American Boy - Larry Watson [4]
Only nineteen days separated Johnny and me in age, but I often felt like his older brother, his worldly, rougheredged older brother. I might have had access to the privileged world of the Dunbars, but at the end of the day I returned to the gloomy little two-bedroom box where I lived with my mother. We weren’t exactly poor, but poverty was always within view. We often ate as well as the Dunbars, but only because my mother brought leftovers home from work. And I seldom sat down to one of our warmed-over meals without wondering about its origins. Had Judge Barron sent that steak back because it was too well done? Was this baked potato originally placed in front of Doris Crum, the wife of Dr. Crum, the dentist? Did George Dummett, owner of Dummett’s Hardware, touch this piece of chicken before pushing his plate aside?
But Johnny Dunbar wasn’t only sheltered by his family’s means; he was like a child in no hurry to grow up. Every initiation, every marker of adulthood that I couldn’t wait for—smoking, drinking, driving, earning money, having sex, being independent—Johnny seemed in no hurry to reach. And what interest he had could often be satisfied vicariously by hearing of my exploits or efforts. If I was occasionally less than forthcoming about what Debbie McCarren and I were doing in her basement, or in the backseat of my mother’s DeSoto, it was because Johnny’s probing questions could be invasive. And if I indulged in a cigar or a six-pack of Hamm’s, I didn’t necessarily want to explain every sensation to him. After Randy Wadnor and I got into a scuffle at a football game, to take one example, I wanted to put the incident behind me as quickly as possible. Johnny, on the other hand, wanted to know every detail of the altercation. We both enjoyed sports, but Johnny was not competitive—he only wanted to play. And we were both good students, but while I studied to improve my future prospects, his success in school was the result of the wide-eyed curiosity he brought to any subject.
Johnny even looked like a little brother. He had his father’s curls, but he couldn’t tame them. They frizzed and coiled in every direction, often making him look as if he’d just climbed out of bed. I could have grown a full beard at that age, while Johnny’s cheeks produced nothing but down. The muscles of his slender body were smooth and undefined as well, and he had a childish habit of bouncing and squirming if he had to sit in one place for long. If anyone in town did believe we were brothers, they likely would have assumed that Johnny took after our delicate mother.
Johnny stopped abruptly ten yards ahead of me in the woods, and when I looked questioningly in his direction, he smiled and pointed up at the low branch of a tilting oak tree.
Many of the boys in our town—and even a few of the girls—grew up in these woods. We built forts, played hideand-seek, climbed trees, and hunted, first with slingshots and BB guns, then with .22s. We formed clubs that had their headquarters in the forest, and we took refuge here when we needed to be alone with our sadness, confusion, or anger. Among these trees we hid from bullies and parents and authorities. We also went to Frenchman’s Forest when we wanted to smoke cigarettes or drink the liquor we had stolen. A few of us had our first sexual experiences in here as well, and though that wasn’t true for Johnny or for me, we both received a rudimentary sexual education in the forest years earlier, when Lannie Corbis straddled the branch of the very oak tree Johnny was standing under now, solemnly holding forth on the mechanics of sex to an eager but skeptical audience of five younger boys. Eventually we’d learn that Lannie was mistaken about some of the ways men and women fit together, but even the corrected record could not alter for me the association of sex with the smell of tree sap and the hum of insects.
“Lannie?” I said.
Johnny nodded, smiling.
Yes, if Louisa Lindahl was