Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

A vertical slab of wet stone struck my face and I screamed, less from pain than from a rush of helplessness. I bumped into other things I couldn’t identify. The river of stars overhead flared in a direction I could no longer grasp. My insignificance was so overwhelming that these impediments surrounded me with austere malevolence. My only hope was that by submitting myself to their awful power, I would be released. That was it! I would flatter the unknown and it would feel sorry for me! At last I caught on, saw the first fissure, and lay down in the densest brush I could find with my hands; I trained my humility on the hope of sunrise.

During the night and in those moments when I escaped my misery enough to think of how I had lost Pie, I was not entirely certain I wanted to survive. I imagined Dr. Olsson’s spare room without her and my heart sank in agony. Even that agony was insufficient to preparing me for what I would feel when I finally was face-to-face with Dr. Olsson.

Sunrise revealed my hollow in the brush. When I stood up, it was easy to see the long slope of grassland to the south and, against its far edge, the winding county road I had driven. The light, the renewed orientation were insufficient consolation for the absence of Pie. By afternoon, I stood before Dr. Olsson. I had never seen him so sad. “You’ve let me down,” he said. “I’m all through with you.”

It was a long walk to my house, and the weather had turned worse. I had to navigate in the lee of the house and still I was soaked on arrival; I hardly noticed. The very abrupt loss of the approval of the only person who had ever believed in me was a blow of such magnitude as I had never experienced, to my stomach and mind at once. And apart from that, I feared that Pie was being eaten by coyotes or shot by a rancher finding her among his livestock.

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!