Driving on the Rim (44 page)

“Not missing a beat?” asked Wilmot. I was jubilant just from having seen a couple of patients.

“Pecking along as best I can.”

“But you look quite pleased.”

“It’s a living,” I said.

“Well, good then. I say, in fact, ‘Marvellous.’ ”

I was sorry I had to hear that. “So, Raymond, what’s up?”

“A courtesy call, really, just a courtesy call. We are working on the status of your situation, which is many-layered.”

“Like a cake?”

“Well, sure. Could be. I did want you to understand that it wasn’t only the staff and board that are the voices being heard. There is always an unseen presence in the room whenever we go through a bad patch like this, and that presence is the community.”

“I’m anxious to know about that,” I said sincerely, even though I knew that “the community” was a bogus concept generally invoked in the service of self-righteousness.

“Oh, rest assured, they’ll be heard. Would you like to be kept in the loop?”

“Not really.”

“Oh?”

“Just tell me how it turns out.”

Wilmot was already backing to the door, having assumed a look of bafflement. “I will. I promise.” I thought about Wilmot’s style of communication: speaking to you in supposedly transparent earnestness while his face grimaced faintly as though from acid reflux. It was a form of snobbery that looked like it could be cured with Pepto-Bismol.

“Adrienne sends her best regards. She was always very fond of you.”

“It’s good you’re still in touch.”

“Adrienne really landed on her feet. I still feel challenged. She married a guy retired from some boutique bank in New York. He needed something besides issuing letters of credit to occupy his time. So he bought a sawmill and a forest. He’s almost ninety, no prenup. I’d love to have her back. Always wanted a forest.”

He was backing out the door as he glanced around the room, looking for medical equipment, I suppose. I meant to get a catalog, but as there were still a few home doctors I thought I could just as well wait for one to die. I realized I was drifting toward this obsolete category, but it seemed to fit. Maybe I had resigned myself to being a square peg in a round hole and welcomed a setting where I could spend less time on explanations.

Perhaps I had gotten ahead of myself, though, because no one called for my services the rest of that day, and by the end of it the little respite I’d enjoyed from obsessing over Jocelyn was gone and I was frantic. I was so uncomfortable that I had to act. I fired up the 88, relieved not just to be doing something about my torment but to find that the car was willing to start, as was not always the case when it had been parked for more than a day. When the Oldsmobile had not been used, the steady press of sunlight on its plastic upholstery produced the smell of obsolescence reminiscent of my pleasant rides with Throckmorton in his giant Audi with its radar and satellite uplinks, the silent highway rushing under its hood. Perhaps in imagining a time when I might stop pushing this old boat down the road, I foresaw days of great change. Nice!

I left town on Highway 12 and soon passed Two Dot, where I once had a patient, a superstitious old lady who described suicides in the distant past and several local ghosts, including a girl on Alkali Creek guzzling blood from a bottle, a cowboy ghost with a hole in his chest, and a woman on fire holding a jug of gasoline. After Mrs. Tierney told me of these things, she always looked me dead in the eye and said, “I’m of sound mind.” And I’d say something like, “Of course you are, but if you don’t measure your glucose regularly and write it down I’m not going to be able to help you.” These phantoms seemed to haunt the benign but lonely landscape as I drove.

Perhaps I was starting to calm down, because as I passed the Hutterite colony at Martinsdale I thought fondly of the beautiful vegetables they brought to our farm markets. When I reached Checkerboard, I spotted the bar among a number of trailers. The sign just said
BAR
. If it had said
EXCELSIOR TAVERN
or something I wouldn’t have stopped. I was alone with the bartender under a low ceiling covered with dollar bills.
Not much light in there. A jukebox. I drank a shell of draft without a word from the bartender and left. The phone booth outside with its bifold door ajar and phone hanging at the end of its metallic cord seemed to taunt my increasingly forlorn state of mind. I hurried on to White Sulphur Springs, reviewing how I had enhanced the concept of “bar” into some kind of cow-town Brigadoon with fiddle music, two-steppers, and irrepressible ranch hands throwing their hats in the air.

At the medical facility in White Sulphur Springs, I identified myself at the desk and went straight to the office of the physician who had treated Jocelyn, Dr. Aldridge. He did not seem pleased to see me, but I launched a wave of cordiality his way. “I understand that you and Miss Boyce have gotten very close.” He just stared at me.

He said, “Yes, we have. I don’t think that needs to get out, do you?”

“Not because of me, Doctor!” I said.

“How did you find out?”

“I guess she had to share it with someone. Feelings are running pretty strong. She realizes it’s not a simple situation.”

Holding his head in his hands, Dr. Aldridge stared down at the papers on his desk. “I just don’t know what to do.”

“It’s not often that true love opens its arms to us, Doctor. What do you have to lose? Jocelyn is a beautiful young woman and she has such marvelous skills.” This last brought Aldridge’s head up; perhaps he smelled a rat. What skills? I let him marinate this bit of psychic mildew for just a moment before I eased the silly bastard down. “It’s as if she and the airplane were one.”

Relief spread across Aldridge’s face: I knew a fellow nincompoop when I saw one.

“But how I wish she wouldn’t fly! Remember, it was I who first treated her after that accident.”

“I do remember. And I have to confess, I was jealous of the gaze that greeted you whenever you entered her room. Well, there’s medicine and there’s life. We know that, don’t we, Doctor? Isn’t that the burden we share on behalf of humanity?” I surprised myself at the level of poison and spite infusing my remarks. And shame. I suppose I got a bit of relief watching another sucker head out on the sleigh ride, but it was cold comfort against the nausea and cross-purposes and lovelorn anger that
were making me squirm. To add to my shame, I was well aware of the dramatization involved as I pictured myself crawling up into a culvert like a wounded coyote.

I didn’t really know what Jocelyn and Womack had in mind, for themselves or the airplane, but I was beginning to think that Jocelyn had foreseen the heat that seemed to follow Womack. It might be that she thought she could do better on her own.

Still, I sat in my old 88 chewing the top of the steering wheel, which I grasped in both hands, squirting salty tears. Fearing that in this sunny parking lot I might soon be making noises the average pedestrian would have trouble understanding, I turned on the radio, one of Paul Harvey’s last broadcasts, and was pleased to drift off into his cheerful anecdotes of a more wholesome world.

But I had not lost focus. I drove back the way I had come and turned off once more toward Jocelyn’s old ranch. A lot of effort had gone into making it something of an airfield, and I was sure it would be used again. As soon as I crossed the cattle guard, I saw a vehicle and felt a helpless surge of excitement, “helpless” because I was determined not to give in to any sort of happiness at seeing Jocelyn until I found out what her game was. I was sure she had an excellent explanation for the various anomalies I was uncovering, but I wanted to hear it from her. I don’t think I doubted that we would soon enjoy our accustomed affection again.

It was not Jocelyn. Two very old men in short-brimmed Stetsons stood by a battered green sedan with Jordan plates, watching me come up the road. I stopped and introduced myself. The stocky man with bushy white eyebrows was Harley Collingwood, a retired roundup cook. Next to him, somehow bravely erect despite touching frailty and leaning on a diamond willow cane, was Con Boyce, Jocelyn’s father. I was nearly certain she’d said he was dead, so I questioned him. He was in a state of acute dismay because someone had burned down his house. Collingwood barked, “Maybe you just forgot, Con. Maybe you can’t remember.”

“Where are you living, Mr. Boyce?”

“She put me in a home.”

“He didn’t want to go,” explained Collingwood. “She just got herself appointed and that was that.”

Boyce looked around and said, almost to himself, “I liked it here. I wanted to wind up here. She didn’t give me a choice.”

“He thinks there was a house here,” said Collingwood.

“I know damn well my house was here,” said Boyce with surprising authority. The three of us walked over to the house site. It was easy to see where the backhoe and bulldozer had covered the location. Boyce pointed at the disturbed ground and looked significantly at Collingwood, then at me. “You a friend of hers?”

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

“You see Jocelyn, tell her I found out about this.”

“Sure will.”

“Next time you pick your friends be more careful.”

By the way Boyce returned to the old green car, I could see he was the leader of this expedition. Collingwood glanced back at me with a shrug, twirling a forefinger alongside his temple. At the car door, Con Boyce was abruptly less sure of himself. He said he had a rug made when his old horse Rags died. As he looked toward the disturbed ground, he said it was in the house.

I
GOT UP EARLY
after a broken sleep. The people across the street were arguing again, and the husband’s by-now-familiar voice carried all the way to my bedroom: “I can’t eat any more of these fuckin’ macaroons!” I went downstairs and made myself a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee, taking both out to my porch, where I sat on the glider and watched the street. An old farrier, Charlie Noon, bent from half a century underneath horses, set out each morning, driving past my porch in his old Dodge truck, forge lashed in the bed, tools and kegs of iron shoes rattling like a circus wagon, heading to his customers with the inevitability of the seasons. There must have been something amiss with his defroster, because he always went by wiping the inside of the windshield with a huge rag, which he waved in my direction if I happened to be on the porch. I had the whole house to myself now, and this allowed me to sit out there in front of the living room window in a state of contentment. That living room now stored books, a canoe, a bicycle, and a female manikin wearing a rubber Ronald Reagan mask and hip boots—some forgotten gag. Charlie was often accompanied by Teresa Borski, a retired stewardess from the coffee-tea-or-me era, who held the horses while Charlie shod them. Teresa had a handsome Missouri Foxtrotter, a tall chestnut with the noble head of a Civil War officer’s horse, which Charlie kept well shod with special shoes to emphasize his elegant gaits. I’d seen Teresa ride him right through town, single-footing in a straight line across town and out the other side.

Parnell Swift is the gloomiest man in town and such an obsessive walker that he brings his gloom to every neighborhood. He’s completely bald, and his frowning visage results in a series of pleats that stop only at the crown of his head. He wears a Pendleton shirt at all times and packers’
boots with undershot heels. Parnell was once a fastidious, in fact hard-nosed, livestock inspector who impounded the horse of a young soldier who, killed in Vietnam, never returned to claim it. Community outrage and the intimate politics of Montana assured that Parnell’s days of public service were over. He collected coins at two car washes for their owners and I don’t know what else.

Since I had no patients until the afternoon—and with Jinx fooling around with my appointments I didn’t know who or what they would be—I was carrying a plastic sack of plant food out to the cemetery. I could have driven, but the sun was out, the wind had died, and so many people were walking around, I didn’t want to miss anything. On days like this, I always daydreamed about running for mayor so that I could look after my constituents like an adoring father. Love was in the air. Prolonged bad weather aroused distaste for one’s fellows, but life had taught me that the quality of light could enlarge the heart. Wasn’t that the Gospel of Thomas? That we came from the light? The cosmology of the Plains Indians? All the same.

Roy Sherwood, dressed like an old western movie star, sauntered along and said, “What a day!” He owned a curio shop and was the son of a world champion bronc rider and one of the founders of the Turtles, the first professional rodeo association. Roy was a gay man in a town where they were still called “fairies.” I could never associate big, hearty Roy Sherwood with the word “fairy” but there it was: old geezers at the coffee shop, “Here comes that fairy Roy Sherwood.” I just couldn’t get a handle on it, but Roy embraced it and turned up at New Year’s Eve parties with sparkling wings and a silver wand, a star at its end. I will say, people appreciated his sense of humor. Roy got censured by the state’s Better Business Bureau for making his own “artifacts” and ended up dropping the price on his arrowheads to the point that they were no longer worth the trouble.

Taking in the ordinariness of my town was a kind of anesthetic for the pain I held in abeyance. I took a moment to watch Jay Houston carry a case of Riesling down into his father’s old bomb shelter, and I remembered making out there with Debbie in tenth grade when Jay’s dad had rented the house out to the priest at St. Michael’s. Debbie’s house was next door and we would slip through the hedge and climb down into the shelter for endless kissing. Since kissing was all it ever amounted to,
moving our heads around was the only way we could express our rising passion, and we always ended up with sore necks.

It seemed the perfect reminiscence to offset my anguish over Jocelyn and my fatuous identification with her father as though we were brothers in abuse. I thought about changing places with him, letting him walk around my hometown trailing my regrets while I retreated to the rest home and a full platter of resignation. The whole thing was becoming such a long story it baffled me that I hoped to tell it all to Jinx. I really didn’t know anyone else who might understand it. Nor did it seem the best expression of friendship. I did think that if I cared about Jinx I’d want her to hear everything; otherwise, what use would I be to her? My story was nearly all I had.