American Boy

by Larry Watson

  The Ford was in the lead until Chuck Killion suddenly slowed, his engine growling as he geared down. In the meantime, Johnny was going over sixty on a street with a thirty-five mile-per-hour speed limit.

  “Why don’t you count this as a win,” I said, “and slow the fuck down.”

  But Johnny didn’t let up on the gas, and having left the last of the streetlights behind at Kendall’s, we sped on into the darkness. Tree trunks and fence posts close to the road, black against the snow, flashed by like iron bars. The road ran ruler-straight for a stretch, before curving south and crossing the railroad tracks. I gripped the armrest tightly, but Johnny kept the Chrysler under control through the curve. Had a train been coming he wouldn’t have been able to do a damn thing to avoid a collision. As it was, we bumped over the rails with a jolt that rattled my teeth.

  We’d traveled about a mile out of Willow Falls. I knew this because I recognized a set of familiar lights and structures up ahead. If Johnny didn’t turn, we’d enter the parking lot of Northland Screens.

  The town’s only industry, Northland was a manufacturer of door and window screens. The factory had once run shifts around the clock, but the business had been in decline for a decade, and of its reduced number of employees, none stayed past six o’clock. And so Northland’s lot was completely deserted when Johnny roared across its blacktop. Then, for no reason I could discern, he hit the brakes and cranked the Chrysler’s steering wheel hard to the left. The tires screamed against the asphalt. The car slid sideways, and if the surface had not been perfectly flat, we likely would have flipped over. “Shit,” Johnny muttered softly.

  My father and I had not been close, and among the reasons was his employment at Northland. He fitted screens to wooden frames—his endlessly repeated joke was, “lucky I didn’t strain myself today”—on the four-to-midnight shift, so he was asleep when I got up in the morning, off to work when I returned from school, and there throughout the evening. Even on the weekends he was often with his buddies from Northland. Hunting or fishing were their announced activities, but according to my mother, those were simply excuses to drink beer and tear around the countryside. Somehow my diminishing memories of my father had matched Northland’s shrinking fortunes over the years.

  But I thought of him now for only an instant, just before the car finally stopped so close to a loading dock that I could see the splinters in its wood and the rust on its steel frame. The factory’s windows reflected the night blankly. Then I leaned across the seat and punched Johnny hard in the shoulder.

  “Asshole,” I said.

  Johnny slumped against his door, exhausted but elated. “What—you’re the only one who can act like a crazy reckless bastard?”

  “You could’ve gotten me killed.”

  “I thought of that. At one point I felt like I was sitting in the backseat watching what I was doing. Anyway, we probably wouldn’t have died. I mean, if we got into an accident.”

  “We probably wouldn’t have died? Jesus!”

  “I wanted to see what it was like!”

  “You wanted to see what what was like?”

  “You know, to take a risk. To not give a shit. Like the way you must have felt when you walked out to the garage with Van Dine.”

  “I was just pissed. That’s all.”

  Mercury-vapor lights mounted on the roofline of Northland Screens shone into the car, turning Johnny’s face a green so pale it was almost white. The ruddy blotches on his cheeks showed up as shadows. But the spectral light was a lie; he had never looked so alive. “Man, I wanted to stop so damn bad,” he said. “So I just kept making myself go, go, go.”

  “That should tell you something. People who do this stuff don’t have to make themselves go. They have to make themselves stop.”

  “Yeah, well, I couldn’t have done this with the Valiant. Six cylinders sort of makes the decision for you.”

  I didn’t remind him that cars were hardly the only means available for risky behavior.

  “Hey, I forgot to tell you,” he said. “Louisa asked if we want her to buy beer again.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Is she running short on cash?”

  “I don’t know why that bothered you so much. Rick Rizner charged us a couple times.”

  “I guess I wanted her to do it out of the goodness of her heart. So what did you tell her?”

  “That I’d ask you. But that probably we did.”

  “And does she want to help us drink the beer again?”

  “I think so. She gets pretty bored sitting around the house.”

  “How about this Saturday night?” I suggested.

  “Why not Friday?” countered Johnny.

  “Because I think I can get out of work on Saturday, but not Friday. They’re having a big goddamn banquet. A fiftieth wedding anniversary or something.”

  Johnny nodded. “Mr. and Mrs. Angleton. I heard my folks talking about it. Dad said it better be a quiet celebration or Mr. Angleton is likely to keel over from a heart attack. But Mrs. Angleton, he said, looks like she could go fifty more with a new husband.”

  “If Louisa wants to come with us,” I said, “we should find someplace to go. Someplace other than the car, I mean.” My mother would be working Saturday night, but I didn’t mention our place as a possibility. Although I believed Louisa’s origins and ambitions brought her closer to me than to Johnny, I didn’t want her to see where I lived.

  “You didn’t like my choice last time? Too many memories of parking there with Debbie?”

  “We should go someplace where she would be more comfortable. Where she’d relax.” I might have broken Glen Van Dine’s arm for his crude remarks about Louisa Lindahl, but that didn’t mean I didn’t believe them.

  “I know just the place,” said Johnny.

  “Where?”

  “You’ll see. It’ll be a surprise. For both of you.” Johnny put the Chrysler in gear and accelerated slowly away from the loading dock.

  “And I’d appreciate it if you’d keep it under fifty this time.”

  “Don’t worry,” Johnny said with a smile. “That was just a phase I was going through.”

  Northland’s owner, Stanley Wine, still lived in Willow Falls. And every year he promised the town that the factory would soon increase production and add shifts again. But it never happened. And in this regard, too, the factory reminded me of my father. He had often told me about what we were going to do together—fish, hunt, bowl, what have you—and when I was young the fact that we never actually did any of these things only added luster to his promises. He’ll teach me, I thought, and then I’ll be able to cast a line to exactly where the biggest fish drifted.... And together we would, we would ... But when it came right down to it, we never did any of those things.

  Johnny wheeled the big car back onto the highway, leaving Northland Screens and its high brick walls, blind windows, and motionless assembly line where no fathers were working.

  12.

  I WAS NEEDED FOR THE BANQUET, all right. In fact, so many people showed up to celebrate the Angletons’ anniversary that Phil Palmer could have hired an extra ten people that night and still been shorthanded. His biggest mistake was allowing guests to order off the menu rather than simply giving everyone a slab of prime rib or a few pieces of baked chicken. The cooks, waitresses, and busboys hustled to keep up, and only the bartender’s speed and generous pours (on Mr. Palmer’s orders) kept the guests from noticing, or at least complaining about, how long it was taking for their orders to be taken, their water glasses to be refilled, their meals to be delivered, or their tables to be cleared. The night was cold, but because Mr. Angleton’s circulation was poor, the heat had to be turned up, and we were all sweating as if it were the Fourth of July.

  By ten thirty everyone had been fed, and the help had cleared out of the dining area so the testimonials to the Angletons’ long marriage could begin. The smells of cooked meat—steaks, chops, chicken, and fish—were replaced with the smoky odor of cigarettes, ci
gars, and pipe tobacco. The clink and scrape of knives, forks, and china plates fell silent. A podium and microphone were set up in a corner, and the various speakers trooped up, first to tell a few jokes about the miseries of married life and then to drone on about what inspiring examples the Angletons were.

  By this time I’d hung up my apron and stuck my clipon bow tie in my pocket. Another busboy and I were standing by the open kitchen door, cooling off and sneaking a smoke, when Phil Palmer burst in.

  “Matthew, go help Mrs. Knurr with her husband. He’s outside the men’s room and he’s hurt his back or something.”

  Phil Palmer was not an unreasonably demanding or bad-tempered employer, but it generally was wise to obey his orders—and immediately. I flicked my cigarette out into the snow and hurried off.

  Mr. Knurr, a Willow Falls attorney, was right where Phil Palmer said he’d be, leaning against the wall outside the men’s room. His wife Beverly was holding onto him, bracing her weight against him in an attempt to keep her husband from sliding to the floor.

  “Mr. Palmer said you could use some help,” I offered.

  “You’re Esther Garth’s boy?” asked Mrs. Knurr.

  I wondered briefly why my identity mattered under the circumstances. Her grasp on her husband’s suit coat seemed so desperate, temporary, and uncertain that she was in no position to refuse any offer of assistance. “Yes ma’am.”

  Mr. Knurr raised his massive bald head to look in the direction of my voice. His small, close-set eyes briefly focused and then went blank again, as if a second was all he needed to determine that I was not worth the effort.

  “My husband,” said Mrs. Knurr, “has a chronic back condition. He can’t predict when it will give out on him. Which is obviously what has happened.”

  A first grader could have discerned Norbert Knurr’s true condition. He was so drunk he couldn’t stand, much less walk. “Obviously,” I replied.

  “I need to get him to the car. And then home to bed.”

  Mr. Knurr was a large man, and I had doubts about our ability to transport him. I was about to suggest to Mrs. Knurr that I recruit the help of another busboy when she said, “If you’ll grab hold of him on the other side, I believe we can manage.”

  And manage we did. Mr. Knurr gave no sign of knowing what was happening, yet somehow he was able to help us help him. While Mrs. Knurr and I supported his weight, he took quick little steps, almost as if he were on wheels, and the three of us exited Palmer’s and moved rapidly across the parking lot to the Knurrs’ black Lincoln Continental. We folded him into the backseat, and I made sure none of Mr. Knurr’s appendages were sticking out before slamming the Lincoln’s heavy door.

  “Can you watch him for a moment,” Mrs. Knurr asked, “while I go back for our coats?”

  I assented, then shivered in my shirtsleeves while she went back into Palmer’s.

  She returned shortly, wearing her fur coat and carrying Mr. Knurr’s topcoat over her arm. She held out the keys to the Lincoln. “Do you mind driving?”

  “I’m still on the job,” I said. “I should go back in.”

  “I spoke to Mr. Palmer. He knows you’re assisting me.” She jingled the keys. “Please? I won’t be able to get him into the house without help.”

  I took the keys and opened the passenger door for her.

  As I drove out of the parking lot of Palmer’s Supper Club, I had a new understanding of Johnny’s impromptu race with Chuck Killion. Like the Chrysler, the Lincoln floated so effortlessly over the streets that you felt there was nothing you couldn’t ask of a big car like that. Even the risks I had accused Johnny of taking seemed reduced once I was steering one of those boats myself. Looking out over the Lincoln’s hood was like looking across a football field, and it felt as if nothing could harm us once the heavy doors had thunked shut. At the first stoplight, I actually thought the engine had died, so softly did it thrum.

  When the light turned green, I resisted the temptation to press hard on the gas and instead accelerated slowly across the intersection. Mrs. Knurr pushed in the cigarette lighter, and when it popped out, she lit a Marlboro. She inhaled so deeply and exhaled with such force that smoke billowed across the windshield. For a moment, the smell of cigarette smoke displaced the smell of Mrs. Knurr’s perfume, Mr. Knurr’s cigars, and the bourbon that both of them drank.

  “You’re the young man who’s been working with Dr. Dunbar, isn’t that right?”

  “Dr. Dunbar has been teaching me some medicine.”

  “Are you hoping to make medicine your career?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “I thought so. That’s why I asked for you. With Norbert’s back being the way it is, I wanted someone who wasn’t going to treat him like a sack of potatoes.”

  Right on cue, Mr. Knurr moaned from the backseat.

  I asked Mrs. Knurr, “Do you think we should take him to Dr. Dunbar?”

  “For now let’s just get him to bed. If that’s not the answer, then we can take other steps.” She turned the heater up. “You must be freezing in that thin shirt. Do you want Norbert’s coat?”

  “I’m okay.”

  The Knurrs lived in a rambling brick ranch house in Rocky Run Acres, an expensive new housing development on Willow Falls’ west side. Before the houses went up, my friends and I would bike out here in the summer, racing up and down the low tawny hills, confident that even if we lost our balance we wouldn’t be hurt since any fall would only tumble us into the switchgrass, bluestem, and Indian grass growing in every direction. And in the winter we dragged our sleds out here and flew down the slopes without worrying about hitting a tree or boulder.

  I drove up the Knurrs’ long driveway and pulled the car into the garage alongside a powder blue Ford Falcon, the Lincoln’s smaller mate and no doubt the car that Mrs. Knurr usually drove, like Mrs. Dunbar’s Valiant.

  Together we hauled Mr. Knurr from the backseat, but by now his wheels barely rolled. His eyes were still open, but he couldn’t support his own weight. Mrs. Knurr and I half-carried, half-dragged him through the house, and when we finally got him into the bedroom we were both out of breath.

  We laid him faceup on the bed, and I slipped off his wing tips while Mrs. Knurr loosened her husband’s tie. I made a move to take off his suit coat, thinking I would proceed to his trousers, but Mrs. Knurr said, “Let’s leave him. If I have to transport him to the doctor I don’t want to have to dress him again.”

  “Dr. Dunbar makes house calls,” I said defensively.

  She smiled. “With all due respect to your Dr. Dunbar, I meant a back specialist. At a hospital.” She motioned for us to leave the room. “But right now Norbert needs to sleep.”

  Throughout this conversation, Norbert said nothing and gave no sign that he comprehended any of what was happening. But his eyes, his tiny dark eyes, sunk deep in his piggy face, remained open. For the first time, I considered the possibility that it truly was his back and not bourbon that had him incapacitated.

  On our way out of the room, I said, “Sciatica?”

  Mrs. Knurr looked at me, puzzled. “Beg pardon?”

  I was only trying to demonstrate my willingness to go along with the pretense. “Is that his back problem? Sciatica?”

  “You’ve certainly been paying attention in class.”

  “Dr. Dunbar has been treating George Ginn for sciatica.”

  “You’re not supposed to reveal that, are you? Isn’t that part of the physician’s oath?”

  I felt myself blush.

  “I’m only teasing you,” said Mrs. Knurr. We were in the living room now, and she asked, “Do you mind staying for just a bit? If Norbert gets worse, I’ll need your help moving him.”

  “Okay.”

  She switched on a lamp beside a brocade couch that was longer than any I’d ever seen. She tossed her fur coat on one end of the couch, and I sat on the other. She was also wearing a short wool jacket, and she took that off as well.

  “Can I get you something?�
�� Mrs. Knurr asked. “A Coke? Or I could make some cocoa? For this cold winter night?”

  “No, thanks.”

  For a long moment, Mrs. Knurr stood silently before me. In only slight ways was she dressed any differently from the other women at the banquet, but those differences were significant. Her strapless cocktail dress, a deep burgundy with a faintly iridescent sheen, was cut lower and tighter than any other woman’s. And Mrs. Knurr had the kind of voluptuous figure very much in vogue at that time—the shape men mimed by carving an hourglass in the air. I couldn’t imagine any other woman in Willow Falls displaying as much cleavage as Mrs. Knurr. In addition to her curvy body, she had a wide mouth, full lips, large dark eyes, and high cheekbones. She stood there before me, almost as if she were encouraging me to stare at her without interruption.

  But I was a teenager, and she was in her forties. She had shoulder-length hair so black it had to be dyed. Her makeup was thickly applied—especially her lipstick, which was a bright crimson, while the girls my age were painting their lips pale that year. Her flesh, tanned even in winter, had begun to take on a leathery look. Her features were oddly flattened and misshapen, and her smile only put things further off-kilter. If the word “blowsy” had been part of my seventeen-year-old vocabulary, I would have attached it to Beverly Knurr.

  Mrs. Knurr finally broke her pose, and if she’d stood perfectly still while allowing me to look her over, now her steps were unsteady as she retrieved her purse from on top of a stereo housed in a coffin-sized mahogany cabinet. She lit another Marlboro, then held the pack out to me. “Cigarette?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Would you like a drink?”

  “No.”

  She smiled. “I understand. How could you possibly answer yes to that question. But if you’ll excuse me ...”