'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 clichй.'
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.'
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