American Boy

by Larry Watson

  He stood, stamped his feet into his overshoes, and jammed his arms into his coat. He stared at me for a long moment. On the rare occasions when Johnny Dunbar was mad, his usually ruddy cheeks became blotched with white, as if anger pulled his flesh so tight that bone showed through. “Fine,” he said. “It’s your own fucking funeral.”

  “Then we should throw a shovel in the trunk.”

  He opened the door before I’d finished buttoning my coat. “Since when did you become the voice of reason?”

  We stepped out into the storm. The snow on the porch was already three feet deep, and the top of the drift had been carved sharp by the wind. We hunched and turned our heads away from the icy sting of wind and snow. I shouted my reply to Johnny. “Weird, isn’t it? It must be a new phase I’m going through.”

  17.

  FOR A TIME IT LOOKED AS IF MRS. DUNBAR’S prediction would prove to be correct. As Johnny drove us up out of the valley, the snow did seem to be diminishing. The air actually lightened, almost as if a window shade had been raised. The road was relatively clear, scoured free of snow by the same wind that had drifted over the streets of Willow Falls.

  But then the road climbed and curved, and we were above and beyond the hills and trees that had temporarily sheltered us. On the prairie there was nothing to block the wind, and gusts rocked the car. The snow came at us in great swirling bursts.

  Johnny clung determinedly to the steering wheel. The defroster worked hard, but was losing the battle with the multiplying frost stars that crept down the glass. The snow was of the drier variety, which allowed the wipers to keep the windshield clear.

  There were no other cars on the highway, and this was a good thing, since the shoulder and center lines had been erased. Where the snow had succeeded in spilling out of the ditch, drifts crossed the road, and Johnny had no choice but to charge through them. The car hit them with a whumpf, and each time it did I expected the car to gasp and come to a halt.

  We’re not going to make it, I thought. And when our frozen bodies are finally discovered, would anyone think to attribute our deaths to the same cause as Lester Huston’s?

  Johnny must have had similar thoughts. We were barely ten miles out of Willow Falls when he leaned forward and hunched over the steering wheel. “I can’t do this.”

  “Sure you can,” I said. “Just keep your head down and plow ahead. One mile at a time. We’ll get there.”

  “I’m pulling over. We can walk to a farm or something.”

  “What farm? I don’t know about you, but I can’t see across the road.”

  “We can come back for the car tomorrow. Or later today if this lets up.”

  “What about all those stories about farmers who got lost walking out to their own goddamn barn during a blizzard? No, man, you’ve got to keep going.”

  “I can’t, Matt. I mean it.”

  “Slow down if you need to. But keep moving.”

  Johnny shifted his hands nervously on the wheel. “I’m pulling over....”

  “You can’t. We might never get going again.”

  “ ... Then you can drive. I can’t do this.”

  “Fine. But don’t pull over too far.”

  Johnny found a spot where the wind had swept the side of the road clear for ten yards, and he eased the Valiant to the shoulder. When the car stopped it seemed less a consequence of Johnny’s application of the brakes and more a loss of mechanical will, as if the vehicle itself had realized it was no match for nature’s forces.

  Johnny opened his door, jumped out as quickly as he could, and slammed the door. I slid over behind the steering wheel. For a brief moment I was alone in the car, and in that instant power and possibility and risk rushed through me. What if I put the car in gear and hit the gas, leaving Johnny snow-blind and freezing on the side of the road? The blizzard probably would have covered my tracks.

  This fleeting feeling was strangely similar to something I’d experienced a few years earlier, when I was tramping around in Frenchman’s Forest. On a late spring day I’d found myself in trouble in school for talking back to Mr. Gordon, who taught eighth-grade science. I’d been walking down the hall on my way to class when Morris McGill, a big stupid farm kid with a reputation for cheerful cruelty, stepped on my foot. He did it deliberately and for no good reason—he was next to me, I was wearing sneakers, and he was wearing boots. When Morris lifted his foot to repeat the act, I shoved him hard against a locker, and Mr. Gordon witnessed my retaliation. “You might have split his skull open,” he said. Without thinking I replied, “A horse could kick him in the head and it wouldn’t dent that skull.” That was enough for Mr. Gordon. He marched me down to the principal’s office, where he said, “Mr. Lucas knows how to deal with hoodlums like you.” As it turned out, Mr. Lucas wasn’t there that afternoon, but the secretary wrote out a summons (that was her term for the appointment slip) for me to return the following morning before school in order to speak with the principal. To make sure I didn’t “forget” the meeting, she said she’d call my parents. Then I made matters worse by correcting her. “Parent,” I said. “I’m down to one.” Before she sent me on my way she told me she’d add smart aleck to the list of offenses to be reported to Mr. Lucas.

  Rather than go directly home after school that day, I headed for Frenchman’s Forest. There, I knew, I’d have an hour or two of solitude, time to calm down and to nurture the self-pity that so often trails in anger’s wake.

  I walked aimlessly, and because I was not determined to remain within the confines of the forest, I soon stepped into an open field. I stood at the bottom of a grassy hill. A few horses grazed nearby, but no owner was visible. Nor could I see a house, stable, or fence line. I wondered why those animals didn’t leave. Why not head for the open prairie and its freedom?

  I’d never been on a horse that wasn’t saddled, but that didn’t prevent me from briefly entertaining a fantasy of climbing bareback on one of those horses and galloping off. The thought was enough. Suddenly it was easier to do what I was going to do anyway: return home, tell my mother about my upcoming meeting with Mr. Lucas, and walk into his office the next morning.

  As it turned out, Mr. Lucas wasn’t particularly interested in me or my violation of school decorum, and he said little to me beyond, “Don’t do something like this on school grounds.” Which I took to mean that I could do anything I wanted to Morris off school grounds.

  I gripped the steering wheel hard and turned my head to the side when Johnny opened the passenger door. Winter rushed in behind him.

  “Jesus Christ!” he said, gasping as if he hadn’t been out in open country, but underwater. “It’s like getting shot with a BB gun!”

  I wiped my hand through the snow that had dusted the dashboard in the seconds the door was open. “And above the waist is legal,” I said. That was a reference to one of our youthful activities in Frenchman’s Forest. Johnny and I and a few of our friends used to have BB gun fights in amongst the trees, and there was one clear rule: aiming above the waist was “illegal.” In spite of our heavy denims, getting hit in the legs or butt could sting like hell and raise a welt. Still, that was our rule.

  “You ready?” I asked Johnny, punching the transmission button for Drive. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  We were able to make progress through the snowstorm due to a number of factors. A recent summer road crew had painted a fresh center dividing line, and its dashes revealed themselves just often enough for me to be sure I was staying on the right side of the road. A farmer had strung his wire fence close enough to the road that the fence posts occasionally showed through the blowing snow. Another farmer had planted a shelterbelt of trees, presenting me with an extra fifty yards of vision. And then the telephone company’s wires ran along the highway at intervals, and those creosote-coated poles were black enough to steer me away from the ditch.

  Also, a driver, and I doubt there was more than one, who had driven that stretch of road before me, did so recently enough th
at I could sometimes see the faint impressions of his tire tracks, heartening proof not only that this highway could be traversed, but also that Johnny and I were not the only ones crazy, foolish, or duty-bound enough to be out in the storm.

  And then finally, the wind that had blown so pitilessly all day began to lose some of its energy and malice, and gradually, gradually, after close to two hours on the road, I could see seventy-five, a hundred, two hundred yards ahead, so that by the time we were within five miles of Bellamy I increased our speed to fifty miles per hour, which was double what we’d been doing. At last the car’s speedometer matched the urgency we’d been feeling since we drove away from the Dunbars’. As if our lightened spirits could affect nature, the western horizon began to brighten and the faintest blue pushed its way through the iron sky. The sun would soon set, but at least it wasn’t lost to us for good.

  “Looks like maybe the drive back will be easier,” said Johnny. Those were the first words he spoke since I’d taken over the driving.

  My hands had turned to claws on the steering wheel. I took one hand off the wheel and then the other, shaking each in turn and flexing my fingers. “Jesus, are you ready for another trip already?”

  “I just meant ... oh, shit. I don’t know what I meant. What if we can’t find them? We’ll have to turn around and head back.”

  “We’ll find them.”

  “We could’ve passed right by them and never seen them. If they slid off the road they could be in a ditch and—”

  “—I said we’ll find them.”

  And yet for all his worry and concern, once we caught sight of the doctor’s car, Johnny wasn’t ready to admit it.

  One of the first businesses on the edge of Bellamy, right where the speed limit dropped to thirty-five, was the Wagon Wheel Motor Inn. For an instant the office and cabins—all painted white—looked like part of the snowy landscape. But neither the snow nor the frost sticking to its surface could have made that black Chrysler Imperial look like anything from the natural world.

  Although the Wagon Wheel was on Johnny’s side of the car and he was looking out in that direction, I was the one who exclaimed, “That’s your dad’s car!”

  I slowed, but not in time to turn into the Wagon Wheel’s lot.

  Johnny, however, waved me on. “We have to check the hospital.”

  “But your dad’s car is back there—”

  “—the hospital.”

  I didn’t have to look at him to know how his jaw was set. “What the hell? Is this because you know your dad and Louisa are there together? It doesn’t mean.... They got caught in the blizzard too, for Chrissake.” The thought of the two of them together in a motel room was as distressing to me as it was to Johnny, though it meant a different kind of loss to each of us. But nothing was to be gained by pretending that we hadn’t seen the car.

  “We’re here to check on Mr. McDonough.” Johnny was staring straight ahead now. “A stroke is nothing to fool around with.”

  “It’s great that you’re concerned about Mr. McDonough, but you know damn well that’s not why your mom sent us here. She doesn’t give a shit if Dale McDonough lives or dies.”

  “I think the hospital is on the north side of town. Up on a hill, if I remember.”

  The blizzard must not have hit as hard here, because the streets and sidewalks were clear in spots, and the brick walls of buildings were not newly plastered in white. Bellamy didn’t feel like a town recently besieged. There were cars on the streets, and in front of J. C. Penney’s a man was shoveling the sidewalk. Inside Lily’s Café—featuring Broasted Chicken to Go—a few patrons were waiting for their Sunday dinners. Bellamy might have been Sundayevening quiet, but the straight lines and right angles of its streets and intersections, to say nothing of its neon signs and the headlights of its hurrying cars, were a striking contrast to the prairie’s whirling white chaos.

  “I can smell that chicken,” I said to Johnny.

  “We’ll get something to eat before we go back.”

  “Promise?”

  “Okay. Yes. Hell, yes. I’ll buy you a steak.”

  “I’ll settle for chicken. That smells damn good.”

  He pointed toward an intersection with a Mobil station on one corner and a First National Bank branch on the other. “Take a right up there.”

  “How come you know where the hospital is?” I asked.

  “I was here to have my tonsils out.”

  “When the hell was this?”

  “Fourth grade? No, fifth. Right after Christmas. Fifth grade.”

  “Huh? How come I didn’t know about this?”

  “This might come as a surprise to you, Matt, but there’s a hell of a lot you don’t know about the Dunbar family.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  This was Johnny’s chance. If he feared—or knew—that something was going on between his father and Louisa Lindahl, Johnny could unburden himself now.

  He was quiet for so long that I almost expected him to do just that. We drove down a block of older brick and stucco houses that looked as though they had been built by someone who knew how hard winds could blow off the prairie. Amber light streamed out of their windows, making squares on the fresh snow.

  Finally Johnny said, “That I don’t have tonsils.”

  18.

  WHEN WE ARRIVED AT SAINT MICHAEL’S HOSPITAL, I told Johnny I’d wait in the car while he went in to find out if Mr. McDonough was a patient, and if so, what his condition was.

  Johnny climbed out of the car, but then, before closing the door, he leaned back in to say, “You’ll be here when I come out, won’t you? You’re not going back to that motel, are you?”

  He knew me too well. Ever since we drove past the Wagon Wheel Motor Inn and saw the black car parked in its lot, I could think of little but the risks we’d taken that afternoon in order to find Dr. Dunbar and Louisa. And yet now, here we were, moving farther away from them.

  “I’ll be here,” I reassured Johnny. “You’re buying me dinner, remember?”

  As soon as he was gone, I let my head fall back against the car seat. When I closed my eyes, I saw the snow falling again, blowing across a highway that buckled and waved in my fatigued imagination, as if the earth were heaving and shifting beneath the road’s surface. Then another car emerged from that drowsy blizzard, speeding right at us in the wrong lane. I awakened with a jolt, momentarily surprised that I wasn’t staring at the headlights of another car.

  Fewer than fifteen minutes after he’d gone into the hospital, Johnny returned, running across the lot toward the car. He ran as if someone was after him, heedless of the parking lot’s packed snow and ice. He stayed on his feet until he was almost at the car, then slipped and collapsed against the car to keep from falling. Johnny tumbled into the car and said breathlessly, “He’s dead—Mr. McDonough is dead.”

  “Okay. We knew that might happen—”

  But then Johnny began to sob.

  “Hey,” I said, “he had a stroke. You know how serious—”

  “—He was dead when they brought him in! My dad brought a dead body to the hospital!”

  “Well, Jesus, what were they supposed to do—shove him out in the snow when he died? Leave him by the side of the road?”

  “Why didn’t they turn back? If Mr. McDonough was already dead ...”

  The thought had occurred to me as well, yet I tried to defend the doctor. “After coming through that storm? I don’t know about you, but I’m sure as hell in no hurry to hit the road again.”

  Johnny shook his head and continued to sob. I wanted to say something to comfort him, but couldn’t think of what that might be. I couldn’t believe he cared this deeply about Dale McDonough. I took out my cigarettes, shook one out in his direction, and held it there until he took it. When the car lighter popped out, I held its glowing orange rings toward him. You can’t light a cigarette while you’re crying like a baby. The incongruity alone will bring you up short. Johnny inhaled deeply and instant
ly calmed down.

  “What else did they say in the hospital? Besides the fact that Mr. McDonough is dead.”

  “I still can’t believe it. He was alive just this morning. Right there in the hotel.”

  “Okay, but believe it or not, it happened. Now what?”

  Johnny’s tears had stopped, but he continued to sniffle and wipe his nose on the back of his glove. “You know what this means?” he said. “He died in our car. I wonder if they knew, or if ... Hell, I hope he didn’t suffer too much.”

  I gave him another moment to allow his confused feelings to congeal, and then I reached over, grabbed his shoulder, and shook him. “That was your dad’s car back there, you know. He’s here. He and Louisa are here in Bellamy. Mr. McDonough is dead, but your dad’s here.”

  He clapped his hand over mine. At first I thought he would push my hand away, but instead—for a second, maybe two—he just covered my hand with his, both of us holding onto Johnny Dunbar. Then he didn’t remove my hand so much as lean away from my grasp.

  “I know what’s going on, Matt. I’m not that goddamn stupid. It’s just that I don’t ... I don’t want ...” His voice caught, and he seemed close to tears again. Then suddenly he said, “I don’t want Louisa to be my stepmother!”

  We both knew that he hadn’t expressed his misery very well—the issue of maternity wasn’t what was troubling him, after all—but it was close enough. For Johnny to leap from denial to an outright statement of fear that his father was fucking Louisa Lindahl would have been too much.

  “Well, hell, you don’t want to be telling me about this—let’s go find your dad and you can tell him how you feel!”

  Before Johnny could articulate all that was wrong with that suggestion, I put the car in drive and sped away from the hospital, the Valiant’s tires slipping on the packed snow and the car’s back end swishing from side to side like a horse’s tail.

  I pulled into the Wagon Wheel’s lot, and as I drove slowly down the line of cabins I noticed that the units were log constructions, but they’d been painted white to look less rustic. In every cabin the curtains were drawn, and no light glowed behind them. I parked next to the doctor’s Imperial, leaving the Dunbar vehicles arranged exactly as they would have been in the family’s garage.