Sundown, Yellow Moon

by Larry Watson

  Dr. Fenzer was a gracious host, providing us with soft drinks and potato chips and encouraging us to smoke if we were so inclined. I sank into the corner of a brocade couch and lit a cigarette, eager to hear what kinds of anecdotes the psychologist would tell outside the school’s walls, since his narratives in the classroom could often be outrageous.

  Somehow we began talking about suicide, a subject that any psychologist, even one practicing in a community as stolid and stoic as Bismarck, could hold forth on for hours. Dr. Fenzer told us that, contrary to the belief that attempted suicides were cries for help, many of these people were quite determined to die. What did he do when he had a patient with that resolve? he asked rhetorically. After a dramatic pause, he said, “I watch the obituaries.” Then he moved to the case closest to all our hearts.

  Dr. Fenzer said, “Take for example that fellow who murdered the legislator and then took his own life. . . . I’ve believed all along that the crime was puzzling to so many people because they couldn’t figure out why he’d want to kill the good senator. But perhaps they couldn’t come up with an answer because they’d asked the wrong question. They should have looked into why the fellow wanted to take his own life.

  “Suicides are often motivated by a sense of worthlessness, of smallness, and more than one man has taken his own life thinking that at last he is doing something large, something dramatic. This chap may have felt as though he’d always been anonymous, overlooked, misunderstood. So he decided he’d do something that would finally cause people to notice him. He’d perform some act, commit some deed, that couldn’t be disregarded. As a result, he’d become famous. The pathogenesis is really quite remarkable. These people feel so insignificant, yet they grow these monstrously large egos. . . .” Dr. Fenzer looked around at his rapt, slightly shocked audience. “Well? Have you any thoughts?”

  After Dr. Fenzer’s brief monologue, the conversation, which had been lively in its back and forth until then, fell silent. The doctor didn’t know that Raymond Stoddard’s son was our classmate, much less that I had a special connection to the family. Mike and Joe looked to me in deference to my Keogh Street address. This was my moment to shine, to show off my insider status, and to impress Dr. Fenzer, all of which I thought I wanted.

  Presented with the opportunity, however, I merely shrugged and said, “Makes sense, I guess.”

  Dr. Fenzer must have sensed something in my recalcitrance that I didn’t wholly comprehend myself. He quickly changed the subject, and for the rest of the evening I had no responsibilities but to listen and keep my cigarette’s ashes from drifting to the floor.

  Two days later, however, at the end of the school day, Dr. Fenzer stopped me in the hall as I was on my way out of the building. “Do you mind if I walk with you?” he asked.

  The day and its sudden changes were typical of spring—warm when the sun was shining, chilly when clouds obscured the sun. Dr. Fenzer lit a cigarette as soon as we stepped outside the school, but we didn’t walk far. We stopped at a fairly new white Lincoln Continental, easily the grandest car in the faculty parking lot. “All right,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “Flowers and cigarettes aren’t my only indulgences.”

  “It’s nice.”

  Small talk finished, he got down to business. “The other night at my house, I might have caused you some discomfort with my remarks, and I wanted to apologize. After you left, Joe mentioned that you were a close friend to the Stoddard boy and a neighbor to the family. I had no idea. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “That friendship must have weighed you down at times.”

  Even as a callow adolescent I knew that to accede to that point would represent a failure of proportion. No matter how much I had come to dislike Gene, I had to admit that I could never own troubles that remotely rivaled his. “Not really.”

  Dr. Fenzer was a good six inches shorter than me, so he stood on his toes and leaned forward to force me to look him in the eye. “Perhaps your experiences are something you’d like to talk about. Sometimes we’re so focused on someone else’s pain that we lose sight of the fact that we’re hurting too. We somehow think that we’re not entitled.”

  I was not a tough kid, not physically or emotionally, but like most males of my era, I knew how to fake it in certain situations and with certain people. “It wasn’t that big a deal.”

  With that, Dr. Fenzer gave up. He stepped back, bowed, and made a sweeping motion, a gesture that indicated both my dismissal and his defeat.

  Dr. Fenzer invited me neither to his home nor to a private conversation with him again. In Introduction to Psychology I received a B, in spite of what I was sure was a poor performance on the final exam.

  The night I graduated from high school was warm for May, and for weeks we had had no rain. As a result, my life took a turn that would not have been possible had the temperature been ten degrees cooler or the Missouri River six inches deeper.

  The river’s sandbars used to be (for that matter, perhaps they still are) a favored location for parties. We gathered there day and night, playing football or softball in the sand, swimming in pools and potholes, building bonfires, and drinking beer no matter what the hour. Depending on the river’s height, we either drove out to one of those stretches of sand or trekked through a channel of icy, muddy, fast-flowing water. The Missouri was notorious for its treacherous currents and invisible drop-offs, and every summer it seemed to claim at least one drowning victim. Only someone very drunk or unfamiliar with the river and its reputation tried to swim through the main waterway. And the Missouri didn’t care who it swallowed.

  But the sandbars’ remoteness and inaccessibility were exactly what made them so popular with the area’s young people. Only the sheriff and his deputies had jurisdiction on the river (and the matter of jurisdiction was complicated by the fact that the river separated Burleigh and Morton counties), and even on the rare occasion when the law did try to patrol the area, we could usually spot them coming from a long way off.

  So of course the river was a logical place for Bismarck High School’s class of 1962 to hold its graduation party, and since the spring had been so dry, the river was low, which meant we could easily drive out to a sandbar southeast of the city for the night’s festivities.

  I’d had family obligations earlier in the evening that prevented me from appearing at the river until well after dark, and by that time, hundreds of cars were parked in a line the length of at least two football fields, and bonfires of various sizes burned along the water’s edge. The stage for the party itself was the long, narrow strip of sand between the cars and the river. Kids were everywhere, saying hello and goodbye to their fellow graduates, offering one another a beer or a drink from a bottle of hard liquor, throwing chunks of driftwood onto one of the fires. Many people were already drunk by the time I arrived, and the jubilation and delirium that traditionally accompanied the occasion had been replaced in some cases by belligerence—rumor had it that kids from Mandan were among our number, and a group of wrestlers and football players were patrolling for party crashers—and lust: Couples had not only gone off into the backseats of cars, but were also making out in full view. Among this second group I saw Gene and Marie. They were leaning against his car, tightly, passionately, locked in each other’s arms. Marie stood on a case of beer—whether the cans were empty or full, I couldn’t tell—the additional height facilitating their deep kisses and allowing their bodies to mesh in a way no doubt special to them. It was probably a fair approximation of the difference in height provided by the step inside Marie’s garage. I walked close to them, testing not only their oblivion (it was complete) but also my vulnerability.

  To say I was unaffected by the sight of them would not be true, but neither was the pain as sharp as it might have been. The entire evening I had been feeling a bit above it all, and not just in a metaphoric sense. Before I joined the party, I drove around for a while, at one point crossing the river and returning over the Memorial Bridge, wh
ose height allowed me to look down on the sandbar and my classmates, at the dark glimmer of their cars and the blaze of their fires.

  High school was over, and I had only a few months left in the city. In the fall I would be attending the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, where, as far as I knew, nothing would mark me as a Bismarcker. I had done a fair job of convincing myself that I would enjoy living in a place where I wouldn’t have an identity that I’d have to share with anyone or anything Stoddard. Of course I had also often wondered how far the notoriety of the Stoddard name had spread and what subtle methods might be available to me to let others know that I had dwelt on Bismarck’s Keogh Street during that stretch of pavement’s most infamous hour.

  Even though I was moving at thirty miles per hour, my position on the bridge looking down at my classmates below provided a fitting emblem for my character. Did he wish to join the party or stay above it? Did he wish to be involved or ignored?

  Metaphors and symbols aside, any thought I might have entertained about living a lofty (in both senses of the word), solitary, or isolated existence no longer had to be merely theoretical. I now had my own car.

  Earlier that day, at a private graduation party to which only family and neighbors were invited, my parents presented me with a 1947 Studebaker Commander Regal DeLuxe. It had a flat-head six and a balky manual transmission, and though its original color had been red, the finish had oxidized over the years until it was a dusty pink. My father bought the car (or more likely accepted it in lieu of a fee) from a client—a literal little old lady—who lived in Sterling, a small town east of Bismarck. It was, in short, a car so obviously uncool that I felt an instant, inexplicable affection for it.

  I was certainly not embarrassed to be driving it, though when I finally decided to unite with my classmates down on the river, I didn’t park on the sandbar but in a stand of cottonwoods farther up on the bank. The walk down gave me more time to consider what, if anything, I wanted from the night.

  As I said, the party was in full progress when I arrived, and for the first hour I did nothing but stroll the sand and observe. As a result of some odd, unthought-through notion that self-denial could uplift my character, I opted not to drink that night, which meant I had to say no to any number of freely offered cups, cans, and bottles. I had to stay away from my friends, since a simple refusal would not have been enough for them. They would have insisted on an explanation for my abstinence, and I knew I couldn’t make them understand what I couldn’t understand myself.

  Eventually I settled into a conversation with Bob Mullen and Diane Burgie, boyfriend and girlfriend and both planning to attend Carleton College in Minnesota in the fall. We stood near the biggest bonfire, which had in turn attracted the largest crowd to its fiery border. Nearby a smaller fire failed in its attempt to compete for people’s attention. Someone had thrown an inner tube onto that fire, and as it burned it not only gave off the stink of scorched rubber, but its smoke rose black, even against the night sky. Bob and Diane weren’t drinking either—in fact, I was surprised to see them at such a gathering; I don’t think I had ever seen them at a party before that night—and the three of us made sad, ironic comments about our classmates’ drunken behavior and what it portended for their future. Right in front of us, for example, a shirtless Mickey Lawson was lying flat on his back and trying, without anyone’s help, to bury himself in the sand. He had barely covered his torso when he heard—we all heard—the persistent bleat of a car horn. That sound was accompanied by the roar of an engine. Everyone looked to the right, and Mickey did more than look—he scrambled to his feet, the dry sand showering from him while the wetter stuff fell in clumps. A car was coming right toward him, churning its way along the open strip between the water and the line of parked cars. It lurched and wallowed through the soft sand and finally stopped near the largest bonfire, very near the space where Mickey had lain only moments earlier.

  Well before the driver came into view, I knew who he was. I had recognized those headlights and that grille coming out of the dark on another occasion. But before I looked to confirm that Gene was driving, I checked for passengers. He appeared to be alone.

  Once the car stopped, the crowd that had pulled back, unsure of the car’s direction and intent, surged forward, so when Gene opened the door and stepped out, he was surrounded by many of his fellow graduates. He tugged at his T-shirt, stuck to him with sweat—both his and Marie’s, I couldn’t help thinking—and combed his fingers through his dark hair. Smiling widely, he raised his arms over his head in that gesture that’s supposed to quiet an assemblage but just as often serves to excite it. With everyone’s attention focused on him, Gene stepped up onto his car’s back bumper and proceeded to clamber from there onto the trunk and then to the roof of his car. I wondered what Gene’s father would have said if he’d found the finish of his car scratched from Gene’s shoes.

  Backlit by the bonfire’s flames, he raised his arms again and shouted, “Stew-Dents! Stew-Dents!” Just that word, pronounced with two distinct, equally accented syllables, was enough to bring laughter and applause from the crowd. One of Bismarck High School’s most eccentric and unintentionally comic teachers was the large-bosomed, blue-haired Miss Bonner, and when she needed to restore order in her sophomore English classes, she waved her arms and cried out, “Stew-Dents!” The previous year we were afforded even more opportunities to hear her hail us in her singular way: She was promoted on an interim basis to vice principal, and she often delivered announcements over the PA system and settled the crowd at school assemblies. She always began with “Stew-Dents,” though the volume at which she spoke the word varied.

  Gene continued with his imitation. “I have an announcement to make . . .” It was not just this extravagant, attention-seeking public display that told me Gene was drunk; if I’d had no other evidence to go on but the toothy width of his smile, I would have reached the same conclusion.

  “. . . to all the wonderful, important, special, special members of the class of ’62.” Now his impression of Miss Bonner turned into an imitation of Mrs. Harway, a school counselor who used the same approach in trying to help every student who came into her office, no matter what his or her problem. Mrs. Harway praised them, fawned over them, and told them what wonderful, unique individuals they were and how, if they could just accept that about themselves, their troubles would soon fade away. Mrs. Harway was decades ahead of her time.

  “And you know what makes you so special?” Gene cooed to us. Had he somewhere along the way spent enough time in Mrs. Harway’s presence to work on this impression? Was it possible that he’d asked for Mrs. Harway’s help when he was worried that Marie was pregnant? That possibility I rejected quickly. After all, he’d completely scorned the suggestion, right after his father’s suicide, that he should see the school counselor, and if he wouldn’t visit Mr. Wallich’s office, he was not likely to seek Mrs. Harway’s counsel. Then again, there had been so many ways that my friend had astonished me over the course of the previous year. Why couldn’t a gift for mimicry simply be another surprise?

  Gene was drunk, of that there was no question, but everything—his entrance, his impressions, his timing—spoke of someone confidently at ease in front of that drunken throng, someone who knew he had everyone’s attention and was now able to toy with it. Here was a Gene Stoddard I had never seen before.

  He turned first in one direction and then quickly pivoted to face another, almost as if he were expecting an attack.

  “Do you?” Gene asked again of the young people clustered around his car. “Do you know why you’ll always be a special, special member of Bismarck High’s class of ’62?”

  I attributed Gene’s out-of-character behavior to his drunkenness. If he weren’t drunk, I reasoned in my sober state, he wouldn’t have been able to act like that. And his drunkenness, I had concluded long before that night, was due to his being Raymond Stoddard’s son. Father had bequeathed to son not only a penchant for alcohol but also
a reason for drinking it. But as I watched Gene sway and balance on the roof of his car, another thought came to me. What if alcohol played no part in the alteration of his personality? What if the change in him occurred entirely because he lived inside the walls of a stucco house where a man had hanged himself? Surely that life-transforming event sent out ripples well beyond the walls of that home, ripples that rocked the neighborhood, the city, the state. . . . But if the lives closest to Raymond Stoddard were most affected, wasn’t it logical to suppose that those next closest were the next most changed? Could there be a way to calculate closeness other than physical proximity? Was there a method that would allow another Keogh Street resident to believe that he was who he was through the strength or weakness of his own will rather than the accident of his address? Was it the weight of realizations like those that Dr. Fenzer had wondered if I needed help carrying?

  But though such thoughts were earth-unsettling enough to make the sand underfoot feel solid by comparison, I set them aside when I saw Marie running down the beach.

  She appeared to have her bathing suit on, and over it she wore cutoff jeans and a man’s shirt, which, unbuttoned, fluttered whitely about her as she ran. She pumped her arms strenuously and lifted her knees high to keep from bogging down in the sand, and by the time she reached Gene’s car—her obvious destination—her chest was heaving for oxygen. But she was not about to let shortness of breath keep her from her mission. “No,” she cried out. “Gene, please!”

  Up until that moment, I had tried to appear as nonchalant as possible at the spectacle of my former friend on top of his car. I hung back from those crowding forward and, unlike them, did nothing to cheer him on. But Marie’s presence always quickened my interest, and now I was torn. Did I take her side in wishing he’d stop whatever he was doing or did I want more than ever—because someone wanted him not to go on—to hear what he had to say? Was it possible that he intended to announce something about his father that had never before been revealed? With that thought I considered trying to pull Marie back from the car myself.