by Larry Watson
“Let’s just play some cards,” pleaded Otis.
“Hey Matt,” said Johnny, “it’s okay.”
“Yeah, Matt,” said Van Dine, “it’s okay.”
“I changed my mind,” I said. “You either walk out of here now, or I’ll throw you out in the fucking snow.”
One moment the young men in that small kitchen were arranged to play and watch a card game, and the next they were all standing, pushed back toward the wall in order to give the two combatants room. Only Gary Krynicki thought to pick up his chips and put them in his shirt pocket.
Glen Van Dine’s smile altered slightly. “I didn’t think it was up to you who stays and who goes.”
“Wrong.”
Van Dine glanced around the room, looking, no doubt, for allies. But even his younger brother had become a spectator. The room was quiet and still.
“If you guys bust anything,” said Otis, “my ass will be grass.”
Van Dine pointed at me. “Hey, tell him. I was sitting here playing cards when he starts in with this bullshit.”
I had two to three inches and at least twenty pounds on Van Dine, but I didn’t know what that difference would mean once we came to blows. He was four or five years older, and I was never sure exactly what advantages age conferred.
“Why don’t you guys take this out to the garage?” Otis suggested.
“Okay by me,” I said.
To get to the adjoining garage it was necessary to go down three steps, through a heavy door, and then down another step. As if they had been given an order to evacuate, the group headed that way in advance of Van Dine and me.
Johnny and I were the last two leaving the kitchen, and he grabbed my shoulder. “This is stupid, Matt. What the hell is this about, anyway? If you’re doing this for me—”
I shrugged out of his grasp. “Better get out there if you want a good seat,” I said.
“I can fight my own battles, you know.”
What was I supposed to say to that? No, Johnny, you can’t? This is my battle as much as it is yours? I didn’t respond, and just kept walking toward the garage.
Starting in grade school, I’d developed a reputation as someone who wasn’t afraid to mix it up, and over the years I’d had more than my share of scuffles and fistfights. But what others might have seen as aggression on my part was in truth closer to impatience. When it looked as though a fight was imminent, I almost always wanted to get right to it. This probably was another example of what Dr. Dunbar had called getting ahead of my skates, but somehow suspense was harder for me to handle than a punch in the jaw.
Glen Van Dine was standing by the open door to the garage, where cold air, concrete, and a group of bloodthirsty males waited. “What do you say?” he said. “This is your last chance to eat your next meal with your own teeth.”
His line sounded scripted, and I guessed he was losing his enthusiasm for what was coming.
I thrust my middle finger in his face.
As I pushed past him, he threw a punch. The doorframe restricted his swing, and as a result, he hit me with a clumsy, weak forearm on the side of the head, more of a clubbing push than a blow.
He drew back to hit me again, but I was close and quick enough to grab his arm before he could throw the punch. I pulled him toward me, and the two of us stumbled into the garage, scrabbling across the oil-spotted floor.
Still holding tight to his wrist, I gained some purchase and spun him around as if I were doing the hammer throw. I flung him as hard as I could in the direction of a wall hung with garden implements, and it occurred to me that he might grab one of them and use it as weapon. But when Glen Van Dine fell backward and landed hard on the concrete, the fight was instantly over.
His arm breaking sounded like an icicle being snapped off an awning.
Van Dine grabbed his left arm and instantly cradled it to his body. “Fuck!” he exclaimed. “Goddamn it! Fuck!”
Some of the boys in the garage had been Boy Scouts and would have known how to make splints or fashion slings, but it was Johnny and I who rushed forward to attend to Glen Van Dine and his injury. Van Dine continued with a string of softly whispered curses.
Johnny gently moved Van Dine’s hand out of the way, so we could examine the injured arm. Johnny looked up at me and said the same word his father had spoken when he showed us the x-rays of Eugene Flint’s broken leg. “Angulation.”
Yes, indeed. It was not a compound fracture—the skin was not punctured—but the break was bad, and the displacement of bone had left Glen Van Dine’s forearm looking like a roller coaster track.
Johnny reached into his pocket for his car keys and handed them to me. “You want to pull the car into the driveway? We have to take him to Dad.”
10.
GLEN VAN DINE VOICED NO OBJECTION to Johnny and me staying in the room while Dr. Dunbar assessed and repaired his broken arm. In fact, from the way Glen kept glaring at me I guessed he might have thought that my having to watch would serve as punishment for what I’d done to him. But when I did finally decide to leave the clinic, neither guilt nor squeamishness had anything to do with it. Quite the opposite. My anger at Glen Van Dine was still running hot, but his injury had cheated me of the satisfaction I would have taken in beating the shit out of him.
I walked out of the clinic, but contrary to what I’d told Johnny and the doctor, I didn’t set out for home. Instead, I wandered from room to room through the first floor of the darkened Dunbar home, still energized by the adrenaline that had fueled my fight with Glen Van Dine. On one of my circuits I passed the wide central staircase. She’s up there, I thought. Up two flights and down a narrow hall, there was her room. I could find my way there without a single light to guide me. Would she wake when I stood in the doorway and whispered her name? Or did she sleep with the door closed? Would she answer when I softly knocked? And when I told her what I had done that night, how I had broken a man’s arm because he insulted her, would Louisa Lindahl take me into her bed in gratitude?
But of course I couldn’t climb those stairs. Louisa Lindahl was sleeping in another man’s home. I was blameless as long as I remained where I was, but I would be a trespasser if I were to climb to her floor.
So I kept circling, though my spirit was baying like a hound. Come down, Louisa! Come down to me!
A few years earlier, on one of the many occasions when I slept over at the Dunbars’, I woke in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. Now, when this happened at home, in our house so small it seemed as if every corner could be touched by stretching out an arm, my wakefulness sometimes turned to fear, and I’d lie there nervously, listening hard to make certain that what I was hearing were natural creaks and sighs—the walls and joists settling themselves, the wind rattling a window frame—and not an intruder, as improbable as that was. The fact that I was the man of the house probably accounted for my anxiety. But that night at the Dunbars’, fear didn’t accompany my insomnia, and after a few minutes I got out of bed and left Johnny’s bedroom to roam through the softly shadowed spaces of that grand house. As long as I stayed out of the rooms where Dr. and Mrs. Dunbar or the twins slept, I had the house to myself.
It was a winter night, and the falling snow made it feel as if the house and I were adrift together on a vast, calm sea. Mrs. Dunbar had left on a few low-wattage lights—a small table lamp in the living room, a sconce in the dining room, a tiny bulb in a candlestick type of fixture on the telephone table—and that night these lights seemed there for no purpose other than to light my way from room to room. I went from window to window, parting the heavy brocade curtains in order to look out, and while I couldn’t see another light that had human activity as its source, every snowflake seemed to find some source of illumination in its descent.
Eventually I settled in a parlor on the main floor, where earlier the entire family—the Dunbar family plus Matthew Garth, that is—had gathered before a small fireplace to take in the doctor’s stories of how deep the snows o
f his childhood had drifted, and how far into spring the lakes and rivers remained locked in ice. With the room to myself that night, I sat in the big overstuffed armchair that the doctor had occupied, and tried to situate myself in the chair such that my boy’s body could feel and fill the indentations Dr. Dunbar’s weight had made in the cushions.
I remained in that parlor for a long time, listening to the Dunbar house’s sounds—less familiar to me than my own, yet none in the least frightening. I wasn’t hungry and I wasn’t thirsty. I wasn’t cold or tired. I wanted nothing, and I wanted for nothing....
Eventually I went back up to Johnny’s room and the twin bed waiting for me. No one ever knew of my nocturnal prowl. My body’s warmth would have left that chair long before the next person sat in it. But I was there nonetheless.
And so this night, when I finally turned away from the staircase leading up to Louisa Lindahl’s bedroom, I wandered back to that same parlor. I sank into that same chair, exactly where Dr. Dunbar had been sitting in his robe and pajamas when we’d walked into the house with the injured Glen Van Dine. The book he’d been reading rested on the table, next to his ashtray and his Chesterfields. The embers of the fire that had warmed the doctor’s slippered feet glowed faintly. While I watched, the nub of a log burned through and broke in half, spraying sparks harmlessly onto the blackened bricks.
But what if a spark should fly too far and land on the rug nearby, I thought? Smoldering there unnoticed, it would soon flare into flame. Then the house would be ablaze, and everyone inside would have to flee. Louisa would run from the burning mansion ... into my rescuing arms. Try as I might, however, I couldn’t imagine the realization of this fantasy. Not least, I suppose, because it would have necessitated the destruction of the building that I loved more than any other, and in which I felt more at ease than in my own home.
Frustrated, confused, and precariously balanced between incompatible impulses, I fell asleep in the doctor’s chair.
Just as I had on the night my father died, I woke to the sound of Dr. Dunbar saying my name as he shook me awake.
“Matthew? It’s almost three o’clock. Would you like to go upstairs and lie down in Johnny’s room?”
Dr. Dunbar stood over me, smoking one of the Chesterfields from the package on the table. He was still in his pajamas, but over them he wore the white lab coat he always changed into upon entering the clinic.
I sat up straight and tried to focus. In the fireplace there were only ashes. The parlor’s chill was palpable. But I had barely registered the lack of heat when, as if it could discern my needs, the furnace clicked on with its customary thunk and sigh.
I looked past the doctor. “Where’s ... ?”
“Johnny went up to bed a while ago. Glen’s in the clinic. The heat lamp is drying the plaster of his cast. He’s in and out of sleep. He wanted to go home, but I insisted he stay here for the night. That was a nasty dislocation fracture. The ulna and the radius.”
He sat down on the footstool. “Does your mother know where you are?”
I nodded. It wasn’t a lie. If she looked in my room and saw I wasn’t in my bed, she’d assume I was here. And that assumption was almost always right.
“Glen didn’t slip on the ice, did he?” asked the doctor.
“He fell—”
“—Don’t, Matt. Don’t say it. Johnny told me what happened. Glen fell all right. With your help.”
“I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
“Didn’t you.” The doctor turned and flipped his cigarette butt into the fireplace. “Johnny also told me what started the fight. I don’t know whether I should thank you or spank you. But I have to say, I’m leaning toward the latter. What’s gotten into you, Matt? The drinking, the brawling. This isn’t the Matthew Garth I know.”
What had gotten into me? Why, surely the doctor recognized the symptoms of Louisa Lindahl fever?
“Some of the things he said ... He had no right.”
“And now you’ve taken it upon yourself to determine what people have or haven’t a right to say? That’s awfully self-important, isn’t it?”
He didn’t expect answers to these questions.
“I’m capable,” Dr. Dunbar went on, “of defending myself against the Glen Van Dines of this world. And so is Miss Lindahl.”
I couldn’t help but notice that he hadn’t included Johnny among those who could take care of themselves.
“But most of the time,” he continued, “no defense is necessary. Stupid people say stupid things, and both the people and their words are generally ignored or quickly forgotten.”
Dr. Dunbar was offering me a variation on the gentleman’s code of conduct, the same code Louisa had mocked. And in this case, I was with her. Far from being ignored, stupid things were usually remembered very well. And endlessly repeated.
He ducked his head down to look up into my eyes. “I’m not fond of having these talks, Matt. It hasn’t been that long since the last one. Is any of what I’m saying sinking in? Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“I understand.”
“And?”
“I understand.”
He waited for more, but I had nothing else to say. The doctor flicked an invisible substance from the sleeve of his lab coat, then stood abruptly. “If you’re going home, you better leave now. Your mother might worry.” Dr. Dunbar turned his back to me, picked up a poker, and jabbed at the ashes of that dead fire.
The light snow that was falling earlier had stopped, but the temperature had kept on dropping. The packed snow creaked with each step. And as I walked my irritation persisted. It isn’t fair, I thought, it isn’t fair! I was walking home in the cold while Glen Van Dine slept under the same roof as Louisa Lindahl. It wasn’t fair!
11.
JOHNNY PUNCHED THE AUTOMATIC TRANSMISSION button, shifting the car into neutral. Then he gunned the car’s engine. At the stoplight next to us was a customized ’49 Ford, into which its owner, Chuck Killion, had dropped a powerful non-stock engine. Chuck had also painted the Ford a red that at night looked like the color of blood.
Johnny put the car back in drive, and when the light turned green, he stomped on the accelerator. His father’s Chrysler Imperial had 413 horses under the hood, but the car still hesitated a moment before the tires took hold on the winter-wet pavement. But within a block, we were doing fifty and picking up speed. Chuck’s Ford was right beside us, so close that if he and I rolled down our windows, we could have shaken hands.
Up and down the street, car horns began to honk, the signal teenagers in our town gave to indicate a race was on. We were speeding east on Chippewa Avenue, four traffic lanes that paralleled the Northern Pacific tracks from one end of Willow Falls to the other. Chippewa was lined with stores, businesses, and eateries, and the glow of their neon signs doubled off their plate glass windows. Because of its length, it was the street that the town’s teenagers cruised to relieve their boredom. But after a few circuits, that activity could become boring, too. To make it less so, impromptu drag races broke out, taunts and threats were tossed from car to car, girls were beseeched to leave their cars and climb into others, and everyone was importuned for information about the location of parties.
This was a scene similar to those depicted countless times in movies and television, to be sure, but while Chuck Killion’s car was right for its part, no filmmaker in his right mind would have cast the doctor’s car—black, sleek, finned, and as long as a limousine—in this role. And in spite of the power of the Chrysler’s engine, Johnny Dunbar never raced on Chippewa Avenue. He was a cautious, responsible driver, and he was also critical—we both were—of our contemporaries who lived to hear their engines roar and their tires squeal. As it was, I knew more about horsepower, cubic inches, and carburetors than I’d ever cared to learn, but the simple fact of the matter was that in our town, knowing which boys had the hottest cars was as natural as knowing who the best-looking girls were, or how the Willow Falls Warriors had fared
recently.
Yet there we were, Johnny gripping the steering wheel tight while the Chrysler approached the traffic signal at the Sixth Street intersection with the speedometer’s needle inching over fifty. The light turned yellow, but neither Johnny nor Chuck slowed. Yellow flashed to red, and only then did Johnny and Chuck Killion hit their brakes. The Chrysler dipped and swayed and its brakes squealed, but we finally slid to a stop.
“Okay,” I said. “That was interesting. Though I don’t know what the fucking point was.”
Johnny didn’t answer. To our right was Sandor’s Mobil, much favored by the town’s young drivers because gas there was always slightly cheaper than at any other station. Off to our left was Giff’s Drive-In, where many of the town’s teenagers docked when they ran out of gas money or tired of driving Chippewa Avenue.
Ordinarily we would have surveyed the lot at Giff’s, looking for familiar faces or cars. But this time Johnny just stared straight ahead down the avenue’s length, his hands clamped to the steering wheel. Next to us, Chuck Killion revved the Ford’s engine. “We’re not finished?” I asked Johnny.
He didn’t answer. The light turned green, and Chuck Killion jumped away from the intersection, having an advantage because of his Ford’s floor-mounted four-speed. But Johnny pushed the gas pedal to the floor, and the Chrysler quickly closed the gap.
We passed Bonnie O’Brien, driving her parents’ Chevrolet station wagon, the vehicle full of our female classmates. We sped past Billy Woodyard in his black Volkswagen, and he bleated his horn as we went by. He probably didn’t even know who was in the Chrysler.
We raced through the town’s last traffic light doing fifty. Johnny passed an old humpbacked Hudson driven by an elderly man who was so startled by the black-asnight Chrysler flashing past that he almost swerved off the road.
The last of Willow Falls’ businesses was on the right—Kendall’s Automotive Supply, with its black stacks of traded-in tires behind a high chain-link fence. It was the last business within the city limits. And it was here that Chippewa Avenue became a country road.
