American Boy. Larry Watson

mother was squarely in the other camp, which included all those suspicious of outsiders and uneasy at the prospect of change. They felt that the Dunbars’ fine clothes, their grand house, and their trips to Minneapolis to take in the symphony or ballet were not markers of culture and sophistication, but rather of ostentation. And for many Minnesotans, there could be no greater failing. These folks were determinedly unpretentious, and their sense that life in Willow Falls didn’t amount to much was consistent with their perspective on life in general. In our wind-blown part of the world, where nothing rose higher than a few cottonwoods, to want too much or to reach too high was to set yourself up for inevitable disappointment. Not surprisingly, most of the people who felt this way had farming in their background; they might have been town dwellers by this point, but not for more than a generation or two, and they likely had a relative or two who still lived out in the country.

      Before leaving the kitchen, my mother said, “Phil asked if you want to bus tables during your Christmas vacation. He’s willing to hire you on.”

      Phil Palmer was my mother’s employer, and I knew she would have asked him for this favor. “I’m thinking about it.”

      “Don’t think too long.”

      My mother walked out of the kitchen, but then returned almost immediately to retrieve her Pall Malls. And she had another question for me. “How does Mrs. Dunbar fix her stuffing?”

      “She mixes in sausage. And slices of apple. To keep it moist, she says.”

      “Sausage and apple ... huh!” Her eyebrows rose as if she found Mrs. Dunbar’s method of preparing dressing more baffling than the news of the shooting.

      “It was good.”

      “I’ll take your word for it. Have you had your fill of turkey yet? If you haven’t, I could make a little one for us. But big enough so we’d have some extra for sandwiches.”

      “That’s okay.”

      “Well, let me know if you change your mind. Red Owl’s going to sell their leftover birds cheap.”

      “But it wouldn’t be for Thanksgiving.”

      “No, but it’d be turkey.”

      I knew the Dunbar house so well that I could tell which of their four telephones Mrs. Dunbar had answered from the sound of her footsteps as she walked away to find her son after putting the receiver down. High heels on the wood floors—the telephone on the small table next to the wide staircase.

      As soon as Johnny came on the line I asked, “Did you hear about Lester Huston?”

      “Yeah,” he replied. “Deputy Greiner called a little while ago to tell Dad what happened. Dad lit into him because apparently Greiner told Lester Huston that Louisa Lindahl was in critical condition. He made it sound like she was going to die. So Lester Huston thought there was a good chance he’d be charged with murder.”

      “What the hell did Greiner do that for?”

      “That’s what Dad asked him. The deputy kept saying it was part of his interrogation. Dad told him that when Sheriff Hart gets back to town he’s going to hear what a screwup he has for a deputy.”

      “Man, what I would’ve given to hear your dad read Greiner the riot act!”

      “He was pissed, all right. Royally pissed.”

      Before that day I would have had a hard time imagining Dr. Dunbar angry. But now I had seen his expression when I touched Louisa Lindahl’s stomach.

      “Does Louisa Lindahl know Huston’s dead?”

      “Dad went upstairs to break the news to her a few minutes ago.”

      “Upstairs?”

      “Dad didn’t want her spending the night in the clinic. There aren’t any real beds in there, and it would have been too far away if she needed something during the night. So we moved her upstairs to that little back bedroom.”

      “It was okay to move her? Jesus, she was shot—. And you helped? Did you carry her or what?”

      “She could walk a little, but only a couple steps. We tried propping her up between us, but she couldn’t raise her arms to put them around our shoulders because it pulled too hard on her stitches. So finally Dad just carried her.”

      “He carried her? Up the stairs?”

      Johnny laughed. “Sure, he’s a doctor!”

      “Did she say anything, you know, when you were trying to help her?”

      “Nah. She barely knew where she was. But when we helped her off the table, she whispered, ‘Fuck.’”

      Lying awake in bed that night, I tried in vain to recall the sight of Louisa Lindahl’s breasts. But try as I might I couldn’t concentrate on that image. Instead, questions kept imposing themselves. What, I wondered, would make a man lean into his own death when all he needed to do to save his life was sit back and slacken the noose that he himself had knotted? Was it fear of the punishment he’d receive, or did he find unbearable the realization that he had killed the woman he’d loved?

       5.

      AMONG DR. DUNBAR’S MANY CONTRIBUTIONS to civic life in Willow Falls—serving on the school board, standing by as physician-in-attendance at high school athletic events, heading up charity drives—he organized hockey in our town.

      Though we clearly did have a climate conducive to the sport—our ponds and the Willow River usually had at least a skin of ice by Thanksgiving—hockey was not popular in our part of the state. In northern Minnesota boys laced up their skates and grabbed a stick as soon as they could walk, but in Willow Falls the big sports were baseball, football, and basketball, as well as hunting and fishing. Dummett’s Hardware sold pucks, sticks, and skates, but there were no school or amateur hockey programs, and no public ice was maintained for the sport. A few kids whacked a puck around on one of the public rinks from time to time, but until Dr. Dunbar came to town there were never hockey games. He had played hockey in high school and college, he loved the sport, and he wasn’t about to give it up just because the residents of our town had wobbly ankles and didn’t know a hip check from a glove save.

      Every year then, once the cold weather came to stay, Dr. Dunbar converted a carefully measured section of their big backyard into a skating rink. And while the children in Willow Falls were welcome to use the rink to practice figure eights or to play crack-the-whip during the week, on weekends the ice was reserved for hockey games. You had to be at least high school age to play, and over the years a few men became passable players—usually enough, anyway, for two full teams.

      When Johnny and I were growing up, Dr. Dunbar provided us with plenty of instruction on the ice. But until we came of age, we stood along the sidelines with the rest of the spectators—at least fifty people would often show up to watch the weekend games. Even when there was little chance we’d be invited to play, though, we always came prepared. We wore our skates, our supporters and cups (we called them “cans”), and we wrapped newspapers or magazines around our shins. Finally, when we were sixteen, we were allowed to take part in the competition.

      In truth, however, those pickup games were far more recreational than they were competitive. What would have landed a player in the penalty box in a real hockey game was likely to be accidental and followed by an apology on our rink. Body checks were more like the suggestion of what an actual check might be, and there was never an occasion when players were tempted to throw down their gloves and square off. And Dr. Dunbar and the Burrows brothers, Stan and Don, were the only players who wore hockey gloves or pads. More often than not, Dr. Dunbar also wore his old Wolverines jersey. The rest of us were out there in wool mackinaws, sweatshirts, and mittens. No one wore a helmet or a mask, but back then very few professional players did either.

      The Burrows brothers were pretty fair hockey players. They’d grown up in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and played in high school.