by Larry Watson
Before I could grab the matches, Johnny picked them up and tossed them to Louisa. I would have lit her cigarette for her.
“You probably know how we landed here,” she said. “Lester said he knew a fellow here who’d give him a job. Guess what. No fellow. No job.”
The bottle came around to me again. I took what I believed to be an impressively long swallow and felt the brandy burn its way down my throat. Heat radiated throughout my chest, but that sensation didn’t match the syrupy sweetness. I grimaced, then spoke up with false confidence. “I can’t wait to get the hell out of Willow Falls.”
“Yeah?” replied Louisa. “You have a destination in mind?”
“Not really. Chicago, maybe. The West Coast. Someplace far away, that’s for sure.”
“How about you?” she asked Johnny. “You looking to get out, too?”
“My dad thinks a small college would be a good fit for me. Someplace like Carleton—that’s in Minnesota. Or maybe Macalester, in Saint Paul.”
“That’s what he thinks. . . . What do you think?”
“Sure, either of those would be okay.”
She turned back to me. “But those aren’t far enough away for you?”
“I’m not sure I’ll wait until college to leave.”
“Really?” She looked unconvinced.
“I might take off next summer. See if I can find a job somewhere. Out west, maybe. Like on a ranch.”
“What the hell do you know about working on a ranch?” asked Louisa.
I shrugged. “I can learn.”
“And break your damn back in the process.”
“I’m not afraid of hard work.”
“I grew up on a farm in North Dakota. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there. Which is what my old man did. Left me and my mom holding the rope.” She shook her head disapprovingly. “And you want to sign on for that kind of life? Thanks but no thanks.”
Wounded though I was, I made an attempt to recover. “Ranch work is what I’d like to do.”
“You think there’s a difference? My mother died on the farm. Drowned in a spring flood, trying to save a cow.”
“Sorry to hear that,” said Johnny.
“Yeah. Well. We hadn’t hardly been in touch for a while. If she hadn’t owed so much on the place I might have got something out of it. Then I wouldn’t have had to follow Lester and his big ideas.”
As fascinating as I found Louisa’s history, some of which I’d heard from my mother and other sources around town, it wasn’t holding Johnny’s interest. He wanted to return to something I’d said. “You mean,” he said, his mouth and eyes all circles of astonishment, “you wouldn’t even stick around for the summer after we graduate?”
I shrugged and looked over to Louisa as if to say, what can you do with these kids?
But Louisa’s attention was drifting. She stood and walked over to one of the small attic windows. “Denver for me,” she said, peering out the cobwebbed glass. “I got a cousin there.”
“Yeah, Denver is cool,” said Johnny.
But Louisa had already lost interest in geography. She poked around the attic’s darker margins, casually inspecting the Dunbar family’s artifacts. She picked up a gilt-framed sepia photograph of a fierce-looking whitebearded man. “Relative?” she asked Johnny.
“My mom’s grandfather.”
“Mean-looking old bastard.”
“He was an Episcopalian minister. Mom said he was pretty strict. Not like her dad.”
“I still think he looks like a mean bastard.” Louisa cocked her head, as if she needed to consider him from another angle. “I lived with a minister’s family once,” she said, “while I was in high school. He was nothing but an old lecher. All short and shriveled and pockmarked. I think maybe he’d had smallpox. Anyway, he was sneaking around all the time, trying to catch me alone or undressing or something. And I was supposed to be grateful they took me in. They did it as a favor to my mom. She thought it was important for me to go to high school, and the town closest to our farm didn’t have one. A high school, I mean.” Louisa shuddered. “I should have told his wife about him spying on me. She was a fat old bitch and she hated me for some reason. But if I would’ve told on her husband I bet she’d have killed him.”
Louisa continued her tour of the attic. When she came to a sewing machine she wiped a finger through the dust that covered it. “This work?”
“I guess.”
“And it’s just sitting up here gathering dust. Must be nice.”
Louisa grabbed the handle of a baby carriage and rolled it a few feet back and forth. “Shouldn’t there be two of these?”
“There were. My mom gave one to her sister. But she wanted to keep this one. Because it was mine, she said. And because it came from a company in England.”
Louisa wheeled the carriage out of the shadows and toward us. “Mrs. Dunbar and her beautiful baby boy ... I bet the two of you made quite a sight rolling around Willow Falls.”
“I remember those days well,” said Johnny with a smile. I could tell by the way his head rolled from side to side on the chair back that he was drunk. “Didn’t have a care in the world. Just laid on my back staring up at the sky. Let someone else do the driving.”
Louisa laughed. “You remember when you were a baby? Like hell.”
“Yep, those were the good old days.”
Johnny rose unsteadily to his feet and handed me the brandy. There wasn’t much left in the bottle. He made his way slowly over toward Louisa. He looked tenderly into the carriage, as if he expected to find his infant self inside. Then he turned around and flopped backward into the carriage. It wobbled and bounced on its springs, but somehow it didn’t collapse or fall over.
Louisa braced herself and held tight to the handle. “Christ!”
I struggled out of the rocking chair. By the time I arrived at the carriage, Johnny was settling in, his legs hanging over the side.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Johnny imitated a baby’s cry in response, a series of evenly spaced “wah-wah-wah’s.”
I looked up at Louisa. “I think he wants his bottle.”
“Better give it to him.” Her laugh was as throaty and deep as a man’s. “So long as I don’t have to nurse him!”
At that Johnny’s crying intensified, and he reached for Louisa.
“Quick,” she said, “give him the damn bottle!”
I thrust the bottle at him, but when Johnny brought it to his mouth, most of the liquor just spilled down his chin. Then he gagged and coughed, spraying blackberry brandy all over himself.
I took the bottle from him. To Louisa I said, “That wasn’t the answer.”
“We’ll take him for a walk.” With that, she wheeled the carriage around and began to push Johnny toward the attic’s darker end. I hurried to catch up so I could walk alongside Louisa.
As he rolled over the attic’s uneven boards, Johnny bounced in the carriage and shouted gleefully, “Whee! Whee!”
Since they were heading toward the stairs, I ran ahead and spread my arms wide, as if the carriage was out of control and needed to be blocked. Louisa misunderstood my intent and thought I was there to catch Johnny. She gave the carriage a hard shove, but even with Johnny’s wobbling weight, the wheels rolled true.
With the extra momentum provided by its heavy load, the carriage bumped hard into my hands. “Hang on!” I told Johnny, and ran a few steps before sending him back on his way to Louisa.
She crouched to catch him. “Come to Momma!”
Back and forth we went, until well beyond the point where Johnny was enjoying the experience. And then he rose up—or tried to—and said, “Stop, stop! I ... I need ...”
He tried to climb out of the carriage, causing it to topple over and crash. Johnny tumbled out, landing hard. And then he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees just in time to throw up a foul, purple, potato chip-flecked liquid.
“Oh, shit!” exclaimed Louisa.
> Johnny’s back arched over and over with the force of his retching. Finally, the coughing and convulsing stopped. He almost pitched forward into his own vomit, but somehow he managed to roll over onto his back.
“Oh no you don’t,” said Louisa. “Sit up! Up, up!” She reached for him, and Johnny lifted his arms toward her limply.
She grabbed his wrists and pulled him up roughly. Then she let go of Johnny slowly, waiting to see if he’d collapse again. He didn’t.
“How about you?” Louisa asked me. “You going to lose your lunch, too?”
The fetid stench of vomit filled the air, but my stomach held. “Not me.”
“Hey,” said Johnny, “I missed the basket.”
“You sure did,” I replied. “But you hit damn near everything else.”
“If you think you’re finished,” Louisa said to Johnny, “I’ll go get the bucket and mop.”
“I am ... finished,” Johnny said with the gesture of an umpire calling a runner safe.
“Why the hell,” Louisa said, pinching her nostrils, “did I ever let myself think I was done cleaning up puke?”
“I know where the mop is,” I said. “I’ll go get it.”
“Forget it,” said Louisa, heading toward the stairs. “I’m still in practice.”
She started down the steps, then stopped suddenly. I could hear the attic door creak open.
“I thought I heard something up here.” It was Dr. Dunbar.
Louisa must not have been very drunk, for she seemed to ascend the steps backward without any difficulty. At the top, she continued to back up, situating herself in such a way as to block Dr. Dunbar’s view of his drunken son. She wrapped the cardigan around herself as she did so.
Wearing a hat and overcoat still, the doctor stepped up into the attic. “Celebrating 1963 a little early, are we?” he said with a laugh.
His smile vanished, however, once he saw the overturned baby carriage and smelled the vomit and cigar smoke. Dr. Dunbar peered around Louisa into the darkness, where his son now sat on his haunches under the attic’s low ceiling. “Johnny? What the hell is going on up here?”
“Hap-Pee New Year!” said Johnny.
As if he knew immediately that his son would not be able to provide a coherent explanation for what had happened, Dr. Dunbar turned to Louisa and me.
“I was on my way to get something to clean up the mess,” Louisa said meekly.
That left me to explain, but Johnny saved me by struggling to his feet just in time.
“Are you all right?” Dr. Dunbar asked his son.
“I will be,” Johnny said, listing unsteadily from side to side.
It made me dizzy to watch Johnny teetering, and I had to look away.
Dr. Dunbar walked over to the carriage and lifted it upright. He rolled it back and forth a few feet, as if it were important to make certain it was still operating properly. Then he walked the length of the attic slowly, like a general inspecting his troops. He stopped and stared down at the record player, as if it—rather than the beer cans or brandy bottle or brimming ashtray—would provide some final answer.
He tilted his hat back and then turned abruptly. “I have to drive out to the Preston place. That’s why I came home. Mr. Preston called and said his wife is having abdominal pains. Louisa, can you help Johnny get into bed?”
She nodded.
“And Matthew, you won’t be spending the night here. If you’re not sober enough to walk home, I’ll give you a ride.”
“I can walk,” I said.
“You might want to tell your mother about this little escapade. She’ll hear about it in any case. I’ll be talking to her tomorrow. So think very carefully about what you say.”
“Okay.”
My response must have sounded flippant. “Okay?” the doctor replied. “You’re damn right it’s ‘okay.’ Now get the hell out of here. Your New Year’s celebration is over.”
After the attic’s musty gloom, entering the well-lit halls of the Dunbar house was like stepping into sunlight, and that instant clarity alerted me to the fact that I was drunker than I’d realized. I couldn’t tarry, however. Dr. Dunbar would soon be coming down the stairs, and I had no desire for another confrontation.
I pulled on my overshoes and buttoned my coat as quickly as I could, but when I walked out the door, Dr. Dunbar was already there, standing beside his Chrysler, his medical bag in hand.
“You sure you don’t want a ride, Matt? It’s twenty below.” Although his words were issued in icy little clouds, his tone was more gentle than it had been in the attic.
“That’s okay. It’s not that far.”
“You might think what you were doing tonight was real grown-up, but trust me, it wasn’t. On your walk home you might give some thought not only to what you’ll tell your mother about your shenanigans tonight, but about what it means to be a man. Because judging from tonight’s behavior, Matthew, you have a long way to go. A hell of a long way.”
No doubt the doctor was right. I should have used the distance I had to travel to contemplate the defects in my character. But I had only reached the bottom of the Dunbar’s long driveway when I felt compelled to look back up at the place I had just been banished from.
The house’s Victorian architecture—its chimney, dormers, tower, and turret—gave it a looming, jagged silhouette against the moonlit sky. Most of the windows were dark, but the two tall rectangles that were Johnny’s bedroom windows glowed faintly. I chose to believe that Louisa had left a light on for Johnny so that when the room began to spin like the wheels on a baby carriage he could find a spot to focus on and thereby slow the revolutions.
Dr. Dunbar was right in a sense. I did want to be a man, with all accompanying powers and privileges. But I also wanted Louisa Lindahl to tuck me into bed, and right now that seemed more likely to happen to a little boy.
7.
WHEN MY MOTHER WOKE AT NOON on New Year’s Day, I asked what she’d recommend for a hangover. I didn’t explain why I wanted to know, and she didn’t ask.
“Aspirin and Pepto-Bismol,” she said. “Good for the stomach and for the head.” My mother specialized in practical lessons that helped with the rigors of daily living. Airy, abstract advice on setting life goals or finding happiness was not for her. Aspirin and Pepto-Bismol. That was classic Esther Garth. And asking for her hangover cure constituted my confession of my New Year’s Eve misbehavior. After that, I no longer worried about the doctor’s call. Not that I’d been especially concerned. My mother might well have told the doctor that he could go to hell, and that she didn’t need his or anyone else’s help in raising her son.
But while the prospect of my mother’s anger didn’t distress me, the possibility of never entering the Dunbar home again did. Following my New Year’s Eve expulsion I believed that was quite possible, and as the first days of 1963 came and went with no word from my friend or his family, my anxiety increased. What I felt was more than worry, more like an alteration of my being. In English class we’d just finished a unit on Greek and Roman mythology, and I felt as if I were living my own variation on the myth of Antaeus. I had to be back in the Dunbar home in order not to be diminished.
Fortunately, before a week was out Johnny phoned and invited me to come over. The science project we’d been collaborating on for weeks would soon be due, and we were far from finished.
“I don’t think your dad would appreciate having me around,” I said.
“Nah, he won’t mind. He’s not mad anymore. Besides, he and Mom won’t be here. They’re taking the twins to the Saint Bartholomew’s Carnival.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. Now get your ass over here.”
Despite Johnny’s assurances, I still had my doubts. When I rang the doorbell and Dr. Dunbar answered, I was prepared to be sent back the way I came.
“Come in, Matthew, come in,” he said. “Johnny’s in the kitchen. Or what was the kitchen. I believe it’s been converted to an anatomy lab.”
Nothing in his demeanor suggested that he wasn’t pleased to see me.
Johnny had laid out poster board on the kitchen table, along with paper, clay, colored pencils, small bottles of model car paints, a portable typewriter, scissors, tape, glue, and a few of his father’s medical books. For our project we planned to capitalize on our reputations as doctors-to-be, and depict ways that major organs could fatally malfunction. Johnny was a talented artist, and he’d drawn on the poster a body with arrows and labels listing the location of major organs. I had some skill with modeling clay, and I molded miniatures of a few organs, both healthy and diseased. We planned to glue these to the poster or arrange them on their own cardboard plaques. Labels would offer brief descriptions of the organ and the symptoms and consequences of disease. The project was an elaborate and visual analogue of the thought I’d had when Dr. Dunbar informed me of my father’s death. I know where the spleen is, do you?
“I’ve seen operating rooms that weren’t as messy,” Dr. Dunbar said as we surveyed the kitchen.
Johnny tossed me a lump of clay. “Make me a liver.”
“With or without cirrhosis?”
“With,” Johnny said. “Definitely with.”
“I would think,” said Dr. Dunbar, “that you two would want to avoid that topic. At least in my presence.”
Johnny laughed at the remark.
Mrs. Dunbar came into the kitchen wearing her fur coat. “There’s cold chicken in the fridge. Or heat up a pizza if you’d prefer. I know it’s futile to ask you to clear off the table when you’re finished, but if you could at least leave enough room for us to have breakfast tomorrow that would be much appreciated.”
“Genius,” said Johnny, “likes things messy.”
“Really?” said Mrs. Dunbar. “Well, I’m sure your sisters would prefer not to stare at a model of a perforated bowel while they eat their Cheerios.”
“Genius can’t be rushed either.”
“And did you explain that to Mr. Lannon when he gave you a due date for your project?” asked Dr. Dunbar.
