American Boy (11 page)

I watched Debbie McCarren walk away through the scrim of the falling snow. It was not quite as reckless a departure as it might have seemed. Both she and Bonnie Wahl lived less than three blocks from Otis Unwin.

I hadn’t been in the best of moods when the evening began. In my mind the remaining Blue Lake Lager belonged to Louisa, Johnny, and me. We were supposed to drink it together, and I begrudged sharing it with the guys. And then just when I felt finished with Debbie McCarren, she had come back into my life, only to push me away again. By the time I walked back into the house I was clenched tight with anger and frustration.

In the half hour or so I’d been away, Johnny’s fortunes had changed significantly. His chip pile was much lower, while Glen Van Dine’s was much higher. It also seemed as if they’d exchanged playing strategies. Now Johnny sat impassively, his smile and banter both gone. And while Van Dine didn’t keep up a nonstop commentary on the cards as Johnny usually did, he asked questions, very specific questions. And when I walked in he was asking them of Johnny.

“Did you know what a whore she was right away? I mean, she doesn’t look like a fucking whore, so I could understand if you didn’t get that.”

Johnny said nothing. He just sipped from the bottle of Blue Lake at his side.

“She looks like a goddamn schoolteacher, don’t you think?”

Johnny looked at his hole cards again. I’d never seen him do that once the cards were dealt.

“But Lester always said there was nothing she wouldn’t do. I mean, nothing.”

The bet was fifteen cents, and while I didn’t know what Johnny had down, he was beat on the board. He called the bet.

“She’d suck cock. Hell, she loved to suck cock.” Glen Van Dine raised a quarter.

Johnny tossed in a blue chip to call.

“She’d probably take it up the ass.”

The last card was dealt down, and Van Dine, with a pair of tens showing, bet a quarter. “Hell, she’d probably take it up the ass while she’s sucking cock.”

Gary Krynicki folded, and Johnny called. Glen Van Dine turned over a third ten, and Johnny just shoved his cards away. The blotches on Johnny’s cheeks had turned from their usual pink to white, as if he were the one who’d come in from the cold.

“Hey,” I said to Glen Van Dine, “how come you know so much?”

He looked up at me for a long moment, then he turned back to the cards being dealt. And to the table Van Dine said, “Anybody sitting on a stool next to Lester at PeeWee’s Bar was sure to get an earful about his piece of meat.” He had a queen showing, and he opened the betting for a dime. Everyone called.

The fourth card came around, and this time Van Dine bet fifteen cents. Once again addressing no one in particular, he said, “I wish I would have been there the night Lester made her give a guy a hand job right there in the bar.”

Another card was dealt, and this time Van Dine bet a quarter. “Yeah, three of them were sitting in a booth, and Lester had her sit next to this guy and jack him off while they just sat there drinking their beers.”

The fifth card was dealt, and once again Van Dine threw a blue chip into the pot. While Otis Unwin and then Johnny were debating whether to fold, call, or raise, Van Dine said to Johnny, “Here’s what I’m wondering. Do you and your old man take turns with her? Him one night and you the next? Or do you get her the same night? First he nails her and then you take your shot? Or maybe it’s like I said before. She sucks you off while he rams it up her ass.”

Otis Unwin folded. Johnny’s fingers trembled slightly as he took a blue chip from his stack and tossed it into the pot.

I walked around the table until I stood behind Glen Van Dine. Before the next card was dealt, I kicked the back of Van Dine’s chair hard enough to jolt him forward against the table. The ashtray at his side jumped and spilled out a load of ashes and cigarette butts. Gary Krynicki grabbed his wobbling beer bottle before it toppled to the floor.

Van Dine spun around. “What the fuck ... ?”

“I liked you better when you were quiet,” I said.

Van Dine surveyed the room as if he were trying to understand not only who I was, but also if I were part of an alliance that had been formed without his awareness.

I nodded in Johnny’s direction. “I’m his friend, if that’s what you’re wondering. But he’s too nice a guy to tell you what a fucking prick you are. So that’s my job.”

“Like a fucking bodyguard?” he asked with a laugh.

“That’s pretty close. And now I’m the one who’s telling you you don’t know shit. Not about him. Not about his father. And not about her. So either shut the fuck up or cash in your chips and get out.”

Glen Van Dine rose from his chair, but as he did so he backed up, careful to put some distance between us. He was a college man, all right, with his penny loafers, corduroys, and blue oxford shirt rolled above his elbows. His blond hair was already thinning, and his front teeth were a little too prominent. But girls, I knew, found both him and his brother desirable properties.

“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 of 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.