Guane - Driving on the Rim

For Laurie, always

The people and places of this book, inspired to some extent by forty years living in Montana, do not exist in reality or even entirely in familiarity. The staff of a medical clinic, here roundly calumniated, if based upon the fine institutions that have served my small needs might deny me their succor just when I most needed it. The appearance of familiar dogs and favorite hats is accidental. Ranchers and farmers are rarely this gloomy, Christians this delusional, or socialites this far from home. It serves no one to suggest that broken hearts are never repaired, especially if, like a blind pig looking for an acorn of truth, you made the whole thing up in the first place. As would be, this is a work of fiction, the last frontier. Take it with a grain of salt.

As for the double life, everyone lives one actually. Why brag about it?

R OBERT W ALSER

M Y NAME IS B ERL P ICKETT , Dr. Berl Pickett. But I sign checks and documents I. B. Pickett, and this requires some explanation. My very forceful mother, a patriot and evangelical Christian, named me after the author of God Bless America; so, I am Irving Berlin Pickett and well aware of the absurdity of my name. My father wanted Lefty Frizzell Pickett. That would have been worse. In any case, my very name illustrates the borrowed nature of my life, not easily denied. In fact, Ive learned to enjoy my circumstances as I have moved among people trapped in their homes, jobs, and familiesand their names! My esteemed colleague Alan Hirsch, mountaineer and cardiologist, calls me Irving, with a chuckle. When I first arrived at our clinic from the Indian Health Service, Dr. Hirsch told me that I couldnt call myself a physician until I had delivered babies to ambivalent parents or taught the old to accept their grotesque new faces. I dont know about that, but I do abide in the conviction that Ive come a long way, and lately Ive wondered how this all happened.

L. Raymond Hoxey bought an old mansion in Livingston, Montana, and converted the third floor into a delightful apartment with a view of the Absaroka Mountains. The second floor housed his print collection in archival conditions, with humidifiers and air-quality equipment. The first floor was divided into two smaller but still comfortable apartments, one of which was home to his assistant, Tessa Larionov, and the other, in summer, to a textile historian employed by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who was also a trout fisherman.

The year the historian died, I was still in pre-med and painting houses to support myself; I moved into his vacated apartment. Acknowledging that there is a difference between being naive and being innocent, I will say that I was entirely naive. My parents lived a few miles away, but we werent getting along and I needed some distance, despite the fact that my mother was sick and often ranted about God. There are many versions of God around the world, but my mothers was definitely a guy, and a mean one. Like many aspiring to study medicine, I planned to get rich but I wasnt rich yet; I was just a poor house painterout of work and looking for whatever came alongand despite all other evidence, I feared that I would be one forever, packing a great wheel of color chips from one indifferent house to another. I dont mean to suggest mild insecurity here: by any reasonable standard, I was losing my mind.

Tessa Larionov was the daughter of a Russian engineer who had immigrated to the United States in 1953 and found his way to Montana, where he set up business building bridges for the railroad. His offices were in Choteau, where Tessa was born and grew up. Tessas mother was not Russian; her father had met her in New Jersey, where he first landed. She may have been Italian. Tessa was a powerfully built but attractive woman, with black hair, black eyes, and the look of a Tartar, wry and a little dangerous. She was liked by everyone who knew her. Trained in library science, she had worked as an archivist at some very august places, including the Huntington, in Pasadena, where shed met her future employer and our landlord, L. Raymond Hoxey, who had let Tessa talk him into retiring to Montana to run his rare-prints business with her help. Hoxey was eighty-one years old, and his arrangement with Tessa was a means of avoiding assisted living. She was very fond of him and had wanted to go home to Montana, and so it worked for both of them. Tessa was exactly thirty, still single, though she had enjoyed an active love life, leaving in her wake only grateful hearts, or so she said. Theyre all still crazy about me, she told me. Thats why I left California. Settling down was of no interest; shed grown absorbed with the prints, and she wanted to keep her eye on Hoxey. I was twenty, but she treated me as if I were even youngera salute to my retarded behavior.

My father had worked briefly as a pipe fitter for the Northern Pacific Railroad. In the course of corporate takeovers, the railroad had actually changed its name several times, but Northern Pacific was the one that stuck in all our minds. It meant something. Burlington Northern meant nothing. Then he had a little stock farm he liked to call a ranch, whose main purpose was to let him keep horses. But he lost it to the bank and went to work for the post office. My mother was a hairdresser and, because of her big mouth and religious mania, had enemies all over southwestern Montana and very few customers. During my childhood, they had had a traveling rug-cleaning business, and the three of us saw most of the West as we towed the steamer behind our van, an old-fashioned Steam Jenny with an oil-filled crankcase and a picture of a Vargas-type girl in black nylons emblazoned on its sidewonderful years, really. As an only child, I was all but homeschooled, then run back and forth between our house and the less fashionable of the two grade schools, before going to the local high school, where I was anonymous, never having been allowed by my overprotective mother to learn a sport. My mother joined one Pentecostal church after another, followed by my father, whose skepticism had long ago evaporated in the heat of her enthusiasm; they stopped just short of snake handling. But I liked to fish; Id fish wherever there was water, and I fished in a lot of ditches where there was no hope of success. I now understand that I was for my age a weirdly underdeveloped human being, ripe for the sort of encounter I had with Tessa Larionov. Even my mother noticed my immaturity; she was always telling me, Stop staring at people! But she had once given me a gift beyond price: looking down at me when I was a little boy, she said, Youre an old soul. Youve been here before.