He was dead and buried for a month before anybody called to tell me.
“I wasn’t s’posed to tell ya,” Red said through the phone. “Brenda made me PROMISE. But I jus’ didn’t think it was RIGHT. Ya know?”
That Brenda didn’t want me to know didn’t surprise me. She and I didn’t get along even before Pendleton married her. She was about the same age as me, which made Pendleton 20 years her senior. He and I had managed to stay friends even though my marriage to his daughter didn’t last; I suppose it had something to do with the fact that his marriage to my bitch of an ex-mother-in-law failed not long after and he moved in with me instead of living in his truck. Even though we got along alright, the two of us in the same living space wasn’t ideal for a lot of reasons – not the least of which that it caused tension between him and my soon to be ex-wife. By the time my divorce was final, I had abandoned the trailer we’d been living in (that I had been living in with his daughter before she left) and moved on to less greener pastures. We managed to stay friends, though, and when he married Brenda I did my best to be happy for him.
The last conversation I had with Brenda was in a hospital waiting room. Prior to that, I hadn’t spoken to her or Pendleton for about two years.She told me to keep in touch. I knew she didn’t mean it. So I didn’t. I liked to think he understood; it’s hard being friends with someone when you don’t get along with his wife, and I didn’t want to cause any trouble. It was easier to move on. It was Red who called to tell me Pendleton was in the hospital and that his condition was pretty serious.
Red first came around because he was dating a friend of my future ex-wife’s; and when that relationship ended because he wanted to settle down and have kids and she wanted to collect stuffed animals and relive the sexual abuse heaped on by her step-daddy, Red stuck around. He and Pendleton could talk about cars. Before the accident that ruined him for work and eventually contributed to his death, Pendleton was a mechanic… and from what I could tell, a pretty good one. He had that magic touch. All he had to do was put his meat hook hands in an engine and regardless of what was wrong or how long it sat, the fucker started every single time. With me, Pendleton talked about books. He never went to college; but he thought it was important to be educated, and he read everything he could get his hands on – from history and sociology to theology, new age medicine, and economics. He told me once that he thought of himself as “a student of human nature.” I asked him what he thought of my nature. He laughed and didn’t answer. Before long Red started reading books so he and Pendleton could talk about that, too.
“Did he go back to the hospital?” I asked. I could hear Red breathing through the phone and he sounded like he’d been drinking. “Was he there for a while? In the ICU? Was he…”
“It was kind of sudden,” he cut me off. “He died at home. It was his heart. It just gave out, ya know? I mean… hell. It was under so much strain anyway, and along with everything else…”
Pendleton was a big man. He once bragged to me that he caught an engine block when the chains holding it up came undone. If he hadn’t caught it, he said, his boss at the garage would have been crushed.
“Thing is,” he also told me, “if I HADN’T caught it and he had died, I probably would’ve ended up getting his job. And if that had happened, I’d probably still be working.”
Red was trying really hard to get off the phone. So I let him. There was no point in prolonging the conversation anyway. Without Pendleton as a common factor, I wasn’t sure there was anything left for us to talk about. I wondered briefly how he felt about breaking his promise to Brenda; but Red clearly saw a larger obligation. That was just the way he was; his days were ruled by his obligations the way a dog is ruled by a leash. Red lost sleep if he got to the end of his day and some small thing was left undone. That was another thing we didn’t have in common; my only obligations have always been to myself. And if I can’t sleep, I drink until I do.
We exchanged our goodbyes. He said he’d call again. He said for me to call him. He told me not to be a stranger. He told me I should visit him so that we could go out drinking the way we used to. I said goodbye and thanked him for telling me. I told him to take care of his family. Then I hung up and poured myself a drink.
