Christine (15 page)

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 shatters". The shitters wouldn't give him the promotion he deserved, the shatters ha 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 on to 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—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 about that particular "shitter"—a four-page rant of Rollie's anger and vitriol. It was a wonder the words didn't smoke 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 once 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 asleep… 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 the eyes; they were dark and wounded. "You know, all of his hurts me, young man… what did you say your name was? I don't want to sit here and sing these sad old 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 its 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 women 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 greatest 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 offence, 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 round to car dealerships wherever Rollie was currently stationed. She and the baby would sit in the old Hornet Rollie bad 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.

"Veronica was supposed to put a stop to that. It was one of the things he married her for. When the binges started, Rollie would come to her for the money. He threatened her with a knife once; held it to her throat. I got this from my sister, who sometimes talked to Veronica on the telephone. Veronica would not give him the money, which at that time, in 1955, totaled about eight hundred dollars. "Remember the car, honey," she told him, with the point of his knife on her throat. "You'll never get that new car if "n you booze the money away.""

"She must have loved him, I said.

"Well, maybe she did. But please don't make the romantic assumption that her love changed Rollie in any way. Water can wear away stone, but only over hundreds of years. People are mortal."

He seemed to debate saying something else along that line and then to decide against it. The lapse struck me as peculiar.

"But he never put a mark on either of them," he said. "And you must remember that he was drunk on the occasion when he held the knife to her throat. There is a great outcry about drugs in the schools now, and I don't oppose that outcry because I think it's obscene to think of children fifteen and sixteen years old reeling around full of dope, but I still believe alcohol is the most vulgar, dangerous drug ever invented—and it is legal.

"When my brother finally left the Army in l957,Veronica had put away a little over twelve hundred dollars, Adding to it was a substantial disability pension for his back injury—he fought the shitters for it and won, he said.

"So the money was finally there. They got the house you and your friend visited, but before the house was even considered, of course, the car came. The car was always paramount. The visits to the car dealerships reached a fever pitch. And at last he settled upon Christine. I got a long letter about her. She was a 1958 Fury sport coups, and he gave me all the facts and figures in his letter. I don't remember them, but I bet your friend could cite her vital statistics chapter and verse."

"Her measurements," I said.

LeBay smiled humorlessly. "Her measurements, yes. I do remember that he wrote her sticker price was just a tad under $3000, but he "jewed 'em down", as he put it, to $2100 with the trade-in. He ordered her, paid ten per cent down, and when she came, he paid the balance in cash—ten- and twenty-dollar bills.

"The next year, Rita, who was then six, choked to death."

I jumped in my chair and almost knocked it over. His soft, teacherish voice had a lulling quality, and I was tired; I had been half-asleep. That last had been like a dash of cold water in my face.

"Yes, that's right," he said to my questioning, startled glance. "They had been out 'motorvating' for the day. That was what replaced the car-hunting expeditions. 'Motorvating'. That was his word for it. He got that from one of those rock and roll songs he was always listening to. Every Sunday the three of them would go out 'motorvating'. There were litterbags in the front and the back. The little girl was forbidden to drop anything on the floor, She was forbidden to make any messes. She knew that lesson well. She… "

He fell into that peculiar, thinking silence again and then came back on a new tack.

"Rollie kept the ashtrays clean. Always. He was a heavy smoker, but he'd poke his cigarette out the wing window instead of tapping it into the ashtray, and when he was done with a cigarette, he'd snuff it and toss it out the window. If he had someone with him who did use the ashtray, he'd dump the ashtray and then wipe it out with a paper towel when the drive was over. He washed her twice a week and Simonized her twice a year. He serviced her himself, buying time at a local garage."

I wondered if it had been Damell's.

"On that particular Sunday, they stopped at a roadside stand for hamburgers on the way home—there were no McDonald's in those days, you know, just roadside stands. And what happened was… simple enough, I suppose… "

That silence again, as if he wondered just how much he should tell me, or how to separate what he knew from his speculations.