Lee confessed that he had.
With its helicopters feathered, the Greyhound came sliding down onto the Bus Terminal's roof; fifteen minutes later Lee stood again at his father's door, that door he had thought once before he would never see again.
The old man's loose-skinned face, tanned like saddle leather, didn't move an inch at the sight of the son: "You again, Semper? Come in then."
Lee vaguely sensed that his father was glad he had come; that there was some unfinished business left from their last conversation and that his father welcomed the opportunity to finish it.
"You know," he said as his stiff-jointed legs carried him back to the table with bottle and glasses trembling on the tray in his hands, "you know, I've named these four walls after old friends of mine—all of them dead—but sometimes they won't answer when I talk to them. And then I'm glad when somebody happens along. But don't take that to mean that I'm in my dotage now or getting mad."
"No, Father; that's just loneliness."
"In any case, Son, there are lots of people lots madder than I am. There's a woman living next door, a spinster, answers to the name of Pimpernel. This morning she came running over crying that her vacuum-cleaner was chasing her all over the house. And by God, Semper, it was a fact. Never saw anything like it. One of those new-fangled automatic contraptions which are supposed to do the job all alone by themselves, and it banged around and chased about as if it had a hornet's nest under its bonnet. Scared the poor woman to death."
"What did you do?"
"What could I do? I'm not a mechanic; there was no cord attached or anything to plug out. So I got my automatic and shot the damn thing."