T. Sam and I were chums when I was on the boat, but if ever he brought a lady friend, I, by magic, made myself invisible once he made a locking sign with thumb and forefinger over slightly pursed lips. The two would then walk around me in the broad cockpit as though I were any other inanimate object. This proved a higher tier to lawn mowing in my study of the American class system, and the resulting aversion had much to do with my practicing medicine while pretending not to be a doctor. Perhaps, too, there was some nostalgia on my part for the days when I was presumed crazy. It always meant freedom, and none are freer than the crazy.
The day came when Mrs. Vaughn discovered the uses to which the cabin cruiser was being put, and she divorced him. “Miss Lillian” had been named after her. He renamed the boat “Miss Ruby” after a subsequent lady friend, then “Miss Alice,” then “Miss Judy,” and so on; the last time her transom was repainted, she was called “Queen for a Day.”
I became Vaughn’s physician, and as time went on, his mind would drift to the bygone days of the cabin cruiser, which proved to be less reminiscence than a prelude to dementia. I continued seeing him as he lived in contented oblivion at the Mountain Shadows Rest Home. I hope that Ruby, Alice, and Judy are with him, and even the younger Lillian. T. Sam was a good soul.
This wouldn’t be a bad time to talk about how I came to be rescued from Christianity in time to become a doctor. I have previously described my days as a wanderer in a family of steam-cleaning Pentecostals, my carnal toils in the arms of my beloved aunt, my years as a ninny and scholar so oversexed that every time the cheerleaders of my school performed the pyramid at a ball game I came close to shooting off in my pants. Fear of this caused me to stoop even when such an event was a remote possibility and to develop a sort of meditation technique for classroom days to keep my mind, if not on the work at hand, at least off the flesh of females. In those days everything reminded me of girls, not excluding tomatoes, chickens, and parking meters — and even, at desperate times, my own shoes.
The day came when my beloved parents grew sardonic about their faith and entered a period they called Boozing for Christ. There was a curious synchronicity, if you shared quarters with them, between this and other forms in which they awaited the Rapture. Visiting my mother’s family in Arkansas, they had been passengers on a powerful bass boat that sped through a crowded water baptism on the Ouachita River, scattering and injuring worshippers. Expecting divine retribution and not getting it seemed to undercut their faith. I think their particular kind of Christian longs for punishment, longs to be shriven, the only road to paradise they could picture. In any case, while awaiting trial for criminal endangerment, my mother and father began hitting the bars. Sometimes a Christian will deliberately go down a bad road just to produce eventual suffering. They’re crazier than pet coons.
They were soon virtual derelicts in our town, my father hanging on to his connections among veterans of foreign wars and my mother seeing the very few friends that couldn’t quite give up on her. Our home was a disaster and I was the subject of various rescue attempts, not just because I was the sort of obsequious ninny who appeals to rescuers but because my basic needs were not being met, and so I smelled bad, though I still did my schoolwork. Eldon Olsson became our family doctor; we were among his few patients. I believe he did this out of concern for me. I’m not sure how this happened except that through hunting on Gladys and Wiley’s ranch he became their friend, and thence my parents’ friend. They could see through their fog that monitoring my health was not a bad thing, and it might be preferable that I received the usual vaccinations. I had been born with a small abdominal hernia, and Dr. Olsson taped a silver dollar over it until it closed and left me with a conventional belly button. He removed my tonsils and bought me the ice cream that was the only reward for what in those days was a gruesome office procedure. Later on, we shared a love of hunting, which was once a boy’s introduction to the natural world, leading often to science and conservation, curiosity and a love of earth. These activities put an end to my puling and whining and that part of my youth whose only promise consisted of fucking my aunt. He bought me a twenty-gauge Winchester shotgun with brass tacks in the stock like an Indian gun, and he kept it at his office. He bought me a white Shakespeare Wonderod and a Martin Blue Chip reel. He kept these at his office as well. I think he tried to maintain some sort of connection with his former professional life, writing articles on matters affecting doctors in law and insurance, all the while counting down to those golden hours when he donned his tattered sporting clothes, put Eskimo Pie, or “Pie,” his setter-spaniel mix, into the converted hearse which was his hunting car and which sometimes sported a canoe on the roof or a johnboat on a rusty trailer bumper hitched below rear doors that divided at the center and opened to the sides to accommodate the coffin. Pie, named for her black and white colors, sat in the back and watched where we’d been; Dr. Olsson drove; I opened his beers and adjusted the radio.
Dr. Olsson, I now recognize, was a country boy, a short, strapping middle-aged Swede with a groove in his chin, jet-black eyebrows, and thick, unruly hair that tried to form bangs, which, since they wouldn’t stay out of his way, were trimmed asymmetrically to accommodate his shooting eye. He too was the son of drunks and had worked his way through school on the green chain of a plywood mill, a terrible job. He still had the hands of a mill worker and occasionally drank wine with the air of someone either on a fabulously exotic mission or saluting the international community. His medical worldview, which I inherited, was that it is unreasonable to expect everyone to get better, much less survive, and great cruelty can be involved in unreasonably prolonging life. In his earliest days of practice, he had served in a Minnesota prison where — he once astonished me by saying — most of the murderers had killed someone who richly deserved it. Dr. Olsson wouldn’t pass muster today, but I revere his memory. I’d give anything to ask him why I think Tessa’s demise was my fault.
The great thing about hunting and fishing with the local doctor is that landowners don’t dare to deny him admittance to their land. A doctor denied can hold his powder until the landowner’s hour of need, and then it’s all she wrote. People in ranching country know this, and so doctors flit around in social zero gravity, always ready with the silver bullet, always invoking a shamanic aura at the gate to the golden hills where we followed Pie to the coveys. I tagged along in this wake of such privilege and in time became a dead shot with my little Indian Winchester as we traversed the sundry Edens in search of game. My personal Virgil in these wild lands, in the high country beaver ponds where we filled our creels with trout, on the short-grass prairie where we found the grouse and partridges in bluestem and snowberry hideaways, and on the windblown prickly pear places where we stalked antelope, was always a step ahead of me, tireless countryman — he aroused in me a wish to become a doctor.