Driving on the Rim by Thomas McGuane Read Free Book Online

like this, but he’ll like it after that badger goes to the next world.”
    Before breakfast the next day, we’d bundled several sticks around a blasting cap and led the fuse back across the meadow to a boulder we meant to get behind at the right moment. It was hot already and the sun was barely up, throwing white bands of light through the cottonwoods and willows along the ditch bank. We sat behind the boulder with a box of kitchen matches and took a last look around before lighting the fuse, which hissed and sparkled to our satisfaction before disappearing inside itself. It seemed to take such a long time getting to the dynamite that we stood up to see what went wrong just when the blast occurred, sending a wash of soil in every direction and throwing the badger nearly forty feet in the air, where it burst into flame and landed in the desiccated alfalfa, setting the meadow ablaze, a fire that quickly burned out of control. Despite the efforts of our extremely capable volunteer fire department, Gladys and Wiley lost much of their hay crop. In front of the firemen, and with an oddly contemplative expression on his face, Wiley knocked Dale senseless and allowed it was time for me to get ready for school.

3
    I FOUND STRONG FEELINGS for my town to be always at hand. I loved its situation in the sweep of a great western river, even the steady, subdued clangor of its railroad yard, the faint but omnipresent background of our lives. And the violent weather kept everyone on their toes. My strongest impressions seem to have originated in summertime, when my life was out-of-doors and the towering clouds were like the castles in which I lived. When Gladys and Wiley didn’t need my help, I spent my days mowing lawns and watching. I say “watching” because the peculiarity of my family and of my own personality gave me the vigilance of an outsider. Remember, we had only recently come in from the road as itinerant rug cleaners, and my education at the loins of Aunt Silbie had exempted me from the pubescent twittering of my classmates. When I finally had a girlfriend, she turned out to be the true Crow maiden Debbie Stands Ahead, who confined our ardor to kisses that, lasting an hour and expressing teen love, were more powerful than the somewhat abrupt gymnastics with my aunt. I always felt in the arms of Debbie a sort of peace of a kind I would be surprised to feel years later when one of my colleagues, Jinx Mayhall, inexplicably embraced me in my hospital bed after I had been stabbed. What on earth could Jinx have been thinking? I had hoped she was embarrassed; I know I was. Years ago when I learned that Debbie had married a dentist I fondly hoped she was denying him coitus: I was still jealous. As for Jinx, I just didn’t know.
    I mowed lawns all over town. I mowed Dr. Burchfield’s, my precursor in the emergency room. That he spent the weekend in his bathrobe should have told me something. Mrs. Hetherington, whose brick house was built before Montana statehood, always made me iced tea and asandwich. She was a lonely old widow who sat by herself at a white painted table in her backyard arranging flowers from her garden. She knew I was seeing Debbie Stands Ahead. “She’s a fine young lady,” said Mrs. Hetherington. “This all used to be theirs.” After Debbie was gone I read the most god-awful books about the frontier, in which the Indian girls appeared as “dusky maidens.” For some reason I embraced this ghastly phrase and was heartbroken that my own dusky maiden was gone (to college). Debbie, forsake your dentist and his half-breed progeny, and come back to me!
    Earl Clancy’s yard was almost too small for me to trifle with and he barely paid me. Earl, now retired, had been a supervisor at the waterworks, and I worked for him to hear his stories. Once a hobo, he esteemed those years as the best of his life. He had the same skinny frame and hangdog face he had probably acquired during his days riding the rails. He