Driving on the Rim (5 page)

It must have been the last summer I worked on the White Bird that Wiley took me up to his summer pasture to clean moss and slime out of the stock tanks. One was on a sandstone ridge overlooking a shallow draw. Atop the ridge, a tall tree held a nest of prairie falcons, and the newly fledged young were gliding down the draw to another tree full of indignant magpies, lording it over birds that would prey on them by the
end of summer. We had a packhorse carrying some war surplus panniers that opened from the bottom, and in those we carried several hundred pounds of salt, which we distributed to the salt troughs arrayed near the springs. We hobbled Train and Madelyn and took a break. Wiley shook a Camel from its pack and captured it with his lips. Striking a match with his thumbnail, he lit the cigarette and drew in the smoke with an air of grateful relief. “We ship in the fall. You need to get out there and be somebody,” he said right out of the blue. I was finished with high school and had done well, though the poor ways of my family and our crackpot religion had made me something of a pariah possessing neither cowboy boots nor penny loafers. The story was always the same: someone would find a reason to be interested in me; then they would hit that little wall which consisted in their detecting my scrutiny of them. They weren’t wrong, but I couldn’t help myself. I perhaps made too much of my enthusiasm for animals, but they did provide me the feeling of being understood, something I badly craved. In my early years of medical practice and as a man about town, I would cultivate an entirely artificial hail-fellow-well-met personality fueled by alcohol, desperation, and my first taste of spending money.

I’d been going out to the ranch almost as Gladys and Wiley’s only family by the time Dr. Olsson turned up asking if he could exercise his bird dog. He was new to the area, having bought himself a little cottage, but he hadn’t yet made any friends, though he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. Far more interested in finding a place to run the dog, he was pretty deft at fishing out information about the local landowners, the location of creeks, who had a grain field, etc. He was certainly not fooling anyone, but Gladys and Wiley liked him and became, for a while, his only friends. Then he met my parents and they hit it off too, because really Dr. Olsson was the kind of solid fellow you couldn’t help but like. He had the look of a onetime football player, which he was, and despite plenty of sore joints he bounded around pretty well. Looking back, I think Dr. Olsson was no more than middle-aged. He first took a shine to me as a way of ingratiating himself with the grown-ups, I think, but maybe he actually liked me. He really seemed to give a damn about how I would turn out.

Gladys and Wiley understood me too, even enjoying my awful timing and geekish silences. They believed I was smart and knew how to work
and that I would eventually find myself if I got out of town and away from my parents. While personally fond of my mother and father, they thought they lacked common sense in raising me and considered my mother’s thermal relationship with Jesus to be beyond the pale. “Jesus is your friend,” Gladys once told me, “but let’s leave it at that.” I later had a spell of poetry reading and in the poems of Saint Theresa found a new version of the Savior, who appeared as a sort of demon lover with all the tools of electrifying conquest. Saint Theresa can make Christ sound like a nine-battery Chinese vibrator. After that came Abelard and Heloise with their thrilling menu of mixed messages. I like to think it was otherwise with my poor mother, but God only knows what they taught her in Arkansas. She was certainly fixated and said of her own father, a crooked door-to-door shoe salesman, that he had “gone to hell with a broken back.” I’m pretty well over all this, I say, but there was a day when the flames danced just beyond the next hill.

So Wiley said, “I had several chances to try something else, but the land claimed me and I was grown old before I realized the land didn’t care about me.”

“How about Gladys?”

“Neither one of us. We’re like two ants crawling over it.”

I suppose this made Wiley sound like a pessimist, which maybe he was, but his day-to-day demeanor was that of a cheerful, optimistic man. This seemed to be the case with people who knew the score, even if it was not encouraging, as though encouragement were just a matter of being pressed into the unknown.

Gladys and Wiley assumed correctly that I was headed for college and that our encounters hereafter would be social calls only. Their new friend Dr. Olsson was nudging me in the direction of education too. Therefore, they would need new help, and indeed that had long been the case, though they had made do with tramps and jailbirds and schoolboys like me. As it was well known that ranch work was hard and underpaid, the pickings were slim, and many of the men they interviewed were, if experienced, broken down or, if inexperienced, not able-bodied. The only exception was a lanky, gum-chewing wise guy in a hot-rod Ford named Dale Brewer. A lazy, scheming, no-account ladies’ man, Dale would be the child Gladys and Wiley never had. They took him into their capacious hearts.

Once after school and during a late-spring snow, Dale and I were feeding cows from a wagon, tossing the bales out as we cut the binder twine. One bale had hit the ground still bound, and Dale got down to cut the twine. As he bent over to do this, an old swinging-bag cow butted him onto his face. Dale jumped up in a rage and screamed at the cow, “Someday I’ll be rich and you’ll be a thousand pounds of Sloppy Joes!”

It turned out to be true. Dale ended up with great wealth.

I was simply summer help, but Dale hoped to keep this job forever. I don’t quite know why Wiley and Gladys took to him as they did; he was an absolute menace around machinery, the only thing that interested him on the ranch, and he broke more than he could fix. We had a low-boy trailer that was in constant use hauling farm equipment in to the John Deere dealership for repair, usually on account of Dale’s neglect. The last summer I worked on White Bird, Dale had taken over the irrigation, resulting in terrible friction with the neighbors. Wiley declined to intervene or bank on his years of goodwill because he wanted Dale to learn for himself how the water was shared and apportioned; but Dale just argued with people, and eventually a ditch rider was assigned to us and everyone had to meet his expenses as he adjudicated every drop that came through the head gate. A ditch rider brings shame to the people of a watershed, a public announcement that the neighbors don’t know how to get along with one another. Once Dale had his share of the water, he did almost nothing with it, and the small amount of alfalfa that ought to have been irrigated dried up on the meadows. Wiley and Gladys just let it happen as part of the education of Dale. Instead of attending to the appropriate chores of damming and spreading water, Dale focused all his attention on a badger living in the middle of the alfalfa field that had made a great, unsightly burrow, in the mouth of which his striped face could be seen. One day Dale handed me an old J.C. Higgins rifle with iron sights and told me to shoot the badger. “I’d do it, but I’m nearsighted.”

Well, I tried and failed, both because of the wiliness of the badger, who after a few of my inaccurate shots, grew evasive, and because the old gun had probably never been sighted in; it seemed to me that the shots landed nowhere near where I aimed. It didn’t help my accuracy that the several glimpses I’d got of the badger had induced sort of an attachment to it, giving me the sense of trying to kill something which wished only to live.

Dale was quite furious at my failures and professed to be fed up with
this badger ruining the alfalfa, alfalfa that was going nowhere for lack of water. He put poison at the mouth of the burrow without effect. He tried running water from the ditch toward the hole but ended up eroding part of the meadow. This finally came to Wiley’s attention, and he wordlessly shoveled the appropriate repair to the ditch bank, his silence betraying his dissatisfaction with Dale and maybe even with me. He walked off toward the house without speaking.

That night in the bunkhouse, Dale said that if we didn’t do something about the badger we were going to get our asses kicked off the ranch. I was so young and credulous at this time that I thought Dale knew something about badgers I didn’t, but now I still believe the problem was the lack of irrigation. Dale pulled a wooden box containing narrow, waxy red cylinders from under his bunk. He held up a stick of dynamite and said it had the badger’s name on it. “Wiley ain’t going to like this, but he’ll like it after that badger goes to the next world.”

Before breakfast the next day, we’d bundled several sticks around a blasting cap and led the fuse back across the meadow to a boulder we meant to get behind at the right moment. It was hot already and the sun was barely up, throwing white bands of light through the cottonwoods and willows along the ditch bank. We sat behind the boulder with a box of kitchen matches and took a last look around before lighting the fuse, which hissed and sparkled to our satisfaction before disappearing inside itself. It seemed to take such a long time getting to the dynamite that we stood up to see what went wrong just when the blast occurred, sending a wash of soil in every direction and throwing the badger nearly forty feet in the air, where it burst into flame and landed in the desiccated alfalfa, setting the meadow ablaze, a fire that quickly burned out of control. Despite the efforts of our extremely capable volunteer fire department, Gladys and Wiley lost much of their hay crop. In front of the firemen, and with an oddly contemplative expression on his face, Wiley knocked Dale senseless and allowed it was time for me to get ready for school.

I
FOUND STRONG FEELINGS
for my town to be always at hand. I loved its situation in the sweep of a great western river, even the steady, subdued clangor of its railroad yard, the faint but omnipresent background of our lives. And the violent weather kept everyone on their toes. My strongest impressions seem to have originated in summertime, when my life was out-of-doors and the towering clouds were like the castles in which I lived. When Gladys and Wiley didn’t need my help, I spent my days mowing lawns and watching. I say “watching” because the peculiarity of my family and of my own personality gave me the vigilance of an outsider. Remember, we had only recently come in from the road as itinerant rug cleaners, and my education at the loins of Aunt Silbie had exempted me from the pubescent twittering of my classmates. When I finally had a girlfriend, she turned out to be the true Crow maiden Debbie Stands Ahead, who confined our ardor to kisses that, lasting an hour and expressing teen love, were more powerful than the somewhat abrupt gymnastics with my aunt. I always felt in the arms of Debbie a sort of peace of a kind I would be surprised to feel years later when one of my colleagues, Jinx Mayhall, inexplicably embraced me in my hospital bed after I had been stabbed. What on earth could Jinx have been thinking? I had hoped she was embarrassed; I know I was. Years ago when I learned that Debbie had married a dentist I fondly hoped she was denying him coitus: I was still jealous. As for Jinx, I just didn’t know.

I mowed lawns all over town. I mowed Dr. Burchfield’s, my precursor in the emergency room. That he spent the weekend in his bathrobe should have told me something. Mrs. Hetherington, whose brick house was built before Montana statehood, always made me iced tea and a
sandwich. She was a lonely old widow who sat by herself at a white painted table in her backyard arranging flowers from her garden. She knew I was seeing Debbie Stands Ahead. “She’s a fine young lady,” said Mrs. Hetherington. “This all used to be theirs.” After Debbie was gone I read the most god-awful books about the frontier, in which the Indian girls appeared as “dusky maidens.” For some reason I embraced this ghastly phrase and was heartbroken that my own dusky maiden was gone (to college). Debbie, forsake your dentist and his half-breed progeny, and come back to me!

Earl Clancy’s yard was almost too small for me to trifle with and he barely paid me. Earl, now retired, had been a supervisor at the waterworks, and I worked for him to hear his stories. Once a hobo, he esteemed those years as the best of his life. He had the same skinny frame and hangdog face he had probably acquired during his days riding the rails. He followed the seasons like a bird of passage and accepted adventures as they befell him. He had some skill as an orchardist and could bring his talents to McIntosh apples and Indian River oranges alike. In Florida, he was arrested for vagrancy and spent a month on a chain gang. When released, he wandered penniless down a dirt road, trying to think how to get back to Montana (it was hot). Passing a Holy Roller church, he heard the pandemonium within and a huge woman stepped out and called to him, “Come in and be saved!” Earl soon found himself rolling around on the floor, where he discovered a wallet with enough money to get him home. The stint on the chain gang had brought him to his senses, such as they were, and he went on to spend the rest of his working life at the waterworks. Because of his special understanding of the operations of the system, Earl was forgiven the very occasional summer binges that took him on sentimental journeys to pick cherries on the shores of Flathead Lake. He was the first of the innately talented, hardworking, somewhat visionary and out-of-control men I have known. I might have been one of them at heart. I hoped not, because all were bachelors and I was in search of the love of my life.

My summertime lawn mowing introduced me to the class system that burdens every community for the simple reason that east of Main Street, people mowed their own lawns. Mowing lawns in the humid summertime could be such grueling work that I began mentally aligning myself
with that class of people who had others do it for them. There was a lingering contradiction here in that Dr. Olsson, who set me on my path, mowed his own lawn. But he was from out East, and that could have explained it. Still, here was another of my ambivalences: I seemed unwilling to rise to that class whose lawns were mowed by others. I wouldn’t like being called “Doctor” if that became appropriate: it would embarrass me, though I expected to love the work. Maybe that was why I drove my troublesome old car. The last mechanic who worked on it said, “Doc, you need to shit-can this rust bucket before it shit-cans you.” But I went on pouring money into it. I even lost my desire for money and developed some kind of sentimental attachment to the poverty of our early days.