Driving on the Rim (42 page)

We were nearly on the floor of the canyon. There was no possible place to set down, and my attempts to exchange some kind of glance with Jocelyn failed. When I asked her what was going on and got no answer, I could see that she little wished to have her concentration broken. Then the canyon curved quite rapidly to the west, narrowing all the while, and, more quickly than I could quite absorb, a flat meadow rose up before us and we were on the ground, tail wheel down and the windshield elevating as the plane changed its angle and stopped. Jocelyn increased the throttle slightly before slowing the propeller to a pause. The quiet was startling. She swept her headset off with one hand, shook out her hair, then turned to me and said, “Happy?”

“Can we get out of here?”

“We’ll find out!” She laughed. “Isn’t it beautiful?” She pushed open her door, and the cockpit filled with balsamic air and the fragrance of wildflowers. I looked around as best as I could beyond the bright wings of the plane. This was some sort of box canyon, and on either side of the meadow in which the plane sat, aspens grew straight up, protected from winter winds. Here and there water ran down the walls of the canyon, catching the light. I imagined the place quickly filling with shadows later in the day, and this thought came with some apprehension because despite the great natural beauty, my main interest was in getting out, which looked to be something of a feat. It was reassuring to climb from the plane and feel solid ground once more.

But Jocelyn’s cheer was infectious. “Come on,” she said. “I’ve got to
show you something.” So I followed along. The only bearing I had was Jocelyn herself, and she moved confidently along the meadow at her persistently lively clip, the same gait she used when walking around her airplane or coming into town and into my room, the same heedless forward motion. With one hand, she gathered up her long hair and twisted it into a knot on top of her head. She tied the Windbreaker around her waist by its sleeves and hopped on one foot as she retied the shoelace on the other. There were many hawks in this canyon, small, rapid short-winged hawks that cried out to one another as they crisscrossed overhead. “You’d never get out of here on foot,” said Jocelyn. It was true, but I couldn’t think why she’d say it. When I asked her where we were going in such a hurry, she only smiled. It seemed to me that we were heading toward a small grove of old cottonwoods at a place where the granite wall receded in a kind of shelter. It could have been an Indian place or a shepherd’s place: I observed some smoke blackening its stone from this distance. When we reached it, I saw that it was indeed habitable—there was a rough lean-to shack apparently thrown together from fallen trees and limbs, enclosed nonetheless with a canvas fly secured against a small opening in front. “You don’t think we’re staying here tonight—”

She said, “We’ll see,” and held the canvas back for me to enter.

The sudden new light into the interior must have been dazzling because it was a moment or two before Womack put the gun down. Or he may simply have been confused, for he was clearly in very bad shape.

Jocelyn said, “I’ve brought the doctor.”

“I didn’t know who it was.”

“Who could it have been?” Jocelyn said, I thought rather sharply, and then to me, “See what you can do. I need Womack.” She bent to sweep a little spot on the floor and sat down. Womack was covered by the sort of light blanket that might have been from the airplane’s supplies.

He said, his tone a slight wail, “My leg is broke.” His speech was impaired by a lip swollen with infection.

“How do you know?”

“I know, I just know.”

Jocelyn said, “He doesn’t know. He’s not a doctor, you’re a doctor.”

I would have to examine Womack. I have examined an infinite number of people old and young, fat and thin, with little other than appropriate
objectivity, but I had a strange aversion to examining Womack. His darting and conspicuously dishonest eyes and the fleshy face that seemed at odds with his remarkably skinny body gave me the creeps. I uncovered him and found that he was quite naked under the blanket. Jocelyn burst into laughter and Womack looked over at her, lips pulled back over his crooked teeth in imploring misery. She covered her mouth in a mock attempt to conceal her mirth, then left to get some things from the plane, which turned out to consist of a very nice collection of medical supplies.

“Where did these come from?”

“The nice old doctor in White Sulphur.”

I couldn’t understand that at all, but treating Womack seemed to loom before me. I did quickly think I could see the problem—a swelling and discoloration over the upper tibia quite obviously emanating from within. Just the same, I diligently palpated my way up the dirty leg, well aware of the rising terror in Womack as I approached the injury. “I’m going to have to touch this,” I told him, “but I will be very careful.” The rest was entirely straightforward despite my inability to X-ray him. Womack had an avulsion fracture; a tendon had detached from part of the bone, though from the looks of things, I didn’t believe surgical reattachment would be necessary. I didn’t ask how the injury had occurred; I was confident that it had to do with Womack’s criminal departure from Texas. If I had known how to read the engine hours in Jocelyn’s airplane, I might have learned that she had gotten him out of there. I pulled the blanket back over Womack’s disturbingly gaunt frame, wondering at my own aversion, and explained the injury to him. I was already reflecting upon Jocelyn’s radiant frostiness in assuming that Womack’s whereabouts were safe with me. Finding this offensive was an early symptom of the possible gradual return of my mental health.

This gave rise to a rather distant explanation of what Womack should do to return to good health. First, though, I cast the leg, using the supplies in the duffel bag brought by Jocelyn. She helped as we applied plaster to the gauze and wound it over the stockinet thoughtfully included, Womack whimpering the entire time. Of course his pain was real. At one point, and with an air of annoyance, Jocelyn presented him with a syringe and an impressive array of injectable painkillers, which seemed to feed his hungry eyes with an attractive future. I thought Dr.
Aldridge in White Sulphur had shown extraordinary trust in Jocelyn’s correct use of these things. I myself wondered what he thought they were for. Maybe Jocelyn could bring a cooler when she brought food, which I thought would be necessary. She said she already had a lot of food in the plane on the assumption Womack would be staying for a spell. I was enacting my physician persona with remarkable alacrity as I prescribed the range-of-motion exercises needed to avoid joint stiffness and atrophy of the unaffected muscles. I even stretched out on the ground and demonstrated the isometrics that would aid his recovery. I was weirdly excited to be practicing medicine. “Contract the muscle without moving the joint, hold the tension, and release it, again without moving the joint. Let pain and not too much pain be your guide.” I was able to apply myself to this demonstration on the dirt floor because I could foresee that Jocelyn would find ways to get me to treat Womack and I wasn’t going to be through with this duty until he got well. I honestly didn’t know if it was my enthusiasm for justice or my suspicion of Womack as a rival for Jocelyn’s affections, as if that word actually applied to her. However, I rose above all that to concentrate my attention on Womack’s physical well-being. I had a lot of responsibility in seeing that the fracture was not disturbed. If there were contradictions here, I couldn’t see them.

I asked Jocelyn, “Will I be coming here on a regular basis?”

“It looks like you should.”

But it never came up.

I asked Womack, “Does that suit you?”

“Gonna have to.”

“I never really asked—did you do this in leaving Texas?”

“Uh-huh, pretty much of a train wreck.”

I said, “You’ll get through this, and I don’t anticipate any complications. It’s going to hurt for a while. I won’t lie to you. Jocelyn has brought you something for it.”

“Yeah, good. We had some street stuff in the plane, but I’d rather have the real deal.” I didn’t ask about that. Nor did I take issue, much as I might have wanted to, when Womack suggested that keeping my mouth shut was an excellent beauty hint.

As we returned to the plane, I saw that Jocelyn was worried, and I
sought to reassure her. I hadn’t seen her worried before, so I lavished attention on this new aspect of my darling. I could hardly wait to see the exhibition of skill it would require to get us airborne again. I had found that every small detail of her being that I could mix with her heedless carnality increased the cocktail’s potency. I suppose I could have seen through the whole thing if I had wanted to. But I didn’t want to. Got it?

We took a different route out of the canyon and it served my purposes very well. Instead of tracking the canyon from its source in the foothills, which must have helped orient Jocelyn to Womack’s hiding place, we climbed as rapidly as Jocelyn could manage, a very steep diagonal along the canyon wall until we topped out in uplands that were familiar to me. We might have been overtaken by dark had we gone out the way we’d come. The departure required Jocelyn’s concentration to the point that beads of perspiration stood out on her face almost as they did during our lovemaking. Pressed into my seat by the angle of ascent and fastened there by my harness, I gazed at Jocelyn and the clouds racing past the windshield, my state one of remarkably foolish transport because this was, as I sensed and she explained, all quite dangerous.

I knew exactly where we were. I could see the ridge of mountains to the southeast where we’d once hunted sheep, my dad and I; and to the north, grasslands managed by the latest husband of Cody’s mother. To the west were the four old grain elevators. We were less than twenty miles from town over some of Dr. Olsson’s favorite hunting places, and most specifically over the country I had followed when I appropriated his dog, Pie. As the yard lights came on in the dusk, I was able to count them back to the place where I had recovered her. All of these things conspired to suggest an atmosphere of divine guidance. The lights on our wingtips popped on in the growing dark.

Jocelyn said, “Womack’s got enemies just like everybody else, but they didn’t have to do that to his leg.” Because the headset obscured her face and the microphone distorted her voice, I couldn’t tell if she was joking. It was as if I had heard a radio broadcast from nowhere.

I
HAD ALWAYS ENVIED THOSE
who held a steady course in life—were raised conventionally, set their sights on a goal lasting a lifetime, found a partner to raise a second wave for when they and the partner had gone on to meet … God. Yes, God! For they had a well-carpentered cosmology that aligned them with time, for all time, including the big kahuna, Eternity. I remembered thinking when I lost Tessa that she was just as dead as King Tut. Death was remarkable in that it did not admit of degrees. What you saw was what you got. Hasta la vista.

I labored under the barrage of malarkey that was the messages I got from what is currently known as the family of origin—the chronically unhappy God of my mother, the sly cynicism of my father, which seemed common among his veteran friends, the goat-like bucking of my aunt, which made the world of procreation something of a barnyard. I sometimes wondered why we kept fixing up these bodies that came to us; I could only conclude that they wished to live and we wished to avoid suffering. But the natural world restored my hope by its capacity for renewal. Renewal alone should have been my religion.

When I hunted and came upon the old homesteads that had failed, I thought briefly of the people who had moved on, but more pointedly of the myriad things nature was doing to reclaim these scenes of disturbance—the grass, the hawthorns, the chokecherries, the sagebrush that took thriving homes and made them into tumuli. Not so bad. A litter of coyotes in the old parlor. Of course they sang.

I had learned much of this love of nature from Dr. Olsson and what I had believed to be the great sustenance he drew from the natural world. But because of the way Olsson wound up, I was somewhat on my
own with the earth. Olsson had a dog or two after the great Pie died of old age, none quite as good as she. He was without a dog for a year—big mistake—when Lawyer Hanson left for China, his new life, and his new bride.

To my astonishment, this opened a long-sealed door between Shirley Hanson, my old squeeze, and Dr. Olsson, who had been in love with Shirley his entire life. He moved back to Ohio and married her. He spent the rest of his life as a henpecked homebody but surprised Shirley on his death by leaving part of his worldly goods to an animal shelter in honor of Pie, or “Eskimo Pie,” as it appears on the plaque, and the remainder to a society for the protection of shorebirds, provoking Shirley to famously cry out, “I should have been a pelican!” Shirley moved to a rest home where, I have reason to assume, she survived. When I went to Olsson’s funeral, my first visit to the town since my college days, there was the formidable Shirley, a little old lady who cut her eyes at me once before sitting through the ceremony as though neither I nor anyone else existed.

The apartments across the street from my house were more animated than ever, and the life within them was entirely nocturnal. I knew there were couples living there, as well as the sort of single people you would associate with night noise. I lay awake that night thinking about my mailman and the thread into my own past which he seemed to represent. But because I was awake later than was normal for me, I began to hear fragments of excited commentary from the open windows across the way, and they disoriented me entirely. “You call that a hat?” Someone, a man, was clearly disapproving of this article and he wished the hat to be replaced by another hat or no hat at all.

The next voice I heard, and it may have been an hour later, was a rich and expressive contralto. “I don’t care how it smells!” I got the feeling she was starting an argument, but it didn’t go anywhere. Then suddenly from the voice that had complained about the smell, “Hold the snow peas!” So I guessed the first outcry was about food. Anyway, I managed to drift off.