by Steven King
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 back brace, as anyone’s Rollie. But his brother had spoken the nickname in that 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 was 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 slaty 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 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 windshield.
“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 there.”
“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 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 nob
ility. 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.”