Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

We met at the Corral Motel in Harlowton and went straight to bed. It was most unsatisfactory. I had so long anticipated this moment that I made something of a fetish of foreplay, and it was clear that Jocelyn got nothing out of it. She said — joking, I assume—“Stick it in. Pull it out. Repeat. Keep it simple.” I found it nearly impossible to rise above this “joke,” but stupefied by adoration, I managed to carry on despite Jocelyn’s finding everything I did funny. I’m quite aware of how abject I must have seemed, but one look at Jocelyn would clear that up for anyone. She was such a gorgeous woman, and the fact that she administered her beauty with coolness and perhaps calculation didn’t seem to detract from it. I don’t think anyone has quite understood the merciless power of women at their apogee. We are reduced to worship — and I do mean reduced. I wasn’t sure brains and character added much at all. Look at Jinx: smart, good, pretty — she just didn’t work it like Jocelyn did. Jinx was a goddess and Jocelyn was a tart — but where did knowing that get me?

“You’ve never been in my plane, have you?”

“No, no, I haven’t. Maybe some—”

“Let’s go now. Let’s crank that baby up. Get dressed.”

I did and watched her do the same. As I observed her flesh disappear into her panties, then her jeans, then her bra, then the bright checkered cowboy shirt I particularly liked, and finally the yellow North Face Windbreaker, I had a fleeting sense of seeing these ravishing objects of my attention for the last time.

In the end, the gooberish demeanor of the supplicant, whether it was someone working me for prescription pills or me trailing Jocelyn to the airplane, was remarkably consistent. Even when angry and demanding, the goober was still an addict. That’s all an addict was, a goober. The long road to terminating exposure to the abused substance was littered with heartbreak. It was part of the training. Oddest of all, it greatly improved the survivors once you acknowledged the many who didn’t make it.

Jocelyn was at the controls, and I sat beside her, cautioned to avoid contact with the parallel set of controls in front of me. The back of the plane was filled with all sorts of things, groceries mostly, but also a big-game rifle and a short-barreled shotgun. I didn’t know she hunted. We both wore headsets and I quickly grew infatuated with the sound of Jocelyn’s voice, slightly distorted as though heard from a faraway place we could both go where our voices would have a slight electronic buzz and all would be renewed. Jocelyn sang into her microphone, “Off we go into the wild blue yonder!” and I felt her excitement at flying even as we rumbled down the rough airfield at her father’s old ranch. I watched her hand with its bright red nail polish on the stick, and it seemed to bespeak her remarkable mix of glamour and ability.

At the end of the field, she pivoted the aircraft, and we looked through the windshield, straight back to where we had just come from. I noticed a strip of surveyor’s tape tied to a tall pole set in the ground. It fluttered in our direction as Jocelyn increased speed, inciting the roar of the engine, the propeller a pale blur in front of us. We’d moved forward slowly at first but accelerated rapidly toward the end of the field. The shuddering of the fuselage abruptly stopped and we were airborne, gaining altitude and sailing toward the line of foothills before us.

“Having fun?”

“Yes! Where are we going?”

Jocelyn turned to me and laughed. I couldn’t see much of her behind the microphone and her aviator’s sunglasses, but she was distinctly laughing, and it seemed more than a little emphatic with the distortion through my headset. She said, “We sure are, honey. We’re going someplace.”

I gazed at the landscape passing beneath us and it seemed to bear an expansive sense of time and of the imperishability of the earth. I had a glimpse of myself as a particularly pathetic exemplar of our race and its fragile gyrations. Never comfortable with this long view, I was grateful when it passed. Only animals really knew how to live.

Airplanes had come to seem quite different machines after the catastrophe in New York. They were overnight turned into projectiles; even if, as now, we used them for something else, they went on being projectiles. I let my gaze drift to Jocelyn’s skillful hands on the controls and could feel the relationship between her floating hands and the movement of the aircraft. Her eyes interrupted their almost robotic scan of the horizon only to flick temporarily to the instruments. The sun coming through the canopy made me sleepy, as did gazing at the wavering shapes that appeared in the blur of the propeller. The inside of the plane smelled entirely of its new upholstery. It was surprising to compare our considerable airspeed to the slowness of the passing landforms below: they came and went as though operating in a different timescape from the one in which the airplane flew. We had stopped talking.

We began to descend after meeting what looked like a wall of mountains; a shadow in one of them slowly opened to reveal a pass into which Jocelyn, still descending, guided the plane. I looked anxiously from side to side as the blue sky in the opening above us seemed to be narrowing. Jocelyn lifted one hand to point through the windshield at a mountain goat grazing at eye level. We were in a canyon that turned slowly to the west between many-hued granite walls and grassy ledges. Below, some trees were scattered on either side of a sparkling creek which, with its regular flashes of white water, must have had a considerable gradient. Teal scattered up from back channels of the creek so far below. The walls on either side confirmed that the only possible direction for the plane to fly was straight forward. I couldn’t picture climbing back out. I was uncomfortable.

We were nearly on the floor of the canyon. There was no possible place to set down, and my attempts to exchange some kind of glance with Jocelyn failed. When I asked her what was going on and got no answer, I could see that she little wished to have her concentration broken. Then the canyon curved quite rapidly to the west, narrowing all the while, and, more quickly than I could quite absorb, a flat meadow rose up before us and we were on the ground, tail wheel down and the windshield elevating as the plane changed its angle and stopped. Jocelyn increased the throttle slightly before slowing the propeller to a pause. The quiet was startling. She swept her headset off with one hand, shook out her hair, then turned to me and said, “Happy?”

“Can we get out of here?”

“We’ll find out!” She laughed. “Isn’t it beautiful?” She pushed open her door, and the cockpit filled with balsamic air and the fragrance of wildflowers. I looked around as best as I could beyond the bright wings of the plane. This was some sort of box canyon, and on either side of the meadow in which the plane sat, aspens grew straight up, protected from winter winds. Here and there water ran down the walls of the canyon, catching the light. I imagined the place quickly filling with shadows later in the day, and this thought came with some apprehension because despite the great natural beauty, my main interest was in getting out, which looked to be something of a feat. It was reassuring to climb from the plane and feel solid ground once more.

But Jocelyn’s cheer was infectious. “Come on,” she said. “I’ve got to show you something.” So I followed along. The only bearing I had was Jocelyn herself, and she moved confidently along the meadow at her persistently lively clip, the same gait she used when walking around her airplane or coming into town and into my room, the same heedless forward motion. With one hand, she gathered up her long hair and twisted it into a knot on top of her head. She tied the Windbreaker around her waist by its sleeves and hopped on one foot as she retied the shoelace on the other. There were many hawks in this canyon, small, rapid short-winged hawks that cried out to one another as they crisscrossed overhead. “You’d never get out of here on foot,” said Jocelyn. It was true, but I couldn’t think why she’d say it. When I asked her where we were going in such a hurry, she only smiled. It seemed to me that we were heading toward a small grove of old cottonwoods at a place where the granite wall receded in a kind of shelter. It could have been an Indian place or a shepherd’s place: I observed some smoke blackening its stone from this distance. When we reached it, I saw that it was indeed habitable — there was a rough lean-to shack apparently thrown together from fallen trees and limbs, enclosed nonetheless with a canvas fly secured against a small opening in front. “You don’t think we’re staying here tonight—”