There was another period of silence. Dad finished sweeping and then glanced around. “Looks pretty good, huh?”
“Great, Dad.”
He smiled a little sadly and lit a Winston. Since his heart attack he had given the butts up almost completely, but kept a pack around, and every now and then he’d have one—usually when he felt under stress. “Bullshit. It looks empty as hell.”
“Well… yeah.”
“You want a hand upstairs, Dennis?”
I got my crutches under me. “I wouldn’t turn it down.” He looked at me and snickered. “Long John Silver. All you need is the parrot.”
“Are you going to stand there giggling or give me a hand?”
“Give you a hand, I guess.”
I slung an arm over his shoulder, feeling somehow like a little kid again—it brought back almost forgotten memories of him carrying me upstairs to bed on Sunday nights, after I started to doze off halfway through the Ed Sullivan Show. The smell of his aftershave was just the same.
At the top he said, “Step on me if I’m getting too personal, Denny, but Leigh’s not going with Arnie anymore, is she.”
“No, Dad.”
“Is she going with you?”
“I… well, I don’t really know. I guess not.”
“Not yet, you mean.”
“Well—yeah, I guess so.” I was starting to feel uncomfortable, and it must have showed, but he pushed on anyway.
“Would it be fair to say that maybe she broke it off with Arnie because he wasn’t the same person anymore?”
“Yes. I think that would be fair to say.”
“Does he know about you and Leigh?”
“Dad, there’s nothing to know… at least, not yet.” He cleared his throat, seemed to consider, and then said nothing. I let go of him and worked at getting my crutches under me. I worked a little harder at it than I had to, maybe.
“I’ll give you a little gratuitous advice,” my father said finally. “Don’t let him know what’s between you and her—and never mind the protestations that there isn’t anything. You’re trying to help him some way, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know if there’s anything either Leigh or I can do for Arnie, Dad.”
“I’ve seen him two or three times,” my father said.
“You have?” I said, startled. “Where?”
My father shrugged. “On the street. Downtown. You know. Libertyville’s not that big, Dennis. He…”
“He what?”
“Hardly seemed to recognize me. And he looks older. Now that his face has cleared, he looks much older. I used to think he took after his father, but now—” He broke off suddenly. “Dennis, has it occurred to you that Arnie may be having some sort of nervous breakdown.”
“Yes,” I said, and only wished I could have told him that there were other possibilities. Worse ones. Possibilities that would have made my old man wonder if I was the one having a nervous breakdown.
“You be careful,” he said, and although he didn’t mention what had happened to Will Darnell, I suddenly felt strongly that he was thinking of it. “You be careful, Dennis.”
Leigh called me on the telephone the next day and said her father was being called away to Los Angeles on year-end business and had proposed, on the spur of the moment, that they all go along with him and get away from the cold and the snow.
“My mother was crazy about the idea, and I just couldn’t think of any plausible reason to say no,” she said. “It’s only ten days, and school doesn’t start again until January 8th.” “It sounds great,” I said. “Have fun out there.”
“You think I should go?”
“If you don’t, you ought to have your head examined.”
“Dennis?”
“What?”
Her voice dropped a little. “You’ll be careful won’t you? I… well, I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.”
She hung up then, leaving me feeling surprised and warm—but the guilt remained, fading a little now, maybe, but still there. My father had asked me if I was trying to help Arnie. Was I? Or was I maybe only snooping into a part of his life which he had expressly marked off-limits… and stealing his girl in the process? And what exactly would Arnie do or say if he found out?
My head ached with questions, and I thought that maybe it was just as well that Leigh was going away for a while.
As she herself had said about our folks, it seemed safer.
On Friday the 29th, the last business day of the old year, I called the Libertyville American Legion Post and asked for the secretary. I got his name, Richard McCandless, from the building’s janitor, who also found a telephone number to go with it. The number turned out to be that of David Emerson’s, Libertyville’s “good” furniture store. I was told to wait a moment and then McCandless came on, a deep, gravelly voice that sounded a tough sixty—as if maybe Patton and the owner of this voice had fought their way across Germany to Berlin shoulder to shoulder, possibly biting enemy bullets out of the air with their teeth as they went.
“McCandless,” he said.
“Mr McCandless, my name is Dennis Guilder. Last August you put on a military-style funeral for a fellow named Roland LeBay—”
“Was he a friend of yours?”
“No, only a bare acquaintance, but—”
“Then I don’t have to spare your feelings none,” McCandless said, gravel rattling in his throat. He sounded like Andy Devine crossed with Broderick Crawford. “LeBay was nothing but a pure-d sandy-craw sonofabitch, and if I’d had my way, the Legion wouldn’t have had a thing to do with planting him. He quit the organization back in 1970. If he hadn’t quit, we would have fired him. That man was the most contentious bastard that every lived.”
“Was he?”
“You bet he was. He’d pick an argument with you, then up it to a fight if he could. You couldn’t play poker with the sonofabitch, and you sure couldn’t drink with him. You couldn’t keep up with him, for one thing, and he’d get mean for another. Not that he had to go far to get to mean. What a crazy bastard he was, you should pardon my fran-sayse. Who are you, boy?”
For an insane moment I thought of quoting Emily Dickinson at him: I’m nobody! Who are you?
“A friend of mine bought a car from LeBay just before he died—”
“Shit! Not that ’57?”
“Well, actually it was a ’58—”
Yeah, yeah, ’57 or ’58, red and white. That was the only goddam thing he cared about, Treated it like it was a woman. It was over that car he quit the Legion, did you know that?”
“No,” I said. “What happened?”
“Ah, shit. Ancient history, kid. I’m bending your car as it is. But every time I think of that sonofabitch LeBay, I see red. I’ve still got the scars on my hands. Uncle Sam had three years or my life during World War II and I never got so much as a Purple Heart out of it, although I was in combat almost all that time. I fought my way across half the little shitpot islands in the South Pacific. Me and about fifty other guys stood up to a banzai charge on Guadalcanal two fucking million Japs coming at us hopped to the eyeballs and waving those swords they made out of Maxwell House coffee cans—and I never got a scar, I felt a couple of bullets go right by me, and just before we broke that charge the guy next to me got his guts rearranged courtesy of the Emperor of Japan, but the only times I saw the colour of my own blood over there in the Pacific was when I cut myself shaving. Then…”
McCandless laughed.
“Shit on toast, there I go again. My wife says I’ll open my mouth too wide someday and just fall right in. What’d you say your name was?”
“Dennis Guilder.”
“Okay, Dennis, I bent your ear, now you bend mine. What did you want?”
“Well, my friend bought that car and fixed it up… for a sort of a street-rod, I guess you’d say. A showpiece.”
“Yeah, just like LeBay,” McCandless said, and my mouth went dry. “He loved that fucking car, I’ll say that for him. He didn’t give a shit for his wife—you know what happened to her?”