Skeleton Crew (68 page)

“Just like ole times,” Bob said, sounding forlorn.
“Nothing’s
just like ole times, Rocky.”

“I know it,” Rocky agreed. He struggled for a deep, luminous thought and found it. “We’re gettin older by the day, Stiffy.”

Bob sighed and belched again. Leo farted in the comer and began to hum “Get Off My Cloud.”

“Try again?” Rocky asked, handing Bob another beer.

“Mi’ as well,” Bob said; “mi’ jus’ as well, Rocky m’boy.”

 

The case Leo had brought back was gone by midnight, and the new inspection was affixed on the left side of Rocky’s windshield at a slightly crazy angle. Rocky had made out the pertinent information himself before slapping the sticker on, working carefully to copy over the numbers from the tattered and greasy registration he had finally found in the glove compartment. He
had
to work carefully, because he was seeing triple. Bob sat cross-legged on the floor like a yoga master, a half-empty can of I.C. in front of him. He was staring fixedly at nothing.

“Well, you sure saved my life, Bob,” Rocky said. He kicked Leo in the ribs to wake him up. Leo grunted and whoofed. His lids flickered briefly, closed, then flew open wide when Rocky footed him again.

“We home yet, Rocky? We—”

“You just shake her easy, Bobby,” Rocky cried cheerfully. He hooked his fingers into Leo’s armpit and yanked. Leo came to his feet, screaming. Rocky half-carried him around the Chrysler and shoved him into the passenger seat. “We’ll stop back and do her again sometime.”

“Those were the days,” Bob said. He had grown wet-eyed. “Since then everything just gets worse and worse, you know it?”

“I know it,” Rocky said. “Everything has been refitted and beshitted. But you just keep your thumb on it, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t d—”

“My wife ain’t laid me in a year and a half,” Bob said, but the words were blanketed by the coughing misfire of Rocky’s engine. Bob got to his feet and watched the Chrysler back out of the bay, taking a little wood from the left side of the door.

Leo hung out the window, smiling like an idiot saint. “Come by the laundry sometime, skinner. I’ll show you the hole in my back. I’ll show you my wheels! I’ll show y—” Rocky’s arm suddenly shot out like a vaudeville hook and pulled him into the dimness.

“Bye, fella!” Rocky yelled.

The Chrysler did a drunken slalom around the three gas-pump islands and bucketed off into the night. Bob watched until the taillights were only flickerflies and then walked carefully back inside the garage. On his cluttered workbench was a chrome ornament from some old car. He began to play with it, and soon he was crying cheap tears for the old days. Later, some time after three in the morning, he strangled his wife and then burned down the house to make it look like an accident.

 

“Jesus,” Rocky said to Leo as Bob’s garage shrank to a point of white light behind them. “How about that? Ole Stiffy.” Rocky had reached that stage of drunkenness where every part of himself seemed gone except for a tiny, glowing coal of sobriety somewhere deep in the middle of his mind.

Leo did not reply. In the pale green light thrown by the dashboard instruments, he looked like the dormouse at Alice’s tea party.

“He was really bombarded,” Rocky went on. He drove on the left side of the road for a while and then the Chrysler wandered back. “Good thing for you—he prob’ly won’t remember what you tole him. Another time it could be different. How many times do I have to tell you? You got to shut up about this idea that you got a fucking hole in your back.”

“You know I got a hole in my back. ”

“Well, so what?”

“It’s
my
hole, that’s so what. And I’ll talk about my hole whenever I—”

He looked around suddenly.

“Truck behind us. Just pulled out of that side road. No lights.”

Rocky looked up into the rearview mirror. Yes, the truck was there, and its shape was distinctive. It was a milk truck. He didn’t have to read CRAMER’S DAIRY on the side to know whose it was, either.

“It’s Spike,” Rocky said fearfully. “It’s Spike Milligan! Jesus, I thought he only made
morning
deliveries!”

“Who?”

Rocky didn’t answer. A tight, drunk grin spread over his lower face. It did not touch his eyes, which were now huge and red, like spirit lamps.

He suddenly floored the Chrysler, which belched blue oil smoke and reluctantly creaked its way up to sixty.

“Hey! You’re too drunk to go this fast! You’re . . .” Leo paused vaguely, seeming to lose track of his message. The trees and houses raced by them, vague blurs in the graveyard of twelve-fifteen. They blew by a stop sign and flew over a large bump, leaving the road for a moment afterwards. When they came down, the low-hung muffler struck a spark on the asphalt. In the back, cans clinked and rattled. The faces of Pittsburgh Steeler players rolled back and forth, sometimes in the light, sometimes in shadow.

“I
was fooling!”
Leo said wildly. “There ain’t no truck!”

“It’s him and he kills people!” Rocky screamed. “I seen his bug back in the garage! God
damn!”

They roared up Southern Hill on the wrong side of the road. A station wagon coming in the other direction skidded crazily over the gravel shoulder and down into the ditch getting out of their way. Leo looked behind him. The road was empty.

“Rocky—”

“Come and get me, Spike!”
Rocky screamed.
“You just come on and get me!”

The Chrysler had reached eighty, a speed which Rocky in a more sober frame of mind would not have believed possible. They came around the turn which leads onto the Johnson Flat Road, smoke spurting up from Rocky’s bald tires. The Chrysler screamed into the night like a ghost, lights searching the empty road ahead.

Suddenly a 1959 Mercury roared at them out of the dark, straddling the center line. Rocky screamed and threw his hands up in front of his face. Leo had just time to see the Mercury was missing its hood ornament before the crash came.

 

Half a mile behind, lights flickered on at a side crossing, and a milk truck with CRAMER’S DAIRY written on the side pulled out and began to move toward the pillar of flame and the twisted blackening hulks in the center of the road. It moved at a sedate speed. The transistor dangling by its strap from the meathook played rhythm and blues.

“That’s it,” Spike said. “Now we’re going over to Bob Driscoll’s house. He thinks he’s got gasoline out in his garage, but I’m not sure he does. This has been one very long day, wouldn’t you agree?” But when he turned around, the back of the truck was empty. Even the bug was gone.

G
eorge’s mother went to the door, hesitated there, came back, and tousled George’s hair. “I don’t want you to worry,” she said. “You’ll be all right. Gramma, too.”

“Sure, I’ll be okay. Tell Buddy to lay chilly.”

“Pardon me?”

George smiled. “To stay cool.”

“Oh. Very funny.” She smiled back at him, a distracted, going-in-six-directions-at-once smile. “George, are you sure—”

“I’ll be
fine.”

If it was, the answer is no. After all, it wasn’t like he was six anymore, when they had first come here to Maine to take care of Gramma, and he had cried with terror whenever Gramma held out her heavy arms toward him from her white vinyl chair that always smelled of the poached eggs she ate and the sweet bland powder George’s mom rubbed into her flabby, wrinkled skin; she held out her white-elephant arms, wanting him to come to her and be hugged to that huge and heavy old white-elephant body: Buddy had gone to her, had been enfolded in Gramma’s blind embrace, and Buddy had come out alive... but Buddy was two years older.

Now Buddy had broken his leg and was at the CMG Hospital in Lewiston.

“You’ve got the doctor’s number if something should go wrong. Which it won’t. Right?”

“Sure,” he said, and swallowed something dry in his throat. He smiled. Did the smile look okay? Sure. Sure it did. He wasn’t scared of Gramma anymore. After all, he wasn’t six anymore. Mom was going up to the hospital to see Buddy and he was just going to stay here and lay chilly. Hang out with Gramma awhile. No problem.

Mom went to the door again, hesitated again, and came back again, smiling that distracted, going-six-ways-at-once smile. “If she wakes up and calls for her tea—”

“I know,” George said, seeing how scared and worried she was underneath that distracted smile. She was worried about Buddy, Buddy and his dumb
Pony League,
the coach had called and said Buddy had been hurt in a play at the plate, and the first George had known of it (he was just home from school and sitting at the table eating some cookies and having a glass of Nestlé’s Quik) was when his mother gave a funny little gasp and said,
Hurt? Buddy? How bad?

“I know
all
that stuff, Mom. I got it knocked. Negative perspiration. Go on, now.”

“You’re a good boy, George. Don’t be scared. You’re not scared of Gramma anymore, are you?”

“Huh-uh,” George said. He smiled. The smile felt pretty good; the smile of a fellow who was laying chilly with negative perspiration on his brow, the smile of a fellow who Had It Knocked, the smile of a fellow who was most definitely not six anymore. He swallowed. It was a great smile, but beyond it, down in the darkness behind his smile, was one very dry throat. It felt as if his throat was lined with mitten-wool. “Tell Buddy I’m sorry he broke his leg.”

“I will,” she said, and went to the door again. Four-o’ clock sunshine slanted in through the window. “Thank God we took the sports insurance, Georgie. I don’t know what we’d do if we didn’t have it.”

“Tell him I hope he tagged the sucker out.”

She smiled her distracted smile, a woman of just past fifty with two late sons, one thirteen, one eleven, and no man. This time she opened the door, and a cool whisper of October came in through the sheds.

“And remember, Dr. Arlinder—”

“Sure,” he said. “You better go or his leg’ll be fixed by the time you get there.”

“She’ll probably sleep the whole time,” Mom said. “I love you, Georgie. You’re a good son.” She closed the door on that.

George went to the window and watched her hurry to the old ’69 Dodge that burned too much gas and oil, digging the keys from her purse. Now that she was out of the house and didn’t know George was looking at her, the distracted smile fell away and she only looked distracted—distracted and sick with worry about Buddy. George felt bad for her. He didn’t waste any similar feelings on Buddy, who liked to get him down and sit on top of him with a knee on each of George’s shoulders and tap a spoon in the middle of George’s forehead until he just about went crazy (Buddy called it the Spoon Torture of the Heathen Chinee and laughed like a madman and sometimes went on doing it until George cried), Buddy who sometimes gave him the Indian Rope Burn so hard that little drops of blood would appear on George’s forearm, sitting on top of the pores like dew on blades of grass at dawn, Buddy who had listened so sympathetically when George had one night whispered in the dark of their bedroom that he liked Heather MacArdle and who the next morning ran across the schoolyard screaming
GEORGE AND HEATHER UP IN A TREE, KAY-EYE-ESS-ESS-EYE-EN-GEE! FIRSE COMES LOVE AN THEN COMES MARRITCH! HERE COMES HEATHER WITH A BABY CARRITCH!
like a runaway fire engine. Broken legs did not keep older brothers like Buddy down for long, but George was rather looking forward to the quiet as long as this one did.
Let’s see you give me the Spoon Torture of the Heathen Chinee with your leg in a cast, Buddy. Sure, kid—EVERY day.

The Dodge backed out of the driveway and paused while his mother looked both ways, although nothing would be coming; nothing ever was. His mother would have a two-mile ride over washboards and ruts before she even got to tar, and it was nineteen miles to Lewiston after that.

She backed all the way out and drove away. For a moment dust hung in the bright October afternoon air, and then it began to settle.

He was alone in the house.

With Gramma.

He swallowed.

“Right,” George said in a low voice, and walked across the small, sunwashed kitchen. He was a towheaded, good-looking boy with a spray of freckles across his nose and cheeks and a look of good humor in his darkish gray eyes.

Buddy’s accident had occurred while he had been playing in the Pony League championship game this October 5th. George’s Pee Wee League team, the Tigers, had been knocked out of their tournament on the first day, two Saturdays ago
(What a bunch of babies!
Buddy had exulted as George walked tearfully off the field.
What a bunch of PUSSIES!)
... and now Buddy had broken his leg. If Mom wasn’t so worried and scared, George would have been almost happy.

There was a phone on the wall, and next to it was a note-minder board with a grease pencil hanging beside it. In the upper comer of the board was a cheerful country Gramma, her cheeks rosy, her white hair done up in a bun; a cartoon Gramma who was pointing at the board. There was a comic-strip balloon coming out of the cheerful country Gramma’s mouth and she was saying, “REMEMBER
THIS,
SONNY!” Written on the board in his mother’s sprawling hand was Dr.
Arlinder, 681-4330.
Mom hadn’t written the number there just today, because she had to go to Buddy; it had been there almost three weeks now, because Gramma was having her “bad spells” again.

George picked up the phone and listened.

“—so I told her, I said, ‘Mabel, if he treats you like that—’

He put it down again. Henrietta Dodd. Henrietta was always on the phone, and if it was in the afternoon you could always hear the soap opera stories going on in the background. One night after she had a glass of wine with Gramma (since she started having the “bad spells” again, Dr. Arlinder said Gramma couldn’t have the wine with her supper, so Mom didn’t either—George was sorry, because the wine made Mom sort of giggly and she would tell stories about her girlhood), Mom had said that every time Henrietta Dodd opened her mouth, all her guts fell out. Buddy and George laughed wildly, and Mom put a hand to her mouth and said
Don’t you EVER tell anyone I said that,
and then
she
began to laugh too, all three of them sitting at the supper table laughing, and at last the racket had awakened Gramma, who slept more and more, and she began to cry
Ruth! Ruth! ROO-OOOTH!
in that high, querulous voice of hers, and Mom had stopped laughing and went into her room.