Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

Ever since Throckmorton and I had our little kestrel, Speed, I’ve been interested in birds. Every bird I learned, if it was a migratory bird, I soon forgot. Didn’t we meet last year? I kept a life list, but its utility as a mnemonic device was quite limited. The spring warblers moved faster than my ability to memorize them, and frankly the sparrows were a nightmare. Anyone interested in birds and living near the Great Plains had to face the sparrow problem, which was that they all looked very similar: rufous, white-crowned, Baird’s, Henslow’s, house sparrows, grasshopper sparrows — all a blur, the bastards. So I switched to raptors, a bit of a copout, as they were more easily differentiated. Priapic male birders all liked raptors because they seemed flatteringly emblematic. Many of the hawk lovers I knew were big-bellied fellows with facial hair and a passion for cocktails. As yet, I didn’t fit this profile. My father, who never claimed bird expertise, remembered every bird he ever saw, even when he was overseas. He liked talking about them, too, but my mother would cut him off with, “Seen one, you’ve seen them all.” He assumed a conspiratorial air when he pointed into the willows and said, “Carolina warbler.” When he rode a tank into Germany, the storks on roofs were the thing that struck him most. He thought that a stork sitting on its eggs and watching an army roll by showed what nature thought about mankind.

With my new leisure following upon my indictment and my failure as a house painter, I had time to walk the woody creek bottoms where I observed the short-winged woodland hawks, Cooper’s and sharp-shinned, speeding through the trees with uncanny nimbleness. I had several times watched prairie falcons diving into blackbirds when I walked around the uplands, and the chaos they made seemed to briefly fill the sky. These jaunts were hardly adventurous, as I never went more than a few minutes from town, but it was greatly reassuring to find wildlife so close to humanity. In fact, I could still make out the old water tower through the trees where I first came upon the goshawk, a northern goshawk, to be precise. Since I came upon her unawares and she was going about her goshawk business under my eye, it made a tremendous impression on me: almost blue-black on her back with a creamy and precisely barred breast. She was swiveling her head from side to side, broadcasting her oddly relentless screams. Over time, I would see her often, hunting, soaring, sleeping. And she saw me often enough that she no longer fled at my sight, moving me by her acceptance.

I also went birding with Jinx, a genuine expert. She had a beautiful pair of Leitz binoculars whose protective covering she had nearly worn away. My optics were el cheapos from Wal-Mart but good enough for my skill level. I was hardly able to keep up with Jinx, whose bird cognition was Olympian and betrayed my slow-witted tagalong efforts to identify those blurry sparrows which she saw as separate races with little in common beyond their genus. I accepted my inferior status as a birder just to be with her.

However, I knew a lot about my goshawk, had watched her fly, run down songbirds, pluck voles, and dine. I had narrowed the field of vision to the point at which I actually knew what I was talking about. So I invited Jinx to join me, knowing she would have to rise above my recent pariah status to accept. Frankly, she was a bit wary on the phone, but the bird interested her and we made a first-light foray into the creek bottom east of town.

I couldn’t find my goshawk.

“Where’s the bird?” Jinx demanded after we had wallowed along the low-water perimeter of the stream, scanning the treetops.

“She’s always here in the morning.”

“Are you sure about this?”

“That she’s always here?”

“No, that there’s actually a bird.”

“Why would there be no bird?”

“I thought you might want to talk privately.”

“Oh, no, no, no. There’s a bird. I’ve watched her every day. Very beautiful. Very queenly. I thought she was the bird for you.”

We fanned out and moved as quietly as we could in the brush. Bohemian waxwings had gathered in a wild crabapple tree, and some jacksnipe probed around the muddy creek. I was pleased to hear the sounds of children at the grade school a short distance away.

“Come here,” called Jinx. I had to look carefully to see her about twenty yards away in her nearly camouflaged clothes. I started that way. “I’ve got her.” When I reached Jinx, she was holding the goshawk by the corners of her wings. She had been shot.

Jinx said, “You’re just bad luck.” I felt, and must have looked, quite crestfallen because she put her arm around my waist and said she was sorry about my hawk.

We went to breakfast at a café by the switching yard, thinking we’d beat the morning crowd, but we didn’t and had to wait for a table. The ambient noise, a miasma of voices and silverware, was substantial. Desperate-looking waitresses navigated the crowd with plates aloft. I got a few stares but had been getting used to that. Quite soon, four ranchers rose and walked past us to the cash register picking their teeth, and we took their table. They wore the big Stetsons they would replace with billed caps as soon as they got home. Three of the ranchers faced the cashier, but one had turned to look at me. “A splendid bird like that,” said Jinx. “Someone just couldn’t stand the pressure. I’m glad I don’t know who it was. It might be someone I delivered and I’d just hate myself for missing my chance.” I compulsively did the math: Jinx was a bit over forty, with enough years of practice in the community to have delivered someone now armed.

When she was indignant, her eyes flashed; she had beautiful eyes. Even when we had both grown old I was fascinated by them. She once said, “My eyes and my ass are my long suits. I’m no sweater girl and without emphatic breasts life in the U.S. can seem quite proscribed.” That had been at one of our wine-soaked dinners at my house at which I grew so alarmed at Jinx’s intimations and proximity. I’m not sure why. She might have been too smart for me at that stage of my life. Now that I was somewhat shriven by circumstances and Jinx had begun to accept me as an unadulterated friend — someone to go birding with or share a ride to racquetball — I saw more in her. My mistakes seemed to accumulate like channel markers behind a boat. But at least I had a friend; I was sure of that.

Jocelyn came into town a couple of times a week, and we usually slept together after I’d taken her to dinner or helped her stock an odd array of supplies: hose clamps, fuel bladder, energy bars, distilled water, anti-icing spray, electrician’s tape, multipurpose tools. I wasn’t much interested in what these things were for, and my casual inquiries were waved away wearily. I had always been wary of sex as something which imposed a not always welcome bonding; it reminded me of those old movies in which a storm strands a group in a bus station or some likewise unpleasant place and they all slip through layers of unearned intimacy, like it or not. I actually fell in love with my aunt, who shooed me away after getting what she wanted. But this was different. I had not bonded with Jocelyn. I was not at all sure I liked her. And while I realized it was irrational to make the connection, the more I saw Jocelyn, the more trouble I had with the 88. At first it wouldn’t start, because power was only intermittently getting from the ignition to the solenoid. I had to change a headlight, which was unreasonably difficult as there was no room to get a hand or tools in there. Once I had it running, it smoked too much and I drove through town followed by a white cloud. Otherwise, it went along okay until the following Saturday, when having made love to Jocelyn again, I began getting alarming noises from the water pump and idler pulley, which, combined with the smoking exhaust and unreliable starting, made me think my car was about three fucks from the wrecking yard. I didn’t actually believe this; it was just a feeling, an association. If we could have made love just once without my car going haywire I believe that feeling would have gone away. It was disquieting. I had gotten used to the non-working dome light, the malfunctioning passenger-side window, and the water trapped in the trunk lid, but the correlation of these new failures to my sex life was unusually troubling. My car had run beautifully for five days when I ran into Jocelyn behind the IGA store and we had a bit of a grope. Jocelyn went on her way and I went on mine, but for the first time in over a hundred thousand miles there was a screeching knock in the steering column which was never resolved, while the heater blew only cold air. I realize that this was some sort of automotive route to erectile dysfunction, and I enjoyed all the attendant irony, but what else was I to conclude?