American Boy

by Larry Watson

  Johnny even looked like a little brother. He had his father’s curls, but he couldn’t tame them. They frizzed and coiled in every direction, often making him look as if he’d just climbed out of bed. I could have grown a full beard at that age, while Johnny’s cheeks produced nothing but down. The muscles of his slender body were smooth and undefined as well, and he had a childish habit of bouncing and squirming if he had to sit in one place for long. If anyone in town did believe we were brothers, they likely would have assumed that Johnny took after our delicate mother.

  Johnny stopped abruptly ten yards ahead of me in the woods, and when I looked questioningly in his direction, he smiled and pointed up at the low branch of a tilting oak tree.

  Many of the boys in our town—and even a few of the girls—grew up in these woods. We built forts, played hideand-seek, climbed trees, and hunted, first with slingshots and BB guns, then with .22s. We formed clubs that had their headquarters in the forest, and we took refuge here when we needed to be alone with our sadness, confusion, or anger. Among these trees we hid from bullies and parents and authorities. We also went to Frenchman’s Forest when we wanted to smoke cigarettes or drink the liquor we had stolen. A few of us had our first sexual experiences in here as well, and though that wasn’t true for Johnny or for me, we both received a rudimentary sexual education in the forest years earlier, when Lannie Corbis straddled the branch of the very oak tree Johnny was standing under now, solemnly holding forth on the mechanics of sex to an eager but skeptical audience of five younger boys. Eventually we’d learn that Lannie was mistaken about some of the ways men and women fit together, but even the corrected record could not alter for me the association of sex with the smell of tree sap and the hum of insects.

  “Lannie?” I said.

  Johnny nodded, smiling.

  Yes, if Louisa Lindahl was in these woods, we were the ones to find her. And it was not hard to imagine that someone fleeing a man with murderous intent would head for Frenchman’s Forest.

  We walked on, down through the treeless depression we called the Boulders, past the spot where Russell Marsh blasted an owl out of a hollow tree with a twelve-gauge, leaving nothing of the bird but a blizzard of feathers, and through the stand of willows whose wandlike limbs we used to swing from. As we searched for Louisa Lindahl, Johnny and I were the source of most of the noise in the forest—twigs snapping, leaves crunching, and clumps of snow falling, brushed from branches and shrubs.

  Then I heard something, and I shushed Johnny. We both stopped and stood unmoving, our heads raised as if, like hounds, we could detect scents in the chilly air. We stood there for a moment, breathless.

  After a long silence, Johnny whispered, “What was it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “She could be hiding. For all she knows Lester Huston is out here looking for her.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. I’d assumed she would want to be found.

  Johnny asked, “Should we call out or something?”

  Before I could form a judgment, Johnny cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “We’re here to help you! Is anyone out there?”

  When no response came, he tried again. “Hello! There’s no need to be afraid!”

  After the sound of Johnny’s voice died away, the forest’s silence seemed amplified, a snowy day’s version of an echo.

  “That’s just what someone who’s after her would say,” I offered with a smile. “‘There’s no need to be afraid.’”

  “What should I say—‘Ollie, Ollie, in-free? Come out, come out, wherever you are?’”

  Once we stood there motionless for a couple minutes, the cold was able to wrap itself around us. I clapped my gloved hands together and stamped my feet. “Jesus. If she’s hiding in here, she could freeze to death.”

  Johnny pinched snot from his nostrils with his mitten. “Freeze or bleed to death. Some choice.”

  “Well, I don’t think she’d choose either one.”

  “Smart-ass. Maybe I should howl like a wolf,” he suggested. “Scare her out of hiding.”

  “Give it a try.”

  But he didn’t. And both of us just stood there listening. After another moment, Johnny asked, “Could it have been a squirrel?”

  “It wasn’t like that. Not scurrying. More like starting and stopping. Like someone limping maybe. Or hunkering down in the leaves.”

  After a few more minutes passed, I began to convince myself that it must have been a squirrel I’d heard. Or possibly a branch, falling by stages from the top of a tall cottonwood. Then I heard it again. And this time Johnny did, too. It sounded like something scuffing slowly through the dry leaves, and we both turned around in the direction from which it came.

  Why had that antlered buck not been frightened into flight? Had he sensed all along that we were no threat, clumping through the forest unarmed? Had he seen us for what we were, boys pretending that they knew his territory as well as he did, boys who thought they had powers greater than men? The buck stared at us and we stared at him for one more long moment, and then he moved on, pausing every few paces to scrape at the leaves in search of food, a being with a real purpose in the woods.

  I looked down. If I hadn’t been standing in snow the outline of my foot would have been hard to see. In late November, cold and snow hastened days to a close early in our part of the world, limiting what could be usefully done with the hours. And in the thickening gloom of Frenchman’s Forest, it was already too dark to find footprints or traces of blood.

  “We should probably head back,” I said in the reluctant voice of a sensible big brother.

  “And just leave her out here?”

  “We don’t even know that she’s still out here.”

  “We don’t know she isn’t.”

  “Come on. In a few minutes we won’t be able to see our hands in front of our faces.”

  Johnny kicked back and forth in the snow, perhaps testing my theory.

  After another moment, he conceded. “All right.”

  As we walked back to the car, I felt discouraged and even humiliated. We had set out with a mission and an accompanying sense of importance, but it seemed most likely that no one, and certainly not Dr. Dunbar, had ever believed we had a realistic chance of finding Louisa Lindahl. It felt now as if our expedition had merely been allowed, indulged as the behavior of children is indulged. Let them go; what’s the harm? And now, like children, we were coming in from our play when darkness fell.

  3.

  UPON RETURNING TO THE DUNBAR HOUSE, our senses were immediately assaulted. Though the meal had been prepared hours earlier, the aroma of stuffed turkey and pumpkin pie lingered, as inseparable from the house as its warmth from fire and furnace. Then Janet came bounding toward us shouting, “She’s here! She’s here!”

  “Who’s here?” Johnny asked.

  “The shot girl!”

  Julia ran into the room just in time to correct her sister. “The girl who got shot!”

  Mrs. Dunbar hurried close behind, trying to quiet the girls. But their excitement had them bouncing in place.

  “Mom?” said Johnny, “what are they talking about?”

  Mrs. Dunbar put her finger to her lips, as if to indicate that even his question was too loud. “They brought her here shortly after you left,” she whispered.

  Johnny and I looked at each other, trying to comprehend what we’d just been told. It felt almost as if we were the victims of a practical joke.

  The snow we’d stamped from our boots hadn’t even melted when Dr. Dunbar entered the room. “Well boys, sorry if your search was for naught.” He was still wearing the vest and tie he’d had on at the dining room table, but he’d exchanged his suit coat for a white lab coat.

  “She’s here?” Johnny asked again.

  “She is indeed.”

  “How is she?” I asked. “Is she ... ?”

  “She’s seen better days, I promise you that. But all in all, she’s faring pretty well.” He was smoking a
cigarette, but he’d only taken a couple drags. He handed it now to Mrs. Dunbar, who smoked Chesterfields as did the doctor, but she held the cigarette as if she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. “In fact,” he added, “I should probably get back in there. She’ll be coming around soon.”

  As he turned to walk back through the house to the clinic, something came over me. I don’t really remember deciding to follow the doctor, but follow I did, as surely as if I’d been invited.

  Johnny trailed along as well, but to this day I believe he was following me and not his father.

  Dr. Dunbar had not gone far before he realized he was being shadowed. He slowed and looked back over his shoulder. “Yes?”

  Mrs. Dunbar had also joined our little entourage, but all of us stopped now, and we stood in a small, dimly lit parlor. Back in the bright foyer, the twins were still spinning with excitement.

  “What is it?” the doctor asked. I had no doubt that his question was directed to me.

  I had no reply.

  “Would you like to see the patient?”

  Of course I wanted to see the patient, but Dr. Dunbar knew this about me before I knew it myself.

  “Oh, Rex,” said Mrs. Dunbar, “do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “Let’s leave it up to them. If they’d rather not, that’s just fine as well.” He turned to us. “Well?”

  I was instantly ready to say yes, but I knew Johnny had to answer first.

  “Is she ... okay?” he asked.

  Dr. Dunbar reached inside the sleeve of his white coat and readjusted a cuff link. “She is now,” he said succinctly. “Or will be soon enough.”

  “All right,” said Johnny, looking at me. “Sure.” Apprehension flickered in his eyes. He might have hoped I’d say that I wasn’t interested, but there was no chance of that.

  “Very well then,” Dr. Dunbar said. “Let’s see if I can teach you something about the treatment of bullet wounds.”

  As odd as this situation might seem, there was reason and precedent behind it. Both Johnny and I had expressed an interest in medicine as a career. Dr. Dunbar hadn’t prodded us in that direction, but since he made every endeavor—from casting a spinner into the river to manipulating a dislocated shoulder back into joint—look enticing, it was hardly surprising that we were drawn to his profession. Medicine might not have had as strong an appeal for Johnny as it did for me—among other possible reasons, he didn’t share my ambition to forge a life different from the one I’d been born into in Willow Falls—but once we showed an interest, Dr. Dunbar seemed eager to share his knowledge and experience with us.

  I couldn’t be sure exactly when Johnny’s medical education began, but I knew to the minute when mine did. I was eight years old, and I woke on a summer night to find Dr. Dunbar sitting on the edge of my bed. I knew who he was, but only vaguely. At that point Johnny and I were only friends as part of a larger group of same-aged boys, and I didn’t associate him with the physician I’d seen for a school checkup. But that night Dr. Dunbar turned on the light beside my bed and softly spoke my name. “Matthew? Matt?” He patted my leg tenderly.

  As soon as he thought I was fully awake, Dr. Dunbar said, “Matthew, your father is dead.”

  I barely had time to gasp before he went on. “He was killed in an automobile accident.”

  “What ... what happened?”

  “He ruptured his spleen.” Dr. Dunbar was to be forgiven for this response. I’d wanted to know about the accident itself, but he’d answered according to how his profession interpreted curiosity. “Do you know where your spleen is?”

  I shook my head. Dr. Dunbar reached over and pressed three fingers against my abdomen. He poked hard to impress me with that area’s softness and vulnerability, and to make certain I understood what he was telling me.

  “His spleen ... ruptured?”

  “The spleen’s job,” he explained, “is to filter out impurities in the blood. It’s enclosed in a thin capsule, and when that capsule ruptures, blood rushes into the abdominal cavity. When that happens, no one can survive for long.”

  Then he subtly shifted from a physician’s rough tour of anatomy to a family friend’s gentle rub. “I’m sorry, Matthew. Your father thought the world of you. He was a good man. We’ll all miss him.” Did Dr. Dunbar know these things to be true of my father, or was he simply trying to help me feel better?

  Dr. Dunbar’s strategy for breaking the news about my father’s death was unusual, but it worked as well as anything could. Detailing that fatal injury had the simultaneous—and paradoxical—effect of hitting me hard with the stark fact of his death and diffusing the force of that blow. With my stomach still tender from the pressure of the doctor’s fingers, I had to concentrate on the physical reality of death, and that diverted me momentarily from thinking about what life would be like without my father. And then on some level I was also flattered that Dr. Dunbar believed I was mature and intelligent enough to handle the hard fact of death along with its complicated physiology.

  Dr. Dunbar waited another moment to make sure of my composure, and then said, “Why don’t you get up now. Your mother needs you.”

  With Dr. Dunbar’s hand resting gently on my shoulder, we moved into the living room, where my mother sat quietly weeping. Her brother was there too, and as I walked into my mother’s arms, in the instant before my own tears commenced, I looked over at my uncle and thought, I know where the spleen is.

  Had Dr. Dunbar already seen something in me before that night, something that led him to conclude I had promise as a physician? And when I took the news of my father’s death without wincing, did he realize that I might have the ability to perform a doctor’s most difficult task—to look into someone’s eyes and give them the hardest news they could ever get? Or had I impressed him with my question about the spleen, suggesting a curiosity that could not be quelled even in the darkest moment?

  Whenever our “education” began, Johnny and I were well embarked on our unofficial course of study by the time we were teenagers. In fact, if patients consented, we were occasionally allowed to be present during a treatment or examination. When June Dunbar complained of an earache, for example, Dr. Dunbar let us look through the otoscope, and pointed out the swollen red membrane that indicated an ear infection. And he once summoned us to the clinic to witness him taking a swab of Betty Schaeffer’s niece’s throat, in order to determine if she had strep throat. Harold Schmitke gave us permission to watch while Dr. Dunbar put four stitches in Mr. Schmitke’s forehead, repairing the damage done by a storm window that had slipped from his hands. We listened to many heartbeats and breaths both deep and shallow; we tapped knees with rubber hammers and attached blood-pressure cuffs; we took pulses and temperatures and watched blood be drawn; we looked at x-rays and learned to see broken bones and lungs with pneumonia. Most of Willow Falls came to refer to us as “Dr. Dunbar’s boys,” and regarded our medical ambitions with tolerance and amusement.

  The vast majority of Dr. Dunbar’s instruction came in conversation rather than in the presence of patients. “I saw something today,” he might say, “that I haven’t encountered in years.” Then, the hook set, he’d tell us about a patient’s bulging eyes, and how they tipped him off to a thyroid condition. Or, shaking his head, he would remark, “I was afraid that finger would have to come off,” and go on to explain the circulatory problems a diabetic could face. And he once held up his hand for a long moment before describing exactly what that hand felt as he palpated an abdomen and felt the mass that led to the discovery of the tumor that killed Mr. Jensen.

  But a bullet wound! Bullet wounds were the stuff of movies and television, and then Louisa Lindahl had not accidentally shot herself while cleaning a weapon—she was the victim of a crime! I couldn’t help but think that we were about to be part of something glamorous and mysterious. And as we followed Dr. Dunbar toward his clinic, I considered the status I’d have at school, with my insider’s knowledge of the event all of Willow Falls would
be talking about.

  As he opened the door to the clinic, the doctor said, “The deputy’s search party found her stumbling along Highway K. Doubled over and bleeding and nearly frozen from being out in the cold in nothing but a thin dress. I wasn’t sure whether it was more urgent to treat her for the gunshot wound or for frostbite.”

  The clinic consisted of a reception area and three small examination rooms, and Dr. Dunbar led us toward the only lighted room. Dr. Dunbar had turned up the heat to thaw out Miss Lindahl, and the corridor was dark and warm.

  “Is the deputy here?” Johnny asked.

  “He’s back at the jail. Interrogating the assailant. He’ll be back later if she’s up to answering questions.”

  In the open doorway, I had my own moment of hesitation. The blood trail that we couldn’t find in the woods was evident now, quarter- and nickel-sized drops dried to a dusty burgundy led to the examination table, where an unconscious woman lay beneath a bright lamp. She was covered with a sheet and a blanket, but her head, neck, and shoulders were bare.

  For a moment, I wondered if Dr. Dunbar had invited us into the clinic not to give us a lesson about bullet wounds, but rather to teach us about death. The young woman’s flesh was beyond pale. It was marmoreal, and I couldn’t help but think that I was looking at a corpse. And then I recognized her. For while the name Louisa Lindahl was unknown to me, the face was not.

  Burke’s Pharmacy was a popular after-school spot in town, and this young woman worked at its soda fountain, scooping ice cream, mixing phosphates, pouring Cokes, and dodging the straw wrappers frequently blown her way. She wasn’t much older than the teenage patrons, but she showed no interest in us except as customers.