After John left, I had a cancellation, so I idled in the hallway and made small talk with the nurses, and the occasional colleague, none of whom seemed anxious to speak to me. Perhaps I began to smell a rat. I don’t remember. We at the clinic, like everyone else around here, were spending most of our time reacting to the sudden growth of our world as retired people and amenity migrants of all sorts began to settle around us. They’d fetishized our terrible weather and made us locals feel like sissies for ever having complained about the wind and cold. They were a virtual LL Bean — Patagonia road show, and what we complained about I suppose had never gotten to them except in a bracing secondhand way. Our town now had so many people who did not seem to exactly need anything we offered — employment, supplies, fellowship. I suppose it might have been a good thing to have had a significant cohort of people who did not feel threatened, since most of us had always felt under siege, if only in our minds, and probably as a consequence of the root-hog-or-die ethos of the region. What had happened to the Indian was happening to us. My father told me that we ruined the American Indian. “We won the Indian Wars. We should have made every Indian an American citizen and then let them tough it out with the micks, the wops, the kikes, the Japs, the krauts, and the spics. They would have done just fine.” Well, okay. But what of us broken-down old conquerors?
So many times, my father told me that we get along by going along. This prescription seemed somewhat at odds with his real nature, especially that of the old warrior whose proud past surfaced now and again, but my mother had talked him into her blustering God, an array of obsequious saints, an earthly existence in which the roof was ever ready to fall in until time came to an end. In ten years he had gone from an M1 Garand to a steam cleaner and from the bleak agnosticism of an infantryman in winter to a thrice-dunked primitive Christian twisting like a rag and speaking in tongues in churches that rented space in failed strip malls. I think he was just doing his best, getting along by going along with my mother, whose piety and evangelical fever had preoccupied her family since the last century. She knew no other world — God the Tyrant and a supplicant humanity crawling on its belly to be forgiven for sins they never knew they’d committed. “It’s no sense defying the Lord,” she told me. “He’s got all the coons up one tree.”
There was some reason I remembered all this and it had to do with my somewhat intense focus on the pilot. It might have been the way she, like Audra, like Tessa, flew into our lives — Tessa in the aftermath of California, Jocelyn in the aftermath of an accident. I began wondering if she would live. I supposed they had taken her to the medical facility in White Sulphur Springs, a little thirty-seven bed facility whose staff I knew cycled between the hospital and clinic, the nursing home, home health care, and so on. It was in technical parlance a “frontier” facility. I would go there. I was drawn to White Sulphur Springs as though by some winch fastened to the town and attached to my Oldsmobile, and I found myself at the counter asking to be directed to the patient’s room, a request that only met with hesitation from the young girl at the desk with the severely plucked eyebrows and the tribal tattoo on her neck — until I explained that I was a physician.
The pilot was in the first room down a very short corridor. Her arms were bandaged, her face badly bruised; someone had secured her hair atop her head with an elastic, and under one slate gray eye hung a swollen blue-green bruise. “You’re the guy at the crash?” I said I was. I was skimming her chart: her name was Jocelyn Boyce and she was forty years old. She was from Two Dot, Montana, and listed as next of kin was her father. The ER summary indicated blowout fracture of the left eye socket, broken ribs, probably torn rotator cuff. She seemed fairly pert in view of these pain producers. The crow’s-feet I had already found attractive as suggesting someone not going to give in easily to hurt, but I didn’t know what sort of medication she had on board.
She did not seem dispirited by her condition. She said, “I thought I had the rookie errors out of my system.”
“I can’t comment,” I said. “I don’t know anything about flying.”
“It’ll be a long time before I live it down.”
Her physician came in about ten minutes after I got there. We knew each other vaguely, and he returned my greeting with reserve. He must have thought I’d been called in until I told him that I was at the accident. At that point, he cheered up and went into bonhomie so abruptly that I was startled and caught the glimpse of an ironic half smile from Jocelyn Boyce. He was Dr. Aldridge and had practiced here and there as he dodged the effects of his drinking, which he had finally controlled, though he was now trailed by his obsolete reputation. He was a good physician and looked the part with his neatly trimmed gray moustache and clear gray eyes. He said, “You can see Miss Boyce has quite a shiner.” He turned an infatuated gaze on his patient.
“I do see that.”
“She has a blowout fracture of the eye socket.” I knew that, but I thought it best for him to tell me. As Jocelyn Boyce and I kept glancing at each other, something odd was going on between us.
“The whole thing?” I asked.
“Just the floor, I think. She doesn’t have double vision and I’ve ruled out surgical repair. And no one wants us going in for that, do they, Miss Boyce?”
“It sounds creepy,” she said. “I’ll give you that.”
“There’s really no sign of muscle entrapment. If Miss Boyce gets bored with us she can roll her eyes whenever she wishes.” In fact, she did so, either at the banality of Dr. Aldridge’s remark or merely as a demonstration.
“You see?” said Dr. Aldridge. “No sign of spinal injury, thank the Lord, but the jury is still out on head trauma for as long as that eye tells us something about the blow she received.”
“Is that the worst of it?”
“The worst of it might be the knee. We’ve got it secured, but it was near disarticulation when she arrived.”
“It’s a long way from my heart,” said Jocelyn.
“You’ll be in the hands of a smart orthopod for that. We’re just the nuts-and-bolts guys, aren’t we, Dr. Pickett?” I smiled at this. “So, this is me going home to feed the cat—” His eyes glanced off mine; I knew his wife had left him during the bad years. “Miss Boyce, I’ll be looking in. I don’t live far and if you need me before my next visit, just call. I’ve left my cell number here—” He pointed to the papers on the bedside table. He was more than interested in Miss Boyce; it was almost embarrassing.