Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

“All the same, I think you should give up your other occupation in the interest of your health.”

“I told you the weeds were under control. You weren’t listening.”

I did not let this sort of thing make me cynical because then I would have been the casualty of these disorders that I treated, and I had strong survival instincts. Many of the people any doctor sees do not have strong survival instincts; in fact, when I look at their smoking, drinking, obesity, and trauma-prone ways I’m inclined to think they scarcely cling to life. And when I poke around for positive things I could emphasize for them, I often find that they have good reason for submitting to gradual painless suicide. At first glance, there’s nothing really terrifying about a half a million doughnuts or cigarettes, and the exhilaration of driving fast on black ice is anesthesia enough for the casualty waiting in the wings. What I may be cynical about is my wonderment at how all of us are dealt such different hands. This is, of course, religious cynicism, and though for thousands of years mankind has tried to unwind it, it remains as obdurate a conundrum as it was in the beginning. Being a doctor keeps one closer to it than some other jobs do. When I worked in the emergency room it was rare to hear stories beyond the immediate circumstances of the injury. “I missed a turn and hit a tree,” not “My husband made me turn tricks to buy weed spray.”

At the end of the day, I saw Alan Hirsch in the parking lot, scrutinizing my car. “Is this an 88?”

“Good for you. Yes, it is. Bought it in Canada.”

“The Hitler car.”

“The what?”

“88. HH in the alphabet. Stands for Heil Hitler.”

“Oh, my God.”

After resuming conventional duties at the clinic, I made a bit of a sortie. One of the nurses. I suppose that wasn’t smart. Her name was Scarlett and things went well, but not at first.

“So you go to work and then you go home.”

“Yeah, that’s about it. I look after my dad.”

“Well, that’s not so different from my M.O. I go to the movies…”

“I don’t go to the movies.”

“You don’t like movies?”

“No, I don’t go to the movies.”

“I go to the movies, by myself, with friends. I like movies.”

“I like the good ones. You have to go through too many to get to the good ones.”

“You probably think it’s a lot of germs.”

“Not really…”

“A public place. It’s like an airplane, people mushed in. Here come the germs!”

“Well, I’m in germs all day. I spend the day with sick people.”

“I guess it’s the same case with me, all around me. But it’s rare I get anything.”

“You just draw blood all day. Half those people are in for a lipid profile, they’re not sick.”

“Sure, I suppose.”

“Mine, half of them cough in my face, sneeze all over my shirt. But I don’t get sick. It isn’t germs we need to fear. It’s something going haywire.”

“Well, maybe if we went to a movie, or for a meal. Maybe this is a little abrupt, don’t you imagine?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m not suggesting performance issues or anything; I’m just saying ‘sudden.’ ”

“I’m with you there.”

“So, what now? Shall I put my clothes back on?”

“I think so, don’t you?”

“I do, I do. I just feel a bit odd I got into this situation.”

“Of course you do, but there you have it.”

The deaths of my parents were the stepping-stones by which I’d crossed the latest river. They spoke in tongues, righteous Holy Rollers to the end. At least my mother was; my father acted his part and may have occasionally believed it. He once told me he actually enjoyed speaking in tongues. Because of what they had been promised, they couldn’t wait to be dead and soon they were. My mother had no last-minute adjustments to make from this life to the next, and though she saw death coming, she crossed over peacefully. I was present, and my mixing grief with the apprehension that a loved one was getting her way has baffled me ever since. My father, on the other hand, had several things in mind, and I’m pleased I got to hear about them. I owed to them my occasionally sporadic social skills, as was often the case in Holy Roller families, and this despite never believing a speck of their doctrine from the very beginning. I was just a natural-born, but not stupid, oaf. I grew out of most of it.

I treated my father in the last days of his life, all geriatric stuff, nothing special. I was sure he missed my mother, but widowhood was easier than marriage and he was generally lighthearted. He came in readily, but the real mission was unpacking the parts of his life that were most on his mind. You would have thought this had happened long ago, but the setting made all the difference: sitting in my examining room with me in my white coat gave things just the formality he required.

He wanted to talk about war. He was close to the end of his life and had quit going to church. “Everything all right?” I asked him, not quite out of the blue. He didn’t look so hot.

“About half the time.”

He began to muse again about his experience in the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge. He seemed to feel fortunate to have been part of it, even though he saw many of his comrades killed or wounded. His reasons were interesting: it was the biggest war of all time; it starred the most evil regime of all time; the desperate German breakout, “Watch on the Rhine,” was the one Nazi offensive conceived entirely by Adolf Hitler, the most evil man of all time, etc., etc. The Panzers, Tigers, and King Tigers, were the best tanks with the most tactically sophisticated tank crews and with air cover by the Luftwaffe, which had sixty jets in the hunt. In some ways, the experience seemed to justify a life otherwise uneventful and even less accomplished. My father led a platoon of infantry right into the first onslaught south of the Losheim Gap; and at Manderfeld and Krewinkel, using the skills he had learned in the woods of America and imparted to his men, my father and his comrades killed twenty-one Volksgrenadiers, experienced soldiers from the Eastern Front in snow camouflage. “In the year 1944, our world offered no greater thrill than shooting Germans.” His group crept up close enough to German transport to shower with lead an armored personnel carrier bearing SS Panzer Commander Jochen Peiper, “a blond fellow handsome even in the binoculars, guilty of many atrocities in Russia, especially Kursk, retired to France after the war, a pleasant life until the village communists burned him alive in his own house. After the fire was out they found Peiper, winner of Hitler’s Knight’s Cross. He weighed three pounds.” Thumbs-up to this, still happy about the roasting of Peiper. He hated Germans. When they dispersed after firing on Peiper, four of his men were killed; one lingered badly wounded and, after a long night of listening to his groans, a trooper from New Jersey tried to go to his aid, whereupon both GIs went up in the same bomb: the Germans had booby-trapped the wounded man’s body.

“Right after the surrender at Schnee Eifel, we ran into a splinter of the Fuhrer Escort Brigade, who drove us into a farmhouse and then overran it. Then while we fought from the back of the cellar, the Germans got overrun by our infantry and we sat in the dark listening to the firefight all night long. When it was over, we climbed to the first floor and saw the dead Germans piled halfway up the walls. Don’t get me wrong, I loved killing Germans, but when I saw all these bodies, they didn’t seem to be Germans particularly. Some of them were too young to be in this at all. It wasn’t like you could ask for someone’s driver’s license before you shot them. I guess the whole logic that kept us all there became less and less clear to me. I watched our men cutting off fingers with wedding rings and I knew I was going to leave the war. I headed downstream as the battles were subsiding and as the Germans retreated to slow the Russians to the east. I crossed the Meuse and kept going west, staying in the countryside because of the snipers still hiding in the rubble. I don’t remember the towns, I remember the bodies. There were seventy-five thousand of them and no route could keep you out of them for long. But guess what? I got to Paris. And in Paris, absent without leave, I began to live again!”