American Boy (12 page)

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.

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?”