“Not missing a beat?” asked Wilmot. I was jubilant just from having seen a couple of patients.
“Pecking along as best I can.”
“But you look quite pleased.”
“It’s a living,” I said.
“Well, good then. I say, in fact, ‘Marvellous.’ ”
I was sorry I had to hear that. “So, Raymond, what’s up?”
“A courtesy call, really, just a courtesy call. We are working on the status of your situation, which is many-layered.”
“Like a cake?”
“Well, sure. Could be. I did want you to understand that it wasn’t only the staff and board that are the voices being heard. There is always an unseen presence in the room whenever we go through a bad patch like this, and that presence is the community.”
“I’m anxious to know about that,” I said sincerely, even though I knew that “the community” was a bogus concept generally invoked in the service of self-righteousness.
“Oh, rest assured, they’ll be heard. Would you like to be kept in the loop?”
“Not really.”
“Oh?”
“Just tell me how it turns out.”
Wilmot was already backing to the door, having assumed a look of bafflement. “I will. I promise.” I thought about Wilmot’s style of communication: speaking to you in supposedly transparent earnestness while his face grimaced faintly as though from acid reflux. It was a form of snobbery that looked like it could be cured with Pepto-Bismol.
“Adrienne sends her best regards. She was always very fond of you.”
“It’s good you’re still in touch.”
“Adrienne really landed on her feet. I still feel challenged. She married a guy retired from some boutique bank in New York. He needed something besides issuing letters of credit to occupy his time. So he bought a sawmill and a forest. He’s almost ninety, no prenup. I’d love to have her back. Always wanted a forest.”
He was backing out the door as he glanced around the room, looking for medical equipment, I suppose. I meant to get a catalog, but as there were still a few home doctors I thought I could just as well wait for one to die. I realized I was drifting toward this obsolete category, but it seemed to fit. Maybe I had resigned myself to being a square peg in a round hole and welcomed a setting where I could spend less time on explanations.
Perhaps I had gotten ahead of myself, though, because no one called for my services the rest of that day, and by the end of it the little respite I’d enjoyed from obsessing over Jocelyn was gone and I was frantic. I was so uncomfortable that I had to act. I fired up the 88, relieved not just to be doing something about my torment but to find that the car was willing to start, as was not always the case when it had been parked for more than a day. When the Oldsmobile had not been used, the steady press of sunlight on its plastic upholstery produced the smell of obsolescence reminiscent of my pleasant rides with Throckmorton in his giant Audi with its radar and satellite uplinks, the silent highway rushing under its hood. Perhaps in imagining a time when I might stop pushing this old boat down the road, I foresaw days of great change. Nice!
I left town on Highway 12 and soon passed Two Dot, where I once had a patient, a superstitious old lady who described suicides in the distant past and several local ghosts, including a girl on Alkali Creek guzzling blood from a bottle, a cowboy ghost with a hole in his chest, and a woman on fire holding a jug of gasoline. After Mrs. Tierney told me of these things, she always looked me dead in the eye and said, “I’m of sound mind.” And I’d say something like, “Of course you are, but if you don’t measure your glucose regularly and write it down I’m not going to be able to help you.” These phantoms seemed to haunt the benign but lonely landscape as I drove.
Perhaps I was starting to calm down, because as I passed the Hutterite colony at Martinsdale I thought fondly of the beautiful vegetables they brought to our farm markets. When I reached Checkerboard, I spotted the bar among a number of trailers. The sign just said BAR. If it had said EXCELSIOR TAVERN or something I wouldn’t have stopped. I was alone with the bartender under a low ceiling covered with dollar bills. Not much light in there. A jukebox. I drank a shell of draft without a word from the bartender and left. The phone booth outside with its bifold door ajar and phone hanging at the end of its metallic cord seemed to taunt my increasingly forlorn state of mind. I hurried on to White Sulphur Springs, reviewing how I had enhanced the concept of “bar” into some kind of cow-town Brigadoon with fiddle music, two-steppers, and irrepressible ranch hands throwing their hats in the air.
At the medical facility in White Sulphur Springs, I identified myself at the desk and went straight to the office of the physician who had treated Jocelyn, Dr. Aldridge. He did not seem pleased to see me, but I launched a wave of cordiality his way. “I understand that you and Miss Boyce have gotten very close.” He just stared at me.
He said, “Yes, we have. I don’t think that needs to get out, do you?”
“Not because of me, Doctor!” I said.
“How did you find out?”
“I guess she had to share it with someone. Feelings are running pretty strong. She realizes it’s not a simple situation.”
Holding his head in his hands, Dr. Aldridge stared down at the papers on his desk. “I just don’t know what to do.”
“It’s not often that true love opens its arms to us, Doctor. What do you have to lose? Jocelyn is a beautiful young woman and she has such marvelous skills.” This last brought Aldridge’s head up; perhaps he smelled a rat. What skills? I let him marinate this bit of psychic mildew for just a moment before I eased the silly bastard down. “It’s as if she and the airplane were one.”
Relief spread across Aldridge’s face: I knew a fellow nincompoop when I saw one.
“But how I wish she wouldn’t fly! Remember, it was I who first treated her after that accident.”
“I do remember. And I have to confess, I was jealous of the gaze that greeted you whenever you entered her room. Well, there’s medicine and there’s life. We know that, don’t we, Doctor? Isn’t that the burden we share on behalf of humanity?” I surprised myself at the level of poison and spite infusing my remarks. And shame. I suppose I got a bit of relief watching another sucker head out on the sleigh ride, but it was cold comfort against the nausea and cross-purposes and lovelorn anger that were making me squirm. To add to my shame, I was well aware of the dramatization involved as I pictured myself crawling up into a culvert like a wounded coyote.
I didn’t really know what Jocelyn and Womack had in mind, for themselves or the airplane, but I was beginning to think that Jocelyn had foreseen the heat that seemed to follow Womack. It might be that she thought she could do better on her own.
Still, I sat in my old 88 chewing the top of the steering wheel, which I grasped in both hands, squirting salty tears. Fearing that in this sunny parking lot I might soon be making noises the average pedestrian would have trouble understanding, I turned on the radio, one of Paul Harvey’s last broadcasts, and was pleased to drift off into his cheerful anecdotes of a more wholesome world.