“Why?”
“Because you were shacked up in the woods with Allison, you—”
Mr. Arnold and Mr. Ryan were lying in bed and watching Hollywood Squares as if nothing unusual were going on three feet above them.
“Shacked up?”
“You — snake in the grass! Taking advantage of a psychotic girl. You — you—”
“Dirty old man?” said Mr. Ryan, looking up for the first time.
“You shut your mouth, you old asshole,” said Kitty, without looking down.
“Yes ma’am,” said Mr. Ryan.
“Well, I’m here to tell you one damn thing, old pal. I hope to God you’re pleased with yourself. She is now hopelessly regressed. She won’t say a word. And I’ll tell you something else. I’m fixing it so you’ll never get your filthy hands on her again, you — snake in the grass. That’s exactly what you are, a snake in the grass!”
“You mean she won’t talk to you?” he asked her.
“I mean she won’t talk period, won’t eat period, won’t live period — unless I do something about it. You bastard,” she said softly. “You knew where she was all along.”
He had spied Mr. Arnold in the hall hopping along on his crutch. There was no mistaking that peeled-onion head and the one bright eye in his shutdown face. Then, after Kitty left, flung out, jammed her fist into her side and flounced her hip with it — it’s amazing, he reflected, how trite rage is: enraged people in life act exactly like enraged people in comic books: there were stars and comets and zaps over Kitty’s head — then Mr. Arnold and Mr. Ryan had a fight.
Mr. Arnold was sitting on the foot of his bed, fisted hand cradled like a baby in his good arm. Though it was his bed and his right to sit there, he was blocking Mr. Ryan’s view of Hollywood Squares. Mr. Ryan began shifting his head back and forth in an exaggerated way to see around Mr. Arnold. He asked him to move but Mr. Arnold either didn’t hear or pretended not to hear.
“You may be a pane, Erroll,” he said to Mr. Arnold with an angry laugh, “but I can’t see through you.”
Mr. Ryan had a neat white crewcut, a youthful face, its skin smooth and pink-creased like a baby waking up. But his eye had a cast in it. One leg was gone from the hip and the other freshly amputated and bandaged below the knee. Diabetes and arteriosclerosis, he explained, watching Will with a keen and lively eye to see how he would take it, and apparently was satisfied, for he, Will, took it as he took everything else, attentively and without surprise. They had got the infection in time, Mr. Ryan said, and this time he could keep his knee. He explained, watching Will Barrett closely, that it was better to chop off a good piece the first time than nibble away as they had done with the other leg. I could have told them from the beginning, he said, that it’s exactly like pruning back boxwood with the blight.
Mr. Ryan was lying on top of the bedclothes. He pulled up his hospital gown to show his stump. “Ain’t that a pistol?” His thigh too had the same pink and white baby skin.
The watchful, almost angry look, he saw, was Mr. Ryan’s way of asking him if he thought he would keep his knee. Is it such a bad thing, he mused chin in hand over Mr. Ryan’s remaining knee, to have a knee to think about day in and day out? Even if both knees were well and all was well, what would you do here? “They going to keep chopping on me till I’ll fit on a skateboard,” said Mr. Ryan, watching him.
“It looks very healthy,” he said. “It looks fine to me.”
“Yes, it does,” said Mr. Ryan instantly. “I believe they got it this time. We can’t see the show, Erroll,” he said to Mr. Arnold.
But Mr. Arnold didn’t move.
After a while Mr. Ryan said, “Like I said, Erroll, you may be a pane but we can’t see through you.”
Still Mr. Arnold didn’t move.
“You want to know what Erroll does?” Mr. Ryan asked Will Barrett with a smile, but his eyes were glittering.
“What?”
“He knows I can’t move yet he sits his ass right there on the end of his bed between me and the TV, Erroll you shit!” said Mr. Ryan, laughing, then with a sob but still laughing lunged out between the two beds and, propping himself on the floor with one hand, grabbed Mr. Arnold’s crutch with the other. When, with difficulty, veins pounding in his neck, glossy eye bulging, he got himself back in place, it appeared he meant only to steal Mr. Arnold’s crutch, but no. Gripping the crutch at the small end in both hands like a baseball bat and giving himself what purchase he could by gathering his knee stump under him, he swung the crutch with all his might and caught Mr. Arnold a heavy glancing blow on his onion dome, cursing all the while.
“You no-good peckerwood son of a bitch!” he cried, his voice going suddenly hoarse.
Mr. Arnold, suddenly on the move, turned, his good eye winking at Barrett, grabbed the crossbar of the crutch with his good hand, yanked it, and kicked out at Mr. Ryan with his good leg, but fell off the bed. Mr. Ryan flew through the air like a doll and fell on top of him. Three fists rose and fell.
“You covite cocksucker,” said Mr. Ryan.
“Cornholer,” said Mr. Arnold clearly. He had got on top, and though he could only use one arm, the curtain of his face had been lifted by rage. His whole mouth formed curses. Cursing cures paralysis.
“Wait, hold it, okay okay,” said Will Barrett, jumping clean across the bed and landing astraddle the roommates in time to catch the crutch on his shin. “Shit,” he said. The two old men were grunting and embracing and cursing like lovers. “I mean for God’s sake stop it!” Picking up Mr. Ryan, who, truncated, was no bigger than a chunky child, he set him in place on his pillows. Mr. Arnold was already back on his perch at the foot of the bed, once again blocking Mr. Ryan’s view of Hollywood Squares. The fight might never have occurred. Instead of moving Mr. Arnold, Will Barrett moved the TV arm so Mr. Ryan’s view could not be blocked. He looked at them. They were gazing at Paul Lynde in the middle square as if nothing had happened.
“How often does this happen?” he asked them.
“Ever’ damn time they chop me down to size, Erroll sits his bony ass right where I can’t see the TV,” said Mr. Ryan.
“It’s the onliest place I can see it good,” said Mr. Arnold. “It’s too little to see from back there.”
“You speak very well,” Will Barrett told Mr. Arnold. “The last time I saw you at my house, you didn’t have much to say.”
“There wasn’t much to say.”
“He’s too damn mean to talk,” said Mr. Ryan. “But knock him upside the head like a mule and he’ll talk your ear off.”
“How long have you been here?” Will Barrett asked Mr. Ryan.
“Two years.”
“How about Mr. Arnold?”
“Ask him.”
“Three years,” said Mr. Arnold clearly. The curtain of his face had not yet shut down.
Strange: even during their rages they seemed to be watching him with a mute smiling appeal. They wanted to be told that no matter what happened, things would turn out well — and they believed him.
He discovered that it was possible to talk to them and even for them to talk to each other, if all three watched TV. The TV was like a fourth at bridge, the dummy partner they could all watch.
Mr. Ryan was a contractor from Charlotte who had moved to Linwood to build condominiums and villas for Mountainview Homes until diabetes and arteriosclerosis had “cut him down to size.”
“Their joists are two foot on centers, the nails are cheap, and the floorboards bounce clean off in two years,” said Mr. Arnold to Peter Marshall of Hollywood Squares. How could anger raise the curtain of his face?