American Boy (2 page)

Since I had volunteered Johnny for duty, I expected that he might speak up.

“No?” the doctor said. Then, to my surprise, he added, “All right then. We have a plan.”

The creases that appeared between Mrs. Dunbar’s eyes led me to believe that she didn’t agree, but she said nothing.

“I know you fellows are hungry,” Dr. Dunbar said, taking in the meal spread before us, “but if you want to join the search party out at Frenchman’s Forest, you’ll have to head out right away. Time is not on the side of someone bleeding from a bullet wound.”

Janet popped up out of her chair and asked, “Can we go, too?” Julia, often willing to allow her more vocal sister to speak for her, eagerly nodded her interest as well. The Dunbar twins were bright, bold little girls whose adventurous spirits made them seem more like their father than their mother.

Dr. Dunbar looked from one daughter to the other as if their request warranted serious consideration. Finally he said, “I don’t doubt that you two have eyes every bit as sharp as the boys’, but that’s just the problem. I’m afraid you might find her. And that means you might see something you wish you hadn’t. No, let’s leave this one to the boys.”

The twins looked both disappointed and relieved.

Johnny and I stood up and left the table in order to prepare for our expedition. While we put on our stocking caps, coats, and overshoes, Mrs. Dunbar assured us that a hot meal would be waiting when we returned. We were almost out the door when Dr. Dunbar called us aside.

“Now, if you do find her,” he said, “don’t try to do anything heroic.” He handed each of us a stack of gauze pads. “A bullet wound is nothing to fool with. If she’s bleeding heavily, use simple compression. No tourniquets or anything extreme.” And then he added with a smile, “And absolutely no field surgery—don’t dig out the bullet with a jackknife or anything along those lines. If you have to touch a wound, use the gauze, not your bare hands. Now go. I’ll set up an emergency room in the clinic.”

As we dressed to go out, Johnny and I were excited, almost giddy, at the prospect of adventure. But when we finally left the house we were solemn and subdued, mindful that the gauze in our pockets was meant to soak up human blood.

2.

IN THE STATE THAT BOASTED OF HAVING ten thousand lakes, Willow Falls was near none of them. Located in the southwestern corner of Minnesota, our town was closer to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, than it was to Minneapolis. We were out on the prairie, the land flat or gently undulating, sparsely populated, and mostly plowed for farming. As for recreation, the grassland was good for upland game, and a few nearby potholes and sloughs attracted wild fowl and the men who hunted them, but we were not a region of cabins on the lake. We did have a river, of course, the Willow, on whose banks the town was built. But it slowed to a trickle in dry years—of which there were many—and its falls, which gave the town its name, were in fact little more than a series of steps the river took as it stumbled over rocks and boulders near the center of town.

And if neither river nor falls merited their names, the same was true of our forest. In that part of Minnesota, only by an occasional stand of cottonwood and bur oak was the prairie interrupted—and then buckthorn, juneberry, and golden currant bushes filled in some open spaces along the river. It was a combination of these that made up Frenchman’s Forest, and without historical incident—in the nineteenth century, a trapper apparently hid in the undergrowth in order to escape a Sioux war party—the area probably never would have been named.

Frenchman’s Forest was on the north edge of town, about a mile from the Dunbars’. We could have walked it, but since time was crucial Johnny drove his father’s black Chrysler Imperial. And once we entered the forest we had no trouble finding Lester Huston’s shack; we just followed the tracks made by other vehicles in the fresh snow.

Deputy Greiner and his search party were back at the site as well, ten men walking in slow, ever-widening circles, searching for any trace of a trail that would lead them to the victim. We climbed out of the Chrysler, but before we could get started, Tiny Goetz drove up in his old Chevy truck and loudly announced from the driver’s seat that footprints, and perhaps blood as well, had been found along the road on the other side of the woods. With that news, the group immediately redirected their search. But Johnny and I declined to join them. We’d already decided to focus on the terrain most familiar to us—the overgrown paths and twisting trails of Frenchman’s Forest.

Before the deputy and his men climbed into their cars, Johnny said, “Wait—shouldn’t you give us a description of the woman?”

Deputy Greiner, a lean, perpetually sour-faced man who wore the same greasy fedora no matter the season, replied caustically: “I’ll tell you what: if you come across a woman and she ain’t been shot—you got the wrong woman.”

Johnny thanked the deputy, but I knew that if Dr. Dunbar had been there, Greiner never would have spoken to him like that.

Also among the searchers was Ed Fields, my fifth-grade Sunday school teacher, and I asked him where the blood had been discovered. He pointed to a break in the woods near a fallen tree, and then he drove off with the deputy and the other men, their vehicles bumping along the snowy ruts of the unpaved road.

Even without Mr. Fields’s direction, Johnny and I could have found the blood simply by going to the spot where the snow was packed down. We stood where the searchers had, looking down at two or three smears, the blood’s crimson diluted in the snow. By then it was apparent that we wouldn’t be able to follow the Lindahl woman’s actual footsteps, because the other searchers had tracked up the snow completely.

Johnny and I entered Frenchman’s Forest slowly, looking not for footprints, but rather another red stain in the snow. In the woods there was less snow but more debris—fallen branches and leaves and undergrowth—and these made for slow going.

Not having discussed a strategy, we each began to search in our own way. Johnny moved rapidly through the woods, hopping over branches and zigzagging through the brush in an effort to cover as much territory as possible. I kept my head down and determinedly trod through the leaves, deadfall, and thorny stalks of weeds.

Only nineteen days separated Johnny and me in age, but I often felt like his older brother, his worldly, rougheredged older brother. I might have had access to the privileged world of the Dunbars, but at the end of the day I returned to the gloomy little two-bedroom box where I lived with my mother. We weren’t exactly poor, but poverty was always within view. We often ate as well as the Dunbars, but only because my mother brought leftovers home from work. And I seldom sat down to one of our warmed-over meals without wondering about its origins. Had Judge Barron sent that steak back because it was too well done? Was this baked potato originally placed in front of Doris Crum, the wife of Dr. Crum, the dentist? Did George Dummett, owner of Dummett’s Hardware, touch this piece of chicken before pushing his plate aside?

But Johnny Dunbar wasn’t only sheltered by his family’s means; he was like a child in no hurry to grow up. Every initiation, every marker of adulthood that I couldn’t wait for—smoking, drinking, driving, earning money, having sex, being independent—Johnny seemed in no hurry to reach. And what interest he had could often be satisfied vicariously by hearing of my exploits or efforts. If I was occasionally less than forthcoming about what Debbie McCarren and I were doing in her basement, or in the backseat of my mother’s DeSoto, it was because Johnny’s probing questions could be invasive. And if I indulged in a cigar or a six-pack of Hamm’s, I didn’t necessarily want to explain every sensation to him. After Randy Wadnor and I got into a scuffle at a football game, to take one example, I wanted to put the incident behind me as quickly as possible. Johnny, on the other hand, wanted to know every detail of the altercation. We both enjoyed sports, but Johnny was not competitive—he only wanted to play. And we were both good students, but while I studied to improve my future prospects, his success in school was the result of the wide-eyed curiosity he brought to any subject.

Johnny even looked like a little brother. He had his father’s curls, but he couldn’t tame them. They frizzed and coiled in every direction, often making him look as if he’d just climbed out of bed. I could have grown a full beard at that age, while Johnny’s cheeks produced nothing but down. The muscles of his slender body were smooth and undefined as well, and he had a childish habit of bouncing and squirming if he had to sit in one place for long. If anyone in town did believe we were brothers, they likely would have assumed that Johnny took after our delicate mother.

Johnny stopped abruptly ten yards ahead of me in the woods, and when I looked questioningly in his direction, he smiled and pointed up at the low branch of a tilting oak tree.

Many of the boys in our town—and even a few of the girls—grew up in these woods. We built forts, played hideand-seek, climbed trees, and hunted, first with slingshots and BB guns, then with .22s. We formed clubs that had their headquarters in the forest, and we took refuge here when we needed to be alone with our sadness, confusion, or anger. Among these trees we hid from bullies and parents and authorities. We also went to Frenchman’s Forest when we wanted to smoke cigarettes or drink the liquor we had stolen. A few of us had our first sexual experiences in here as well, and though that wasn’t true for Johnny or for me, we both received a rudimentary sexual education in the forest years earlier, when Lannie Corbis straddled the branch of the very oak tree Johnny was standing under now, solemnly holding forth on the mechanics of sex to an eager but skeptical audience of five younger boys. Eventually we’d learn that Lannie was mistaken about some of the ways men and women fit together, but even the corrected record could not alter for me the association of sex with the smell of tree sap and the hum of insects.

“Lannie?” I said.

Johnny nodded, smiling.

Yes, if Louisa Lindahl was in these woods, we were the ones to find her. And it was not hard to imagine that someone fleeing a man with murderous intent would head for Frenchman’s Forest.

We walked on, down through the treeless depression we called the Boulders, past the spot where Russell Marsh blasted an owl out of a hollow tree with a twelve-gauge, leaving nothing of the bird but a blizzard of feathers, and through the stand of willows whose wandlike limbs we used to swing from. As we searched for Louisa Lindahl, Johnny and I were the source of most of the noise in the forest—twigs snapping, leaves crunching, and clumps of snow falling, brushed from branches and shrubs.

Then I heard something, and I shushed Johnny. We both stopped and stood unmoving, our heads raised as if, like hounds, we could detect scents in the chilly air. We stood there for a moment, breathless.

After a long silence, Johnny whispered, “What was it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“She could be hiding. For all she knows Lester Huston is out here looking for her.”

I hadn’t thought of that. I’d assumed she would want to be found.

Johnny asked, “Should we call out or something?”

Before I could form a judgment, Johnny cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “We’re here to help you! Is anyone out there?”

When no response came, he tried again. “Hello! There’s no need to be afraid!”

After the sound of Johnny’s voice died away, the forest’s silence seemed amplified, a snowy day’s version of an echo.

“That’s just what someone who’s after her would say,” I offered with a smile. “‘There’s no need to be afraid.’”

“What should I say—‘Ollie, Ollie, in-free? Come out, come out, wherever you are?’”

Once we stood there motionless for a couple minutes, the cold was able to wrap itself around us. I clapped my gloved hands together and stamped my feet. “Jesus. If she’s hiding in here, she could freeze to death.”

Johnny pinched snot from his nostrils with his mitten. “Freeze or bleed to death. Some choice.”

“Well, I don’t think she’d
choose
either one.”

“Smart-ass. Maybe I should howl like a wolf,” he suggested. “Scare her out of hiding.”

“Give it a try.”

But he didn’t. And both of us just stood there listening. After another moment, Johnny asked, “Could it have been a squirrel?”

“It wasn’t like that. Not scurrying. More like starting and stopping. Like someone limping maybe. Or hunkering down in the leaves.”

After a few more minutes passed, I began to convince myself that it must have been a squirrel I’d heard. Or possibly a branch, falling by stages from the top of a tall cottonwood. Then I heard it again. And this time Johnny did, too. It sounded like something scuffing slowly through the dry leaves, and we both turned around in the direction from which it came.

Why had that antlered buck not been frightened into flight? Had he sensed all along that we were no threat, clumping through the forest unarmed? Had he seen us for what we were, boys pretending that they knew his territory as well as he did, boys who thought they had powers greater than men? The buck stared at us and we stared at him for one more long moment, and then he moved on, pausing every few paces to scrape at the leaves in search of food, a being with a real purpose in the woods.

I looked down. If I hadn’t been standing in snow the outline of my foot would have been hard to see. In late November, cold and snow hastened days to a close early in our part of the world, limiting what could be usefully done with the hours. And in the thickening gloom of Frenchman’s Forest, it was already too dark to find footprints or traces of blood.

“We should probably head back,” I said in the reluctant voice of a sensible big brother.

“And just leave her out here?”

“We don’t even know that she’s still out here.”

“We don’t know she isn’t.”

“Come on. In a few minutes we won’t be able to see our hands in front of our faces.”

Johnny kicked back and forth in the snow, perhaps testing my theory.

After another moment, he conceded. “All right.”