Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, I’ll just write it down. Maybe it will mean something to the judge.”

I don’t know what possessed me to describe Womack so exactly. Honestly, it was unintentional. By nightfall, he was featured in a composite sketch in our newspaper and, I suppose, a few thousand people were poring over it. I saw the paper myself and was startled to see what a fine job the sketch artist had done.

Deanne was carrying the paper when she visited me, my first real visitor. She was also carrying the same purse! I stared at it and asked if she was here to finish the job. If she tried again, I’d have to accept it. Her eyes filled with tears as she shook her head and pitched forward, her face against the side of my bed. I was turbulent with emotions, as I had been interrupted in the midst of a rich fantasy of Jocelyn. But this astonishing development was pushing even Jocelyn from my mind. For the moment, I had lost interest in everything. I was also overwhelmed by the sensation that I didn’t know what I would do next. Unexpectedly, I pitied Deanne and was on the verge of bursting into tears all over again. She said, “I’m worthless, aren’t I?”

“Not in the least.”

“Don’t be nice. I’m nobody.” She looked miserable, and I was aghast at what I had just done. As though parsing some term or concept for the local philological society, I tried to persuade Deanne that it was I who was worthless, not she, but I really didn’t get anywhere. Worthless seemed to apply as a general condition in Deanne’s life, and she was determined to hang on to it.

I had another wave of terror as she retrieved a Kleenex from her purse, this time to blow her nose, and having done so, she raised the newspaper as evidence and asked why I had protected her. I had to give this long thought before telling her that I believed that she was entitled to her action. “Oh, no!” she cried. I had known Deanne only as a worthily combative force, and I was desperate to absolve myself of having reduced her to this abject state. I had to believe that I was free of cruelty. Without that, in the words of Deanne, I would be Nobody. I would be Worthless.

So I poured myself into confessing my sins against her all over again. She had only one child and I’d seen to his demise. I left so little doubt that without my interference Cody might have lived that I half expected she would again try to kill me, but she seemed to absorb the long, slow death of Clarice. I really relived those scenes, and suffered them all over again. Never mind the knife, I was finally at her mercy, but she said, “I understand.” She didn’t say it quickly — she weighed my fate in her eyes for several long moments — but she said it. She said it with such gravity that I must have glimpsed what she was giving up.

HAD I LEARNED ANYTHING? I’d learned that I was remarkably unformed for a man of my age and experience. It wasn’t until I lay in a hospital bed fingering a near fatal wound that I gave any thought to mortality. Then I knew that the spiritual component of my self, while small, was inextinguishable. My mother had instilled in me a longing but populated it with figures I found unbelievable: the omnipotent old man with the white beard, the sad boy with the crown of thorns, the virgin mom, the board of directors called the saints. I never succeeded in differentiating them from the equally compelling characters in my collection of comic books. I confused God with Space Man, whose battles with the robot monster that controlled outer space formed my first cosmology; meanwhile my compassion for Christ caused me to submerge him into Naza the Stone Age Warrior, who returns to kick Herod’s ass and work mayhem on the Philistines.

Another thing occasioned by my close call was a vivid remembrance of childhood friends. I’d built the tree house with Chong Wells. His real name was Don Wells, but his admiration for Cheech and Chong supplied a nickname which followed him all the way to the Persian Gulf, from where he did not return. Dave “Second Hand” Smoke moved to Miles City, where he had a backhoe business. When I get out of here, I thought, I should give Second Hand a call. Childhood friends call me “Hook” for Captain Hook, which was a reference to my love of fishing.

What was left of my rudimentary religiosity? Only my question: What was far-fetched about the continued existence of the human spirit? Why was mankind in all places and all ages convinced of it? Fingering my knife wound, I went on believing that the real me could shoot out of this tiny hole in the event of a shutdown.

But most emotions attending the long hours of daydreaming were occupied with thoughts of Jocelyn, some remarkably impure, but most idealistically pastel and conceived as operatic scenes of reunion and promise. In the encounters I pictured it was only remarkable that the players were not winged. This might have been a reference to Jocelyn’s flying, but I didn’t think so. I pictured her in the cockpit with the headset pulled down over her International Harvester cap, and as I dragged her from the fuel spill at the crash site, then at the hospital in White Sulphur when I was a still-employed caregiver offering diplomatic advice in the bailiwick of another physician. In short, I could hardly wait to get my hands on her.

This grueling need so pervaded my imagination that it encouraged me to think about a long-term relationship with Jocelyn; and here I hit a wall because her air of independence betrayed a smidgeon of aversion directed either at me or, more likely, at any form of predictability. Too, I found her lack of sentimentality over the burning of the old homestead and her generally harsh remarks about home and family to be a tad extreme. Her strictly genital approach to sex could, I dimly supposed, grow thin without a larger view, but I could always supply that — thought I foolishly. As was so often the case, romance was well to the rear of the united front of thighs, breasts, etc. The little twang in her voice had me shivering with ecstasy. My most elevated thoughts were of the clean lines of her cheekbones, her smooth, round forehead, her full and insolent lips. At the moment, I could not picture her nose. Fidgeting under the sheets, I worked away at recalling the nose, then finally left it that she had one, and that was that.

She must not have known I was in the hospital.

Alan Hirsch came in to see me with his athlete’s bounce and sat, one leg on the floor, on the edge of my bed. “I think it’s time you blew this pop stand, Irving.”

“I do too.” I couldn’t mention that I had nowhere in particular to go, or that seeing him and other physicians speeding past my doorway had given me an insurmountable heartache compared to the longing for Jocelyn.

“You look blue.”

“I am blue.”

“Nothing to do with your injury, I hope?”

“I want to work.”

“You want to work? Are you crazy?”

Alan was just trying to cheer me up. He liked to work, I knew that. His needy athleticism had led him down the path of extreme sports, but he was always on the job, always good, and the huge Kodachromes of his rock climbing and of his son on the Miles City football team which adorned his office walls seemed to reassure his cardio patients. He gave me a protracted, considered look and then tapped me with his clipboard. “You’ll get through this. You have my word. I personally don’t think this ever needed to happen, but Wilmot used all his grease to get the law involved.”

“He hates me, but he is my patient.”

So I went home, and I felt fine; but my first thought at entering my house was, “What am I doing here?” There were reentry issues, which I met by housekeeping and replenishing food supplies. A nap helped. I found a baseball game on the radio. Still under a legal cloud, I concentrated on the everyday. I ran the vaccuum. Then for several days I was just lost.