Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

“Please call as soon as you can.” This from the crop duster. The delectable pilot. Jocelyn Boyce. I felt instinctively that it could change everything. Take this job and shove it, etc.

I stuck with my decision to use Niles Throckmorton as my lawyer. To begin with, he was so passionate about my case. Hadn’t he called when I had not even been charged with anything? Too many lawyers are inclined to gloat at the misfortune of doctors, but Niles was an old friend. Still, I was surprised at his enthusiasm. I guessed that would be a good thing, but though I am misfortunate, it is not my mission to help others gloat.

The death of my mother was a very confusing occasion. I can’t say we were close, that wasn’t it. Her periods of “rest” at various institutions increased her distance from us. At the end, adult-onset asthma, which had for a long time predisposed her to bacterial infections, resulted in one that we ultimately couldn’t control. I say “we” because for obvious reasons I didn’t want to be alone on that one, and because I sensed that she couldn’t wait to get out of here (earth) and be on her way to a better place (heaven) and was making very little effort to stay. I could see why the death of persons with those views persuades others of their truth; Mama’s peace and delight at dying gave the three attending doctors, including me, the inspirational feeling that here was a person who had just left behind a burdensome vessel, her body. Perhaps we could see how the body was an ongoing annoyance, and she seemed so glad to go. The three of us definitely felt exalted and disturbed. But my father’s ill-concealed relief gave rise to secondary confusion, though time helped me understand that the oppression of her religious views had lifted at last. After decades of faithfully attending those noisy services — which I now read as simple devotion to my mother — he never went again; and when that muscle-bound whack job of a pastor made his third importuning visit to the house, my father slammed the door in his face so vehemently that we went to the window to see if the pastor was still on his feet. Flying coattails disappearing into a four-door sedan were our reward. My father ostentatiously dusted off his hands, and that was that.

My situation, under the law, was so fraught with ambiguity that I wondered why I found it comfortable. My earnings were at an end, though I was in no peril economically, having reasonable savings and even a few investments. Stranger still was my indifference to all things my income might have provided. My eating had long been confined to basic needs, I used only one light in the house, and I had all but quit driving my car. As I walked I felt the aura of my disgrace shine out before me like the beams of headlights. Seeing familiar faces turn away fascinated me. Human entanglement was so tiresome that if we were of sound ego, we would find it exhilarating to arouse disgust in others. Besides being guilty of the death of Cody Worrell and knowing guilt was guilt, I could well accept the fact that the people of my town considered me guilty of the death of Tessa.

My mother’s Southern — that is, Ozarkian — origins afforded her several distinctions compared to neighbors, and among them was a taste for what she called without bigotry “race music,” a kind of postwar rhythm and blues that she played on our home Victrola. God knows where she got the records. And she had a source for moonshine: both my parents drank it, but not with the feral abandon associated with that substance. They treated it as a superior liqueur and sipped it on special occasions. My father said, “It’s just bourbon, but it’s handmade.” I do remember them once having more than a taste and dancing on the exhausted linoleum of our kitchen floor in modest abandon to Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88,” after which my father said plainly that he never wanted to hear that song again. My mother danced with a lot of soul and seemed faintly amused at my father’s rhythmless hopping around.

I had some success in going on about my business as though things were normal, and in an odd way they were . I even popped in at the clinic on one pretext or another, getting this and that from my office or merely amiably greeting my former colleagues. I did so often enough that at first they grew somewhat accustomed to seeing me; then they seemed to have forgotten the charges against me, and finally a bit of compassion emerged from one or two of them.

Some nights I was terrified.

I lay sweating on sheets overdue for changing and racked my brain for happier days. Often I went back to my hours as a house painter but could never quite put my finger on what I had liked about that besides its inconsequentiality. I did remember the pleasure of making something change color.

Whenever Jinx wished to see me, she always just came to my office or any other empty room I was purported to be in, as there was a certain informality about working spaces at the clinic. This time, she had our receptionist call and ask me to “stop by at my convenience.” I didn’t like the sound of that at all. But I went. I found Jinx in the consultation room she had staked out as her own, much the most commodious, and originally meant as a sort of conference room, her intense, intelligent, battle-ready face already fixed in the ominous pause that would precede her remarks and her graceful body propped against the broad, paper-stacked desk that also held the odd assortment of hats she cycled through during the week. She tried hard to avoid being beautiful, but it wasn’t working. I didn’t have to say anything. I merely raised my eyebrows inquiringly.

“Close the door.” I did. “Well, sport, it’s coming your way.”

IN RETROSPECT, I realized that the tone of my working world had changed with Wilmot’s installation on our small board of directors. At first it was hard for me to see how this could have happened. Wilmot had money in ample supply, which often proved a cipher for personal capacity. It mattered little if you found it under a rock: it was yours and it spoke volumes about your merit. Moreover, he’d quickly risen among his fellow directors to the chairmanship. That was when he’d begun to call in efficiency experts and to insist on more-stringent board oversight, down to the appointment of nurses. We doctors also saw to the small rest home, which relied on minimally qualified but mostly competent caregivers. Wilmot got his mitts on this too, and we had a lot of devastating resignations as he called on various employees, including impoverished older women, to supply professional bona fides. For a short time, the old folks were virtually abandoned to the whims of family members and doctors like me who found time to enter their exceedingly gloomy world and provide what minimal help we could while the draconian fallout that showered down from Wilmot settled. I think that seeing our cardiologist, Alan Hirsch, operate a waffle iron at daybreak in that shadow world made us realize how far off course things had drifted.

A special meeting was called and it stopped just short of acrimony. We doctors politely informed the board that a certain flexibility was required in a small town where the employment pool contained not just the niche-ready, trained personnel but ordinary citizens willing to adapt to things that were as new to them as they might be to us. Wilmot seemed to listen politely from where he sat at the end of the board table in blazer and perky spotted bow tie embedded in his ruddy neck. Only his eyebrows, oddly antic, gave any indication that he heard us at all. The board members — salesman, dentist, and housewife — especially seemed uneasily deferential to Wilmot, who had not spoken; even the usually argumentative rodeo clown, a middle-aged cowboy in tight jeans, large belt buckle, and snap-button shirt who had been a scourge for our lackadaisical bill collecting, kept his trap shut today. Doctors are reliable guardians of their own cheese balls, but the divagations of human nature led them to occasionally notice the straitened circumstances of some fellow humans. I later assumed that this reticence of the board had been a prearranged stage setting for what followed: a blistering call for the members of the clinic to raise our standards of efficiency and expertise. It was an astonishing performance, since Wilmot to all appearances hardly knew what he was talking about, a fact that had little effect on his rant. Gripping one wing of his bow tie between thumb and forefinger while he shook the forefinger of the other hand at us, he demanded that we act… like grown-ups!