Driving on the Rim (20 page)

I knew my way around the house well enough that, having left my pathologist’s hat behind, so to speak, I was able to stride straight to the bedroom—there was only one—and open the door slightly but enough to look in: a dresser, a bed, a photograph of Wiley at the Big Timber
rodeo—I recognized the grandstand—and making a small mound under her comforter, Gladys, at the extent of her life span as one of earth’s longest-living mammals. She seemed asleep—a tremendously different appearance than the airless gray look of the dead—and a pitcher of water on the stand at her bedside still had a few ice cubes floating. Good on Dale. I entered and sat at the foot of the bed.

Gladys opened her eyes and said, “It’s the end of me.”

“I don’t know if it is or it isn’t,” I said, “but you’ve lived a long time.”

It was a while before she answered. She said, “I suppose.” I think she must have drifted off. She seemed peaceful and even comfortable. This was looking like a fairly jolly segué considering the options of which as a physician I was aware, especially the brutal fights to live I had seen waged by accident and shooting victims during my ER days. Mortality and the sense of unfairness were poor bed companions.

Gladys dying made a modest bump. Nothing there to claim admiration for the thousands of miles she’d ridden through her herds, the horses, dogs, and husband she’d outlived, the thousand pies baked, the cattle cars she’d helped crowd, and the hours she’d listened to the radio wondering about the world. The Stetson hats it took a decade to rot out, the britches that went first in the seat, the war-surplus sunglasses she wore, the Ford tractor that after a quarter century could take no more of her abuse and died. The little flower bed in her front yard never got better; in fact, after Wiley died, it got worse.

She didn’t regain consciousness right away, and I could see that her respiration had declined markedly since she’d spoken her few words. I reached over and found her pulse at the carotid and, without trying very hard to count, got the impression it was down around forty. Gladys had every right to fade away and I had every intention of permitting it. If her throat muscles began to fail and the dreaded rattle began, there would be no intubation, which I felt violated the old. If she failed to wake up, we wouldn’t haul her to town and introduce isotopes to her system to determine whether or not there was blood flow to her brain, though that was just what a couple of the turkeys back at my clinic would do, especially if they were trying out some new machine. By keeping her right here on home ground, I would see to it that no one turned to hopeless ventilation out of some bogus respect for life, or moved her around strange places, for fear she would awaken at the end and not know where she was.

I was tired and struggled against objectless inertia, relieved only by lending my car to the still moping Dale and sending him to town for a pizza.

“Plain pizza,” he said, barely moving his lips.

“Surely not. With everything.”

“Even pineapple?”

“Yes, which reminds me: go by the Dairy Queen and pick up a Tropical Freeze. What d’you want?”

“Beer.” Then he cried out for emphasis, “
Beer!
”

“Get that too, but go to DQ last so the Tropical Freeze doesn’t melt.” I could see Dale bridle at this bit of micromanagement, but he said nothing before heading for my car, wavering off like a windblown rag.

When Dale was gone, I was free to sit on the porch, on an old church pew, and look out at the land. The base of ledge rock was deep in shadow, but the crown of grass was luminous gold in the late-evening sun. I’d had old ranchers tell me that the day always came when they realized the land didn’t care about them; I think it was a moment of despair. I don’t think Gladys had ever had such a moment: this was White Bird. The wild grass no more needed to care about anybody than the doorway to the house needed to remember Gladys and Wiley’s honeymoon. They were an unlikely couple: Gladys part horse and Wiley part cigarette.

I went back inside and gazed at her. I believed I saw great fading, but distrusted myself and got out my stethoscope. Her bowels were silent, her lungs were torpid, and her heart was lagging its own meter. I’d be lucky to finish my pizza before Gladys went through the pearly gates. While I insulated myself with such whimsy, I knew all along that when the moment arrived it would be impossible to remain unmoved. While the changes might be microscopic, the difference between life and death always communicated itself with terrible solemnity. A dead person looked nothing whatsoever like a living one. In anatomy class, we greeted our first corpse with unholy terror until the absence of its original owner sank in and we went to work on “it.” We had a well-muscled old six-footer and felt frightened only when someone put an R. G. Dun commemorative cigar in his lips: “
It’s a boy!
”

Dale arrived with the pizza and we sat out at the picnic table under the spreading ash with the great complicated disk before us to be eaten by hand. I tested my Tropical Freeze for firmness and concluded I could eat the pizza first. Dale ostentatiously picked the pineapple off his side of
the pie, and then separated a wedge to eat, indenting it skillfully in the middle with his forefinger so that the mozzarella wouldn’t run off. Dale had good pizza technique and I was not above copying it as we fell to. When he talked, he gobbled with his mouth full and, suddenly touched by the precariousness of his future, I was inclined to talk with my mouth full too.

“She’s all done, ain’t she?”

“All done.”

“Comfortable?”

“Out like a light.”

“When someone had a great life and don’t suffer, do you think it’s sad, Doc, when they go?”

“It will be when it happens. I don’t know why.”

“Big difference between here and gone?”

“Huge.”

Our pizza eating came to a stop. Deep thoughts. Everyone was implicated by every departure. As I looked at Dale, and heard his inappropriately profound voice, I realized that after Gladys was gone, he would face what to him would be a terrible emptiness.

“So what happens to the place?” There was something wild in his eyes when he asked.

“The lawyer will tell us or the State of Montana will tell us. I’ve been through this before and they never let the bodies cool.”

“She asked to be buried right here. Have the service sometime later.”

“Where’s ‘right here’?”

“In them trees. Right opposite Wiley. You were here.”

“I was?”

“Wait till you see how hard that ground is.”

I’d have to have a nap first, let all these pizza proteins restore my vitality. I didn’t even want to think about reorganizing my patient schedule. I was somewhat impatient this last time checking Gladys’s vital signs before returning to the Tropical Freeze, which Dale stared at after eating two-thirds of the pizza. “I’m not sharing,” I told him firmly.

Talking to Dale about Gladys’s long decline, I was pleased to notice how closely he had observed her. I did think that things at present were going about as they should: his account suggested a blood deficit to the
brain, with the usual neurological decline, a cruel scenario without hope of revision. There had been no big events, but the increasing recurrence of transient ischemia episodes was chipping away at her humanity and, as she had already beaten the odds, I was content with the present situation. If I dreaded anything, it was her revival. My stethoscope had already told me that the renewal of blood was hardly coursing, and all things considered, the end was at hand, as Gladys had herself seemed to know. I gathered from Dale that organized thought for Gladys was already slipping away. She’d been sputtering along until something happened that occasioned Dale’s summoning me; I supposed it had been a stroke, infarction of brain tissue, the oxygen cycle winding down toward the waiting stillness. Basically, it ends in a riddle. Meanwhile, Dale and I had not only pizza but sunshine and oxygen, those delicious metabolic elements of the ongoing. I suddenly felt joyous, with no doubts about intervening in Gladys’s situation. This above all things branded me a country doctor, and I fancied myself part of the countryside, a sort of pizza and Dairy Queen shaman.

“Doc, I don’t feel so good myself.”

“You’ve eaten too much.”

“I’m low-spirited.”

“You’ll have to work on that.”

This didn’t satisfy Dale, and it was time to check on Gladys, who was awake again, but barely. I leaned very close to her face so that she could see me. I thought she looked quite serene; she muttered something unintelligible about going to White Bird and closed her eyes. Something told me that they wouldn’t open again and she wouldn’t again speak. Dale slept in the bunkhouse and I slept on the sofa in the front room. I got up, washed my face at the kitchen sink with cold water, went into Gladys’s room and confirmed her death. She hadn’t moved since I’d seen her last, but whatever it was, was gone.

She left Dale the ranch, and in time Dale saw to converting it into real estate.

I
READ A COMIC BOOK VERSION
of
Don Quixote
when I was a boy, and then an abridged one as a young man, and finally I read it entirely in later years, and more than once. It was now part of my general memory, and some of its ideas emerged unexpectedly, especially when I was oppressed by the feeling that I was living my life under an evil star and that everything in life was circular—the seasons and so on—except human life, which hastened in a straight line to the end and, moreover, without hope of renewal. The death of Gladys, which I had attended with such sangfroid, had produced a delayed reaction that, as best I can tell, had to do with my final severance from the world of my childhood. I thought I had dealt with this long ago, but I must not have because I was very downcast and regarded my life, or anyone else’s, as an adventure dubious in the extreme. The part of Cervantes’s disquisition which had once given me hope I had memorized: “Many who have lacked the light of faith, being guided solely by the illumination that nature affords them, have yet attained to a comprehension of the swiftness and instability of this present existence and the eternal duration of the one we hope for.” As to this, Sancho Panza, who his master said feared lizards more than God, had the last word. To Sancho, death was a lady with no flesh on her bones; she was powerful but not squeamish and devoured every single thing that came her way. She on no account took a siesta and was “as hungry as a dog that never has its fill.” I did feel a truth in the idea that just beneath our follies and day-to-day distractions a terrible grinding mechanism was at work and had a full tank of gas. This was not necessarily a bad thing and gave gravity to our madness and ignorance, our persiflage, our deviousness and clamor for renown. In the news today,
placentas were being found in urban sewage. I don’t know if the Trade Center bombing just pushed this sort of thing to the surface, but since then we seemed to have lost a layer of skin. And such things as fate, which I had long since viewed as discredited, seemed to have come to life all over again.

Also, I’d say things lacked a certain sparkle. It was Lewis and Clark this and Lewis and Clark that; traveling dinosaur shows and children’s theater staged by aging potheads; ranchers scheming for a buyout and watching the inbound flights from either coast; and the political races for the state legislature in Helena: one notch above a greased-pig contest. Furthermore, I was losing my capacity to go along and get along with my more obstreperous patients. One fellow, a tousle-headed middle-aged wheat farmer from a small valley to the north, suffered, it seemed to me, from unreasonable pride in his origins, which he viewed with outlandish romanticism. While I took his blood pressure and felt his thyroid, which seemed a bit enlarged, he proudly went on about how suspicious the people in his valley were of anyone they hadn’t known for three generations. I agreed that people were very backward in his parts. With much animation, he explained that they had accustomed themselves to subsisting on what little the land and weather yielded. I explained that ignorance and shiftlessness seldom provided reasonable comforts. When he disclosed that his great-grandparents were all born in that same valley, I offered my most heartfelt sympathy. Of course, he went away mad and I doubt I’ll see him again. A doctor who views his patients as clay pigeons has seen better days. I’d by now had many come to me needing a kick in the ass more than any other treatment. You can’t urge them to change their habits or exercise; they just want to take something. Well, anyone could see where that was headed.

Some of my sickest patients have been those indifferent to mortal health issues. One woman thought she would go to outer space when she died and rarely followed my advice, and that reluctantly, because she feared landing on some strange planet only to be called “earthling” by the locals and never really being accepted. One old fellow told me, “It’s been a wonderful life. I wish I understood it.” Another had all sorts of intestinal problems from drinking rainwater out of a barrel. At my urging
he drilled a well but complained he “didn’t get enough water to run a washing machine.” I lost a twenty-five-year-old girl to suicide when all my pharmaceutical remedies had failed; her husband had “moved to Nashville to write cheatin’ songs.” Some of the problems in a region where energy development and resource extraction are king came from the battered values of small towns sitting in country desecrated in the search for platinum or gas or coal, whatever you can dig out, dam up, chop down, or sell: the wild world of philistine commercialism had its price even in places like mine. I didn’t always think in these terms, but stretched out on my office couch, listening to NPR and languidly guessing at a piano puzzler, I was inclined to be gloomy. If I bothered changing stations, it was On-Air Bliss for the Demented. It beat flailing. I put on a Pablo Casals suite for unaccompanied cello and felt way better. I promised myself to leave well enough alone with the single nurses, even acknowledging that one’s reputation as an accomplished wencher was at stake. Success in these matters resulted in the circulation of pheromones, which took the guesswork out of venery. I was just trying to give a sense of my daydreams, all of which were unrealistic, fanciful, or ironic.