The Challenge(3)

Ted had been unable to accept the fact that his son was less than perfect. He had kept away from Tim at first, then had gone through a period of heavy drinking, which was how he handled most problems, like his father had. He had finally conquered his problem with alcohol through AA, but sought a “geographic” solution to their marital problems. He had left June and Tim, and taken a job in Oklahoma, working in the oil fields. He had done well, but came home seldom, unable to face the problems there. Then he took a job in Texas, which included working on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and later traveled in the Middle East. After four years of it, and his seeming inability to remember that he had a wife and son in Montana, June finally divorced Ted when Tim was five. He no longer remembered a time when his parents were together. He saw his father once or twice a year now. Ted sent him postcards from exotic places and called him once in a while, but rarely saw him. He still couldn’t handle Tim’s handicap, no matter how well Tim had mastered it with his mother’s help. Ted never told people that he had a deaf son, except in AA meetings when he blamed his drinking on the divorce, rather than the reverse. He ignored the fact that he had run away from his wife and son to work halfway around the world, so he didn’t have to face them. He could afford to send them enough child support so they could live comfortably in a house at the edge of town that June rented. He never stayed longer than a day when he came to visit, and he couldn’t leave fast enough. He still couldn’t face what he perceived to be Tim’s imperfections. He felt guilty for having run out on them, but had never been able to turn it around. He never even tried. He had run away from his problems all his life, just like his father.

June tried not to be bitter about it, and refrained from making disparaging comments to Tim about his dad, but she felt cheated by Ted nonetheless. She’d had a few brief affairs in the nine years since her divorce from Ted, but her only real love was her son. Ted had turned out to be someone they couldn’t count on, and Tim had in effect grown up without a father. The life Ted led sounded glamorous, working in foreign places, and Tim made him sound like a hero when he talked about him, but he and June knew he wasn’t. Tim had had more fathering from Bill Brown and Pitt Pollock than he had ever had from his own father.

Matt and Peter were like his brothers. He and Peter were only children with devoted mothers. The main difference being that, other than in name and occasional brief annual visits, Tim had no father. Tim tried to impress his father with his grades and his athletic accomplishments, none of which seemed to interest Ted in his distant life on the oil rigs. June was well aware that if there were ever an emergency, she wouldn’t even know where to reach Ted, but fortunately there had never been one. Tim was not a wild child, or prone to high-risk activities, other than his rock climbing, which he was responsible about, as he was in all things, unlike his father. The Browns and Pollocks often included him on their vacations, and they were well aware that he needed a stand-in father. They provided it as best they could, for which June was deeply grateful. Tim needed a man in his life, in lieu of the fantasy father he had, who was more of an illusion than a reality, and had disappointed Tim all his life. His mother was the person who never let him down. He wanted to be a speech therapist like her when he grew up, so he could help kids like him.



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The fourth member of their gang lived at the edge of Fishtail too, near Tim’s house. Noel Wylie had gone to school with the other three boys since kindergarten. His parents, Marlene and Bob, had moved to Montana from Denver right after Noel was born, and were Fishtail’s two very respected attorneys. They opened a joint practice, and the Pollocks were clients. Living in Fishtail was a choice they had made, not an accident of birth, and they loved it. They had wanted to bring up their two sons in a healthy, wholesome, rural atmosphere, and to get away from cutthroat city lawyering. It had been the answer to their prayers. Fishtail had met all their expectations, and they had a busy, booming practice. They thought Fishtail was the most beautiful place on earth.

Their older son, Justin, was entering his senior year of high school at the end of August, and Noel would be starting as a freshman. Neither of the boys were enchanted with their parents’ choice to live out of the mainstream, in Fishtail, and both wanted to return as soon as possible to the city life they no longer remembered but were sure they would prefer. They had both decided that growing up in a town with a population of four hundred was oppressive and a form of deprivation. Justin wanted to go to law school, and he dreamed of Chicago, New York, Denver, or L.A., wherever he got into college and eventually law school. His parents hoped he’d come back to Fishtail, to join them in their practice, but all he wanted was to get hired by a big city law firm, the bigger the better, and never live in Fishtail again once he left for college. He insisted that city life was in his DNA, and he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in Fishtail or the Beartooth Mountains. He was counting the days until he could leave.

Noel shared the same opinion. Their parents were highly intelligent, Ivy League–educated attorneys who had chosen the less traveled path, as the children of overachievers themselves. Justin and Noel wanted to try their hands at that kind of achievement in a more competitive, urban, challenging world.

Noel wanted to go to med school. The idea had come to him when he was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at seven. He had faced the challenge well, and wore an insulin pump now, which spared him from having to administer insulin shots to himself. The pump monitored his sugar levels for him and gave him the insulin doses he needed. His three closest friends, some of his classmates, and all of his teachers were aware that he was diabetic. He had explained it in medical terms to his three closest friends in detail, showed them the pump on his side, and told them the implications of having juvenile diabetes. He wanted to treat juvenile diabetic patients one day, and, like Justin, he wanted to practice in a big city, at a teaching hospital in San Francisco or L.A. His parents had taken him to Children’s Hospital Colorado, in Denver, and UCSF in San Francisco for diagnosis and treatment, and he loved the bustle and activity of the hospitals he’d seen. After a while, they no longer frightened him. He wanted to be a doctor like the ones on the teams that had treated him. He’d had some hard times with the disease at first, until they got it regulated. He’d handled it well, with the careful supervision of his mother. His brother Justin was knowledgeable about the disease as well, and knew everything he needed to in case Noel ever fainted, or had a reaction from high or low sugar or a problem with the insulin. Justin was as well versed as his parents about how to handle a diabetic crisis for Noel, but there had been none in many years. And Noel himself knew how to deal with it. His friends almost forgot that he was diabetic, and that their parents were well versed in it too, in case there was ever a problem while Noel visited them.