American Boy - Larry Watson [36]
Still holding tight to his wrist, I gained some purchase and spun him around as if I were doing the hammer throw. I flung him as hard as I could in the direction of a wall hung with garden implements, and it occurred to me that he might grab one of them and use it as weapon. But when Glen Van Dine fell backward and landed hard on the concrete, the fight was instantly over.
His arm breaking sounded like an icicle being snapped off an awning.
Van Dine grabbed his left arm and instantly cradled it to his body. “Fuck!” he exclaimed. “Goddamn it! Fuck!”
Some of the boys in the garage had been Boy Scouts and would have known how to make splints or fashion slings, but it was Johnny and I who rushed forward to attend to Glen Van Dine and his injury. Van Dine continued with a string of softly whispered curses.
Johnny gently moved Van Dine’s hand out of the way, so we could examine the injured arm. Johnny looked up at me and said the same word his father had spoken when he showed us the x-rays of Eugene Flint’s broken leg. “Angulation.”
Yes, indeed. It was not a compound fracture—the skin was not punctured—but the break was bad, and the displacement of bone had left Glen Van Dine’s forearm looking like a roller coaster track.
Johnny reached into his pocket for his car keys and handed them to me. “You want to pull the car into the driveway? We have to take him to Dad.”
10.
GLEN VAN DINE VOICED NO OBJECTION to Johnny and me staying in the room while Dr. Dunbar assessed and repaired his broken arm. In fact, from the way Glen kept glaring at me I guessed he might have thought that my having to watch would serve as punishment for what I’d done to him. But when I did finally decide to leave the clinic, neither guilt nor squeamishness had anything to do with it. Quite the opposite. My anger at Glen Van Dine was still running hot, but his injury had cheated me of the satisfaction I would have taken in beating the shit out of him.
I walked out of the clinic, but contrary to what I’d told Johnny and the doctor, I didn’t set out for home. Instead, I wandered from room to room through the first floor of the darkened Dunbar home, still energized by the adrenaline that had fueled my fight with Glen Van Dine. On one of my circuits I passed the wide central staircase. She’s up there, I thought. Up two flights and down a narrow hall, there was her room. I could find my way there without a single light to guide me. Would she wake when I stood in the doorway and whispered her name? Or did she sleep with the door closed? Would she answer when I softly knocked? And when I told her what I had done that night, how I had broken a man’s arm because he insulted her, would Louisa Lindahl take me into her bed in gratitude?
But of course I couldn’t climb those stairs. Louisa Lindahl was sleeping in another man’s home. I was blameless as long as I remained where I was, but I would be a trespasser if I were to climb to her floor.
So I kept circling, though my spirit was baying like a hound. Come down, Louisa! Come down to me!
A few years earlier, on one of the many occasions when I slept over at the Dunbars’, I woke in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. Now, when this happened at home, in our house so small it seemed as if every corner could be touched by stretching out an arm, my wakefulness sometimes turned to fear, and I’d lie there nervously, listening hard to make certain that what I was hearing were natural creaks and sighs—the walls and joists settling themselves, the wind rattling a window frame—and not an intruder, as improbable as that was. The fact that I was the man of the house probably accounted for my anxiety. But that night at the Dunbars’, fear didn’t accompany my insomnia, and after a few minutes I got out of bed and left Johnny’s bedroom to roam through the softly shadowed spaces of that grand house. As long as I stayed out of the rooms where Dr. and Mrs. Dunbar or the twins slept, I had the house to myself.
It was a winter night,