American Boy

by Larry Watson

  “Johnny—?”

  “Johnny’s with them.” It took a moment for the import of what I told her to take hold, but once it did, her relief was visible.

  “He decided to ride back with his dad,” I added.

  “I called your mother earlier—”

  “Yeah, but I just thought it would be better if I came back sooner rather than later. You know. She worries. Because of what happened with my dad.”

  She smiled kindly at me and sat up, careful to tug her skirt down in the process. “You’re a good son, Matt.”

  I stood up. “Well, I don’t know about that ...”

  “And a good friend to Johnny. When the two of you left this afternoon I wasn’t worried because the two of you were going. I knew Johnny would be all right with you along.”

  There was so much I could have said. You didn’t send both of us; you sent Johnny and you didn’t know, at least not at first, that I’d go along. And did you really believe that Johnny would be all right? But what was the point? I knew very well what Mrs. Dunbar was doing. She was smoothing her skirt and rearranging the collar of her blouse and straightening up the past, bringing it all in line with who she had to be. Like Louisa, like me, Mrs. Dunbar had her own list of what she had to do in order to create herself in her own image. Though she didn’t have to write anything down.

  “Johnny drove,” I said. “I was just along for the ride.”

  The room was dark, but Mrs. Dunbar saw something darker. “Matt, is that a bruise? On the side of your face?”

  She reached up tentatively, and I wanted to crouch down again, to come close, to feel her cool fingers where my head still throbbed from her husband’s fist, to feel a mother’s touch....

  “I slipped getting out of the car in Bellamy. Fell right on my face.”

  “If Rex were here he could take a look at it.”

  “He already did. He said I should be more careful.”

  “I have an aspirin....”

  “No, it’s okay. It doesn’t hurt. It was mostly just embarrassing.”

  Mrs. Dunbar smiled up at me. She now had her ankles crossed. “It was very cute earlier. The twins wanted to stay up late, until you and Johnny came back. That’s what they said: Until Johnny and Matt come back, please? Not their father. Not just Johnny. Johnny and Matt.”

  At any other time I might have been touched by her remark. There were times when I came close to forgetting that Janet and Julia were not my little sisters, too. But it was late, I was tired, and I still had something I needed to do before my night came to a close. “Yeah. Cute. But hey, I need to go upstairs and pick up something and then I’ll be on my way, okay?”

  “Would you like me to give you a ride?”

  The Dunbars... always ready to give me a ride. “That’s all right,” I said. “You have to stay with the twins. Besides, it’s not far.”

  As I climbed the stairs, I kept to the side of each step so they were less likely to creak. I stayed close to the wall as I tread carefully down the halls, and I turned the doorknob slowly, trying to make as little noise as possible. Mrs. Dunbar knew I was there. The twins were not likely to wake. It was the house itself I was trying not to disturb. I took what I came for and made my way out as quietly as I could.

  21.

  MY LIFE KEPT MAKING ragged duplicates of itself.

  Before I went to bed that night I examined my swollen face in the bathroom mirror, another injury that had come at the hands of Rex Dunbar. But I didn’t look or puzzle long over the bruise or the how and why of it. This time I was sure of the motive behind the blow.

  And once again I was waiting, just as I had done after New Year’s Eve, when Dr. Dunbar predicted consequences that never came. This time, however, I felt better equipped for what might come. When the doctor burst into the motel room and punched me I’d been completely unprepared for the blow, but I swore I wouldn’t be blindsided again.

  But Monday came and Dr. Dunbar didn’t knock on our door, ready to kick my ass again. He didn’t pull up to the curb as I was walking to school, or leap from his big Chrysler and pummel me. Nor did the sheriff show up to pull me out of class. Not that day or the next.

  I couldn’t relax though, because now I was waiting for Thursday. That was the day when Jay’s Pancake House slid a few tables together at the back of the restaurant for the afternoon Kiwanis Club meeting, and the women’s circle met in the basement of the First Presbyterian church. Dr. Dunbar belonged to the first organization, and Mrs. Dunbar the second.

  On Thursday afternoon, shortly after lunch, when I felt confident both meetings were underway, I asked to be excused from my fifth-period history class. I told Mrs. Spires that I was sick to my stomach, and I said it with a grimace in the hopes of implying a messy urgency behind my request.

  I had the car that day, so when I left the high school I was able to travel quickly to my destination. A light snow sifted down, as fine as cornmeal, which meant that I would leave a trail. But while that realization was upsetting, I also knew I couldn’t cover every contingency, and I wasn’t about to abandon my plan. Perhaps my footprints would mingle with the milkman’s and the postman’s, and perhaps as the snow continued to fall it would conceal my tracks rather than reveal them.

  How many times had I entered the Dunbar house over the years? Thousands, certainly. Yet very seldom had I walked in through the front door, as I did that Thursday afternoon. I didn’t bother to take off my coat, but I did pull off my overshoes. I was willing to leave my footprints in the snow leading up to the door, but I wouldn’t dirty Mrs. Dunbar’s floors.

  I didn’t have to search long before I found Louisa. She was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a ham sandwich and paging through a copy of Look magazine. A Chesterfield from the pack on the table burned in the ashtray, and there was a bottle of 7-Up open next to her.

  She spotted me before I said a word, and once again, she didn’t startle at my appearance. Maybe she had been expecting me to turn up. And maybe she had experienced so much in her life that she could no longer scare.

  I was about to find out.

  “Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.” Louisa put down her sandwich and picked up her cigarette. “Somehow I didn’t think I’d heard the last of Matthew Garth. Come on in. Take a load off.”

  I didn’t move. Not yet.

  She smiled at me. “I don’t suppose you brought me a Valentine, did you?” It suddenly dawned on me what day it was.

  I stepped forward, but I didn’t sit down.

  “Ooh,” Louisa winced. She was referring to the yellow and purple bruise coloring the side of my face. “He really nailed you, didn’t he?”

  I felt myself losing heart in her presence, so I rushed to my purpose for being there. “You’re going to Denver,” I said.

  She smiled and raised her eyebrows. “Maybe. Someday. But right now”—she wriggled a bit as if the hard kitchen chair were as soft as an armchair and she could sink more deeply into it—“I like it here.”

  “Today,” I said. “Denver. Or Minneapolis. Or Fargo. Or Sioux Falls. But somewhere.”

  I reached into my back pocket and took out my billfold. I counted out two fifties, six twenties, five tens, and seven fives, and laid them all out on the table. “That’s enough to cover bus or train fare and arrive with some money in your pocket. The Greyhound leaves this afternoon at four o’clock. If you’d rather take the train, you can get on at Bellamy.”

  When I put my wallet back in my pocket I noticed how much thinner it was without those twenty bills.

  “Goddamn. You are persistent, Matt. I’ll say that for you. But me running off with you was about the stupidest, pie-in-the-fucking-sky notion before. And now my ... prospects have improved. So that idea that didn’t interest me in the least then has far less appeal now.”

  “We’re not going to Denver,” I said. “You. Alone. Today.”

  Louisa reached out and tapped through the pile of bills with her index finger. It was a casual, dismissive
gesture. But it was also enough for her to see how much was there. “And this is supposed to persuade me? What is this—the money you were saving to buy a car? To pay for college? Did you save this up from your paper route?”

  In fact, I’d taken the money that morning from an envelope in the top drawer of my dresser. The amount had fluctuated over the years, saved from doing odd jobs in the neighborhood—shoveling snow or mowing lawns or putting up storm windows—or from opening an annual birthday or Christmas card from my uncle and finding a five-dollar bill inside, or busing tables at Phil’s. The money had always been important to me, and while I’d never hoarded it—I had no trouble taking money out to buy beer or take Debbie to a movie—I tried to replace what I took and add to the pile when I could. I never put any money in the bank, but when smaller bills accumulated, I took them to a teller at First National and converted them to larger denominations.

  Still, when Louisa made that remark, it occurred to me that I’d never been saving the money for anything in particular. But people always needed money, whether it was to get through a day or a year, to last through a life or to start a new one.

  “You better get packed,” I said. “If you like, I can drive you to the station. Or even to the depot in Bellamy. But you have to get going now.”

  “Matt. Matt. You’re stuck on the one note. Come on. Look around. Why would I want to leave this? This is as good as I’ve ever had it, and it’s only going to get better.”

  I didn’t have to look around. I knew that room and that house as well as any on the planet. I knew them better than Louisa Lindahl did.

  “You’re leaving”—I drew a breath and started over—“You’re leaving because if you don’t I’ll tell Mrs. Dunbar—and mister too—that you’ve been scheming to ... to take up with the doctor. To steal him away.”

  She smiled, and a look of relief crossed her face. She obviously thought she knew what I had, and to her it didn’t look like much.

  “You don’t understand, Matt. That’s not the way it works between men and women. I didn’t steal him. He fell for me.”

  “I’ll say it different.”

  “You can say it anyway you like. But, Matt”—if I didn’t know better, I would have thought her puckered forehead indicated genuine concern—“why the hell would anyone believe you?”

  I reached inside my coat pocket and touched the item that I’d gone upstairs to take the night I drove the Valiant back from Bellamy. Since then it had either been on my person or, while I slept, under my pillow.

  Quickly, before I lost what little courage I had left, I pulled out the stenographic pad, held it aloft, and said, “Because of this.”

  Louisa didn’t bother pretending. She knew what I held, what it was, and what it meant.

  “That doesn’t belong to you, Matt.”

  I was so uncertain and unsteady in this enterprise that I hid behind what I’d already said. “This is why you’re leaving. Because if you don’t, I’ll tell the doctor and his wife what you’ve been scheming. This is proof, and we both know it.”

  Her smile returned, but its fragility was plain. “Show him. He won’t care....”

  “If you believe that, then you don’t know the man.”

  “That’s not yours, Matt. It’s not yours—” She lurched a little, as if she considered leaping up and trying to take the pad from me.

  “It was yours, but I took it. Now it’s mine. Sound familiar?”

  “You really are a prick. You know that? A real prick.” Color rose to her cheeks.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’ve heard that. Now you need to go upstairs and pack your things.”

  Louisa took a moment to survey the room. She lingered over the big gas range, the refrigerator with its double doors. The breakfast dishes that had been washed and rinsed, then left to dry in the rack beside the sink. The money on the table. The half-eaten sandwich. The cigarettes. There was nothing there that could help her, unless it was a butcher knife in a drawer. I almost felt sorry for her.

  But when she looked back at me it was with a smile and a plan better than the sharpest blade in the house.

  “Why don’t you come upstairs with me, Matt? We’ve got the house to ourselves.” She glanced at the clock over the stove. “And time.”

  I shook my head. “Can’t do it.”

  “You won’t have to do anything. Just hang on tight. I’ll do all the work.”

  “You don’t have time. You have to pack.”

  “Do you get it? Do you fucking get it? Do you know what I’m offering you?”

  “I believe you’re proposing a business arrangement. Some sort of exchange—”

  “—Don’t be a fucking smart-ass, Matt.”

  It was my turn to look at the clock. “You have to get going.”

  “Matt ...” The head-lowered, heavy-lidded look she gave me was supposed to be seductive, and I had no doubt she could usually convey that message very well. But something had slipped away from her, and the expression she wore now had too much desperation to be enticing. “We had some good times together,” she continued. “I knew what you wanted. I always knew. And now you can have it. It can be like before, only with you and me—”

  I just shook my head.

  Louisa apparently sensed a greater intransigence in me than I felt. “Oh, fuck it,” she said, and swept up the 305 dollars in one quick motion. “I’ll be goddamned if I’ll beg.”

  She was on her way out of the room when she wheeled about to face me once again. “You don’t need to wait around. I’ll find my own ride.” Two steps up the maid’s staircase she turned a final time. “And Matt? You can stick that steno pad up your ass for all I care.”

  Until that moment I had never seen Louisa Lindahl’s eyes glisten with tears. That she was capable of tears didn’t mean she could be trusted, however. When I left the house, I got in the car and drove away, but then I circled around and parked on a hillside. From there I had a view—through the light, fine-grained snow, through a winter-bare stand of trees—of the front of the Dunbar house.

  Within half an hour a car pulled up in front of the house. I recognized the driver as Hank Hettig, a fellow who might well have shared a booth with Louisa and Lester at PeeWee’s Bar. He didn’t get out of the car, but he didn’t have to. Almost immediately Louisa came out the front door, chipboard suitcase in hand. She climbed into the car, and they drove off together.

  I never saw Louisa Lindahl again, and as far as I know, she never returned to Willow Falls. Nor did I ever enter the Dunbar house again, not even when I came back to town after completing my education. By then that old Victorian mansion had been chopped up into apartments and offices, so its rooms would have served me well for both a residence and a clinic where I could practice medicine myself. I ended up leasing a home and an office in another part of town instead, not so much because I feared ghosts, but rather because the Dunbar house was already in need of repair.

  But that afternoon when I kept watch on the Dunbar home from my hillside post, I felt as if I had saved both house and family from ruin. I was seventeen years old, the only child of a single working mother. I should have known better. There are destructive forces at loose in the world, from which neither buildings nor families can be saved.

  The doctor was the first Dunbar to return that afternoon. Maybe he had a patient he had to see. And maybe he wanted to be with Louisa while they had the house to themselves. Once that big black Chrysler Imperial drove up, however, I drove away.

  Dr. Dunbar left Willow Falls within a year, headed, so the story went, to Iowa to participate in a program in rural medicine sponsored by the University of Iowa. He was only supposed to be gone for a couple months, but when time passed and he didn’t return, it was said that a small town in South Dakota had extended a very attractive offer, luring Dr. Dunbar to their community, where he would head up a brand-new clinic. Maybe this story was true. But when Mrs. Dunbar left Willow Falls with the children soon after, they went in the opposite direction, to Saint P
aul, where her family lived. The house was soon for sale.

  Maybe the good doctor and Louisa Lindahl remained in contact and reunited in that small South Dakota town. Or maybe he discovered elsewhere a woman—or women—who would do what Mrs. Dunbar wouldn’t.

  I LAST SPOKE TO JOHNNY DUNBAR on that occasion when so many people exchange final words, although they seldom know or admit it at the time.

  The night of our high school commencement was blustery and unseasonably cold. As we marched out of the auditorium, the wind found us even under our black gowns. A gust ripped loose a few flakes of snow, and in that instant our graduation was not the reason the date was notable. Instead, it became the day when something rarer occurred—snow in May, and in late May at that. It was the eighth consecutive month that snow fell on Willow Falls that year.

  Our after-graduation party was held in an open field north of Frenchman’s Forest. We would have built a bonfire no matter what, but we wouldn’t have huddled around it for warmth the way we had to that night. And we surely would have been drinking anyway, but we might have stayed out until dawn had it not been so cold. As it was, the heart went out of our celebration early, and kids drifted off, pairing off with boyfriends or girlfriends, or heading home to warm beds.

  Johnny Dunbar and I were among the last of the class of 1963 to remain by the fire, and when it was little more than embers and choking smoke, Johnny spoke the first words he had spoken to me since that night I fled from him and his father.

  He was holding a bottle of beer, and he kicked something toward the fire. Then Johnny Dunbar said, “We could have been happy.”

  He said this with a look so fierce that I didn’t argue with him. I didn’t remind him that it was his father, his father and Louisa Lindahl, who had upset the balance of our lives. I didn’t mention how long it had taken the bruises on my back to fade, bruises made by his boots when he ground me into the snow. And I didn’t ask him who “we” were.