Driving on the Rim (3 page)

I learned a great deal during my stays with Gladys and Wiley, and I was well fed. Wiley taught me to smoke cigarettes, something I no longer do but still miss and plan to resume late in life. And Gladys taught me over the many times I stayed on the ranch about the hard, wordless love of some country women who lead by example in these out-of-the-way places.

Gladys also liked cigarettes. Sometimes the three of us smoked instead of talking, in individual styles: Wiley rarely took the cigarette from his mouth and squinted one eye; Gladys held hers in an elevated manner between the first two fingers of her hand; I pinched mine between thumb and forefinger and sometimes sucked up the smoke that
rose from the ash. Paper sticking to lips, irregular burning, the advent of filters, assaults by the surgeon general—all came under discussion. When we watched TV, I felt stylish lacing my hands behind my head, slouching in my chair, and allowing the cigarette to hang from the exact center of my mouth. We liked to fill that room with so much smoke you could barely see the screen. I enjoyed forcing one or the other to remind me that my ash was about to fall. The hiss when I dropped a burning butt into a beer can as Wiley fussed with the volume control was a memory that would recur long after Wiley was gone. Horses and farm equipment were dangerous and produced a fatalistic culture impervious to health warnings.

I irrigated, fixed fence, cut cedar posts, rewired the calving shed, repudiated the government, ate three squares a day, and borrowed Wiley’s International truck to pay regular visits to Tessa, who treated me like something she might have acquired at a pet store. That was just fine with me, though. I only wanted to be around her.

Tessa soon took charge of my life. She would have given me money if she’d known I needed it. Instead, she decided that it would be good if we did something together, just for fun. “Mr. Hoxey feels terrible about all that has happened,” she said. “He wants to treat us to a night on the town.” That Friday, we signed up for tango lessons.

Tessa and I and six other couples entered the Elks Hall, with its terrible acoustics and all-consuming clamminess. We were conventionally dressed, I in a secondhand sport coat and wide tie, Tessa in a black sheath that struggled to encase her well-muscled shape. The others were more South American in style, hot-red lipstick on their small-town faces, tortoiseshell combs in swept-up hair. The men had gone with a pomaded look that spoke of their sense of mission. They seemed to smolder in anticipation of their future proficiency.

Our instructor was Juan Dulce, or just Dulce, a genuine Argentine who worked his way around the American West giving lessons. He had created a real interest in the tango in the most unlikely places—cow towns, oil towns, uranium towns, coal towns—where such a hint of another kind of life carried a special allure. He was perhaps sixty, thin as a herring in his striped pants, formal black coat, ruby cravat, and stacked heels. His hair, slicked to his skull, emphasized eyes that seemed to
belong to some sort of marine creature. He was without humor in conveying the sacredness of his mission. I doubt that I shall forget the sight of him standing on a Pepsi crate and pouring out his introductory remarks in a deep and vibrant voice that seemed to make the room hum.

“When I am fifteen in Buenos Aires, I am longing for love and suffering and, above all, success—the hope of becoming a legend of our hot and drowsy tango. I underwent numberless deprivations, but success would reward the sensual designs that I displayed in many venues. Now the money I earn is exchanged for my fatigue, but I have no other way to go, and there are days I awaken upon wretchedness. Once I converted my dancing of three weeks’ duration by a pocket ruler into three hundred seventy-two kilometers. Still, tango is all! Without tango, my face inspires doubt. Therefore, my advice is, press your tango to great advantage! And now we begin.”

He turned on the big sound system, which had hitherto been employed to enlarge the voices of prairie politicians bent on higher office or nostalgic Scandinavian chorales with cow horns on their heads. The system had astounding capacity, and as the old tangos were broadcast by Dulce, the room was filled with the somber, inevitable cadences of this prelude to intercourse. At school, I had not only enjoyed several instances of copulation—albeit with Mr. Goodwrench staring down at me—but I had seen it explained on huge blackboards, so that there could never be any doubt about what was going on.

We began to learn the little steps, in the chest-to-chest Argentine style. We arranged ourselves counterclockwise and concentrated on maintaining our space between the other dancers. The great power of Tessa, at first exhilarating, gave way to apprehension, as though I were riding an unruly horse, and when I failed to comprehend the crossover steps as required by Dulce, Tessa, a determined expression on her face, used her might to drag me into position. To avoid humiliation, I attached myself by my wiry grasp to her flying carcass. Her cry of alarm brought Dulce to our side and the other dancers to a dead halt just as I was beginning to enjoy myself.

“
Señor!
Grappling has no place in our national dance!”

“I cannot follow her movements,” I explained in an accent accommodatingly identical to Dulce’s, which I found infectious.

“You are not to follow—you are to lead!”

“It’s my fault,” Tessa said. “I lost patience with him during the first
abrazo
. He just seemed lost. I’ll try to do better.”

“Perhaps, this is the time to work on our syncopation,” Dulce said sternly to both of us, “with greater respect for the movements of each other.”

“The music is unfamiliar,” I explained. “You don’t happen to have ‘La Bamba’?” He held his head and moaned as though he’d been shot.

The other couples had deftly caught on to the oddly triangular chests-together, feet-apart position. An older pair of bottle blonds, obviously trained in other kinds of ballroom dance, made an effort to slide past us. The woman had a fixed and toothy Rockettes smile, and at close range she caught my eye and called out, “Piece of cake!”

I gave Dulce my word that I would syncopate respectfully, and I proceeded in earnest. At first, Tessa complimented me on my “good hustle,” but she soon proved unequal to my speed and dexterity. Whatever had been going on in my life up to that point came out in my tango, and the exultation I began to experience was interrupted only when Tessa let out a real showstopper of a screech. Then Dulce came between us and made the mistake of laying hands on me. Insofar as I retained a modicum of male pride, this quickly devolved into a dusty floor battle, with the raucous music of Argentina and the angry sounds of interference from the other students. With their help, I was flung into the street. “Good night, Doctor!” I realized that Tessa had told the others that I was already out of medical school and that she was no cradle robber.

I recall feeling breathless and completely without direction as I allowed Tessa to take charge of our stroll home. She stopped momentarily, between two old commercial buildings, not far from the railroad yard, looked straight at me, and said, “Boo. Hiss.” We went on. “I’m lucky you didn’t request Mannheim Steamroller,” she added. I was defeated. “Now don’t be offended, and more importantly, don’t walk in front of that car,” she said. “I realize you aren’t attracted to me, are you?”

“That’s not the real story,” I replied. “I just need a little encouragement.” At these two sentences, uttered with such sincerity, Tessa responded with visible pleasure.

“Then let me tell you my own fears. Why? Because you’re adorable. Of course you’re a complete idiot, but within that, there is a certain
appeal. But I have fears, too. Isn’t that real friendship, to tell someone your fears? You could have been extremely disagreeable about those phone calls.”

“What good would it have done?”

“None, but how many would recognize that? I sense that you have a good heart, a good heart trapped in a self that is a hop, skip, and jump from kiddie day care. Obscene phone calls from a stranger are intolerable. But when they come from someone you know, particularly a deluded old walrus like Hoxey, well, they don’t arouse quite the same wrath. The right to revenge belonged to you, and you declined to take it. Mr. Hoxey and I are in your debt.”

I had a clear glimpse here of the sensible side of Tessa, and a hunch that she would end up a friend, which rather worried me because she was the sort who might anchor me and teach me to accept reality, such as it was then emerging.

“How about you just walk me home?” she said finally. “That work for you?”

“Sure,” I said, my voice rising.

We paused at the railroad tracks to watch a big northern express rip through. She peered intently, and I positioned myself behind her so that it looked like the train was pouring into one of her ears and out the other. I knew then that I would kiss her. I suppose it took ten minutes for us to get back to the house, during which time Tessa did her level best to spill out her hopes and dreams, which were honest and simple: ride old man Hoxey into the ground and clean out his estate. This wasn’t how she put it, naturally. Her concern was expressed as a passion for aesthetic rarities. “No one knows the inventory as I do. No one cares as I do, and no one knows the importance of getting it into strong and caring hands as much as I do.” I didn’t say anything, and I suppose she took my silence as censorious. We entered her apartment. Before pushing the door shut behind her, she said, “At the end of the day, it is what it is.” I wondered what that meant. Of course, it is what it is, and it didn’t even have to be the end of the day to be what it was. I couldn’t understand this sort of thing at all, and in a way kissing someone who said things like that was even more confusing.

When I did it, it was with the kind of apprehension one feels on placing
a cocked mousetrap in a promising corner. She held me at arm’s length, giving me what one of my professors had called the pre-copulatory gaze. Tessa seemed ominous. I thought of the Big Bang Theory, wherein a tiny speck of matter mysteriously expanded to fill the universe.

I said, “What do you think?” My heart pounded.

She said, “Let’s give it a whirl.”

We made love on the couch. I performed in a state of amazement at all that skin, Tessa egging me on with smutty cries. She asked, “My God, who taught you to do it like this?” and I said, “My aunt.” And she said, “Oh God, no, please not your aunt. No details, thank you very much!” Skin everywhere! She said, “I wonder if you could change your expression. I can barely do this.” When I reached that point to which all our nature aspires and where the future of the species is spasmodically assured, she gave a great sigh and remarked, “Never a dull moment.”

I
WAS NEARLY MIDDLE-AGED
before I learned that my mother’s hometown in Arkansas was not called, as my father had said, “Crackeropolis.” It was Ayers. Ayers, Arkansas. When I figured this out, I then invested way too much time in analyzing my father’s odd little satire. Was it contempt for my mother’s origins? Probably he was just being funny; but I wasn’t sure. I did a bit of research on Ayers and learned that it was the site of an annual slasher film festival held in a big old Art Deco movie theater that was in the registry of historic buildings. Otherwise, a quiet soybean town peopled by farmers in dashboard overalls.

Unwinding my mother’s pointed remark to my father to the effect that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, I eventually grasped that it referred to his few droplets of Cree blood. My father always pretended to be of French Canadian stock, but I’d heard from other of his relatives that they were originally mixed-race folk who worked the lime kilns after the buffalo disappeared. All those people went back and forth between here and Canada looking for work and so got into the habit of saying they were French Canadians as a way to avoid being called half-breeds. The war and generations of marriage evaporated all that, turning that class of folk into garden-variety Americans with slightly exotic names like mine. My full name, Irving Berlin Pickett, will never find its way into common usage.

When I was in my teens I bought a set of drums: a snare, a bass with a foot pedal, and a broad, handsome Zildjian cymbal. I didn’t go far, much past Gene Krupa’s “Lyonnaise Potatoes and Some Pork Chops,” which I got off a 78 rpm record called
Original Drum Battle: Gene Krupa & Buddy
Rich
and which I blasted for weeks out the window of my parents’ house, exhibiting early and alarming antisocial tendencies aggravated by my rhythmless accompaniment. One day the drum set was gone.

“Where’s the drums at?” I demanded of my parents with a fierceness neither I nor they had ever seen. I was just back from school and close to going off the deep end when they said—and I knew it was a lie—that they didn’t know where the drums “was at.” A neighborhood tipster, one Mrs. Kugel, a member of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church and so an enemy of my parents and their Holy Roller ways, confided that my drums were in the town dump. So they were: I stood on a cold winter day staring at them, crushed among the DeSoto parts, shattered lava lamps, and sundry garbage, paper, and dry-rot wood. I was alone with three crows.

Those drums had enabled me to dominate my household and substantial parts of the neighborhood without resort to ideas or speech. I was practicing, I explained, to join a big band like that of Harry James, he of the screeching trumpet. This last detail was entirely strategic, as Harry James was known to me only as a favorite of my parents, who, with their big black vinyls treasured in original sleeves, sometimes fell into music-induced reminiscence of the war years, even to the point of dancing by candlelight while I presumably slept. Their necking during “You Made Me Love You” grossed me out, as it would have any youngster observing his parents being happy in quite that way. I didn’t want to join a swing band, whatever that was; I wanted to rule by noise, and in that I had entirely succeeded. Until the day the drums vanished.

Certainly my parents had made off with them, and I am in no doubt about the great courage required to cross their only child, but their lives had become unbearable: when I was not drumming, I was playing
Drum Battle
from my room and down the stairwell. My father read his newspaper in the backyard. I now see with shame that our home was really not habitable.