Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

I HAD ALWAYS ENVIED THOSE who held a steady course in life — were raised conventionally, set their sights on a goal lasting a lifetime, found a partner to raise a second wave for when they and the partner had gone on to meet… God. Yes, God! For they had a well-carpentered cosmology that aligned them with time, for all time, including the big kahuna, Eternity. I remembered thinking when I lost Tessa that she was just as dead as King Tut. Death was remarkable in that it did not admit of degrees. What you saw was what you got. Hasta la vista.

I labored under the barrage of malarkey that was the messages I got from what is currently known as the family of origin — the chronically unhappy God of my mother, the sly cynicism of my father, which seemed common among his veteran friends, the goat-like bucking of my aunt, which made the world of procreation something of a barnyard. I sometimes wondered why we kept fixing up these bodies that came to us; I could only conclude that they wished to live and we wished to avoid suffering. But the natural world restored my hope by its capacity for renewal. Renewal alone should have been my religion.

When I hunted and came upon the old homesteads that had failed, I thought briefly of the people who had moved on, but more pointedly of the myriad things nature was doing to reclaim these scenes of disturbance — the grass, the hawthorns, the chokecherries, the sagebrush that took thriving homes and made them into tumuli. Not so bad. A litter of coyotes in the old parlor. Of course they sang.

I had learned much of this love of nature from Dr. Olsson and what I had believed to be the great sustenance he drew from the natural world. But because of the way Olsson wound up, I was somewhat on my own with the earth. Olsson had a dog or two after the great Pie died of old age, none quite as good as she. He was without a dog for a year — big mistake — when Lawyer Hanson left for China, his new life, and his new bride.

To my astonishment, this opened a long-sealed door between Shirley Hanson, my old squeeze, and Dr. Olsson, who had been in love with Shirley his entire life. He moved back to Ohio and married her. He spent the rest of his life as a henpecked homebody but surprised Shirley on his death by leaving part of his worldly goods to an animal shelter in honor of Pie, or “Eskimo Pie,” as it appears on the plaque, and the remainder to a society for the protection of shorebirds, provoking Shirley to famously cry out, “I should have been a pelican!” Shirley moved to a rest home where, I have reason to assume, she survived. When I went to Olsson’s funeral, my first visit to the town since my college days, there was the formidable Shirley, a little old lady who cut her eyes at me once before sitting through the ceremony as though neither I nor anyone else existed.

The apartments across the street from my house were more animated than ever, and the life within them was entirely nocturnal. I knew there were couples living there, as well as the sort of single people you would associate with night noise. I lay awake that night thinking about my mailman and the thread into my own past which he seemed to represent. But because I was awake later than was normal for me, I began to hear fragments of excited commentary from the open windows across the way, and they disoriented me entirely. “You call that a hat?” Someone, a man, was clearly disapproving of this article and he wished the hat to be replaced by another hat or no hat at all.

The next voice I heard, and it may have been an hour later, was a rich and expressive contralto. “I don’t care how it smells!” I got the feeling she was starting an argument, but it didn’t go anywhere. Then suddenly from the voice that had complained about the smell, “Hold the snow peas!” So I guessed the first outcry was about food. Anyway, I managed to drift off.

I confronted the idea that I might have time on my hands and was pulling together my fishing tackle, my prized fly rod, the fly box given to me by Dr. Olsson long ago and made, as he said, of “airplane metal” or aluminum. I had begun to speculate as to which creek might have which bugs — a rumination that got me to imagine the loop of line suspending the imitation insect slowly descending toward the speckled beauty feeding below. I was really getting in the mood when the phone rang and one Thad Pelletier, unknown to me, wished to bring in his eight-year-old boy, who had stepped on a broken bottle. Another Jinx referral, and with no warning I was startled, but agreed. I then ran around like a madman to make sure I had everything I needed — that is, I seemed propelled by joy. In a very short time, father and son were at my door, and I admitted them to the former parlor of this old house. I already loved this pair, but now meant to get to know them. I had hastily pushed a few items of furniture into the parlor, chairs for both Pelletiers. Thad Pelletier came in the front door cautiously leading his son, who even with a small towel duct-taped around his foot was managing to hobble. The father was quite young, in his twenties, I thought, a city maintenance man, and his son, Cory, seemed frightened, not of his injury but of me. I rubbed my hands together as though we were about to have a wonderful time and asked them to sit. The father, wearing heavy work boots that seemed to embarrass him as he drew them back under his chair, apologized for calling me at home, and I joked that that was the only place to get me these days. I turned to Cory, who was making himself as small as possible in his chair, a pink-cheeked boy whose sandy hair stuck out in every direction. I could see blood seeping through the towel. “Cory, what happened here?”

“I stepped on some glass.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Were you scared?”

“Yes, sir, when I saw the blood.”

“Did it bleed a long time?”

“I was home,” said Thad. “I don’t think it was too long.”

“Cory, may I look at it?” I asked and Cory nodded rapidly.

I lifted Cory’s foot into my lap; it was trembling. He had a deep cut in the ball behind his big toe, the length of which I was slowly converting into millimeters as I calculated the anesthetic, which I decided would be topical. Cleaning the wound was quite straightforward, as there seemed to be no foreign material in it. Cory several times involuntarily pulled the foot away from me, which I continued to treat as a joke until he could see it was funny and laughed through helpless tears. Next I applied a mixture of tetracaine, adrenaline, and cocaine — TAC — great stuff for kids as it doesn’t scare them quite like other anesthetic approaches, but we had to wait for it to work. With Thad I discussed the removal of trees compromised by pine bark beetles in the city park, and flag football with Cory, who was a wide receiver. Once I determined sufficient numbness had set in, I had Cory rest his foot on his father’s thigh — I didn’t have the appropriate table in my parlor — so that I could close up the wound. My emergency room days made me quite expert at this sort of thing and I gripped the suture needle with a needle driver — actually an ordinary hemostat I was using for this purpose in the face of short supplies — and began quickly stitching, making certain the needle penetrated below the base of the wound before rotating it out, reaching through to pull up the loops and tying the square knot. I was frankly a bit mesmerized at how reliably this skill was embedded in my muscle memory and I seemed to watch from afar as the elegant stitches marched to the end of the wound. When I looked up I could see that Thad was close to fainting, his face pale. I said to Cory, “Dude, we’re done. Let’s put something over this and you can head out.” And before the smile had faded from his face, I had the tetanus booster in his arm and they were free to go. Thad wanted to pay me and my explanation that I was going fishing anyway seemed not to satisfy him. So I accepted twenty bucks and saw the two on their way. I then sat down, fingers laced behind my head, and gave in to thoughts of office furniture. Holding the twenty-dollar bill up to view, I smiled.