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

learned that he moved to Billings to pimp and sell meth. At a football game in Great Falls, Chong saw him driving a new Eldorado with tinted windows. He was later arrested together with our mayor, Todd Bakesly, father of seven, for soliciting a prostitute. Louie went to jail, the possibility of which he once described to his admirers at the Dairy Queen as “the price you pay” and “the choice is yours.” He had a philosophical streak.
    One summer I traveled back and forth to Wild Horse Island on Flathead Lake, where T. Sam Vaughn, the owner of our town’s bank, kept his big Chris-Craft with its cocktail bar and white Naugahyde interior. I had scraped and painted its bottom in the spring and twice touched up its varnish during the summer, after which Vaughn put me on a Greyhound for home with a check in my pocket and on my lap a nice lunch, made with his own hands. But by far my sharpest memory is of T. Sam, his wife elsewhere, a cocktail in one hand, the marine gas nozzle in the other while fumes arose around the cigarette dangling from his lips. I was sure we would go down as one of America’s regular cabin cruiser explosions, but as you see it never happened. Once T. Sam allowed me to bring Debbie Stands Ahead as my guest; he chaperoned us in separate cabins and joined Debbie in preparing meals. At midday when my work was done and Debbie had tired of sunbathing on the deck, we would swim in water so cold that those who drowned in it were never seen again. Our banker was our lifeguard, watching vigilantly from the helm as we swam furiously to keep warm. Debbie and I always watched the sunrise over the Mission Range where Debbie had Kootenai-Salish relatives. When Debbie got out of the sun to study her schoolbooks, T. Sam would wink at me and nod: this is the girl for you. In middle age, I still found myself yearning, and Debbie’s marriage to a dentist made me a lifelong connoisseur of anti-dentist commentary.
    T. Sam and I were chums when I was on the boat, but if ever he brought a lady friend, I, by magic, made myself invisible once he made a locking sign with thumb and forefinger over slightly pursed lips. The two would then walk around me in the broad cockpit as though I were any other inanimate object. This proved a higher tier to lawn mowing in my study of the American class system, and the resulting aversion hadmuch to do with my practicing medicine while pretending not to be a doctor. Perhaps, too, there was some nostalgia on my part for the days when I was presumed crazy. It always meant freedom, and none are freer than the crazy.
    The day came when Mrs. Vaughn discovered the uses to which the cabin cruiser was being put, and she divorced him. “Miss Lillian” had been named after her. He renamed the boat “Miss Ruby” after a subsequent lady friend, then “Miss Alice,” then “Miss Judy,” and so on; the last time her transom was repainted, she was called “Queen for a Day.”
    I became Vaughn’s physician, and as time went on, his mind would drift to the bygone days of the cabin cruiser, which proved to be less reminiscence than a prelude to dementia. I continued seeing him as he lived in contented oblivion at the Mountain Shadows Rest Home. I hope that Ruby, Alice, and Judy are with him, and even the younger Lillian. T. Sam was a good soul.
    This wouldn’t be a bad time to talk about how I came to be rescued from Christianity in time to become a doctor. I have previously described my days as a wanderer in a family of steam-cleaning Pentecostals, my carnal toils in the arms of my beloved aunt, my years as a ninny and scholar so oversexed that every time the cheerleaders of my school performed the pyramid at a ball game I came close to shooting off in my pants. Fear of this caused me to stoop even when such an event was a remote possibility and to develop a sort of meditation technique for classroom days to keep my mind, if not on the work at hand, at least off the flesh of females. In those days