Christine (14 page)

But he didn't do that… at least, not quite. He gave Arnie's hand a single token squeeze and then dropped it.

"Christine," he said in a dry voice. Yes, the family resemblance was there—in the way the brow shelved over the eyes, the set of the jaw, the light blue eyes. But this man's face was softer, almost kind; I did not think he was ever going to have the lean and vulpine aspect that had been Roland D. LeBay's. "The last note I got from Rollie said he'd sold her."

Good Christ, he was using that damned female pronoun, too. And
Rollie!
It was hard to imagine LeBay, with his peeling skull and his pestiferous backbrace, as anyone's Rollie. But his brother had spoken the nickname in the same dry voice. There was no love in that voice, at least none that I could hear.

LeBay went on: "My brother didn't write often, but he had a tendency to gloat, Mr Cunningham. I wish there was a gentler word for it, but I don't believe there is. In his note, Rollie spoke of you as a 'sucker' and said he had given you what he called 'a royal screwing'."

My mouth dropped open. I turned to Arnie, half expecting another outburst of rage. But his face hadn't changed at all.

"A royal screwing," he said mildly, "is always in the eye of the beholder. Don't you think so, Mr LeBay?"

LeBay laughed… a little reluctantly, I thought.

"This is my friend. He was with me the day I bought the car."

I was introduced and shook George LeBay's hand.

The soldiers had drifted away. The three of us, LeBay, Arnie and I, were left eyeing one another uncomfortably. LeBay shifted his brother's flag from one hand to the other.

"Can I do something for you, Mr Cunningham?" LeBay asked at last.

Arnie cleared his throat. "I wag wondering about the garage," he said finally. "You see, I'm working on the car, trying to get her street-legal again. My folks don't want it at my house, and I was wondering—"

"No."

"—if maybe I could rent the garage—"

"No, out of the question, it's really—"

"I'd pay you twenty dollars a week, Arnie said "Twenty-five, if you wanted." I winced. He was like a kid who has stumbled into quicksand and decides to cheer himself up by eating a few arsenic-laced brownies.

"—impossible." LeBay was looking more and more distressed.

"Just the garage," Arnie said, his calm starting to crack. "Just the garage where it originally
was.
"

"It can't be done," LeBay said. "I listed the house with Century 21, Libertyville Realty, and Pittsburgh Homes just this morning. They'll be showing the house—"

"Yes, sure, in time, but until—"

"—and it wouldn't do to have you tinkering around. You see, don't you?" He bent toward Arnie a little. "Please don't misunderstand me. I have nothing against teenagers in general—if I did, I'd probably be in a lunatic asylum now, because I've taught high school in Paradise Falls, Ohio, for almost forty years—and you seem to be a very intelligent, well-spoken example of the genus adolescent. But all I want to do here in Libertyville is sell the house and split whatever proceeds there may be with my sister in Denver. I want to be shut of the house, Mr Cunningham, and I want to be shut of my brother's life."

"I see," Arnie said. "Would it make any difference if I promised to look after the place? Mow the grass? Repaint the trim? Make little repairs? I can be handy that way."

"He really is good at stuff like that," I chipped in. It wouldn't hurt, I thought, for Arnie to remember later that I had been on his side even if I wasn't.

"I've already hired a fellow to keep an eye on the place and do a little maintenance," he said. It sounded plausible, but I knew, suddenly and surely, that it was a lie. And I think Arnie knew it, too.

"All right. I'm sorry about your brother. He seemed like a… a very strong-willed man." As he said it, I found myself remembering turning around and seeing LeBay with large, greasy tears on his cheeks.
Well, that's that. I'm shut of her, sonny.

"Strong-willed?" LeBay smiled cynically. "Oh. yes. He was a strong-willed son of a bitch." He appeared not to notice Arnie's shocked expression. "Excuse me, gentlemen. I'm afraid the sun has upset my stomach a little."

He started to walk away. We stood not far from the grave and watched him go. All at once he stopped, and Arnie's face brightened; he thought LeBay had suddenly changed his mind. For a moment LeBay just stood there on the grass, his head bent in the posture of a man thinking hard. Then he turned back to us.

"My advice to you is to forget the car," he said to Arnie. "Sell her. If no one will buy her whole, sell her for parts. If no one will buy her for parts, junk her. Do it quickly and completely. Do it the way you would quit a bad habit. I think you will be happier."

He stood there, looking at Arnie, waiting for Arnie to say something, but Arnie made no reply. He only held LeBay's gaze with his own. His eyes had gone that peculiar slatey color they got when his mind was made up and his feet were planted. LeBay read the look and nodded. He looked unhappy and a little ill.

"Gentlemen, good day."

Arnie sighed. "I guess that's that." He eyed LeBay's retreating back with some resentment.

"Yeah," I said, hoping I sounded more unhappy than I felt. It was the dream. I didn't like the idea of Christine back in that garage. It was too much like my dream.

We started back toward my car, neither of us speaking. LeBay nagged at me. Both LeBays nagged at me. I came to a sudden, impulsive decision—God only knows how much different things might have been if I hadn't followed the impulse.

"Hey, man," I said. "I gotta go take a whiz. Give me a minute or two, okay?"

"Sure," he said, hardly looking up. He walked on, hands in his pockets and eyes on the ground.

I walked off to the left, where a small, discreet sign and an even smaller arrow pointed the way toward the restrooms. But when I was over the first rise and out of Arnie's view, I cut to the right and started to sprint toward the parking lot. I caught George LeBay slowly folding himself behind the wheel of an extremely tiny Chevette with a Hertz sticker on the windscreen.

"Mr LeBay!" I puffed. "Mr LeBay?" He looked up curiously. "Pardon me," I said. "Sorry to bother you again."

"That's all right," he said, "but I'm afraid what I said to your friend still stands. I can't let him garage the car here."

"Good," I said.

His bushy eyebrows went up.

"The car," I said. "That Fury. I don't like it." He went on looking at me, not talking.

"I don't think it's been good for him. Maybe part of it's being… I don't know…"

"Jealous?" he asked me quietly. "Time he used to spend with you he now spends with her?"

"Well, yeah, right," I said. "He's been my friend for a long time. But I—I don't think that's all of it."

"No?"

"No." I looked around to see if Arnie was in sight, and while I wasn't looking at him, I was finally able to come out with it. "Why did you tell him to junk it and forget it? Why did you say it was like a bad habit?"

He said nothing, and I was afraid he had nothing to say—at least, not to me. And then, almost too softly to hear, he asked, "Son, are you sure this is your business?"

"I don't know." Suddenly it seemed very important to meet his eyes. "But I care about Arnie, you know. I don't want to see him get hurt. This car has already gotten him into trouble. I don't want to see it get any worse."

"Come by my motel this evening. It's just off the Western Avenue exit from 376. Can you find that?"

"I hotpatched the sides of the ramp," I said, and held out my hands. "Still got the blisters,"

I smiled, but he didn't smile back. "Rainbow Motel. There are two at the foot of the exit. Mine is the cheap one."

"Thanks," I said awkwardly. "Listen really, th—"

"It may not be your business, or mine, or anyone's," LeBay said in his soft, school-teacherish voice, so different from (but somehow so eerily similar to) his late brother's wild croak.

(and that's about the finest smell in the world… except maybe for pussy)

"But I can tell you this much right now. My brother was not a good man. I believe the only thing he ever truly loved in his whole life was that Plymouth Fury your friend has purchased. So the business may be between them and them alone, no matter what you tell me, or I tell you."

He smiled at me. It wasn't a pleasant smile, and in that instant I seemed to see Roland D. LeBay looking out through his eyes, and I shivered.

"Son, you're probably too young to look for wisdom in anyone s words but your own, but I'll tell you this: love is the enemy." He nodded at me slowly. "Yes. The poets continually and sometimes willfully mistake love. Love is the old slaughterer. Love is not blind. Love is a cannibal with extremely acute vision. Love is insectile; it is always hungry."

"What does it eat?" I asked, not aware I was going to ask anything at all. Every part of me but my mouth thought the entire conversation insane.

"Friendship," George LeBay said. "It eats friendship. If I were you, Dennis, I would now prepare for the worst."

He closed the door of the Chevette with a soft
chuck!
and started up its sewing-machine engine. He drove away, leaving me to stand there on the edge of the blacktop. I suddenly remembered that Arnie should see me coming from the direction of the comfort stations, so I headed that way as fast as I could.

As I went it occurred to me that the gravediggers or sextons or eternal engineers or whatever they were calling themselves these days would now be lowering LeBay's coffin into the earth. The dirt George LeBay had thrown at the end of the ceremony would be splattered across the top like a conquering hand. I tried to dismiss the image, but another image, even worse, came in its place: Roland D. LeBay inside the silk-lined casket, dressed in his best suit and his best underwear—
sans
smelly, yellowing back brace, of course.

LeBay was in the ground, LeBay was in his coffin, his hands crossed on his chest and why was I so sure that a large, shit-eating grin was on his face?

12 SOME FAMILY HISTORY

Can't you hear it out in Needham?

Route 128 down by the power lines…

It's so cold here in the dark,

It's so exciting here in the dark…

— Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers

The Rainbow Motel, was pretty bad, all right. It was one level high, the parking-lot paving was cracked, two of the letters in the neon sign were out. It was exactly the sort of place you'd expect to find an elderly English teacher. I know how depressing that sounds, but its true. And tomorrow he would turn in his Hertz car at- the airport and fly home to Paradise Falls, Ohio.

The Rainbow Motel looked like a geriatric ward. There were old parties sitting outside their rooms in the lawnchairs the management supplied for that purpose, their bony knees crossed, their white socks pulled up over their hairy shins. The men all looked like aging alpinists, skinny and tough. Most of the women were blooming with the soft fat of post-fifty and no hope. Since then I've noticed that there are motels which seem filled up with nothing but people over fifty—it's like they hear about these places on some Oldies but Goodies Hotline. Bring your Hysterectomy and Enlarged Prostate to the Not-So-Scenic Rainbow Motel. No Cable TV but We Do Have Magic Fingers, Just a Quarter a Shot. I saw no young people outside the units, and off to one side the rusty playground equipment stood empty, the swings casting long still shadows on the ground. Overhead, a neon rainbow arced over the sign. It buzzed like a swarm of flies caught in a bottle.

LeBay was sitting outside Unit 14 with a glass in his hand. I went over and shook hands with him.

"Would you like a soft drink?" he asked.

"No, thanks," I said. I got one of the lawn-chairs from in front of an empty unit and sat down beside him.

"Then let me tell you what I can," he said in his soft, cultured voice. "I am eleven years younger than Rollie, and I am still a man who is learning to be old."

I shifted awkwardly in my chair and said nothing.

"There were four of us " "he said. "Rollie was the oldest, I am the youngest. Our brother Drew died in France in 1944. He and Rollie were both career Army. We grew up here, in Libertyville. Only Libertyville was much, much smaller then, you know, only a village. Small enough to have the ins and the outs. We were the outs. Poor folks. Shiftless. Wrong side of the tracks. Pick your cliché."

He chuckled softly in the dusk and poured more 7-Up into his glass.

"I really remember only one constant thing about Rollie's childhood—after all, he was in the fifth grade when I was born—but I remember that one thing very well."

"What was it?"

"His anger," LeBay said. "Rollie was always angry. He was angry that he had to go to school in castoff clothes, he was angry that our father was a drunkard who could not hold a steady job in any of the steel mills, he was angry that our mother could not make our father stop drinking. He was angry at the three smaller children—Drew, Marcia and myself—who made the poverty insurmountable."

He held his arm out to me and pushed up the sleeve of his shirt to show me the withered, corded tendons of his old man's arm which lay just below the surface of the shiny, stretched skin. A scar skidded down from his elbow toward his wrist, where it finally petered out.

"That was a present from Rollie," he said. "I got it when I was three and he was fourteen. I was playing with a few painted blocks of wood that were supposed to be cars and trucks on the front walk when he slammed out on his way to school. I was in his way, I suppose. He pushed me on to the sidewalk, and then he came back and threw me. I landed with my arm stuck on one of the pickets of the fence that went around the bunch of weeds and sunflowers that my mother insisted on calling "the garden". I bled enough to scare all of them into tears—all of them except Rollie, who just kept shouting, 'You stay out of my way from now on, you goddam snotnose, stay out of my way, you hear?'"