by Larry Watson
Sunrise was less than an hour away when Marie finally reappeared. She was wearing a sling, just as she had been when she went in, but not the jury-rigged version I had knotted from her father’s shirt. This one was made for its purpose. Canvas, it cradled her arm completely, and its work was supplemented by Ace bandages elaborately swathed around her, immobilizing her arm and shoulder. The elastic extended diagonally from the base of her neck to below her breasts and wound around her chest. To accommodate the wrap, the top half of her swimming suit was pulled down and bunched around her waist, while her shirt was draped around her shoulders.
She looked tired, but the color that pain had siphoned away earlier had returned to her cheeks. She smiled at me and asked, “Have you dried out yet?”
“Almost.” In truth, only a little dampness remained in the creases of my clothes. “How about you? Can you leave or are they going to check you in?”
“No, I can go.” Her glance over her shoulder made me wonder if she was escaping rather than being released.
Just at that moment Dr. DuFresne emerged from the small office behind the nurse’s desk. “Remember, young lady,” he said sternly, “you’re to check in with your family doctor next week. He’ll want to see how that bone’s healing. I’m not convinced that surgery isn’t called for.”
Marie nodded curtly at his admonition, and kept moving toward the door. I rose and followed her, catching a glimpse, on my way out, of Dr. DuFresne’s look of disgust at my damp, disheveled, barefoot appearance.
Marie’s collarbone was broken, and if the combination of the wrap and the sling didn’t work, then it would be necessary, in Dr. DuFresne’s view, to knit the bone back together with a surgical screw. For the next six weeks she was to use her arm as little as possible and to keep that beautiful body tightly bound.
The hours she spent inside the hospital were not all devoted to treatment of her injury. The first delay occurred because her sister had to be telephoned and her permission given for Marie to be treated. Her sister was willing to give that but wondered if she should come to the hospital herself, something she didn’t want to do because their younger brother couldn’t be left alone. Marie assured her that wouldn’t be necessary and that someone was there who could bring her home. Next, both the X-ray technician and the doctor were called away to attend to other patients. The first was an old woman already in the hospital who fell attempting to go to the bathroom on her own. The technician wasn’t supposed to read the X-rays, much less reveal what he saw on them, but he told Marie that the old woman had broken her hip. Dr. DuFresne, on the other hand, said nothing about the patient he was called away to see, but he was even more curt with Marie when he returned.
“Grumpy old bastard,” Marie said as we drove away from the hospital. “Why would anyone who hates people as much as he does want to be a doctor in the first place?”
“How did it feel getting all trussed up like that?”
“It hurt like hell.”
“Well, there’s your answer.”
We were both tired, Marie was in pain, and the eastern sky’s night blue was already surrendering its darkest hue to morning’s lighter tint, but Marie didn’t want to go home. Not just yet. “Take the long way,” she said.
I wasn’t sure what that route would be. If I drove all around the city’s perimeter, the trip probably wouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes. Then it came to me. Marie wanted to be driven past Gene’s house.
While I drove, Marie worried out loud about how her life would accommodate a broken clavicle. She was supposed to start her summer job at J. C. Penney’s in the next week—would they want a clerk who could use only one arm and who would have to wear blouses with an empty sleeve? Who was going to change her Ace bandage and wrap her up again? Marie would prefer asking that favor of her sister rather than her mother, but her sister might attend summer school in Minneapolis. How often could she bathe? She wouldn’t be able to wear a bra or shave her armpits for weeks!
She fell silent, however, when I turned up Keogh Street. Within the distance of a couple blocks—there could be no doubt about the direction in which we were headed—she raised the hand of her uninjured arm as if she were blocking traffic. “I want to go home,” she said. “Now.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Just turn at the corner.”
I did as I was told.
By the time I parked in Marie’s driveway and walked her to the door, doves somewhere overhead muttered their oohs and aahs over the hour we were coming in, and there was sufficient light to read the address on the house across the street. That was the same test I had subjected dawn to on another occasion. This time I knew where Marie was.
I held the door to the garage open for her. “Will your sister be waiting up?”
“I doubt it. When I talked to her from the hospital and convinced her I was okay, she just told me to come in quietly.”
Once again we were standing at her back door. Once again she thanked me for escorting her through a difficult time. Once again I thought of what it must be like to stand in this place and be more than Marie Ryan’s friend.
Then, abruptly, she said, “Okay. Now.”
“Now?”
“Now you can kiss me.” She laughed at how her statement sounded like a regal command. “Said the queen.”
“I’m not sure that would be such a good idea. Gene—”
“Forget about Gene. You must know that he and I are finished.”
“He’s gone through so much—”
She clapped her hand over my mouth. “Stop it. Stop defending him.”
Her hand slipped away, but its sensation—softness, warmth, a faintly antiseptic smell from the hospital—lingered. Once I could form words again, I continued to try to talk my way out of the moment that I had desired more than any other. “Down at the river tonight . . . that wasn’t the real Gene. He would never—”
“Don’t you think I know by now who and what the real Gene is? And better than you? Now, are you going to take me up on my offer? You don’t want to make a girl feel rejected.”
Before I could answer, she hooked her fingers inside the collar of my T-shirt, pulled me close, and kissed me.
I had kissed a few girls before Marie, but her kiss, with its wide openmouthed intensity, its ability to at first be hard and then yield to pliancy, was astonishing. Because of her injury she had to withhold most of her body, yet her entire being still seemed behind her kiss.
Our lips came apart, and immediately I went back for more, to confirm both my good fortune and my physical impressions.
The next kiss was amazingly deeper, firmer, and softer than the first, and eventually I had to step back, breathless, unbelieving, and a little frightened that I couldn’t match her passion.
“Whew!” was all I could manage, and with that, Marie laughed and sent me on my way, albeit with the admonition that I had best call her the following afternoon.
I parked the Studebaker in front of the house and was surprised to see both my father and mother hurry down the front walk to meet me. It was still too early for them to have gotten up, especially on a Saturday, so obviously they had been waiting for my arrival. The night before, they had cheerfully given me their permission to stay out as long as I liked, but as they approached, their expressions were drawn tight with anything but approval. Just as sunrise’s gradual light brings to view one feature of the landscape after another, I saw, dawning across my parents’ faces, anger, worry, and relief, all within the span of seconds.
My father put his arm across my shoulders, an action that should have seemed an expression of affection; instead it seemed as if he were gently restraining me. On my other side, my mother also walked close, ready to block my movement in the other direction. Together they herded me toward the house, but neither said anything; that was left to Uncle Burt, who came out onto the porch as we approached.
Uncle Burt had driven down from Wembley for my graduation, and he had stayed the night. He to
o must have been waiting for me. His cigar had burned down to a stub, and the coffee cup in his hand was probably not his first of the morning.
He said, in that voice that was always a strange combination of delicacy and heartiness, “Your folks have been worried about you. As you might know, your classmates had a party down on the river last night, and there was an accident, a drowning.”
I couldn’t hear any more. I twisted away from my father’s loose embrace and tore off across the lawn. I must have heard one of my parents—both of them—yell after me, “It wasn’t Gene! It wasn’t Gene!” just as I must have concluded, once I saw his car parked in front of the Stoddard house, that he could not have been the drowning victim, but I ran on and didn’t stop until I came to that car and saw, faintly in the early morning light, the dusty outlines of footprints on the trunk, rear window, and roof, evidence of its having been used as Gene’s stage. I ran my hand along the rear fin, not far from where Marie had fallen. I backed away from the Ford. In its wheel wells were traces of sand.
My mother had followed me down the street, and now she caught up to me. Gently she turned me back toward our house. “Sshh. That’s okay,” she said, as if I had been crying and needed to be quieted. “He’s all right.”
I certainly didn’t argue with her, but I might have said, He is not all right, he is definitely not all right, and soon he will be worse. . . .
Back in the house, I allowed myself to be comforted and reassured. My parents were convinced that I had broken away out of fear and concern for my friend. In truth, what had panicked me was fear, and a familiar one. I had felt it on the night when Marie and I searched the branches of the trees for Gene’s hanging body, and my fear then was that his death would preserve Marie’s love for him. How much worse would it have been if on the night when Marie and I had exchanged our breaths, he lost his forever. She would never have recovered.
As it turned out, neither Bob Mullen nor Diane Burgie attended Carleton College in the autumn of 1962. Diane enrolled at Bismarck Junior College, and her decision to remain in her hometown was largely determined by her fragile emotional state at the time. And Bob? Diane’s boyfriend and fellow scholarship winner was the young man who drowned in the Missouri River on the night of our high school graduation.
She blamed herself for what happened, and Bob likely would not have had it any other way. After I left the party in pursuit of Marie, after Gene slid off his car at the end of his act (as it turned out, his performance was mostly complete at the time of my departure), Diane was persuaded to drink a can of beer. The person who talked her into consuming alcohol for the first time was: A football player from Mandan High School; A trumpet player from St. Mary’s Central High School; A farm kid from a small town west of Bismarck. All three accounts made the rounds, but probably the important detail, present in every version, was that this young man was someone who had been Diane’s playmate in childhood. He had moved to another town or another neighborhood.
It doesn’t matter. He was, as narratives so often require such a character to be, an outsider, the other. Diane was pleased to see him. Or at least she pretended to be. She and Bob had quarreled. He apparently had wanted to leave the party, but she had wanted to stay. The attention she paid the new boy, as well as the beer she drank (and another and another followed the first), was calculated to anger Bob and to demonstrate to him that she didn’t have to shape all the contours of her life to his.
Her tactic worked. Or was it a tactic? Perhaps she allowed herself, under the influence of alcohol or not, to be attracted to someone other than Bob. Perhaps the occasion, an end and a beginning, prompted her to consider alternatives that she had previously barred from consideration.
Bob, desperate to win back her attention—or to garner the attention of others and in so doing demonstrate that he didn’t need Diane’s—began to do front and back flips on the sandbar. Bob was known for his conscientiousness, his seriousness, his intelligence; he was, in other words, someone who readily gained the respect and admiration of adults while he had few qualities that made him cool or popular or attractive among his peers. He wasn’t an athlete, at least not in any of the sports that had audiences or followers. But Bob Mullen participated in gymnastics throughout high school, and it was that training that enabled him to impress the drunken crowd at the sandbar. In addition to his flips, he did a somersault off the roof of a car. But that was not his most impressive performance. He twisted through the air; he landed on the earth. But then he needed to bring the other elements into play. For fire, he launched himself over one of the bonfires, landing with a perfect roll on the other side of the flames.
Bob Mullen backed up from the river and then took a run at it. When his feet touched the waterline, he catapulted himself into the air, flipped, and came down right into the river’s main current. Had he been heavier and less skilled at hurling his body, perhaps he would not have been able to propel himself so far from the sandbar. Had he been taller, perhaps he would have landed where he could touch bottom and still keep his head above water.
Almost immediately the laughter and shouts of encouragement that had accompanied Bob’s attempt to entertain his classmates died when they saw him swept away—from light, the fire’s flickering orange reflection on the water, to darkness, the river’s true night face—the instant he splashed down.
And yet something—drunkenness, disbelief, all those years of parental warnings about the river’s treacherousness, something—paralyzed the witnesses. A long moment passed before anyone stepped into the river for a rescue attempt. By then it was already too late. Most people said he vanished immediately into the black water, pulled under by a current that wouldn’t permit him to surface even for a second to wave or shout for help. At least that’s what most people said. But Karen Conroy, who had been standing right at the river’s edge, told me she caught one final glimpse of Bob Mullen. She said she could see his pale form tumbling through the water, as if he were still doing his somersaults and flips while the Missouri rushed him off.
His body was discovered two days later, tangled in the driftwood and brush at a bend in the river fifteen miles south of Bismarck.
Although Bob Mullen died with a mouth full of water, the taste of dirt was on his tongue.
The previous sentence appears in one of my journals, but the line never found its way into a poem, story, or novel. For the insight—if it qualifies as such—on that sensation, I had my own tumble into a Missouri River pothole to thank.
Why have I bothered to relate the Bob Mullen story when it is a tributary that never joins the main narrative? Because while I know—rationally, logically, sensibly, I know that Raymond Stoddard’s deeds had nothing to do with that young man’s drowning, I can’t separate them emotionally. Everything that occurred near that place and time seems somehow to owe its causality to Raymond Stoddard and his murder of Monty Burnham. Raymond Stoddard? He set the universe in motion.
The slain politician’s son doesn’t want to board the train.
His mother and his uncle, however, remind him that being sent away is not a punishment but a privilege, a reward for being a good student and a respectful, dutiful boy who has borne up under difficult circumstances. His mother kisses his forehead, and when she embraces him, he suddenly thinks he has a legitimate excuse for not getting on the train. He’s ill! In his throat he feels that scratchy constriction that’s often the first sign of tonsillitis. But that thought is enough to carry him back from the verge of tears, and with that retreat the sensation vanishes.
Just as he lifts his foot onto the step stool that will carry him into the train car, his uncle hisses into his ear, “Don’t stay in the bathroom longer than you have to.” Another passenger comes up behind him, so the slain politician’s son doesn’t have time to ask his uncle the question that seems so obvious: Why would I?
He walks down the train’s aisle, looking for a seat on the side of the train that won’t force him to look out on the platform where his mother and
uncle will be standing, and as he does, his feeling of banishment is complete. He is being sent to a strange country whose customs, population, even food, will be alien to him. He is on his way to spend two weeks at Camp Way-Tah-Ga in northern Wisconsin, and he knows that the congregation of First Lutheran Church chose him to go, rather than a boy from a poor family as in years past, because the congregation, indeed the entire town, feels sorry for him. But why not leave, he thinks, since he is obviously no longer understood in his own land. Otherwise why would his mother, who has always been perfectly attuned to his likes and dislikes, his enthusiasms and fears, believe that living with boys he has never met would be anything but punitive?
Further evidence of this estrangement he comes upon two hours into his journey when he unwraps the ham sandwich his mother prepared for his lunch. The bread has been spread thickly with butter. Mustard—he likes mustard only. He dislikes butter on everything but pancakes and then only the thinnest film, which must melt completely. He folds the sandwich back into its waxed-paper wrapper and then tucks it inside the copy of Boys’ Life that he’s already read. He lays both on the empty cushion beside him and tries to act as though they belong to the person who will soon return to his seat. If the sandwich has done nothing else, it has replaced some of his despondency with disgust. Adults—they act as though they understand, but they fall so far short you wonder why they even bother with the pretense.