“Is the deputy here?” Johnny asked.
“He’s back at the jail. Interrogating the assailant. He’ll be back later if she’s up to answering questions.”
In the open doorway, I had my own moment of hesitation. The blood trail that we couldn’t find in the woods was evident now, quarter- and nickel-sized drops dried to a dusty burgundy led to the examination table, where an unconscious woman lay beneath a bright lamp. She was covered with a sheet and a blanket, but her head, neck, and shoulders were bare.
For a moment, I wondered if Dr. Dunbar had invited us into the clinic not to give us a lesson about bullet wounds, but rather to teach us about death. The young woman’s flesh was beyond pale. It was marmoreal, and I couldn’t help but think that I was looking at a corpse. And then I recognized her. For while the name Louisa Lindahl was unknown to me, the face was not.
Burke’s Pharmacy was a popular after-school spot in town, and this young woman worked at its soda fountain, scooping ice cream, mixing phosphates, pouring Cokes, and dodging the straw wrappers frequently blown her way. She wasn’t much older than the teenage patrons, but she showed no interest in us except as customers.
She was tall, slender, and pretty in a way unfamiliar to most of us. She wore no makeup, but her luminous skin and excellent bone structure made the lipstick and eye shadow that the girls our age had begun to wear unnecessary. Her neck was long, and her jaw was delicate but square. Her chestnut hair was not tightly pin-curled or overly coiffed, but simply tied back or piled on top of her head without regard to style or fashion. She wore faded print dresses that looked as if they came out of a grandmother’s closet, though these dresses must have been a smaller person’s hand-me-downs, for they always looked a bit too tight, and the hems and sleeves too short. And yet along with an element of aloofness, her austere, gray-eyed loveliness gave her a refined, almost aristocratic appearance, at least to my small-town eyes. These contradictions fascinated me—not only the shabby attire coupled with her regal beauty, but also the good looks with no apparent attempt to adorn or enhance them. And then there was the fact that she was a waitress, but seemed completely indifferent to pleasing people....
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 if we were mature enough, if we were serious enough about the profession we said we were interested in, to be shown a young woman’s breasts without making a wisecrack to conceal our titillation or discomfort?
If we were being tested, Johnny might have received a lower score. He gasped when Louisa Lindahl’s breasts were first revealed, though it wasn’t much as gasps go, just a quick intake of breath, closer to a pain-induced wince than it was to any sound associated with pleasure. I’m not even sure his father heard it. A look might have passed between them, but I couldn’t be certain. I was unpracticed in the subtle communications between fathers and sons.
A bullet wound was uncommon in Willow Falls, of course, but I had already learned from being around Dr. Dunbar that doctors—and, for that matter, those interested in becoming doctors—differ from other people in a fundamental way: they generally want to get closer to the sights that most people want to turn away from. And when Dr. Dunbar directed us to the wound traversing Louisa Lindahl’s midsection—a foot-wide gash sewn shut with fourteen sutures and painted amber with betadine—the eyes closest to her torso were the doctor’s and mine.
“Do you see why I call her lucky?” Dr. Dunbar said, tracing the wound in the air just inches above her abdomen. “Her assailant was plainly trying to end her life. He wasn’t aiming at an arm or a leg. She probably turned to the side just when he fired at her, and the bullet tunneled under a couple layers of skin and then from one side of her to the other. An inch or two deeper in and who knows what kind of damage it might have done.”
“But an inch the other way and it would have missed her completely,” said Johnny.
Even without the benefit of Dr. Dunbar’s peeved look, I knew that Johnny’s suggestion was not consistent with the lessons his father was trying to teach. “If the bullet had gone in an inch deeper,” I asked, “wouldn’t it have passed through her liver?”
He cocked his head as if he needed that alteration of perspective to note the arrangement of her organs. “Liver? Maybe so.... It could have even hit a rib, and when a projectile hits bone, you generally have serious trouble. Then you can get fragments—of bullet or bone—flying off in any direction.”
Dr.
