I glanced over Arnie’s shoulder at the mileometer. The glass was cloudy, but I could read the damage all the same: 97,432. And six-tenths. Jesus wept.
“If you love the car so much, why are you selling it?” I asked.
He turned a milky, rather frightening gaze on me. “Are you cracking wise on me, son?”
I didn’t answer, but I didn’t drop my gaze either.
After a few moments of eye-to-eye duelling (which Arnie totally ignored; he was running a slow and loving hand over one of the back fins), he said, “Can’t drive anymore. Back’s gotten too bad. Eyes are going the same way.”
Suddenly I got it—or thought I did. If he had given us the correct dates, he was seventy-one. And at seventy, this state makes you start taking compulsory eye exams every year before they’ll renew your driver’s licence. LeBay had either failed his eye exam or was afraid of failing. Either way, it came to the same thing. Rather than submit to that indignity, he had put the Plymouth up. And after that, the, car had gotten old fast.
“How much do you want for it?” Arnie asked again. Oh he just couldn’t wait to be slaughtered.
LeBay turned his face up to the sky, appearing to consider it for rain. Then he looked down at Arnie again and gave him a large, kindly smile that was far too much like the previous shit-eating grin for me.
“I’ve been asking three hundred,” he said. “But you seem a likely enough lad. I’ll make it two-fifty for you.”
“Oh my Christ,” I said.
But he knew who his sucker was, and he knew exactly how to drive the wedge in between us. In the words of my grandfather, he hadn’t fallen off a haytruck yesterday.
“Okay,” he said brusquely. “If that’s how you want it. I got my four-thirty story to watch. Edge of Night. Never miss it if I can help it. Nice chinning with you boys. So long.”
Arnie threw me such a smoking look of pain and anger that I backed off a step. He went after the old man and took his elbow. They talked. I couldn’t hear it all, but I could see more than enough. The old man’s pride was wounded. Arnie was earnest and apologetic. The old man just hoped Arnie understood that he couldn’t stand to see the car that had brought him through safe to his golden years insulted. Arnie agreed. Little by little, the old man allowed himself to be led back. And again I felt something consciously dreadful about him… it was as if a cold November wind could think. I can’t, put it any better than that.
“If he says one more word, I wash my hands of the whole thing,” LeBay said, and cocked a horny, calloused thumb at me.
“He won’t, he won’t,” Arnie said hastily. “Three hundred, did you say?”
“Yes, I believe that was—”
“Two-fifty was the quoted price,” I said loudly.
Arnie looked stricken, afraid the old man would walk away again, but LeBay was taking no chances. The fish was almost out of the pond now
“Two-fifty would do it, I guess,” LeBay allowed. He glanced my way again, and I saw that we had an understanding—he didn’t like me and I didn’t like him.
To my ever-increasing horror, Arnie pulled his wallet out and began thumbing through it. There was silence among the three of us. LeBay looked on. I looked away at a little kid who was trying to kill himself on a puke-green skateboard. Somewhere a dog barked. Two girls who looked like eighth- or ninth-graders went past, giggling and holding clutches of library books to their blooming chests. I had only one hope left for getting Arnie out of this; it was the day before payday. Given time, even twenty-four hours, this wild fever might pass. Arnie was beginning to remind me of Toad, of Toad Hall.
When I looked back, Arnie and LeBay were looking at two fives and six ones—all that had been in his wallet, apparently.
“How about a cheque?” Arnie asked.
LeBay offered Arnie a dry smile and said nothing
“It’s a good cheque,” Arnie protested. It would be, too. We had been working all summer for Carson Brothers on the I-376 extension, the one which natives of the Pittsburgh area firmly believe will never be really finished. Arnie sometimes declared that Penn-DOT had begun taking bids on the I-376 work shortly after the Civil War ended. Not that either of us had any right to complain; a lot of kids were either working for slave wages that summer or not working at all. We were making good money, even clocking some overtime. Brad Jeffries, the job foreman, had been frankly dubious about taking a runt like Arnie on, but had finally allowed that he could use a flagman; the girl he had been planning to hire had gotten herself pregnant and had run off to get married. So Arnie had started off flagging in June but had gotten into the harder work little by little, running mostly on guts and determination. It was the first real job he’d ever had, and he didn’t want to screw it up. Brad was reasonably impressed, and the summer sun had even helped Arnie’s erupting complexion a little. Maybe it was the ultraviolet.
“I’m sure it’s a good cheque, son,” LeBay said, “but I gotta make a cash deal. You understand.”
I didn’t know if Arnie understood, but I did. It would be too easy to stop payment on a local cheque if this rustbucket Plymouth threw a rod or blew a piston on the way home.
“You can call the bank,” Arnie said, starting to sound desperate.
“Nope,” LeBay said, scratching his armpit above the scabrous brace. “It’s going on five-thirty. Bank’s long since closed.”
“A deposit, then,” Arnie said, and held out the sixteen dollars. He looked positively wild. It may be that you’re having-trouble believing a kid who was almost old enough to vote could have gotten himself so worked up over an anonymous old clunk in the space of fifteen minutes. I was having some trouble believing it myself. Only Roland D. LeBay seemed not to be having trouble with it, and I supposed it was because at his age he had seen everything. It was only later that I came to believe that his odd sureness might come from other sources. Either way, if any milk of human kindness had ever run in his veins, it had curdled to sour cream long ago.
“I’d have to have at least ten per cent down,” LeBay said. The fish was out of the water; in a moment it would be netted. “If I had ten per cent, I’d hold her for twenty-four hours.”
“Dennis,” Arnie said. “Can you loan me nine bucks until tomorrow?”
I had twelve in my-own wallet, and no particular place to” go. Day after day of spreading sand and digging trenches for culverts had done wonders when it came to getting ready for football practice, but I had no social life at all. Lately I hadn’t even been assaulting the ramparts of my cheerleader girlfriend’s body in the style to which she had become accustomed. I was rich but lonely.
“Come on over here and let’s see,” I said.
LeBay’s brow darkened, but he could see he was stuck with my input, like it or not. His frizzy white hair blew back and forth in the mild breeze. He kept one hand possessively on the Plymouth’s hood.
Arnie and I walked back toward where my car, a ’75 Duster, was parked at the kerb. I put an arm around Arnie’s shoulders. For some reason I remembered the two of us up in his room on a rainy autumn day when we were both no more than six years old—cartoons flickering on an ancient black-and-white TV as we coloured with old Crayolas from a dented coffee can. The image made me feel sad and a little scared. I have days, you know, when it seems to me that six is an optimum age, and that’s why it only lasts about 7.2 seconds in real time.
“Have you got it, Dennis? I’ll get it back to you tomorrow afternoon.”
“Yeah, I’ve got it, “I said. “But what in God’s name are you doing, Arnie? That old fart has got total disability, for Christ’s sake. He doesn’t need the money and you’re not a charitable institution.”
“I don’t get it. What are you talking about?”
“He’s screwing you. He’s screwing you for the simple pleasure of it. If he took that car to Darnell’s, he couldn’t get fifty dollars for parts. It’s a piece of shit.”
“No. No, it isn’t.” Without the bad complexion, my friend Arnie would have looked completely ordinary. But God gives everyone at least one good feature, I think, and with Arnie it was his eyes. Behind the glasses that usually obscured them they were a fine and intelligent grey, the colour of clouds on an overcast autumn day. They could be almost uncomfortably sharp and probing when something was going on that he was interested in, but now they were distant and dreaming. “It’s not a piece of shit at all.”
That was when I really began to understand it was more than just Arnie suddenly deciding he wanted a car. He had never even expressed an interest in owning one before; he was content to ride with me and chip in for gas or to pedal his three-speed. And it wasn’t as if he needed a car so he could step out; to the best of my
