Christine

He skidded the heels of his hands up the sides of his face in a gesture that was nearly savage. “Fine,” he said hoarsely. “Come on.”

“Sure.”

I thought he meant it was time to go, but he didn’t start back toward where I’d parked my Duster; he started down the hill instead. I started to ask him where he was going and then shut my mouth. I knew well enough; he wanted to talk to LeBay’s brother.

The brother was standing with two of the Legionnaire types, talking quietly, the flag under his arm. He was dressed in the suit of a man who is approaching retirement on a questionable income; it was a blue pinstripe with a slightly shiny seat. His tie was wrinkled at the bottom, and his white shirt had a yellowish tinge at the collar.

He glanced around at us.

“Pardon me,” Arnie said, “but you’re Mr LeBay’s brother, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.” He looked at Arnie questioningly and, I thought, a little warily.

Arnie put out his hand. “My name is Arnold Cunnningham. I knew your brother slightly. I bought a car from him a short while ago.”

When Arnie put his hand out, LeBay had automatically reached for it—with American men, the only gesture which may be more ingrained than the handshake response is checking your fly to make sure it’s zipped after you come out of a public restroom. But when Arnie went on to say he had bought a car from LeBay, the hand hesitated on its course. For a moment I thought the man was not going to shake after all, that he would pull back and just leave Arnie’s hand floating out there in the ozone.

But he didn’t do that… at least, not quite. He gave Arnie’s hand a single token squeeze and then dropped it.

“Christine,” he said in a dry voice. Yes, the family resemblance was there—in the way the brow shelved over the eyes, the set of the jaw, the light blue eyes. But this man’s face was softer, almost kind; I did not think he was ever going to have the lean and vulpine aspect that had been Roland D. LeBay’s. “The last note I got from Rollie said he’d sold her.”

Good Christ, he was using that damned female pronoun, too. And Rollie! It was hard to imagine LeBay, with his peeling skull and his pestiferous backbrace, as anyone’s Rollie. But his brother had spoken the nickname in the same dry voice. There was no love in that voice, at least none that I could hear.

LeBay went on: “My brother didn’t write often, but he had a tendency to gloat, Mr Cunningham. I wish there was a gentler word for it, but I don’t believe there is. In his note, Rollie spoke of you as a “sucker” and said he had given you what he called “a royal screwing".”

My mouth dropped open. I turned to Arnie, half expecting another outburst of rage. But his face hadn’t changed at all.

“A royal screwing,” he said mildly, “is always in the eye of the beholder. Don’t you think so, Mr LeBay?”

LeBay laughed… a little reluctantly, I thought.

“This is my friend. He was with me the day I bought the car.”

I was introduced and shook George LeBay’s hand.

The soldiers had drifted away. The three of us, LeBay, Arnie and I, were left eyeing one another uncomfortably. LeBay shifted his brother’s flag from one hand to the other.

“Can I do something for you, Mr Cunningham?” LeBay asked at last.

Arnie cleared his throat. “I wag wondering about the garage,” he said finally. “You see, I’m working on the car, trying to get her street-legal again. My folks don’t want it at my house, and I was wondering—”

“No.”

“—if maybe I could rent the garage—”

“No, out of the question, it’s really—”

“I’d pay you twenty dollars a week, Arnie said “Twenty-five, if you wanted.” I winced. He was like a kid who has stumbled into quicksand and decides to cheer himself up by eating a few arsenic-laced brownies.

“—impossible.” LeBay was looking more and more distressed.

“Just the garage,” Arnie said, his calm starting to crack. “Just the garage where it originally was.”

“It can’t be done,” LeBay said. “I listed the house with Century 21, Libertyville Realty, and Pittsburgh Homes just this morning. They’ll be showing the house—”

“Yes, sure, in time, but until—”

“—and it wouldn’t do to have you tinkering around. You see, don’t you?” He bent toward Arnie a little. “Please don’t misunderstand me. I have nothing against teenagers in general—if I did, I’d probably be in a lunatic asylum now, because I’ve taught high school in Paradise Falls, Ohio, for almost forty years—and you seem to be a very intelligent, well-spoken example of the genus adolescent. But all I want to do here in Libertyville is sell the house and split whatever proceeds there may be with my sister in Denver. I want to be shut of the house, Mr Cunningham, and I want to be shut of my brother’s life.”

“I see,” Arnie said. “Would it make any difference if I promised to look after the place? Mow the grass? Repaint the trim? Make little repairs? I can be handy that way.”

“He really is good at stuff like that,” I chipped in. It wouldn’t hurt, I thought, for Arnie to remember later that I had been on his side… even if I wasn’t.