Driving on the Rim (8 page)

The wind stopped shortly after midnight, and then the rain stopped as well. I slipped out from under the covers and dressed, tiptoeing downstairs through the sleeping household and out the kitchen door that led directly to the garage. It was difficult to raise the garage door without making noise, but I succeeded by raising it with agonizing slowness. In the light from the street, I could make out the contours of my father’s black Ford, a six-cylinder coupe with its stick shift on the steering column. I opened the driver’s door enough to slide in and shift the transmission into neutral, which allowed me to brace myself between the car and my father’s workbench, put my shoulder against the grille and roll the car into the street, where its well-kept paint reflected the stars in the clearing sky. I drove several blocks before turning on the headlights, and soon I was tooling north toward the mountains and the last place I’d seen Pie. My feet were already blistered, but the pain was as nothing in the face of my mission, and I scarcely noticed.

I knew that I had little chance of finding her if she had disappeared into open country, but I was sure she had gotten lost, not abandoned me, and that she would seek out humanity somewhere. So I drove the county road along the base of the foothills and at each ranch I turned off the headlights, glided to a stop, walked to within sight of the buildings, and called as discreetly as I could, prolonging the call until I could be mistaken for a coyote. Several of the ranches had yard lights, and I was able to examine things quite closely while letting out my forlorn intonement of “
Pie,
” confident that if she ever heard me, she would respond. At a hardscrabble ranch-stead where Horsethief Creek came under the road I had to fight off the guard dog with a quickly acquired stick, long enough to make friends and send it whimpering back to the house. The dog had made so much noise confronting me that I called out Pie’s name without discretion but drew no response.

I seemed to be leaving the territory where she might be. Certainly, I was close to a series of breaks, badlands almost, that Pie would have recognized as the end of her hopes for rescue. She had benefited from such good care that I had no doubt she would pin her last hopes on humanity.

I was excessively cautious approaching the next house, a dilapidated prefab with several cars parked in front and all its lights on. Drawing closer, I realized that some kind of party was still under way—strange in the middle of the week and so close to sunrise. I was frankly alarmed at the vehemence of the voices that emerged from the structure, a kind of mechanical hilarity and laughter that had become screams. I sat in the dark and stared at the shapes and sporadic shadows behind the drawn curtains. Overcoming hopelessness, I called out Pie’s name firmly, confident that the people of the house would never notice above the din, and was answered by an inquisitive bark.

It was Pie.

She was tied with a piece of short, frayed rope to a steel tractor wheel, no food or water in sight. When she saw me, she leapt the length of the rope and somersaulted in midair. I untied it at the wheel and used it as a leash so that I could get Pie under cover of dark to my car and avoid the chance that her enthusiasm would give us away. Once in the car, we abandoned ourselves to emotion until I felt sufficiently collected to start the car, drive to a safe distance without lights, and then park again to go about removing the burs from Pie’s coat and especially her ears, which were nearly rigid with encrustation. She was so unwilling to have them removed from the backs of her legs that I had to hold her mouth shut with one hand to keep from being nipped. I threw burs out the window by the handful, until finally I could run my fingers through her coat. The light was now sufficient for us to stop again at Horsethief Creek, where she drank greedily from its crystalline waters. Then we went to see Dr. Olsson, whom we found still in his bathrobe. He looked at me, then at Pie, a study in propriety and subdued emotion. Then he said, quite formally, I think, given the occasion, “Why don’t you come in? I’ll make tea. I think we have some planning to do.”

I
WAS HAVING A REMARKABLY SMOOTH SENIOR YEAR
, my passion for the outdoors compensating for my lack of interest in team sports or, actually, my aversion to team sports. It disturbed me to even watch them, especially basketball, where fans huddled to watch two groups mob each other in their underwear. With football, I was attracted to the kickoff, but my interest waned thereafter. For two weeks that fall, I lived alone, looking after myself. My parents had gone to Idaho to care for Aunt Silbie, who was holed up dying of injuries sustained when a train hit her car, which she had parked on the tracks. She had once told me that she had kept her figure during her affairs with five different bosses while their wives grew fat. My mother was greatly consoled that the radio in Silbie’s car was tuned to an inspirational religious station; and the wrecker, ambulance crew, and attending physician all attested that the car, nearly flattened, continued to broadcast uplifting messages even as it was towed away.

“The car just stalled on the tracks,” asserted my mother with a glare.

I remembered the day I had been caught in flagrante by my parents and my mother called me an instrument of Lucifer and said that it would have been better that a millstone had been tied around my neck, etc., among other obloquies resulting in my isolation and unexpected grief at the death of my aunt, whose touch I would never forget. The harshness of my mother’s brand of Christianity was forever impressed upon me.

I was going to college in Dr. Olsson’s hometown and with his financial help. I would live in the home of his friends. Dr. Olsson did what he could to prepare me for my trip; I suppose he assumed some culture
shock. “The Hansons are an old and important family in the town and as a resident of the Hanson home, under its protection, you will have nothing to fear from this new place. Karl Hanson is just the latest incarnation of a century of stability, as fine a man as I’ve ever known, and we’ve known each other all our lives.” He hadn’t said anything about Hanson’s wife and so I asked. He paused, and then said, “I am older than Karl. Shirley was homecoming queen of Karl’s class. She’s a beautiful woman and Karl holds her in highest esteem.” I could tell that Dr. Olsson had, for some reason, a low opinion of Shirley. This was enough for me: I couldn’t wait to see Shirley!

I was soon on my way to Calabash College in northern Ohio, a tiny Congregationalist college that, once thriving, had nearly vanished during an imaginary Red scare when local farmers drove out the faculty with pitchforks. I was warmly greeted by my new host, Karl Hanson. He said, “Welcome” and then, after a pause, “welcome, welcome, welcome.” I smiled all the way into the upper corners of the room. “And how is my honored friend Olsson?”

“Dr. Olsson is just fine. He sends his best.”

“I wish we saw more of him. Y’know the bugger won’t play golf. We could have had some winter trips to Camelback. Always out in the woods. Out in the prairie now, I suppose, chasing some dog. But what a guy, and a hell of a doc. He’d had enough. Dyed-in-the-wool bachelor gonna live his life, come hell or high water. He and
my
wife were sweethearts. She says he’s still carrying a torch. You believe that? Me either. Female bull, is all. When Olsson tells me he’s going to Montana, you could of knocked me over with a feather and, jeez, I’ve missed him ever since. We had the same Chinese tailor, came through once a year, shantung sport coats a tenth of what they ream you for here. I did try to get into the grouse-hunting thing, but first time he cut loose with his repeater I hit the ground. Not my game, not my game at all. Here, let me hang that up for you. I’ll show you your room and then you can meet my ball and chain. Just kidding. Shirley’s the queen of this castle! You could tell I was kidding, couldn’t you? About Shirley?”

Calabash College had recovered in the intervening decades, somewhat, and served students who wished to attend college but could not find admission elsewhere. As a result, the student body was a heterogeneous
group of idiots, local mediocrities, and brilliant misfits. Our backgrounds were so diverse that we acquired functional identities as the very first information about us emerged. As someone from the West, I found myself branded the campus cowboy. Wiley would have had a good laugh over that. An undernourished Portuguese boy from New Bedford was “a whaler.” Girls who kissed with their tongues were whores. The kid with Hollywood mufflers on his jalopy was “Brick Track Jack” for the Indianapolis 500. The dorm room where we got free haircuts was Barber College, and so on. It was a loose atmosphere entirely, even from the standpoint of the administration. In my brief stint writing a sports column for the mimeographed campus weekly, I suggested that the chronically losing basketball team might look to ways to play better. The team beat me to a pulp, and even the president, a former tool-and-die executive, judged I had spoken out of turn. All of this was quite manageable, and in fact I did manage, with the expenses of my education borne mostly by Dr. Olsson and reduced by my living in a house owned and occupied by Karl Hanson and his wife. I’m sure Dr. Olsson had no way of knowing that in their subtle way the well-to-do and well-educated Hansons were every bit as strange as my own parents. They were only twice as old as me—that is, somewhere in their thirties, with Shirley sporting a sort of Jazz Age look that had lingered in these Midwestern pockets. The Hansons’ house was somewhat disorderly, as their live-in black lady had gone back to Georgia. Each year a representative of Ton Yik Tailors of Hong Kong made the rounds of the Rust Belt, measuring local nabobs for custom-made suits, the equivalent of Hart, Shaffner and Marx at a third the cost; and each year Karl had a new one made, worsteds, wool, mohair, shantung sport jackets, and so on, all exploding from his closet on the second floor. Shirley’s specialty was fox furs with the heads and black glass eyes that surmounted her fitted Chanel knockoffs and accented her excellent figure. I quickly noticed that excellent figure, and as soon as I could, I told her the men in my family were not long lived and that my greatest fear was dying a virgin. I just let this one soak while I went to class. I could tell by her expression that she couldn’t decide quite what to do with me but that for the moment she would dismiss me as a hopeless goober.

I felt the futility of coming of age in the time of two iconic buffoons,
Ronald Reagan and John Wayne. And when I got to college I was still a very backward boy. I’ll never forget the expressions on the Hansons’ faces the first time they saw me licking my plate. But I’m a quick study, and it wasn’t long before I was quite a conventional youth, managing at once to do my schoolwork well, get drunk, and manually inspect the occasional coed. I was well along in self-invention, representing myself to be the son of ranchers Gladys and Wiley. I’m ashamed to say that I was not proud of my own parents. I was at a ghastly stage in life, having raised faultfinding to a science. Some of this came from my Bible-crazed mother, who treated every phenomenon as a possible false sign or lying wonder.

At the beginning of my years at Calabash College, Karl Hanson and his wife, Shirley, were very kind to me. The Hansons had a strong social conscience, and this led them to hire a housekeeper, Audra Vasiliauskytė, a displaced person from somewhere in Eastern Europe, Lithuania, I think. Audra had come to America with her sister, and the two of them were gorgeous schemers. Audra’s sister, Anya, had stolen a Great Lakes freighter captain away from his wife. Audra really stirred things up around the Hanson household, and in the end I was the beneficiary of her troublemaking. When Hanson would come in from work on cold winter evenings, Audra would help him off with his coat and even kneel before him to unbuckle his galoshes, a show enhanced by the omission of several blouse buttons. An excellent cook, she introduced Lithuanian dishes until once I heard Shirley cry out, “One more platter of kugelis and I’m outta here.” Audra was extremely but coolly polite to Shirley. I was more age-appropriate to her enthusiasms, but she treated me with acidic contempt and took the fact of my social awkwardness as proof of homosexuality. She’d spit out, “You fairy!” when we passed in the upstairs corridor. Her mistake was assuming that I was not only gauche but also unobservant. Hence I was able to examine the cautious but steady gravitation of poor Karl into Audra’s web.

In fact, I was more observant than even that: I took note of Shirley’s vigilance as Audra went from helping with his heavy winter coat to meeting him at the door of his car, the better to touch his elbow as he clambered out. The biggest problem was that Audra at twenty-eight was, as Karl confided to me, “easy on the eyes.” She was indeed: fresh-faced,
cascading oak blond hair, and a tidy figure made poignant by the cheap Eastern European clothes she’d arrived with. She spoke an oddly correct schoolgirl English and radiated the sort of industry that predicted success in her new country. She was also a baseball nut, like Karl, and their amiable skirmishing over statistics drove Shirley to distraction. Audra feverishly studied baseball magazines in her room, as though she were trying to pass the bar exam. I several times sidled up to her, but she blew me off disdainfully, which I lamented as only a blue-balled late adolescent could. We each had our rooms on the north end of the second floor, at the end of a blind corridor, and shared a bathroom. That she sauntered around up there in her underwear, breasts spilling from an abbreviated bra, only emphasized how insignificant I was. Because of Audra, my energy was grossly depleted by jacking off, and had I not brought this vice under control, my grades surely would have fallen enough to keep me out of medical school. And what a way to fail a career in medicine!

At the point that Shirley looked likely to voice her indignation, I thought to reintroduce my manufactured fear of dying a virgin. From then on, it was merely a matter of waiting for Karl’s next business trip to coincide with Audra’s time off.

While Shirley drove Audra like a government mule, cooking, cleaning, polishing floors, washing windows from a ladder, cleaning eaves troughs, and ironing, Audra never lost her composure; only I knew how close to eruption her moods could be as she shoved me out of the way en route to the bathroom or pretended to spit in my face when I smiled at her. Karl only occasionally asked Audra to do something, and usually it was something quite small, like keeping an eye out for lost keys or glasses. If Shirley was present, Audra complied like a dutiful servant. If Shirley was not present, Audra let her joy at being of service to Karl shine in her eyes before purring, “Of course I find dose glasses. A lawyer must be able to see!” A pause before, a pause after. Then Karl, quietly, “Thank you, Audra.”