Driving on the Rim by Thomas McGuane

everything reminded me of girls, not excluding tomatoes, chickens, and parking meters—and even, at desperate times, my own shoes.
    The day came when my beloved parents grew sardonic about their faith and entered a period they called Boozing for Christ. There was a curious synchronicity, if you shared quarters with them, between this and other forms in which they awaited the Rapture. Visiting my mother’s family in Arkansas, they had been passengers on a powerful bass boat that sped through a crowded water baptism on the Ouachita River, scattering and injuring worshippers. Expecting divine retribution and not getting it seemed to undercut their faith. I think their particularkind of Christian longs for punishment, longs to be shriven, the only road to paradise they could picture. In any case, while awaiting trial for criminal endangerment, my mother and father began hitting the bars. Sometimes a Christian will deliberately go down a bad road just to produce eventual suffering. They’re crazier than pet coons.
    They were soon virtual derelicts in our town, my father hanging on to his connections among veterans of foreign wars and my mother seeing the very few friends that couldn’t quite give up on her. Our home was a disaster and I was the subject of various rescue attempts, not just because I was the sort of obsequious ninny who appeals to rescuers but because my basic needs were not being met, and so I smelled bad, though I still did my schoolwork. Eldon Olsson became our family doctor; we were among his few patients. I believe he did this out of concern for me. I’m not sure how this happened except that through hunting on Gladys and Wiley’s ranch he became their friend, and thence my parents’ friend. They could see through their fog that monitoring my health was not a bad thing, and it might be preferable that I received the usual vaccinations. I had been born with a small abdominal hernia, and Dr. Olsson taped a silver dollar over it until it closed and left me with a conventional belly button. He removed my tonsils and bought me the ice cream that was the only reward for what in those days was a gruesome office procedure. Later on, we shared a love of hunting, which was once a boy’s introduction to the natural world, leading often to science and conservation, curiosity and a love of earth. These activities put an end to my puling and whining and that part of my youth whose only promise consisted of fucking my aunt. He bought me a twenty-gauge Winchester shotgun with brass tacks in the stock like an Indian gun, and he kept it at his office. He bought me a white Shakespeare Wonderod and a Martin Blue Chip reel. He kept these at his office as well. I think he tried to maintain some sort of connection with his former professional life, writing articles on matters affecting doctors in law and insurance, all the while counting down to those golden hours when he donned his tattered sporting clothes, put Eskimo Pie, or “Pie,” his setter-spaniel mix, into the converted hearse which was his hunting car and which sometimes sported a canoe on the roof or a johnboat on a rusty trailer bumper hitched below rear doors that divided at the center and opened to thesides to accommodate the coffin. Pie, named for her black and white colors, sat in the back and watched where we’d been; Dr. Olsson drove; I opened his beers and adjusted the radio.
    Dr. Olsson, I now recognize, was a country boy, a short, strapping middle-aged Swede with a groove in his chin, jet-black eyebrows, and thick, unruly hair that tried to form bangs, which, since they wouldn’t stay out of his way, were trimmed asymmetrically to accommodate his shooting eye. He too was the son of drunks and had worked his way through school on the green chain of a plywood mill, a terrible job. He still had the hands of a mill worker and occasionally drank wine with the air of someone either on a fabulously exotic mission or saluting the international community. His