Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

I bought a twenty-year-old Oldsmobile Starfire 88 from a used-car salesman with a pencil-thin moustache. In my numerology, 88 is big: the tank traveling in front of my father’s had been destroyed by a German self-propelled 88, a big gun on rails, operated by civilians — two men, two women, and a priest. My father’s tank captured it, and in his crew were men from the Deep South who had a special view of war: they executed the gun crew. Others in my father’s division, suffering from various kinds of battle trauma, were given pills called 88s and sent back into combat. The Oldsmobile 88 is a discontinued car.

When the car salesman in Canada learned I needed to get home, he marked it down two hundred dollars. That I was dirty and unshaven seemed not to matter. I gave him a check, and he said he didn’t need the identification I offered. When the deal was done, he said, “I’m sorry.” As I had not yet understood the situation, I could only shake my head ambivalently. I was still trying to absorb the event the bus passengers claimed to have seen on television. An old Indian woman used both her hands to represent the aircraft while she stared into my eyes. That didn’t work either.

The car went on operating all the way across BC to the Washington border, when it first gave signs of giving up the ghost. I was taking in nothing, not the scenery, no time but the passage of miles toward home, where I meant to look for myself at all the pictures and listen to all the surmises of friends, family, and talking heads. For now all I could do was drive the car. When I hit rain south of Penticton I started singing “Maybellene,” trying to imitate Chuck Berry’s voice as I roared the lines, “The rain blowin’ all under my hood, I know that I was doin’ my motor good.” I needed some luck getting into America, and the 88 felt like it was choking on its own fuel.

There wasn’t much to entering the U.S., an extraordinary informality, more especially in that I had a jalopy with Canadian dealer tags. On the American side, I made little attempt at explanation except to say that I’d been away when it all went down and assumed everyone just wanted to go home. The customs agent looked at me sadly, said, “No shit,” and waved me on. I found a pay phone in the middle of a hundred square miles of rolling wheat and learned that a limited number of planes would be flying from Spokane. I booked a seat and pushed the choking Olds south, feathering the accelerator to keep the engine alive as I trained a worried eye on the temperature gauge. It grazed red-line as mountains began to show in the east.

I abandoned the car in short-term parking and we boarded on schedule. Every seat was filled and the plane was silent. An hour passed, and with it our departure time for Salt Lake City passed, yet there was no word from the cockpit. Indeed the door had never been open and there was no way for us to be sure that it contained pilots. There were no stewardesses, but hardly a murmur emerged from the crowd of faces.

I sat in the exit row and had room to almost sprawl. Not only was the legroom extended but the middle seat was occupied by an Igloo ice chest, strapped in as though it was a passenger, and at the window, I assumed, its owner. From time to time, he turned in my direction, but no expression crossed his face, a face that seemed not quite his own. The only way to let the air out of this thing was to strike up a conversation.

I rested my hand on the cooler. “Is this yours?”

“Don’t touch it, please.”

I withdrew my hand. He looked out the window. I looked past him to the field: there was no one out there. I could see the parking lot but not the 88. My seatmate wore a short-sleeved shirt in the kind of broad plaid you don’t see anymore, a pattern to be found at Sears some years back but not even there now. His arms were very white and hairless, and he rested his hands in his lap, corresponding fingers of each touching at their tips. He sighed.

Perhaps I felt rebuffed at being asked not to touch the cooler and wanted to provoke him a little. In any case, when he returned his gaze to the back of the seat in front of us, I said, “What’s in it?”

He turned and looked straight into my eyes. “It’s a miracle on ice.”

At that moment, the pilot made an announcement. It was quite startling to hear the intercom come alive, having had no prior assurance there was anyone in the cockpit. “The original cabin crew is not going to join us on today’s flight. I’m sure all of you will understand. FAA regulations require us to have cabin crew before we fly. We’re waiting now for new cabin crew. When further information is available, you will be informed. I’m sure you understand.”

My seatmate, looking out the window, said, “Nice.”

The passengers were extraordinarily docile. You would expect some sort of outcry, sarcastic remarks about skipping the peanuts and flying the plane, the perennial expressions of dissatisfaction, but today: silence. It made the passengers appear, when I looked back, like a sea of disembodied souls. I had not yet entered their world, but I knew that soon I would. I was afraid of it.

An hour passed.

“When you say the cooler contains a miracle on ice, what do you mean by that?”

“You couldn’t stand it, could you?”

After a moment, I said, “The cooler has its own seat.”

“Yes? Well, that’s how we do it.”

“That’s how you do what?” I said sharply.

“That’s how we transport a human heart.” I had nothing to say and little to feel beyond a general sense of my impertinence. I must have communicated that because my seatmate softened immediately. I suppose he required some show of respect from me. “Let me correct myself”—yes, it was conciliatory—“This is how we used to do it before the cryonic shippers, the nitrogen drums, and so on. But things aren’t like they used to be.”

“I’m finding that out.”

He looked at me oddly. “We have less time is what I’m trying to tell you. There’s no pre-alert for the pickup in Salt Lake. I’m supposed to get this door-to-door. It wasn’t a good day for the stewardesses to sleep in.”

I suppressed an urge to say something.

“You harvest the heart, let the family decide if they want an open-casket funeral or not. You get through the elimination of blood, the rapid cooling, the packing, and the trip to the airport. It goes well, the heart’s in a viable state. It’s one hour to Salt Lake, the patient is on the table with his chest propped open, you’ve got a four-hour window from harvest to transplant, no ifs ands or buts, and the stewardesses slept in.”

“I don’t think it’s that they slept—”

“I got it! Look, this thing has another hour left and it’s getting to me.”

“I understand.”

I’m not sure I did, but that’s what I said. The outburst from my seatmate was over and he fell silent again. So did I. Time now had a terrible weight. We heard nothing from the cockpit for an interminable period, then the door opened and the pilot appeared to tell us directly that we weren’t going. He got off the plane. The copilot appeared and looked at the passengers with perplexity, unable to identify what species we belonged to, and he got off the plane. I turned and spoke to the back of my seatmate’s head.

“What’s going to happen now?” He seemed not to have heard me. I wondered if he would just ignore my question, and in fact he never looked back my way but continued to gaze at the empty runway.

He said, “What do you think happens when the heart dies?”

I drove toward the mountains. It didn’t matter that the Oldsmobile barely ran. I was glad to be in it. It was an 88.

WHEN YOU IRRADIATED A PLACE as we did Nagasaki it didn’t come back in quite the same way as a failed homestead, whose proprietors could move on to other hopes — unlike the pedestrians of that Asian city, who perhaps melted. I faced up to this being a different world and to the fact that we were ill equipped to absorb some of the newer differences. The New York catastrophe that greeted my return from fishing was one such alteration to our view of life. As a doctor, I had been kept aware of the changing threats to our health, which seemed to be macro adjustments to our environment — greenhouse gases, holes in the ozone layer — to which we made reasoned response — use sunblock, turn down the thermostat, etc. The destruction of the World Trade Center seemed akin to this; it was an environmental change of the kind that few understood but most could not stop talking about. Our exemption from the cyclone of world forces was over. As they said in Mexico, “We have seen the tips of the wolf’s ears.”