Exley (39 page)

Exley suddenly threw his book to the floor, pushed himself off the couch, and lurched toward us. Yardley tried to take a step back, but Exley caught him before he did. He put his hands on Yardley's shoulders and leaned into him. Their noses were almost touching. Exley looked Yardley right in the eyes this time and said, “‘If it will allay the ache in your heart,' then let's go.”

EXLEY INSISTED HE
be the one who drove Yardley's Volvo, and Yardley let him. Yardley sat in the front passenger's seat. I had the back. Exley
lit a cigarette without asking if it was OK or opening the window. He turned the key, started the car, and put it in drive, went west on the Public Square, then south on Washington. It had snowed overnight but wasn't snowing now. The road was clear and dry enough. Still, Exley was barely moving. Cars were screeching past and beeping at us and flipping us off.

“What's going on?” I said.

Yardley turned around and whispered, “‘He drives in the lifelong drunk's manner: very, very slowly.'”

I tried to catch Exley's eyes in the mirror, but he was looking straight ahead. We crept past the YMCA. The skinny, wolfish guys were already outside smoking their cigarettes in their shirtsleeves. “‘The YMCA,'” Yardley said and pointed at it. “‘Where students played billiards and table tennis, or read books and magazines in the big lobby with soft comfortable chairs.'” We kept going south, past the library, the historical society, the hospitals, then to the middle and high schools. “That's my school,” I said to Yardley. Yardley nodded and said, “‘The 1940s were a bright period in the school's history. Spirit was high, inflated if anything by wartime patriotism. Dress was neat and manners were good.'” He looked back at me, at my wrinkled clothes, the clothes I'd slept in, and frowned. “‘The teachers were the law. Boys and girls gathered in the auditorium, where they talked quietly, perhaps kissed chastely.'”

“I have this teacher,” I said, “Mrs. T.”

But Yardley wasn't listening. He was looking at the open space between the school buildings. It was just lawn. It wasn't a sports field or anything. But Yardley said, “‘Football games were important events that brought the entire school together, from the pregame pep rallies with bonfires and cheers to the postgame parties.'”

“They lit fires?” I said. Our pep rallies now meant that one Friday in September, everyone who wasn't a football player sat in the bleachers in the gym while Coach B., who was also the football coach, spoke too loudly into the microphone about what a great group of guys he had playing for him this year. Then he'd introduce the guys and pronounce most of their names wrong. “In the gym?”

“No, not in the gym,” Yardley said.

“But where?” I said. I wasn't being a wise guy. I really wanted to know. “Did you have bonfires during pep rallies at your school?” I asked.

“‘I prefer to keep myself out of what is, after all, his biography and not mine,'” Yardley said. We didn't talk after that. Exley picked up a little steam as we went up the big Washington Street hill, then left on Route 67. We were getting close, and I started feeling nervous again. A few seconds later, Exley took a right and passed between the stone pillars and under the big metal arch that read
BROOKSIDE CEMETERY
. We bumped along slowly. Yardley didn't tell Exley where to go, and Exley didn't seem to need directions. He turned this way, then that, all on his own. Something started falling from the sky that wasn't quite rain, wasn't quite snow. It was cemetery weather. The sky was so low it seemed the taller trees—the pointy pines, the mighty oaks—might punch right through it. I looked at Exley's face in the rearview. He looked calm, in control, as he smoked his cigarette and squinted out the windshield at the gravestones on our right. If ever there was a picture of a man on the way to see his own grave, this wasn't it.

“Here we go,” Exley said, and stopped the car. No one said anything or made a move for a second, then another. Yardley was looking out his window. “‘He had originally specified that he be cremated and his ashes “dropped in the Lost Channel of the St. Lawrence River,”'” he said, making air quotes here to let us know he was acknowledging his sources, “‘but in the fall of 1991 he changed his mind and asked to be buried next to his father and mother in Watertown.'” He looked at Exley, then at me. He looked like the minister in the Public Square, when he was about to lay to rest the dead soldier. “‘This was done,'” he said. He opened his door, got out, and started walking. I opened my door, got out, and followed. The snow was about a half-foot deep, and Yardley didn't have gloves, but he bent over and started brushing snow off something. Gravestones, I guessed. I came up and stood next to him. This is what I saw:

EXLEY
CHARLOTTE M      EARL E
1906–1989      1906–1946

To the left of that was more snow. And then farther to the left I saw this:

FRED HUNTINGDON
JENNINGS
1879–1946

“He was buried here,” Yardley said. “I saw the gravestone.”

“Huh,” I said through my hands. I'd put them over my mouth so that Yardley couldn't see I was smiling. “Maybe you got confused.”

“Confused,” Yardley said.

“Because the guy buried here is named Fred, too,” I said.

“I'm not
confused
about anything,” Yardley said. He got down on his knees and started digging in the snow with his hands, in the space between Exley's parents' stone and this Jennings guy's stone. I looked back at the car. Exley was still in the driver's seat, smoking another cigarette. “Look, you can see where his stone was,” Yardley said. I turned back to him. He'd dug all the way through the snow to the ground. True, the ground was a little chewed up, a bit more dirt than grass and some small rocks scattered around. But this was November in Watertown. This was just the way the earth looked this time of year; it would look that way until May. The spot he was pointing at didn't look much different than any other patch of earth in Watertown or in the cemetery itself. It just didn't.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I don't see it.”

“This is
insane
,” Yardley said. It was weird. Yardley didn't sound mad, not exactly. He sounded amazed, like he couldn't believe what he was seeing or saying. In his book, Yardley had written that he “shared Exley's ardor for professional football and, in those younger and stronger days, for distilled spirits.” He looked like he could have used some distilled spirits right about now. “You
moved the headstone
,” he told me.

“I didn't,” I said.

“Then he did,” Yardley said, pointing in the direction of his Volvo. “That”—I could see him struggling to find the right word to describe Exley. I felt bad for him. He'd written a book that was supposed to be the final word on Exley. Now he didn't know what word he was supposed to use next—“man,” he finally said, “obviously dug up the headstone.”

“I don't think so,” I said. “And he's not just a ‘man.' He's Exley. You know he is.”

“Oh, come on,” Yardley said. “He doesn't even sound like Exley.”

“He does,” I said.

“No, he doesn't,” Yardley said. “The real Exley wouldn't sound that way.”

“What way?”

“He wouldn't speak only in quotations from
A Fan's Notes
,” Yardley said.

I tried to raise one of my eyebrows at Yardley. I'd never been able to do it before, and I couldn't do it now. I'm sure it looked like I had something in my eye. But Yardley apparently got the idea. His face grew red and he sputtered for a while.

“The man and woman who are supposedly his parents are
buried
here,” Yardley finally said. “Don't you think if he was really their son he would have at least gotten out of the car?”

I shrugged. “You know what he's like,” I said.

“‘Fuckin' Fredness to the end,'” Exley shouted from the car, scaring both of us. “You wrote that in your book.”

Yardley charged over to the car to talk to Exley. But I stayed where I was, looking at Exley's parents' stone. I wanted to tell them something. I thought of what my parents might want to hear about me if they were dead and I wasn't. They'd probably want to hear,
He's fine. Don't worry about your son. He's doing OK
. But that didn't seem quite right. Mr. and Mrs. Exley would never believe their son was OK or fine. Finally, I just said what I felt. “I'm sorry you're dead and buried here,” I told them. “But I'm so glad your son isn't. I need him.” Then I turned away from their headstone and walked back to the car. The car was still running. Yardley was in the car now, with Exley. Exley was in the passenger seat, his back to me, smoke from his cigarette pouring over his shoulder. I couldn't see his face, but I could see Yardley's: his eyes were wide and he was nodding a lot, to show that whatever Exley was telling him, Yardley understood. When I got near the car, Yardley noticed me and smiled; it was a tight-lipped, sympathetic smile, and I wondered if that meant Exley had been telling Yardley about my dad. Anyway, I opened the back door
and climbed into a cloud of smoke. I waved the smoke from my face, then closed the door.

“What's going on in here?” I said.

Neither of them said anything for a second. Something in the car seemed to have changed. The stuff falling from the sky had changed, too. It was definitely snowing now, hard. The windshield wipers were on, but they couldn't keep up. I could barely see the sky because of the snow, but from what little I could see of it, it looked black, like it was night, although it was still morning.

“What time is it anyway?” I said.

“It's time for me to go home,” Yardley said. He put out his hand and Exley shook it, and they smiled at each other like friends, the way Harold and J. had smiled at me before I'd made them hate me. “It's so good to finally meet you,” he said to Exley, “after all these years.” Exley nodded likewise, and then he squinted back at me through the smoke.
It's you
, I told him with my eyes.
Even Yardley believes it's you. You really are Exley
. It was still snowing, but the sun had broken through the darkness and was pouring through the car windows and mingling with the smoke. It made Exley look holy, like someone who really might save us.

“I think my dad would really like to meet you,” I said. My lips were dry. Mother always said that licking your dry lips only made them drier. But I always licked them anyway. “It would make him feel so much better. I think we're finally all ready now.”

Exley didn't say anything at first. He took a final drag off his cigarette, rolled down the window, and with his thumb and pointer finger flipped the cigarette into the snow, where it went
hiss
.

“‘There are certain appeals that quite startle and benumb the heart,'” Exley said. He sounded sad. I thought I knew why. Because if Exley helped my dad get better, then I wouldn't need Exley anymore. I wouldn't need both a dad and an Exley. Exley must have known that. Then why was he going to help me? Because maybe Yardley was right when he wrote that most of us are born with only a few arrows in our quivers. And these were two of Exley's arrows: he could write a great book that my dad and I loved, and he could help me get my dad back, even if it meant Exley himself had
to go. Even if I didn't want him to.
Don't go
, I wanted to tell him. I missed Exley so much already, just thinking about it. I almost said,
Don't do it. Don't help me
, and I would have meant it. Instead, I told him, “Thank you.” I meant that, too. Exley nodded,
You're welcome
. He glanced over at Yardley. “I'll drop you two off at the VA hospital on my way out of town,” Yardley said.

 

 

M
y dad was lying in bed when we got there. His eyes were closed as usual. He hadn't been shaved yet, and his gray stubble made his face look even paler and older than normal. Suddenly, I was sure that this whole visit was a terrible mistake and that meeting Exley would never make my dad feel better, because nothing would, that nothing would ever change about him except the change I didn't want. I almost started to cry, and Exley must have noticed because he got down on his right knee, put his left hand on my right shoulder, looked me in the eye, and asked, “Are you tough?” This, of course, is exactly what Stout Steve Owen asked Exley on
page 53
of his book. On
page 53
, Exley was about my age. But whereas Stout Steve asked the question gruffly, in italics, Exley asked it so gently. He smiled gently, too, encouraging me to give the right answer.

“I don't know, sir,” is what Exley said to Stout Steve on
page 53
, ______ years before, and what I said to Exley now, too. Exley nodded once, pushed himself to his feet, and walked over to where my father was lying. And then he did something weird: he leaned over, looked at the bracelet on my dad's wrist, nodded, and then said, “It's a pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Le Ray.” My dad didn't say anything back. He just lay there with his eyes closed. I closed my eyes, too. Because I knew Exley would ask my dad what Stout Steve asked his dad: “Is he tough, Mr. Exley?” In the book, Exley's dad told Stout Steve, “It's too soon to tell.” But I knew my dad wouldn't ever say that, because I knew he wouldn't say anything ever again.

“Is your boy tough, Mr. Le Ray?” I heard Exley say.

My dad didn't say anything back. I kept my eyes closed. Still my dad didn't say anything. And then suddenly I knew what was going to happen.
I could see it, even with my eyes closed. I would wait and wait for my dad to say something, until finally Exley wouldn't want to wait anymore. So he would pretend to be my dad. He would say,
Yes, he's tough
, in what he thought my dad's voice would sound like. I would have to open my eyes then. I would know it was Exley who had said that and not my dad. And either I would have to tell him so, or I would have to say,
Oh my God, did my dad say that
? Either way, I would want to die. But I didn't know how to make that not happen. So I kept standing there with my eyes closed, waiting and waiting. Finally, Exley said, “C'mon, why doncha open your eyes already?”