The Doctor and Mr. Dylan (18 page)

“I thought you were number one.”

“Nope. I was number two. Remember I told you there were two kids in my class who got accepted into Harvard?”

“Yes.”

“Those two students were Angel and me. After she got pregnant, we told Harvard the truth
—that we couldn’t go, that we needed to stay closer to home and deal with it. We stayed in Hibbing to have the baby. When she was four months pregnant, Angel developed a rare bone cancer called osteosarcoma in her left femur—the thighbone. The doctors amputated the leg and hit her with maximum chemotherapy, but it didn’t work. The malignancy spread to her liver, and was incurable. She died.”

“How old was she?”

“Nineteen.”

“Jeez. And the baby?”

“The baby didn’t survive the cancer and the chemotherapy.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this stuff before?”

I shrugged. “You didn’t need to know.”

“So you blew off Harvard to be a dad, and then it all fell apart.”

“Yep. I enrolled at the University of Minnesota at Duluth the following year. The Harvard door closed.”

“I’m sorry, Dad. That’s a terrible story.”

My eyes were dry. I’d cried my final tears over Angel years before.

“Next question,” Johnny said. “What’s going on with you and mom?”

“Your mother and I are heading toward a divorce.”

Johnny chomped on the stem of grass, and looked north into the cumulus clouds that hovered over the Canadian border. “I figured as much. I shouldn’t be surprised. I never saw you two hang out together for more than ten minutes at a time. Two separate bedrooms. And the fighting was ridiculous. You two argued like 5-year-olds. You two were a living advertisement for never getting married.”

“We tried….”

“You tried to have the shittiest marriage in the world?”

“No, we tried. I tried.”

“Spare me, Dad. And Echo’s mom?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know you’re doing Echo’s mom.”

“Doing?”

“Screwing her. Having sex. Whatever you old people want to call it.”

Old people?
I searched for the right words, somewhere up there in the treetops, among the sparrows and swallows. “Lena and I are friends,” I said at last.

“Echo says her mom talks about you all the time. She says her mom is happier than she’s ever been. Echo says her mom is in love with you.”

“That’s nice to hear. Time will tell what happens between Lena and me.” I’d waited long enough. I blurted out, “Are you and Echo having sex?”

Johnny glared back. He threw another stick into the water and followed its progress downstream as if the future of the human race depended on it.

“Are you?” I repeated.

Still no answer. Johnny’s tacit reply could only mean one thing. He and Echo were doing the deed. “Echo’s dad called me this morning. He knows. He found your pubic hair in Echo’s bed.”

“So what?”

“He doesn’t want you in his 17-year-old daughter’s bed, that’s what.”

“That piece of shit. Why doesn’t he just leave us alone? Everybody has sex in high school. It’s no big deal.”

“It is a big deal. I just told you what happened to Angel and me.”

“Well, I’m not you. As much as you keep trying to make me into Nico Junior, I’m not you.”

“Are you using protection?”

“Let it go, Dad. Leave me alone.” Johnny sent a huge lugie on a river cruise to Memphis, and said, “This is so bogus. I’m trapped out here in the woods, facing the paternal inquisition. What are you going to do next, ram toothpicks under my fingernails until I talk? I want to go home.”

“We’re not done. I can’t follow you around and make sure you’re not having sex with Echo, but if you do have sex, you need to use birth control. Got it?”

“Yes, Herr General. I vill obey. Can we go now?”

“I want to talk about this summer. Your mother expects you to spend half your summer in California.”

“No way, Dad. I’m staying here. I’m not leaving Echo.”

“I repeat, your mother expects you to spend half your summer in California.”

“And I repeat, no way.”

“You’re not going back to see your mother at all before school starts?”

“Nope. What kind of mother is she, anyway? Where is she in my life, day to day? If Minnesota has taught me one thing, Dad, it’s that life is simpler without her around. Mom can come up north if she wants to see me so bad. I like it here. No one’s calling me a lazy shit, and the ‘Boy with the B’s’ is gone. I want to sleep in, hang out with my girl, and work at the hospital to make some money. I want to get my own car.”

“Are you going to tell your mother that?”

“I told her on the phone last night. It’s my life. I don’t want to go back. If she wants to see me, Mom needs to come to Minnesota. I told her that. She just ranted about her job and how hard it is for her to get away.”

Johnny hurled a handful of sand into the Baby Mississippi and said, “You and Mom need to clue in. I know more than you. I know who Johnny Antone is. You don’t.” He hopped across the remaining six rocks to my side of the river, and started alone down the path back to the car.

What could I say? Johnny paid off his parents in the currency we demanded: he turned himself into the straight-A student we’d dreamed of. Now he was determined to collect his just rewards, and follow his own dreams.

CHAPTER 14

BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

At dawn on a September morning I was scheduled to anesthetize a 28-year-old female for termination of her 8-week-old pregnancy. Termination of pregnancy is medical jargon for an abortion. I didn’t love giving anesthesia for abortions, but I had no moral objection to assisting a woman’s right to make that choice. The patient’s name was Kendra White. When I met her in pre-op, Kendra was cheery and rosy-cheeked. If she felt any guilt over the abortion, she was hiding it well. Perhaps she was relieved to be dodging the responsibilities of motherhood. I didn’t know, and it wasn’t my job to ask.

I introduced myself, asked her the standard pre-anesthesia questions, and she signed her consent to proceed. I left the bedside to prepare my operating room for the anesthetic, and ran into Bobby Dylan. He had a dark expression, and pulled me aside into an empty conference room.

“Doin’ some baby-killing today, Doctor?” he said.

“What?”

“It’s bad business to get into around here. Doing abortions. Up here we’ve got a lot of good Christian people who believe that life begins in the womb.”

I exhaled with bluster at this unexpected skirmish. I wasn’t in the mood for a pro-life lecture from Dylan. “I’m not killing any babies here, Bobby. I’m just giving an anesthetic.”

“You’re aiding and abetting a murder.”

“It’s a first trimester pregnancy. There are thousands of these terminated in America every day. It’s a legal procedure.”

“But it’s wrong,”

“You think it’s wrong. I don’t.”

Dylan shook his head. “I thought you were a good guy, Doctor, but this is wrong. You know better. You’re as bad as your kid, bringing your California amorality to town.” His face twisted into a sneer. His upper lip was vibrating.

He was a rocket ready to blow. I’d seen enough. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said. “I’ve got to get going.” I shouldered my way past Dylan, and proceeded to my operating room.

Thirty minutes later the procedure was over. The gynecologist inserted a plastic hose through the cervix and suctioned the contents of Kendra White’s uterus into a plastic bottle. There was no discernable baby in the bottle—no macroscopic sign of life—just a reddish collection of blood and tissue. I managed the woman’s anesthetic drugs and her medical condition, and never looked at that plastic bottle for a second.

After Kendra White was awake and safe, tucked into her recovery room bed, I sidled up to Dr. James Saunders, the gynecologist who’d performed the procedure, and asked, “How much pushback do you get for doing abortions around here? Do you have a hard time finding nurses or anesthesia personnel to do the cases?”

“A few of the staff are opposed on a religious basis. I respect that. But there are enough staff who are OK with it, so I just work with those who are. Why?”

“Bobby Dylan gave me a hard time about killing babies.”

“Oh, give me a break. He’s a wackjob.”

“He’s been a decent friend to me.”

Dr. Saunders rolled his eyes. “Take my word for it. He’s a wacko. I never trusted the guy. I mean, Bobby Dylan? Maybe I’ll change my name to Mick Jagger.” He laughed at his own joke, and walked away.

The implosion of my relationship with Dylan concluded two days following Kendra White’s abortion. There were no surgeries scheduled at the hospital, and he invited me to meet him for a hunting trip north of town. The sun was peeking inches above the pine forest east of Long Lake as I parked my car next to Bobby’s truck. The leaves were on fire with autumn colors. We were 10 miles south of Bigfork, at the trailhead of an old logging road. I unzipped the long leather case that held Dom’s 12-gauge shotgun, and unsheathed it. Like most Minnesota boys, I’d learned to shoot a firearm when I was in the 6th grade, and had shot my share of birds during my teens.

This morning the 12-gauge was loaded and ready. It was the first day of partridge hunting season, and I was looking forward to flushing a few fowl out of the brush. I buttoned the front of my jacket and stepped out into the freshness of the morning air. A blustery post-dawn breeze stung my fingers where they circled the metal of the trigger guard. It was 8 a.m., time for the ruffled grouse of Northern Minnesota to forage for breakfast. If my aim was true, a partridge or two would enjoy their last meal this very day.

Bobby Dylan jumped down from the cab of his pickup truck. He carried a beautiful firearm of polished walnut and glinting steel. He offered no words of greeting, and busied himself by loading shells into his double-barreled shotgun.

We still performed together at Heaven’s Door twice a week, but our relationship had cooled since the pubic hair incident and Kendra White’s abortion. We played our gigs, didn’t talk much, and when we did, the conversation was strained.

It was my nature to try to make amends. When Dylan suggested the hunting trip, I saw it as an opportunity to mend our friendship. I wasn’t mad at him. We worked together and we rocked together. I wanted us to get along. It was Bobby who had a bug up his ass about me. I was hopeful we could kill some partridge together, have a laugh or two, and forget about teenage sex and the morality of terminating a pregnancy.

Dylan shouldered his gun, and exhaled a thick cloud of Marlboro smoke. He took a second deep drag on the cancer stick and growled, “Let’s go find us some birds.”

No other words followed. No cordial “Good morning,” or “How are you doing today?” He took off into the forest at flank speed, and I hustled to keep up with him. We marched single file up the trail under the orange and yellow canopy of the Chippewa National Forest. This old logging trail was two parallel troughs of dirt with a row of tall grass between them. A rugged automobile could forge up this trail, but the route was best suited for hikers.

“Beautiful morning, eh?” I offered.

Dylan still didn’t answer, and I began to worry. Maybe he was tired, or maybe he needed caffeine. Or maybe Dylan was angry at me. Maybe he was as crazy as Lena described. I turned around and looked back down the trail, and began to devise exit plans.

Dylan never looked back at me. He tucked his shotgun under one arm while he lit another cigarette, quickened his stride, and offered no more words than an owl in a birch tree. The sky darkened, and rain began to fall. I turned up my collar, and struggled to keep pace with Dylan. He climbed farther up the hill until he finished the last puff of his second cigarette. We’d hiked half a mile from where we’d parked the cars. There was nothing around us except trees, an occasional chipmunk, and a canopy of gray sky. Dylan and I had never been more isolated from society, or from each other. This isolation was by design. He stopped with a huff, mashed the butt of his cigarette into the heel of his boot, and turned to face me. His face was wet with rain, and his eyes were wild. Dylan held his shotgun at his hip, and aimed it at the middle of my chest.

“I’m done with you, Doctor. I drove past Lena’s house yesterday morning on the way in to work, and I saw a familiar automobile parked in the alley behind her place. Turns out that automobile was a certain black BMW that you don’t see much up in this part of the country.”

I held my breath and froze. I knew what was coming, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

“I was mighty curious and a bit agitated when I saw that there black car,” Dylan said. “So I parked a block away and waited. Pretty soon, Lena’s back door opens, and this dude pops out. A skinny guy, wavy hair, likes to wear sunglasses and pointy black shoes. Seems this dude looks a lot like one Nico Antone.” He spat on the ground between us and said, “It seems to me a rebellious abuse of friendship, to be fucking your buddy’s wife, does it not?”

He positioned himself between me and the path back to the car. I looked to the left and the right, and saw nothing but an infinite expanse of forest. I was alone in the woods with a jealous man holding a loaded shotgun.