Driving on the Rim by Thomas McGuane Read Free Book Online Page A

followed the seasons like a bird of passage and accepted adventures as they befell him. He had some skill as an orchardist and could bring his talents to McIntosh apples and Indian River oranges alike. In Florida, he was arrested for vagrancy and spent a month on a chain gang. When released, he wandered penniless down a dirt road, trying to think how to get back to Montana (it was hot). Passing a Holy Roller church, he heard the pandemonium within and a huge woman stepped out and called to him, “Come in and be saved!” Earl soon found himself rolling around on the floor, where he discovered a wallet with enough money to get him home. The stint on the chain gang had brought him to his senses, such as they were, and he went on to spend the rest of his working life at the waterworks. Because of his special understanding of the operations of the system, Earl was forgiven the very occasional summer binges that took him on sentimental journeys to pick cherries on the shores of Flathead Lake. He was the first of the innately talented, hardworking, somewhat visionary and out-of-control men I have known. I might have been one of them at heart. I hoped not, because all were bachelors and I was in search of the love of my life.
    My summertime lawn mowing introduced me to the class system that burdens every community for the simple reason that east of Main Street, people mowed their own lawns. Mowing lawns in the humid summertime could be such grueling work that I began mentally aligning myselfwith that class of people who had others do it for them. There was a lingering contradiction here in that Dr. Olsson, who set me on my path, mowed his own lawn. But he was from out East, and that could have explained it. Still, here was another of my ambivalences: I seemed unwilling to rise to that class whose lawns were mowed by others. I wouldn’t like being called “Doctor” if that became appropriate: it would embarrass me, though I expected to love the work. Maybe that was why I drove my troublesome old car. The last mechanic who worked on it said, “Doc, you need to shit-can this rust bucket before it shit-cans you.” But I went on pouring money into it. I even lost my desire for money and developed some kind of sentimental attachment to the poverty of our early days.
    I mowed lawns for nuns and priests. We had a priest from Ireland for a while, Father Noonan, a tall, somber man known to be an extremely bad-tempered golfer. The many Irish associated with the railroad in our town thought that Noonan gave them a bad name by being so humorless. They had a point. Noonan was never happy with my work and demanded that I use an edger, which he didn’t own. When he presented me with one and pointed out the work it was meant to do, I quit. Father Noonan called me a bum and chased me off the rectory grounds as though I’d been fired. I got dirty looks from some Catholics, but that died down.
    I wasn’t the only lawn boy in town, and we all liked the Dairy Queen for lunch and ogling. We had the best tans, which drew some girls, including sophomore Edna Sedlicky, who made it clear she was available for whatever we might have in mind, which scared us to death, sending Edna elsewhere for fulfillment. School threw us together arbitrarily, but meeting at the DQ as boys of common labor seemed to produce more-enduring friendships. This was how I met Chong Wells and Second Hand Smoke. The three of us were fascinated by Louis Echeverria, a Basque-Cheyenne mixed-blood burglar who told us stories of his derring-do without quite tempting us, though the allure of creeping around where we had no business was attractive. Another Indian who worked at the Conoco station, Gary American Horse, known as “Walkman” because of his omnipresent audio device, told us that Louis was known on the reservation as “Louie Crooked-Fucker,” and when wetried addressing him by this name, he fled, assuming his reputation pursued him. We never saw him again, though we