Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

Before entering the building, I took a long look around the outdoors — the blue sky, the lenticular clouds, the treetops encircling the pretty houses. What reluctance I felt, and what disinclination to enter. I was the last to arrive and far from reassured to see those assembled. Gary Haack, the orthopedic surgeon, was the first to remark on my arrival. Gary is a compact, youthfully muscular man, a tennis player and bachelor who takes his vacations in places such as East Timor. He sprawls in his chair like a highly paid linebacker bored at a team meeting, flipping the lid of his cell phone. He cried, “What happened to you?” I turned to the other jackals, who gazed at me with elevated eyebrows.

“Changing a tire on a dirt road. Ever try it?”

“After you changed the tire,” Gary asked, “did you spend the night under the car?” I ignored him.

“What’s the state of play here? Are we getting anything done? I see I’m late.”

Laird McAllister, the cold-blooded old family-practice guy, tented his hands and said, “Little to report, Berl. Lots of administration, not much medicine.” Laird had once famously remarked to a woman patient, “Cosmetic surgery being what it is today, there’s no reason in the world for you to go on living with a nose like that.” Jinx Mayhall looked like she was asleep, though she covertly watched me with a worried gaze. Alan Hirsch seemed pained by Haack’s aggressive tone.

Then Haack said, “I just wish I could walk in and know what my day would be like without the detective work.” I think he was addressing me, but he didn’t seem to want to look my way.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“It’s not that complicated: appointments, billing, patient history, easy retrieval of diagnostic data.” He seemed to be lecturing me.

“Buy the software.”

“Hell, no, I’m not buying the software.”

“Who did you have in mind to buy you the software?”

“Berl, you need sleep.”

Jinx Mayhall said, “I have no trouble keeping track of my patients’ history, but I don’t have hobbies and it pleases me to have the well-being of my patients fully in mind at all times. We have a clinic manager and he sees to the billing. I hope it’s fair and appropriate, but I don’t worry about it much. I’m comfortable in my house and my car runs. I don’t change my own tires, I have Triple A. I like my figure, but I avoid being seen in a bathing suit. I look after children, period, full stop.”

Unseen by Jinx Mayhall, Dr. Gary Haack rolled his eyes for the benefit of Dr. McAllister, as they were in cahoots, two well-bred, cut-to-the-chase doctors. Unheard from until now, Dr. Elvis Wong, our eagle-eyed radiologist, asked, “Who sets the information parameters and where is the database? Is it here?” Wong was always the most up-to-date of all of us, and he turned out to be right about the needs of the clinic more often than anybody else because his individualism and ego were under control. I was having a terrible time caring, but that might have been my state. I mean, of course it was my state.

I didn’t want to get politicized in our claustrophobic group, but I did say, “As I understand it, we’d set the parameters according to specializations, exams, blood groups — all that stuff. The database is elsewhere. I’m not recommending this. We may be too small. I’m just responding to Gary wanting this from elsewhere.”

“That’s right, blame me,” said Dr. Haack.

“No,” I said, patiently, “but my caseload is too diverse for this sort of thing. You’re just looking at bones.”

Haack said, “How about a shower?”

“In due time.”

This was all fairly good-natured, but I was tired. We had a clinic manager and he seemed to be doing all right, despite being a Wilmot appointee. Once in a while we’d get annoyed and fire the manager, but this wasn’t one of those times. And we used to have better control of our board. We often excluded the manager from our meetings in case the impulse to fire him overtook us unexpectedly, and with Wilmot elsewhere surveying lift sites, we’d leap to do so just because the opportunity was there. Things were moving along. Mostly, I noticed the air of contentment among these doctors, hardworking men and women all. This was their life. I alone seemed to have missed this accommodation, though I’d had it once until several blows uprooted my certainty. I wondered whether I might be over-crediting my particular subjectivity, whether, in fact, all the other doctors were likewise seething with doubt, though they didn’t look it. They looked bored and anxious to go back to work they enjoyed. I think they believed themselves to be necessary. I wasn’t sure I did. Not today anyway. I was just beginning to feel if not ashamed about the binge at least baffled at my own behavior. But I was mistaken: they were not anxious to get back to work; only I rose to leave. A conspicuous pause ensued and I knew it was about me.

“Yes?”

“I wonder if you’d stay for a minute,” said Laird McAllister. He was the only one looking up; the others seemed to have found something in their laps to be interested in. I was most worried by the look of compassion on McAllister’s lined old face. I knew he was just acting.

I said, “Of course.” This brought the heads up, newly adorned with concern, anger, and inquiry. By this point, however, Laird McAllister was swept by awkwardness and inauthentic embarrassment. It was terribly quiet and I thought for a moment of getting them out of this, but I refrained. At length Jinx addressed me.

“Berl,” she said, “is everything all right?”

I said that it was. I should have reflected on the somber state of things. Instead, I reacted to Jinx’s earnest concern by staring at her lips. Nice lips. I didn’t dare subject Jinx to my primitive wooing under so many prying eyes, but I did want to give her at least a little smile. I caught her trying not to return it.

Laird McAllister, animated once again, suddenly threw his head back and bayed, “Nothing whatsoever has been normal about your behavior, Berl, for a very long time.” Laird, from New Hampshire, our sole Yale man, had a declamatory style that defied contradiction: lofty and blunt. I had known this was coming even during his theatrical run-up.

“All in the eye of the beholder, Laird. I’ve never found you normal. But it’s a great country and we accept one another.”

It was true that I was a little indisposed as I appeared before them; it had been a long day and night. I saw no advantage in this roadshow assassination of Saint Stephen and so I went to my nurse for the day’s schedule, which was promptly obliterated by an emergency which looked to be entirely open-ended. McAllister’s accusation rang in my ears. I thought that my nurse was a bit cavalier as she informed me, and I concluded that my deteriorated standing was showing up everywhere. Now she stood before me with a gift box of Dole pineapples acquired on her vacation in Hawaii and I couldn’t remember her fucking name, which caused me to enthusiastically celebrate the pineapples.

Gladys was now a very old widow living out in the tall uncut practically by herself — she had a hired man, Dale, equally if prematurely decrepit, a hundred cows, eleven bulls, and three swaybacked horses. Dale, my sort-of-moronic playmate when I had worked for Gladys and Wiley, was the one who had called the clinic to say that he thought she might be dying. She had spent eighty-three years under the south-facing rimrock that formed the edge of her grazing land, a great plateau of native grass where ravens built nests in low trees. She was a clever old woman whom I was always ready to serve, on house calls and otherwise; she was canny about what would become of her ranch after she was gone, but all alone and, from the drift of today’s report, dying. Gladys had seemed to be quite old the whole time I’d known her; I think she was older than my mother and father, whom she outlived. But now she was genuinely very old.