American Boy - Larry Watson [64]
I didn’t have to look at him to know how his jaw was set. “What the hell? Is this because you know your dad and Louisa are there together? It doesn’t mean.... They got caught in the blizzard too, for Chrissake.” The thought of the two of them together in a motel room was as distressing to me as it was to Johnny, though it meant a different kind of loss to each of us. But nothing was to be gained by pretending that we hadn’t seen the car.
“We’re here to check on Mr. McDonough.” Johnny was staring straight ahead now. “A stroke is nothing to fool around with.”
“It’s great that you’re concerned about Mr. McDonough, but you know damn well that’s not why your mom sent us here. She doesn’t give a shit if Dale McDonough lives or dies.”
“I think the hospital is on the north side of town. Up on a hill, if I remember.”
The blizzard must not have hit as hard here, because the streets and sidewalks were clear in spots, and the brick walls of buildings were not newly plastered in white. Bellamy didn’t feel like a town recently besieged. There were cars on the streets, and in front of J. C. Penney’s a man was shoveling the sidewalk. Inside Lily’s Café—featuring Broasted Chicken to Go—a few patrons were waiting for their Sunday dinners. Bellamy might have been Sundayevening quiet, but the straight lines and right angles of its streets and intersections, to say nothing of its neon signs and the headlights of its hurrying cars, were a striking contrast to the prairie’s whirling white chaos.
“I can smell that chicken,” I said to Johnny.
“We’ll get something to eat before we go back.”
“Promise?”
“Okay. Yes. Hell, yes. I’ll buy you a steak.”
“I’ll settle for chicken. That smells damn good.”
He pointed toward an intersection with a Mobil station on one corner and a First National Bank branch on the other. “Take a right up there.”
“How come you know where the hospital is?” I asked.
“I was here to have my tonsils out.”
“When the hell was this?”
“Fourth grade? No, fifth. Right after Christmas. Fifth grade.”
“Huh? How come I didn’t know about this?”
“This might come as a surprise to you, Matt, but there’s a hell of a lot you don’t know about the Dunbar family.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
This was Johnny’s chance. If he feared—or knew—that something was going on between his father and Louisa Lindahl, Johnny could unburden himself now.
He was quiet for so long that I almost expected him to do just that. We drove down a block of older brick and stucco houses that looked as though they had been built by someone who knew how hard winds could blow off the prairie. Amber light streamed out of their windows, making squares on the fresh snow.
Finally Johnny said, “That I don’t have tonsils.”
18.
WHEN WE ARRIVED AT SAINT MICHAEL’S HOSPITAL, I told Johnny I’d wait in the car while he went in to find out if Mr. McDonough was a patient, and if so, what his condition was.
Johnny climbed out of the car, but then, before closing the door, he leaned back in to say, “You’ll be here when I come out, won’t you? You’re not going back to that motel, are you?”
He knew me too well. Ever since we drove past the Wagon Wheel Motor Inn and saw the black car parked in its lot, I could think of little but the risks we’d taken that afternoon in order to find Dr. Dunbar and Louisa. And yet now, here we were, moving farther away from them.
“I’ll be here,” I reassured Johnny. “You’re buying me dinner, remember?”
As soon as he was gone, I let my head fall back against the car seat. When I closed my eyes, I saw the snow falling again, blowing across a highway that buckled and waved in my fatigued imagination, as if the earth were heaving and shifting beneath the road’s surface. Then another car emerged from that drowsy blizzard, speeding right at us in the wrong lane. I awakened with a jolt, momentarily surprised that I wasn’t staring at the headlights of another car.
Fewer than fifteen minutes after he’d gone into the hospital, Johnny returned, running across the lot toward the car. He ran as if someone was after him, heedless of the parking lot’s packed