Driving on the Rim (22 page)

Jinx reminded me of a girl from the forties—the thick russet hair, the smart but unprovocative clothes. I thought she looked like Gene Tierney. She had never had a steady male friend, leading to several inferences: that she was gay, that her longing for children led to her career in children’s medicine. Neither was true. She had flings on adventure cruise ships to Antarctica or Cape Horn—“To get it out of my system”—and was unsentimental about children to the point of indifference. Her interest in them—indeed, her passion—was entirely clinical. Only the children recognized this: they were not drawn to her. Her renown was based altogether on her success in treating them. She was such a good friend of mine that when others viewed her sexually, it annoyed me—which should have been a sign. We had a little spell in which we turned into a couple of drunks. That was fun. It just amazes me now: we’d sit around my house and talk, half fried, and never lay a hand on each other.

A year or two ago, in the spring, I went up to the headwaters of a mountain creek and brought back a dozen small, gorgeous brook trout, which encrusted with
panko
lay before us on a platter, surrounded by broad homegrown tomatoes, new potatoes, sliced Spanish onions, and Manchego cheese. I bought the cheese next to the railroad station that morning under the scrutiny of a hulking man with a black moustache, massive under his nose. He stared at me with such intensity that I awaited his coming outburst with grim patience. At last it came. “
My God, I love Manchego.
” Jinx had taken on the lassitude one associates with old historians or bookshop operators who hate their customers, a possible effect of the cold bottle of Riesling we’d shared. “That was a goodish white, didn’t you think? What else is there to drink with these minnows? I feel drawn toward inebriation.” We had another bottle, some stony-tasting thing, after which Dr. J began eating the little trout with her hands. Watching her languid moves as she ate, I felt my heart race. Then she was merry and laughed to herself. She plucked a brochure for Airstream trailers from her purse, held it in front of me, and said, “This is how Americans must live.” I remembered when, years ago, the Wally Byam Caravan came to our town and filled the IGA parking lot with their silver Airstreams. A group of hippies parked in the midst of
them, wrapping their old vans in aluminum foil from the IGA, and smoked marijuana in broad daylight while making sardonic forays into socializing with the Airstream people. Anyway, Jinx bought the Airstream but never took it anywhere. Finally, it became a kind of office, and from it she published papers in pediatrics. When we had finished the brook trout and the rest of the wine, Jinx gave me her lowering, authoritarian look and advised me to take a real inventory of my life. “Any life,” she said, “consists of myriad elements, two-thirds of which are superfluous. The gift of living lies in enlarging the discard pile as we move to our true gestalt.”

“Our who?”

“Purpose.”

“Of course that’s what you said.”

I found myself examining the figures in my napkin, some old linen my mother had prized. Jinx had risen from the table and was standing at a mirror over the sideboard; then she stuck her tongue out at her own image and returned to the table.

She said, “I wish we’d get a phone call.”

“I know what you mean.”

“There are automated messages, weather and so forth.”

“I think we can do better than that, Jinx.”

“There’s always work.”

“There’s always work.”

“And we are useful, which is quite different from indispensable.” Jinx stared into space and said, “A couple of sad caregivers.”

This seemed unimaginably despairing, and I put the sounds of the humpback whale on my modest sound system. This had a terrific effect on us as the room filled with their oceanic howls. We arose and circled the table with an undulant gait, imitating the movement of the great marine mammals. It seemed as we came up for breath, our spirits rose too. When the recording was stopped, she plopped back into her chair. “Nothing like the sea,” she said. I noted in an utterly abstract way the light falling on the side of her face, candlelight.

“More are cured by salt air than all our ministrations combined,” I groggily proposed. “The people who live near the sea have more plausible ideas about mortality than mountain people, who from birth tend to
be a bubble and a half off plumb—not to mention the empty schemers of the prairie, who covet everything between themselves and the farthest point they can see. They drive enormous automobiles and race them at the horizon hoping to expand the objects of their greed. As new things rise up toward them they are seized by a sort of mania, and this goes on until they run out of gas.”

“How right you are,” Jinx murmured, face resting on her palm. “I’m a prairie person and it’s so easy for me to see those folks parked at the end of the world. Life was never easy for them, but there comes a day when it’s time to leap into the void, leave that Cadillac behind.”

Another bottle, a lovely Pedro Domecq, seemed quite harmles, and we went at it with respectful restraint, talking about the “busy bees” at the clinic, the “clueless” we billed. “We’re cloaked in ignorance,” said Jinx, “and yet they come to us with open hearts.”

“A good thing too,” I twanged. I tapped the neck of the Domecq with the ball of my forefinger. “This don’t go for the same as soda pop.” I was just trying to be funny—but my ER days had given me, as it had given others, a certain detachment. No good came of lamentation over the mangled we had to put right. They seemed pleased enough, coming and going on gurneys as was their wont.

I had a houseguest named Clancy Boyer, who had been a classmate of mine at medical school before he dropped out and went into commercial real estate, at which he prospered. Clancy still lived in Ohio, but he came out each year to hunt and stayed with me. He was a dark-complected, wonderfully fit, lanky sportsman who hiked alone in the mountains with a lightweight .270 Winchester over his shoulder, an old-fashioned big-game hunter who did it the hard way and lived on wild meat despite the riches of commercial real estate. He packed out quarters of mule deer or elk from the far reaches of the local mountains, sometimes making two or three trips on foot. I thought Clancy would be just perfect for Jinx, and so I fixed them up. I don’t know where they went or what they did, but Clancy didn’t get back to my house until three in the morning.

I blew up.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” I demanded. Jinx had given me pajamas for Christmas and I had put them on, thinking that coming
down the stairs in only my shorts and the heat of indignation wouldn’t do. I failed to notice until it was too late that the pajamas’ depiction of French Pierrot-type clowns throwing colored hoops in the air could have made me look ridiculous at a time when I meant to be taken seriously.

“What business is it of yours?”

“ ‘What business is it of mine’? Is it necessary to point out to you that this is my house?”

Clancy looked at me in astonishment, walked out the door jingling his car keys between thumb and forefinger, and was gone. I have not seen Clancy since. The next day Jinx said that she thought Clancy was a goon. “I know a goon when I see one,” she said, but the whole thing was for my benefit and I saw right through it. We were painfully uncomfortable.

N
ILES
T
HROCKMORTON HAD BEEN CALLING
frantically, and I guessed someone had advised him—before advising me!—that I was about to have a problem. Up until then, I’d thought Jinx was off her rocker. I didn’t even try to understand it. I felt that would just be complicity. Nor did I expect to see Officer Seaver again, and I told him so. He smiled in a way that let me understand he saw right through me. Meanwhile, Throckmorton just couldn’t seem to get enough of my problem. The first thing he said to me was, “I called and left a message on your chickenshit answering machine. Turn that thing in to the county museum. Fucking sprocket noise is off the charts.”

In fact, I was disconcerted by his enthusiasm for a couple of reasons: I had known Niles most of my life, and while he certainly respected my modest rise from abject stupidity, I remained a somewhat indelible dunce to everyone who had known me since my boyhood; furthermore, Throckmorton was considered by some to be more or less crazy.

Everything changed. What once seemed absorbing society for such a small place was replaced by a queer sense of thinness. I felt isolated. I reviewed all the responses from my colleagues after the death of Tessa, asking myself if I now saw in their condolences something else, and of course I began to think that indeed I did see something else, less accusatory than slyly knowing. That was worse, doubly so because I wasn’t sure I had seen it at all.

Looking back as I now could, I noticed first my inexplicable concern with the pressure of my tires. As I drove along on perfectly good pavement, I would sense imbalances in all four wheels. I sometimes pulled
over to have a look, but could find nothing amiss. So I bought a tire gauge and checked the respective pressures, sometimes more than once a day, and if I found them uneven, sometimes by only a pound or two, I headed for a gas station immediately.

Also, if the moon was more than half full and the tree shadows around the house too sharp, I had to sleep with a mask over my eyes but woke up at every coyote or owl. At one particularly low point I awakened to imagine that coyotes and owls were in cahoots, calling across my darkened yard and laying plans for me which I might not have enjoyed. It didn’t help when one of the horned devils fluttered to rest on the outside windowsill.

My first inkling of the general view in town that Tessa had died of foul play and that she had died in my hands and on my watch and that there was a connect which, for the nonce, would not be formally made, arrived at the coin-operated car wash where I lovingly bathed my Oldsmobile; in the next bay a blue Lexus pulled out as I deposited my quarters and parked by the vacuum cleaner, and from it emerged the vice president of our local agricultural lender, Enid Lawlor. She was tall, a former basketball player, and groomed in the style of an old Hollywood pinup, with blatantly bleached blond hair in a long pageboy and a slightly mannish blue suit with pants that flared over spike heels. She kept her fingernails long, bloodred and perfect. She stood her purse on the roof of the car as she vacuumed the inside and didn’t notice me until she saw me through the rear window of her own car while she vacuumed the backseat. She stopped everything. I kept my wand moving the spray over my Oldsmobile and wondered what Enid had in store for me. Her swinging gait in those high-heeled shoes seemed to convey a lively menace.

“You’ve been making yourself scarce!” she cried. I said that I didn’t think I had, but I had been working hard and at the expense of some objectivity about my patients so that their lives were becoming entirely too much a part of mine.

“Enid, I don’t even see you at the clinic. You still use us, don’t you?”

“I’m never sick.”

“Well, good. I hope it stays that way.”

I happened to know something about Enid’s bawdy sense of humor, which I saluted without having been its beneficiary. Jerry Kagy, one of
our general practitioners, had taken a crash course in sigmoidoscopy, which he abandoned because his rough and unpracticed technique was producing complaints for the whole clinic; we had to ask him to stop. Enid was one of his earliest attempts as part of her annual physical; I gather that she was essentially naked on some sort of examining table while Jerry, like a student driver, awkwardly manipulated the flexible sigmoidoscope in her rectum, intermittently inflating the lower bowel to better examine its lining. Lacking much experience, Jerry, a heavyset, redheaded, and rather monstrous-looking man, repeatedly overinflated the bowel, causing Enid to loudly break wind. In response to her gruesome situation, Enid looked over her shoulder at the sweating Jerry Kagy and said, “Doctor, have I ever told you that I love you?” Kagy, entirely lacking a sense of humor, abruptly ended the exam and left Enid to dress in the empty room. Kagy told us the story himself, and we marveled that he had no idea Enid was trying to be funny. He thought she was in love with him. Well aware of the shortcomings of his technique, we found her heroic.

“It’s so sad,” Enid said to me, “that poor Tessa is gone, don’t you think? Don’t you think she had a place here?”

“She must not have thought so.”

“Oh?”

“Why else would she have done away with herself?”

“Is that what she did?” Enid asked carefully, looking at me the while. I saw where this was headed. It was headed for an old issue that had nothing to do with Tessa, but if it arrived there, I felt, the consequences would be bad. I immediately attempted to quell its progress.

“That’s what she did.”

Enid gazed at me for a moment, then, without a word, she got in her car and left.

At the clinic, I was routinely cheerful, a mad if mechanical greeter by name of all I saw, but since the rumors, I looked on myself doing this—the same as I had always done—as though I were watching a busker at some street fair addressing the monkeys. While I knew what had happened to Tessa and felt sufficiently guilty in a maddeningly nonspecific way, it seemed I was even guiltier because others thought that I had done
away with her. That it was not true seemed to make little difference. If I failed to find my way out of this mess I was very liable to become a murderer in my own eyes, because when I went over Tessa’s last hours to reassure myself, Cody would suddenly appear. I recognized an emergency: something which could ruin me in my own eyes, despite the fact that “ruin” was a word that came with a faint romantic whiff. The sensation of being trailed by false rumor was its own lure, a costume drama, just behind which lurked something far worse. At my lowest point, not many days after my latest dinner with Jinx, I admitted cultivating an enigmatic smile, even, for instance, while checking my tire pressure. Anyone electing to be touched by my plight will recognize that I was merely holding the wolf at bay with what feeble means were at hand, though I had nightmares in which my struggle to save Tessa in all its visceral detail was converted into something ghoulish and horrible, the face of a dying Tessa replaced by Cody’s innocent gaze. It was not hard to see that something awaited me from which no good could come.