Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

A rancher from over near Shawmut, Kurt Merrill, was willing to talk to Joyce and try some medication as well. He was in bad shape. His only son, Terry, had committed suicide over a girl who was not his wife, and since they had always been close, Kurt could not believe that Terry had not communicated with him. Kurt had trained his grief into an obsession with cell phone records and was certain the phone company had lost a final message from Terry. I was very worried about Kurt and so was hugely relieved when he consented to be put into better hands.

I really didn’t know why anyone would want my advice on such things unless they were so needy as to want the inside scoop from a fellow nut. I wasn’t being modest: people in some circumstances will only trust a misfit, and that is where my long life in this town had its uses. My shabby past and the reputation of my family for shiftlessness were assets of which I could finally be proud. My former nurse Scarlett summed it up when she said, “If an idiot like you can be a doctor, anybody can be a doctor.” Even an insult had its uses. Scarlett had left nursing to write a novel and despite her contempt for me, she once asked me to read it. I vividly remember a line introducing the heroine: “Using her ball gown to prop up the toilet seat, Annette turned her thoughts to the evening.” Scarlett never had much in her pretty head. It was only a matter of time before she ran for office.

Well, Jocelyn turned up. By that time, I had some office furniture and she walked in as I was examining the loudmouth from across the street for strep throat. I had just told him that by irritating his throat in shouting matches with his wife he had made it susceptible to bacteria and viruses; there was some truth to this, but the fact was that I had subjective interest in the diagnosis in my hope to get the couple to quiet down. This was the first time I had seen Chaz close up, and I was somewhat surprised to find him such a meager individual — bespectacled, male pattern baldness, a tiny paunch, girlish little hands. His shyness was in contrast to a baritone which he had some difficulty keeping at a low volume. I could see right away that Chaz lived through his voice, that it had a life of its own, even delivering all sorts of messages that might not have been entirely authorized by Chaz. As he sat on my examining table, I had great difficulty imagining this meek fellow bellowing about “the fucking macaroons” or diabolical snow peas. Quite formally, I instructed Jocelyn to have a seat in the waiting room, once the downstairs bedroom where we had fornicated. She looked at me in disbelief, gave a little laugh, and did as I suggested. Then, just to be safe, I cultured Chaz’s throat while he intoned around the swab, “Great tits.” Chaz had a screw loose, but I treated him as I would have any other patient, glad to have the work. Eventually his wife became an occasional patient; she must have been thirty years older than Chaz and twice his size. She bore an authoritarian air, even with me, and having already scoured various medical manuals for some self-diagnosis, she was ready for argument.

To be safe, I locked the front door the minute Chaz was on his way and went into the parlor to see Jocelyn, who was just then running all ten fingers through her thick, streaky hair to retie it with an elastic. Unwillingly, I took note of the beauty of her hands and her shapely forearms. An image of Jinx wobbling up the county road on her bicycle caused a sharp pain in my forehead. Jocelyn hiked up on the library table, sat with hands clasped before her and said, “What’s up, Doc?”

“You tell me.”

“Thought I’d stop by and say thanks. I’m fixing to head on down the line.”

“Sounds like a song.”

“It is to me. Before I breeze out of your life I wanted to clear up a few things that might have bothered you. Womack and I did some stuff with the airplane some people might say we shouldn’t have. I don’t know who those people might be, since the country is run by criminals: read the paper. I just wanted to fly, but when you’re between jobs flying gets expensive. We both got pretty involved with the product at that time and so judgment-wise, things could have been better. I’m afraid I let him take me down some roads that were probably a mistake.” She spilled this all out in a somewhat prepared manner; I shouldn’t have absorbed it quite so easily.

“Like Mexico?”

“Sure, some roads in Mexico. For what Womack had in mind, Mexico is always where it’s at.” She was just tossing these replies at me. “Airplanes make all these little old countries run together. From the air, you just can’t tell one from another.”

“What was the point of coming here?” I liked to think this question suggested my suspicions, but I was flattering myself.

“Well, I had the homeplace and Womack was pretty fascinated with Canada. Canada is one big pharmacy and I guess he saw some opportunity there.”

“There were so many warning signs,” I said. “I wonder what made me fall for you like I did.” The nincompoop within thought that casting doubt on her story would bring her to heel. She laughed heartily, and I felt myself going down that slope all over again.

“You really need to look into that,” she said. “You’ve got a long way to go!” In retrospect, this was her one burst of candor. Even as I felt myself illuminated I was aware of her crazy allure — I think it had to do with a certain feral, almost sovereign amorality disguised as freedom. Jocelyn was also a brilliant liar. I ought to record the best one, whose inner mechanism was not unlocked for a few years. The preliminary deception — after me! — of Dr. Aldridge in White Sulphur Springs, which fell short of his actually leaving his wife, began and ended with his providing a morphine drip pump and enough ingredients to keep Womack comfortable for quite a while. She didn’t tell me this, Dr. Adridge did after I paid one more awkward visit to his clinic. Jocelyn told me that Womack had held so many incriminating things over her head that she was obliged to go along with him if she wanted to keep flying. After I caused him to be arrested, she was threatened with exposure all over again. To keep him from talking she had no choice but to help him escape, or jump bail anyway. I pressed her about the broken leg, which I thought was the result of his escape, but it was only the work of someone to whom Womack owed money. I got a neurotic pleasure going through all this because in my deplorably gaga way I was still buying it. Therefore, she went on feeding me the following: her conscience unexpectedly struck and as much as she loved her freedom, it was time to accept the consequences of her life and actions. She flew Womack back to Texas, persuading him that there he would be safer and it would be easier to get him the medical care he needed; she couldn’t fly me back and forth into the hills because in the end suspicion would fall on all of us. When she got to Texas, she turned Womack in, and either he didn’t know it was she who had fingered him or he too finally accepted his fate, because he never betrayed her. She visited him in jail, she said, and he was remarkably transformed, as though having found a kind of peace he’d never had. The jailer had gotten him a guitar and he was writing songs, even some Christian ones.

All bullshit. I imagined looking back on myself sitting there with a dorky smile on my face, buying the whole thing. Maybe I was being too hard on myself, because when she suggested we make love as a sort of farewell, I declined. She wore a blue tube top which she pulled down to show me her stripper’s breasts. I concealed the abrupt knot in my stomach and said, “Lovely, thanks, maybe another time.” This occasioned, for the last time, a superb laugh and she told me I was finally getting somewhere. All I did was ask her what she was going to do next. She said, “I think I’ll try California. Everyone else has.” She did seem too confident that her old friend Womack would keep his mouth shut. I should have pursued that. It pleased me to think I smelled a rat and saw through her, but probably I didn’t. That’s why we got to tell our stories later.