“The hell you will!” Ellie declared grandly, and left the room.
“My little sister,” I said.
Leigh was smiling. “She’s great.”
“If you had to live with her full-time you might change your mind. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Leigh put one of the Xerox copies on the glass coffee table where the pieces of my casts had been yesterday.
It was the re-registration of a used car, 1958 Plymouth sedan (4-door), red and white. It was dated November 1, 1978, and signed Arnold Cunningham. His father had co-signed for him:
SIGNATURE OF OWNER
SIGNARURE OF PARENT OR GUARDIAN (IF OWNER IS UNDER 18)
“What does that look like to you?” I asked.
“One of the signatures on one of the squares you showed me,” she said. “Which one?”
“It’s the one he signed just after I got crunched in Ridge Rock,” I said. “It’s the way his signature always looked. Now let’s see the other one.”
She put it down beside the first. This was a registration slip for a new car, 1958 Plymouth sedan (4-door), red and white. It was dated November 1, 1957—I felt a nasty jolt at that exact similarity, and one look at Leigh’s face told me she had seen it too.
“Look at the signature,” she said quietly.
I did.
SIGNATURE OF OWNER
SIGNATURE OF PARENT OR GUARDIAN (IF OWNER IS UNDER 18)…
This was the handwriting Arnie had used on Thanksgiving evening, you didn’t have to be a genius or a handwriting expert to see that. The names were different, but the writing was exactly the same.
Leigh reached for my hands, and I took hers.
What my father did in his basement workshop was make toys. I suppose that might sound a little weird to you, but it’s his hobby, Or maybe something more than a hobby—I think there might have been a time in his life when he had to make a difficult choice between going to college and going out on his own to become a toymaker. If that’s true, then I guess he chose the safe way. Sometimes I think I see it in his eyes, like an old ghost not quite laid to rest, but that is probably only my imagination, which used to be a lot less active than it is now.
Ellie and I were the chief ben eficiaries, but Arnie had also found some of my father’s toys under various Christmas trees and beside various birthday cakes, as had Ellie’s closest childhood friend Aimee Carruthers (long since moved to Nevada and now referred to in the doleful tones reserved for those who have died young and senselessly) and many other chums.
Now my dad gave most of what he made to the Salvation Army 400 Fund, and before Christmas the basement always reminded me of Santa’s workshop—until just before Christmas it would be filled with neat white cardboard cartons containing wooden trains, little tool-chests… Erector-set clocks that really kept time, stuffed animals, a small puppet theatre or two. His main interest was in wooden toys (up until the Vietnam war he had made battalions of toy soldiers, but in the last five years or so they had been quietly phased out—even now I’m not sure he was aware he was doing it), but like a good spray hitter, my dad went to all fields. During the week after Christmas there was a hiatus. The workshop would seem terribly empty, with only the sweet smell of sawdust to remind us that the toys had ever been there.
In that week he would sweep, clean, oil his machinery, and get ready for next year. Then, as the winter wore on through January and February, the toys and the seeming junk that would become parts of toys would begin appearing again—trains and joined wooden ballerinas with red spots of colour on their cheeks, a box of stuffing raked out of someone’s old couch that would later end in a bear’s belly (my father called every one of his bears Owen or Olive—I had worn out six Owen Bears between infancy and second grade, and Ellie had worn out a like number of Olive Bears), little snips of wire, buttons, and flat, disembodied eyes scattered across the worktable like something out of a pulp horror story. Last, the liquor-store boxes would appear, and the toys would again be packed into them.
In the last three years he had gotten three awards from the Salvation Army, but he kept them hidden away in a drawer, as if he was ashamed of them. I didn’t understand it then and don’t now—not completely—but I know it wasn’t shame. My father had nothing to be ashamed of.
I worked my way down that evening after supper, clutching the bannister madly with one arm and using my other crutch like a ski-pole.
“Dennis,” he said, pleased but slightly apprehensive. “You need any help?”
“No, I got it.”
He put his broom aside by a small yellow drift of shavings and watched to see if I was really going to make it. “How about a push, then?”
“Ha-ha, very funny.”
I got down, semi-hopped over to the big easy chair my father keeps in the corner beside our old Motorola black-and-white, and sat down. Plonk.
“How you doing?” he asked.
“Pretty good.”
He brushed up a dustpanful of shavings, dumped them into his wastebarrel, sneezed, and brushed up some more. “No pain?”
“No. Well… some.”
“You want to be careful of stairs. If your mother had seen what you just did—”
I grinned. “She’d scream, yeah.”
“Where is your mother?”
“She and Ellie went over to the Rennekes”. Dina Renneke got a complete library of Shaun Cassidy albums for Christmas. Ellie is green.”
“I thought Shaun was out,” my father said.
“I think she’s afraid fashion might be doubling back on her.”
Dad laughed. Then there was a companionable silence for a while, me sitting, him sweeping. I knew he’d get around to it, and presently he did.
“Leigh,” he said, “used to go with Arnie, didn’t she?”
“Yes,” I said.
He glanced at me, then down at his work again. I thought he would ask me if I thought that was wise, or maybe mention that one fellow stealing another fellow’s girl was not the best way to promote friendship and accord. But he said neither of those things.
“We don’t see much of Arnie anymore. Do you suppose he’s ashamed of the mess he’s in?”
I had the feeling that my father didn’t believe that at all; that he was simply testing the wind.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I don’t think he has much to worry about. With Darnell dead”—he tipped his dustpan into the barrel and the shavings slid in with a soft flump—“I doubt if they’ll even bother to prosecute.”
“No?”
“Not Arnie. Not on anything serious. He may be fined, and the judge will probably lecture him, but nobody wants to put an indelible black mark on the record of a nice young suburban white boy who is bound for college and a fruitful place in society.”
He shot me a sharp questioning look, and I shifted in the chair, suddenly uncomfortable.
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“Except he’s not really like that anymore, is he, Dennis?”
“No. He’s changed.”
“When was the last time you actually saw him?”
“Thanksgiving.”
“Was he okay then?”
I shook my head slowly, suddenly feeling like crying and blurting it all out. I had felt that way once before and hadn’t; I didn’t this time, either, but for a different reason. I remembered what Leigh had said, about being nervous for her parents on Christmas Eve. And it seemed to me now that the fewer the people who knew about our suspicions, the safer… for them.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does Leigh?”
“No. Not for sure. We have… some suspicions.”
“Do you want to talk about them?”
“Yes. In a way I do. But I think it would be better if I didn’t.”
“All right,” he said. “For now.”
He swept the floor. The sound of the hard bristles on the concrete was almost hypnotic.
“And maybe you had better talk to Arnie before too much longer.”
“Yeah. I was thinking about that.” But it wasn’t an interview I looked forward to.