Sundown, Yellow Moon

by Larry Watson

  Her pleas did nothing to deter him, however. He drew himself up to his full, unsteady height, and answered the question he himself had posed. “Because of me, that’s why. Me. Because you graduated in the same class as Gene Stoddard, son of Raymond and Alma Stoddard.”

  “Don’t do this,” Marie begged. “Please, Gene.” She moved closer, and now she too was both shadowed and illuminated by the flames behind her. In their flickering light her reddish hair took on a coppery glow.

  “I made you all famous,” Gene said. “No matter where you go, you can always say, ‘I went to high school with—’ ”

  Her spoken appeal ineffectual, Marie took action. Following the same route that Gene had taken, she began to climb onto the car. She had barely stepped from the bumper to the trunk, however, when Gene turned to repel this encroachment on his territory.

  “God damn it!” he said. “Let me do this—this is mine!”

  Gene had stepped toward Marie, and she obviously believed he was coming to help her up to his post. She reached out to him, but rather than grab her open hand and pull her to him, Gene pushed her.

  Her balance on the car was precarious, so not much force was necessary to send her reeling backward. She fell in two stages. First she groped behind her with one foot, trying to find a stable step, and for an instant it seemed as though she might regain her balance as she teetered on the bumper. But then she half-slid, half-fell from that perch, toppling sideways to the sand. If her arms had not been reaching in Gene’s direction, she might have been able to break her fall. As it was, she struck the earth with a thud as audible as Gene’s shouted curse.

  But her tumble brought only laughter from the throng. They were glad she’d failed. They were enjoying Gene’s performance and wanted it to continue.

  Her fall—her fall and Gene’s cruelty—must have knocked the breath from Marie, but she was soon on her feet and shoving her way through the crowd and away from her boyfriend’s car.

  Gene meanwhile barely missed a beat. “As I was saying . . .” Cheers now accompanied the laughter.

  As fascinating as I found Gene’s performance, I had to turn away to see where Marie was headed. As she wove her way through the rows of parked cars, I had a moment of panic when I lost sight of her, but her white shirt soon reappeared. She was obviously walking away from the party and by the most direct passage available.

  “No matter where you go,” Gene continued, “you can say, ‘Remember that guy who shot the senator—’ ”

  Ahead of Marie I could see glinting in the darkness a channel of the river that cut into the sandbar. If she walked right through the water, she’d have a head start that I’d have difficulty overcoming. As determined as she was, however, she still circled around, and I took that to be a sign. I pushed back from the crowd, and ran after Marie. Before Gene’s voice faded completely from earshot, I clearly heard, “. . . the assassin’s son!”

  Up ahead, Marie had a steep grassy bank to negotiate, and for some reason I believed I had to get to her before she struggled to the top. That meant I had to go through the water, and as I approached the channel, I looked for the furrowed shadows of car tracks—their presence would mean that it was shallow enough to run through. I saw none, but by then I had made my commitment. I went in at a full run, and initially at least, the footing was firm.

  My third stride, however, carried me to a point where the bottom dropped away sharply, and I splashed face-forward and went under so suddenly and completely it seemed for an instant as though the elements had become mixed up and it was the sky that had turned to river water and night that had closed over my head. To further the confusion the icy water tasted like dirt.

  I must not have truly believed I would drown because I was able to appreciate the irony of the moment: You are going to drown chasing after a girl who belongs to someone else. . . . Within that inlet the river didn’t seem to have sufficient power to do anything but steal my breath with its cold. No current tried to pull me down or push me out into the main channel, and I soon adjusted to my situation enough to probe for the bottom. It was near and firm enough that I could thrust back to the surface. When I came up I was soaked, sputtering for air, and missing my shoes, but half-paddling and half-running, I continued after Marie.

  She had heard the splashing behind her and had stopped, no doubt hoping it was Gene pursuing her. From the top of the bank she gazed down at me, and it seemed as if she were about to say something, but in the dark it was hard to tell. Before I could climb to her height, she turned and disappeared.

  Each step I took came with more difficulty since both sand and water weighted down my socks, but I kept on and my perseverance was rewarded. Up on level ground, not far from the cottonwoods where my car was parked, Marie had paused to empty sand from her tennis shoes.

  “What’s the matter,” I said to her, panting my way through the line I had rehearsed in case I caught up to her, “didn’t you want to stay back there and be famous with Gene?”

  For a long moment she stared, unsmiling, at me. The sounds of the party could still reach us, but they were nothing compared to the belching, trilling songs of frogs coming out of the surrounding darkness.

  Then Marie turned to go, and I quickly called after her, “Wait! I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  I hobbled after her and was soon at her side.

  “Did he send you after me?” she asked. “That would be just like him. . . .”

  “No, no. I came . . . I came on my own.” Considering what I felt for her, those words seemed like a declaration of love.

  “That asshole,” she said, assuming we were both interested in discussing Gene Stoddard’s character. “I told him not to do something like that. I told him he’d just make a fool of himself and say something that tomorrow he’d regret. But no. Famous . . . That’s exactly what he thinks he is. Or should be. What a stupid shit.”

  “He’s drunk—”

  “Don’t make excuses for him.”

  “I meant it as more of a question.”

  “He’s drunk so often it’s not even worth asking.”

  She began to walk away again, and now I noticed that she seemed to be favoring her right side. “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. Away from here. Home, I suppose.”

  The city and her house were miles away. “You can’t walk. Let me give you a ride.”

  “I’m not going back down there.” She nodded in the direction of the party and the rows of parked cars. From where we stood the largest bonfire was still clearly visible, its flames licking even higher than before. Someone must have found another source of fuel.

  “You don’t have to. My car’s right over there.”

  As we moved through the trees, I watched Marie carefully. Yes, she was injured, of that there could be no doubt. She kept her right arm pinned tight to her side.

  I pointed to her shoulder, which was slumped down and forward. “What happened? Are you hurt?”

  “When I fell off Gene’s car, I landed kind of hard.”

  I almost corrected her—you didn’t fall; you were pushed—but I let it pass.

  We arrived at my car, and I announced, “This is it. All mine. A graduation present.”

  Marie squinted through the darkness. “Pink? Is it pink?”

  “More like a pale red. When it’s washed, it’ll be easier to tell the real color.”

  We both laughed at my defense of the car. “Okay. Have it your way. But it’s a very pale red,” she said.

  I had another little clutch of fear when it occurred to me that the keys might have fallen out when I tumbled into the water, but they were still in the pocket of my jeans. I unlocked Marie’s door and held it open for her.

  “You’ll get your car seat wet.” She waggled her finger up and down in my direction to indicate my drenched condition.

  “Oh well.”

  “You don’t have anything to put on the seat? Gene always keeps a blanket in the car.”

&
nbsp; Her statement nicked me, but I loved her all the more for it, and in the process learned one more lesson about the inextricability of pain and love. And another lesson about my own character. Some other boys—most other boys?—in my place would have followed up Marie’s remark with a wink and salacious question of their own—Yeah? What was the blanket for? And I have no doubt she would have answered.

  “It’s not like it’s a new car or anything,” I said.

  When she entered the car, I noticed again how carefully she moved, and now she was supporting her right arm with her left hand.

  “Is it your arm? Or your shoulder?”

  Just the question was enough to make her wince. “Shoulder, I guess.”

  “Can you lift your arm?”

  She made an effort, but it brought a gasp from her. “Not very well. It feels like something’s grinding in there.”

  “Can I take a look?”

  I stepped back, and she slowly, gingerly, extricated her right arm from the shirt. Once that was done, she sat back against the car seat to facilitate my examination.

  Leaning over her, I caught the faint but unmistakable odor of Old Spice. I knew it so well because it was my father’s aftershave, and I seldom stepped into the bathroom in the morning without smelling it. But I hadn’t thought Gene used it. Finally I concluded that the white shirt must have been her father’s, and the scent imbedded in the collar his.

  Marie’s breasts swelled above her swimming suit, the top of which had slipped down just enough to expose a line of paler flesh. . . . I forced myself, however, to attend to the duty I had volunteered for, and I concentrated on her right shoulder, which, even though she was sitting back, was still hunched forward.

  The car’s dome light was not very bright, and shadows extending from the hollow of her throat made it difficult to be certain, but it looked as though she had a distinct bump on her collarbone and perhaps the start of a bruise there as well.

  “I should take you to the emergency room. In case something’s broken.”

  That suggestion caused her to crane her neck in an attempt to look down at herself, and that movement brought only another grimace to her face. Then, in order to prove to me her injury wasn’t severe, she quickly smiled and tried again to lift her arm. That failed too. “Shit,” she said softly but angrily.

  “Here. Let me try something. Can you take your shirt off all the way?”

  If she was skeptical or suspicious, her expression didn’t show it. Nevertheless, to demonstrate the purity of my motives, I stepped back again and looked away while she struggled out of the shirt. Once she was free of it, I took it from her, unrolled the sleeves, and knotted them together. I folded the fabric until it was in the approximate shape of a sling, which I then slipped over Marie’s head. Now both the strap of her bathing suit and the sleeves of the shirt were looped around her neck.

  “Try this,” I said. “If it’s too long or short, I can adjust it.”

  “Much better,” she said, smiling her gratitude.

  “All that Boy Scout training . . . finally good for something.”

  “You’re a Scout?”

  “Not really. Was. A Cub Scout. I quit after a couple years. The knot-tying always gave me trouble.”

  “I didn’t think you were a Scout or an Explorer or whatever they call themselves. Troop 109 tried to make me their mascot or an honorary member or something. I think it was just a ruse to get me to go on their overnight camping trips with them.”

  “Can’t blame guys for trying.”

  “Oh, no,” Marie said, adjusting her sling slightly. “I never blame them for trying. Guys wouldn’t be guys if they didn’t try.”

  As I backed the Studebaker out of the cottonwood grove, it was with a gladdened heart and a relieved conscience.

  When we arrived at the hospital, Marie insisted she didn’t have to go in. Her shoulder felt better, she said, and she was sure her injury wasn’t severe. To destroy her argument I only had to ask her to lift her arm. When she couldn’t do that, I pulled into the emergency room bay.

  I helped Marie from the car, and then said, “I’ll park the car and be right in.”

  My father and mother wouldn’t be waiting up for me—staying out all graduation night was a tradition that many parents honored—and Marie didn’t have to worry about coming in late either. Her parents were out of town, and the older sister who was staying with Marie and her younger brother didn’t care what time Marie came in. We were both free to spend as many hours at the hospital as might be required, hardly where either of us had believed we’d end up on that night.

  As if in a concession to the lateness of the hour, the emergency room area was hushed and dimly lit. The only hospital employee I could see was a nurse behind a high counter, and Marie was speaking to her when I walked in. When I took my place alongside Marie, the nurse, a sour-faced older woman with tiny eyes, stared intently at me. I must have made quite a sight—barefoot, clothes soaking wet, and wearing a smile probably rare in those surroundings. But then the other people who came into the hospital didn’t make the trip in the company of Miss Marie Ryan. But I could clearly read the inquiry in the nurse’s gaze: Who are you? Since I had no answer for the question, I simply grinned a little harder and tried to appear as though I was exactly where I belonged.

  The nurse pointedly addressed Marie. “You can wait over there. Someone will be with you shortly.”

  We had barely sat down when Marie said, “His problem is he can’t get out of his head the idea that something, something, good should come out of what his dad did. This stupid show he put on tonight—God!—that was just his latest crazy idea. Famous . . . He’ll be famous, all right.”

  Since we’d left the river, Marie had not once spoken Gene’s name.

  “Yeah, they’ll be talking about that for a long time,” I said.

  “I’ve tried to tell him, you’re never going to forget what happened. Never. But you have to stop pulling the past up to the present. Let it stay back there. Let the days keep putting more distance between now and then.” She shook her head and grimaced, and I couldn’t be sure if her expression of pain came from her injury or this renewal of her frustration at trying to help Gene and failing. “You can see how much success I’ve had,” she said ruefully.

  She looked up at me, and I had the sense that she was waiting for me to confess my own inability to aid my friend through his life’s worst period. What could I say? I have stopped short of openly professing my love for his girlfriend. . . .

  “He’d be worse off without you,” I said. “A hell of a lot worse off.”

  The height to which her eyebrows rose indicated that my words had failed to persuade her. I couldn’t summon any enthusiasm, however, for extending the argument. Besides, the worsening pain in Marie’s shoulder was commanding all her attention. Suddenly light-headed, she bent forward in her chair in order to lower her head and keep from fainting.

  “Should I call the nurse?” I asked.

  Marie shook her head, but just then the nurse came out from behind her desk to take Marie to an examining room. That didn’t however, mean a diagnosis or treatment would be forthcoming. Hospitals today of course are staffed around the clock with emergency room physicians and support staff, but in 1962 Marie couldn’t be attended to until a doctor on call was notified and an X-ray technician was wakened and summoned to the hospital. I saw both of them arrive. The tech, a sleepy, slow-moving, dark-haired, handsome young man not much older than Marie and I, showed up first, and not long after, Marie was ushered away, but more than an hour passed before the doctor appeared. I recognized him as Dr. DuFresne, an older physician famous in Bismarck for his elegance, his encyclopedic medical knowledge, and his vinegary disposition. He stopped just inside the door and took a last drag on the cigarette poised at the tip of his long fingers. When he thrust the butt into the ashtray’s sand, it was a gesture performed with impatience. I worried that Marie would not be treated gently or compassionately, at least no
t in his hands.

  Once the requisite medical personnel were in attendance, however, the wait for Marie was still long. And frustrating. Since we were both trapped in the hospital, why couldn’t we be allowed to pass the time in each other’s company?

  At one point I leaned back in my chair and dozed off, an act that would likely be noted in fiction only because it would present an opportunity to reveal a character’s dream. But in life we remember few of our dreams, and those we do recall are usually not tied to a time or a place. Dreams—and more commonly nightmares—create their own settings, and override our waking sense of our surroundings. But since so many of the moments of that time in my life have, as I recollect them, dreamlike qualities—unpredictable, emotionally intense yet ambiguous, imagistically vivid—I feel as though it’s appropriate to make up a dream to accompany that scene in the hospital’s waiting room.

  I’ve been led into a ward with a long row of beds or gurneys, each separated from the next by a gauzy cloth curtain. I suspect that Marie is just on the other side of the partition, and soon that suspicion hardens into certainty. I can see her, albeit only in silhouette, but a shadow is enough for me to know it’s her. She’s moving around, dancing perhaps, and occasionally a part of her—her forehead, a leg, an elbow, her entire torso, especially her breasts—presses against the fabric, strains against it, almost as though she is trying to tear through. I don’t understand whether I’m being invited to touch her through the cloth or whether she doesn’t even know I’m there. My dilemma is complicated when I hear her voice. The sound of it is so faint that I can’t make out any words, yet its murmur has a rhythm—rising and falling, louder and softer—that tells me she’s speaking in sentences. But again, I don’t know if she’s talking to me. I’m paralyzed with the fear that if I reach out or speak to her, only to learn that her speech and movements are intended for someone else, someone whose shadow I can’t see, I’ll not only embarrass myself—something I’m willing to risk—but also frighten and alienate her when I’m revealed as an eavesdropper. Suddenly from over the top of Marie’s side of the partition something is thrown—again, whether accidentally or purposely I can’t know—over to my side. I can’t tell what the object is, but it’s right overhead, floating at first, then falling at great speed. I stretch out my hands to catch it, and in so doing startle myself awake.