Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

“I’ll just go in and see her,” I said to Dale.

“I’ll go in with you.”

I declined his offer mildly enough, but Dale appeared to have received a gallon of ice water in the face. I just couldn’t take the time to explain why I thought it best to quietly enter without introduction or surprise and assess Gladys’s state without introductory remarks by Dale. So I left him where he stood, seemingly staggered by rejection. His arms hung at his sides, and in his face indignation and grievance were at war. Out of the sun his unfortunate eyes were visible.

I knew my way around the house well enough that, having left my pathologist’s hat behind, so to speak, I was able to stride straight to the bedroom — there was only one — and open the door slightly but enough to look in: a dresser, a bed, a photograph of Wiley at the Big Timber rodeo — I recognized the grandstand — and making a small mound under her comforter, Gladys, at the extent of her life span as one of earth’s longest-living mammals. She seemed asleep — a tremendously different appearance than the airless gray look of the dead — and a pitcher of water on the stand at her bedside still had a few ice cubes floating. Good on Dale. I entered and sat at the foot of the bed.

Gladys opened her eyes and said, “It’s the end of me.”

“I don’t know if it is or it isn’t,” I said, “but you’ve lived a long time.”

It was a while before she answered. She said, “I suppose.” I think she must have drifted off. She seemed peaceful and even comfortable. This was looking like a fairly jolly segué considering the options of which as a physician I was aware, especially the brutal fights to live I had seen waged by accident and shooting victims during my ER days. Mortality and the sense of unfairness were poor bed companions.

Gladys dying made a modest bump. Nothing there to claim admiration for the thousands of miles she’d ridden through her herds, the horses, dogs, and husband she’d outlived, the thousand pies baked, the cattle cars she’d helped crowd, and the hours she’d listened to the radio wondering about the world. The Stetson hats it took a decade to rot out, the britches that went first in the seat, the war-surplus sunglasses she wore, the Ford tractor that after a quarter century could take no more of her abuse and died. The little flower bed in her front yard never got better; in fact, after Wiley died, it got worse.

She didn’t regain consciousness right away, and I could see that her respiration had declined markedly since she’d spoken her few words. I reached over and found her pulse at the carotid and, without trying very hard to count, got the impression it was down around forty. Gladys had every right to fade away and I had every intention of permitting it. If her throat muscles began to fail and the dreaded rattle began, there would be no intubation, which I felt violated the old. If she failed to wake up, we wouldn’t haul her to town and introduce isotopes to her system to determine whether or not there was blood flow to her brain, though that was just what a couple of the turkeys back at my clinic would do, especially if they were trying out some new machine. By keeping her right here on home ground, I would see to it that no one turned to hopeless ventilation out of some bogus respect for life, or moved her around strange places, for fear she would awaken at the end and not know where she was.

I was tired and struggled against objectless inertia, relieved only by lending my car to the still moping Dale and sending him to town for a pizza.

“Plain pizza,” he said, barely moving his lips.

“Surely not. With everything.”

“Even pineapple?”

“Yes, which reminds me: go by the Dairy Queen and pick up a Tropical Freeze. What d’you want?”

“Beer.” Then he cried out for emphasis, “ Beer! ”

“Get that too, but go to DQ last so the Tropical Freeze doesn’t melt.” I could see Dale bridle at this bit of micromanagement, but he said nothing before heading for my car, wavering off like a windblown rag.

When Dale was gone, I was free to sit on the porch, on an old church pew, and look out at the land. The base of ledge rock was deep in shadow, but the crown of grass was luminous gold in the late-evening sun. I’d had old ranchers tell me that the day always came when they realized the land didn’t care about them; I think it was a moment of despair. I don’t think Gladys had ever had such a moment: this was White Bird. The wild grass no more needed to care about anybody than the doorway to the house needed to remember Gladys and Wiley’s honeymoon. They were an unlikely couple: Gladys part horse and Wiley part cigarette.

I went back inside and gazed at her. I believed I saw great fading, but distrusted myself and got out my stethoscope. Her bowels were silent, her lungs were torpid, and her heart was lagging its own meter. I’d be lucky to finish my pizza before Gladys went through the pearly gates. While I insulated myself with such whimsy, I knew all along that when the moment arrived it would be impossible to remain unmoved. While the changes might be microscopic, the difference between life and death always communicated itself with terrible solemnity. A dead person looked nothing whatsoever like a living one. In anatomy class, we greeted our first corpse with unholy terror until the absence of its original owner sank in and we went to work on “it.” We had a well-muscled old six-footer and felt frightened only when someone put an R. G. Dun commemorative cigar in his lips: “ It’s a boy! ”

Dale arrived with the pizza and we sat out at the picnic table under the spreading ash with the great complicated disk before us to be eaten by hand. I tested my Tropical Freeze for firmness and concluded I could eat the pizza first. Dale ostentatiously picked the pineapple off his side of the pie, and then separated a wedge to eat, indenting it skillfully in the middle with his forefinger so that the mozzarella wouldn’t run off. Dale had good pizza technique and I was not above copying it as we fell to. When he talked, he gobbled with his mouth full and, suddenly touched by the precariousness of his future, I was inclined to talk with my mouth full too.

“She’s all done, ain’t she?”

“All done.”

“Comfortable?”

“Out like a light.”

“When someone had a great life and don’t suffer, do you think it’s sad, Doc, when they go?”

“It will be when it happens. I don’t know why.”

“Big difference between here and gone?”

“Huge.”

Our pizza eating came to a stop. Deep thoughts. Everyone was implicated by every departure. As I looked at Dale, and heard his inappropriately profound voice, I realized that after Gladys was gone, he would face what to him would be a terrible emptiness.

“So what happens to the place?” There was something wild in his eyes when he asked.

“The lawyer will tell us or the State of Montana will tell us. I’ve been through this before and they never let the bodies cool.”

“She asked to be buried right here. Have the service sometime later.”

“Where’s ‘right here’?”

“In them trees. Right opposite Wiley. You were here.”

“I was?”

“Wait till you see how hard that ground is.”

I’d have to have a nap first, let all these pizza proteins restore my vitality. I didn’t even want to think about reorganizing my patient schedule. I was somewhat impatient this last time checking Gladys’s vital signs before returning to the Tropical Freeze, which Dale stared at after eating two-thirds of the pizza. “I’m not sharing,” I told him firmly.

Talking to Dale about Gladys’s long decline, I was pleased to notice how closely he had observed her. I did think that things at present were going about as they should: his account suggested a blood deficit to the brain, with the usual neurological decline, a cruel scenario without hope of revision. There had been no big events, but the increasing recurrence of transient ischemia episodes was chipping away at her humanity and, as she had already beaten the odds, I was content with the present situation. If I dreaded anything, it was her revival. My stethoscope had already told me that the renewal of blood was hardly coursing, and all things considered, the end was at hand, as Gladys had herself seemed to know. I gathered from Dale that organized thought for Gladys was already slipping away. She’d been sputtering along until something happened that occasioned Dale’s summoning me; I supposed it had been a stroke, infarction of brain tissue, the oxygen cycle winding down toward the waiting stillness. Basically, it ends in a riddle. Meanwhile, Dale and I had not only pizza but sunshine and oxygen, those delicious metabolic elements of the ongoing. I suddenly felt joyous, with no doubts about intervening in Gladys’s situation. This above all things branded me a country doctor, and I fancied myself part of the countryside, a sort of pizza and Dairy Queen shaman.