Driving on the Rim (28 page)

The news had yet to spread, and things were altogether normal until early afternoon. I did a couple of physicals, ordered X-rays for an ankle injury that turned out to be a sprain. The young electrician was very disappointed it wasn’t broken, and I tried to console him. I should never have told him he could go back to work immediately, as it caused him to leave in a somber mood without a word to me. I was for a moment reasonably happy, handing out SSRIs and birth control pills with abandon. I ate lunch from the coin machines in the lobby while reading
Field & Stream
. Things started going downhill in the middle of the afternoon with unannounced cancellations, all my appointments, really. I sat alone in my office and watched clouds in my window. As the day heated up, the clouds moved a little faster, but that was about it for celestial change—i.e., no revelations except that I began to wonder whether I was actually guilty in some way and if, after a very long time rising from my unpromising origins, I was finally ruined.

I was, of course, guilty of the crime, but the victim wasn’t Tessa. Was this a technicality? Would honesty compel me to plead no contest? I had ethical standards to guide me from time to time, but they tended to flit in and out on the winds of that day’s mood. The great difficulty lay in my feeling no guilt for what I was being accused of. The actual source of my discomfort eventually came to me. We are most of us romantic enough to imagine that the perfect partner exists for us somewhere in the world. We know this is not true, the idea that only one other human being could suffice. But it doesn’t bother us that it is untrue, and that’s the essence of romance: indifference to truth. I felt that only one person could have been my life companion and that I had failed to recognize her through obstinate want of self-knowledge. It was Tessa. Who cared if she was an utter fright? She alone had understood me, and I had failed her. But did that constitute murder? Of course, she would have driven me completely crazy and that would have seemed sufficient motivation. When I thought of a lifetime with Tessa, a crime of passion seemed not out of the question.

I believed my colleague Gary Haack was someone who might have something heartening to tell me. He was a reasonable man, a secular man, free of all social juju, levelheaded in practice and in staff meetings, a man who made few bones about the fact that work was no more than a means to an end, no matter what kind of work it was. He once told me that if he spent a decade ministering to the victims of the atomic bomb, it still would be a means to more skiing and hot-air ballooning. I don’t know why we believed this thoughtlessness gave Dr. Haack some kind of authenticity, but I expect that the Hallmark card view of medicine had come to seem cloying: the kindly old shit in pince-nez and dangling stethoscope bending over the rosy-cheeked tomboy, a worried spaniel occupying a nearby rag rug. I also thought that the fact that Haack had never particularly liked me increased the chance of his being objective. I didn’t like him either, the asshole.

He was faced away from me, toward the window and its view of restricted parking. I announced myself, and he straightened slightly at the sound of my voice. He said, “Do please leave me out of this.”

I was taken aback. Walking the corridors, I found not a single face turned in my direction—plenty of backs, though. After the first moments
of paralysis and dismay, I sank into unexpected and unfamiliar rage. It came as a spiraling, helpless anguish and an abstract revulsion at my plight. But what was my plight? I was new to this pariah status and could have more readily accepted it if only a few of my patients had shown up. It also seemed to me now that self-pity was fuel for this fire and a powerful fuel it was. I don’t know if you can beat the anger and self-pity cocktail for real mayhem potential.

When I was in school I worked part-time as a telemarketer. It was surprising how many people, on hearing my message, told me to eat shit and die. Telemarketing was a distressing glimpse of human nature which I ought to have forgotten but hadn’t. It’s no damn use finding deficiencies in human nature, because sooner or later you spot them in yourself. My job was to sell candles over the phone: car candles, soy candles, church candles, scented candles, pillar candles, colored river rocks to go with your floating candles, votive candles, wedding and anniversary candles, citronella candles to keep bugs away, birthday candles. Always the same result—“Fuck you. Eat shit. Et cetera.” I’d tell them, “I know where you live, I’m gonna get you.” Then when I was an intern, I heard about people shoving candles up their rectums. I’ve had a lot of trouble with candles and they’ve
given
me a lot of trouble. You won’t find them in my house. I don’t know who thought them up in the first place. Poor light source anyway, and a fire hazard.

For several days, the nicest thing I heard about myself was that I was not a flight risk. On reflection, I found this offensive. After a rocky beginning, this town had tidied me up. No flight risk. No flight, period. I certainly didn’t want to go to prison.

The very thought slowly turned a leaf of dread inside. I have watched patients stare into the parking lot knowing that they were not to leave for the time being or, in other cases, ever. I found that more dreadful than violence. I’ve seen the anguish in a patient’s face when someone they were watching got in a car below their window and drove away.

You can’t leave
.

I avoided my office for nearly a week. Our receptionist had organized a small pile of message slips under an old souvenir letter opener from
Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia, where I had gone with a girl I thought I’d marry—two girls I thought I’d marry. There were several notes trying to explain cancellations “in view of the circumstances,” several solicitations, and one very short note. Some had left in the most extraordinary circumlocutionary style messages plump with exit strategies, in case I was acquitted. But back to the shortest of them all.

“Please call as soon as you can.” This from the crop duster. The delectable pilot. Jocelyn Boyce. I felt instinctively that it could change everything. Take this job and shove it, etc.

I stuck with my decision to use Niles Throckmorton as my lawyer. To begin with, he was so passionate about my case. Hadn’t he called when I had not even been charged with anything? Too many lawyers are inclined to gloat at the misfortune of doctors, but Niles was an old friend. Still, I was surprised at his enthusiasm. I guessed that would be a good thing, but though I am misfortunate, it is not my mission to help others gloat.

The death of my mother was a very confusing occasion. I can’t say we were close, that wasn’t it. Her periods of “rest” at various institutions increased her distance from us. At the end, adult-onset asthma, which had for a long time predisposed her to bacterial infections, resulted in one that we ultimately couldn’t control. I say “we” because for obvious reasons I didn’t want to be alone on that one, and because I sensed that she couldn’t wait to get out of here (earth) and be on her way to a better place (heaven) and was making very little effort to stay. I could see why the death of persons with those views persuades others of their truth; Mama’s peace and delight at dying gave the three attending doctors, including me, the inspirational feeling that here was a person who had just left behind a burdensome vessel, her body. Perhaps we could see how the body was an ongoing annoyance, and she seemed so glad to go. The three of us definitely felt exalted and disturbed. But my father’s ill-concealed relief gave rise to secondary confusion, though time helped me understand that the oppression of her religious views had lifted at last. After decades of faithfully attending those noisy services—which I now read as simple devotion to my mother—he never went again; and when that muscle-bound whack job of a pastor made his third importuning visit to the house, my father slammed the door in his face so vehemently that we went to the window to see if the pastor was still on his
feet. Flying coattails disappearing into a four-door sedan were our reward. My father ostentatiously dusted off his hands, and that was that.

My situation, under the law, was so fraught with ambiguity that I wondered why I found it comfortable. My earnings were at an end, though I was in no peril economically, having reasonable savings and even a few investments. Stranger still was my indifference to all things my income might have provided. My eating had long been confined to basic needs, I used only one light in the house, and I had all but quit driving my car. As I walked I felt the aura of my disgrace shine out before me like the beams of headlights. Seeing familiar faces turn away fascinated me. Human entanglement was so tiresome that if we were of sound ego, we would find it exhilarating to arouse disgust in others. Besides being guilty of the death of Cody Worrell and knowing guilt was guilt, I could well accept the fact that the people of my town considered me guilty of the death of Tessa.

My mother’s Southern—that is, Ozarkian—origins afforded her several distinctions compared to neighbors, and among them was a taste for what she called without bigotry “race music,” a kind of postwar rhythm and blues that she played on our home Victrola. God knows where she got the records. And she had a source for moonshine: both my parents drank it, but not with the feral abandon associated with that substance. They treated it as a superior liqueur and sipped it on special occasions. My father said, “It’s just bourbon, but it’s handmade.” I do remember them once having more than a taste and dancing on the exhausted linoleum of our kitchen floor in modest abandon to Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88,” after which my father said plainly that he never wanted to hear that song again. My mother danced with a lot of soul and seemed faintly amused at my father’s rhythmless hopping around.

I had some success in going on about my business as though things were normal, and in an odd way they
were
. I even popped in at the clinic on one pretext or another, getting this and that from my office or merely amiably greeting my former colleagues. I did so often enough that at first they grew somewhat accustomed to seeing me; then they seemed to have forgotten the charges against me, and finally a bit of compassion emerged from one or two of them.

Some nights I was terrified.

I lay sweating on sheets overdue for changing and racked my brain for happier days. Often I went back to my hours as a house painter but could never quite put my finger on what I had liked about that besides its inconsequentiality. I did remember the pleasure of making something change color.

Whenever Jinx wished to see me, she always just came to my office or any other empty room I was purported to be in, as there was a certain informality about working spaces at the clinic. This time, she had our receptionist call and ask me to “stop by at my convenience.” I didn’t like the sound of that at all. But I went. I found Jinx in the consultation room she had staked out as her own, much the most commodious, and originally meant as a sort of conference room, her intense, intelligent, battle-ready face already fixed in the ominous pause that would precede her remarks and her graceful body propped against the broad, paper-stacked desk that also held the odd assortment of hats she cycled through during the week. She tried hard to avoid being beautiful, but it wasn’t working. I didn’t have to say anything. I merely raised my eyebrows inquiringly.

“Close the door.” I did. “Well, sport, it’s coming your way.”

I
N RETROSPECT
, I realized that the tone of my working world had changed with Wilmot’s installation on our small board of directors. At first it was hard for me to see how this could have happened. Wilmot had money in ample supply, which often proved a cipher for personal capacity. It mattered little if you found it under a rock: it was yours and it spoke volumes about your merit. Moreover, he’d quickly risen among his fellow directors to the chairmanship. That was when he’d begun to call in efficiency experts and to insist on more-stringent board oversight, down to the appointment of nurses. We doctors also saw to the small rest home, which relied on minimally qualified but mostly competent caregivers. Wilmot got his mitts on this too, and we had a lot of devastating resignations as he called on various employees, including impoverished older women, to supply professional bona fides. For a short time, the old folks were virtually abandoned to the whims of family members and doctors like me who found time to enter their exceedingly gloomy world and provide what minimal help we could while the draconian fallout that showered down from Wilmot settled. I think that seeing our cardiologist, Alan Hirsch, operate a waffle iron at daybreak in that shadow world made us realize how far off course things had drifted.

A special meeting was called and it stopped just short of acrimony. We doctors politely informed the board that a certain flexibility was required in a small town where the employment pool contained not just the niche-ready, trained personnel but ordinary citizens willing to adapt to things that were as new to them as they might be to us. Wilmot seemed to listen politely from where he sat at the end of the board table in blazer and perky spotted bow tie embedded in his
ruddy neck. Only his eyebrows, oddly antic, gave any indication that he heard us at all. The board members—salesman, dentist, and housewife—especially seemed uneasily deferential to Wilmot, who had not spoken; even the usually argumentative rodeo clown, a middle-aged cowboy in tight jeans, large belt buckle, and snap-button shirt who had been a scourge for our lackadaisical bill collecting, kept his trap shut today. Doctors are reliable guardians of their own cheese balls, but the divagations of human nature led them to occasionally notice the straitened circumstances of some fellow humans. I later assumed that this reticence of the board had been a prearranged stage setting for what followed: a blistering call for the members of the clinic to raise our standards of efficiency and expertise. It was an astonishing performance, since Wilmot to all appearances hardly knew what he was talking about, a fact that had little effect on his rant. Gripping one wing of his bow tie between thumb and forefinger while he shook the forefinger of the other hand at us, he demanded that we act … like grown-ups!