The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [81]
“Now you do understand, Billy, that technically you were trespassing…”
They took me to a young Cuban doctor on Woodland Avenue and he was in a panic. He started making exactly the kind of noises Desi Arnaz made in I Love Lucy when Lucy did something really boneheaded—only he was doing this over my leg. “I don’ thin’ I can do this,” he said, and looked at them beseechingly. “It’s a really bad break. I mean look at it. Wow.”
I expect he was afraid he would be sent back to Cuba. Eventually he was prevailed upon to set the break. For the next six weeks my leg remained more or less backward. The moment they cut off the cast, the leg spun back into position and everyone was pleasantly surprised. The doctor beamed. “Tha’s a bit of luck!” he said happily.
Then I stood up and fell over.
“Oh,” the doctor said and looked troubled again. “Tha’s not good, is it?”
He thought for a minute and told my parents to take me home and to keep me off the leg for the rest of the day and overnight and see how it was in the morning.
“Do you think it will be all right then?” asked my father.
“I’ve no idea,” said the doctor.
The next morning I got up and stepped gingerly onto my wounded leg. It felt okay. It felt good. I walked around. It was fine. I walked a little more. Yes, it was definitely fine.
I went downstairs to report this good news and found my mother in the laundry room bent over sorting through clothes.
“Hey, Mom, my leg’s fine,” I announced. “I can walk.”
“Oh, that’s good, honey,” she said, head in the dryer. “Now where’s that other sock?”
IT WASN’T THAT MY MOTHER AND FATHER were indifferent to their children’s physical well-being by any means. It was just that they seemed to believe that everything would be fine in the end and they were always right. No one ever got lastingly hurt in our family. No one died. Nothing ever went seriously wrong—and not much went wrong in our town or state either, come to that. Danger was something that happened far away in places like Matsu and Quemoy and the Belgian Congo, places so distant that nobody was really quite sure where they were.
It’s hard for people now to remember just how enormous the world was back then for everybody, and how far away even fairly nearby places were. When we called my grandparents long distance on the telephone in Winfield, something we hardly ever did, it sounded as if they were speaking to us from a distant star. We had to shout to be heard and plug a finger in an ear to catch their faint, tinny voices in return. They were only about a hundred miles away, but that was a pretty considerable distance even well into the 1950s. Anything farther—beyond Chicago or Kansas City, say—quickly became almost foreign. It wasn’t just that Iowa was far from everywhere. Everywhere was far from everywhere.
America was especially blessed in this regard. We had big buffering oceans to left and right and no neighbors to worry us above or below, so there wasn’t any need to be fearful about anything ever. Even world wars barely affected our home lives. During World War II, when the film mogul Jack Warner realized that from the air his Hollywood studio was indistinguishable from a nearby aircraft factory, he had a giant arrow painted on the roof above the legend “Lock-heed That-Away!” to steer Japanese bombers safely away from some of the valuable stars who didn’t go to war (and that included, just for the record, Gary Cooper, Bob Hope, Fred MacMurray, Frank Sinatra, John Garfield, Gene Kelly, Alan Ladd, Danny Kaye, Cary Grant, Bing Crosby, Van Johnson, Dana Andrews, Ronald Reagan, and John Wayne, among many other valiant heroes who helped America to act its way to victory) and toward the correct target.
No one ever knew whether Warner was in earnest with his sign or not, but it didn’t really matter because no one seriously expected (at least not after the first jittery days of the war) that the Japanese would attack the U.S. mainland. At the same time, on the other side