Christine

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 shatters ha 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.

LeBay leaned forward. “But that talent was just another wellspring for his anger, young man. And it was an anger that never ended until he bought that car that your friend now owns.”

“What do you mean?”

LeBay chuckled dryly. “He fixed Army convoy trucks, Army staff cars, Army weapons-supply vehicles. He fixed bulldozers and kept staff cars running with spit and baling wire. And once, when a visiting Congressman came to visit Fort Arnold in west Texas and had car trouble, he was ordered by his commanding officer, who was desperate to make a good impression, to fix the Congressman’s prized Bentley. Oh, yes, we got a four-page letter about that particular “shitter" — a four-page rant of Rollie’s anger and vitriol. It was a wonder the words didn’t smoke the page.