Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

When Throckmorton lumbered off the examining table, he said, “If changing my habits would add a decade to my life, I wouldn’t consider it. I don’t think people like you, looking from on high, quite realize how much I enjoy my life. Every time I pass inspection as I have done today I feel the gods have approved my habit of living. Tonight, when you put your head on the pillow or on some fair maiden’s bosom, say this to yourself: ‘ Not guilty. ’ ”

MY RECENT CONSCIENTIOUSNESS about tending my parents’ graves had proven to be a consolation, as though I were tucking them in. When I saw others at the cemetery I began to theorize that this was a universal feeling — those people with pruning shears and watering cans had become serenely familiar. From time to time, one or another of us would simply sit down next to a headstone and weep with cleansing ordinariness, before getting briskly back to work, tidying up, trimming, tending. I did so a couple of times, until it finally became part of my no-contest attitude: The Floater , coming to a theater near you. I became increasingly aware of the landscape of a small-town cemetery with its trees and weather and purposeful visitors. As I had seen others do, the time came for me to move out of the vicinity of my own graves and see what was what. Hands plunged in pockets, an amiable and bemused expression on my face, the well-executed passing nods — all plausibly put the lie to the mission I was so slow to admit: I was looking for the grave of Cody Worrell.

At the time of the funeral I was so comfortable with my part in things that I’d attended as a kind of tourist, just curious. I did remember that it was a nice day and I enjoyed that. I had always been remarkably sensitive to and moved by weather. I remembered the zephyrs that fluttered the cottonwood leaves so attractively and the little cavalcade of ill-dressed people with their prematurely old faces. That carelessness, my almost aerial contentment, things having turned out as I supposed they should, I now saw as one of the lagging indicators of my prolonged adolescence. Whatever comfort I’d enjoyed, whatever pleasure I’d taken in the day, was now gone. I began to feel tormented by my part in Cody’s death almost immediately after the funeral. And the thought remained: something was wrong with me. My indignation about the abuse of his young wife, my irresistible incentive, seemed to fade; I tried to revive it, but it returned as simple sadness, insufficient incentive for what I had done. I even caught myself angry at her for having been so hapless. I thought I had better put an end to this line of thinking before I started blaming her to get myself off the hook. No matter how I went at it, the issue would remain twisted inside me until I did something about it. That last moment of innocence in Cody’s face… unbearable.

I found his grave quite easily and, I suppose, from memory — on the expanding edge of the cemetery where the trees were smaller and the direct sun starker. From here, too, the houses of the living were more eminent and unaccountably intrusive. I sensed the distinct peacefulness of the old cemetery lost in this funereal sprawl. In any case, there they were, another surprise: the two graves. I had not recalled that the young couple had been buried side by side forever. Perhaps it was because I came to their funeral only out of morbid interest as to whether or not anyone missed him, and the peculiar pleasure of attending incognito when I was the reason all the rest of them were there. But here they were, the young couple, side by side. It wouldn’t be long before their brutal history would be subsumed in forgetfulness. She might reappear as the shy bride or he on his first bicycle. I would have to go on wondering what had impelled her repeated availing of herself to his rages. Then or now, I didn’t care what had inflamed him. His abuse was sufficiently prolonged to accord him opportunity for change, but he never missed a step.

For my part, this review of the facts was just whistling in the dark. I had, as was said, taken the law into my own hands. My father, when describing the pleasure he took in shooting Germans, said that we came from a long line of people who shot first and asked questions later. But I knew perfectly well that he had arrived at this only when seeing friends fall had made his accustomed humanity vanish in anger. I recall him admitting his surprise at how easily charity could slip away. He had thought it was a bit more enduring. Apparently that surprised all those soldiers, especially infantrymen. They had initially admired the Wehrmacht for its efficiency, but as their friends were mowed down their hatred grew in detail. My father recalled the first time he tipped up the head of a dead German soldier for the purpose of guessing his age. He remembered thinking “somewhere around fourteen,” which disturbed him anew, undermined his anger. At the time of that recollection, I was helping him repair our unreliable furnace, and he held the big red pipe wrench in his hand as his eyes drifted off: it was all quite present to him, the burning figment of the boy in the Wehrmacht helmet, my father’s boot under his chin.

I may have been enduring the same fear, the eventual acknowledgment that in suspending the rules of humanity for the convenience of emotion we gave way to wickedness; at a bare minimum, we were in error. The matching headstones with their chiseled hearts encouraged my view that everything real was eventually reduced to human contrivance. As I walked back through the old cemetery to my car, every inscription seemed lurid with deceit.

I supposed that I was guilty.

I noticed that Jocelyn was limping. Otherwise she had changed little since I’d seen her in the White Sulphur Springs hospital — the same nice crow’s-feet that seemed to intensify her gaze, the same slightly weathered quality of some good-looking women entering middle age. Her expression was, I guess, amusement at our turning up like this. However, she caught my glance. We had stopped at a steak joint, the Trail Head, just off the interstate. “Yes,” she said, “it’s permanent.” We went inside and were given a table.

Jocelyn shrugged off her Windbreaker. Underneath she wore a snap-button shirt that seemed somewhat incongruous with her cotton skirt, but her vitality made it work and would probably have made anything work. If I’d taken her to one of our clinic get-togethers, I would have been afraid the wives would have found her a little tough even as they noticed their husbands’ interest with irritation.

I said, “I’m happy to see you again. But I’m surprised.”

She smiled and didn’t say anything right away. “I expected to be well received. Weren’t you flirting with me at the hospital?”

“Was I?”

She burst out laughing. “Oh, never mind!”

Anyway, our drinks arrived, whatever they were. It didn’t matter what was in them: I was slipping into a trance. But not an entirely guileless trance. I was already trying to imagine how I might avoid telling Jocelyn about my problems. A doctor hoping to have charges reduced to manslaughter didn’t seem like much of a catch. There was hardly anyone in the restaurant on this off night, and the sparseness seemed to isolate us. I felt something happening to me and would have appreciated some background noise.

“I’m not in Texas anymore. I’m back in Two Dot. My father died.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know that.”

“Well, he was ninety. I think he had long since figured there’s worse things than dying. He wouldn’t leave the place, kept mortgaging it to pay nurses. It was a mess. I couldn’t fly anymore, not ag flying, because I was no longer insurable. So now it’s my place, for better or worse.”