Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

There was some reason I remembered all this and it had to do with my somewhat intense focus on the pilot. It might have been the way she, like Audra, like Tessa, flew into our lives — Tessa in the aftermath of California, Jocelyn in the aftermath of an accident. I began wondering if she would live. I supposed they had taken her to the medical facility in White Sulphur Springs, a little thirty-seven bed facility whose staff I knew cycled between the hospital and clinic, the nursing home, home health care, and so on. It was in technical parlance a “frontier” facility. I would go there. I was drawn to White Sulphur Springs as though by some winch fastened to the town and attached to my Oldsmobile, and I found myself at the counter asking to be directed to the patient’s room, a request that only met with hesitation from the young girl at the desk with the severely plucked eyebrows and the tribal tattoo on her neck — until I explained that I was a physician.

The pilot was in the first room down a very short corridor. Her arms were bandaged, her face badly bruised; someone had secured her hair atop her head with an elastic, and under one slate gray eye hung a swollen blue-green bruise. “You’re the guy at the crash?” I said I was. I was skimming her chart: her name was Jocelyn Boyce and she was forty years old. She was from Two Dot, Montana, and listed as next of kin was her father. The ER summary indicated blowout fracture of the left eye socket, broken ribs, probably torn rotator cuff. She seemed fairly pert in view of these pain producers. The crow’s-feet I had already found attractive as suggesting someone not going to give in easily to hurt, but I didn’t know what sort of medication she had on board.

She did not seem dispirited by her condition. She said, “I thought I had the rookie errors out of my system.”

“I can’t comment,” I said. “I don’t know anything about flying.”

“It’ll be a long time before I live it down.”

Her physician came in about ten minutes after I got there. We knew each other vaguely, and he returned my greeting with reserve. He must have thought I’d been called in until I told him that I was at the accident. At that point, he cheered up and went into bonhomie so abruptly that I was startled and caught the glimpse of an ironic half smile from Jocelyn Boyce. He was Dr. Aldridge and had practiced here and there as he dodged the effects of his drinking, which he had finally controlled, though he was now trailed by his obsolete reputation. He was a good physician and looked the part with his neatly trimmed gray moustache and clear gray eyes. He said, “You can see Miss Boyce has quite a shiner.” He turned an infatuated gaze on his patient.

“I do see that.”

“She has a blowout fracture of the eye socket.” I knew that, but I thought it best for him to tell me. As Jocelyn Boyce and I kept glancing at each other, something odd was going on between us.

“The whole thing?” I asked.

“Just the floor, I think. She doesn’t have double vision and I’ve ruled out surgical repair. And no one wants us going in for that, do they, Miss Boyce?”

“It sounds creepy,” she said. “I’ll give you that.”

“There’s really no sign of muscle entrapment. If Miss Boyce gets bored with us she can roll her eyes whenever she wishes.” In fact, she did so, either at the banality of Dr. Aldridge’s remark or merely as a demonstration.

“You see?” said Dr. Aldridge. “No sign of spinal injury, thank the Lord, but the jury is still out on head trauma for as long as that eye tells us something about the blow she received.”

“Is that the worst of it?”

“The worst of it might be the knee. We’ve got it secured, but it was near disarticulation when she arrived.”

“It’s a long way from my heart,” said Jocelyn.

“You’ll be in the hands of a smart orthopod for that. We’re just the nuts-and-bolts guys, aren’t we, Dr. Pickett?” I smiled at this. “So, this is me going home to feed the cat—” His eyes glanced off mine; I knew his wife had left him during the bad years. “Miss Boyce, I’ll be looking in. I don’t live far and if you need me before my next visit, just call. I’ve left my cell number here—” He pointed to the papers on the bedside table. He was more than interested in Miss Boyce; it was almost embarrassing.

After Aldridge left, it was quiet in the room. Finally, I said, “It looks like you’ll get better.”

“So they say.”

“It’s time for you to rest. I’ll be on my way.”

“I wonder if you might think of stopping again.”

I looked down suddenly. “Yes,” I said, “I’d like to.”

At least once a week, my travels took me past the old strip mall where my parents’ Pentecostal church formerly met. It was now a Radio Shack outlet, and the electronics buffs and various tech weenies going in and out the door obviously felt no residual vibrations from its Holy Roller days. But I did: I painfully remembered when my mother began taking her raptures to the street, accosting pedestrians in tongues. My mother was a small woman, unthreatening in physical presence or demeanor, so she was no more than a curiosity at these passionate displays, with my father, abashed and meek, trailing at a safe distance. I, too, was influenced by my mother’s activity at this time: I started to look for signs of craziness in myself, and I found plenty. People with a crazy parent will be unsure of their own mental health all their lives. My grade school classmate Roscoe Tate often remarked when my mother made a public nuisance of herself that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Facing such things definitely budged me out of a childhood in many ways pleasantly prolonged by my mother’s peculiarities. It also occasioned the deepening of my friendship with our family doctor, Eldon Olsson.

We met in his chaotic office, bird dog sleeping on an old and overstuffed armchair, a well-worn sixteen-gauge pump gun standing in the corner. Dr. Olsson leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. I thought that it must have seemed unlucky to Dr. Olsson to have stumbled on Wiley and Gladys in his partridge-hunting forays and ending up with my family as his patients. I suppose he realized we didn’t have the money for a more regular arrangement.

“Your mother needs some help.”

“What kind of help?”

“Inpatient psychiatric help.”

“Because of her religion?”

“I don’t know because of what. I only know that Health and Human Services won’t allow her to do what she does much longer without stepping in.”

I was growing up fast. “What can we do?”

“We can head it off through a voluntary commitment, which would allow us to specify the date of release. That way we hold the cards. But you’re going to have to sell it. She’s got your father under her thumb, and he may be a nut too.” This hurt, but I withheld reaction. “Your task is to make your mother see the light on this one. Good luck.”

I sold it, and on a winter day we drove my mother to the Warm Springs State Mental Hospital, old buildings under bare trees by the Clark Fork River. She hardly seemed defeated by her situation, and dressed in her wool coat with the rabbit fur collar and unbuckled galoshes, she strode into her room, looked around, and pronounced it wonderful to see that Jesus was there too. I could hear the cold river through the window. It was clear that in her odd kindheartedness she was doing this to make my father and me feel better.

My mother’s spirits helped me a bit with the guilt I felt at talking her into this arrangement. As we drove home my father found much to marvel at in the winter landscape, especially the colossal statue of Our Lady of the Rockies outside Butte, a ninety-footer sitting atop the Continental Divide; the vast mine diggings around the city which I found such an assault on nature, he saw as a tribute to the determination of men. “That Berkeley Pit filled a lot of lunch pails. Crying shame it got so big they had to tear down the Columbia Gardens, but people got to eat.” As we passed the great wheat farms west of Three Forks, he averred that Americans fed the world. I may have been a bit offended on my mother’s behalf at his very high spirits. I was brooding over the fact, which I recalled from publicity at the time it was raised, that Our Lady of the Rockies was dedicated to all the mothers in the world. The Army National Guard supplied a sky crane to install the Virgin’s head. I don’t know what I had supplied on behalf of motherhood. Not much.