Christine

“Son, you’re probably too young to look for wisdom in anyone s words but your own, but I’ll tell you this: love is the enemy.” He nodded at me slowly. “Yes. The poets continually and sometimes wilfully mistake love. Love is the old slaughterer. Love is not blind. Love is a cannibal with extremely acute vision. Love is insectile; it is always hungry.”

“What does it eat?” I asked, not aware I was going to ask anything at all. Every part of me but my mouth thought the entire conversation insane.

“Friendship,” George LeBay said. “It eats friendship. If I were you, Dennis, I would now prepare for the worst.”

He closed the door of the Chevette with a soft chuck! and started up its sewing-machine engine. He drove away, leaving me to stand there on the edge of the blacktop. I suddenly remembered that Arnie should see me coming from the direction of the comfort stations, so I headed that way as fast as I could.

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…

— Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers

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.”