American Boy. Larry Watson

       4.

      WHEN I ARRIVED HOME THAT NIGHT my mother was in her customary place and engaged in her favorite activity. The telephone cord stretched from the wall to the kitchen table, where she sat with the black receiver in one hand and a Pall Mall in the other. She was wearing a bathrobe, her usual after-work attire, and her hair was done up in curlers. The room’s only light came from the fluorescent strip along the back of the stove. In contrast to the Dunbar home, where the aroma of Mrs. Dunbar’s turkey and all the sumptuous extras still hung in the air, our house smelled like cabbage, though my mother hadn’t prepared cabbage in weeks.

      Whoever was on the other end of the line was telling my mother something so fascinating that she couldn’t be bothered to greet me. Nevertheless, she held up her hand to indicate that I was to wait in the room until her conversation was finished.

      My mother loved gossip, though she never would have called it that. She’d lived in Willow Falls all her life, and for her staying abreast of its citizens and their activities was like keeping up with the family. And between her job and her network of female friends, she had access to plenty of information, as well as the means to move it along. This proclivity of hers didn’t bother me much. She put in long hours on her feet at work and then came home to cook, clean, and pinch pennies. I understood that she took her pleasures where she could. Besides, I often picked up a few juicy rumors about our town’s mostly respectable citizens, some of them parents of my schoolmates.

      She said good-bye and handed the receiver to me so I could walk it back to the cradle.

      “Sadie?” I asked. It was a good bet. My mother usually concluded her day talking with Sadie Pruitt, even if the two of them had just worked the evening shift together at Palmer’s.

      “Doris Greiner.”

      “What did Doris have to say?”

      “Mrs. Greiner,” my mother corrected. “She said a young woman got herself shot today. But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”

      “They brought her to Dr. Dunbar.”

      “Saved her life, did he?”

      “I don’t know about that, but she’s going to live.”

      She nodded and crossed her legs in order to massage an aching foot. But she’d be back on her feet at Palmer’s the following day. The hair curlers told me that. My mother was a homely woman, but she tried to look her best at work. She’d wear a little rouge to add color to her sallow cheeks, and lipstick to help define her narrow mouth’s tight line. Mascara and eyeliner would make her eyes seem less small and close-set. The curlers would put a little wave in her steel-gray hair. Nothing could make her figure anything but stick-thin—smoking and long hours on her feet saw to that—but her uniform would be clean and pressed, her shoes polished. In the end, however, the good tips my mother usually received came because she worked hard to see to her customers’ needs, not because she charmed them. And she wouldn’t have had it any other way.

      “I take it the gunshot wound wasn’t serious then?”

      My mother was seeking corroboration for what she had heard from Doris Greiner, that and the small odd, possibly lurid detail that her regular informants might not have provided.

      “A superficial abdominal laceration,” I said, not entirely sure of the rightness of the terminology, but proud nevertheless of my ability to use it.

      “Lucky gal.”

      “That’s what the doctor said.”

      “You know anything else about her?”

      “She worked at Burke’s. Lindahl. Louisa Lindahl. But you already know that.”

      She blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “She was living with the fellow who shot her. Lester Huston. Not married to, living with.” My mother was no moralist, but she obviously regarded this piece of information as essential to the narrative. “You know anything about him?”

      “Not a thing.”

      “Except that he had a bad temper.”

      That verb’s tense almost slipped by me. “Had?”

      Before answering, she devoted an unusual amount of time and care to pinching a scrap of tobacco from her lip. Then, as if she’d decided the entire smoking enterprise wasn’t worth the bother, she crushed out the cigarette.

      She looked up at me, vaguely surprised. “You didn’t hear? Lester Huston killed himself in the county jail. Tore up a sheet, tied one end around his neck and the other around the frame of his cot, and then just leaned forward and strangled himself.”

      “Damn!”

      “So, no trial for Mr. Huston. And no getting up on the witness stand for Miss Lindahl.”

      “Jesus Christ. He strangled himself?”

      “Doris says that’s why they don’t have lights or any overhead fixtures in the cells. So the prisoners can’t hang themselves. But I guess where there’s a will there’s a way.”

      “Nobody at the Dunbars’ said anything about ...”

      “Maybe they don’t know. This is fresh news.” She stood and straightened her robe. “I guess your doctor can’t save’em all.”

      That remark’s nasty edge was almost surely not an accident. I’d always suspected that my mother didn’t like Dr. Dunbar, and while jealousy would have been the obvious explanation, I doubted that was it. She knew I looked up to the doctor, and that I’d attached myself to the family. But those things didn’t seem to bother her. She subscribed to the laissez-faire school of parenting, a philosophy that reflected her own upbringing. She was the seventh of eleven children, and growing up on a dusty little family farm during the Depression fostered in her the belief that we all had to look out for ourselves in this world. Accordingly, she felt she was fulfilling her parental duties by providing food and shelter for her only child. As long as I stayed in school and out of jail, she’d stay out of my life.

      No, my mother’s dislike of the doctor didn’t have its source in jealousy, not least because she believed it was a sin to be impressed by another human being. Her feelings about Rex Dunbar could best be understood in the context of the town’s divided opinion of itself. On one side were the town’s civic leaders and politicians, its merchants and professionals, and the wives of those men. Those people genuinely believed in the town’s slogan—“a city on the rise”—though the use of the term “city” was a bit overstated in light of the fact that its population was right around two thousand at the time. They truly thought that more people hadn’t settled in Willow Falls only because they didn’t know about it. And they saw the presence of Dr. Dunbar as corroboration of their view of Willow Falls as a special place. After all, the Dunbars were discerning, intelligent people, and they could only have chosen Willow Falls because they could see the town for what it was—a desirable place to make a life and raise a family. The attractive and refined Dr. and Mrs. Dunbar,