“I ran into another AWOL, Donald Boyes from Garden City, Kansas, and we found a taxicab with an English-speaking driver. We wanted to hit the nightclubs and told the driver where to go, but it became obvious he was taking us to the MPs. When the driver took a shortcut to where we knew perfectly well the MPs were headquartered, up between tall dark walls just wide enough for the cab, Don Boyes shot him with a Walther he was very proud of. It had SS proof marks and a real clear swastika, a great souvenir. From then on, we were on the run and soon fell in with a group of men also AWOL. Some of them were even Germans who were living in rat holes all over Paris, stealing gasoline and selling it on the black market, hijacking vehicles, counterfeiting three-day passes, and so on. Do you want to hear this?”
“You bet I do.” I wondered if patients were piling up at my door.
“I’m not taking anything with me. I want to be light as a feather.” After a very long silence, he said, “Your mother forbade me to tell you any of this while she was alive.” He looked at his hands in thought. “My group were all from out west, some of them crooked, some of them shell-shocked, some of them defected from Patton after he lost men trying to rescue his son-in-law. We turned into gasoline pirates and I was their king. When the Krauts surrendered, we just drifted back into our units and said we escaped from POW camps. We had a couple of months in occupied Germany.” The Fräuleins were available. Though the men were undeterred by army rules against fraternization, they had a motto: “Copulation without conversation is not fraternization.” They whistled “Lili Marlene” just like the Boche and were disappointed when they could no longer listen to jazz on Axis Sally’s radio show. Don Boyes and my dad demobbed like all the others and went home. “After the war, I joined Boyes in Kansas. We had a lot of money and we spent it all on big, well-fed strong American whores and whiskey. When it was gone, I thought I better go into the hospital, but Donald took me to a Pentecostal church. He was anxious to repent, and that’s where I met your mother. I don’t know whether she cured me or God did, but I was in a bad way. It took me over two years to stop shaking and get a job.”
Whenever my old man went to the VFW he indulged his sole dandyism by wearing the parachute-silk scarf he’d worn all through the war. It was German silk.
I hardly knew what to do with my father after the death of my mother. A big plank bridge built on the skeleton of a railroad car, right where the cattle ford was a hundred years ago, spanned the racing green creek. On hot days, we took lawn chairs there and the breeze from the creek kept us cool. And birds — there were always so many birds there, goldfinches and juncos, warblers and magpies. In a dry landscape, this small, persistent water gave life to an eternally busy community of creatures. I could see some water hemlock and an ancient cottonwood that had abruptly died that spring, already colonized by sapsuckers in its metropolis of leafless branches. He was still baffled by religion and felt there must be something or other he could go by. Instead I could tell by the way he gazed upon this lively scene that it would at least do until something better came along. A Socrates man myself, I never felt that human spiritual development prior to the birth of Christ was canceled by his arrival. Still, I was very anxious for my father to have whatever consolation was available, despite my usual harkening to Harry Truman’s remark “When I hear them praying in the amen corner, I head home and lock the chicken house.”
A raucous kingfisher dove from the willows, heedlessly hunting tiny trout in the rushing surface of the stream. From my vantage at some elevation in my lawn chair there was something boyish about my father dangling his legs from the bridge. “Very strange thing about living,” he mused. “You start out by yourself but head for the crowds. The infantry, that was a fine crowd. But then the crowd dispersed and kept on getting smaller, and in the end, I’ve wound up almost by myself again. I think it’s pretty normal.”
“Sure.”
“Your mother and I, we got old. No surprises. I’m still hanging around. That’s about it. Hey, relax! I like it. What I’m headed for, it’s a mystery. Mysteries are good. Let me at ’em.”
We just lay low the next several days. My dad had checked out a best seller from the lending library; I couldn’t believe he’d ever get through it, eight hundred pages about a straying but remorseful husband, set in the Hamptons during the Civil War. And we rented a movie: Bruce Willis dynamites the sewers of Chicago to rescue an autistic Navajo boy. I had to get him away from this sort of thing. We built a fire. I read him some poetry, Saint-John Perse, Seamarks, John Donne, The Eve of St. Agnes, and an epic that had been appearing serially in our local paper, Love Slaves of the Upper Yellowstone. He fell asleep and I had to wake him and lead him, groggy, to his bed. I tucked him in, opened his window a crack, and set a glass of water on the side table. I laced my fingers over the top of one of the bedposts and just kind of hung there watching him sleep, unable to tell why my heart ached. I’d gotten into the habit of sailing through moments like this and I thought if I could get it right, I wouldn’t do that anymore; I’d stay right there with it until it was clear.
10
SOMETIMES AFTER LUNCH, I climbed the sandstone bluff behind the clinic, which, after the first ascent, opened onto vast rolling grassland that seemed to extend forever. I did this for my health, of course, but the great vista, which changed continuously with the light and the seasons, was something I found heartening. Shadowed in places, lifted here and there by breeze, the grassland that afternoon looked silken; about halfway across were small circular shapes, of several colors, bobbing and drifting in the summer air like ectoplasms. I stopped to stare: I couldn’t account for them. I’d been up here often but this was new. It was a long walk until I could confront the mystery: five colored balloons, JUST MARRIED on their sides, bobbing on zephyrs.
On these walks, I always expected to have some small experience of the sacred, something to help me become not so much a doctor as a shaman who sets out on his flight through home skies. I walked toward the wedding balloons with that hope. I had observed my mother speaking in tongues, but her attempts to indoctrinate me went in one ear and out the other. Still the longing remained.
Seneca said, “Each of us is sufficient audience for the other.” I tried to live up to this, but I was well aware of my frequent failures as the recitations of others embedded in their sufferings only reminded me of my own. I did plan to rise above this but hadn’t arrived at that station, and so I went on grinding at my own story without much satisfaction.
One of my patients, an old Harvard man, had come west with a private income when very young, bringing his bride. For the last thirty years the two had tried most of the barstools of our town, first out of fascination with the ways of a region not familiar to them, then out of a fascination with alcohol and the inability to go home together until obliged to do so, for they were famous battlers whose shouts could be heard all over town. Roger was known as “Old Yeller” for his share of the bellowing; Diana, the wife, died of cirrhosis of the liver and Roger was not far behind. But he went on seeing me and in fact all the doctors, and inevitably I served as listener to his various salutations to the late Diana, intoned in his remarkable diction. A small and finely wrinkled man with a high forehead showing thin blue veins, he began to speak as though others besides me awaited his remarks. “Nothing ever quite picked Diana up like a libation presented at an unexpected hour. She had such marvelous blood.” I was working on my listening, but the visuals that ran through my mind over Roger’s sound track of their falling in and out of low bars made the story harder to follow than plausible conversation might have been. He had told me over and over that he and Diana had met at dance class: “She caught my eye while I attended a pair of lissome suffragettes.” Roger’s hands were shaking, and as he rambled on I gradually fought off my daydreaming to note that he was headed somewhere, and indeed he was: Roger wanted me to help him die. “I’ve read everything under the sun on the subject, and the bottom line is I won’t feel a thing.”