Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

We followed a snowplow into Bozeman Pass, spewing a great falling wing of snow on the roadside. My father turned to me to give me another boost out of my youth. “There’s something I’d like to tell you,” he said. I glanced quickly his way, fearful of taking my eyes off the slippery road. “I became an atheist the first time I saw a German tank and I’ve been one ever since. So never think I’m not devoted to your mother.”

In arranging my mother’s voluntary commitment, the hospital required us to accept that she could be held for five days after the requested release. On the occasion of her emptying a tub of Tuna Surprise on the dietician’s head, the facility exercised this option and used the time to request that the court convert her deal to an involuntary commitment. Thanks to what I would long view as my betrayal, my mother was often institutionalized until she died. Since going somewhat AWOL from the clinic, I have been trying to forgive myself for this sin, and several others. That’s right, sins. What else could I have called them? On one long drunken night in February I found myself at 8,500 feet gazing up at the illuminated Our Lady of the Rockies towering over the forlorn town of Butte, waiting for something that would lift the weight of my mother’s life from my shoulders.

I HEARD THAT IN YEARS PAST, pigs were drawn into the slaughterhouse of the Chicago Stockyards by hooks attached to their noses. A pig is a smart animal, but this placed the decision elsewhere. It was in this spirit that I headed once more to White Sulphur Springs to pay a call on Jocelyn Boyce. Wasn’t I in a sense a first responder at the scene of the accident? Naturally I had an interest in the outcome. But it was as if a tiny animal living in the corner of my mind, smaller than a mouse, smaller than an ant, and unobtrusive even considering its size, was saying, “Bullshit.” Anyway, it was a nice drive and the 88 seemed to like it as we coursed along a well-kept highway not too wide for its passage across sandstone bluffs, juniper savannahs, and dashing spate streams. A pickup passed me heading south, a dead elk in the bed and small American flags attached to each elevated leg. The sun was just over my left shoulder, warming my neck, and every few miles I glimpsed a herd of antelope in the distance, its movement syncopated with its shadow’s. The dashboard, with its discolored plastics and deep layer of dust, radiated the pleasant warmth it had absorbed from the sun. A small cloudburst darkened the road ahead of me, then vanished. This daydreaming interlude was soon succeeded by anxiety about the visit. What business was this of mine? Was her asking me to come back a pleasantry which acted upon would arouse annoyed surprise? What if she said, “Can’t you see I don’t feel well? I thought you were a doctor!” And was that the risk? Back to the corridor for a squirming session, fuel up, drive home? If so, I decided to accept the risk. Unfortunately, I went off the rails imagining how I might describe myself to someone like Miss Boyce should they wish to know me as I am: irritable, hypercritical, obsessively orderly, claustrophobic, impatient, antisocial, and agoraphobic, filled with objectless dread, pessimistic, and faultfinding. This led to more general reflections of my current state: my dreams at night were populated by strangers ordering me to pay up and threatening to “discard my application,” and the recurrent “Why can’t you remember your password?” A phantom gate agent haunted my dreams as well. He holds my boarding pass to his eyes and says: “Someone has folded this, or has begun to fold it and has had a change of heart. I’m afraid you’ve run out of luck.” In one genuinely appalling dream, which also recurred, I am at a dinner and have selected the wrong condiment, causing my tongue to swell; it overfills my mouth until I can see it, red and horrible, at the edge of my vision. Breathing mulishly through my nose, I begin to smother. This was poor preparation for my visit, and the thoughts fell upon my mood like a ton of bricks. Once at a fund-raiser for our clinic and hospital I had been charged with babysitting a major donor and had somehow thought it wise to have a candid conversation about where I believed the country was headed; we lost the donation. I recall the donor all too well and how I’d misjudged him for an open-minded soul: an old man dressed in a mixture of styles — tight hip-huggers, a blue Oriental silk shirt, and a corncob pipe. He had long hinted, as his own medical needs increased, that he was contemplating coughing up part of his cheese ball, but in the end it was given to the Elks, B.P.O.E. He was hard of hearing and had the TV turned up so loud I couldn’t understand him when he talked. When I quietly reached to lower the volume, he barked, “Don’t fool with that TV!” Somehow I went off on the state of the nation, based on earlier fund-raising experiences that a rising cloud of amiable generalizations was great preparation for the kill. It was an improvement over Jinx’s sardonic suggestion that I begin by saying, “Stand by for the ram.” I think I said something about the military-industrial complex, or something equally well-worn from the lips of Eisenhower, when I first heard the words I feared again now: “Get out.” For him the military-industrial complex was the last hope of mankind. How was I to know? I can still see him, teeth bared around the stem of his pipe, eyes blazing as I backed out of the room with its roaring TV.

She was standing next to the bed folding a blanket, arms outstretched, its middle held between her chin and her chest. She said, “Grab the end.” I helped fold the blanket, which she threw across the foot of the bed before climbing back under the sheet. “Too hot.” She was wearing white pajamas with blue piping, her knee taped and wrapped. A radio next to the bed played at a murmur: a minor ayatollah was explaining to the world that God had not made America; he had made all the other countries but he had not made America.

“I came to see how you were getting along.”

“Did you.” She smiled at me. “Good then, they’re turning me loose.”

“Well, you said stop back.”

“That’s right, I did. And you did. Very nice to have a visitor. And I need a lift to my car, if you’re up for that.” I nodded.

“The eye’s better?”

“Yup. Can you see if you can get the Venetian blind to work?” I got up and sorted out the tangled runners.

“Are you rested?”

“Evidently, I am!”

I found Jocelyn comely but a bit unnerving; she seemed to be one jump ahead of me in conversation. “You can’t watch the news anymore unless you’re a fan of ethnic cleansing. I love the sports channel, but they just had someone named Stone Cold Steve Austin beating someone up. I’m a baseball fan. I love the radio. In fact, when I get to my car the first thing I’ll do is turn on that radio.”

“I love baseball too.” I hated baseball, but I wasn’t ready to close that door. I noticed that the blacks were leaving the sport. Only whitey could stand around all day like that. I don’t have any idea why I said I liked it: I don’t know dick about baseball.

“Was I in a fog when you were last here? Dr. Aldridge told me you were a doctor. I didn’t realize that.” She was gathering her belongings, tossing them into a day pack and a purse.

“I’m a general practitioner at a hospital south of here. I might have been more help where you crashed, but I was afraid to move you by myself.”

“There’s nothing left of the airplane. Nice airplane, too. Beautiful old Piper Pawnee. It’s no excuse, but flying right on the deck in this damn country to avoid chemical drift, well, you’re just going to hit stuff.”