American Boy

by Larry Watson

  She was tall, slender, and pretty in a way unfamiliar to most of us. She wore no makeup, but her luminous skin and excellent bone structure made the lipstick and eye shadow that the girls our age had begun to wear unnecessary. Her neck was long, and her jaw was delicate but square. Her chestnut hair was not tightly pin-curled or overly coiffed, but simply tied back or piled on top of her head without regard to style or fashion. She wore faded print dresses that looked as if they came out of a grandmother’s closet, though these dresses must have been a smaller person’s hand-me-downs, for they always looked a bit too tight, and the hems and sleeves too short. And yet along with an element of aloofness, her austere, gray-eyed loveliness gave her a refined, almost aristocratic appearance, at least to my small-town eyes. These contradictions fascinated me—not only the shabby attire coupled with her regal beauty, but also the good looks with no apparent attempt to adorn or enhance them. And then there was the fact that she was a waitress, but seemed completely indifferent to pleasing people....

  No matter how those of us boys sitting at the soda fountain teased or interrogated her (the girls pretended not to notice her), she wouldn’t say much of anything beyond what her work required. And she always refused to disclose where she was from or why she had come to our town. She even resisted the entreaties and flirtations directed her way by more accomplished suitors. I was sitting at the counter one Friday afternoon, when Rick Carver took his best shot. Rick had graduated from Willow Falls High a few years before, and he was known for scoring both on and off the basketball court. Tall, blond, and possessed of an irresistible smile, Rick attended Augustana College on a scholarship, but he came home occasionally to mingle with mortals. On that day, however, he might as well have been a stammering high school freshman. After trying repeatedly to attract her interest, he finally resigned himself to failure, spun off his stool, softly cursed, and walked out of Burke’s. She didn’t even watch him go, and a part of me silently cheered.

  But none of the previous impressions I had of Louisa Lindahl, none of the intriguing ambiguities or puzzling paradoxes, could possibly match the salient facts of this day: Tarpaper shack. Lester Huston. Gunshot wound.

  Dr. Dunbar led the way into the room, and we arranged ourselves at the examination table, the doctor on one side, Johnny and I on the other, and the unconscious Louisa Lindahl between us.

  “This young lady,” Dr. Dunbar said, “should be rechristened. A more appropriate name for her would be Lucky Lindahl. She was shot in the torso with a small-caliber pistol, probably a .22, and if you think that gun’s smaller slug and slower velocity would constitute a reduced threat to her, you’d be sorely mistaken. At close range a .22 can do plenty of damage. But in this case her assailant could not have injured her any less severely if he had been trying. Look here—”

  Slowly, as if his main concern was not to wake the patient, Dr. Dunbar pulled the blanket down to her knees. Only a sheet covered her now, and beneath it the contours of her naked body were apparent.

  Dr. Dunbar next took hold of the top of the sheet, but then he left it in place. “Matt, there’s another sheet in that cabinet behind you. Would you get it for me, please?”

  I tugged open a drawer, and was greeted by the smell of bleached linens. I handed a folded sheet to the doctor, and he looked Louisa Lindahl up and down. “How shall we do this?”

  He partially unfolded the sheet I gave him, and draped it across her upper body, right on top of the other sheet. Then he pulled the lower sheet down below her navel. For an instant, however, this maneuver left her breasts uncovered, an error he hastily corrected by pulling down the top sheet.

  The glimpse I had of Louisa Lindahl’s breasts can’t have lasted much more than a second. But it was enough time to take in breasts perfect in their symmetry, pale and faintly blue-veined. The rose-colored aureoles were the size of silver dollars, and there was a tiny slit in each nipple. The breasts were large enough to sag slightly to the side from their own weight.

  The doctor didn’t acknowledge the accident with the sheets—no oops, no embarrassed laugh, no humorous remark. In fact, he whisked that sheet back in place so swiftly, so dexterously, that I wondered if he had been testing us, the way he did when he asked us if a boy who cut his foot on a brick at a construction site should be given a tetanus shot. Perhaps he wanted to know if we were mature enough, if we were serious enough about the profession we said we were interested in, to be shown a young woman’s breasts without making a wisecrack to conceal our titillation or discomfort?

  If we were being tested, Johnny might have received a lower score. He gasped when Louisa Lindahl’s breasts were first revealed, though it wasn’t much as gasps go, just a quick intake of breath, closer to a pain-induced wince than it was to any sound associated with pleasure. I’m not even sure his father heard it. A look might have passed between them, but I couldn’t be certain. I was unpracticed in the subtle communications between fathers and sons.

  A bullet wound was uncommon in Willow Falls, of course, but I had already learned from being around Dr. Dunbar that doctors—and, for that matter, those interested in becoming doctors—differ from other people in a fundamental way: they generally want to get closer to the sights that most people want to turn away from. And when Dr. Dunbar directed us to the wound traversing Louisa Lindahl’s midsection—a foot-wide gash sewn shut with fourteen sutures and painted amber with betadine—the eyes closest to her torso were the doctor’s and mine.

  “Do you see why I call her lucky?” Dr. Dunbar said, tracing the wound in the air just inches above her abdomen. “Her assailant was plainly trying to end her life. He wasn’t aiming at an arm or a leg. She probably turned to the side just when he fired at her, and the bullet tunneled under a couple layers of skin and then from one side of her to the other. An inch or two deeper in and who knows what kind of damage it might have done.”

  “But an inch the other way and it would have missed her completely,” said Johnny.

  Even without the benefit of Dr. Dunbar’s peeved look, I knew that Johnny’s suggestion was not consistent with the lessons his father was trying to teach. “If the bullet had gone in an inch deeper,” I asked, “wouldn’t it have passed through her liver?”

  He cocked his head as if he needed that alteration of perspective to note the arrangement of her organs. “Liver? Maybe so.... It could have even hit a rib, and when a projectile hits bone, you generally have serious trouble. Then you can get fragments—of bullet or bone—flying off in any direction.”

  Dr. Dunbar stepped back from Louisa Lindahl, and while Johnny must have understood that we were to do the same, I missed the message. I remained bent over the wound, my face less than a foot from Louisa Lindahl’s flesh. I could smell the antiseptic, and under that, faintly, something else.... Blood perhaps, maybe nicotine, and then something deeper, muskier, a smell belonging to Louisa Lindahl’s essence. The black knots of the sutures looked like flies lined up along her pale abdomen. I had to touch her—how could I come this close and not?—and yet I couldn’t decide where. I paused, my hand hovering over her.

  That hesitation provided enough time for the doctor to speak my name—“Matthew!”—and step toward me.

  But by then it was too late. I placed my palm lightly on Louisa Lindahl’s belly, just below the furrow of flesh that Dr. Dunbar’s stitches had closed. The tip of my little finger slipped into her navel with such ease it seemed to have found its natural place.

  My hand rested there for no longer than Louisa Lindahl’s breasts had been bared, but it was long enough for the feeling of her cool soft skin to stamp itself into my memory indelibly.

  I jerked my hand back and stood up just in time to escape Dr. Dunbar’s attempt to swat me away.

  “Matthew! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “I just wanted to see if she felt... cold.”

  “You never touch, Matthew. Not without the patient’s permission. I invited you in here because it’s a unique learning situati
on. It’s not an opportunity for you to indulge your personal curiosity.”

  “Sorry.”

  He stared sternly at me for a long moment. “Did I make a mistake inviting you in here?” To make clear that the question was meant for both of us, he shifted his gaze to Johnny and then back to me.

  “No sir,” I said, intending to answer for both of us.

  “You’re still interested in learning something?”

  I nodded eagerly.

  “Johnny?”

  “Sure.”

  Once he was assured that he had our attention again, Dr. Dunbar proceeded to lecture us on primary and secondary wounds, temporary and permanent cavities, and the stretching and displacement of tissue. Dr. Dunbar got no closer to combat than a New Jersey Army hospital during the Second World War, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this part of the lesson was intended not only to educate us, but to impress us with his knowledge of ballistics.

  And knowing what we had seen of Miss Lindahl, perhaps he wanted to stress the clinical nature of the situation as well. After all, the girl lying there before us was not to be looked at for her naked beauty, but rather as a patient in need of a physician’s help. She was her wound, and the purpose of Dr. Dunbar’s lecture was to remind us of that.

  But I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to know so much more than debridement techniques and the dangers of sepsis. “Why’d you knock her out?” I asked.

  Dr. Dunbar’s reply came in tones as icy as his earlier glare. “Knock her out? I didn’t knock her out. I anesthetized her. When she came in she was in pain, in shock, and bleeding. I wasn’t sure of the extent of her injuries, or what she’d require in the way of treatment.”

  The tension that had developed in the room seemed to make Johnny uneasy, and he rushed to ask an easily answered question: “So there’s no chance she will die?”

  “She will not die.”

  “Will she have a bad scar?”

  “A bad scar? Depends on what you mean by bad. You saw how her body is already trying to heal itself. The scar will be the mark of how well it succeeds. I’d expect there to be some delling. You know what that is, don’t you? It’s a little depression, like a dimple. And then sometimes the body does too good a job, so to speak. She could develop a keloid, a scar that doesn’t know when to stop. I know you’ve seen those—the flesh mounds up, the skin acquires a sheen. Depending on its size it might even look pulpy....”

  Louisa Lindahl stirred beneath the sheet, her body twitching and rippling as if an electric current were coursing through it. Dr. Dunbar was suddenly alert, watching for a sign that would probably be meaningless or invisible to Johnny or me. He stepped forward and placed his hand on her shoulder, his fingers extending just below her clavicle, where neither organ nor vital sign pulsed. Instantly, as if his touch had thrown a switch, her contractions ceased.

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  The doctor merely smiled. It was the same smile he’d worn when he sent us on our way with pockets full of gauze.

  4.

  WHEN I ARRIVED HOME THAT NIGHT my mother was in her customary place and engaged in her favorite activity. The telephone cord stretched from the wall to the kitchen table, where she sat with the black receiver in one hand and a Pall Mall in the other. She was wearing a bathrobe, her usual after-work attire, and her hair was done up in curlers. The room’s only light came from the fluorescent strip along the back of the stove. In contrast to the Dunbar home, where the aroma of Mrs. Dunbar’s turkey and all the sumptuous extras still hung in the air, our house smelled like cabbage, though my mother hadn’t prepared cabbage in weeks.

  Whoever was on the other end of the line was telling my mother something so fascinating that she couldn’t be bothered to greet me. Nevertheless, she held up her hand to indicate that I was to wait in the room until her conversation was finished.

  My mother loved gossip, though she never would have called it that. She’d lived in Willow Falls all her life, and for her staying abreast of its citizens and their activities was like keeping up with the family. And between her job and her network of female friends, she had access to plenty of information, as well as the means to move it along. This proclivity of hers didn’t bother me much. She put in long hours on her feet at work and then came home to cook, clean, and pinch pennies. I understood that she took her pleasures where she could. Besides, I often picked up a few juicy rumors about our town’s mostly respectable citizens, some of them parents of my schoolmates.

  She said good-bye and handed the receiver to me so I could walk it back to the cradle.

  “Sadie?” I asked. It was a good bet. My mother usually concluded her day talking with Sadie Pruitt, even if the two of them had just worked the evening shift together at Palmer’s.

  “Doris Greiner.”

  “What did Doris have to say?”

  “Mrs. Greiner,” my mother corrected. “She said a young woman got herself shot today. But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”

  “They brought her to Dr. Dunbar.”

  “Saved her life, did he?”

  “I don’t know about that, but she’s going to live.”

  She nodded and crossed her legs in order to massage an aching foot. But she’d be back on her feet at Palmer’s the following day. The hair curlers told me that. My mother was a homely woman, but she tried to look her best at work. She’d wear a little rouge to add color to her sallow cheeks, and lipstick to help define her narrow mouth’s tight line. Mascara and eyeliner would make her eyes seem less small and close-set. The curlers would put a little wave in her steel-gray hair. Nothing could make her figure anything but stick-thin—smoking and long hours on her feet saw to that—but her uniform would be clean and pressed, her shoes polished. In the end, however, the good tips my mother usually received came because she worked hard to see to her customers’ needs, not because she charmed them. And she wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  “I take it the gunshot wound wasn’t serious then?”

  My mother was seeking corroboration for what she had heard from Doris Greiner, that and the small odd, possibly lurid detail that her regular informants might not have provided.

  “A superficial abdominal laceration,” I said, not entirely sure of the rightness of the terminology, but proud nevertheless of my ability to use it.

  “Lucky gal.”

  “That’s what the doctor said.”

  “You know anything else about her?”

  “She worked at Burke’s. Lindahl. Louisa Lindahl. But you already know that.”

  She blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “She was living with the fellow who shot her. Lester Huston. Not married to, living with.” My mother was no moralist, but she obviously regarded this piece of information as essential to the narrative. “You know anything about him?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Except that he had a bad temper.”

  That verb’s tense almost slipped by me. “Had?”

  Before answering, she devoted an unusual amount of time and care to pinching a scrap of tobacco from her lip. Then, as if she’d decided the entire smoking enterprise wasn’t worth the bother, she crushed out the cigarette.

  She looked up at me, vaguely surprised. “You didn’t hear? Lester Huston killed himself in the county jail. Tore up a sheet, tied one end around his neck and the other around the frame of his cot, and then just leaned forward and strangled himself.”

  “Damn!”

  “So, no trial for Mr. Huston. And no getting up on the witness stand for Miss Lindahl.”

  “Jesus Christ. He strangled himself?”

  “Doris says that’s why they don’t have lights or any overhead fixtures in the cells. So the prisoners can’t hang themselves. But I guess where there’s a will there’s a way.”

  “Nobody at the Dunbars’ said anything about ...”

  “Maybe they don’t know. This is fresh news.” She stood and straightened her robe. “I guess your doctor can’t sav
e’em all.”

  That remark’s nasty edge was almost surely not an accident. I’d always suspected that my mother didn’t like Dr. Dunbar, and while jealousy would have been the obvious explanation, I doubted that was it. She knew I looked up to the doctor, and that I’d attached myself to the family. But those things didn’t seem to bother her. She subscribed to the laissez-faire school of parenting, a philosophy that reflected her own upbringing. She was the seventh of eleven children, and growing up on a dusty little family farm during the Depression fostered in her the belief that we all had to look out for ourselves in this world. Accordingly, she felt she was fulfilling her parental duties by providing food and shelter for her only child. As long as I stayed in school and out of jail, she’d stay out of my life.

  No, my mother’s dislike of the doctor didn’t have its source in jealousy, not least because she believed it was a sin to be impressed by another human being. Her feelings about Rex Dunbar could best be understood in the context of the town’s divided opinion of itself. On one side were the town’s civic leaders and politicians, its merchants and professionals, and the wives of those men. Those people genuinely believed in the town’s slogan—“a city on the rise”—though the use of the term “city” was a bit overstated in light of the fact that its population was right around two thousand at the time. They truly thought that more people hadn’t settled in Willow Falls only because they didn’t know about it. And they saw the presence of Dr. Dunbar as corroboration of their view of Willow Falls as a special place. After all, the Dunbars were discerning, intelligent people, and they could only have chosen Willow Falls because they could see the town for what it was—a desirable place to make a life and raise a family. The attractive and refined Dr. and Mrs. Dunbar, in turn, gave the town a glitter it never had before they arrived. If Willow Falls could see the image of Rex Dunbar when it looked into the mirror, life there had to be ascendant.