Driving on the Rim (18 page)

A raucous kingfisher dove from the willows, heedlessly hunting tiny trout in the rushing surface of the stream. From my vantage at some elevation in my lawn chair there was something boyish about my father dangling his legs from the bridge. “Very strange thing about living,” he mused. “You start out by yourself but head for the crowds. The infantry, that was a fine crowd. But then the crowd dispersed and kept on getting smaller, and in the end, I’ve wound up almost by myself again. I think it’s pretty normal.”

“Sure.”

“Your mother and I, we got old. No surprises. I’m still hanging around. That’s about it. Hey, relax! I like it. What I’m headed for, it’s a mystery. Mysteries are good. Let me at ’em.”

We just lay low the next several days. My dad had checked out a best seller from the lending library; I couldn’t believe he’d ever get through it, eight hundred pages about a straying but remorseful husband, set in the Hamptons during the Civil War. And we rented a movie: Bruce Willis dynamites the sewers of Chicago to rescue an autistic Navajo boy. I had to get him away from this sort of thing. We built a fire. I read him some poetry, Saint-John Perse,
Seamarks
, John Donne,
The Eve of St. Agnes
, and an epic that had been appearing serially in our local paper,
Love Slaves of the Upper Yellowstone
. He fell asleep and I had to wake him and lead him, groggy, to his bed. I tucked him in, opened his window a crack, and set a glass of water on the side table. I laced my fingers over the top of one of the bedposts and just kind of hung there watching him sleep, unable to tell why my heart ached. I’d gotten into the habit of sailing through moments like this and I thought if I could get it right, I wouldn’t do that anymore; I’d stay right there with it until it was clear.

S
OMETIMES AFTER LUNCH
, I climbed the sandstone bluff behind the clinic, which, after the first ascent, opened onto vast rolling grassland that seemed to extend forever. I did this for my health, of course, but the great vista, which changed continuously with the light and the seasons, was something I found heartening. Shadowed in places, lifted here and there by breeze, the grassland that afternoon looked silken; about halfway across were small circular shapes, of several colors, bobbing and drifting in the summer air like ectoplasms. I stopped to stare: I couldn’t account for them. I’d been up here often but this was new. It was a long walk until I could confront the mystery: five colored balloons,
JUST MARRIED
on their sides, bobbing on zephyrs.

On these walks, I always expected to have some small experience of the sacred, something to help me become not so much a doctor as a shaman who sets out on his flight through home skies. I walked toward the wedding balloons with that hope. I had observed my mother speaking in tongues, but her attempts to indoctrinate me went in one ear and out the other. Still the longing remained.

Seneca said, “Each of us is sufficient audience for the other.” I tried to live up to this, but I was well aware of my frequent failures as the recitations of others embedded in their sufferings only reminded me of my own. I did plan to rise above this but hadn’t arrived at that station, and so I went on grinding at my own story without much satisfaction.

One of my patients, an old Harvard man, had come west with a private income when very young, bringing his bride. For the last thirty years the two had tried most of the barstools of our town, first out of fascination with the ways of a region not familiar to them, then out of a fascination
with alcohol and the inability to go home together until obliged to do so, for they were famous battlers whose shouts could be heard all over town. Roger was known as “Old Yeller” for his share of the bellowing; Diana, the wife, died of cirrhosis of the liver and Roger was not far behind. But he went on seeing me and in fact all the doctors, and inevitably I served as listener to his various salutations to the late Diana, intoned in his remarkable diction. A small and finely wrinkled man with a high forehead showing thin blue veins, he began to speak as though others besides me awaited his remarks. “Nothing ever quite picked Diana up like a libation presented at an unexpected hour. She had such marvelous blood.” I was working on my listening, but the visuals that ran through my mind over Roger’s sound track of their falling in and out of low bars made the story harder to follow than plausible conversation might have been. He had told me over and over that he and Diana had met at dance class: “She caught my eye while I attended a pair of lissome suffragettes.” Roger’s hands were shaking, and as he rambled on I gradually fought off my daydreaming to note that he was headed somewhere, and indeed he was: Roger wanted me to help him die. “I’ve read everything under the sun on the subject, and the bottom line is I won’t feel a thing.”

“Roger, it would be highly inappropriate. You’re the picture of health.” That was a lie, but I was trying to encourage him. At least he wasn’t fat. “In this state, assisted suicide is murder. Roger, I wouldn’t murder you under any circumstances.” That wasn’t true. I don’t think there was a doctor in our clinic who hadn’t dispatched someone to the happy hunting ground. Roger was weeping.

“
Send me to Diana.
”

“I can’t, Roger, and I won’t.”

“What about that woman you took care of? You seem to be able to help your old girlfriends, don’t you? Well, Doctor, I’m afraid I’m not one of those.” Roger got to his feet and, plucking a tissue from the box beside my examining table, turned to me with a transformed face, an expression of lofty annoyance. “You tin-pot sawbones. I’ll find someone who will do as I ask.”

“I’m terribly sorry …”

“Oh, no, you’re not. Let’s not part on that note.”

As he left, I heard him addressing people out in the hall. He would no
longer support the clinic, he would put in a call to Washington, he would yield to the pressure of his lawyers, and so on. He was furious and probably knew that his wish for assisted suicide was wholly focused on the potions I might use to bring it about. He had really ruined his little wife, who was not a bad sort. She had a gesture of slinging her shoulders to get her hair off her face, something preserved from girlhood no doubt, since her hair had grown light as air. She arrived in our town, according to my father, full of gentle cultivation, only to be transformed into a dazed barfly by her husband, whom my father called “a vicious nonentity.” For good reason, Roger was friendless. “When he dies,” said my father, “they’ll have to screw him into the ground.”

Many of the problems I treated were related to overeating. Almost everyone these days was wholly focused on his or her stomach, what Dante called “that miserable sack that makes shit of what we eat.” I also got a good many women complaining of stress, and the stress often turned out to be the thug they’d married. Some of the women put up a good fight, but the effort took it out of them. The wife of a big-game hunter who came home from a bear hunt in Canada two months late, bringing by way of propitiation a Canadian souvenir, was told by this spunky woman to “take the little Mounty and shove it where the monkey hid the peanut.” This precipitated a battle wherein the bear hunter offered to cut off her head and defecate down her neck. After reciting each of these tales, she smiled, upper teeth resting on lower lip as if the smile had to lean on something to stay upright. She withstood these barrages, but in a matter of days she came in to see me, asking me for tranquilizers. I prescribed an SSRI instead and, as they are slow to work, gave her a pile of Xanax samples and advised her to stay half gaga until the SSRIs elevated her serotonin level. “I don’t suppose you’d consider dumping Big Boy, which would be best, so we’ll just medicate you so you can go on until the next catastrophe.” She said it was a beautiful bear and they were having it mounted.

On days like that, I saw this as a town spoiled by God’s displeasure.

But that never lasted and I came to love the sight of ordinary activity once again, the thing that had sustained me most of my life. When I had the Oldsmobile serviced, I spent time with the mechanics. I began to frequent the breakfast cafés again, even the clubby ones where the farmers
and ranchers huddled like conspirators. In the happy years between the steam-cleaning service and the post office—that is, before my father lost his dream ground to foreclosure—we would make the short drive into town on our winding road through walls of chokecherry and hawthorn past bounding deer and the occasional bear to arrive just as the bicycles were wheeled out in front of their shop and awnings were cranked out, or the aged were taking their constitutionals and the flags were being raised and groggy children were heading out to their schools and the train could be heard down in the valley. Nowadays, experiences came at me like bugs hitting the windshield. I wasn’t sure I could keep up. Of all the mysteries of life, nothing was more mysterious than the return of happiness. I was willing to wait.

I drove a little over a mile outside town to the place my parents had lost. It may have been absorbed into larger property around it, but in any case the house was long abandoned. I pulled into the yard and got out of the car. Then I walked across the footbridge that replaced the creek ford of a century ago, carrying my drink and making a desultory effort to recognize the birds around me. I followed the trail through a small forest of aspens, the dense canopy only here and there revealing the bright clouds and blue sky just then taking on the scrim of evening. I finished my drink and left the glass beside the trail.

The creek turned sharply toward the north as I left the aspens and they followed its bank. This created a tiny meadow protected from all normal winds, and in this meadow stood the oldest cottonwood I knew of. I’d been visiting this tree all my life. I didn’t think it was unusual for children to hit upon a favorite tree, and I believed that this early affinity came from a memory of a time when trees could be sacred; I felt no need to shake off this conception. Perhaps it sheltered Crow people. There was something too about this tree as an aerial being held from beneath the ground by the grand starburst of roots, life and death, with the earth as the threshold between worlds. I’ve courted this state at times all my life—comparing bones to the stones around the tree, breath to the wind, eyes to sunlight, head to the moon, and so on. I’m not sure what I got out of it, but I have always found in nature something of a cosmic liturgy.

The old tree stood alone, but to the east a few strides away its seed-bearing
flowers dispersed by insects and wind had created a forest of smaller trees. I sat at the base of the cottonwood, my back against its deeply furrowed gray bark, and looked up into the world of its branches toward its top, which might have been a hundred fifty feet away. The clouds of leaves and catkins blocked my view not far above my head; I knew that by midsummer fledgling birds would venture to the ends of its branches to begin their first attempts at flight, a skill that would take some to the sea, some to the pampas. Then all the leaves would float to earth and against a darker sky the somber outline of the great cottonwood would emerge and brace itself for the long winter; a willful crookedness of its limbs, defiant and imploring, suggested the long fight ahead. Here and there on our old place, one of these giants lay on its side, several tons of earth reared up around the tangled root ball, a few branches half a story high trying to live on. I used to hear them go down in windstorms all the way from the house and the abrupt subsidence, a welter of sounds, spoke certainly of the surrender of a great soul. It had been a long time since any of this was ours. I guess we couldn’t afford it.

The dispute with the board was finally resolved when Wilmot suddenly found other interests, something about a ski resort he’d invested in, and without his egging them on, the rest of the board slipped back into their customary status as airheads and boobs. Still, I found myself in bad odor with some of my colleagues for having continued to go to work as though there was no problem. That there turned out to be in fact no problem seemed to have little bearing on my situation, and so my discomfort was not alleviated. There was to be a staff meeting in the morning, and I think it was my dread of it that encouraged me to hook up with some old school chums and go on a bit of a bender at Pine Creek Lake. It was wonderfully just like high school. We had girls and a campfire, s’mores and an old M1 rifle to fire tracer shells into the night. One of my friends, a chiropractor from Miles City, was rolling blunts of high-octane BC bud, and I ended up sleeping in my Oldsmobile. Sad to say, I had to go straight to the dreaded staff meeting at the clinic, still half asleep, though not sleepy enough to relieve my apprehension at the sight of the reserve parking entirely occupied by the cars of doctors. My hair was filled with excelsior or some other packing material from a box of
Christmas lights that had been in the backseat of the Olds for a couple of years, and it was clear that a number of the fastenings to my clothing had not made the trip back to town. I was late but I was also a doctor.

Before entering the building, I took a long look around the outdoors—the blue sky, the lenticular clouds, the treetops encircling the pretty houses. What reluctance I felt, and what disinclination to enter. I was the last to arrive and far from reassured to see those assembled. Gary Haack, the orthopedic surgeon, was the first to remark on my arrival. Gary is a compact, youthfully muscular man, a tennis player and bachelor who takes his vacations in places such as East Timor. He sprawls in his chair like a highly paid linebacker bored at a team meeting, flipping the lid of his cell phone. He cried, “What happened to you?” I turned to the other jackals, who gazed at me with elevated eyebrows.

“Changing a tire on a dirt road. Ever try it?”

“After you changed the tire,” Gary asked, “did you spend the night under the car?” I ignored him.

“What’s the state of play here? Are we getting anything done? I see I’m late.”

Laird McAllister, the cold-blooded old family-practice guy, tented his hands and said, “Little to report, Berl. Lots of administration, not much medicine.” Laird had once famously remarked to a woman patient, “Cosmetic surgery being what it is today, there’s no reason in the world for you to go on living with a nose like that.” Jinx Mayhall looked like she was asleep, though she covertly watched me with a worried gaze. Alan Hirsch seemed pained by Haack’s aggressive tone.