Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

Dr. McAllister stepped over to welcome me. I guess it was a welcome. Coming from such a tall, patrician Anglo-Saxon, it was not easy to tell, and his speaking style — launching the words without seeming to care whether they landed — contributed to the abstract atmosphere. Dr. McAllister wore a beautiful gray and brown houndstooth sport jacket, broad soft lapels meeting at the top of two buttons. The red silk tie seemed to disappear at just the right point. He had a highball in hand, and he delicately bobbed an ice cube with the tip of his finger.

“I led the review committee, Doctor, that looked over your qualifications, and it wouldn’t be wrong to suggest that I led the effort to see you land in our clinic. You’re a very well-prepared physician, and we especially liked that you’re a general practitioner.”

“Oh, good.” I smiled.

“General practitioners have become the redheaded stepchildren of our profession, and we’re thrilled that the role claimed your ambition. Welcome!”

“Thank you.”

He tipped his highball toward my beer: clink.

Slowly surveying the guests in my parents backyard, he said, “I hope you’re prepared for the changes coming to your social life.” This I liked less.

I said, “I don’t think it will be a problem. I’ve always lived here. Where are you from?”

He didn’t say a word. He only gave me a wintry smile and returned to his companions.

I got a turn in the emergency room right early on, and one of the first patients I saw was a gas station robber shot by the police; I saw that he would survive the.38 Special hollow-point round that went right through his thorax and out the back without expanding. As time went by, I chatted less with the people who came through the door on gurneys and otherwise, but this fellow looked like a recent college graduate in his slacks and blue Windbreaker, his Seattle Seahawks cap, his loafers. When I asked what’d inspired him to stick up a gas station, he told me with peculiar sincerity, “You’re only young once.” I guess I had to accept that, but it became an enduring enigma.

I was not an excitement-oriented person. I liked what they call on TV “a slow news day.” I may not have been as interested or informed about the big wide world as I should have been, and what news I got of war, disease, and famine did not inspire in me a cascade of solutions. I wished it were otherwise, but this was hardly my worst inadequacy.

When I was in high school, my father kept some horses on a patch of stock farm he owned for the few years he could afford it. Among them were my saddle horse and a government mule he’d acquired from the park service, which, when he tried to shoe it, put him in the hospital. This big wary mule with its suspicious ears and sloped muscular build was the only animal with smooth enough gaits for my father’s old bones. So he put up with him — named him John Lee. I don’t remember why. I helped Dad shoe John Lee by giving him a generous injection of sedative, then laying him on his side so we could shoe him horizontally while the comatose brute snored and blew bubbles out his nose. I nailed on the big, iron, strangely narrow keg shoes, and Dad, crouched and wheezing, clinched behind me. When we’d finished, we leaned up against the old cottonwood that shaded the pole pen in the middle of the rented ground and waited for John Lee to wake up. Dad seemed to think John Lee had died, but wake up he did. My father was so pleased to see him restored to life on earth that he promptly saddled him and rode off.

After my problems began, I found myself riding more often too. My horse, Errol, not only was easy to catch but actually seemed eager to be ridden. Errol began life as a mustang. I bought him at a BLM auction at the Red Desert corrals in Wyoming. Like others in the band, he was bigger than a pure mustang, having acquired some genetic advantages from the draft horses turned onto the desert during the Boer War.

Now that my medical career was suspended, I rediscovered Errol. I felt guilty about having paid so little attention to him while I worked at building my earthly cheese ball. In some abstract way, I hoped to make it up to him. I remembered when I’d acquired him, a stout yearling that we roped and loaded into my trailer, a pretty grulla colt, frightened and sweating with anguish over his lost freedom. He grew into a big, happy horse, and when he was three I rather timidly tried to break him to ride. It was my first year in practice, and I imagined I had a responsibility to my career at odds with risking my bones on a horse. The fact is, I was a bit scared of Errol, who now weighed over a thousand pounds and was not entirely predictable. I led him around on a halter rope, backed him up, shoved him all over the place — and he accepted it. I longed him with a saddle on his back, stirrups slapping his flanks, and he never objected. His complacent acceptance of all I threw at him encouraged me and beat back my fears until the day came to mount him. I even felt that Errol was telling me the same thing, that the time had come. And so I mounted Errol confidently.

I never had a chance. Errol bucked with four feet off the ground, lit on his front end, fired out behind, then bucked me straight over his head into the dirt like a lawn dart. There I could observe his leisurely grazing on the scanty orchard grass at the edge of the corral. I watched as he wandered over to my father’s house and looked in the front window.

I was not hurt and walked over to Errol. He looked at me as though wondering what my problem was. I unsaddled him and called a man in Clyde Park who broke horses. I explained that as a busy doctor I just didn’t have time to break him myself. I got him back a few months later, ready to be used. The cowboy said he “tried to tear me up” and asked if Errol was by any chance a mustang. I said, “Absolutely not.”

So, I had time on my hands. I wanted to continue to live under the questions that had befallen me and resist the rising sensation that here lay opportunity. Treating the disentanglement from my career as an opportunity would be the way to some badly needed enlightenment. But I failed that test: I started to be happy contemplating my guilt like some obscure marine creature recently dredged from lightless seas.

I began to wander around town, watching people, visiting construction projects, school recesses, and so on. One day I found a small parade celebrating something or other and was impressed by the look of joyless fatalism in the faces of the marchers. I speculated that they had been ordered to this event by their superiors but later learned it was some sort of sweethearts’ club with the mission of rekindling first love. On a cool afternoon with arrested white clouds hanging over the town, I loaded the push mower into the trunk of the 88 and drove to the cemetery, where I did, I must say, a fine job of clearing my parents’ graves, virtually primping them, feeling not sadness but remarking the peculiarity of our funerary habits as though I were a visitor from another planet. The word I have most often associated with death—“ Poof! ”—appeared nowhere in this humble memorial park. A good many folks strolled the cemetery while I tidied things up — the young visibly anxious to get it over with; the old mindful and gloomy, thinking perhaps of what my mother called the Great By-and-By.

The real reason for my coming to the cemetery dawned on me but slowly. It was only when I had finished the job and should have been loading the hand mower into the trunk of my car that it began to surface. I pushed it back and forth while I thought, enjoying the whir of its oiled blades and the subtle knock of its ball bearings. In the end, I left it right where it was, while I sought the grave of the man I had urged to oblivion. I might have remembered where it was since I had attended his funeral, but there had been a surprising number of mourners and I remembered only the outpouring of grief for someone I saw as not worth mourning. I must have simply been drawn to the gathering without reference to where it was taking place. Of course, my unique role in the proceedings, known only to me, must have focused my thoughts in such a way as to obscure awareness of my physical surroundings. This was a working cemetery, hardly one of the antique jobs so old they spared the onlooker any of humanity’s burdens. I had to go from grave to grave until something rang a bell. I keenly looked forward to being inspired on such a beautiful fall day. I left my father’s well-cared-for lawn mower right where it was and set out.