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He was obsessed and he was angry, but he was not a monster,
George LeBay had told me.
At least… I don't think he was.
It had seemed
that, lost in the past as he had been, he had been about to say something
more… and then had realized where he was and that he was talking to a
stranger. What had he been about to say?"
All at once I had a really monstrous idea. I pushed it away. It went… but it
was hard work, pushing that idea.
Like pushing a piano. And I could still see its outlines in the shadows.
I became aware that Leigh was looking at me very closely, and I wondered
how much of what I had been thinking showed on my face.
"Did you take Mr LeBay's address?" she said.
"No." I thought for a moment, and then remembered the funeral, which now
seemed impossibly far back in time. "But I imagine the Libertyville
American Legion Post has it. They buried LeBay and contacted the brother.
Why?"
Leigh only shook her head and went to the window, where she stood looking
out into the blinding day.
Shank of the year,
I thought randomly.
She turned back to me, and I was struck by her beauty again, calm and
undemanding except for those high, arrogant cheekbones—the sort of
cheekbones you might expect to see on a lady probably carrying a knife in her
belt.
"You said you'd show me something," she said. "What was it?"
I nodded. There was no way to stop now. The chain reaction had started.
There was no way to shut it down.
"Go upstairs," I said, "My room's the second door on the left. Look in the
third drawer of my dresser. You'll have to dig under some of my undies, but
they won't bite."
She smiled—only a little, but even a little was an improvement". "And what
am I going to find? A Baggie of dope?"
"I gave that up last year," I said, smiling back. " 'Ludes this year. I finance my
habit selling heroin down at the junior high."
"What is it? Really?"
"Arnie's autograph," I said, "immortalized on plaster."
"His autograph?"
I nodded. "In duplicate."
She found them, and five minutes later we were on the couch again, looking
at the two squares of plaster cast. They sat side by side on the glass-topped
coffee table, slightly ragged on the sides, a little the worse for wear. Other
names danced off into limbo on one of them. I had saved the casts, had even
directed the nurse on where to cut them, Later I bad cut out the two squares,
one from the right leg, one from the left.
We looked at them silently:
on the right;
on the left.
Leigh looked at me, questioning and puzzled. "Those are pieces of your—"
"My casts, yeah."
"Is it… a joke, or something?"
"No joke. I watched him sign both of them." Now that it was out, there was a
queer kind of loosening, or relief. It was good to be able to share this. It had
been on my mind for a long time, itching and digging away.
"But they don't look anything alike."
"You're telling me," I said. "But Arnie isn't much like he used to be either.
And it all goes back to that goddam car." I poked savagely at the square of
plaster on the left. "That isn't his signature. I've known Arnie almost all my
life. I've seen his homework papers, I've seen him send away for things, I've
watched him endorse his paychecks,
and that is not his signature.
The one
on the left, yes. This one, no. You want to do something for me tomorrow,
Leigh?"
"What?"
I told her. She nodded slowly. "For us."
"Huh?"
"I'll do it for us. Because we have to do something, don't we?"
"Yes," I said. "I guess so. You mind a personal question?" She shook her
head, her remarkable blue eyes never leaving mine."
"How have you been sleeping lately?"
"Not so well," she said. "Bad dreams. How about you?"
"No. Not so good.
And then, because I couldn't help myself anymore, I put my hands on her
shoulders and kissed her. There was a momentary hesitation, and I thought
she was going to draw away then her chin came up and she kissed me back,
firmly and fully. Maybe it was sort of lucky at that, me being mostly
immobilized.
When the kiss was over she looked into my eyes, questioning.
"Against the dreams," I said, thinking it would come out stupid and phony-
smooth, the way it looks on paper, but instead it sounded shaky and almost
painfully honest.
"Against the dreams," she repeated gravely, as if it were a talisman, and this
time she inclined her head towards me and we kissed again with those two
ragged squares of plaster staring up at us like blind white eyes with Arnie's
name written across them. We kissed for the simply animal comfort that
comes with animal contact—sure, that, and something more, starting to be
something more—and then we held each other without talking, and I don't
think we were kidding ourselves about what was happening—at least not
entirely. It was comfort, but it was also good old sex—full, ripe, and randy
with teenage hormones. And maybe it had a chance to be something fuller and
kinder than just sex.
But there was something else in those kisses—I knew it, she knew it, and
probably you do too. That other thing was a shameful sort of betrayal. I could
feel eighteen years of memories cry out—the ant farms, the chess games, the
movies, the things he had taught me, the times I had kept him from getting
killed. Except maybe in the end, I hadn't. Maybe I had seen the last of him—
and a poor, rag-tag end at that—on Thanksgiving night, when he brought me
the turkey sandwiches and beer.
I don't think it occurred to either of us until then that we had done nothing
unforgivable to Arnie—nothing that might anger Christine.
But now, of course, we had.
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