Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

They knew who I was. I didn’t care. I was riding along on my interior tumult as on a big wave whose force I hoped would take me far up the beach. It was only at the door to my own house that I noticed the shoes on my sore feet, and the mismatched socks; they were square-toed brogans, quite comfortable, but they weren’t mine.

I HAD A NORMAL REST OF THE WEEK at work. I ignored Jinx with a smile when she said, “Go.” I had a cancellation Friday afternoon and it was taken by Pastor Rawl Pennington — he who had fed the pandemonium! — who had a sore throat and the beginnings of an infection. My sense was he had grabbed a cancellation to take my temperature on matters of the spirit. As I somewhat rigidly greeted him, my first thought was that he would try to initiate some sort of revival meeting in my office, shredding what little remained of my reputation. Rawl operated a mobile welding service subcontracted to the Burlington Northern Railroad and lived at the south end of H Street near the rodeo grounds. I swabbed the white spots in his throat to have them cultured and wrote him a prescription for antibiotics. I don’t think church would ever have come into this had I not tried to relate all the shouting on Sunday to the poor condition of his throat. He agreed with me. “Should have been toughened up by this time, don’t you think?” This was the first acknowledgment, if a bit off the wall, of my attendance at his services.

“Well, I don’t know how much of that you do.”

“Ever’ week. Say, did you get anything out of it?”

“I don’t know, I might have. I have to be honest, it wasn’t exactly a religious experience.”

“Did you feel any better?”

“I felt way better.”

“Good enough. Maybe you just need to see folks more.” At the door, I shook his powerful hand and thanked him for the advice. “Don’t worry if you can’t make it again,” he said. “It’s not for everybody.”

Before I left for home that day, I prayed at my desk. It was hardly the first time I’ve prayed, because my mother embedded that in my habits from the beginning. But I just kind of launch these petitions into the unknown, as I am hardly a person of faith. You could say I believe in that vast entirety that is not me and I find it a suitable destination for prayer. I also pray to those manifestations of the natural world that catch my eye. I have prayed to clouds, canyons, springs, at least one landslide, birds, Swimming Woman Creek, the town of Martinsdale, the Jefferson River, and so on. I’ve prayed to my old 88. After a rain, I prayed to a mud puddle. Today a pair of teal flew past the window of my office, and I directed a really heartfelt prayer to them for the people of my mother’s church. This has given me great consolation. I will go on praying. However, when McAllister’s nurse came in with a stack of Medicare forms, she wanted to know why I was kneeling by the window. I felt there was no reason to back away from my new understanding and I told her simply that I was praying to ducks. She dropped the papers on my desk and left without saying anything.

As far as patients, I was just taking what came through the door. Something was afoot with me, and no pattern of regulars had emerged recently, old regulars being notably absent. I had ranchers reluctant to come to town because they considered all towns parasites on the ranching community. I had railroaders anxious to acquire workmen’s compensation looking for someone to verify their claims of disability. It was the age of hard-to-specify complaints of the spine and neck. At least once a week, someone came to me hoping for prescription opiates, sometimes the spine-and-neck folk hunting early retirement and sometimes unemployed night owls. Every one of these small western towns had a nocturnal population, people you never saw during daylight. Generally, they were up to no good. A prairie town usually had a dense grove of trees somewhere, often a cemetery, to which the night people resorted. And most were no strangers to the legal system. One of the biggest problems was the indiscriminate making of babies, and I handed out birth control pills with the feeling of pounding sand down a rat hole. I even tried arousing a sense of responsibility in the young fathers. Of course they all professed to want nothing more than the coming child, but these young men were easily bored and the poor girls who took them at their word were soon left holding the bag. I recall one young man, a baby-faced cowboy with a baritone voice and vaguely arrogant air, who was the father of three of my patients’ babies. I may have been less diplomatic with him than was my custom, but his reply has stayed with me to this day: “I only screws them what needs screwin’.” I was so entirely flummoxed by this remark, delivered as it was with obstinacy and challenge, that I could only tell him to keep up the good work, and I saw him to the door. I failed to understand how innocent he was of irony, for he walked away in triumph, determined, I now admit, to do as I directed, and now with my blessing.

Being a doctor in a small town was a strange experience indeed because “doctor” implied affluence, though it had come to seem nothing exceptional now that the easiest money came to those who didn’t work. Still, the title retained some of its old value, and you often heard that such and such ranch was closed to hunting because it was rented to “a bunch of doctors,” even though no doctors were actually involved. Napoleon said that if it weren’t for religion the poor would kill the rich. This may be all you needed to know about any human community. The churches were the real police stations, the real keepers of law and order.

Todd Clancy visited me at home on Thursday night, bringing a couple of beers which he managed to dangle between the fingers of one large hand. He had a cigarette between his lips, his suit coat flared over his substantial belly, and his tie pulled loose from an unbuttoned shirt collar. Todd had the broad, substantial, and florid face that I somewhat unfairly associated with the name Clancy. “May I come in?” His high voice was as incongruous as Mike Tyson’s.

“You may.”

Todd followed me into my kitchen, where he unceremoniously deposited the beer.

“Mind if I sit?”

“Nope. Is this an occasion?”

“Uh-huh.”

That made me nervous. Moreover, whatever was on Todd’s mind, he didn’t seem in any hurry to speak. He appeared to think I could guess what was on his mind. I could not. It came to his attention. He said, “Do you have any idea why I’m here?”

“You needed company?”

“You really don’t know?”

“I really don’t know.”

“That makes my job tougher.”

“Todd. Rise above it.”

Todd gripped his beer, and then embedded the tip of his forefinger in the opening. He was the county prosecutor and a pretty tough guy, used to all sorts of unpleasantness, but he had a very painful time telling me that it was possible I’d be charged for negligence in the death of Tessa Larionov. I really had no reply to make but stupidly asked anyway, “Why would I do that?”

He went into his prosecutor’s number. “Why does anyone commit a crime? I only know that my job has to do with whether or not they did it, not why they did it.” I found this irritating.

He settled down a bit. “I’ve been given a job to do.”

“I have to say, I’m having trouble getting my mind around this one. I did everything I could to keep Tessa alive. Who has suggested otherwise?”

“Are you going to drink that one?”

“No, I don’t want it.”

Clancy took the other beer and immediately drank from it. “I would say that your board of directors aren’t your friends. It’s none of my business, but coming in I noticed that you’ve let all your bird feeders get empty.”