Left for Dead Read online

  But gradually I realized I was in pretty good shape. There was even the gratification of discovering people less than half my age, athletes, who couldn’t do what I did. These were the high school football players I encountered toward the end of my first summer back in Dallas. We shared the same running track, and I was delighted at every chance to run right around them, as if they were standing still, dying. It was one of my life’s great pleasures.

  Peach:

  When we got back to Texas and Beck started working really long hours I did get lonely, and lonelier and lonelier. I started thinking about having children. This was not out of a strong maternal instinct. I had spent very little time around kids, and frankly had been a disaster as a baby-sitter. I am very squeamish, cannot stand the sight of blood, even my own, even on television.

  Yet I really wanted to have a child, and so decided on my own that we would. I didn’t actually stop taking the Pill, as Beck has suspected. But I did sort of play Russian roulette. The result was our son, Beck, who was born in October 1978.

  I was knocked flat. I didn’t know anything about marriage, but what I didn’t know about marriage paled in comparison with what I didn’t know about parenthood. Getting used to the idea was a big hurdle, like moving tectonic plates.

  Peach:

  Beck was not crazy about helping me out. But it was very fulfilling for me to have that little boy demanding my love and attention. I threw all my energy into him, which made me a happier person. Beck was throwing all his energy into work, so it allowed us to coexist better, I think.

  This was also the time that I started making connections with other women, most of them young mothers like myself, who later would become my indispensable circle of confidantes.

  The first one I met was Pat White, whose husband, Terry, practices at Medical City with Beck. Pat and I met when we were both pregnant with our first children, at a holiday house party for the Medical City staff. By coincidence, her son, Charles, and my Bub were seated together at Meadowbrook preschool in North Dallas (both their last names begin with W) and began a friendship that has endured all the way into college. Charles and Beck were roommates for their first two years at Duke.

  Another early acquaintance was Cecilia Boone. The Boones’ daughter, Aimee, attended Meadowbrook, too. Cecilia and I met when she invited me to join her carpool. Later, when the Boones bought a house near ours, their second child, Katherine, and our Meggie became—and remain—as inseparable as Bub and Charles White.

  Pat White:

  I come from the Midwest, where being straightforward is considered more normal than it is in Dallas. It’s also one of the traits I admire most in Peach. I value her opinion. We don’t always agree on everything, but 90 percent of the time we do. I think that gives us both a cup of courage. It is sort of, “Oh, you see things the way I do? Okay, I’m going to go ahead with this.”

  Cecilia Boone:

  Peach is my best friend. She has an extraordinarily practical mind, and can separate emotions from difficult situations. When we spoke about her situation with Beck, I never got the impression that she was looking for answers. In retrospect, I don’t think she ever questioned that Beck was just the way he was, that he wasn’t going to change. The big thing to decide was if she wanted to be married to him.

  Peach has called Meg my baby, and that’s true in a way. By the time she came along in August of 1981, I’d grown accustomed to parenthood. Meg was not that big a step. I’d already shifted the continents, so to speak. So instead of just being surprised, I was happy. Peach had allowed me to play superdoc during Beck’s early rearing. In her great wisdom, she decided that wasn’t going to go on anymore—I was going to participate.

  I wiped that baby girl’s bottom a million times, and changed a ton of diapers. Peach made sure I read each night to Meggie, which both of us enjoyed.

  Meggie instinctively knew how to communicate with me. Her older brother was quiet; he would not walk up and shake you if there was something he needed. Meggie, however, would make clear exactly what she wanted done, and how she wanted you to do it. That worked real well for me.

  Bub:

  Dad is very direct. He’d just say to me, “I love you!” And under my breath I’d say, “I love you, too, Dad,” just hoping none of my friends were around.

  Or we’d be watching TV. We always watched a show called Rescue 911 in which people would be saved from various dangerous situations. Dad would be sitting there eating his mashed potatoes with big tears in his eyes. When I asked him why he was crying he said, “When I see that sort of thing, I put you or your sister in that situation and it just tears me up.”

  Meg:

  I was Daddy’s little girl. I remember he used to read to me a lot. Oh gosh, I loved that! It was a big deal for me, and we did it, like, every night for years.

  I liked it that he expressed himself. We’d be sitting around and suddenly he’d say, “You know, I really love you!” It’s great to have a father who’s not afraid to tell you that he loves you.

  I also remember him crying during Rescue 911. We watched that all the time. You don’t expect to see your parents cry. It was kind of touching.

  When something engages me, it engages me fully. I was never bothered when adults on Rescue 911 were wounded and maimed. Any time a child was endangered, however, I could not watch with any sort of detachment, even when I knew the child was going to be okay. I had to get up and leave the room.

  Peach:

  The other new addition to our family was Muffin the cat.

  Growing up, I was always around cats, and I always talked to them, created personalities for them. When I got married and found myself alone again, I returned to the habit. The fact that Beck was working so late every night in those years gave me lots of time to develop Muffin’s personality.

  Beck filled his days up, and I talked to the cat.

  She became another presence in our house, a coping mechanism, a way for us to communicate because we couldn’t talk directly to each other. Muffin, who was the meanest cat ever, became a release valve, a messenger, a foil. Through her we used humor as a conduit—it was going to be either humor or anger.

  I basically got sucked into it because it was intriguing. There never has been a more inappropriately named animal than Muffin the cat. Vlad the Impaler was more like it. Demon seed. And that was the point. For sheer malevolence, black-furred Muffin was unequaled throughout her lifetime, a fifteen-or sixteen-year reign of terror broken only by her death.

  Then would come Baby, who, if anything, was worse.

  Muffin, in our elaborate fantasy, was incredibly worldly: a writer, a bon vivant and celebrity accustomed to dealing with the paparazzi. She moved in circles Peach and I only dreamed of. She brooked no insults whatsoever. Look at her cross-eyed and she lay teeth into you. She traveled by limousine and drank saucers of champagne and was always drunk.

  This personality for Muffin just kept expanding and expanding. She wrote articles and books, was celebrated in Southern Kitten magazine.

  We’d play out these scenarios. I, for instance, was constantly being sued because Muffin had laid into someone. So we had to have a full-time legal staff on retainer. She also hated Peach, and regarded her basically as the Woman Who Carries Me Around. Muffin wanted to know why I still had Peach under contract. Totally dismissive of her.

  This feature of Muffin’s personality alone provided Peach ample latitude to slice and dice me, always with a smile.

  Toward the end of her life, Muffin got into the dark arts, and started writing a book about demonology and spells. This helped explain bad things happening anywhere in the world, but especially in our family. Of course, Muffin would never do anything to harm me. However, if I got in the way of something else, it was just too damn bad.

  We also acquired Missy, a little sheltie, in this period. Missy is as cute as she possibly could be. One day Meg put Missy on a leash to go show her off to the people across the street. Unfortunately for Missy, the fami
ly owned a huge rottweiler named Hannah, who blew through a chain-link fence, took Missy in her teeth and tore the poor little dog five ways from Sunday—with Meg still hanging on to her leash. It was astonishing that Missy was not killed.

  We ran over, wrapped the dog in some towels and took her up to the vet, who stitched Missy back together. She came home looking like the Bride of Frankenstein—a mess. She couldn’t move, because everything hurt.

  We didn’t want to leave her alone, so for the next few nights I slept with Missy on the kitchen floor. I think it was the second night that she was just able to move a little bit. Missy stood up, quivering, and walked over and licked me on the nose. Then she lay down next to me.

  After that moment, no matter how angry and tired everyone else got with Dad, I still knew that when I walked in the door, Missy would greet me as if I’d been gone forever, and had just returned with the lost treasures of the Orient.

  Muffin finally keeled over, although Peach was suspicious that her death was staged. Not long thereafter—on Father’s Day, 1995, the year before I went to Everest—Peach presented me with a new cat, a clawed terror named Baby. I told her that Muffin had been quite enough, thank you, and that I really didn’t want another cat. Big mistake. Peach said, “Okay! You’ll regret this.” Baby became hers.

  Whenever anything was too painful for Peach to handle head-on—when she really wanted to call me a horse’s ass—Baby was always there to help out.

  A year later, I went off and got wounded. When I returned, Baby and Peach had totally bonded. There was nothing this cat could not have. Peach fawned over Baby, carrying him everywhere, and everywhere Baby went, he glared at me, the man whom Baby felt he had usurped. He was a liar, too, and said the most awful things about me, because that was in his character. He made up things that I supposedly had said and done to him. I always was trying to defend myself.

  Missy, by contrast, was steadfast. She wasn’t at all sure of me the day I came home from Everest, and I sat on the edge of the sofa, all covered in bandages. I looked funny to her. I smelled funny. She wasn’t real sure.

  This went on for about an hour. Finally she got right up next to me and didn’t move a muscle until she finally decided, Yup! That’s Dad! and sat down beside me.

  Baby was having none of that. He thought I was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. I mean, this animal was vindictive. Fueling that meanness was a threat I made at one point to make him go live with relatives.

  The situation was manageable until one day when Baby discovered Muffin’s book of spells. We figured that out because bad things started to happen. Remember, Muffin was widely read. Baby was sort of illiterate, mostly because he was lazy. He could do only a couple of things. One was eat and the other was sleep. Other than that, he was adored.

  Then I began traveling, and Baby saw this as the opportunity of a lifetime. He got out Muffin’s book, and virtually every time I left he’d wreak havoc somewhere in the world. The problem was that Baby wasn’t bright enough to have any sense of proportion. His idea of a lion, for example, was an itty-bitty toy that lived in a TV box.

  Nor could he grasp geography. He had no concept of space and distance. If I went to Tennessee to deliver a talk, for example, and a town was leveled in Florida, we knew it was because Baby had worked his evil magic.

  We began hiding my itinerary from him—just in case. As it was, the moment I was out the door we knew he’d basically try to blast me out of the air, drown me, get me shot.

  My only recourse was to suck up to him, humiliate myself, which I gladly did, and which I gladly would still be doing. Alas for Baby, a 1998 visit to the vet to have his teeth cleaned ended suddenly in death under anesthesia.

  We mourned for Baby. Even though he’d been the bane of my existence, I truly missed him. When Peach’s pain and anger toward me had to come out, it did so through Baby the cat. That allowed her to express herself, and made it easier for me to accept those words without becoming too defensive. After all, what do you do to defend yourself against a cat? Make him eat dry food?

  Beck at Windy Corner, Mt. McKinley, 1989.

  PART THREE

  SIXTEEN

  If you’ve never felt very good about yourself, you never really expect to, and therefore you don’t begrudge your lack of happiness. You’re never content, but you manage.

  That is not to say you function normally. You are not emotionally whole, and you cannot bring much value to your personal relationships. But you can keep putting one foot in front of the other, day in and day out, just as you must do when you climb mountains. There’s even a certain grim satisfaction in succeeding in this way, by sheer dint of will and intelligence.

  That was my outlook in the early years of my marriage. I did what I’ve always done best—work—and I courted a sufficient number of challenges and diversions to keep my mind engaged. It was a form of running away, of course.

  I tend to be a little over the top at first with a new idea or interest. I’ll get fascinated and learn a lot about it. Then having scratched that itch, I move on to something else.

  My first hobby was a Hobie; that is, a Hobie Cat, a type of small sailboat in which I navigated Dallas-area lakes during my residency at Southwestern. This was not a fleeting interest. My long-term goal was to sail around the world. The cat was simply a first step in what I expected would be a methodical, protracted process leading to the actual expedition. Events, however, intervened.

  I took correspondence courses in every imaginable subject, from oceanography to marine meteorology, acquiring as much technical knowledge and sailing skill as one can living several hundred miles from the nearest saltwater. I also attended sailing schools and assembled a large sailing library. Some of my practical experience was gained in the Caribbean, where I went “bareboating”—renting a boat with no captain or crew—on a couple of occasions.

  If you think you’re good at shading the truth, you ought to see what it takes to convince some guy he should rent you, a stranger, his valuable sailboat for a few days. The first time I went I took along Tom Dickey and his then-wife, who was dubious enough to commit her last will and testament to toilet paper on the flight down from Dallas.

  I instructed them not to ask any questions in front of the boat’s owner, just to stand there and look knowledgeable. If they were to inquire what the front and back are called, I explained, or what that tall thing in the center was, we might end up nailed to the dock, or drinking mai tais someplace, but we definitely would not be sailing.

  Dickey called me Captain Bligh.

  On my second bareboating excursion, I took along my father, my brother Dan, Tom Dickey, and my brother-in-law Howard, who would be the team cook. Once again I had to warn this band of lubbers—Howie had done some sailing—not to betray their inexperience until we were safely away.

  Sailing was a parallel to my later mountain climbing in that it involved the serious pursuit over time of the skills I thought I’d eventually need to achieve a somewhat unrealistic goal way off in the future. Gradually, I raised the bar. On the first trip we rented a thirty-two-and-a-half footer, for example. The second time the boat was a fairly sophisticated forty-one-footer. It was also like training to become a doctor, a matter of taking apart a chore and defining all the little baby steps that will get you where you want to go. Along the way, I picked up a succession of licenses and certificates, little trophies to mark my progress, substantive official proof of achievement, like merit badges or that God and Country Award I earned in Saudi Arabia but never received.

  Out of sailing there also grew a second pastime—ham radio. This avocation lasted about two years. I enjoyed learning it, and I kept collecting ever higher licenses until I hit the top rank, which is called ham extra. By then I’d erected a one-hundred-foot radio tower in our side yard.

  The professional portion of my life—the part to which I devoted so much time and energy—blossomed nicely. Unlike other physicians, who build practices over time, my group has a large a
nd reliable clientele, the patient population at Medical City, whom we attend under contract with the hospital. Month to month, we serve at the hospital’s pleasure.

  In 1982, I was elected president of the twelve-hundred-person medical staff at Medical City, a three-year commitment: one year as president-elect, one as president and one as past president. At age thirty-five, I was easily the youngest person ever elected to the job. I spent my term in office employing the sorts of political and organizational skills few medical doctors are ever called upon to exercise. I discovered I had a gift for leading large organizations, that I can mold opinion and understand the logic of an impending struggle, no matter what’s being said. I also am not easily dissuaded.

  One other obvious benefit of the job, when you work as a franchise as we do, is that your livelihood is unlikely to be taken away when you’re chief of staff.

  I enjoyed it although—or perhaps because—my institutional and professional responsibilities were huge and unrelenting and tended to elbow aside competing claims on my time, particularly those of my wife and children.

  Domestic life was not my forte. I wasn’t good at it—at all.

  “All this work is for us,” I’d say to Peach. Whether that was or was not true, it made a good line.

  My material success gave me something to hide behind, too. You certainly think that if you’re working really hard and you’re bringing home the bacon, and you give your family the things they want, that’s a big chunk of what you, as a man, are supposed to provide. I could say to myself, How bad can I be? I work hard. I provide all these things. I love them.