin object and held it aloft. I stared at it. “You like beef jerky? I made this myself. Be my guest.”

I walked out into the street, stunned and carrying my treat. What on earth was Jocelyn doing with this bird? I quickly figured it out: Womack may have had some issues with the law, here and there, but his skill as an aircraft mechanic was indispensable to a pilot doing high-risk work. I admired Jocelyn for keeping such a worrisome yet useful man at arm’s length. Such nuanced and practical talent for management was something I could do no more than admire from afar.

I’m just saying all this.

I went back to my house, and the waiting Jocelyn, on speeding legs that seemed to have a life of their own. I thought it best to manage the information and confine my remarks to a plain statement of vindicating Womack of any responsibility for my injury. I myself would be like O. J. Simpson looking for the real killer. I understood that news of Womack heading south on a rail might reveal itself as glee on my part: my good thing, my love, would go up in smoke.

I tugged Jocelyn down the hall to my bedroom. We undressed quickly and without teasing delays. I noticed for the first time that she had had her breasts enhanced; they were lovely in their gravity-defying shapeliness. I was repressing unwelcome mirth based, I suppose, on some combination of relief and adoration, but also on an old memory of Alan Hirsch dancing around his office, a silicone implant in each hand, doing a terrible rendition of Dean Martin singing, “Mammaries are made of this,” to a kind of muted Latin shuffle. I had to push that one well to the rear. I came from an era when breasts just happened, were not built to suit.

I returned to the matter at hand, which I hoped to prolong, having already pictured a virtual afternoon of foreplay. But Jocelyn seemed to be in a rush—I suppose “eager” might be a better word and throughout my leisurely fondling seemed bent on pulling me atop of her and getting it over with. By forcing her to slow down, I thought I was being provocative, but she expelled air through slightly parted lips in a way unmistakable
for anything but impatience. It seemed advisable to get down to business. Jocelyn performed her part with exemplary animation, crying out as I came but falling still abruptly thereafter and staring at the lamp. We lay beside each other without speaking in the dim light of the room. My mind wandered briefly and then I remembered the nose. I remembered that I couldn’t picture Jocelyn’s nose. I turned my head until her profile came into view, and experienced a shock: her nose appeared to be almost, well, less a nose than a … snout. I jumped up and lifted the blinds. Jocelyn had raised herself on her elbows to watch my sudden activity. I came back to bed, where I snuggled up to her warm body and reexamined the nose, which was, in this light, quite normal after all. In my not easily understood relief, I told Jocelyn that I loved her. Without turning her head in my direction, she said, “Puh-leeze.” I was shocked. I waited, hoping there was time for one more erection. I was down to that.

Like I said, I’m only reporting this.

The ancient truism that a stiff prick has no conscience is misleading. It would be better to say that a stiff prick arouses unreasonable hope. Or, as the late Throckmorton once said, “No erection should be allowed to go unattended.” Many a fine man has been led by one into a morass of emotional entanglement, unfulfillable dreams, and unworthy or inglorious fates like bankruptcy. In today’s political climate no one would have the nerve to say that a moist vagina has no conscience, but the case can be made; and in fact a good many candid and enlightened women are prepared to acknowledge as much. It’s not just my hat that’s off to them.

The fact of the matter, the matter of Jocelyn, is that I simply could not be rebuffed. I found her every attempt to lower my expectations just one more thing to find either A. ravishing or B. adorable. That’s love and I freely declared it in the face of “puh-leeze.” Jocelyn was always honest.

Jocelyn was not at her father’s old place and neither was her airplane. I really didn’t know where to start. Meanwhile, Jinx was driving me crazy by arbitrarily booking patients for me to see right in my own disordered house, ones she claimed were not exactly pediatric. I saw them in the front room, which I’d turned into something of an office. These were routine cases, but I was at least back to looking at people, worrying about them and writing a few scripts. I have to admit that I would have
been pretty happy if I hadn’t been stewing about Jocelyn and daydreaming about combining our skills in flying and medicine for some sort of wilderness thing or other. Alpine sort of backdrop, lonely rivers, etc.

But then she called me on the telephone. “Is this you, Berl?” I said it was. “Berl, you got my ass in a world of hurt.”

I was somewhat startled by her tone, not exactly creamy with longing. She was snapping at me. I said, “Oh?”

“When you turned Womack in. I know you went down there and talked to those people.”

“I didn’t turn Womack in. Womack got picked up.”

“Thanks to your description of the attacker. You’re a damn fly in the ointment.”

Now I headed for shakier ground. “I was stabbed, understand? I did the best I could to describe the assailant.” I was still wondering what in my consciousness had caused me to describe Womack to a T. Squeamishly clinging to my imaginary attacker wasn’t fortifying the tone of conviction I needed at this moment. “Where are you, anyway?”

“I’m back at my dad’s place with the plane.”

“I know that, but you—”

“Room in Harlo. At the Corral. You could come see me. I mean, the choice is yours. They’ve got Womack locked up in Texas all over again. Mission accomplished, sport.”

Outrageous really, but all I could come up with was, “Well, yes.” Good God. Was this the gruesome tug of my childhood and youth? To what else did I owe my lack of character in the face of such a quandary? I wasn’t working enough; I was not being useful. When hard at work I knew what to do about such things. Maybe that was why Jinx was putting me back to work. She seemed to know what I needed. I was grateful that she couldn’t hear my obsequious “Well, yes.” And really I knew better, but Jocelyn was my vision and my craving; when she spoke to me I watched her lips with rapture and didn’t hear a word. Without her before me—that is, with her on the telephone—I had a chance to take in a certain hardness in her demeanor, but I passed it up. I had only one thing in mind and that thing was laying a cold trail for me, one foot in front of the other. Did anyone ever rise above it?

We met at the Corral Motel in Harlowton and went straight to bed. It
was most unsatisfactory. I had so long anticipated this moment that I made something of a fetish of foreplay, and it was clear that Jocelyn got nothing out of it. She said—joking, I assume—“Stick it in. Pull it out. Repeat. Keep it simple.” I found it nearly impossible to rise above this “joke,” but stupefied by adoration, I managed to carry on despite Jocelyn’s finding everything I did funny. I’m quite aware of how abject I must have seemed, but one look at Jocelyn would clear that up for anyone. She was such a gorgeous woman, and the fact that she administered her beauty with coolness and perhaps calculation didn’t seem to detract from it. I don’t think anyone has quite understood the merciless power of women at their apogee. We are reduced to worship—and I do mean reduced. I wasn’t sure brains and character added much at all. Look at Jinx: smart, good, pretty—she just didn’t work it like Jocelyn did. Jinx was a goddess and Jocelyn was a tart—but where did knowing that get me?

“You’ve never been in my plane, have you?”

“No, no, I haven’t. Maybe some—”

“Let’s go now. Let’s crank that baby up. Get dressed.”

I did and watched her do the same. As I observed her flesh disappear into her panties, then her jeans, then her bra, then the bright checkered cowboy shirt I particularly liked, and finally the yellow North Face Windbreaker, I had a fleeting sense of seeing these ravishing objects of my attention for the last time.

In the end, the gooberish demeanor of the supplicant, whether it was someone working me for prescription pills or me trailing Jocelyn to the airplane, was remarkably consistent. Even when angry and demanding, the goober was still an addict. That’s all an addict was, a goober. The long road to terminating exposure to the abused substance was littered with heartbreak. It was part of the training. Oddest of all, it greatly improved the survivors once you acknowledged the many who didn’t make it.

Jocelyn was at the controls, and I sat beside her, cautioned to avoid contact with the parallel set of controls in front of me. The back of the plane was filled with all sorts of things, groceries mostly, but also a big-game rifle and a short-barreled shotgun. I didn’t know she hunted. We both wore headsets and I quickly grew infatuated with the sound of Jocelyn’s voice, slightly distorted as though heard from a faraway place we could both go where our voices would have a slight electronic buzz
and all would be renewed. Jocelyn sang into her microphone, “Off we go into the wild blue yonder!” and I felt her excitement at flying even as we rumbled down the rough airfield at her father’s old ranch. I watched her hand with its bright red nail polish on the stick, and it seemed to bespeak her remarkable mix of glamour and ability.

At the end of the field, she pivoted the aircraft, and we looked through the windshield, straight back to where we had just come from. I noticed a strip of surveyor’s tape tied to a tall pole set in the ground. It fluttered in our direction as Jocelyn increased speed, inciting the roar of the engine, the propeller a pale blur in front of us. We’d moved forward slowly at first but accelerated rapidly toward the end of the field. The shuddering of the fuselage abruptly stopped and we were airborne, gaining altitude and sailing toward the line of foothills before us.

“Having fun?”

“Yes! Where are we going?”

Jocelyn turned to me and laughed. I couldn’t see much of her behind the microphone and her aviator’s sunglasses, but she was distinctly laughing, and it seemed more than a little emphatic with the distortion through my headset. She said, “We sure are, honey. We’re going someplace.”

I gazed at the landscape passing beneath us and it seemed to bear an expansive sense of time and of the imperishability of the earth. I had a glimpse of myself as a particularly pathetic exemplar of our race and its fragile gyrations. Never comfortable with this long view, I was grateful when it passed. Only animals really knew how to live.

Airplanes had come to seem quite different machines after the catastrophe in New York. They were overnight turned into projectiles; even if, as now, we used them for something else, they went on being projectiles. I let my gaze drift to Jocelyn’s skillful hands on the controls and could feel the relationship between her floating hands and the movement of the aircraft. Her eyes interrupted their almost robotic scan of the horizon only to flick temporarily to the instruments. The sun coming through the canopy made me sleepy, as did gazing at the wavering shapes that appeared in the blur of the propeller. The inside of the plane smelled entirely of its new upholstery. It was surprising to compare our considerable airspeed to the slowness of the passing landforms below: they came and went as though operating in a different timescape from the one in which the airplane flew. We had stopped talking.

We began to descend after meeting what looked like a wall of mountains; a shadow in one of them slowly opened to reveal a pass into which Jocelyn, still descending, guided the plane. I looked anxiously from side to side as the blue sky in the opening above us seemed to be narrowing. Jocelyn lifted one hand to point through the windshield at a mountain goat grazing at eye level. We were in a canyon that turned slowly to the west between many-hued granite walls and grassy ledges. Below, some trees were scattered on either side of a sparkling creek which, with its regular flashes of white water, must have had a considerable gradient. Teal scattered up from back channels of the creek so far below. The walls on either side confirmed that the only possible direction for the plane to fly was straight forward. I couldn’t picture climbing back out. I was uncomfortable.