Driving on the Rim (37 page)

“Come here,” called Jinx. I had to look carefully to see her about twenty yards away in her nearly camouflaged clothes. I started that way. “I’ve got her.” When I reached Jinx, she was holding the goshawk by the corners of her wings. She had been shot.

Jinx said, “You’re just bad luck.” I felt, and must have looked, quite crestfallen because she put her arm around my waist and said she was sorry about my hawk.

We went to breakfast at a café by the switching yard, thinking we’d beat the morning crowd, but we didn’t and had to wait for a table. The ambient noise, a miasma of voices and silverware, was substantial. Desperate-looking waitresses navigated the crowd with plates aloft. I got a few stares but had been getting used to that. Quite soon, four ranchers rose and walked past us to the cash register picking their teeth, and we took their table. They wore the big Stetsons they would replace with billed caps as soon as they got home. Three of the ranchers faced the cashier, but one had turned to look at me. “A splendid bird like that,” said Jinx. “Someone just couldn’t stand the pressure. I’m glad I don’t know who it was. It might be someone I delivered and I’d just hate myself for missing my chance.” I compulsively did the math: Jinx was a bit over forty, with enough years of practice in the community to have delivered someone now armed.

When she was indignant, her eyes flashed; she had beautiful eyes. Even when we had both grown old I was fascinated by them. She once said, “My eyes and my ass are my long suits. I’m no sweater girl and without emphatic breasts life in the U.S. can seem quite proscribed.” That had been at one of our wine-soaked dinners at my house at which I grew so alarmed at Jinx’s intimations and proximity. I’m not sure why.
She might have been too smart for me at that stage of my life. Now that I was somewhat shriven by circumstances and Jinx had begun to accept me as an unadulterated friend—someone to go birding with or share a ride to racquetball—I saw more in her. My mistakes seemed to accumulate like channel markers behind a boat. But at least I had a friend; I was sure of that.

Jocelyn came into town a couple of times a week, and we usually slept together after I’d taken her to dinner or helped her stock an odd array of supplies: hose clamps, fuel bladder, energy bars, distilled water, anti-icing spray, electrician’s tape, multipurpose tools. I wasn’t much interested in what these things were for, and my casual inquiries were waved away wearily. I had always been wary of sex as something which imposed a not always welcome bonding; it reminded me of those old movies in which a storm strands a group in a bus station or some likewise unpleasant place and they all slip through layers of unearned intimacy, like it or not. I actually fell in love with my aunt, who shooed me away after getting what she wanted. But this was different. I had not bonded with Jocelyn. I was not at all sure I liked her. And while I realized it was irrational to make the connection, the more I saw Jocelyn, the more trouble I had with the 88. At first it wouldn’t start, because power was only intermittently getting from the ignition to the solenoid. I had to change a headlight, which was unreasonably difficult as there was no room to get a hand or tools in there. Once I had it running, it smoked too much and I drove through town followed by a white cloud. Otherwise, it went along okay until the following Saturday, when having made love to Jocelyn again, I began getting alarming noises from the water pump and idler pulley, which, combined with the smoking exhaust and unreliable starting, made me think my car was about three fucks from the wrecking yard. I didn’t actually believe this; it was just a feeling, an association. If we could have made love just once without my car going haywire I believe that feeling would have gone away. It was disquieting. I had gotten used to the non-working dome light, the malfunctioning passenger-side window, and the water trapped in the trunk lid, but the correlation of these new failures to my sex life was unusually troubling. My car had run beautifully for five days when I ran into Jocelyn behind the IGA
store and we had a bit of a grope. Jocelyn went on her way and I went on mine, but for the first time in over a hundred thousand miles there was a screeching knock in the steering column which was never resolved, while the heater blew only cold air. I realize that this was some sort of automotive route to erectile dysfunction, and I enjoyed all the attendant irony, but what else was I to conclude?

At some point I said to the old man, “Tell me, Pop, what made you desert?” We had just brought a load of well-weathered cow manure from Gladys’s ranch for him to spread around the raised beds of his cherished vegetable garden. I couldn’t have gotten a bigger rise if I had shot a big-game arrow through his thorax. He stiffened, lowered the handles of the wheelbarrow, and turned to me very slowly.

Everyone must look back over their lives and consider what the big mistakes were. This surely was one of mine. If this spell of forced leisure had a mission, it seemed to be this review as to how I got to this place. It was dawning on me that only while working did I focus on what was under my nose.

My father made me see how demoralizing hedge warfare was, a lethal enterprise on a sort of chessboard, where the terrifying art of ambush became a cerebral exercise. My father’s longing for his native plains became more emphatic as woodlands became death traps. Months of digging in had given him a fear of daylight and transformed him into something of a homebody once he had a choice. Night had been a friend, and the terror of German flares had altered his diurnal habits stateside; my mother told me it was a long time before walking around in broad daylight gave him much pleasure. He had befriended a Mormon officer from Idaho early on and stood near him on a sunny afternoon when the officer’s map board flashing in the sun gave him away to a German sniper; a distant crack and his new friend fell at his feet. A bout with scabies had made him, once home, a fervent bather: even when we were on the road cleaning rugs, wherever we stopped he sought out the water source, the tubs and showers. My father was not a particularly reflective man, but watching prisoners transported to the rear perplexed him; late in the war young Wehrmacht grenadiers were packed in trucks like the ones used to haul cattle, though in this case far more crowded than
would be considered acceptable for livestock. The only signs of the penned humanity were the streams of urine and vomit seeping from between the planks on the sides of the lorries. In circumstances where he had been advised to “eat every chance you get and piss every chance you get” this dismal image never left him. The ethnicity of the truck’s contents faded in the mind of a man who had once thought of killing the enemy as life’s greatest pleasure. A word or two from comrades might have had a similar effect, for in every unit there were thoughtful individuals who doubted that war made any sense in the first place. He was given profound pause as he watched a captured German medical team ordered to treat Allied wounded: his description of their care and efficiency might have had something to do with my early enthusiasm for medicine, as it was the first war story I ever heard from him but it was about making people well.

He disclosed a substantial litany of experiences that inclined toward dismantling a human mind: the silence of incoming mortars, the endless hover of flares, the scream of rockets, the otherworldly burp of the Schmeisser machine pistols. And of course, the 88s. Because of my impertinent question, I heard this, if not for the first time, in greater detail than ever before. My father’s gaze remained level, his eyes fixed on mine as he answered my question.

My father loved horses all his life, and toward the end of the war, when the enemy could be located by the sound of their horses, he realized the end was in sight. The Germans were running out of everything, including fuel and transportation machinery, so farm horses were being commandeered to move their guns. The Allies were pouring a firestorm upon them, and increasingly the POWs were walleyed lunatics indifferent to what their captors had in mind for them.

As they approached Aachen and Germany itself, my father’s unit captured a group of German soldiers: frightened children in rags. Taken to the rear, one of the boys pulled out an antiquated pistol and shot the sergeant. The escort threw the boy up onto a roll of barbed wire and machine-gunned him. That night my father deserted. The Luger he carried to Paris he had found on a fully dressed skeleton under a tree in the Hürtgen Forest.

“Had enough?” he asked me. I said that I had.

•  •  •

I rarely heard about the war after that, until right at the end of my father’s life. I remember visiting him after my mother had died and I was his sole medical care, though he needed little assistance and was remarkably independent. VFW friends of his vintage were starting to fade away, mostly grateful for having lived so long. But when I visited him that day he was agitated. Radio personality Rush Limbaugh was being interviewed on television and my father was certain that it was Hermann Göring. “I thought he committed suicide at Nuremberg!” he cried. After this, my poor father began to assume he had been lied to about nearly all other things and that he could never be sure which ones they were. I can’t say his last days were good ones, for he increasingly suffered from an abstract sense of betrayal until the day that he greeted my arrival with a wry look of miserable resignation: he had begun to suspect me as well. But even as dementia swept over him, he was able to putter around in his garden and refill the hummingbird feeder. Here, shovel in hand, seated on the railroad ties that supported the earthen beds, he died. I buried him beside my mother on a beautiful June day, cottonwood seeds filling the air and new perennials popping up from some of the earliest graves. Several old soldiers attended and a veteran of the Iraq War played taps on the bugle. Seeing the headstones paired at last, I was unable to conclude that I knew these two people very well, or understood them. I would quite painfully miss them, but only as people I once knew. Religion had surrounded my mother with an impenetrable reality, and war had done something quite similar to my father. I had the sense that I had been alone since birth.

I
WAS DRIVING EAST
on the interstate in my cherished 88, skating over black ice at about seventy miles an hour. The days were getting short and I was headed to Big Timber, another dinner with Jocelyn at the Grand Hotel. I didn’t want to go that fast, but if you went slower, the big trucks would nearly mow you down and suspend you blind in a cloud of snow, ice chips, and diesel fumes. Radio reception was shitty to say the least, or else supplied fascist newscasts from the Nashville stations broadcasting overproduced studio music for brain-dead hillbillies. Looking down the unequal beams of my headlights, I saw that the windshield wipers wiped only in selected places, requiring me to raise and lower my head to find a clear view. Wildlife T-boned by unyielding traffic was pitched up on the roadside with twisted heads and limbs, strewn intestines. That we accepted gut piles along the motorway as a gift of the automobile struck me then as a grisly novelty. In other words, I hated the highway. I must have been in a dissociative state because even the word “automobile” seemed strange. I said it aloud. “Automobile, automobile, automobile!” It didn’t help. I had the feeling I wasn’t entirely sure what an automobile was.

The 88 was ruby red and the interior a red Naugahyde with white piping. The upholstery held the cold of night well into the day, even while the heater irradiated my shins. Still, I trusted it; and that is why, just past the Mission Creek exit, I was slow to respond when the driveshaft just fell out of it and the universal joint tried to beat through the floor under my feet. I thought the 88 could keep going. It could not.

I had no way to notify Jocelyn, or to call a wrecker. It was too cold to walk and the nearest sign of life, a minuscule light suspended in remote
darkness, was too far. I had no choice but to wait for a highway patrolman to stumble onto me, which happened in about an hour. The patrolman called for assistance and a wrecker arrived an hour and a half after that. Wild lights of vehicles streamed by me all that time, flying on snow and ice. I could easily imagine being killed or mangled. I tried the philosophical exercise of imagining the world without me. It was easy. It was a little too easy.

I believed I could pass the time by embracing radio music. I hunted the dial until I found some rhythm and blues, where a phrase like “all night long” or “yes, it’s me” could last half a song. I didn’t usually listen to lyrics, but these tunes were really wrapped around the words and it was a pleasant exercise to listen and think. I was surprised to hear how many of the country crooners admitted sneaking out on their marriages. It came up so often that despite the disclaimers and professions of suffering a kind of exultation was implied. An equal number sought to “put a ring on your finger.” The cycling between hoped-for togetherness and feverish cheating was disconcerting. Even stranger, the glamorous barflies of the lyrics described the liquor of their choice as being wine if the song was about marrying or cheating on your spouse. If beer was the beverage, it signaled a rowdy call to arms for “country” values. There was a surprising number of quite threatening songs of patriotism, often with a semi-thudding march tempo, a gathering of violent warnings. Lots of biography on the part of the singer about other famous singers he knew or admired. Our deteriorated modern world was often deplored, from heaven, by “Hank.” God took a wider view, but Hank had a streak of sarcasm and disappointment over how sorry things had gotten. Another decried those who preferred sandals to “manly footwear.” I turned the radio off: I was sick of these people, all prison-bound, where they would be challenged to avoid sodomy by monsters from the inner city. It was easy to think like this when the driveshaft fell out of your car at seventy per.

The tow truck was driven by a nice young man named Lane who was happy to have the work. He had big work-hardened hands and wore green zip-up coveralls with a sky blue bandanna tied around his neck. His billed cap said
ICE DOGS
and displayed a flying hockey puck trailed by stars, and all around the edges of the cap his thick blond hair stuck
out. He winched the 88 up with a cable drum, chocked the wheels, boomed it down with chains, and invited me into the cab. As we drove east, I enjoyed the elevation and the wide beam of lights that declared our progress and right-of-way a long distance ahead. The big meshing noise of the diesel seemed authoritative and reminded me of my father’s descriptions of the sound of Panzer tanks.