Christine (11 page)

“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 in 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 that 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, schoolteacherish 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

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 it's 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 lawn-chairs 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. “There's a machine in the office that dispenses them.”

“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 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, went 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?' ”

I looked at the old scar, fascinated, realizing that it looked like a skid because that small, chubby three-year-old's arm had grown over the course of years into the skinny, shiny old man's arm I was now looking at. A wound that had been an ugly gouge spilling blood everywhere in the year 1921 had slowly elongated into this silvery progression of marks like ladder-rungs. The wound had closed, but the scar had . . . spread.

A terrible, hopeless shudder twisted through me. I thought of Arnie slamming his fists down on the dashboard of my car, Arnie crying hoarsely that he would make them eat it, eat it, eat it.

George LeBay was looking at me. I don't know what he saw on my face, but he slowly rolled his sleeve back down, and when he buttoned it securely over that scar, it was as if he had drawn the curtain on an almost unbearable past.

He sipped more 7-Up.

“My father came home that evening—he had been on one of the toots that he called ‘hunting up a job'—and when he heard what Rollie had done, he whaled the tar out of him. But Rollie would not recant. He cried, but he would not recant.” LeBay smiled a little. “At the end my mother was terrified, screaming for my father to stop before he killed him. The tears were rolling down Rollie's face, and still he would not recant. ‘He was in my way,' Rollie said through his tears. ‘And if he gets in my way again I'll do it again, and you can't stop me, you damned old tosspot.' Then my father struck him in the face and made his nose bleed and Rollie fell on the floor with the blood squirting through his fingers. My mother was screaming, Marcia was crying, Drew was cringing in one corner, and I was bawling my head off, holding my bandaged arm. And Rollie went right on saying, I'd do it again, you tosspot-tosspot-damned-old-tosspot!' ”

Above us, the stars had begun to come out. An old woman left a unit down the way, took a battered suitcase out of a Ford, and carried it back into her unit. Somewhere a radio was playing. It was not tuned to the rock sounds of FM-104.

“His unending fury is what I remember best,” LeBay repeated softly. “At school, he fought with anyone who made fun of his clothes or the way his hair was cut—he would fight anyone he even
suspected
of making fun. He was suspended again and again. Finally he left and joined the Army.

“It wasn't a good time to be in the Army, the twenties. There was no dignity, no promotion, no flying flags and banners. There was no nobility. He went from base to base, first in the South and then in the Southwest. We got a letter every three months or so. He was still angry. He was angry at what he called ‘the shitters.' Everything was the fault of ‘the shitters.' The shitters wouldn't give him the promotion he deserved, the shitters had cancelled a furlough, the shitters couldn't find their own behinds with both hands and a flashlight. On at least two occasions, the shitters put him in the stockade.

“The Army held onto him because he was an excellent mechanic—he could keep the old and decrepit vehicles which were all Congress would allow the Army in some sort of running condition.”

Uneasily, I found myself thinking of Arnie again—Arnie who was so clever with his hands.

LeBay leaned forward. “But that talent was just another wellspring for his anger, young man. And it was an anger that never ended until he bought that car that your friend now owns.”

“What do you mean?”

LeBay chuckled dryly. “He fixed Army convoy trucks, Army staff cars, Army weapons-supply vehicles. He fixed bulldozers and kept staff cars running with spit and baling-wire. And once, when a visiting Congressman came to visit Fort Arnold in west Texas and had car trouble, he was ordered by his commanding officer, who was desperate to make a good impression, to fix the Congressman's prized Bentley. Oh, yes, we got a four-page letter from that particular ‘shitter'—a four-page rant of Rollie's anger and vitriol. It was a wonder the words didn't smoke on the page.

“All those vehicles . . . but Rollie never owned a car himself until after World War II. Even then the only thing he was able to afford was an old Chevrolet that ran poorly and was eaten up with rust. In the twenties and thirties there was never money enough, and during the war years he was too busy trying to stay alive.

“He was in the motor pool for all those years, and he fixed thousands of vehicles for the shitters and never had one that was all his. It was Libertyville all over again. Even the old Chevrolet couldn't assuage that, or the old Hudson Hornet he bought used the year after he got married.”

“Married?”

“Didn't tell you that, did he?” LeBay said. “He would have been happy to go on and on about his Army experiences—his war experiences and his endless confrontations with the shitters—for as long as you and your friend could listen without falling alseep . . . and him with his hand in your pocket feeling for your wallet the whole time. But he wouldn't have bothered to tell you about Veronica or Rita.”

“Who were they?”

“Veronica was his wife,” LeBay said. “They were married in 1951, shortly before Rollie went to Korea. He could have stayed Stateside, you know. He was married, his wife was pregnant, he himself was approaching middle age. But he chose to go.”

LeBay looked reflectively at the dead playground equipment.

“It was bigamy, you know. By 1951 he was forty-four, and he was married already. He was married to the Army. And to the shitters.”

He fell silent again. His silence had a morbid quality. “Are you all right?” I asked finally.

“Yes,” he said. “Just thinking. Thinking ill of the dead.” He looked at me calmly—except for his eyes; they were dark and wounded. “You know, all of this hurts me, young man . . . what did you say your name was? I don't want to sit here and sing these old sad songs to someone I can't call by his first name. Was it Donald?”

“Dennis,” I said. “Look, Mr. LeBay—”

“It hurts more than I would have suspected,” he went on. “But now that it's begun, let's finish it, shall we? I only met Veronica twice. She was from West Virginia. Near Wheeling. She was what we then called shirt-tail southern, and she was not terribly bright. Rollie was able to dominate her and take her for granted, which was what he seemed to want. But she loved him, I think—at least until the rotten business with Rita. As for Rollie, I don't think he really married a woman at all. He married a kind of. . . of wailing wall.

“The letters that he sent us . . . well, you must remember that he left school very early. The letters, illiterate as they were, represented a tremendous effort for my brother. They were his suspension bridge, his novel, his symphony, his great effort. I don't think he wrote them to get rid of the poison in his heart. I think he wrote them to spread it around.

“Once he had Veronica, the letters stopped. He had his set of eternal ears, and he didn't have to bother with us anymore. I suppose he wrote letters to her during the two years he was in Korea. I only got one during that period, and I believe Marcia got two. There was no pleasure over the birth of his daughter in early 1952, only a surly complaint that there was another mouth to feed at home and the shitters took a little more out of him.”

“Did he never advance in rank?” I asked. The year before I had seen part of a long TV show, one of those novels for television called
Once an Eagle.
I had seen the paperback book in the drugstore the next day and had picked it up, hoping for a good war story. As it turned out, I got both war and peace, and some new ideas about the armed services. One of them was that the old promotion train really gets rolling along in times of war. It was hard for me to understand how LeBay could have gone into the service in the early twenties, slogged through two wars, and still have been running junk when Ike became President.

LeBay laughed. “He was like Prewitt in
From Here to Eternity.
He would advance, and then he would be busted back down for something—insubordination or impertinence or drunkenness. I told you he had spent time in the stockade? One of those times was for pissing in the punchbowl at the Officers Club at Fort Dix before a party. He only did ten days for that offense, because I believe they must have looked into their own hearts and believed it was nothing more than a drunken joke, such as some of the officers themselves had probably played as fraternity boys—they didn't, they
couldn't,
have any idea of the hate and deadly loathing that lay behind that gesture. But I imagine that by then Veronica could have told them.”

I glanced at my watch. It was quarter past nine. LeBay had been talking for nearly an hour.

“My brother came home from Korea in 1953 to meet his daughter for the first time. I understand he looked her over for a minute or two, then handed her back to his wife, and went out to tinker on his old Chevrolet for the rest of the day . . . getting bored, Dennis?”

“No,” I said truthfully.

“All through those years, the one thing that Rollie really wanted was a brand-new car. Not a Cadillac or a Lincoln; he didn't want to join the upper class, the officers, the shitters. He wanted a new Plymouth or maybe a Ford or a Dodge.

“Veronica wrote now and then, and she said that they spent most of their Sundays going around to car dealerships wherever Rollie was currently stationed. She and the baby would sit in the old Hornet Rollie had then, and Veronica would read little storybooks to Rita while Rollie walked around dusty lot after dusty lot with salesman after salesman, talking about compression and horsepower and hemi heads and gear ratios . . . I think, sometimes, of the little girl growing up to the background sound of those plastic pennants whipping in the hot wind of half a dozen Army tank-towns, and I don't know whether to laugh or cry.”

My thoughts turned back to Arnie again.

“Was he obsessed, would you say?”

“Yes. I would say he was obsessed. He began to give Veronica money to put away. Other than his failure to get promoted past Master Sergeant at any point in his career, my brother had a problem with drink. He wasn't an alcoholic, but he went on periodic binges every six or eight months. What money he had would be gone when the binge was over. He was never sure where he spent it.