American Boy - Larry Watson [19]
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.