Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

“Tha-ank you.”

“And point up.”

“I don’t believe you have a lot of sympathy for me, do you, Doctor? It must be nice looking at this thing from the outside, a regular Monday-morning quarterback. I don’t think you realize what made me do what I did.”

“You mentioned Chicken McNuggets and popcorn. Clarice was my patient. My impression was that she wished to live.”

Cody went on sniveling while giving me a hard stare. I was surprised at my own harsh voice: “Put it in your mouth, Cody. It’s the right thing to do.”

It wasn’t long before he was angry. That was his drug; it was a great way to get lost and I could see what relief it gave him. I was a big shot, I’d had it easy, had no idea what guys like him had to put up with, wouldn’t know a stacked deck if it bit me on the ass. He said all his life he’d given more than he’d gotten just to have sons of bitches like me look down their noses at him. He must have thought starting a fight with me might be an escape from the fate he’d called down on himself. I wasn’t about to give an inch. He was trying to gnaw his way out of the trap he’d built. Perhaps, in some vastly dark place, some vengeful corner that I would have been happy to never visit again, I even enjoyed this. In short, I grew impatient for him to shoot himself.

With his meager question—“Isn’t it time you called the police, Doctor?”—my contempt boiled over and I smiled at him pleasantly. This bolstered his conviction that he was misunderstood. “You think this is easy? You think this is easy? ”

He looked down at the gun he was holding in his lap before lifting it up and pointing it at me. A laugh escaped his compressed lips. Now he used the sights as though to get me in just the right spot. He said, “You’ll love this, Doc. Nine-millimeter hollow points get to twelve millimeters and never leave an exit wound. When eight hundred feet per second comes to a complete stop somebody’s got to know about it.”

“Fascinating.”

He shook his head. “You think I’m getting nowhere.”

I watched him closely for a long moment and said, “Pretty much.”

“So, Doctor, what do you think I should do? You’re the doctor.”

“I think you should kill yourself.”

I remembered his pensive look; or maybe it was a look of melancholy, as he put the gun barrel in his mouth. I gazed back at him and raised my hand, right thumb up. I said he was good to go. I at once remembered my father telling me how they lifted the right arms of German prisoners looking for SS tattoos. If they found them, they shot the prisoners on the spot.

A look of sudden innocence crossed his face, something I would forever live with, and he fired. Despite my glamorous view of my father as a deliverer of swift justice and my feeling that Cody had it coming, this was about to become the front parlor of hell. I wouldn’t have felt any different if I had shot him myself. I wondered if I was still a doctor or even a human being.

I called the police and was sufficiently composed to describe the situation and suggest what equipment would be required. The telephone was in the same room as the bodies, a grisly tableau growing in my imagination as the associated personalities began to disappear. Any detachment my medical training had given me was gone, and I hurried from the house to the sidewalk, where I waited for the authorities. When they arrived, two older officers, I described the situation in such a way that they seemed more focused on my delivery than on what might await them in the house. I excused myself and set out on a walk that took me into the rest of that run-down neighborhood where I sought out signs of normalcy: papers fetched from porches, men with lunch pails, schoolchildren setting out with backpacks, a speckled dog sailing into the back of an old station wagon, a smiling senior pushing her walker down the sidewalk with a purse and a quart of milk in the basket, teenagers with their torsos under a car hood; I seized on everything, wishing I might always be able to seize on everything. In half an hour I found the railroad tracks and followed the cinder pathway toward the country, stopping only to admire the graffiti on a slow train, beautiful mammoth letters in spray-on colors. I walked out of town, the moving train giving me a pleasant illusion of greater speed. In an hour I was resting in the open prairie under a box elder, next to the tracks, the smell of steel and wild grasses, the air filled with the song of meadowlarks, as yet unwilling or unready to face my guilt. In the words of my late mother, I understood I would have to be shriven.

When they lowered Clarice into her grave I was swept by regret as much for humanity as for her. But when they buried Cody I thought, “It’s Miller Time.” It wouldn’t last, though. I was lying to myself.

IN THE EARLY DAYS OF MY PRACTICE, I sustained an affair with an incredibly self-absorbed folksinger named Kay who left me for another man and a career in music that went nowhere. I remember an awful evening at her riverside condo, snow blowing against the double-paned picture window, when she auditioned for a New York impresario who held his head and moaned while she intoned, “I loves you, Porgy,” over the big twelve-string. Tessa was still around town and I often heard that she was furious with me for dating Kay. If she thought I went out of my way to stay out of hers, she was right — not from a simple wish for avoidance so much as a recognition of the power acquired in my youth which she still held over me, and which, considering my standing, I now thought to be unseemly. I had grown to be an independent sort, a bachelor who thrived on connubial hopelessness and the outdoors. I kept bird dogs and horses, and I went on some sort of adventure at least once a year. I felt I was much too fancy even for acquaintance with Tessa. This was a form of whistling in the dark, because whenever I saw her she wielded exactly the same authority over me as she had when I was very young.

Over the years that followed, I’d occasionally see her going about the affairs of Hoxey. As he was now old, sick, and demented and Tessa was seen as exploiting him, she had acquired a questionable reputation around town. When Hoxey died, whatever worries I might have had for her were briefly allayed, as it seemed that she must have inherited the business. Then she made an appointment to see me at the clinic. I had forgotten her physical abundance and burning vitality. Her hair piled atop her head and held there by a bright-red plastic comb seemed to represent fulminating energy. She had a white streak in her hair, which she attributed to “trauma.” She stared at me significantly.

“Henchmen of Hoxey have turned me out into the street,” she told me, “with little more than the clothes on my back.”

“Tessa, I find this very hard to picture.”

“Perhaps a few prints, a negligible watercolor or two.”

“Who exactly are these ‘henchmen’?”

“Grown daughters. I never factored them in. They arrived on the scene like Valkyries hovering over the battlefield in search of corpses to eat.”

“I’m terribly sorry.”

“At a difficult time, Doctor, I offered you companionship and sexual healing.”

“Is there anything I can do? Medication is my line, but I don’t think that is what you have in mind.”

“I’ll have to start looking for work. I hope you’ll recommend me.”

I reached for a pen, poised to join the millions who’ve made their way out of a difficult situation by providing letters of recommendation. But Tessa said, “Not now. I’ll let you know.” That, more or less, was the end of our appointment. She seemed happy with my response, taking my hand in both of hers. I suppose she was just checking to see whether I was still on her side.