Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

I watched them drive off, even giving them an irresolute wave, before turning to my surroundings. I was stuck and forced to make do with mild curiosity about the property and its accumulated detritus. Occupancy of the place was long-standing, I concluded, because a horse-drawn harrow was among the discarded machinery and bundles of rusty barbed wire, broken posts, feed sacks, as well as a small brown plastic TV and an early washing machine. I suspected that the wind blowing over this mess probably never stopped, and I thought about the rural people I had seen in my practice who wanted something to help them with the wind of the Great Plains, a superb marketplace for sedatives.

I couldn’t fathom being left here. It had happened with such routine that its inconvenience dawned on me only after it was too late to do anything about it. I had a house half painted back in town that I wanted to finish. At the moment, I was surprised at how urgently I wanted to paint that house and even paint many more houses. In this isolation, I daydreamed about all the pleasant colors of the houses I could possibly paint. I had tried to get my father to agree to paint our house, but he didn’t think it made any difference whether his house was painted or not. War had greatly reduced the number of things he cared about and home improvement didn’t make the cut. I remembered feeling that my wish to paint the house only revealed how trivial were the values of those of us who hadn’t been to war. I may have been ashamed of wanting to paint our house. I recalled revisiting the colors it could possibly have been and assigning inappropriate attributes to them: cowardly gray, immoral yellow, and so on. Almost all of my father’s stories were war stories, and it wasn’t until I emerged into a wider world — later than most — that war occupied a more usual place in the array of human experiences. Nothing absorbed him so much as unrolling the old silk invasion map of Europe and tracing the roads where he and other infantrymen had followed the tanks east. I did notice during the Vietnam days that returning veterans had a separate society, but not quite like my father’s because they felt unwelcome. I saw some in my practice who seemed almost unreachably forlorn. My father and I were close, and he told me about his life sort of in secret since my mother was sick of the whole thing and generally focused on her spiritual education, which consisted mostly of fires, floods, perdition, and inestimable glory.

The only room that had a clean bed was Jocelyn’s childhood room. The old man’s bed was stripped of its clothes and mice had nested right in the middle of it. It appeared that Jocelyn and Womack had stayed in her old room. I thought that after a walk I might nap there and think about that. I wasn’t in so deep I couldn’t be objective.

I took a walk up the coulee that led south from the ranch and kept me out of the west wind sweeping the prairie and the juniper savannah. At a muddy spring surrounded by willows I surprised a brood of wild turkeys, camouflaged young pullets, which left the spring in no great hurry and even continued feeding as they ascended. A grove of chokecherries made a nice protected place to rest and so I stretched out and watched the clouds. Today was a day of high-traveling altocumulus: they were crossing the earth, and watching their departure to the east pleased me. I understood that meeting different ground conditions might cause them to halt their travels and simply disappear — they were not like trains leaving the station. My mother believed that heaven was overhead, and imperfectly understood even by the faithful. When I was a child I stared into the blue sky trying to see it, believing — since it provided so many rewards to the saved — that it must have a few nice facilities, but I could never quite see them. My mother hadn’t conveyed enough of her cosmology to make me see that the Rapture was a state that didn’t require furnishing. At some remote place I was a man of faith. “Creation” was as good a word for what mattered as any other.

I returned to the house and immediately looked for something to eat. The refrigerator contained a discouraging collection of energy drinks and snack foods, none of which appealed to me. This must have been the crap brought in by Womack. Next to a well-worn armchair a stack of magazines rose several feet from the floor, Drovers’ Journal, American Rifleman , and an ancient copy of the Playboy with centerfold of Bettie Page, the pinup girl with the geometric black bangs. The American Rifleman profiled one Elmer Keith, a sourpuss in a ten-gallon hat and a meerschaum pipe who tested his guns on horses. I flopped them all back on the pile, went into Jocelyn’s room, stretched out, and fell asleep. I didn’t mean to fall asleep, but I started replaying some of the better clouds — I realized I was still ranking them — and drifted off. Probably I dreamed. I don’t know.

I woke up very briefly disoriented because Jocelyn was sitting on the edge of the bed smiling at me. My first feeling, that this was a bit awkward, left me perplexed, as though sleep had transported me to someplace unfamiliar. I resorted to a banality: “You just get back?”

“Womack’s plane was late. I didn’t want to leave until I was sure he was on his way. You were in a deep sleep. Have any dreams?”

“One. Painting a house.”

“That’s not much of a dream.”

“No?”

“No. A dream should be about hope.”

“Well, I hope to paint this house.” I immediately regretted saying this, since I had no interest in explaining why I was painting a house or my enthusiasm for the task, which I inadequately comprehended anyway. In fact, with Jocelyn sitting so close, the idea of spending the day rolling enamel on clapboard had lost much of its romance. “I suppose I ought to get up.”

“You in a hurry to get someplace?” I said I was in no hurry to get someplace. “Good, then stay where you are.”

I thought it had become obvious what was going to happen. With the slightest tug on the edge of her blouse, I encouraged her to recline next to me. With my face in her hair I found I was not wrong about the smell. Probably it was nothing but shampoo but I was swept away by this cosmetic product. I ruefully considered that I could have gone into a grocery store, opened a bottle of the stuff, and saved myself a lot of trouble. Jocelyn wiggled amiably, sighed, and said this was nice; but before we got off on some sibling nap, I slid my hand over the gentle curve of her belly, then held one of her breasts, firm as a chalice. Jocelyn turned around sharply and stared straight into my eyes.

“What’s going on here?”

She didn’t say anything. We were very still for a long period of thought, at the end of which she abruptly got up and announced she was taking me home. I sat on the edge of the bed, running both hands through my hair, trying to revive the thrill of house painting. But as we retraced the road back through Harlowton and turned south toward the Absaroka Mountains, she talked about her life growing up, the early departure of her mother, her dislike of her father, and finally of the place itself. I found hope: maybe the house was the problem! But in this too I was mistaken. She dropped me at my door and said, “You’ve got my number. Put on a clean shirt and take me someplace nice.”

I resumed work on the nice old folks’ house. I bought a few things — a couple of scrapers in different sizes, some paper dust masks, a pair of coveralls — but everything else, starting with the ladder, I had to rent. I was more than a little aware of the escapism of my house painting endeavor: I didn’t need the money, I didn’t need the job. But what was wrong with escapism? I was in a situation that made escape in every form entirely attractive.