Driving on the Rim (6 page)

I mowed lawns for nuns and priests. We had a priest from Ireland for a while, Father Noonan, a tall, somber man known to be an extremely bad-tempered golfer. The many Irish associated with the railroad in our town thought that Noonan gave them a bad name by being so humorless. They had a point. Noonan was never happy with my work and demanded that I use an edger, which he didn’t own. When he presented me with one and pointed out the work it was meant to do, I quit. Father Noonan called me a bum and chased me off the rectory grounds as though I’d been fired. I got dirty looks from some Catholics, but that died down.

I wasn’t the only lawn boy in town, and we all liked the Dairy Queen for lunch and ogling. We had the best tans, which drew some girls, including sophomore Edna Sedlicky, who made it clear she was available for whatever we might have in mind, which scared us to death, sending Edna elsewhere for fulfillment. School threw us together arbitrarily, but meeting at the DQ as boys of common labor seemed to produce more-enduring friendships. This was how I met Chong Wells and Second Hand Smoke. The three of us were fascinated by Louis Echeverria, a Basque-Cheyenne mixed-blood burglar who told us stories of his derring-do without quite tempting us, though the allure of creeping around where we had no business was attractive. Another Indian who worked at the Conoco station, Gary American Horse, known as “Walkman” because of his omnipresent audio device, told us that Louis was known on the reservation as “Louie Crooked-Fucker,” and when we
tried addressing him by this name, he fled, assuming his reputation pursued him. We never saw him again, though we learned that he moved to Billings to pimp and sell meth. At a football game in Great Falls, Chong saw him driving a new Eldorado with tinted windows. He was later arrested together with our mayor, Todd Bakesly, father of seven, for soliciting a prostitute. Louie went to jail, the possibility of which he once described to his admirers at the Dairy Queen as “the price you pay” and “the choice is yours.” He had a philosophical streak.

One summer I traveled back and forth to Wild Horse Island on Flathead Lake, where T. Sam Vaughn, the owner of our town’s bank, kept his big Chris-Craft with its cocktail bar and white Naugahyde interior. I had scraped and painted its bottom in the spring and twice touched up its varnish during the summer, after which Vaughn put me on a Greyhound for home with a check in my pocket and on my lap a nice lunch, made with his own hands. But by far my sharpest memory is of T. Sam, his wife elsewhere, a cocktail in one hand, the marine gas nozzle in the other while fumes arose around the cigarette dangling from his lips. I was sure we would go down as one of America’s regular cabin cruiser explosions, but as you see it never happened. Once T. Sam allowed me to bring Debbie Stands Ahead as my guest; he chaperoned us in separate cabins and joined Debbie in preparing meals. At midday when my work was done and Debbie had tired of sunbathing on the deck, we would swim in water so cold that those who drowned in it were never seen again. Our banker was our lifeguard, watching vigilantly from the helm as we swam furiously to keep warm. Debbie and I always watched the sunrise over the Mission Range where Debbie had Kootenai-Salish relatives. When Debbie got out of the sun to study her schoolbooks, T. Sam would wink at me and nod: this is the girl for you. In middle age, I still found myself yearning, and Debbie’s marriage to a dentist made me a lifelong connoisseur of anti-dentist commentary.

T. Sam and I were chums when I was on the boat, but if ever he brought a lady friend, I, by magic, made myself invisible once he made a locking sign with thumb and forefinger over slightly pursed lips. The two would then walk around me in the broad cockpit as though I were any other inanimate object. This proved a higher tier to lawn mowing in my study of the American class system, and the resulting aversion had
much to do with my practicing medicine while pretending not to be a doctor. Perhaps, too, there was some nostalgia on my part for the days when I was presumed crazy. It always meant freedom, and none are freer than the crazy.

The day came when Mrs. Vaughn discovered the uses to which the cabin cruiser was being put, and she divorced him. “Miss Lillian” had been named after her. He renamed the boat “Miss Ruby” after a subsequent lady friend, then “Miss Alice,” then “Miss Judy,” and so on; the last time her transom was repainted, she was called “Queen for a Day.”

I became Vaughn’s physician, and as time went on, his mind would drift to the bygone days of the cabin cruiser, which proved to be less reminiscence than a prelude to dementia. I continued seeing him as he lived in contented oblivion at the Mountain Shadows Rest Home. I hope that Ruby, Alice, and Judy are with him, and even the younger Lillian. T. Sam was a good soul.

This wouldn’t be a bad time to talk about how I came to be rescued from Christianity in time to become a doctor. I have previously described my days as a wanderer in a family of steam-cleaning Pentecostals, my carnal toils in the arms of my beloved aunt, my years as a ninny and scholar so oversexed that every time the cheerleaders of my school performed the pyramid at a ball game I came close to shooting off in my pants. Fear of this caused me to stoop even when such an event was a remote possibility and to develop a sort of meditation technique for classroom days to keep my mind, if not on the work at hand, at least off the flesh of females. In those days everything reminded me of girls, not excluding tomatoes, chickens, and parking meters—and even, at desperate times, my own shoes.

The day came when my beloved parents grew sardonic about their faith and entered a period they called Boozing for Christ. There was a curious synchronicity, if you shared quarters with them, between this and other forms in which they awaited the Rapture. Visiting my mother’s family in Arkansas, they had been passengers on a powerful bass boat that sped through a crowded water baptism on the Ouachita River, scattering and injuring worshippers. Expecting divine retribution and not getting it seemed to undercut their faith. I think their particular
kind of Christian longs for punishment, longs to be shriven, the only road to paradise they could picture. In any case, while awaiting trial for criminal endangerment, my mother and father began hitting the bars. Sometimes a Christian will deliberately go down a bad road just to produce eventual suffering. They’re crazier than pet coons.

They were soon virtual derelicts in our town, my father hanging on to his connections among veterans of foreign wars and my mother seeing the very few friends that couldn’t quite give up on her. Our home was a disaster and I was the subject of various rescue attempts, not just because I was the sort of obsequious ninny who appeals to rescuers but because my basic needs were not being met, and so I smelled bad, though I still did my schoolwork. Eldon Olsson became our family doctor; we were among his few patients. I believe he did this out of concern for me. I’m not sure how this happened except that through hunting on Gladys and Wiley’s ranch he became their friend, and thence my parents’ friend. They could see through their fog that monitoring my health was not a bad thing, and it might be preferable that I received the usual vaccinations. I had been born with a small abdominal hernia, and Dr. Olsson taped a silver dollar over it until it closed and left me with a conventional belly button. He removed my tonsils and bought me the ice cream that was the only reward for what in those days was a gruesome office procedure. Later on, we shared a love of hunting, which was once a boy’s introduction to the natural world, leading often to science and conservation, curiosity and a love of earth. These activities put an end to my puling and whining and that part of my youth whose only promise consisted of fucking my aunt. He bought me a twenty-gauge Winchester shotgun with brass tacks in the stock like an Indian gun, and he kept it at his office. He bought me a white Shakespeare Wonderod and a Martin Blue Chip reel. He kept these at his office as well. I think he tried to maintain some sort of connection with his former professional life, writing articles on matters affecting doctors in law and insurance, all the while counting down to those golden hours when he donned his tattered sporting clothes, put Eskimo Pie, or “Pie,” his setter-spaniel mix, into the converted hearse which was his hunting car and which sometimes sported a canoe on the roof or a johnboat on a rusty trailer bumper hitched below rear doors that divided at the center and opened to the
sides to accommodate the coffin. Pie, named for her black and white colors, sat in the back and watched where we’d been; Dr. Olsson drove; I opened his beers and adjusted the radio.

Dr. Olsson, I now recognize, was a country boy, a short, strapping middle-aged Swede with a groove in his chin, jet-black eyebrows, and thick, unruly hair that tried to form bangs, which, since they wouldn’t stay out of his way, were trimmed asymmetrically to accommodate his shooting eye. He too was the son of drunks and had worked his way through school on the green chain of a plywood mill, a terrible job. He still had the hands of a mill worker and occasionally drank wine with the air of someone either on a fabulously exotic mission or saluting the international community. His medical worldview, which I inherited, was that it is unreasonable to expect everyone to get better, much less survive, and great cruelty can be involved in unreasonably prolonging life. In his earliest days of practice, he had served in a Minnesota prison where—he once astonished me by saying—most of the murderers had killed someone who richly deserved it. Dr. Olsson wouldn’t pass muster today, but I revere his memory. I’d give anything to ask him why I think Tessa’s demise was my fault.

The great thing about hunting and fishing with the local doctor is that landowners don’t dare to deny him admittance to their land. A doctor denied can hold his powder until the landowner’s hour of need, and then it’s all she wrote. People in ranching country know this, and so doctors flit around in social zero gravity, always ready with the silver bullet, always invoking a shamanic aura at the gate to the golden hills where we followed Pie to the coveys. I tagged along in this wake of such privilege and in time became a dead shot with my little Indian Winchester as we traversed the sundry Edens in search of game. My personal Virgil in these wild lands, in the high country beaver ponds where we filled our creels with trout, on the short-grass prairie where we found the grouse and partridges in bluestem and snowberry hideaways, and on the windblown prickly pear places where we stalked antelope, was always a step ahead of me, tireless countryman—he aroused in me a wish to become a doctor.

One day in late October on a vast juniper savannah north of Two Dot and next to a tiny spring where watercress grew and where Pie sipped
and slept, we ate our lunch, following the hawks with our eyes and admiring the partridges we’d laid in front of us. The warmth of blue sky that had persisted all through September had given way to a steelier blue and the suggestion that the clouds sailing across us on prevailing westerlies would soon bring snow.

Dr. Olsson was watching me, and at first said nothing. Then, “We’re going to get you out of your house before we lose you altogether.” My rejected first impulse was to stage some defense of my household culture, which for all its deficiencies was mine and mine alone. But it was clear that Olsson would leave it at that and allow his remark to acquire its own weight.

One of the unusual things about Dr. Olsson was that he had never married. He had no children and was all in all a very proper fellow who neither drank to excess nor flirted, though he confessed to me that he once played strip poker with the nurses back in Ohio. My mother told me that he had been in love with a girl in school who married his best friend. His shamed grin at this confession was enormously appealing. I rarely saw him without a clean shirt, pressed pants, and often a tie. His great passion was hunting partridges with his black and white dog. Unless she was in trouble for running off or breaking point, she was just “Pie.” Pie was a shrewd little mongrel, four years old, with a brisk, upright tail, a liver-colored spot on her right ribs shaped like Australia, one black ear, and a finely speckled muzzle. She hunted and pointed birds and would not retrieve the ones we shot, though she helped us find them. She handled nicely on Dr. Olsson’s whistle, changing direction on one blast and returning on two. Dr. Olsson was inordinately proud of his whistle, which was of chromed brass and made in England, an “Acme Thunderer.” It hardly thundered but had a nice sharp sound when compared to the spit-filled gurgle of a police whistle.

When Pie thought hunting was afoot, she would whirl in place, faster and faster, then tip over and bite her own leg, only to jump up with a cry and dash to the screen door, where she slid to a stop and awaited assistance. She was an outstanding and enthusiastic bird dog, found in a ditch alongside the Two Dot road where she had been tossed from a moving car. A Canadian tourist delivered her to the All Creatures veterinary service in Big Timber, where Dr. Olsson acquired her. He had her
dewclaws removed, had her vaccinated and spayed, then brought her home and propped her beside him in bed where, night after night, he read the essays of Montaigne while feeding her treats with his free hand. Given the degree to which Dr. Olsson was besotted by his new prize, it was not unexpected that when she was half grown he trained her firmly in unstinting daily increments. By six months, Pie knew “here,” “heel,” “whoa,” and “no,” and she had them learned for life. After that, her days became less stressful as Dr. Olsson introduced her to game birds—partridges and grouse—freely allowing her to make mistakes as she determined her objectives and strategies in the mysteries of wind. Dr. Olsson told me, “A bird dog needs to be just that much wild” as he held thumb and forefinger an inch apart. I didn’t think she could be very wild with her head on a pillow every night, but in the field Pie revealed not just energy and purpose but a thousand-yard stare. Dr. Olsson said, “They know things we don’t know.” Twice in the early days of Pie’s training, she either left Dr. Olsson or got lost. Most would leave a personal garment on the ground, go home, and return in the morning hoping to find their dog. Dr. Olsson curled up on the prairie and slept until Pie found him. When he walked Pie around town, attentive at heel, people commented, “Here comes old Dr. Olsson and his wife.” Pie was the wife and I was the child. He wore a sport coat when he was hunting, a worn old tweed from J. Press clothiers in New York. Sometimes he called a covey a “bevy,” an old-fashioned term. He wore glasses except to shoot, and he trusted Pie so much that when she was pointing a covey he patiently removed his glasses, slipped them into his pocket, and then flushed the birds. He was an excellent shot. Dr. Olsson took me hunting as frequently as I was willing to go. He found me a timid shot at first and suggested, “Step forward, shoot a lot, and claim everything.” I gradually rose to holding my own and even began to understand the management of a bird dog in the field. It required concentration on the dog. Shooting also required concentration. Understanding habitat and wild country took concentration. I had never tried concentration before, being such a random, disorganized young man when Dr. Olsson took me under his wing that he was lucky I didn’t accidentally shoot him. He taught me to use the recoil to speed the slide for the second shot on the Winchester. It took me a long while to understand any of this, and I was predictably
abashed as Pie led us to the birds I had missed while Dr. Olsson had harvested at extraordinary range.