Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [43]
“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.”
His laughter had already modulated into sympathy. “Tough.” He shook his head, and in the middle of a shake I saw him realize that I couldn’t shake mine, that I was looking up at him under my eyebrows because I couldn’t tilt my head back. He sat down quickly on the Bendix crate to bring himself closer to my level. Few people are that understanding or that considerate.
“Howth the wife? Thee with you?”
“We’re divorced.”
Left for a moment uncertain whether to pursue that delicate subject or let it drop, he let it drop. Through his dizzy glasses he inspected my chair. His nostrils looked as if they had been made with an auger, I could see clear into his head. “Quite a rig you got,” he said. “You get around all over in that?”
“Pretty much. I have to stay in the slow lane on the freeway.”
Haw haw haw again. What a companion. A prince of good fellows.
“You thtill a profethor?”
“I’ve retired. Why don’t you come out some Saturday and have a beer and watch the ballgame on TV?”
“Thay,” Al said, “don’t think I wouldn’t like to. Thaturdayth are tough, though. All the working girlth do their wath.”
“You own the shop?”
“Thit,” Al said. “It ownth me.”
He sat on the crate with his mouth open a little, his tongue protruding slightly. His nostrils were black and hairy. Behind his shifting, glittering glasses he had as many eyes as Argus. We had a real bond: one of us is about as hard to look at as the other.
“What have you got on?” I said. “What kind of glasses are those?”
“Thethe?” He took them off and dangled them by an earpiece, looking down at them as if he had just become