little now, maybe, but still there. My father had asked me if I was trying to help Arnie. Was I? Or was I maybe only snooping into a part of his life which he had expressly marked off-limits . . . and stealing his girl in the process? And what exactly would Arnie do or say if he found out?
My head ached with questions, and I thought that maybe it was just as well that Leigh was going away for a while.
As she herself had said about our folks, it seemed safer.
On Friday the 29th, the last business day of the old year, I called the Libertyville American Legion Post and asked for the secretary. I got his name, Richard McCandless, from the building's janitor, who also found a telephone number to go with it. The number turned out to be that of David Emerson's, Libertyville's 'good' furniture store. I was told to wait a moment and then McCandless came on, a deep, gravelly voice that sounded a tough sixty - as if maybe Patton and the owner of this voice had fought their way across Germany to Berlin shoulder to shoulder, possibly biting enemy bullets out of the air with their teeth as they went.
'McCandless,' he said.
'Mr McCandless, my name is Dennis Guilder. Last August you put on a military-style funeral for a fellow named Roland LeBay - '
'Was he a friend of yours?'
'No, only a bare acquaintance, but - '
'Then I don't have to spare your feelings none, McCandless said, gravel rattling in his throat. He sounded like Andy Devine crossed with Broderick Crawford. 'LeBay was nothing but a pure-d sandy-craw sonofabitch, and if I'd had my way, the Legion wouldn't have had a thing to do with planting him. He quit the organization back in 1970. If he hadn't quit, we would have fired him. That man was the most contentious bastard that every lived.'
'Was he?'
'You bet he was. He'd pick an argument with you, then up it to a fight if he could. You couldn't play poker with the sonofabitcb, and you sure couldn't drink with him. You couldn't keep up with him, for one thing, and he'd get mean for another. Not that he had to go far to get to mean. What a crazy bastard he was, you should pardon my fran-sayse. Who are you, boy?'
For an insane moment I thought of quoting Emily Dickinson at him: I'm nobody! Who are you?
'A friend of mine bought a car from LeBay just before he died - '
'Shit! Not that '57?'
'Well, actually it was a '58 - '
Yeah, yeah, '57 or '58, red and white. That was the only goddam thing he cared about, Treated it like it was a woman. It was over that car he quit the Legion, did you know that?'
'No,' I said. 'What happened?'
'Ah, shit. Ancient history, kid. I'm bending your car as it is. But every time I think of that sonofabitch LeBay, I see red. I've still got the scars on my hands. Uncle Sam had three years or my life during World War II and I never got so much as a Purple Heart out of it, although I was in combat almost all that time. I fought my way across half the little shitpot islands in the South Pacific. Me and about fifty other guys stood up to a banzai charge on Guadalcanal two fucking million Japs coming at us hopped to the eyeballs and waving those swords they made out of Maxwell House coffee cans - and I never got a scar, I felt a couple of bullets go right by me, and just before we broke that charge the guy next to me got his guts rearranged courtesy of the Emperor of Japan, but the only times I saw the colour of my own blood over there in the Pacific was when I cut myself shaving. Then . . . '
McCandless laughed.
'Shit on toast, there I go again. My wife says I'll open my mouth too wide someday and just fall right in. What'd you say your name was?'
'Dennis Guilder.'
'Okay, Dennis, I bent your ear, now you bend mine. What did you want?'
'Well, my friend bought that car and fixed it up . . . for a sort of a street-rod, I guess you'd say. A showpiece.'
'Yeah, just like LeBay,' McCandless said, and my mouth went dry. 'He loved that fucking car, I'll say that for him. He didn't give a shit for his wife -