Driving on the Rim (17 page)

“Are you serious? I was cleared of that a long time ago.”

“Really? It’s right here in the records. I’ve never known them to lie, but let’s just let that pass for a moment. Now once more, did you have relations with Miss Larionov?”

“None of your business, cocksucker. And give Wilmot my fondest regards.”

“You clearly have no idea what effect such replies may have on your future.”

“A fair wind to your ass, Curtis. By the way, which hole do you shit out of?”

He just smiled.

I went on working. I treated a farm wife for gonorrhea. She was a plain young woman carrying a leather purse with rodeo scenes carved into it. She sat before me in utter defeat once she’d had the diagnosis but seemed to cling to the hope that if this wasn’t the same thing they called the clap she could live with it. I didn’t tell her it was the same thing they called the clap. Initially, she had presented asymptomatic pelvic pain only, no bleeding, no discharge. I had her in twice because it took a couple of days to culture the cervical smear, and looking for bacteria on a stained slide was inconclusive, as it usually is. I told her I should see her husband as well, since he had every chance of contracting it. This threw her into further panic. “He’ll kill me!” “Well, we don’t want that,” said I in the tones of the medical detachment that had contributed to my going nuts. As I wrote out a prescription for one of the third-generation antibiotics,
telling her that I expected good results from them, I questioned her a bit to find out how she had managed to come down with this disorder. Her husband, she told me, was a fanatic about controlling weeds on the farm. Outbreaks of spurge, spotted knapweed, star thistle, and water hemlock had defeated his efforts to control them, and the only hope lay in buying expensive herbicides, which they couldn’t afford. Therefore, he enlisted her in a Billings escort service, and by the end of the first year the weeds were gone but his wife was fighting several sexually transmitted diseases. She did seem to fear violence from him but thought that so long as it wasn’t “the clap” she might have a bit of leeway. Rather than level with her—I’m not proud of this—I told her how she could secretly add antibiotics to his everyday food and drink, thereby preventing him from getting this “ailment”—she couldn’t remember the word “gonorrhea”—and things could go on as before. “Thank God,” she said. “After all, there’s no good reason to upset our happy marriage.”

“All the same, I think you should give up your other occupation in the interest of your health.”

“I told you the weeds were under control. You weren’t listening.”

I did not let this sort of thing make me cynical because then I would have been the casualty of these disorders that I treated, and I had strong survival instincts. Many of the people any doctor sees do not have strong survival instincts; in fact, when I look at their smoking, drinking, obesity, and trauma-prone ways I’m inclined to think they scarcely cling to life. And when I poke around for positive things I could emphasize for them, I often find that they have good reason for submitting to gradual painless suicide. At first glance, there’s nothing really terrifying about a half a million doughnuts or cigarettes, and the exhilaration of driving fast on black ice is anesthesia enough for the casualty waiting in the wings. What I may be cynical about is my wonderment at how all of us are dealt such different hands. This is, of course, religious cynicism, and though for thousands of years mankind has tried to unwind it, it remains as obdurate a conundrum as it was in the beginning. Being a doctor keeps one closer to it than some other jobs do. When I worked in the emergency room it was rare to hear stories beyond the immediate circumstances of the injury. “I missed a turn and hit a tree,” not “My husband made me turn tricks to buy weed spray.”

At the end of the day, I saw Alan Hirsch in the parking lot, scrutinizing my car. “Is this an 88?”

“Good for you. Yes, it is. Bought it in Canada.”

“The Hitler car.”

“The what?”

“88. HH in the alphabet. Stands for Heil Hitler.”

“Oh, my God.”

After resuming conventional duties at the clinic, I made a bit of a sortie. One of the nurses. I suppose that wasn’t smart. Her name was Scarlett and things went well, but not at first.

“So you go to work and then you go home.”

“Yeah, that’s about it. I look after my dad.”

“Well, that’s not so different from my M.O. I go to the movies …”

“I don’t go to the movies.”

“You don’t like movies?”

“No, I don’t go to the movies.”

“I go to the movies, by myself, with friends. I like movies.”

“I like the good ones. You have to go through too many to get to the good ones.”

“You probably think it’s a lot of germs.”

“Not really …”

“A public place. It’s like an airplane, people mushed in. Here come the germs!”

“Well, I’m in germs all day. I spend the day with sick people.”

“I guess it’s the same case with me, all around me. But it’s rare I get anything.”

“You just draw blood all day. Half those people are in for a lipid profile, they’re not sick.”

“Sure, I suppose.”

“Mine, half of them cough in my face, sneeze all over my shirt. But I don’t get sick. It isn’t germs we need to fear. It’s something going haywire.”

“Well, maybe if we went to a movie, or for a meal. Maybe this is a little abrupt, don’t you imagine?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m not suggesting performance issues or anything; I’m just saying ‘sudden.’ ”

“I’m with you there.”

“So, what now? Shall I put my clothes back on?”

“I think so, don’t you?”

“I do, I do. I just feel a bit odd I got into this situation.”

“Of course you do, but there you have it.”

The deaths of my parents were the stepping-stones by which I’d crossed the latest river. They spoke in tongues, righteous Holy Rollers to the end. At least my mother was; my father acted his part and may have occasionally believed it. He once told me he actually enjoyed speaking in tongues. Because of what they had been promised, they couldn’t wait to be dead and soon they were. My mother had no last-minute adjustments to make from this life to the next, and though she saw death coming, she crossed over peacefully. I was present, and my mixing grief with the apprehension that a loved one was getting her way has baffled me ever since. My father, on the other hand, had several things in mind, and I’m pleased I got to hear about them. I owed to them my occasionally sporadic social skills, as was often the case in Holy Roller families, and this despite never believing a speck of their doctrine from the very beginning. I was just a natural-born, but not stupid, oaf. I grew out of most of it.

I treated my father in the last days of his life, all geriatric stuff, nothing special. I was sure he missed my mother, but widowhood was easier than marriage and he was generally lighthearted. He came in readily, but the real mission was unpacking the parts of his life that were most on his mind. You would have thought this had happened long ago, but the setting made all the difference: sitting in my examining room with me in my white coat gave things just the formality he required.

He wanted to talk about war. He was close to the end of his life and had quit going to church. “Everything all right?” I asked him, not quite out of the blue. He didn’t look so hot.

“About half the time.”

He began to muse again about his experience in the Ardennes, the
Battle of the Bulge. He seemed to feel fortunate to have been part of it, even though he saw many of his comrades killed or wounded. His reasons were interesting: it was the biggest war of all time; it starred the most evil regime of all time; the desperate German breakout, “Watch on the Rhine,” was the one Nazi offensive conceived entirely by Adolf Hitler, the most evil man of all time, etc., etc. The Panzers, Tigers, and King Tigers, were the best tanks with the most tactically sophisticated tank crews and with air cover by the Luftwaffe, which had sixty jets in the hunt. In some ways, the experience seemed to justify a life otherwise uneventful and even less accomplished. My father led a platoon of infantry right into the first onslaught south of the Losheim Gap; and at Manderfeld and Krewinkel, using the skills he had learned in the woods of America and imparted to his men, my father and his comrades killed twenty-one Volksgrenadiers, experienced soldiers from the Eastern Front in snow camouflage. “In the year 1944, our world offered no greater thrill than shooting Germans.” His group crept up close enough to German transport to shower with lead an armored personnel carrier bearing SS Panzer Commander Jochen Peiper, “a blond fellow handsome even in the binoculars, guilty of many atrocities in Russia, especially Kursk, retired to France after the war, a pleasant life until the village communists burned him alive in his own house. After the fire was out they found Peiper, winner of Hitler’s Knight’s Cross. He weighed three pounds.” Thumbs-up to this, still happy about the roasting of Peiper. He hated Germans. When they dispersed after firing on Peiper, four of his men were killed; one lingered badly wounded and, after a long night of listening to his groans, a trooper from New Jersey tried to go to his aid, whereupon both GIs went up in the same bomb: the Germans had booby-trapped the wounded man’s body.

“Right after the surrender at Schnee Eifel, we ran into a splinter of the Fuhrer Escort Brigade, who drove us into a farmhouse and then overran it. Then while we fought from the back of the cellar, the Germans got overrun by our infantry and we sat in the dark listening to the firefight all night long. When it was over, we climbed to the first floor and saw the dead Germans piled halfway up the walls. Don’t get me wrong, I loved killing Germans, but when I saw all these bodies, they didn’t seem to be Germans particularly. Some of them were too young to be in this at all. It
wasn’t like you could ask for someone’s driver’s license before you shot them. I guess the whole logic that kept us all there became less and less clear to me. I watched our men cutting off fingers with wedding rings and I knew I was going to leave the war. I headed downstream as the battles were subsiding and as the Germans retreated to slow the Russians to the east. I crossed the Meuse and kept going west, staying in the countryside because of the snipers still hiding in the rubble. I don’t remember the towns, I remember the bodies. There were seventy-five thousand of them and no route could keep you out of them for long. But guess what? I got to Paris. And in Paris, absent without leave, I began to live again!”

I hadn’t heard this before. And I didn’t understand it. His own father had deserted in the First World War, and that story, told over and over, had functioned as an original stain, even one which in fraught moments my mother would disinter. I was getting the feeling that it was merely tangential to what I was hearing now, as having long been given to understand that my father’s valor had at its heart my grandfather’s desertion and the need to redeem our blood, ordinary as it was.

“I ran into another AWOL, Donald Boyes from Garden City, Kansas, and we found a taxicab with an English-speaking driver. We wanted to hit the nightclubs and told the driver where to go, but it became obvious he was taking us to the MPs. When the driver took a shortcut to where we knew perfectly well the MPs were headquartered, up between tall dark walls just wide enough for the cab, Don Boyes shot him with a Walther he was very proud of. It had SS proof marks and a real clear swastika, a great souvenir. From then on, we were on the run and soon fell in with a group of men also AWOL. Some of them were even Germans who were living in rat holes all over Paris, stealing gasoline and selling it on the black market, hijacking vehicles, counterfeiting three-day passes, and so on. Do you want to hear this?”

“You bet I do.” I wondered if patients were piling up at my door.

“I’m not taking anything with me. I want to be light as a feather.” After a very long silence, he said, “Your mother forbade me to tell you any of this while she was alive.” He looked at his hands in thought. “My group were all from out west, some of them crooked, some of them shell-shocked, some of them defected from Patton after he lost men trying to
rescue his son-in-law. We turned into gasoline pirates and I was their king. When the Krauts surrendered, we just drifted back into our units and said we escaped from POW camps. We had a couple of months in occupied Germany.” The Fräuleins were available. Though the men were undeterred by army rules against fraternization, they had a motto: “Copulation without conversation is not fraternization.” They whistled “Lili Marlene” just like the Boche and were disappointed when they could no longer listen to jazz on Axis Sally’s radio show. Don Boyes and my dad demobbed like all the others and went home. “After the war, I joined Boyes in Kansas. We had a lot of money and we spent it all on big, well-fed strong American whores and whiskey. When it was gone, I thought I better go into the hospital, but Donald took me to a Pentecostal church. He was anxious to repent, and that’s where I met your mother. I don’t know whether she cured me or God did, but I was in a bad way. It took me over two years to stop shaking and get a job.”

Whenever my old man went to the VFW he indulged his sole dandyism by wearing the parachute-silk scarf he’d worn all through the war. It was German silk.

I hardly knew what to do with my father after the death of my mother. A big plank bridge built on the skeleton of a railroad car, right where the cattle ford was a hundred years ago, spanned the racing green creek. On hot days, we took lawn chairs there and the breeze from the creek kept us cool. And birds—there were always so many birds there, goldfinches and juncos, warblers and magpies. In a dry landscape, this small, persistent water gave life to an eternally busy community of creatures. I could see some water hemlock and an ancient cottonwood that had abruptly died that spring, already colonized by sapsuckers in its metropolis of leafless branches. He was still baffled by religion and felt there must be something or other he could go by. Instead I could tell by the way he gazed upon this lively scene that it would at least do until something better came along. A Socrates man myself, I never felt that human spiritual development prior to the birth of Christ was canceled by his arrival. Still, I was very anxious for my father to have whatever consolation was available, despite my usual harkening to Harry Truman’s remark “When I hear them praying in the amen corner, I head home and lock the chicken house.”