American Boy - Larry Watson [9]
No matter how those of us boys sitting at the soda fountain teased or interrogated her (the girls pretended not to notice her), she wouldn’t say much of anything beyond what her work required. And she always refused to disclose where she was from or why she had come to our town. She even resisted the entreaties and flirtations directed her way by more accomplished suitors. I was sitting at the counter one Friday afternoon, when Rick Carver took his best shot. Rick had graduated from Willow Falls High a few years before, and he was known for scoring both on and off the basketball court. Tall, blond, and possessed of an irresistible smile, Rick attended Augustana College on a scholarship, but he came home occasionally to mingle with mortals. On that day, however, he might as well have been a stammering high school freshman. After trying repeatedly to attract her interest, he finally resigned himself to failure, spun off his stool, softly cursed, and walked out of Burke’s. She didn’t even watch him go, and a part of me silently cheered.
But none of the previous impressions I had of Louisa Lindahl, none of the intriguing ambiguities or puzzling paradoxes, could possibly match the salient facts of this day: Tarpaper shack. Lester Huston. Gunshot wound.
Dr. Dunbar led the way into the room, and we arranged ourselves at the examination table, the doctor on one side, Johnny and I on the other, and the unconscious Louisa Lindahl between us.
“This young lady,” Dr. Dunbar said, “should be rechristened. A more appropriate name for her would be Lucky Lindahl. She was shot in the torso with a small-caliber pistol, probably a .22, and if you think that gun’s smaller slug and slower velocity would constitute a reduced threat to her, you’d be sorely mistaken. At close range a .22 can do plenty of damage. But in this case her assailant could not have injured her any less severely if he had been trying. Look here—”
Slowly, as if his main concern was not to wake the patient, Dr. Dunbar pulled the blanket down to her knees. Only a sheet covered her now, and beneath it the contours of her naked body were apparent.
Dr. Dunbar next took hold of the top of the sheet, but then he left it in place. “Matt, there’s another sheet in that cabinet behind you. Would you get it for me, please?”
I tugged open a drawer, and was greeted by the smell of bleached linens. I handed a folded sheet to the doctor, and he looked Louisa Lindahl up and down. “How shall we do this?”
He partially unfolded the sheet I gave him, and draped it across her upper body, right on top of the other sheet. Then he pulled the lower sheet down below her navel. For an instant, however, this maneuver left her breasts uncovered, an error he hastily corrected by pulling down the top sheet.
The glimpse I had of Louisa Lindahl’s breasts can’t have lasted much more than a second. But it was enough time to take in breasts perfect in their symmetry, pale and faintly blue-veined. The rose-colored aureoles were the size of silver dollars, and there was a tiny slit in each nipple. The breasts were large enough to sag slightly to the side from their own weight.
The doctor didn’t acknowledge the accident with the sheets—no oops, no embarrassed laugh, no humorous remark. In fact, he whisked that sheet back in place so swiftly, so dexterously, that I wondered if he had been testing us, the way he did when he asked us if a boy who cut his foot on a brick at a construction site should be given a tetanus shot. Perhaps he wanted to know