Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock(4)

Walt counters with a line from Key Largo, saying, “You were right. When your head says one thing and your whole life says another, your head always loses.”

I smile even bigger because whenever we trade Bogart-related quotes, our conversations seem to make a weird sort of sense that is unpredictable and almost poetic.

I go with a Bogart quote I looked up on the Internet, “There never seems to be any trouble brewing around a bar until a woman puts that high heel over the brass rail. Don’t ask me why, but somehow women at bars seem to create trouble among men.”

He goes back to the Casablanca well and says, “Where were you last night?”

So I finish the quote, playing Rick and say, “That’s so long ago, I don’t remember.”

He says, “Will I see you tonight?”

It sort of freaks me out, because no one will ever see me again after today, so the question seems weighty. I remind myself that he couldn’t possibly know my plan; he’s just playing the dumb Bogart game we always play. He’s clueless.

I become Rick again and finish the quote: “I never make plans that far ahead.”

Walt smiles, blows smoke at the ceiling, and says, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

I sit down on his couch and end the game the way we always do by saying, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

“Why aren’t you in school learning?” Walt says as the flame from his Zippo lights up his face and another cigarette sparks to life. But he doesn’t really care. I skip school all the time just to watch old Bogart films with him. He loves it when I skip school.

He starts coughing and you can hear the terrible tobacco phlegm rattling.

A two-pack-a-day sixty-year-habit smoker’s cough.

Foul.

I just stare at Walt for a long time, waiting for him to wipe his hand on his robe and catch his breath.

I wish he were healthier, but it’s hard to imagine him without a cigarette in his hand. Like I bet even in his high school yearbook pictures he was smoking. That’s just who he is. Like Bogart too.

Man, I’m going to miss Walt so much. Watching old smoky Bogart movies with him is one of the few things I’ll truly miss. It was always the highlight of my week.

Walt says, “You okay, Leonard? You don’t look well.”

I shake off the weirdness, wipe my eyes with my sleeve, and say, “Yeah, I’m fine.”

He says, “You got all your hair tucked up into that fedora along with the tops of your ears?”15

I nod.

I don’t want to tell him I cut off all my hair, for some reason, maybe because Walt’s one of my best friends—he really cares about me, I swear to god—and he’d know something was wrong if he saw my f*cked-up haircut. He’d get upset, and I want to exit on a good note—I want this to be a happy good-bye, something he can remember and actually feel good about after I’m gone.

“Bought you a present,” I say, and then pull the turtle-looking wrap job from the top of my backpack.

He says, “It’s not my birthday, you know.”

I hope he guesses that it’s mine—or that he might figure it out, deduce it, so I wait a second as he fingers the present and tries to mentally guess what the hell it might be.

He looks so happy to get a present.

I kind of promise myself that I won’t kill Asher Beal, nor will I off myself, if only Walt just says “happy birthday” to me one time, as silly and trivial as that seems.

He doesn’t, and that makes me sad, even though I probably never even told him when my birthday was and I know he would definitely say “happy birthday” if I had.

But I really want him to say “happy birthday” to me without any prompting, and when he doesn’t, I get to feeling hollow as a dry-docked boat or something.

“Why do I get pink paper? Do you think I’m a faggot?” he says, and then starts laughing really hard and coughing again.

I say, “It’s the twenty-first century. Don’t be such a homophobe,” but I’m not really mad at him.

Walt’s so old that you can’t hold his bigotry against him, because for almost all his life it was okay for him to say “faggot” among friends, and then suddenly it wasn’t.

He also says things like nigger and kike and Polack and chink and light in the loafers and sand nigger and slant and spade and spook and camel jockey and smokes and porch monkey and just about a trillion other awful slurs.

I hate bigotry, but I also love Walt.

It’s like Herr Silverman teaches us about the Nazis. Maybe Walt was just unlucky being born at a time when everyone was prejudiced against homosexuals and minorities, and that’s just the way it was for his generation. I don’t know.

I’m starting to get sad about all that, so I change the subject by pointing at his present and saying, “Well, aren’t you going to open it?”

He nods once like a little kid and then tears into the pink paper with his yellow shaky fingers. Halfway in he says, “I think I know what this is!”

When he has the Bogart hat unwrapped, he says, “Hot digitty dog!” all corny and nestles the hat down on his white hair.

It’s a perfect fit, just like I knew it would be, because I measured his head once when he was passed out, drunk.

He composes his face, gets all black-and-white-movie-star-looking, and says, “I’ve got a job to do too. Where I’m going you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. Leonard, I’m no good at being noble but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that.”