Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

I rented a pressure washer, masked everything, used a quality primer, and picked my weather for the final coat. It looked much better, but Lauderdale never responded to the bill I sent, nor the second or third. Live and learn. I wasn’t much interested in exploring my remedies, and since other revenues were unassured, I sold my car and went on a grocery binge. Also, in celebration of two months in the apartment, I bought a bed, which I put out in the middle of the living room, where I could luxuriate in all that space and gaze east, west, and south, but not north, at fine window views that were better than any painting, in that they were full of those moving, changing parts known as “Life.”

I heard a timid knock on my door and called, “Enter!” I was stretched out on my new bed in my shorts reading a newspaper I’d found in the doorway to the bank. My visitor was the chief of police. I was really pleased to see him, so pleased that I easily set aside any worries over the reason for his visit. I suppose I was lonely. In a decent society, the chief of police is the one stranger you should be able to welcome into your home without reservation. In this case the first thing he told me was that I’d better get dressed, as I was going to jail. He gazed at me with sad knowingness. He had a big, warm face; it shouldn’t be misunderstood if I declare that he looked like Porky Pig, with all that guileless amiability, the same pink complexion.

“Tessa Larionov”—he gestured with his head in the direction of Tessa’s abode—“has charged you with making obscene phone calls to her.”

“Oh?” I said. “I don’t have a phone.” For one miraculous moment, there were people passing all three windows, and the chief remarked that I needed curtains. “How bad were they supposed to be?” I tried to picture myself as the twisted man placing these calls. In a weird way, it seemed plausible.

“They were not nice.”

It comes as a great surprise to anyone jailed in a small town that it is a remarkably stress-free environment. If your reputation is of no concern, your troubles are behind you. The local jail was as good a place as any I’ve found to unravel all the causes for the state I was in. In a rare moment of lucidity, I suggested a wiretap. The chief didn’t take my idea seriously, but tomorrow was a new day because Tessa informed him that the calls had continued while I was in custody. So the wiretap was tried after all, and it soon paid off.

Hoxey was making the calls. Tessa declined to press charges, and it all went down as a lovers’ quarrel, once you swallowed the fifty-one-year difference in their ages. Tessa’s routine continued unaltered, except that her phone no longer rang so much after her workday was done. I finally ran into her in the hallway just as she was coming down with the packages one afternoon. She stopped in her tracks, arms loaded, and regarded me quizzically. “Hello,” she said. I waited before replying. I wanted her to think about what she had done to me. But she didn’t seem troubled, and the longer I waited the less troubled she looked.

“Hello,” I said.

“You look like you’ve been painting.”

“Yes, I’ve been painting a house.”

“Here in town?”

“Yes, a doctor’s house on Third.”

“How funny. Since you’re going to be a doctor.”

“Yes, I’m going to be a doctor.” Riches danced before me like sugarplums.

“I don’t suppose we’ll ever get to the bottom of that.”

“No, probably not.”

“If you were sick, would you go to a doctor or treat yourself?”

“Oh, I’d go to a doctor. I’m not a doctor yet.”

“I mean if you already were… Oh, never mind. Can you help me with these?”

We took the packages to the post office and I stood outside on the steps while she mailed them. I watched a grackle walk between parked cars, one of which had an American flag on its antenna. A strong young man was wheeling a cart of pies into the back of a restaurant. He looked too powerful to wheel pies. My mother drove past, blowing her horn, her colossal agitation visible through the windshield. People in town enjoyed such scenes.

Once the packages were sent, Tessa and I stood in front of the building and had a delightful conversation. She commended me for having taken the jailing episode with such good grace. I told her that I didn’t know how I could have done otherwise, which she mistook for some form of chivalry. I used both speech and body language to indicate that I mostly understood and what I didn’t, I forgave.

I had been raised to believe that time delivers our dreams and quietly carries our nightmares away, and that most of what lies ahead is welcoming and serene. It was part of the strange but cozy world of my home with God in the role of Mr. Goodwrench. Or at least that’s how I saw it, peering out from the cocoon of my oddly sheltered Pentecostal household, where there was nothing to worry about but the flames of eternal damnation, which didn’t seem like all that much. I saw Satan as just another person who could be bought after my career took off. My mother was always telling me how deceitful the devil was, but that only made me think that I could handle him.

My parents lived on a small piece of ground north of town where there was no hiding from prevailing winds and the desolate ground-hugging plants offered no shade. My father soldiered on at jobs he disliked while my mother was busy with her evangelical splinter group. While my father’s religious convictions were mostly an attempt to get along with her, both of them awaited the Rapture with a complacency that in my father’s case was mostly the hope of getting out of the wind. They were aware of my impractical nature but proud that I had somehow got myself into a small college, even though they must have realized that my bizarre if loving upbringing had not fitted me well for life in the world. Schoolwork had been my anchor in all our wanderings, and having had an aunt who saw to my ardor and venery, I was able in my airhead way to satisfy the odd lonely girl during my school years. I called it “pollinating coeds” and thought I was funny.

Having heard of my godless ways in town, my parents moved me out to a friend’s ranch, where I helped with chores until it was time to resume my studies. Gladys and Wiley were subsistence ranchers on an old place called White Bird. I had known them all my life. Wiley and Gladys liked my mother, whom my father had met at a USO facility in Arkansas, and they could tolerate her religious enthusiasm without sharing it. I don’t think they believed my dad shared it either, and later, when he told me he believed in God but also believed that God was crazy, I began to realize that Gladys and Wiley might have been right. I have a thoroughly secular mind, and despite all the sessions I endured at churches in storefronts and old gymnasiums I never believed any of it. Still, I am content to have had this background, as it acquainted me with the fabulous range of hope entertained by humanity.

Wiley had fought in the Pacific, some very nasty places like Peleliu and New Guinea, hand-to-hand stuff. He had brought home a Japanese suicide sword, a wakizashi , which he used for all sorts of things around the ranch until it wore down and ended up in Gladys’s kitchen drawer. After the war he had worked at many jobs trying to hang on to his land. He and Gladys spent three winters south of Billings feeding Cheyenne steers on beet tops and treating septicemia outdoors in winter conditions that included regular blizzards. Wiley was another VFW guy with my dad, along with a relatively new friend, Dr. Eldon Olsson, who had been a battlefield surgeon in Italy and North Africa. Dr. Olsson left a family practice in the Midwest, and then came to Montana to hunt partridges, practicing only enough to support his austere lifestyle. He confided in my parents that he had never married because his true love had married his best friend. He took up with my parents after he’d joined the VFW, and with Gladys and Wiley because they had nice creek fishing and a spring pond.