Driving on the Rim (43 page)

I confronted the idea that I might have time on my hands and was pulling together my fishing tackle, my prized fly rod, the fly box given to
me by Dr. Olsson long ago and made, as he said, of “airplane metal” or aluminum. I had begun to speculate as to which creek might have which bugs—a rumination that got me to imagine the loop of line suspending the imitation insect slowly descending toward the speckled beauty feeding below. I was really getting in the mood when the phone rang and one Thad Pelletier, unknown to me, wished to bring in his eight-year-old boy, who had stepped on a broken bottle. Another Jinx referral, and with no warning I was startled, but agreed. I then ran around like a madman to make sure I had everything I needed—that is, I seemed propelled by joy. In a very short time, father and son were at my door, and I admitted them to the former parlor of this old house. I already loved this pair, but now meant to get to know them. I had hastily pushed a few items of furniture into the parlor, chairs for both Pelletiers. Thad Pelletier came in the front door cautiously leading his son, who even with a small towel duct-taped around his foot was managing to hobble. The father was quite young, in his twenties, I thought, a city maintenance man, and his son, Cory, seemed frightened, not of his injury but of me. I rubbed my hands together as though we were about to have a wonderful time and asked them to sit. The father, wearing heavy work boots that seemed to embarrass him as he drew them back under his chair, apologized for calling me at home, and I joked that that was the only place to get me these days. I turned to Cory, who was making himself as small as possible in his chair, a pink-cheeked boy whose sandy hair stuck out in every direction. I could see blood seeping through the towel. “Cory, what happened here?”

“I stepped on some glass.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Were you scared?”

“Yes, sir, when I saw the blood.”

“Did it bleed a long time?”

“I was home,” said Thad. “I don’t think it was too long.”

“Cory, may I look at it?” I asked and Cory nodded rapidly.

I lifted Cory’s foot into my lap; it was trembling. He had a deep cut in the ball behind his big toe, the length of which I was slowly converting into millimeters as I calculated the anesthetic, which I decided would be
topical. Cleaning the wound was quite straightforward, as there seemed to be no foreign material in it. Cory several times involuntarily pulled the foot away from me, which I continued to treat as a joke until he could see it was funny and laughed through helpless tears. Next I applied a mixture of tetracaine, adrenaline, and cocaine—TAC—great stuff for kids as it doesn’t scare them quite like other anesthetic approaches, but we had to wait for it to work. With Thad I discussed the removal of trees compromised by pine bark beetles in the city park, and flag football with Cory, who was a wide receiver. Once I determined sufficient numbness had set in, I had Cory rest his foot on his father’s thigh—I didn’t have the appropriate table in my parlor—so that I could close up the wound. My emergency room days made me quite expert at this sort of thing and I gripped the suture needle with a needle driver—actually an ordinary hemostat I was using for this purpose in the face of short supplies—and began quickly stitching, making certain the needle penetrated below the base of the wound before rotating it out, reaching through to pull up the loops and tying the square knot. I was frankly a bit mesmerized at how reliably this skill was embedded in my muscle memory and I seemed to watch from afar as the elegant stitches marched to the end of the wound. When I looked up I could see that Thad was close to fainting, his face pale. I said to Cory, “Dude, we’re done. Let’s put something over this and you can head out.” And before the smile had faded from his face, I had the tetanus booster in his arm and they were free to go. Thad wanted to pay me and my explanation that I was going fishing anyway seemed not to satisfy him. So I accepted twenty bucks and saw the two on their way. I then sat down, fingers laced behind my head, and gave in to thoughts of office furniture. Holding the twenty-dollar bill up to view, I smiled.

Less pleasantly, my thoughts turned to Womack and his broken leg—that is, to the leg first and then to Womack, who was undoubtedly suffering in his brush shelter. I supposed that Jocelyn had been in to visit him, bring him things, and that soon I would hear from her. But I hoped I would also hear from her in some context other than the health and well-being of Womack, who, despite his somewhat stark affect, I had some trouble picturing in other than the select occasions we had shared. I
tried to imagine an ordinary Womack day and failed. If I had turned on reruns of the
Grand Ole Opry
and there was Womack in a spangled cowboy suit I wouldn’t have been surprised. He had a little Porter Waggoner to his rubber-lipped but skinny I-see-right-through-you gaze. And cruel eyes that stood out, unflinching predator eyes. It was mostly what you saw. It abruptly occurred to me that he was certainly not an airplane mechanic. I was a little slow in reaching this conclusion, even though Lieutenant Crosby had let me glimpse the rap sheet. Someone more alert than I at that moment would have had a hard time connecting its details to his purported profession.

I had not seen Jocelyn in a while, though she was so often in my thoughts that encountering her corporeal self might have been beside the point. Her absence was acutely on my mind for the most irrational of reasons: it was daylight savings, time to adjust my clock. I went through my customary confusion over the spring-forward-fall-back business, something I could never quite understand—which gave rise to a reflection, based first on the non-sighting of Jocelyn, on the tyranny of time, feeling it as a sort of bully pushing me down a corridor where family members, acquaintances, and companions were regularly picked off into rooms along the way, never to be seen again. At the moment I could not think of a single instance in which time was my friend. My temporary inability to sort out the spring-forward-fall-back business seemed to emphasize that the rules were made elsewhere.

Furthermore, my infatuation, which had formerly produced a nice demarcation between Jocelyn and her circumstances, including the persistence of Womack, had begun to sag. Something so unexpectedly disturbing had come along that I seemed to have lost focus, if losing focus on an obsession is technically possible.

Jinx and I went on one of our nature walks, well, more than that because we had made a foray of several miles into the hills before we took our surroundings seriously: Jinx was on a mission. I didn’t bring my field glasses and so we shared her nice old Leitz binoculars. It was one of the first genuine spring days; some of the earliest wildflowers, the ground-hugging phlox and violets that seemed to creep right in behind the receding snow, were already appearing in the sagebrush openings amid the bunchgrass and needle grass stands. We were high above the Yellowstone River, and in its broad valley the new warmth had raised a
sun-shot fog. I had suppressed an impulse to ask Jinx where we were going simply because it was more interesting to tag along and guess.

By following a game trail in a small grove of junipers, we found ourselves on an elevated wooded point that looked out on a small valley between the ridges. I was increasingly cautioned to be quiet, to walk softly, to slow down—and finally to sit in a horseshoe of stacked stones, which I recognized as a hunting blind built by Indians. This gave us a protected view of the small valley and would have been an ideal place for its builders to launch an arrow at animals grazing toward them. We sat here for a long time; at first I thought I was supposed to stay silent, and after a while I was disinclined to talk at all. I wondered if this was meant to be some exercise in meditation, but whatever it was, I seemed quite happy to sit next to Jinx on a sunny spring day and to, in effect, enjoy her breathing. I even had a brief erotic impulse flit past like some bird, which caused me to smile. Jinx was quite resolute in scanning with her binoculars, and I found myself waiting for the steady sweep to come to a stop. When finally it did, she put a hand on my knee and handed me the glasses. She whispered, “Look right above the rock outcrop.”

At first I could not find the outcrop at all and even once I did, it was another moment before I saw the wolf. I went through the same experience shared by everyone else who sees a wolf: surprise that a wolf doesn’t look like anything else on earth.

She seemed to stare right at us from across the grass and sage, then elevated her nose in the beginning of a long and luxurious stretch, after which she looked carefully around the basin, then disappeared behind the rock, to emerge moments later carrying a pup by the scruff of its neck. She carried it a good distance and deposited it amid the sagebrush. Then she went back for another, squirming and dangling in her teeth, and placed it in a new place. After six were hidden here and there, she rested on the rock, lying on her belly with forelegs dangling. Jinx let me have the binoculars more than my share of the time: this was not her first visit to the wolves. We spent the entire morning in the old Indian blind watching as the wolf went from one hidden baby to another, nursing each. It was almost high noon before the wind came up behind us and the wolf knew of our presence. In an instant, she simply was no longer there. She seemed to evaporate.

On our way back to the trailhead where we had left Jinx’s car, she no
more than responded to my various questions. I found her indifferent even to my excitement at what we had seen. At her car, she mentioned that she was leaving town to practice elsewhere. She rather tossed that off, but I didn’t take it well. She was the only real friend I had. She had hinted at it before, but now it seemed like a plan. Where would I go?

I made several trips to Jocelyn’s old homeplace and found nothing. The airplane was gone and in fact the runway looked unused. Because word had gotten out that I was available for basic medical services—and was cheap!—I found myself with several patients a day who simply showed up. I had no one to manage appointments, and no inclination to turn anyone away if I could treat them without special equipment. Several who needed other kinds of help I hustled over to the clinic, recommending whichever of my old colleagues best fit the case. Therefore, it was nightfall before I could turn my thoughts first to Jocelyn and my seemingly abiding love of her, and then to Jinx, whose move threatened to leave me friendless. It was not easy to see why these two appeared in my imagination roughly at the same time. Jinx and I were not lovers; our compatibility had gotten in the way. How weird was that? The very sight of Jinx filled me with delight, and our forays in the outdoors were perfect little idylls. I thought she was pretty, even physically attractive, for crying out loud. But we were friends! We loved each other, in some way. And we found in the earth, the land of our beautiful West, what others had found in religion or some world elsewhere. The land and its wildlife were our miracles, and our gratitude did not extend to prying questions about how these came to be: they were enough. And we both liked patching people up! There was some connection between being useful and loving the place where we lived that made a nice circle for us. Why, then, were the forces driving me toward Jocelyn so irresistible?

As would be, I was seeing an old gent, Carl Tate, for his rheumatoid arthritis, which had been caught too late because of Carl’s stoicism, with the result that cartilage damage and bone erosion could no longer be averted by some anti-rheumatoid strategies, though I was still following them to lesser effect while averting pain with the usual stuff—when Wilmot appeared, and said with some mystification, “Still seeing patients?” And I had Ellen Coopersmith waiting for me in the parlor. I was determined to finish what I was doing.

I asked him to wait. I finished with Carl shortly and he sort of bowed out with a wordless glance at Wilmot, stuffing a few bills in the blue glass flower vase Jinx had given me, into which I had failed to put flowers, letting it now serve as repository for my fees, such as they were. When Jinx saw what I was doing with it, she said, “Oh, boy,” since she went on performing the ministrations of a bookkeeper despite the claims of her own busy practice.

I was not looking forward to seeing Wilmot, or to doubtless polished explanations for my situation, to which I had no doubt he had contributed generously. I was not sure why, but I sensed that he thought I wasn’t playing the game as it should be played, that the puzzle pieces of the hierarchy were not well served if doctors went around being undignified. Perhaps he had learned of my brief service at the hot dog stand, or my indiscretions with nurses and others—all commonplace among bachelors in such a setting. My association with Tessa, during her happier days, was not viewed positively, and the latest event seemed to spread the stain. There was an awful time when Tessa was living in a homeless shelter and telling tall tales in which I sometimes figured unfavorably. She had long been displeased with me and even wrote letters to the editor about certain persons who had “grown too big for their britches,” widely viewed as a reference to me.

I think Wilmot had expected me to stop what I was doing, but I had to see Ellen Coopersmith, age fifty-one, who believed she had pneumonia, though she did not. She had bought an old rock house near her job teaching school in the country, and on a very cold morning discovered there was no water in the kitchen sink, so she went to the downstairs bathroom for water to make coffee. The next day the water in the bathroom was gone too, and she had to go to the second floor for water to make coffee. The following day, also cold, there was no water on the second floor and teaching school without coffee had seemed an impossibility. But Ellen forbore this inconvenience, and the weather abruptly warmed up that night, as it does in this country, letting Ellen know why she’d had no water for her coffee: every pipe in the house had burst and in the thaw Ellen was now showered in falling ice water while each room in the house flooded. Still, she did not have pneumonia, she had a cold; and I showered her with samples and placebos while declining payment, though she stuffed something in the vase anyway. Then I turned to
Wilmot, who had elevated his chin a degree or two with every delay, and smiled coolly to Ellen Coopersmith as I saw her to the door.