Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

At some point I said to the old man, “Tell me, Pop, what made you desert?” We had just brought a load of well-weathered cow manure from Gladys’s ranch for him to spread around the raised beds of his cherished vegetable garden. I couldn’t have gotten a bigger rise if I had shot a big-game arrow through his thorax. He stiffened, lowered the handles of the wheelbarrow, and turned to me very slowly.

Everyone must look back over their lives and consider what the big mistakes were. This surely was one of mine. If this spell of forced leisure had a mission, it seemed to be this review as to how I got to this place. It was dawning on me that only while working did I focus on what was under my nose.

My father made me see how demoralizing hedge warfare was, a lethal enterprise on a sort of chessboard, where the terrifying art of ambush became a cerebral exercise. My father’s longing for his native plains became more emphatic as woodlands became death traps. Months of digging in had given him a fear of daylight and transformed him into something of a homebody once he had a choice. Night had been a friend, and the terror of German flares had altered his diurnal habits stateside; my mother told me it was a long time before walking around in broad daylight gave him much pleasure. He had befriended a Mormon officer from Idaho early on and stood near him on a sunny afternoon when the officer’s map board flashing in the sun gave him away to a German sniper; a distant crack and his new friend fell at his feet. A bout with scabies had made him, once home, a fervent bather: even when we were on the road cleaning rugs, wherever we stopped he sought out the water source, the tubs and showers. My father was not a particularly reflective man, but watching prisoners transported to the rear perplexed him; late in the war young Wehrmacht grenadiers were packed in trucks like the ones used to haul cattle, though in this case far more crowded than would be considered acceptable for livestock. The only signs of the penned humanity were the streams of urine and vomit seeping from between the planks on the sides of the lorries. In circumstances where he had been advised to “eat every chance you get and piss every chance you get” this dismal image never left him. The ethnicity of the truck’s contents faded in the mind of a man who had once thought of killing the enemy as life’s greatest pleasure. A word or two from comrades might have had a similar effect, for in every unit there were thoughtful individuals who doubted that war made any sense in the first place. He was given profound pause as he watched a captured German medical team ordered to treat Allied wounded: his description of their care and efficiency might have had something to do with my early enthusiasm for medicine, as it was the first war story I ever heard from him but it was about making people well.

He disclosed a substantial litany of experiences that inclined toward dismantling a human mind: the silence of incoming mortars, the endless hover of flares, the scream of rockets, the otherworldly burp of the Schmeisser machine pistols. And of course, the 88s. Because of my impertinent question, I heard this, if not for the first time, in greater detail than ever before. My father’s gaze remained level, his eyes fixed on mine as he answered my question.

My father loved horses all his life, and toward the end of the war, when the enemy could be located by the sound of their horses, he realized the end was in sight. The Germans were running out of everything, including fuel and transportation machinery, so farm horses were being commandeered to move their guns. The Allies were pouring a firestorm upon them, and increasingly the POWs were walleyed lunatics indifferent to what their captors had in mind for them.

As they approached Aachen and Germany itself, my father’s unit captured a group of German soldiers: frightened children in rags. Taken to the rear, one of the boys pulled out an antiquated pistol and shot the sergeant. The escort threw the boy up onto a roll of barbed wire and machine-gunned him. That night my father deserted. The Luger he carried to Paris he had found on a fully dressed skeleton under a tree in the Hürtgen Forest.

“Had enough?” he asked me. I said that I had.

* * *

I rarely heard about the war after that, until right at the end of my father’s life. I remember visiting him after my mother had died and I was his sole medical care, though he needed little assistance and was remarkably independent. VFW friends of his vintage were starting to fade away, mostly grateful for having lived so long. But when I visited him that day he was agitated. Radio personality Rush Limbaugh was being interviewed on television and my father was certain that it was Hermann Göring. “I thought he committed suicide at Nuremberg!” he cried. After this, my poor father began to assume he had been lied to about nearly all other things and that he could never be sure which ones they were. I can’t say his last days were good ones, for he increasingly suffered from an abstract sense of betrayal until the day that he greeted my arrival with a wry look of miserable resignation: he had begun to suspect me as well. But even as dementia swept over him, he was able to putter around in his garden and refill the hummingbird feeder. Here, shovel in hand, seated on the railroad ties that supported the earthen beds, he died. I buried him beside my mother on a beautiful June day, cottonwood seeds filling the air and new perennials popping up from some of the earliest graves. Several old soldiers attended and a veteran of the Iraq War played taps on the bugle. Seeing the headstones paired at last, I was unable to conclude that I knew these two people very well, or understood them. I would quite painfully miss them, but only as people I once knew. Religion had surrounded my mother with an impenetrable reality, and war had done something quite similar to my father. I had the sense that I had been alone since birth.

I WAS DRIVING EAST on the interstate in my cherished 88, skating over black ice at about seventy miles an hour. The days were getting short and I was headed to Big Timber, another dinner with Jocelyn at the Grand Hotel. I didn’t want to go that fast, but if you went slower, the big trucks would nearly mow you down and suspend you blind in a cloud of snow, ice chips, and diesel fumes. Radio reception was shitty to say the least, or else supplied fascist newscasts from the Nashville stations broadcasting overproduced studio music for brain-dead hillbillies. Looking down the unequal beams of my headlights, I saw that the windshield wipers wiped only in selected places, requiring me to raise and lower my head to find a clear view. Wildlife T-boned by unyielding traffic was pitched up on the roadside with twisted heads and limbs, strewn intestines. That we accepted gut piles along the motorway as a gift of the automobile struck me then as a grisly novelty. In other words, I hated the highway. I must have been in a dissociative state because even the word “automobile” seemed strange. I said it aloud. “Automobile, automobile, automobile!” It didn’t help. I had the feeling I wasn’t entirely sure what an automobile was.

The 88 was ruby red and the interior a red Naugahyde with white piping. The upholstery held the cold of night well into the day, even while the heater irradiated my shins. Still, I trusted it; and that is why, just past the Mission Creek exit, I was slow to respond when the driveshaft just fell out of it and the universal joint tried to beat through the floor under my feet. I thought the 88 could keep going. It could not.

I had no way to notify Jocelyn, or to call a wrecker. It was too cold to walk and the nearest sign of life, a minuscule light suspended in remote darkness, was too far. I had no choice but to wait for a highway patrolman to stumble onto me, which happened in about an hour. The patrolman called for assistance and a wrecker arrived an hour and a half after that. Wild lights of vehicles streamed by me all that time, flying on snow and ice. I could easily imagine being killed or mangled. I tried the philosophical exercise of imagining the world without me. It was easy. It was a little too easy.