The Doctor and Mr. Dylan (19 page)

“Did you think I was a dummy, that I’d never find out?” Dylan had a crazed look in his eye. His emphasis on the word
dummy
was loud and extreme. The word caromed off the tree trunks and resonated off the ceiling of leaves. I shook my head—not really a denial, but an action of disbelieving remorse. My heart thumped double-time while I searched my brain for a solution.

Bobby Dylan’s black eyes burned into me with a glare I hadn’t seen since our first meeting. “I wanted to corner you out here with no one around and no place for you to run to. You’re a sorry-ass excuse for a friend, and you know it, you chickenshit sleaze ball. I’ll never trust you again.”

I chose my next words with great heed, walking on unseen eggshells. “I’m sorry you feel that way. I didn’t tell you because I knew you wouldn’t like it. But hey, man, you and Lena split up years ago. And you sleep with lots of other women.”

“Don’t give me any of your bullshit rationalization, Doctor Holier-Than-Thou. You’re porking Lena behind my back. End of story. Hunting accidents, they occur. You know that, and I know that. Everyone knows that. Rainy morning. Man trips on a root. Gun goes off. Another man inherits a chest full of buckshot. No way to save you, so far from civil-eye-za-shun. No jury would convict me. You dig? I brought you out here to kill you. I killed men in Afghanistan, and I can do it again. I planned it this way, to fill your bony chest full of holes.”

I was trapped. There was no way out of the woods except though the man. I curled my finger against the trigger of my shotgun, and wondered if I could shoot a man in cold blood.

Then it ended. Dylan fell back, withdrew his gun, and leaned it against his shoulder, the barrel pointed high into the darkening sky. He slumped down on a fallen trunk of a birch tree. His face lost its color, and his eyelids sagged. “Now I can’t do it,” he said. “I can’t gun you down pointblank over this… this recreational fucking.” He pointed down the trail, and said, “Just get out of here. Get out of my life, out of my hospital, and out of my town. Take your jailbait-loving son, get into that fucking German piece of shit car and ride off into the sunset. I don’t ever want to see your repulsive mug again. The next time I might not feel so conflicted. The next time you might wind up with some buckshot up your asshole.”

I wasn’t going to argue. I backed down the path one step at a time, and kept the barrel of my shotgun aimed at the earth between Dylan and myself all the while. I rounded a curve in the trail. As soon as the stickman’s outline disappeared behind the autumn foliage, I turned and ran full bore without looking back, a wiser man thankful for the breath in my lungs.

My census of friends had dropped by one.

CHAPTER 15

I’LL BE YOUR BABY

I drove back to town with one eye on the rear view mirror. With luck, Bobby Dylan, Afghanistan-War Posttraumatic Stress Syndrome veteran and Antone-hater extraordinaire, would not show up at my front door with second thoughts about revenge. The whole episode rattled me. What kind of psycho takes you hunting 30 miles from home, walks you into the wilderness where you have no car, no cell phone signal, and no defense, points a gun at you and says, “It seems to me a rebellious abuse of friendship, to be fucking your buddy’s wife?”

A crazy psycho, that’s who. The red flags had always been flapping around Bobby Dylan: the year in a psychiatric institution, the hijacking of Bob Dylan’s name and life, the brash drug use, the searing “opt-out” confrontation in the operating room, and the intense friendship offered up in haste. Now, with equal intensity and speed, that friendship had turned into hatred.

I needed an ally. I drove straight to Lena’s house. She needed to know what had just happened. She needed to know about this threat to our relationship. I ran up Lena’s front steps and found her in the living room, face down on the marshmallow couch, crying into a towel.

What was going on? Did she know already? Lena looked up, her cheeks wet and her eyes wild, and said, “Echo is pregnant! She cannot have a baby now. She’s still in high school, for God’s sakes.”

“What?”

“Johnny got her pregnant, what else? Echo is flipping out. I’m flipping out. She’s locked in the bathroom upstairs.” Lena grabbed a pack of Marlboros from the coffee table and lit a cigarette. I frowned. I’d never seen her smoke before.

I tried to sit next to her. Lena clamored to the opposite corner of the couch to maximize the space between us, and said, “Echo was nauseated. Her period was late. I asked her if she could be pregnant, and she wouldn’t look me in the eye.
I drove down to Walmart, bought a pregnancy test, and threw it in her lap. Echo took it into the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush, I heard the sobbing, and I heard her talking to Johnny on her cell phone. She locked the door and hasn’t come out yet.”

My thoughts spun like a roulette wheel, and the ball kept landing on OO. The tidy roadmap of Johnny’s life was torn into shreds of parchment on a dirt floor, and no one knew that better than me. My teenage world imploded with Angel’s pregnancy, and nothing good came of it.

Lena cowered on the couch, her hands shaking and the cigarette smoldering. What a mess. There was only one easy way out. I asked the obvious question. “Will Echo have an abortion?”

“Never. This family doesn’t believe in abortions. Her dad will never agree to that.”

“It’s not his choice. It’s Echo’s decision.”

She blasted thick blue smoke out through her nose, twin jets of rage. Where had she learned to do that, all of a sudden? “This family doesn’t kill fetuses. No abortions. Echo will have this baby.”

I was incredulous. “She’s seventeen years old. Echo and Johnny are too young to raise a baby. She needs to get rid of the pregnancy.”

“Get rid of it? Just like taking out the garbage? That’s not going to happen. She’ll have the baby. Bobby would kill her if she got an abortion.”

“Bobby almost killed me today. He cornered me out in the woods, with his finger on the trigger of a 12-gauge shotgun. Bobby knows we’ve been sleeping together. He told me to get out of town.”

“Oh, fuck that. Bobby would screw the crack of dawn if he could get up that early. He can go fuck himself. I don’t care. He needs to crawl into a hole and stay there.”

I had never heard her swear before, not even once. I was seeing an ugly Lena Johnson I’d never known. She stubbed out the cigarette in an empty wine glass, and repeated, “Fuck him.”

I needed to get out of there. I had nothing to offer either of the Johnson females. I needed to go to Johnny. My kid needed his dad right now. “I have to leave,” I said. “I have to go home and see my son.”

“Go ahead,” she said. “Get the hell out of here.”

Her words were a splash of ice water across my face. There were no I love you’s today. She didn’t have to tell me twice. I left.

I raced home and found Johnny sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. I could feel my heart breaking as I sat down across from him. Johnny’s eyes were red-rimmed and wet. His jaw scraped the tabletop. “I’m so sorry, Dad,” he said. “I messed up. I should have…”

I held back on the I-told-you-so lecture I had pre-loaded. Instead, I played the compassion card. “Don’t beat yourself up, son. We’ll get through this.”

“No, we won’t. What am I supposed to do now? Everything’s screwed up. Echo won’t see me. She won’t answer my texts. She won’t answer my calls. I love her, Dad. For the first time in my life, I love a girl. Then I screw it all up and get her pregnant. Now she’s on another planet.”

Johnny made no mention of the baby. All he could talk about was Echo. Losing Echo.

“It’s too fresh,” I said, searching for an angle to soften the pain. “Echo just found out about all this. Give her a few days to calm down.”

“It’s not that simple. Even when she does calm down, her old man won’t calm down. He hates my guts already. What am I going to do?” Johnny reared back his head and howled at the ceiling.

I let him howl, and stared at the lines in the hardwood of the kitchen floor. What a terrible day. First I stared down a double-barreled shotgun, and now this.

Johnny stopped crying and wiped the tears away with the sleeve of his sweater. “Dad, I know what needs to happen now.”

“What?”

“I need to marry Echo.”

“That’s ridiculous.” The picture flashed across my mind: Johnny in a rented Hibbing tuxedo. Echo wearing white, her midriff bulging with child. My own lost youth reprised—the fireplace photo of Angel and me morphed into a photo of Johnny and pregnant Echo. I moved back to Minnesota to make Johnny’s life better, and instead I’d turned him into Nicolai the Second. “No one’s marrying anyone right now. You’re too young. Give this some time, and we’ll sort the whole thing all out.”

Johnny picked up a plastic Minnesota Vikings cup from the table and hurled it against the kitchen wall with all the fury he could muster. The cup rattled to the floor. Vertical lines of Coca-Cola streaked the yellow paint and dripped into a brown puddle on the floor. He stomped off toward his bedroom.

“Stop behaving like a two-year-old,” I said.

Johnny stopped halfway up the stairs and said, “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m just so sad right now. So sad.” Then he marched back down the stairs and returned to the kitchen. He found a towel, dropped to his knees, and mopped the spilled soda off the floor. Johnny said nothing further and made no eye contact. When he was finished, he slinked back to the solitude of his room. I heard the bedsprings creak, and prayed the kid would fall asleep in minutes and find peace for the night.

Instead, Johnny called out from the second floor, “One more crappy thing, Dad. I called Mom, and she went ballistic. She told me it was all your fault for bringing me up here to live.”

I wasn’t surprised. When you threw gasoline onto a fire, the blaze worsened. “I’ll talk to your mother about it. Get some sleep.”

“Mom’s arriving in Hibbing tomorrow. She said she’s going to fix everything, because you’re too lame to do it yourself.”

The words hit me like an uppercut to the jaw. The situation went from awful to worse. Alexandra Antone would be venting her poison in the North Country.

CHAPTER 16

IDIOT WIND

I knocked back two bottles of Budweiser and three shots of vodka and fell asleep with the shot glass cradled in the fingers of my right hand. The sound of someone pounding hard on the front door woke me. I looked at the clock—it was 6:05 a.m. The banging on the door persisted. I walked to the window and pulled back the curtain. A lone figure stood on the stoop, a hood concealing the face.

It had to be Dylan in full vigilante mode. There was no way I was going to let him in. “Who is it?” I called out.

“It’s Alexandra, you asshole. I’m freezing out here. Open up.”

I turned the front lock, and Alexandra Antone blew into Dom’s house like an unwelcome storm. Her boots tracked dirty snow over the carpet. She slammed the door behind her, peeled back her hood, and said, “Where’s Johnny?”

“He’s upstairs sleeping.”

“I’m so wired and so annoyed right now. I flew into Minneapolis at midnight, rented a car and drove all night to this God-forsaken hellhole. I’m not going to let one more molecule of chaos infect our son’s crumbling existence. I haven’t slept in 24 hours, and I’m so angry at you I could scream. I can’t believe how you’ve messed up this family.”

“Wait a minute, I didn’t…”

“Don’t get defensive on me. You’re the one who chose to move to Bumfuck, Minnesota. You’re the one who let your son hang out with some loose trailer-trash Iron Range girl who wasn’t smart enough to swallow a birth control pill once a day. And you’re not capable of navigating our family out of this mess, either.”

She threw her jacket on the couch and walked into the kitchen. “Do you have any wine? I need something to calm myself down before I engage these small-town cretins who want my 17-year-old to become the youngest father in America.”

“There’s no wine in this house. Besides, it’s six in the morning. It’s a little early for alcohol.”

Alexandra extracted a Budweiser from the refrigerator, popped the top off, and chugged it down like it was the nectar of the gods. “This is all your fault, Nico,” she said. “Couldn’t you have looked out for him up here? I’ve never been as mad at you as I am right now.”

“I’m mad at you, too. You were in bed with some stooge the last time I saw you.”

She said, “I’m an adult. I can go to bed with whoever I want. I found someone who hit all the places you never were man enough to reach.”

I felt like shoving the beer bottle up her ass sideways. “Don’t talk to me like that,” I said. “Get out of this house.”

She tossed her hair back and laughed in my face. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m here to see Johnny. You’re pathetic. You’re the one who left me. You moved two thousand miles away and took our only child away from me. Johnny needs me right now. It’s too late for your ‘I’m the doctor and I know everything’ bullshit. He needs me.”

“I don’t need you hollering at Dad,” came a voice from the stairwell. Johnny stood there, looking down on us, his shirt rumpled, his eyes puffy, and his shoulders frozen in their slouch from last night. He glared at his mother, and she glared back. Nobody moved. This mother and child reunion invoked no hugs. This mother and child reunion was devoid of affection. I’d seen Alexandra suck the joy out of a room hundreds of times during my life, but this was even worse. There was no joy to suck out of Johnny.