Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

This was making me sick. I was able to suppress an outburst because I knew I had business with Deanne. What business was that? I only knew it was connected to my own survival.

“I don’t want you to think I have any regrets about the ex, whatever that Callagy deal is. She was too serious. She was serious as lip cancer. A guy needs to have some fun every now and then. Which leads him to whatever bar where all the man-eaters live. And believe you me, I’m not bitter. I just wish Deanne would quit smoking and writing ‘thank you’ on my alimony checks. No need to be rubbing it in.”

WE YOUNGER DOCTORS had been substantially democratized by comparison with our older colleagues. The senior doctors seemed to bask in their original status as small-town aristocrats, content in their golf, cocktails, and domestic architecture, their thin but emblematic connoisseurship, and their eccentricities. Dr. Gallagher — now gone — wore his kilt to dinner parties, GP Boland Mercer exercised his wolfhound by tying bacon to the end of its tail, and dermatologist Joe Mariani tried year after year to interest the town in building a bocce court. When I first arrived, nearly all of them were former smokers who had greeted the surgeon general’s warning about tobacco use with unified astonishment.

We of the next generation have been all over the map and at one point indistinguishable from the rising tide of hippies. We prided ourselves on unexpected remarks and enthusiasms. At the first dinner party including most of us, I especially recall Jinx holding up an empty highball glass and declaring, “One more of these and somebody’s going to put out.” We occasionally partook of controlled medications by way of inducing artificial elation and when work prevented sleep, we might well have turned to pills for stimulation too. Generally, this was dispensed on an as-needed basis, but before Alan Hirsch took up cycling with such passion the pharmaceuticals rather got away from him and soon he had a child in Miles City. This produced if not pain for Alan, at best inconvenience, but he met his obligations and when the child grew up and led Miles City to the Class A football play-offs, Alan made no secret of being the father. He even showed some conviction about his own work by expressing his wish that Jared (“I didn’t name him, for Christ’s sakes”) go to medical school, while Jared taught his father how to ride a horse. Our lessons in the ways in which one generation succeedeth another were exceptionally diagrammatic.

I wasn’t sure what I had done to annoy Jocelyn, but whatever it was she seemed to have forgotten it. She was preoccupied with selling her father’s ranch. I took her around to the Realtors’ offices trying to get a sense of its value. It was too small to provide a living for a family and it had no recreational potential short of stargazing such as might have made it a vacation property. The land booms of the Rockies were in a down cycle; it was too far from the airport; the house was in disrepair. In the general national gloom, fewer people were investing in faraway follies in the West; it was enough to keep the roof on back in Westchester. When the last Realtor that Jocelyn approached suggested a test drill for coal bed methane, she decided to lease the grazing to a neighbor. We talked about bulldozing a landing strip for her airplane but decided against keeping fuel or building a small hangar. Facilities at White Sulphur and Harlowton were adequate. As it turned out, Womack was not a boyfriend, or no longer one, but an airplane mechanic. Hence his annoyance. I still didn’t understand why she needed her own mechanic, unless it was one per airplane. But then, I didn’t understand airplanes and flying. I didn’t even like going up a ladder to paint. Womack got a room in Martinsdale over a retired schoolteacher’s house, and we rarely saw him. I don’t know whether they were just talking about the flying facilities elsewhere for my benefit, at any rate Womack soon rented some equipment and bulldozed an airfield a quarter mile west of the old homestead.

Jocelyn said that since the place was going to be uninhabited and she didn’t want the expense of insurance, she thought she ought to get rid of the house. I suggested she insure it for a year to be certain, since this was where she had grown up, after all, the scene of her childhood. Maybe that was the point. On her instructions, Womack burned it to the ground, dug a hole with a backhoe, pushed all the wire, pipe, and ashes into it, and covered it up. I expected something valedictory from Jocelyn, but all she offered was “Womack can do anything he sets his mind to.” Pictures of the blaze made the paper with commentary about the loss of pioneer structures including a cavalry bunkhouse from the days of the Indian Wars. “Another reason not to join the cavalry,” said Jocelyn. It was a real inferno and left a very strong impression on people. I heard from Throckmorton, the all-knowing, that the Meagher County sheriff was so offended he tried to make an issue of it but Womack’s permits were entirely in order and none of the accelerants were illegal. Word had it, however, that the encounter left a bit of bad blood between the two.

“How do you know these people?” Throckmorton asked me. I was in his office for a much-avoided consultation. I told him it was a long story. I didn’t have the will to describe the plane crash, and I particularly didn’t want Throckmorton’s opinion on these matters. Throckmorton was in one of his comedic moods, despite the fact that my future hung in the balance, the present reason for my being there. “I’m giving up the law,” he said, “to become a forensic barber. ‘What your ’do says about you.’ Forget DNA, dental records. Look at the coif. You’ll know.” His secretary rang into his office, and Throckmorton said there was water on the receiver. “Are you pissing in the other end?” Then after a long silence, “Stop blubbering!” He put the phone down. “Jesus H. Christ. Has no one a sense of humor anymore? I’ll be right back.” He went out to comfort his secretary. When he returned, he said, “She’s in love with me. She says I have no respect. There’s no object. What ever happened to grammar? I have no respect? For what? She didn’t say. Perhaps it’s for the best. I have no respect for her, something she has yet to learn. An excellent secretary, lucky to have her. I just wish she had a little respect for me.”

I had known Throckmorton for a long time, since the seventh grade, when he was often in trouble and I was ever on the margins because we had moved quite often; my parents had so little standing in town that the children were only too happy to reproduce these dismal social patterns from kindergarten on. My mother wanted to teach me at home, using the Bible, but my father, strengthened by new friendships at the VFW, put his foot down. I saw now that it was the beginning of our joining a community, and gratitude to the VFW aroused my fascination with my father’s service in WWII. I badly wanted to belong to something, and my father may have felt the same way: as I have so often said, our house was full of old soldiers. On the other hand, my mother’s passions produced little or no society for us. Those zealots were too focused on their journey for the sort of convivial pleasures enjoyed by my father’s friends and their wives. While my mother complained about the bad language of the former or the recklessness of their wives, she had a surprising capacity for fun, especially if it involved music and dancing. She could dance all night long. I remembered the strange feeling I got when I noticed the electricity she generated at some of our backyard parties, despite — or because of — her fixation on God. I remembered my father’s assertive forefinger in the chest of one of his contemporaries who had let my mother’s allure embolden him in the form of an impulsive kiss.