by Walter Kirn
Harry was as kindhearted as his wife, perhaps because of a trauma from his childhood. His father had been a partner in a large brokerage firm, Piper, Jaffrey and Hopwood, that was based in my home state of Minnesota, and his mother, Virginia, a famous Twin Cities society figure, had been the victim of the highest-ransom unsolved kidnapping in American history. I met Harry when he’d asked for my opinion of a book he was writing about the crime, which happened in 1972, not long before the Patty Hearst abduction, which pushed it from the headlines. After paying one million dollars for his wife’s freedom, Harry’s father was directed by the perpetrators to a secret spot in the northern Minnesota woods where he and Harry, who was in his teens then, found Virginia lashed to a tree trunk. The coiffed and gowned socialite Harry knew from home had been replaced by a shivering wild beast caked in its own feces. He felt revulsion, and then shame for feeling it. Seeing his mother in her disheveled state had colored his view of her afterward, he told me, and he hoped that the book might somehow purge his troubled conscience.
Before I could leave on what I’d estimated would be a three-day drive to the East Coast (Maggie planned to fly out and join me when I arrrived, both to meet Clark, who intrigued her, and to enjoy a weekend city holiday before her November due date drew too near), I had to learn to put Shelby in her wheelchair. I tenderly slipped my arms beneath her and carried her outside to the yard. Through her skin I could feel the outlines of her organs—spongy, faintly rounded objects that seemed to be floating loose inside her body. The source of her feeble life force was hard to locate. Her heart didn’t beat; it just very lightly tapped, like a grasshopper jumping inside a paper bag.
The wheelchair was a spidery contraption fabricated from some lightweight metal and equipped with several straps and slings that held Shelby’s paralyzed back end in place, preventing her legs from scraping on the ground or rubbing against the tires. Because her legs were more like ropes than limbs, getting them into the harness was a challenge. Finally, I tied on her booties, two leather pouches meant to shield her back feet in case they dragged.
We repeated the procedure so I’d remember it and could teach it to Clark.
“Time for our girl to show off,” said Harry. “Come!”
Shelby jerked forward in her metal armature. The first stretch of progress was easily achieved; it took only a tiny pulse of will to turn the axle and the two spoked wheels. Then the wheelchair sped up and reached a downhill grade, panicking Shelby with its momentum. She twisted sideways as though to get away from it, staggered, yelped in reflex, and turned around as if to bite the thing. Harry went to calm her. This took awhile. After her panting slowed and she stopped trembling, he walked away and ordered her to come again.
I felt sick. The whole exercise seemed doomed. Harry had said that Shelby was improving, that she’d come a long way, a miraculously long way, but the quavering manner in which she held herself convinced me that she’d started to slip again. In my pocket was the first cell phone I’d ever owned, bought to update the Pipers and Clark during the trip. Should I use it to call him in New York and cancel our arrangement? He’d want a good reason. He might even get angry; he had a certain peevish streak, I’d noticed. Most rich people did. They wanted what they wanted when they wanted it.
Harry and I freed Shelby from her prosthesis and lifted her into the cab of my Ford pickup truck. His help was symbolic, like a pallbearer’s—I could have done the job myself—and it complicated the maneuver, nearly causing us to drop her. Once she was situated on the seat and had resumed her natural shapelessness, Harry stepped back and finally let the tears crash. Mary looked down. His crying was hard to watch, startlingly primal and disfiguring, with sources beyond those in the present, it seemed.
“Please drive safely,” he said.
“I will. I always do.”
“You have your phone?”
“It’s right here in my pants.”
“She’s Clark’s now,” he said. “She’s little Shelby Rockefeller.”
Harry produced a glass vial from his shirt that contained water from the Sea of Galilee. He flicked a few drops at Shelby on the seat and sprinkled a few more on the truck’s hood. The night we’d had dinner I’d told him about the shelter dog, a hyperactive, big-boned mutt named Miles, that had leapt in front of the truck that spring while I was driving into a hayfield. Miles’s head appeared above the hood line, his tongue lolling horribly from his open mouth, and then he vanished, followed by an articulated crunch that I felt through the steering wheel in both my wrists. I braked and backed up, then jumped down out of the cab and gathered the broken black body in my arms. The trip into town with Miles across my lap, jerking and slackening, leaking life and spirit, prepared me for nightmares that, strangely, never came. I braced myself for them; they never came. Their absence was a subtle form of punishment, denying me the catharsis that I craved.
After the ritual of the holy water, Harry asked us to join hands and close our eyes. His prayer, which was fervent, petitioned the saints and angels to watch over me and Shelby as we traveled and guide us safely to our destination. He also asked the spirits to smile on Clark, to bless him with wisdom, fill his heart with love, and grant him the gift of healing as Shelby’s keeper.
When we opened our eyes again, I was free to go.
I WASN’T IN ANY shape for a long drive. I’d worn myself out that spring and early summer driving 120 miles each way back and forth between Livingston and Billings, Montana’s largest city, where I was reporting a cover story for Time on methamphetamine abuse. The photographer with me had covered foreign wars but said that he found Billings after dark scarier than Zimbabwe or Beirut. I insisted on full immersion in the dark atmosphere and made us stay in a cowboy-themed motel with brown cartographic stains on its thin mattresses. We followed the addicts around from bar to bar, lighting and relighting their bent cigarettes and listening to their fierce paranoid raps about UFO microphones sewn into their scalps and underground cities of scheming Jewish bankers. The photographer owned a police band radio that we kept turned on inside my car so we could race to drug-related crime scenes. We happened on stabbings whose victims were still bleeding and chain-swinging riots in pit-bull trailer courts. In my glove compartment was a loaded pistol—a macho secret that bred a rugged attitude—and in my jeans was a bottle of Ritalin, a drug that I sometimes used when writing on deadline. When the pills hit my bloodstream I felt brisk and competent, a hard-boiled reporter in an old movie, but once they wore off I grew touchy and distracted. The only antidote was another pill, dissolved in a can of soda for faster action. I built up quite a tolerance this way, for both Ritalin and Dr Pepper.
Between my nights on assignment I played rancher, wrestling with the tools of western agriculture—shovels, post-hole diggers, and wire stretchers. I liked the ranch; having grown up in the country, I’d never done well in towns and cities. Urban landscapes made of language, bristling with cautions, promotions, and announcements, kept me thinking, even in my sleep. In the old days, I’d used liquor to smooth things out. But on a trip to New York in 1992 I had my last drink, a double shot of vodka on top of two sleeping tablets I’d taken earlier but decided were duds when they didn’t work immediately, allowing me to rush down to a bar located close enough to my hotel that I judged I could make it back to bed in case they did start to hit. I timed things terribly. I woke in an alley behind a Chinese restaurant with grains of fried rice on me that I thought were maggots. I’d learned my lesson, but only about booze. Pharmaceuticals still had much to teach me.
Maggie was feeling poorly from her pregnancy. She rejected more food that spring than she consumed and seemed frustrated by the progress of the remodeling job that I was doing myself with two paid helpers, one of whom was a listless aging junkie who drilled through walls into current-bearing wires and clogged the toilet almost every time he used it. We’d passed through the stage when you talk about the baby—what its room will be like, whose features it will have—and into the one whe
re you watch the TV news and wonder, without saying anything out loud, why you ever decided to reproduce. Or maybe only I wondered; aside from her nausea, Maggie seemed happy enough. My fear of fatherhood wasn’t normal fear, though; instead of releasing adrenaline, it sapped it, producing a stony, inert fatigue, as though I’d been injected with heavy plastic. Sometimes, if I had an article to write, I took Ritalin in my office or at home, followed by Ambien to bring on sleep. The Ambien only worked for a few hours, and I would wake in a dream state and raid the kitchen, preparing weird mashes of flour and pancake syrup that I would find smeared on dishes in the morning. Sometimes I also found e-mails to old girlfriends and misspelled, unpunctuated notes for lurid short stories with outlandish settings, including, once, a brothel in the Arctic.
My last trip to Billings had been especially harrowing. I met up with a source, a twenty-year-old addict who’d abandoned her toddler during a three-week meth spree, and drove with her to an abandoned house where she was squatting with three male friends who were living off welfare checks that she was still receiving even though her child was in foster care. I interviewed them in the kitchen. It was empty except for a pyramid of beer cans assembled with such maniacal precision that no light could be seen between the cans; they stood four feet high where the table should have been. The tweakers were cooperative at first but things disintegrated when they asked the girl for her check and she answered that she’d lost it. (She’d told me it was hidden in her underwear.) One of her friends dumped her purse out on the floor while another went upstairs and came back down with an army-style rifle. He pointed it at me and my photographer and asked who we really worked for. “Time,” I said. But who owned Time? I tried to tell him. The girl started trying to talk him down, allowing me to slip out with the photographer. We drove a circuitous route to our motel, but the Ritalin in me convinced me we’d been followed. Too jumpy to sleep, I cracked the blinds and monitored the parking lot all night.
AT THE END OF the Pipers’ driveway I stopped my truck. Beside me, on a plywood platform that I’d made myself and covered with a green blanket, Shelby lay with her nose stuck in a vent. In front of us was the immense Montana sky. White clouds were stacked up to the atmosphere’s curved ceiling and monumental disclosures seemed at hand. I lit a cigarette to prepare for them and entered a frontage road that served I-90, exhaling sideways through my rolled-down window. At some point I looked down and to my right and saw Shelby’s nostrils, the most responsive part of her, gaping wide as though to pull the smoke in. I blew a small puff at her, experimenting, and saw that her tobacco hunger was real. A legacy of the master who’d abandoned her? Or was it some campfire reflex from ancient hunting times, when man and dog and spear and pipe were one?
Someone called my new phone a few miles into the drive, but when I picked up I couldn’t hear a voice—the signal was too weak. In case it was Clark, I tried his number, but I was confident he wouldn’t answer; all phone calls had to originate with him. It was a privacy measure, one of many. He’d also told me he used his Rockefeller name only with friends and family, never in public. The phone rang and rang when I called it; no machine. He’d said he didn’t like answering machines because the tapes or computer chips inside them could fall into untrustworthy hands.
Within an hour of setting out, I’d learned all there was to know about the challenges of driving a dog without a functioning nervous system in the back half of its body. The main problem was that Shelby couldn’t brace herself; she was helpless against centrifugal force. When I hit the brakes or rounded a curve, she’d pinball around inside the cab, slamming against the dashboard and the door. I fastened her in with a seatbelt but she hated it and protested by chewing at the buckle. Afraid that she’d break her teeth, I set her free and positioned her with her head across my lap and my right arm pressing firmly on her neck. This steadied her but it distracted me, forcing me to bear down at critical moments when I should have been focused on my driving.
About twice an hour she had to pee. She didn’t whimper or fidget when the urge came, but we were becoming psychic, the two of us, intimately dual, and I knew in my muscles when she had to go. I’d start scanning for places to pull over, but it was Montana, where freeway exits are rare, so I would find myself weighing up the cost of letting her wet herself inside the truck versus the risk of parking on the shoulder, unprotected against hurtling semis. The first two times this happened, I chose safety, but once the green blanket was reeking of ammonia I decided to stop no matter what.
My end of the deal, where peeing was involved, meant lifting her down from the truck onto the ground and holding her under the belly while the urine drizzled from her urethra. It drizzled because the nerve damage she’d suffered prevented her from directing it. Once, at a rest stop, the urine soaked my arm, creating the problem of how to dry my arm. I could walk to the bathrooms and fetch a paper towel, but since I couldn’t leave Shelby lying there helpless, I either had to carry her in with me or lock her in the truck. The truck was closer. Once I got her into it, my dripping arm had wiped off on her fur. The problem had solved itself, though not in a way I felt good about.
I didn’t much care by then. I was in despair.
The air conditioner gave out near Billings and filled the cab with the toxic smell of engine coolant. A short distance on, I ran over a length of steel-belted tire—what truckers call a “gator”—that seemed to put my alignment out of whack. I regrouped and refueled at a truck stop with a casino that attracted the desperate meth types familiar to me from my reporting. I kept an eye on them loitering near the building—for some reason they always came in couples, often a pasty, heavy, braless woman with a wolfish, jiggly-eyed man—as I set down the red plastic bowl I’d brought along and filled it from a jug of water. But without her chair to hold her upright so she could get her head over the bowl, Shelby couldn’t lap the water. I unfolded the chair and worked to get her into it. I had to push her face in the bowl to make her drink, but she refused to unfurl her pink tongue, which wasn’t as pink as a dog’s tongue ought to be. It was gray, gray like freezer-burned meat. I grabbed her chin and pushed a thumb and finger in between her jaws to wedge them open, then poured the bowl of water over her snout. A little went down, but she choked and coughed it out. I was crying by then, and in the purest way—the way people cry when there’s no one around who cares and they can stop or carry on as they please. And so they carry on; they might as well.
“Shelby, you have to drink for me,” I said.
I was starting to wonder what might befall a person who disappointed a Rockefeller.
I QUIT DRIVING THAT night in Forsyth, Montana, having gone only a couple hundred miles. Forsyth was a town of dumpy storefronts that would have gone out of business in healthier places where people still expected to make money, but here there was no reason to abandon them, since the owners weren’t selling things from them anymore, just using them as ringside seats to watch the bar fights, furtive pain-pill swaps, weeping fits, and stray animal attacks of final-stage social collapse on the great plains.
At a convenience store I bought a Gatorade and strapped Shelby into her wheechair for a walk. This drew glances, and one looker approached me, a man with bowed legs and a deeply concave chest that looked like it had been crushed under a boulder. He was smoking a little cherry-scented cigar that stayed in his mouth when he asked me, “What’s the deal there?,” touching one foot to the edge of Shelby’s chair. “This worth it?” he said. I wasn’t sure what he meant. Was it worth it for the dog or me? “Barely,” I said. I expected a wry laugh. Instead, the guy pressed me on my destination, knowing it couldn’t be Forsyth. “New York,” I said. “It’s kind of a story.”
“Well, I hope so, this poor thing.”
“A Rockefeller adopted it,” I said. I was curious how this would play in the real world, and this was that, a place as real as dirt.
“Good people,” he said. “Broad thinkers. I’ve met a few.”
“Where?” Montana can
surprise you. The towns may be hurting, but out on the big ranches live many fugitive millionaires, titans even.
‘I used to coach track at prep schools in the East. I knew their kids. They raise them tight and trim. No brats. No.” He kneeled down and petted Shelby’s head, then cleared some gunk from her eye with a long fingernail. “This doesn’t seem like a city dog to me, though. Twitchy. Not settled.”
“I’m only doing a job.”
“That ignorant thing people say, they rule the world? Not true. Not anymore at least. The Rockefellers are mostly broke now. No one runs the world, I’m sad to say. They don’t even try. It was better when they did.”
The motel I chose was an old place beside some railroad tracks that charged a cleaning fee to guests with dogs. I didn’t tell the clerk I had a dog. This was a habit I’d picked up from my father: saving nickels and dimes through petty lies. He was a patent lawyer in Saint Paul who planned to retire to Montana to fish and hunt. I didn’t look forward to having him nearby. Since his divorce from my mother eight years ago, our lifelong clash of temperaments had sharpened. I found him aggressive and overbearing. He found me self-deluding and neurotic. My therapist urged me to cut him off completely but I continued to call him on holidays and when I had important news. He knew about the ranch and Maggie’s pregnancy, but not much else about my recent life. He didn’t know a thing about my trip. This was too bad; I suspected he might approve. Action delighted him. Boldness was his creed. “Hit the other guy harder than he hits you,” he’d taught me in my schoolboy football days, but it was plainly all-around advice. I’d heard he was scary in courtrooms and often won settlements simply by scrambling the other lawyers’ nerves. He drank black coffee straight from a Thermos and his cars were littered with shotgun shells and jackknives that he used to cuts swatches of fur from roadkilled deers to use in tying trout flies.