American Boy (6 page)

The doctor skated up quickly, joining Dennis McMaster beside the goal. “You okay, Matt?” Dennis asked.

“Yeah.” The answer was reflexive. I hadn’t had time yet to access my injuries.

I tried to pull myself to my feet, using for support the same pipe I’d banged into. A skate slid out from under me, but before I fell again Johnny was there, his arm under my armpit, steadying and lifting me.

“Doesn’t count,” he said with a smile, “if your head goes into the net. It’s got to be the puck.”

“Head. Puck. I get those mixed up.” I tasted blood, and began to probe carefully with my tongue to determine if I’d lost any teeth. They were all there, but blood filled my mouth and I spit, streaking the snow.

My cheek. I had bit my cheek.

“Goddamn, Matt,” Dennis said, a comment I initially thought was prompted by my bloody expectoration.

Dr. Dunbar dropped his stick, thrust his hand under his arm to pull off his glove, and reached toward me. “Better let me look at that, Matthew.”

I assumed he was referring to the hole in my cheek, but when I opened my mouth and tilted my head a curtain of red fell over one eye.

Either the ice or the steel pipe had opened a gash over my eye, and that was the injury that concerned Dr. Dunbar. I tried to wipe away the blood, but a red fog immediately clouded my vision.

Dr. Dunbar gently pushed my hand out of the way and inspected my injury. His fingers were warm on my forehead. After gently prodding the split skin around my eyebrow, he said, “Let’s go inside, Matthew. We need to take care of that cut.”

As the doctor and I walked off the ice, he made no apologies for having played a part in my fall. But I knew instinctively what he’d done. I’d underestimated how protective he felt toward Johnny, and how far a father would be willing to go in order to seek retribution for an injury to his son.

The people standing around the rink parted to allow the doctor and me to pass. The twins hurried over to check out my injury. Julia turned away at the sight of my blood, while Janet tried to get closer and said, “Ooh, Matt, your eye!”

“He’ll be all right,” said the doctor. “We’ll just take him inside and put a Band-Aid on it.”

It seemed clear that he was minimizing my injury for the sake of his daughters’ peace of mind, but the doctor’s words still calmed me.

Dr. Dunbar and I stopped on the porch to take off our skates. He removed his first, then squatted down to unlace mine, enabling me to tilt my head back and keep the heel of my hand pressed to my eye.

“You wait here, Matt,” Dr. Dunbar said. “I’ll go find a towel or something so we can walk through the house without you bleeding on Mrs. Dunbar’s carpet. And if you feel thirsty, help yourself.” He pointed to a galvanized washtub packed with snow and bottles of Miller High Life and Coca Cola, the after-hockey refreshments he always provided. “But even if you don’t want anything to drink,” he added, “grab a handful of snow and hold it over your eye. It’ll slow the bleeding.”

I could hear the familiar sounds of the game behind me—the
clack clack
of wooden sticks colliding, and the
skrrk skrrk
of sharpened steel on ice. Would I ever hear those again without remembering the taste of blood? I shivered as my sweat cooled beneath the layers of clothes.

Just as Dr. Dunbar reached for the door, it opened from the inside, and I inhaled sharply when I saw who was standing there. “I was watching,” said Louisa Lindahl. “I saw what happened.” She held out a rag she’d brought for my wound.

Not long after the doctor stitched her up that fateful Thanksgiving Day, Louisa Lindahl was back on her feet, though they didn’t take her far. Once it became apparent that the young woman had no resources and no place to go, the Dunbars told her she could move in with them. She could work in the clinic, handling some of the clerical work, thereby freeing Betty Schaeffer to concentrate on nursing. Louisa accepted the offer, and she had been helping Mrs. Dunbar with household chores as well as working in the clinic. She was staying in the back bedroom upstairs, the same one Dr. Dunbar had carried her to after treating her for the bullet wound.

But I knew all this already, and so I was not surprised to see her. No, my sharp intake of breath was caused by something else.

Since that day when I’d stood over her in the clinic, I’d been completely taken with Louisa Lindahl. It was too soon to call it love and too simple to call it lust, but I felt something powerful, and whatever it was would have had me following her from room to wainscoted room in the Dunbar house if I could have done so without attracting the wrong kind of attention. She, on the other hand, had given no sign of noticing me. Except once.

A week earlier Louisa was alone in the kitchen, putting away dishes, when I came in looking for glue for a science project Johnny and I were working on upstairs. I generally had no trouble making conversation with girls who interested me, but I lost all courage in Louisa Lindahl’s presence. Her haughty beauty was as intimidating as it was alluring, and she was in her twenties. And then there was the fact that I’d seen her unconscious and unclothed, a delicious secret knowledge that nonetheless put an even tighter clamp on my mouth. Finally, there was that matter of the gunshot wound. I had no idea how that factored into the whole equation, but it could hardly be ignored.

I said hello that night, but received no greeting in return, which was exactly what usually happened when our paths crossed in the presence of others in the Dunbar home. Then, as I was on my way out of the room with the bottle of Elmer’s, Louisa Lindahl said, “Nice of the Dunbars to take in strays and give them the run of the place, eh?”

I’m not sure what kept me from arguing with her, in spite of the fact that that was my first impulse. Was it the fear that this was an argument I would lose? Or could it possibly be the notion that I might benefit in the future from her belief that she and I had something in common? Whatever the reason, I stammered, “I guess,” and hurried from the room.

Now, when Dr. Dunbar took the cloth that Louisa offered, a look passed between them. Even if my vision had not been restricted, I still wouldn’t have been able to interpret it. Then the doctor smiled his best Rex Dunbar smile and said, “Anticipating my every need. Thank you, Louisa.”

She returned his smile.

Dr. Dunbar folded the cloth into a rectangle the size of a paperback. “Press this over your eye, Matt.” Behind me I heard a puck hit the pipe.

With his hand on my elbow, the doctor steered me inside. Mrs. Dunbar was in the kitchen, taking a tray of sugar cookies out of the oven. When she saw me and the bloody cloth, she exclaimed, “Oh my God, Matty!” Her expression of concern was that of a mother’s.

“Take it easy, Alice. It looks worse than it is. A few stitches and Gordie Howe here will be right back out on the ice.”

The doctor continued to guide me through the house as if blood had blinded me in both eyes, and I could hear Louisa’s footsteps as she followed close behind. She’d been watching the game ... she’d seen what happened ... but did she know why?

At the door to the clinic, Louisa asked, “Should I come in with you? Do you need any help?”

“No need,” replied the doctor, much to my disappointment. “Matthew could probably sew himself up.”

We went into the same examination room where Dr. Dunbar had treated Louisa Lindahl. “Lie down on the table, Matthew.”

I did as I was told. I wasn’t about to ask for it, but I wished I had the blanket he’d used to cover Louisa. My feet were freezing after standing out on the porch in my socks.

“Now, ordinarily I’d put a drape over the patient’s face, leaving only the laceration exposed. Hell, you might like to watch. I have a hand mirror here in the drawer.

“All right.”

Once I had the mirror in hand, I slowly took the compress away. Blood was leaking more than flowing from the cut, and that soon stopped when Dr. Dunbar numbed the area with lidocaine and epinephrine. “This is what a cut man uses to stop a boxer’s bleeding.” Dr. Dunbar was close enough that I could smell his sweat and his aftershave.

He continued to talk his way through the procedure, exactly as he would have done if I were watching him work on someone else. He cleaned the wound with 300 cc of saline solution and then prepared to sew. He explained the type of thread (6-0 nylon) and sutures (simple interrupted) he’d be using. “And notice that I’m not shaving your eyebrow, Matthew. Some doctors might do that, but it’s not necessary. And I’d probably mar your good looks. Takes a hell of a long time for eyebrows to grow back. Different kind of hair.”

I felt nothing but a vague tugging as the needle went in and out, and I watched my reflection with one eye while the doctor administered to the other, adding to the sense that I was more observer than patient.

He treated me so gently that I wondered again if I could have been wrong about what happened during the hockey game. Touch that tender didn’t seem as if it could belong to the same man who had speared and then tripped me, sending me sprawling on the ice.

I handed the mirror back to him when he finished, but Dr. Dunbar wasn’t through looking. He circled the table slowly, examining his handiwork from different angles.

“Any other injuries that need attending to?” he asked.

“I bit my cheek, but I think the bleeding’s stopped.”

Nevertheless, he inspected the inside of my mouth with the aid of a light and a tongue depressor. After a moment of probing he declared, “Nothing serious.” He patted my shoulder. “You can sit up now.”

I did, slowly.

“Feeling woozy?”

“A little.”

“Take your time. Lie back down if you like.”

“I’m okay.”

“Sit for a minute. You’re done playing for the day. This isn’t the Stanley Cup.”

I took a few deep breaths to steady myself, and the doctor reached into a drawer to pull out a pack of Chesterfields. He sat down on a rolling stool and lit up, using a kidneyshaped steel bowl for an ashtray. Then, after taking another look at me, he held the bowl out toward me. “You need this? You think you might throw up?”

I hadn’t cursed, cried, complained, or recoiled at any time during the procedure. I couldn’t think of any other way to convince him that I could handle this except to say again, “I’m okay.”

“You look pale.” The doctor’s tone puzzled me. It was oddly formal, almost grave, and not at all like the jocular, light-hearted Dr. Dunbar I knew. Was he angry with me? Did all this have to do with my having knocked Johnny off his skates?

“I feel fine.” I considered insisting on lacing my skates back up and returning to the game.

“If you say so.” He cocked his head as he looked at me. “You’ll have a black eye.”

“That’s okay.”

“Sure. It’ll make you look like a tough guy. You want people to think you’re a tough guy?”

So, it was about Johnny. “I never thought about it.”

“Some girls go for that.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Trust me.”

He inhaled deeply on his cigarette. He made an incongruous sight, wearing his hockey jersey yet holding his cigarette in that elegant way he had. “You know, Matthew, there’s more to hockey than just banging into people. You need skills to go along with your aggression. We used to have an expression that applied to guys like you. ‘Getting ahead of your skates.’ That’s you out on the ice, Matt. Ahead of your skates.”

I was right. Dr. Dunbar had wanted to teach me a lesson for hitting his son.

“I know I stink out there,” I said. “So I try to hustle and skate hard and hope that makes up for it.”

He ignored my comment. “I wonder if that’s you in life, Matthew. Out ahead of your skates.”

I understood that we were in the realm of metaphor, but I didn’t really understand what was being said about my character. Still, I no more would have inquired after his meaning than I would have asked for a blanket to cover my cold feet.

“Maybe so.” I got off the table.

Later that night, after my mother had gone to bed, I went into our little bathroom. I stood at the sink, in front of the faucet that always seemed to drip. Above it, the mirror’s silver backing made every image seem as if it were decomposing before your very eyes. Under the harsh light, I undressed and inspected the injuries that the masculine code had prevented me from paying attention to earlier. The rectangular bruise on my side could not have been a more perfect impression of the butt of Dr. Dunbar’s stick. The inside of my cheek was red, raw, and puckered. My eye was starting to blacken, the socket rimmed in deep purple. And the newly repaired cut throbbed as if my blood was trying to break free of the doctor’s stitches.

6.

JOHNNY AND I HAD BEEN LOOKING FORWARD to Buzz Mallen’s New Year’s party for weeks. Buzz’s parents would be in Saint Paul for the night, and his older brother had agreed to buy beer and hard liquor for the occasion. Then, only two days before the party, its format changed. Now it was going to be a small affair, one you could only gain entry to with a date. I had recently broken up with Debbie McCarren, my girlfriend of five months, because she felt we were “getting too serious,” which was almost surely a euphemism for either “I want to date someone else,” or “I’m tired of slapping away your roving hands.” And since neither Johnny nor I could possibly find dates on such short notice, we resigned ourselves to missing the party.

Rather than give up completely on the idea of celebration, however, we improvised our own feeble party plan. Johnny’s parents always went out on New Year’s Eve, first to dinner at Palmer’s (where I might have cleared their table had I not arranged to have the night off), and then to a dance at the Heritage House Hotel. The twins were sleeping over at the home of a friend. Johnny and I would have the Dunbar house more or less to ourselves. Along, I hoped, with Louisa Lindahl.

And so that New Year’s Eve, Johnny and I lugged his record player up to the attic, along with a bag of potato chips, a log of summer sausage, a few cigars, two cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and a fifth of blackberry brandy I’d stolen from Palmer’s. The large dusty space smelled of mold and unfinished wood from the heavy dark timbers slanting overhead. And because that night was exceptionally cold, we plugged in a space heater; its glowing bars and an old floor lamp illuminated the corner where we would usher in 1963. The attic was a deliberate choice. We’d both been drunk a few times, but that night we planned to reach a new level of inebriation, one that would require sequestration. We even designated a tin wastebasket as the receptacle if either of us had to throw up and couldn’t make it down to the bathroom in time.