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
Can’t you hear it out in Needham?
Route 128 down by the power lines…
It’s so cold here in the dark,
It’s so exciting here in the dark…
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 its 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 lawnchairs 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.
“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 am 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 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 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 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 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.