Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [41]
My father, who was superintendent of the Zodiac to the end, stayed on, and moldered away with the towns. He did not live to see their partial rejuvenation by the urbanoids who in the ’50s and ’60s bought up pineland and filled the hills with picture windows. I myself was away during all the years of decline and renewal, and when I came back I came not to the changed towns but to the almost unchanged house of my grandparents in these secluded twelve acres. I dislike what the towns have become, especially since the freeway, and I go through them deliberately not noticing anything, like a machine set on automatic pilot. People clear a path for me, and though their heads turn to watch the freak bore by, mine wouldn’t turn if it could. Rodman would probably say that in my fixation on history and my dislike for the present I display a bad case of tunnel vision. Actually, I feel a certain anticipation every time I go to town, but the minute I get there I can’t wait to get home. I don’t like the smog and the crowded sidewalks, and I don’t expect to see anyone I know.
Then I ran into Al Sutton, or almost did.
There was this skinny man with a little pot belly and a sagging pants’ seat and glasses pushed up on his forehead, standing in front of the Peerless Laundromat looking away from me across the street. Behind him, blocking the wall side, was a crated Bendix; coming the other way, along the curb, were a woman and child. I stopped, and the skinny man heard me and turned. Unmistakable. Forty years hadn’t been able to modify those nostrils that opened straight outward—we used to say if he lay down in the rain he’d drown. His little narrow-set eyes jumped to mine, apology formed all over him like instant moss, he hustled a nimble, accommodating step backward, out of my way.
“Hello, Al,” I said. “Remember me? Lyman Ward.”
He stared, he snapped his fingers, his brow wrinkled deeply under the pushed-up glasses and the glasses fell down astride the flat bridge of his nose. They were odd glasses that in the sunlight refracted and divided the eyes behind them so that for an instant he looked as multiple-eyed as a horsefly. His mouth opened, and sure enough, there was the old wart on the end of his tongue. It pulled in and hid behind his lower teeth, it crept out again and lay slyly between his lips.
“Thun of a bith!” he said. “Lyman!”
He pumped my hand. I was afraid he was going to pound me on the back, but I should have known Al better. Having been a freak all his life, he has a tenderness for other freaks. Even while he was still shaking my hand and thun of a bithing and saying, Thay, boy, ith nithe to thee you, those odd compound eyes were touching, and taking in, and shyly withdrawing from, the chair, the stiff neck, the crutches in their cradle, the stump under the pinned flap of trouser leg.
“Thomebody told me you were back living on the old plathe,” he said. “I been thinking I might drop out and thay hello, but you know. Bithneth. How are you, anyway?”
“I can’t complain,” I said. “How are things with you? You haven’t changed.”
“Oh thit,” Al said, “I’m indethtructible.” As gently as a hand might be offered to a possibly scared or nervous dog, his eyes dropped to my stump. He said sympathetically, “They got you thort of laid up. How that happen?”
“You get careless,” I said. “I was paring a corn one day.”
Haw haw haw. One of the lovable things about Al Sutton was always the ease with which he could be doubled up laughing. He used laughter as a way of placating persecution in advance. Nobody ever held out for long. He could make you feel that there hadn’t been anybody so funny as you since Artemus Ward (no relation). He snorted and strangled and became himself a comic figure. He got you laughing too—with him or at him, it didn’t matter. Same old Al out there on the sidewalk this noon. Lyman Ward, once the town’s rich kid, might have come by in a basket, or on a plank with roller skates under it, and Al would have made all the old ingratiating moves.
“God damn, you kill me. How’d it really happen? Acthident?”
“Bone disease.