Christine

Brad Jeffries, our road-crew foreman, was in his midforties, balding, stocky, permanently sunburned. He liked to holler a lot—particularly when we were behind schedule—but he was a decent enough man. I went to see him during our coffee break to find out if Arnie had asked for part or all of the afternoon off.

“He asked for two hours, so he could go to a buryin,” Brad said. He took off his steel-rimmed glasses and massaged the red spots they had left on the sides of his nose. “Now don’t you ask—I’m losing you both at the end of the week anyway, and all the jerk-offs are staying.”

“Brad, I have to ask.”

“Why? Who is this guy? Cunningham said he sold him a car, that’s all. Christ, I didn’t think anyone went to a used car salesman’s funeral, except for his family.”

“It wasn’t a used car salesman, it was just a guy. Arnie’s having some problems about this, Brad. I feel like I ought to go with him.”

Brad sighed.

“Okay. Okay, okay, okay. You can have One to three, just like him. If you’ll agree to work through your lunch hour and stay on till six Thursday night.”

“Sure. Thanks, Brad.”

“I’ll punch you out just like regular,” Brad said. “And if anybody at Penn-DOT in Pittsburgh finds out about this, my ass is going to be grass.”

“They won’t.”

“Gonna be sorry to lose you guys,” he said. He picked up the paper and shook it out to the sports. Coming from Brad, that was high praise

“It’s been a good summer for us, too.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, Dennis. Now get out of here and let me read the paper.

I did.

At one o’clock I caught a ride up to the main construction shed on a grader. Arnie was inside, hanging up his yellow hardhat and putting on a clean shirt. He looked at me, startled.

“Dennis! What are you doing here?”

“Getting ready to go to a funeral,” I said. “Same as you.”

“No,” he said immediately, and it was more that word than anything else—the Saturdays he was no longer there, the coolness of Michael and Regina over the phone, the way he had been when I had called him from the movies that made me realise how much he had shut me out of his life, and how it had happened in just the same way LeBay had died. Suddenly.

“Yes,” I said. “Arnie, I dream about the guy. You hear me talking to you? I dream about him. I’m going. We can go separately or together, but I’m going.”

“You weren’t joking, were you?”

“Huh?”

“When you called me on the phone from that theatre. You really didn’t know he was dead.”

“Jesus Christ! You think I’d joke about something like that?”

“No,” he said, but not right away. He didn’t say no until he’d thought it over carefully. He saw the possibility of all hands being turned against him now. Will Darnell had done that to him, and Buddy Repperton, and I suppose his mother and father too. But it wasn’t just them, or even principally them, because none of them was the first cause. It was the car.

“You dream about him.”

“Yes.”

He stood there with his clean shirt in his hands, musing over that.

“The paper said Libertyville Heights Cemetery, I said finally. “You going to take the bus or ride with me?”

“I’ll ride with you.”

“Good deal.”

We stood on a hill above the graveside service, neither daring or wanting to go down and join the handful of mourners. There were less than a dozen of them all told, half of them old guys in uniforms that looked old and carefully preserved—you could almost smell the mothballs. LeBay’s casket was on runners over the grave. There was a flag on it. The preacher’s words drifted up to us on a hot late-August breeze: man is like the grass which grows and then is cut down, man is like a flower which blooms in the spring and fades in the summer, man is in love, and loves what passes.

When the service ended, the flag was removed, and a man who looked to be in his sixties threw a handful of earth onto the coffin. Little particles trickled off and fell into the hole beneath. The obit had said he was survived by a brother and a sister. This had to be the brother; the resemblance wasn’t overwhelming, but it was there. The sister evidently hadn’t made it; there was no one but the boys down there around that hole in the ground.

Two of the American Legion types folded the flag into a cocked hat, and one of them handed it to LeBay’s brother. The preacher asked the Lord to bless them and keep them, to make His face shine upon them, to lift them up and give them peace. They started to drift away. I looked around for Arnie and Arnie wasn’t beside me anymore. He had gone a little distance away, He was standing under a tree. There were tears on his checks.

“You okay, Arnie?” I asked. It occurred to me that I sure as hell hadn’t seen any tears down there, and if Roland D. LeBay had known that Arnie Cunningham was going to be the only person to shed a tear for him at his small-time graveside ceremonies in one of Western Pennsylvania’s lesser-known boneyards, he might have knocked fifty bucks off the price of his shitty car. After all, Arnie still would have been paying a hundred and fifty more than it was worth.