Christine

1 FIRST VIEWS

“Oh my God!” my friend Arnie Cunningham cried out suddenly.

“What is it?” I asked. His eyes were bulging from behind his steel-rimmed glasses, he had plastered one hand over his face so that his palm was partially cupping his mouth, and his neck could have been on ball-bearings the way he was craning back over his shoulder.

“Stop the car, Dennis! Go back!”

“What are you—”

“Go back, I want to look at her again.”

Suddenly I understood. “Oh, man, forget it,” I said. “If you mean that… thing we just passed—”

“Go back!” He was almost screaming.

I went back, thinking that it was maybe one of Arnie’s subtle little jokes. But it wasn’t. He was gone, lock, stock, and barrel. Arnie had fallen in love.

She was a bad joke, and what Arnie saw in her that day I’ll never know. The left side of her windscreen was a snarled spiderweb of cracks. The right rear deck was bashed in, and an ugly nest of rust had grown in the paint-scraped valley. The back bumper was askew, the boot-lid was ajar, and stuffing was bleeding out through several long tears in the seat covers, both front and back. It looked as if someone had worked on the upholstery with a knife. One tyre was flat. The others were bald enough to show the canvas cording. Worst of all, there was a dark puddle of oil under the engine block.

Arnie had fallen in love with a 1958 Plymouth Fury, one of the long ones with the big fins. There was an old and sun-faded FOR SALE sign propped on the right side of the windscreen—the side that was not cracked.

“Look at her lines, Dennis!” Arnie whispered. He was running around the car like a man possessed. His sweaty hair flew and flopped. He tried the back door on the passenger side, and it came open with a scream.

“Arnie, you’re having me on, aren’t you?” I said. “It’s sunstroke, right? Tell me it’s sunstroke. I’ll take you home and put you under the frigging air conditioner and we’ll forget all about this, okay?” But I said it without much hope. He knew how to joke, but there was no joke on his face then. Instead there was a kind of goofy madness I didn’t like much.

He didn’t even bother to reply. A hot, stuffy billow of air, redolent of age, oil, and advanced decomposition, puffed out of the open door. Arnie didn’t seem to notice that, either. He got in and sat down on the ripped and faded back seat. Once, twenty years before, it had been red. Now it was a faded wash pink.

I reached in and pulled up a little puff of stuffing, looked at it, and blew it away. “Looks like the Russian army marched over it on their way to Berlin,” I said.

He finally noticed I was still there. “Yeah… yeah. But she could be fixed up. She could… she could be tough. A moving unit, Dennis. “A beauty. A real—”

“Here! Here! What you two kids up to?”

It was an old guy who looked as if he was enjoying—more or less—his seventieth summer. Probably less. This particular dude struck me as the sort of man who enjoyed very little. His hair was long and scraggy, what little there was left of it. He had a good case of psoriasis going on the bald part of his skull.

He was wearing green old man’s pants and low-topped Keds. No shirt; instead there was something cinched around his waist that looked like a lady’s corset. When he got closer I saw it was a back brace. From the look of it I would say, just offhand, that he had changed it last somewhere around the time Lyndon Johnson died.

“What you kids up to?” His voice was shrill and strident.

“Sir, is this your car?” Arnie asked him. Not much question that it was. The Plymouth was parked on the lawn of the postwar tract house from which the old man had issued. The lawn was horrible, but it looked positively great with that Plymouth in the foreground for perspective.

“What if it is?” the old guy demanded.

“I”—Arnie had to swallow—“I want to buy it”.

The old dude’s eyes gleamed. The angry took on his face was replaced by a furtive gleam in the eye and a certain hungry sneer around the lips. Then a large resplendent shit-eating grin appeared. That was the moment, I think then, just at that moment—when I felt something cold and blue inside me. There was a moment—just then—when I felt like slugging Arnie and dragging him away. Something came into the old man’s eyes. Not just the gleam; it was something behind the gleam.

“Well, you should have said so,” the old guy told Arnie. He stuck out his hand and Arnie took it. “LeBay’s the name. Roland D. LeBay. US Army, retired.”

“Arnie Cunningham.”

The old sport pumped his hand and sort of waved at me. I was out of the play; he had his sucker. Arnie might as well have handed LeBay his wallet.

“How much?” Arnie asked. And then he plunged ahead. “Whatever you want for her, it’s not enough.”

I groaned inside instead of sighing. His chequebook had just joined his wallet.

For a moment LeBay’s grin faltered a little, and his eyes narrowed down suspiciously. I think he was evaluating the possibility that he was being put on. He studied Arnie’s longing face for signs of guile, and then asked the murderously perfect question:

“Son, have you ever owned a car before?”

“He owns a Mustang Mach II,” I said quickly. “His folks bought it for him. It’s got a Hurst gearbox, a supercharger, and it can boil the road in first gear. It—”

“No,” Arnie said quietly. “I just got my driver’s licence this spring.”

LeBay tipped me a brief but crafty gaze and then swung his full attention back to his prime target. He put both hands in the small of his back and stretched. I caught a sour whiff of sweat.

“Got a back problem in the Army,” he said. “Full disability. Doctors could never put it right. Anyone ever asks you what’s wrong with the world, boys, you tell em it’s three things: doctors, commies, and nigger radicals. Of the three commies is the worst, closely followed by doctors. And if they want to know who told you, tell em Roland D. LeBay. Yessir.”

He touched the old, scuffed hood of the Plymouth with a kind of bemused love.

“This here is the best car I ever owned. Bought her in September 1957. Back then, that’s when you got your new model year, in September. All summer long they’d show you pictures of cars under hoods and cars under tarps until you were fair dyin t’know what they looked like underneath. Not like now.” His voice dripped contempt for the debased times he had lived to see. “Brand-new, she was. Had the smell of a brand-new car, and that’s about the finest smell in the world.”

He considered.

“Except maybe for pussy.”

I looked at Arnie, nibbling the insides of my cheeks madly to keep from braying laughter all over everything. Arnie looked back at me, astounded. The old man appeared to notice neither of us; he was off on his own planet.

“I was in khaki for thirty-four years,” LeBay told us, still touching the hood of the car. “Went in at sixteen in 1923. 1 et dust in Texas and seen crabs as big as lobsters in some of them Nogales whoredens. I saw men with their guts comin out of their ears during Big Two. In France I saw that. Their guts was comin out their ears. You believe that, son?”

“Yessir,” Arnie said. I don’t think he’d heard a word LeBay said. He was shifting from foot to foot as if he had to go to the bathroom bad. “About the car, though—”

“You go to the University?” LeBay barked suddenly. “Up there at Horlicks?”

“No sir, I go to Libertyville High.

“Good,” LeBay said grimly. “Steer clear of colleges. They’re full of niggerlovers that want to give away the Panama Canal. “Think-tanks,” they call em. “Assholetanks,” say I.”

He gazed fondly at the car sitting on its flat tyre, its paintwork mellowing rustily in the late afternoon sunlight.

“Hurt my back in the spring of ’57,” he said. “Army was going to rack and ruin even then. I got out just in time. I came on back to Libertyville. Looked over the rolling iron. I took my time. Then I walked into Norman Cobb’s Plymouth dealership—where the bowling alley is now on outer Main Street—and I ordered this here car. I said you get it in red and white, next year’s model. Red as a fire-engine on the inside. And they did. When I got her, she had a total of six miles on the mileometer. Yessir.”

He spat.

I glanced over Arnie’s shoulder at the mileometer. The glass was cloudy, but I could read the damage all the same: 97,432. And six-tenths. Jesus wept.

“If you love the car so much, why are you selling it?” I asked.

He turned a milky, rather frightening gaze on me. “Are you cracking wise on me, son?”

I didn’t answer, but I didn’t drop my gaze either.

After a few moments of eye-to-eye duelling (which Arnie totally ignored; he was running a slow and loving hand over one of the back fins), he said, “Can’t drive anymore. Back’s gotten too bad. Eyes are going the same way.”

Suddenly I got it—or thought I did. If he had given us the correct dates, he was seventy-one. And at seventy, this state makes you start taking compulsory eye exams every year before they’ll renew your driver’s licence. LeBay had either failed his eye exam or was afraid of failing. Either way, it came to the same thing. Rather than submit to that indignity, he had put the Plymouth up. And after that, the car had gotten old fast.

“How much do you want for it?” Arnie asked again. Oh he just couldn’t wait to be slaughtered.

LeBay turned his face up to the sky, appearing to consider it for rain. Then he looked down at Arnie again and gave him a large, kindly smile that was far too much like the previous shit-eating grin for me.

“I’ve been asking three hundred,” he said. “But you seem a likely enough lad. I’ll make it two-fifty for you.”

“Oh my Christ,” I said.

But he knew who his sucker was, and he knew exactly how to drive the wedge in between us. In the words of my grandfather, he hadn’t fallen off a haytruck yesterday.

“Okay,” he said brusquely. “If that’s how you want it. I got my four-thirty story to watch. Edge of Night. Never miss it if I can help it. Nice chinning with you boys. So long.”

Arnie threw me such a smoking look of pain and anger that I backed off a step. He went after the old man and took his elbow. They talked. I couldn’t hear it all, but I could see more than enough. The old man’s pride was wounded. Arnie was earnest and apologetic. The old man just hoped Arnie understood that he couldn’t stand to see the car that had brought him through safe to his golden years insulted. Arnie agreed. Little by little, the old man allowed himself to be led back. And again I felt something consciously dreadful about him… it was as if a cold November wind could think. I can’t, put it any better than that.

“If he says one more word, I wash my hands of the whole thing,” LeBay said, and cocked a horny, calloused thumb at me.

“He won’t, he won’t,” Arnie said hastily. “Three hundred, did you say?”

“Yes, I believe that was—”

“Two-fifty was the quoted price,” I said loudly.

Arnie looked stricken, afraid the old man would walk away again, but LeBay was taking no chances. The fish was almost out of the pond now.

“Two-fifty would do it, I guess,” LeBay allowed. He glanced my way again, and I saw that we had an understanding—he didn’t like me and I didn’t like him.

To my ever-increasing horror, Arnie pulled his wallet out and began thumbing through it. There was silence among the three of us. LeBay looked on. I looked away at a little kid who was trying to kill himself on a puke-green skateboard. Somewhere a dog barked. Two girls who looked like eighth- or ninth-graders went past, giggling and holding clutches of library books to their blooming chests. I had only one hope left for getting Arnie out of this; it was the day before payday. Given time, even twenty-four hours, this wild fever might pass. Arnie was beginning to remind me of Toad, of Toad Hall.

When I looked back, Arnie and LeBay were looking at two fives and six ones—all that had been in his wallet, apparently.

“How about a cheque?” Arnie asked.

LeBay offered Arnie a dry smile and said nothing.

“It’s a good cheque,” Arnie protested. It would be, too. We had been working all summer for Carson Brothers on the I-376 extension, the one which natives of the Pittsburgh area firmly believe will never be really finished. Arnie sometimes declared that Penn-DOT had begun taking bids on the I-376 work shortly after the Civil War ended. Not that either of us had any right to complain; a lot of kids were either working for slave wages that summer or not working at all. We were making good money, even clocking some overtime. Brad Jeffries, the job foreman, had been frankly dubious about taking a runt like Arnie on, but had finally allowed that he could use a flagman; the girl he had been planning to hire had gotten herself pregnant and had run off to get married. So Arnie had started off flagging in June but had gotten into the harder work little by little, running mostly on guts and determination. It was the first real job he’d ever had, and he didn’t want to screw it up. Brad was reasonably impressed, and the summer sun had even helped Arnie’s erupting complexion a little. Maybe it was the ultraviolet.

“I’m sure it’s a good cheque, son,” LeBay said, “but I gotta make a cash deal. You understand.”

I didn’t know if Arnie understood, but I did. It would be too easy to stop payment on a local cheque if this rustbucket Plymouth threw a rod or blew a piston on the way home.

“You can call the bank,” Arnie said, starting to sound desperate.

“Nope,” LeBay said, scratching his armpit above the scabrous brace. “It’s going on five-thirty. Bank’s long since closed.”

“A deposit, then,” Arnie said, and held out the sixteen dollars. He looked positively wild. It may be that you’re having-trouble believing a kid who was almost old enough to vote could have gotten himself so worked up over an anonymous old clunk in the space of fifteen minutes. I was having some trouble believing it myself. Only Roland D. LeBay seemed not to be having trouble with it, and I supposed it was because at his age he had seen everything. It was only later that I came to believe that his odd sureness might come from other sources. Either way, if any milk of human kindness had ever run in his veins, it had curdled to sour cream long ago.

“I’d have to have at least ten per cent down,” LeBay said. The fish was out of the water; in a moment it would be netted. “If I had ten per cent, I’d hold her for twenty-four hours.”

“Dennis,” Arnie said. “Can you loan me nine bucks until tomorrow?”

I had twelve in my-own wallet, and no particular place to go. Day after day of spreading sand and digging trenches for culverts had done wonders when it came to getting ready for football practice, but I had no social life at all. Lately I hadn’t even been assaulting the ramparts of my cheerleader girlfriend’s body in the style to which she had become accustomed. I was rich but lonely.

“Come on over here and let’s see,” I said.

LeBay’s brow darkened, but he could see he was stuck with my input, like it or not. His frizzy white hair blew back and forth in the mild breeze. He kept one hand possessively on the Plymouth’s hood.

Arnie and I walked back toward where my car, a ’75 Duster, was parked at the kerb. I put an arm around Arnie’s shoulders. For some reason I remembered the two of us up in his room on a rainy autumn day when we were both no more than six years old—cartoons flickering on an ancient black-and-white TV as we coloured with old Crayolas from a dented coffee can. The image made me feel sad and a little scared. I have days, you know, when it seems to me that six is an optimum age, and that’s why it only lasts about 7.2 seconds in real time.

“Have you got it, Dennis? I’ll get it back to you tomorrow afternoon.”

“Yeah, I’ve got it, “I said. “But what in God’s name are you doing, Arnie? That old fart has got total disability, for Christ’s sake. He doesn’t need the money and you’re not a charitable institution.”

“I don’t get it. What are you talking about?”

“He’s screwing you. He’s screwing you for the simple pleasure of it. If he took that car to Darnell’s, he couldn’t get fifty dollars for parts. It’s a piece of shit.”

“No. No, it isn’t.” Without the bad complexion, my friend Arnie would have looked completely ordinary. But God gives everyone at least one good feature, I think, and with Arnie it was his eyes. Behind the glasses that usually obscured them they were a fine and intelligent grey, the colour of clouds on an overcast autumn day. They could be almost uncomfortably sharp and probing when something was going on that he was interested in, but now they were distant and dreaming. “It’s not a piece of shit at all.”

That was when I really began to understand it was more than just Arnie suddenly deciding he wanted a car. He had never even expressed an interest in owning one before; he was content to ride with me and chip in for gas or to pedal his three-speed. And it wasn’t as if he needed a car so he could step out; to the best of my knowledge Arnie had never had a date in his life. This was something different. It was love, or something like it.

I said, “At least get him to start it for you, Arnie. And get the hood up. There’s a puddle of oil underneath. I think the block might be cracked. I really think—”

“Can you loan me the nine?” His eyes were fixed on mine. I gave up. I took out my wallet and gave him the nine dollars.

“Thanks, Dennis,” he said.

“Your funeral, man.”

He took no notice. He put my nine with his sixteen and went back to where LeBay stood by the car. He handed the money over and LeBay counted it carefully, wetting his thumb.

“I’ll only hold it for twenty-four hours, you understand,” LeBay said.

“Yessir, that’ll be fine,” Arnie said.

“I’ll just go in the house and write you out a receipt,” he said. “What did you say your name was, soldier?”

Arnie smiled a little. “Cunningham. Arnold Cunningham.”

LeBay grunted and walked across his unhealthy lawn to his back door. The outer door was one of those funky aluminium combination doors with a scrolled letter in the centre—a big L in this case.

The door slammed behind him.

“The guy’s weird, Arnie. The guy is really fucking w—”

But Arnie wasn’t there. He was sitting behind the wheel of the car. That same sappy expression was on his face.

I went around to the front and found the hood release. I pulled it, and the hood went up with a rusty scream that made me think of the sound effects you hear on some of those haunted-house records. Flecks of metal sifted down. The battery was an old Allstate, and the terminals were so glooped up with green corrosion that you couldn’t tell which was positive and which was negative. I pulled the air cleaner and looked glumly into a four-barrel carb as black as a mineshaft.

I lowered the hood and went back to where Arnie was sitting, running his hand along the edge of the dashboard over the speedometer, which was calibrated up to an utterly absurd 120 miles per hour. Had cars ever really gone that fast?

“Arnie, I think the engine block’s cracked. I really do. This car is lunch, my friend. It’s just total lunch. If you want wheels, we can find you something a lot better than this for two-fifty. I mean it. A lot better.”

“It’s twenty years old,” he said. “Do you realize a car is officially an antique when it’s twenty years old?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The junkyard behind Darnell’s is full of official antiques, you know what I mean?”

“Dennis—”

The door banged. LeBay was coming back. it was just as well; further discussion would have been meaningless, I may not be the world’s most sensitive human being, but when the signals are strong enough, I can pick them up. This was something Arnie felt he had to have, and I wasn’t going to talk him out of it. I didn’t think anyone was going to talk him out of it.

LeBay handed him the receipt with a flourish. Written on a plain sheet of notepaper in an old man’s spidery and slightly trembling script was: Received from Arnold Cunningham, $25.00 as a 24-hr deposit on 1958 Plymouth, Christine. And below that he had signed his name.

“What’s this Christine?” I asked, thinking I might have misread it or he might have misspelled it.

His lips tightened and his shoulders went up a little, as if he expected to be laughed at… or as if he were daring me to laugh at him. “Christine,” he said, “is what I always called her.”

“Christine,” Arnie said. “I like it. Don’t you, Dennis?”

Now he was talking about naming the damned thing. It was all getting to be a bit much.

“What do you think, Dennis, do you like it?”

“No”, I said. “If you’ve got to name it, Arnie, why don’t you name it Trouble?”

He looked hurt at that, but I was beyond caring. I went back to my car to wait for him, wishing I had taken a different route home.

2 THE FIRST ARGUMENT

I drove Arnie to his house and went in with him to have a piece of cake and a glass of milk before going home. It was a decision I repented very quickly.

Arnie lived on Laurel Street, which is in a quiet residential neighbourhood on the west side of Libertyville. As far as that goes, most of Libertyville is quiet and residential. It isn’t ritzy, like the neighbouring suburb of Fox Chapel (where most of the homes are estates like the ones you used to see every week on Columbo), but it isn’t like Monroeville, either, with its miles of malls, discount tyre warehouses, and dirty book emporiums. There isn’t any heavy industry—it’s mostly a bedroom community for the nearby universitv. Not ritzv, but sort of brainy, at least.

Arnie had been quiet and contemplative all the way home; I tried to draw him out, but he wouldn’t be drawn, I asked him what he was going to do with the car. “Fix it up,” he said absently, and lapsed back into silence.

Well, he had the ability; I wasn’t questioning that. He was good with tools, he could listen, he could isolate. His hands were sensitive and quick with machinery; it was only when he was around other people, particularly girls, that they got clumsy and restless, wanting to crack knuckles or jam themselves in his pockets, or, worst of all, wander up to his face and run over the scorched-earth landscape of his cheeks and chin and forehead, drawing attention to it.

He could fix the car up, but the money he had earned that summer was earmarked for college. He had never owned a car before, and I didn’t think he had any idea of the sinister way that old cars can suck money. They suck it the way a vampire is supposed to suck blood. He could avoid labour costs in most cases by doing the work himself, but the parts alone would half-buck him to death before he was through.

I said some of these things to him, but they just rolled off. His eyes were still distant, dreaming. I could not have told you what he was thinking.

Both Michael and Regina Cunningham were at home she was working one of an endless series of goofy jigsaw puzzles (this one was about six thousand different cogs and gears on a plain white background; it would have driven me out of my skull in about fifteen minutes), and he was playing his recorder in the living room.

It didn’t take long for me to start wishing I had skipped the cake and milk. Arnie told them what he had done, showed them the receipt, and they both promptly went through the roof.

You have to understand that Michael and Regina were University people to the core. They were into doing good, and to them that meant being into protest. They had protested in favour of integration in the early ’60s, had moved on to Vietnam, and when that gave out there was Nixon, questions of racial balance in the schools (they could quote you chapter and verse on the Ralph Bakke case until you fell asleep), police brutality, and parental brutality. Then there was the talk—all the talk. They were almost as much into talking as they were into protesting. They were ready to take part in an all-night bull-session on the space programme or a teach-in on the ERA or a seminar on possible alternatives to fossil fuels at the drop of an opinion. They had done time on God alone knew how many “hotlines”—rape hotlines, drug hotlines, hotlines where runaway kids could talk to a friend, and good old DIAL HELP, where people thinking about suicide could call up and listen to a sympathetic voice say don’t do it, buddy, you have a social commitment to Spaceship Earth. Twenty or thirty years of university teaching and you’re prepared to run your gums the way Pavlov’s dogs were prepared to salivate when the bell rang. I guess you can even get to like it.

Regina (they insisted I call them by their first names) was forty-five and handsome in a rather cold, semi-aristocratic way—that is, she managed to look aristocratic even when she was wearing bluejeans, which was most of the time. Her field was English, but of course when you teach at the college level, that’s never enough; it’s like saying “America” when someone asks you where you’re from. She had it refined and calibrated like a blip on a radar screen. She specialized in the earlier English poets and had done her thesis on Robert Herrick.

Michael was in the history biz. He looked as mournful and melancholy as the music he played on his recorder, although mournful and melancholy was not ordinarily a part of his makeup. Sometimes he made me think of what Ringo Starr was supposed to have said when the Beatles first came to America and some reporter at a press conference asked him if he was really as sad as he looked. “No,” Ringo replied, “it’s just me face.” Michael was like that. Also, his thin face and the thick glasses he wore combined to make him look a little like a caricature professor in an unfriendly editorial cartoon. His hair was receding and he wore a small, fuzzy goatee.

“Hi, Arnie,” Regina said as we came in. “Hello, Dennis.” It was just about the last cheerful thing she said to either of us that afternoon.

We said hi and got our cake and milk. We sat in the breakfast nook. Dinner was cooking in the oven, and I’m sorry to say so, but the aroma was fairly rank. Regina and Michael had been flirting with vegetarianism for some time, and tonight it smelled as if Regina had a good old kelp quiche or something on the way. I hoped they wouldn’t invite me to stay.

The recorder music stopped, and Michael wandered out into the kitchen. He was wearing bluejean cutoffs and looking as if his best friend had just died.

“You’re late, boys,” he said. “Anything going down?” He opened the refrigerator door and began to root around in it. Maybe the kelp quiche didn’t smell so wonderful to him either.

“I bought a car,” Arnie said, cutting himself another piece of cake.

“You did what?” his mother cried at once from the other room. She got up too quickly and there was a thud as her thighs connected solidly with the edge of the cardtable she did her jigsaws on. The thud was followed by the rapid patter of pieces falling to the floor. That was when I started to wish I had just gone home.

Michael Cunningham had turned from the refrigerator to stare at his son, holding a Granny Smith apple in one hand and a carton of plain yoghurt in the other.

“You’re kidding,” he said, and for some absurd reason I noticed for the first time that his goatee—which he had worn since 1970 or so—was showing quite a bit of grey. “Arnie, you’re kidding, right? Say you’re kidding.”

Regina came in, looking tall and semi-aristocratic and pretty damn mad. She took one close look at Arnie’s face and knew he wasn’t kidding. “You can’t buy a car,” she said. “What in the world are you talking about? You’re only seventeen years old.

Arnie looked slowly from his father by the fridge to his mother in the doorway leading to the living room. There was a stubborn, hard expression on his face that I couldn’t remember ever having seen there before. If he looked that way more often around school, I thought, the machine-shop kids wouldn’t be so apt to push him around.

“Actually, you’re wrong,” he said. “I can buy it with no trouble at all. I couldn’t finance it, but buying it for cash presents no problems. Of course, registering a car at seventeen is something else entirely. For that I need your permission.”

They were looking at him with surprise, uneasiness, and—I saw this last and felt a sinking sensation in my belly—rising anger. For all their liberal thinking and their commitment to the farm workers and abused wives and unwed mothers and all the rest, they pretty much managed Arnie. And Arnie let himself be managed.

“I don’t think there’s any call to talk to your mother that way,” Michael said. He put back the yoghurt, held onto the Granny Smith, and slowly closed the fridge door. “You’re too young to have a car.”

“Dennis has one,” Arnie said promptly.

“Say! Wow! Look how late it’s getting!” I said. “I ought to be getting home! I ought to be getting home right away! I—”

“What Dennis’s parents choose to do and what your own choose to do are different things,” Regina Cunningham said. I had never heard her voice so cold. Never. “And you had no right to do such a thing without consulting your father and me about.

“Consult you!” Arnie roared suddenly. He spilled his milk. There were big veins standing out on his neck in cords.

Regina took a step backward, her jaw dropping. I would be willing to bet she had never been roared at by her ugly-duckling son in her entire life. Michael looked just as flabbergasted. They were getting a taste of what I had already felt—for inexplicable reasons of his own, Arnie had finally happened on something he really wanted. And God help anyone who got in his way.

“Consult you! I’ve consulted you on every damn thing I’ve ever done! Everything was a committee meeting, and if it was something I didn’t want to do, I got outvoted two to one! But this is no goddam committee meeting. I bought a car and that’s… it!”

“It most certainly is not it,” Regina said. Her lips had thinned down, and oddly (or perhaps not) she had stopped looking just semi-aristocratic; now she looked like the Queen of England or someplace, jeans and all. Michael was out of it for the time being. He looked every bit as bewildered and unhappy as I felt, and I knew an instant of sharp pity for the man. He couldn’t even go home to dinner to get away from it; he was home. Here it was a raw powerstruggle between the old guard and the young guard, and it was going to be decided the way those things almost always are, with a monstrous overkill of bitterness and acrimony. Regina was apparently ready for that even if Michael wasn’t. But I wanted no part of it. I got up and headed for the door.

“You let him do this?” Regina asked, She looked at me haughtily, as if we’d never laughed together or baked pies together or gone on family camp-outs together, “Dennis, I’m surprised at you.”

That stung me. I had always liked Arnie’s mom well enough, but I had never completely trusted her, at least not since something that had happened when I was eight years old or so.

Arnie and I had ridden our bikes downtown to take in a Saturday afternoon movie. On the way back, Arnie had fallen off his bike while swerving to avoid a dog and had jobbed his leg pretty good. I rode him home double on my bike, and Regina took him to the emergency room, where a doctor put in half a dozen stitches. And then, for some reason, after it was all over and it was clear that Arnie was going to be perfectly fine, Regina turned on me and gave me the rough side of her tongue. She read me out like a top sergeant. When she finished, I was shaking all over and nearly crying—what the hell, I was only eight, and there had been a lot of blood. I can’t remember chapter and verse of that bawling-out, but the overall feeling it left me with was disturbing. As best I remember, she started out by accusing me of not watching him closely enough—as if Arnie were much younger instead of almost exactly my own age—and ended up saying (or seeming to say) that it should have been me.

This sounded like the same thing all over again—Dennis, you weren’t watching him closely enough—and I got angry myself. My wariness of Regina was probably only part of it, and to be completely honest, probably only the small part. When you’re a kid (and after all, what is seventeen but the outermost limit of kidhood?), you tend to be on the side of other kids. You know with a strong and unerring instinct that if you don’t bulldoze down a few fences and knock some gates flat, your folks—out of the best of intentions—would be happy to keep you in the kid corral forever.

I got angry, but I held onto it as well as I could.

“I didn’t let him do anything,” I said. “He wanted it, he bought it.” Earlier I might have told them that he had done no more than lay down a deposit, but I wasn’t going to do that now. Now I had my back up. “I tried to talk him out of it, in fact.”

“I doubt if you tried very hard,” Regina shot back. She might as well have come out and said Don’t bullshit me, Dennis, I know you were in it together. There was a flush on her high cheekbones, and her eyes were throwing off sparks. She was trying to make me feet eight again, and not doing too bad a job. But I fought it.

“You know, if you got all the facts, you’d see this isn’t much to get hot under the collar about. He bought it for two hundred and fifty dollars, and—”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars!” Michael broke in. “What kind of car can you get for two hundred and fifty dollars?” His previous uncomfortable disassociation—if that’s what it had been, and not just simple shock at the sound of his quiet son’s voice raised in protest—was gone. It was the price of the car that had gotten to him. And he looked at his son with an open contempt that sickened me a little. I’d like to have kids myself someday, and if I do, I hope I can leave that particular expression out of my repertoire.

I kept telling myself to just stay cool, that it wasn’t my affair or my fight, nothing to get hot under the collar about… but the cake I had eaten was sitting in the centre of my stomach in a large sticky glob and my skin felt too hot. The Cunninghams had been my second family since I was a little kid, and I could feel all the distressing physical symptoms of a family quarrel inside myself.

“You can learn a lot about cars when you’re fixing up art old one,” I said. I suddenly sounded like a loony imitation of LeBay to myself. “And it’ll take a lot of work before it’s even street-legal.” (If it ever is, I thought.) “You could look at it as a… a hobby…”

“I look upon it as madness,” Regina said.

Suddenly I just wanted to get out. I suppose that if the emotional vibrations in the room hadn’t been getting so heavy, I might have found it funny. I had somehow gotten into the position of defending Arnie’s car when I thought the whole thing was preposterous to begin with.

“Whatever you say,” I muttered. “Just leave me out of it. I’m going home.”

“Good,” Regina snapped.

“That’s it,” Arnie said tonelessly. He stood up. “I’m getting the fuck out of here.”

Regina gasped, and Michael blinked as if he had been slapped.

“What did you say?” Regina managed. “What did you—”

“I don’t get what you’re so upset about,” Arnie told them in an eerie, controlled voice, “but I’m not going to stick around and listen to a lot of craziness from either of you.

“You wanted me in the college courses, I’m there.” He looked at his mother. “You wanted me in the chess club instead of the school band; okay, I’m there too. I’ve managed to get through seventeen years without embarrassing you in front of the bridge club or landing in jail.”

They were staring at him, wide-eyed, as if one of the kitchen walls had suddenly grown lips and started to talk.

Arnie looked at them, his eyes odd and white and dangerous. “I’m telling you, I’m going to have this. This one thing.”

“Arnie, the insurance—” Michael began.

“Stop it!” Regina shouted. She didn’t want to start talking about the specific problems because that was the first step on the road to possible acceptance; she simply wanted to crush the rebellion under her heel, quickly and completely. There are moments when adults disgust you in ways they would never understand; I believe that, you know. I had one of those moments then, and it only made me feel worse. When Regina shouted at her husband, I saw her as both vulgar and scared, and because I loved her, I had never wanted to see her either way.

Still I remained in the doorway, wanting to leave but unhealthily fascinated by what was going on—the first full-scale argument in the Cunningham family that I had ever seen, maybe the first ever. And it surely was a wowser, at least ten on the Richter scale.

“Dennis, you’d better leave while we thrash this out,” Regina said grimly.

“Yes,” I said. “But don’t you see, you’re making a mountain out of a molehill. This car—Regina… Michael—if you could see it… it probably goes from zero to thirty in twenty minutes, if it moves at all.”

“Dennis! Go!”

I went.

As I was getting into my Duster, Arnie came out the back door, apparently meaning to make good on his threat to leave. His folks came after him, now looking worried as well as pissed off. I could understand a little bit how they felt. It had been as sudden as a cyclone touching down from a clear blue sky.

I keyed the engine and backed out into the quiet street. A lot had surely happened since the two of us had punched out at four o’clock, two hours ago. Then I had been hungry enough to eat almost anything (kelp quiche excepted). Now my stomach was so roiled I felt as if I would barf up anything I swallowed.

When I left, the three of them were standing in the driveway in front of their two-car garage (Michael’s Porsche and Regina’s Volvo wagon were snuggled up inside they got their cars, I remember thinking, a little meanly; what do they care), still arguing.

That’s it, I thought, now feeling a little sad as well as upset. They’ll beat him down and LeBay will have his twenty-five dollars and that ’58 Plymouth will sit there for another thousand years or so. They had done similar things to him before. Because he was a loser. Even his parents knew it. He was intelligent, and when you got past the shy and wary exterior, he was humorous and thoughtful and… sweet, I guess, is the word I’m fumbling around for.

Sweet, but a loser.

His folks knew it as well as the machine-shop white-soxers who yelled at him in the halls and thumb-rubbed his glasses.

They knew he was a loser and they would beat him down.

That’s what I thought. But that time I was wrong.

3 THE MORNING AFTER

I cruised by Arnie’s house the next morning at 6:30 A.M. and just parked at the kerb, not wanting to go in even though his mother and father would still be in bed—there had been too many bad vibes flying around in that kitchen the evening before for me to feel comfortable about the usual doughnut and coffee before work.

Arnie didn’t come out for almost five minutes, and I started to wonder if maybe he hadn’t made good on his threat to just take off. Then the back door opened and he came down the driveway, his lunch bucket banging against one leg.

He got in, slammed the door, and said, “Drive on, Jeeves.” This was one of Arnie’s standard witticisms when he was in a good humour.

I drove on, looked at him cautiously, almost decided to say something, and then decided I better wait for him to start… if he had anything to say at all.

For a long time it seemed that he didn’t. We drove most of the way to work with no conversation between us at all, nothing but the sound of WMDY, the local rock-and-soul station. Arnie beat time absently against his leg.

At last he said, “I’m sorry you had to be in on that last night, man.”

“That’s okay, Arnie.”

“Has it ever occurred to you,” he said abruptly, “that parents are nothing but overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually kicking and screaming?”

I shook my head.

“Tell you what I think,” he said. We were coming up on the construction site now; the Carson Brothers trailer was only two rises over. The traffic this early was light and somnolent. The sky was a sweet peach colour. “I think that part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.”

“That sounds very rational,” I said. “Mine are always trying to kill me. Last night it was my mother sneaking in with a pillow and putting it over my face. Night before that it was Dad chasing my sister and me around with a screwdriver.” I was kidding, but I wondered what Michael and Regina might think if they could hear this rap.

“I know it sounds a little crazy at first,” Arnie said, unperturbed, “but there are lots of things that sound nuts until you really consider them. Penis envy. Oedipal conflicts. The Shroud of Turin.”

“Sounds like horseshit to me,” I said. “You had a fight with your folks, that’s all.”

“I really believe it, though,” Arnie said pensively. “Not that they know what they’re doing; I don’t believe that at all. And do you know why?”

“Do tell,” I said.

“Because as soon as you have a kid, you know for sure that you’re going to die. When you have a kid, you see your own gravestone.”

“You know what, Arnie?”

“What?”

“I think that’s fucking gruesome” I said, and we both burst out laughing.

“I don’t mean it that way,” he said.

We pulled into the parking lot and I turned off the engine. We sat there for a moment or two.

“I told them I’d opt out of the college courses,” he said. “Told them I’d sign up for VT right across the board.”

VT was vocational training. The same sort of thing the reform-school boys get, except of course they don’t go home at night. They have what you might call a compulsory live-in programme.

“Arnie,” I began, unsure of just how to go on. The way this thing had blown up out of nothing still freaked me out. “Arnie, you’re still a minor. They have to sign your programme—”

“Sure, of course,” Arnie said. He smiled at me humourlessly, and in that cold dawn light he looked at once older and much, much younger… like a cynical baby, somehow. “They have the power to cancel my entire programme for another year, if they want to, and substitute their own. They could sign me up for Home Ec and World of Fashion, if they wanted to. The law says they can do it. But no law says they can make me pass what they pick.”

That brought it home to me—the distance he had gone, I mean. How could that old clunker of a car have come to mean so much to him so damned fast? In the following days that question kept coming at me in different ways, the way I’ve always imagined a fresh grief would. When Arnie told Michael and Regina he meant to have it, he sure hadn’t been kidding. He had gone right to that place where their expectations for him lived the most strongly, and he had done it with a ruthless expediency that surprised me. I’m not sure that lesser tactics would have worked against Regina, but that Arnie had actually been able to do it surprised me. In fact, it surprised the shit out of me. What it boiled down to was if Arnie spent his senior year in VT, college went out the window. And to Michael and Regina, that was an impossibility.

“So they just… gave up?” It was close to punch-in time, but I couldn’t let this go until I knew everything.

“Not just like that, no. I told them I’d find garage space for it and that I wouldn’t try to have it inspected or registered until I had their approval.”

“Do you think you’re going to get that?”

He flashed me a grim smile that was somehow both confident and scary. It was the smile of a bulldozer operator lowering the blade of a D-9 Cat in front of a particularly difficult stump.

“I’ll get it,” he said. “When I’m ready, I’ll get it.”

And you know what? I believed he would.

4 ARNIE GETS MARRIED

We could have had two hours of overtime that Friday evening, but we declined it. We picked up our cheques in the office and drove down to the Libertyville branch of Pittsburgh Savings and Loan and cashed them. I dumped most of mine into my savings account, put fifty into my chequeing account (just having one of those made me feel disquietingly adult—the feeling, I suppose, wears off), and held onto twenty in cash.

Arnie drew all of his in cash.

“Here,” he said, holding out a ten-spot

“No,” I said. “You hang onto it, man. You’ll need penny of it before you’re through with that clunk.”

“Take it,” he said. “I pay my debts, Dennis.”

“Keep it. Really.”

“Take it.” He held the money out inexorably.

I took it. But I made him take out the dollar he had coming back. He didn’t want to do that.

Driving across town to LeBay’s tract house, Arnie got more jittery, playing the radio too loud, beating boogie riffs first on his thighs and then on the dashboard. Foreigner came on, singing “Dirty White Boy.”

“Story of my life, Arnie my man, ! said, and he laughed too loud and too long.

He was acting like a man waiting for his wife to have a baby. At last I guessed he was scared LeBay had sold the car out from under him.

“Arnie,” I said, “stay cool. It’ll be there.”

“I’m cool, I’m cool,” he said, and offered me a large, glowing, false smile. His complexion that day was the worst I ever saw it, and I wondered (not for the first time, or the last) what it must be like to be Arnie Cunningham, trapped behind that oozing face from second to second and minute to minute and…

“Well, just stop sweating. You act like you’re going to make lemonade in your pants before we get there.”

“I’m not,” he said, and beat another quick, nervous riff on the dashboard just to show me how nervous he wasn’t. “Dirty White Boy” by Foreigner gave way to “Jukebox Heroes” by Foreigner. It was Friday afternoon, and the Block Party Weekend had started on FM-104. When I look back on that year, my senior year, it seems to me that I could measure it out in blocks of rock… and an escalating, dreamlike sense of terror.

“What exactly is it?” I asked. “What is it about this car?”

He sat looking out at Libertyville Avenue without saying anything for a long time, and then he turned off the radio with a quick snap, cutting off Foreigner in mid-flight.

“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “Maybe it’s because for the first time since I was eleven and started getting pimples, I’ve seen something even uglier than I am. Is that what you want me to say? Does that let you put it in a neat little category?”

“Hey, Arnie, come on,” I said. “This is Dennis here remember me?”

“I remember,” he said. “And we’re still friends, right?”

“Sure, last time I checked. But what has that got to do with—”

“And that means we don’t have to lie to each other, or at least I think that’s what it’s supposed to mean. So I got to tell you, maybe it’s not all jive. I know what I am. I’m ugly. I don’t make friends easily. I… alienate people somehow. I don’t mean to do it, but somehow I do. You know?”

I nodded with some reluctance. As he said, we were friends, and that meant keeping the bullshit to a bare minimum.

He nodded back, matter-of-factly. “Other people—” he said, and then added carefully, “you, for instance, Dennis don’t always understand what that means. It changes how you look at the world when you’re ugly and people laugh at you. It makes it hard to keep your sense of humour. It plugs up your sinuses. Sometimes it makes it a little hard to stay sane.”

“Well, I can dig that. But—”

“No,” he said quietly. “You can’t dig it. You might think you can, but you can’t. Not really. But you like me, Dennis—”

“I love you, man,” I said. “You know that.”

“Maybe you do,” he said. “And I appreciate it. if you do you know it’s because there’s something else—something underneath the zits and my stupid face—”

“Your face isn’t stupid,” Arnie,” I said. “Queer-looking, maybe, but not “stupid.”

“Fuck you,” he said, smiling.

“And de cayuse you rode in on, Range Rider.”

“Anyway, that car’s like that. There’s something underneath. Something else. Something better. I see it, that’s all.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah, Dennis,” he said quietly. “I do.”

I turned onto Main Street. We were getting close to LeBay’s now. And suddenly I had a truly nasty idea. Suppose Arnie’s father had gotten one of his friends or students to beat his feet over to LeBay’s house and buy that car out from under his son? A touch Machiavellian, you might say, but Michael Cunningham’s mind was more than a little devious. His specialty was military history.

“I saw that car—and I felt such an attraction to it… I can’t explain it very well even to myself. But…”

He trailed off, those grey eyes looking dreamily ahead.

“But I saw I could make her better,” he said.

“Fix it up, you mean?”

“Yeah… well, no. That’s too impersonal. You fix tables, chairs, stuff like that. The lawnmower when it won’t start. And ordinary cars.”

Maybe he saw my eyebrows go up. He laughed, anyway—a little defensive laugh.

“Yeah, I know how that sounds,” he said. “I don’t even like to say it, because I know how it sounds. But you’re a friend, Dennis. And that means a minimum of bullshit. I don’t think she’s any ordinary car. I don’t know why I think that… but I do.”

I opened my mouth to say something I might later have regretted, something about trying to keep things in perspective or maybe even about avoiding obsessive behaviour. But just then we swung around the corner and onto LeBay’s street.

Arnie pulled air into his lungs in a harsh, hurt gasp.

There was a rectangle of grass on LeBay’s lawn that was even yellower, balder, and uglier than the rest of his lawn. Near one end of that patch there was a diseased-looking oil-spill that had sunk into the ground and killed everything that had once grown there. That rectangular piece of ground was so fucking gross I almost believe that if you looked at it for too long you’d go blind.

It was where the ’58 Plymouth had been standing yesterday.

The ground was still there but the Plymouth was” gone.

“Arnie,” I said as I swung my car in to the kerb, “take it easy. Don’t go off half-cocked, for Christ’s sake.”

He paid not a bit of attention. I doubt if he had even heard me. His face had gone pale. The blemishes covering it stood out in purplish, glaring relief. He had the passenger door of my Duster open and was lunging out of the car even before it had stopped moving.

“Arnie—”

“It’s my father,” he said in anger and dismay. “I smell that bastard all over this.”

And he was gone, running across the lawn to LeBay’s door.

I got out and hurried after him, thinking that this crazy shit was never going to end. I could hardly believe I had just heard Arnie Cunningham call Michael a bastard.

Arnie was raising his fist to hammer on the door when it opened. There stood Roland D. LeBay himself. Today he was wearing a shirt over his back brace. He looked at Arnie’s furious face with a benignly avaricious smile.

“Hello, son,” he said.

“Where is she?” Arnie raged. “We had a deal! Dammit we had a deal! I’ve got a receipt!”

“Simmer down,” LeBay said. He saw me, standing on the bottom step with my hands shoved down in my pockets. “What’s wrong with your friend, son?”

“The car’s gone,” I said. “That’s what’s wrong with him.”

“Who bought it?” Arnie shouted. I’d never seen him so mad. If he had had a gun right then, I believe he would have put it to LeBay’s temple. I was fascinated in spite of myself. It was as if a rabbit had suddenly turned carnivore. God help me, I even wondered fleetingly if he might not have a brain tumour.

“Who bought it?” LeBay repeated mildly. “Why nobody has yet”, son. But you got a lien on her. I backed her into the garage, that’s all. I put on the spare and changed the oil.” He preened and then offered us both an absurdly magnanimous smile.

“You’re a real sport,” I said.

Arnie stared at him uncertainly, then turned his head creakily to took at the closed door of the modest one-car garage that was attached to the house by a breezeway. The breezeway, like everything else around LeBay’s place, had seen better days.

“Besides, I didn’t want to leave her out once you’d laid some money down on her,” he said. “I’ve had some trouble with one or two of the folks on this street. One night some kid threw a rock at my car. Oh yeah, I got some neighbours straight out of the old AB.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The Asshole Brigade, son.”

He swept the far side of the street with a baleful sniper’s glance, taking in the neat, gas-thrifty commuters cars now home from work, the children playing tag and jumprope, the people sitting out on their porches and having drinks in the first of the evening cool.

“I’d like to know who it was threw that rock,” he said softly. “Yessir, I’d surely like to know who it was.”

Arnie cleared his throat. “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time.”

“Don’t worry,” LeBay said bridkly. “Like to see a fellow stand up for what’s his… or what’s almost his. You bring the money, kid?”

“Yes, I have it.”

“Well, come on in the house. You and your friend both. I’ll sign her over to you, and we’ll have a glass of beer to celebrate.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll stay out here, if that’s okay.”

“Suit yourself, son,” LeBay said… and winked. To this day I have no idea exactly what that wink was supposed to mean. They went in, and the door banged shut behind them. The fish had been netted and was about to be cleaned.

Feeling depressed, I walked through the breezeway to the garage and tried the door. It ran up easily and exhaled the same odours I had smelled when I opened the Plymouth’s door yesterday—oil, old upholstery, the accumulated heat of a long summer.

Rakes and a few old garden implements were ranked along one wall. On the other was a very old hose, a bicycle pump, and an ancient golf-bag filled with rusty clubs. In the centre, nose outward, sat Arnie’s car, Christine, looking a mile long in this day and age when even Cadillacs look squeezed together and boxy. The spiderweb snarl of cracks at the side of the windscreen caught the light and turned it to a dull quicksilver. Some kid with a rock, as LeBay had said—or maybe a little accident coming home from the VFW hall after a night of drinking boilermakers and telling stories about the Battle of the Bulge or Pork Chop Hill. The good old days, when a man could see Europe, the Pacific, and the mysterious East from behind the sight of a bazooka. Who knew… and what did it matter? Either way, it was not going to be easy, finding a replacement for a big wrap windscreen like that.

Or cheap.

Oh, Arnie, I thought. Man, you are getting in so deep.

The flat LeBay had taken off rested against the wall. I got down on my hands and knees and peered under the car. A fresh oil-stain was starting to form there, black against the brownish ghost of an older, wider stain that had sunk into the concrete over a period of years. It did nothing to alleviate my depression. The block was cracked for sure.

I walked around to the driver’s side and as I grasped the handle, I saw a wastecan at the far corner of the garage. A large plastic bottle was poking out of the top. The letters SAPPH were visible over the rim.

I groaned. Oh, he had changed the oil, all right. Big of him. He had run out the old—whatever was left of it—and had run in a few quarts of Sapphire Motor Oil. This is the stuff you can get for $3.50 per recycled five-gallon jug at the Mammoth Mart. Roland D. LeBay was a real prince, all right. Roland D. LeBay was all heart.

I opened the car door and slid in behind the wheel. Now the smell in the garage didn’t seem quite so heavy, or so freighted with feelings of disuse and defeat. The car’s wheel was wide and red—a confident wheel. I looked at that amazing speedometer again, that speedometer which was calibrated not to 70 or 80 but all the way up to 120 miles an hour. No kilometres in little red numbers underneath; when this babe had rolled off the assembly line, the idea of going metric had yet to occur to anyone in Washington. No big red 55 on the speedometer, either. Back then, gas went for 29.9 a gallon, maybe less if a price-war happened to be going on in your town. The Arab oil-embargoes and the double-nickel speed limit had still been fifteen years away.

The good old days, I thought, and had to smile a little. I fumbled down to the left side of the seat and found the little button console that would move the seat back and forth and up and down (if it still worked, that was). More power to you, to coin a crappy little pun. There was air conditioning (that certainly wouldn’t work), and cruise control, and a big pushbutton radio with lots of chrome—AM only, of course. In 1958, FM was mostly a blank wasteland.

I put my hands on the wheel and something happened.

Even now, after much thought, I’m not sure exactly what it was. A vision, maybe—but if it was, it sure wasn’t any big deal. It was just that for a moment the torn upholstery seemed to be gone. The seat covers were whole and smelling pleasantly of vinyl… or maybe that smell was real leather. The worn places were gone from the steering wheel; the chrome winked pleasantly in the summer evening light falling through the garage door.

Let’s go for a ride, big guy, Christine seemed to whisper in the hot summer silence of LeBay’s garage. Let’s cruise.

And for just a moment it seemed that everything changed. That ugly snarl of cracks in the windscreen was gone—or seemed to be. The little swatch of LeBay’s lawn that I could see was not yellowed, balding, and crabgrassy but a dark, rich, newly cut green. The sidewalk beyond it was freshly cemented, not a crack in sight. I saw (or thought I did, or dreamed I did) a ’57 Cadillac motor by out front. That GM high-stepper was a dark minty green, not a speck of rust on her, big gangster whitewall tyres, and hubcaps as deeply reflective as mirrors. A Cadillac the size of a boat, and why not? Gas was almost as cheap as tap-water.

Let’s go for a ride, big guy… let’s cruise.

Sure, why not? I could pull out and turn toward downtown, toward the old high school that was still standing—it wouldn’t burn down for another six years, not until 1964 and I could turn on the radio and catch Chuck Berry singing “Maybeliene” or the Everlys doing “Wake Up Little Susie” or maybe Robin Luke wailing “Susie Darling.” And then I’d…

And then I got out of that car just about as fast as I could. The door opened with a rusty, hellish screech, and I cracked my elbow good on one of the garage walls. I pushed the door shut (I didn’t really even want to touch it, to tell you the truth) and then just stood there looking at the Plymouth which, barring a miracle, would soon be my friend Arnie’s. I rubbed my bruised crazybone. My heart was beating too fast.

Nothing. No new chrome, no new upholstery. On the other hand, plenty of dents and rust, one headlamp missing (I hadn’t noticed that the day before), the radio aerial crazily askew. And that dusty, dirty smell of age.

I decided right then that I didn’t like my friend Arnie’s car.

I walked out of the garage, glancing back constantly over my shoulder—I don’t know why, but I didn’t like it behind my back. I know how stupid that must sound, but it was how I felt. And there it sat with its dented, rusty grille, nothing sinister or even strange, just a very old Plymouth automobile with an inspection sticker that had gone invalid on June 1, 1976—a long time ago.

Arnie and LeBay were coming out of the house. Arnie had a white slip of paper in his hand—his bill of sale, I assumed. LeBay’s hands were empty; he had already made the money disappear.

“Hope you enjoy her,” LeBay was saying, and for some reason I thought of a very old pimp huckstering a very young boy. I felt a surge of real disgust for him—him with his psoriasis of the skull and his sweaty back brace. “I think you will. In time.”

His slightly rheumy eyes found mine, held there for a second, and then slipped back to Arnie.

“In time,” he repeated.

“Yessir, I’m sure I will,” Arnie said absently He moved toward the garage like a sleepwalker and stood looking at his car.

“Keys are in her,” LeBay said. “I’ll have to have you take her along. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Will she start?”

“Started for me yesterday evenin,” LeBay said, but his eyes shifted away toward the horizon. And then, in the tone of one who has washed his hands of the whole thing: “Your friend here will have a set of jumpers in his boot, I reckon.”

Well, as a matter of fact I did have a set of jumper cables in my boot, but I didn’t much like LeBay guessing it. I like him guessing it because… I sighed a little. Because I didn’t want to be involved in Arnie’s future relationship with the old clunker he had bought, but I could see myself getting dragged in, step by step.

Arnie had dropped out of the conversation completely. He walked into the garage and got into the car. The evening sun was slanting strongly in now, and I saw the little puff of dust that went up when Arnie sat down and automatically brushed at the seat of my own pants. For a moment he just sat there behind the wheel, hands gripping it loosely, and I felt a return of my unease. It was, in a way, as if the car had swallowed him. I told myself to stop it, that there was no damn reason for me to be acting like a goosey seventh-grade schoolgirl.

Then Arnie bent forward a little. The engine began to turn over. I turned and shot LeBay an angry, accusatory glance, but he was studying the sky again, as if for rain.

It wasn’t going to start; no way it was going to start. My Duster was in pretty good shape, but the two I’d owned before it were clunkers (modified clunkers; neither was in the same class as Christine); and I’d become very familiar with that sound on cold winter mornings, that slow and tired cranking that meant the battery was scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Rurr-rurr-rurr… rurr… rurrr… rurrr… rurr—

“Don’t bother, Arnie,” I said. “It’s not going to fire up.”

He didn’t even raise his head. He turned the key off and then turned it on again. The motor cranked with painful, dragging slowness.

I walked over to LeBay. “You couldn’t even leave it running long enough to build up a charge, could you?” I asked.

LeBay glanced at me from his yellowing, rheumy eyes, said nothing, and then began checking the sky for rain again.

“Or maybe it never started at all. Maybe you just got a couple of friends to come over and help you push it into the garage. If an old shit like you has any friends.”

He looked down at me. “Son,” he said. “You don’t know everything. You ain’t even dry behind the ears yet. When you’ve slogged your way through a couple of wars, like I have—”

I said deliberately, Fuck your couple of wars,” and walked toward the garage where Arnie was still trying to start his car, Might as well try to drink the Atlantic dry with a straw or ride a hot-air balloon to Mars, I thought.

Rurr… rurr… rurr.

Pretty soon the last ohm and erg would be sucked out of that old corroded Sears battery, and then there would be nothing but that most dismal of all automotive sounds, most commonly heard on rainy back roads and deserted highways: the dull, sterile click of the solenoid, followed by an awful sound like a death-rattle.

I opened the driver’s side door. “I’ll get my cables,” I said.

He looked up. “I think she’ll start for me,” he said.

I felt my lips stretch in a large, unconvincing grin. “Well, I’ll get them, just in case.”

“Sure, if you want,” he said absently, and then in a voice almost too low to hear he said, “Come on, Christine. What do you say?”

In the same instant, that voice awoke in my head and spoke again—Let’s go for a ride, big guy… let’s cruise and I shuddered.

He turned the key again. What I expected was that dull solenoid click and death-rattle. What I heard was the slow crank of the engine suddenly speeding up. The engine caught, ran briefly, then quit. Arnie turned the key again. The engine cranked over faster. There was a backfire that sounded as loud as a cherry-bomb in the closed space of the garage. I jumped. Arnie didn’t. He was lost in his own world.

At this point I would have cursed it a couple of times, just to help it along: Come on, you whore is always a good one; Let’s go, cocksucker has its merits, and sometimes just a good, hearty shit-FIRE! will turn the trick. Most guys I know would do the same; I think it’s just one of the things you pick up from your father.

What your mother leaves you is mostly good hardheaded practical advice—if you cut your toenails twice a month you won’t get so many holes in your socks; put that down, you don’t know where it’s been; eat your carrots, they’re good for you—but it’s from your father that you get the magic, the talismans, the words of power. If the car won’t start, curse it… and be sure you curse it female. If you went seven generations back, you’d probably find one of your forebears cursing the goddam bitch of a donkey that stopped in the middle of the tollbridge somewhere in Sussex or Prague.

But Arnie didn’t swear at it. He murmured under his breath, “Come on, doll, what do you say?”

He turned the key. The engine kicked twice, backfired again, and then started up. It sounded horrible, as if maybe four of the eight pistons had taken the day off, but he had it running. I could hardly believe it, but I didn’t want to stand around and discuss it with him. The garage was rapidly filling up with blue smoke and fumes. I went outside.

“That turned out all right, after all, didn’t it?” LeBay said. “And you don’t have to risk your own precious battery.” He spat.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. To tell you the truth, I felt a little embarrassed.

The car came slowly out of the garage, looking so absurdly long that it made you want to laugh or cry or do something. I couldn’t believe how long it looked. It was like an optical illusion. And Arnie looked very small behind the wheel.

He rolled down the window and beckoned me over. We had to raise our voices to make ourselves heard clearly that was another thing about Arnie’s girl Christine; she had an extremely loud and rumbling voice. She was going to have to be Midasized in a hurry. If there was anything left of” the exhaust system to attach a silencer to, that was, besides a lot of rusty lace. Since Arnie sat down behind the wheel, the little accountant in the automotive section or my brain had totted up expenses of about six hundred dollars not including the cracked windscreen. God knew how much that might cost to replace.

“I’m taking her down to Darnell’s!” Arnie yelled. “His ad in the paper says I can park it in one of the back bays for twenty dollars a week!”

“Arnie, twenty a week for one of those back bays is too much!” I bellowed back.

Here was more robbery of the young and innocent. Darnell’s Garage sat next door to a four-acre automobile wasteland that went by the falsely cheerful name of Darnell’s Used Auto Parts. I had been there a few times, once to buy a starter for my Duster, once to get a rebuilt carb for the Mercury which had been my first car. Will Darnell was a great fat pig of a man who drank a lot and smoked long rank cigars, although he was reputed to have a bad asthmatic condition. He professed to hate almost every car-owning teenager in Libertyville… but that didn’t keep him from catering to them and rooking them.

“I know,” Arnie yelled over the bellowing engine. “But it’s only for a week or two, until I find a cheaper place. I can’t take it home like this, Dennis, my dad and mom would have a shit fit!”

That was certainly true. I opened my mouth to say something else—maybe to beg him again to stop this madness before it got completely out of control. Then I shut my mouth again. The deal was done. Besides, I didn’t want to compete with that bellowing silencer anymore, or stand there pulling a lot of evil fried-carbon exhaust into my lungs.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll follow you.”

“Good deal,” he said, grinning. “I’m going by Walnut Street and Basin Drive. I want to stay off the main roads.”

“Okay.”

“Thanks, Dennis.”

He dropped the hydramatic transmission into D again, and the Plymouth lurched forward two feet and then almost stalled. Arnie goosed the accelerator a little and Christine broke dirty wind. The Plymouth crept down LeBay’s driveway to the street. When he pushed the brake, only one of the tail-lights flashed. My mental automotive accountant relentlessly rang up another five dollars.

He hauled the wheel to the left and pulled out into the street. The remains of the silencer scraped rustily at the lowest point of the driveway. Arnie gave it more gas, and the car roared like a refugee from the demo derby at Philly Plains. Across the street, people leaned forward on their porches or came to their doors to see what was going on.

Bellowing and snarling, Christine rolled up the street at about ten miles an hour, sending out great stinking clouds of blue oilsmoke that hung and then slowly raftered in the mellow August evening.

At the stop sign forty yards up, it stalled. A kid rode past the hulk on his Raleigh, and his impudent, brassy shout drifted back to me: “Put it in a trash-masher, mister!”

Arnie’s closed fist popped out of the window. His middle finger went up as he flipped the kid the bird. Another first. I had never seen Arnie flip anyone the bird in my life.

The starter whined, the motor sputtered and caught. This time there was a whole rattling series of backfires. It was as if someone had just opened up with a machine-gun on Laurel Drive, Libertyville, USA. I groaned.

Someone would call the cops pretty soon, reporting a public nuisance, and they would grab Arnie for driving an unregistered, uninspected vehicle—and probably for the nuisance charge as well. That would not exactly ease the situation at home.

There was one final echoing bang—it rolled down the street like the explosion of a mortar shell—and then the Plymouth turned left on Martin Street, which brought you to Walnut about a mile up. The westering sun turned its battered red body briefly to gold as it moved out of sight. I saw that Arnie had his elbow cocked out the window.

I turned to LeBay, mad all over again, ready to give him some more hell. I tell you I felt sick inside my heart. But what I saw stopped me cold.

Roland D. LeBay was crying. It was horrible and it was grotesque and most of all it was pitiable. When I was nine, we had a cat named Captain Beefheart, and he got hit by a UPS truck. We took him to the vet’s—my mom had to drive slow because she was crying and it was hard for her to see—and I sat in the back with Captain Beef heart. He was in a box, and I kept telling him the vet would save him, it was going to be okay, but even a little nine-year-old dumbhead like me could see it was never going to be all right for Captain Beefheart again, because some of his guts were out and there was blood coming out of his asshole and there was shit in the box and on his fur and he was dying. I tried to pet him and he bit my hand, right in the sensitive webbing between the thumb and the first finger. The pain was bad; that terrible feeling of pity was worse. I had not felt anything like that since then. Not that I was complaining, you understand; I don’t think people should have feelings like that often. You have a lot of feelings like that, and I guess they take you away to the funny-farm to make baskets.

LeBay was standing on his balding lawn not far from the place where that big patch of oil had defoliated everything, and he had this great big old man’s snotrag out and his head was down and he was wiping his eyes with it. The tears gleamed greasily on his checks, more like sweat than real tears. His adam’s apple went up and down.

I turned my head so I wouldn’t have to look at him cry and happened to stare straight into his one-car garage. Before, it had seemed really full—the stuff along the walls, of course, but most of all that huge old car with its double headlights and its wraparound windscreen and its acre of hood. Now the stuff along the walls only served to accentuate the garage’s essential emptiness. It gaped like a toothless mouth.

That was almost as bad as LeBay. But when I looked back, the old bastard had gotten himself under control well, mostly. He had stopped leaking at the eyes and he had stuffed the snotrag into the back pocket of his patented old man’s pants. But his face was still bleak. Very bleak.

“Well, that’s that,” he said hoarsely. “I’m shot of her, sonny.”

“MrLeBay,” I said. “I only wish my friend could make the same statement. If you knew the trouble he was in over that rustbucket with his folks—”

“Get out of here,” he said, “You sound like a goddam sheep. Just baa, baa, baa, that’s all I hear comin out’n your hole. I think your friend there knows more than you do. Go and see if he needs a hand.”

I started down the lawn to my car. I didn’t want to hang around LeBay a moment longer.

“Nothin but baa, baa, baa!” he yelled shrewishly after me, making me think of that old song by the Youngbloods—I am a one-note man, I play it all I can “You don’t know half as much as you think you do!”

I got into my car and drove away. I glanced back once as I made the turn onto Martin Street and saw him standing there on his lawn, the sunlight gleaming on his bald head.

As things turned out, he was right.

I didn’t know half as much as I thought I did.

5 HOW WE GOT TO DARNELL’s

I drove down Martin to Walnut and turned right, toward Basin Drive. It didn’t take long to catch up with Arnie. He was pulled into the kerb, and Christine’s boot-lid was up. An automobile jack so old that it almost looked as if it might once have been used for changing wheels on Conestoga wagons was leaning against the crooked back bumper. The right rear tyre was flat.

I pulled in behind him and had no more than gotten out when a young woman waddled down towards us from her house, skirting a pretty good collection of plastic-fantastic that was planted on her lawn (two pink flamingos, four or five little stone ducks in a line behind a big stone mother duck, and a really good plastic wishing well with plastic flowers planted in the plastic bucket). She was in dire need of Weight Watchers.

“You can’t leave that junk here,” she said around a mouthful of chewing gum. “You can’t leave that junk parked in front of our house, I just hope you know that.”

“Ma’am,” Arnie said. “I had a flat tyre, is all. I’ll get it out of here just as soon as—”

“You can’t leave it there and I hope you know that,” she said with a maddening kind of circularity. “My husband’ll be home pretty soon. He don’t want no junk car in front of the house.”

“It’s not junk,” Arnie said, and something in his tone made her back up a step.

“You don’t want to take that tone of voice to me, sonny”, this overweight be-bop queen said haughtily. “It don’t take much to get my husband mad.”

“Look,” Arnie began in that same dangerous flat voice he had used when Michael and Regina began ganging up on him. I grabbed his shoulder hard. More hassle we didn’t need.

“Thanks, ma’am,” I said. “We’ll get it taken care of right away. We’re going to take care of it so quick you’ll think you hallucinated this car.”

“You better,” she said, and then hooked a thumb at my Duster. “And your car is parked in front of my driveway.”

I backed my Duster up. She watched and then joggled back up to her house, where a little boy and a little girl were crammed into the doorway. They were pretty porky, too. Each of them was eating a nice nourishing Devil Dog.

“Wassa matta, ma?” the little boy asked. “Wassa matta that man’s car, Ma? Wassa matta?”

“Shut up,” the be-bop queen said, and hauled both kids back inside. I always like to see enlightened parents like that; it gives me hope for the future.

I walked back to Arnie.

“Well,” I said, dragging out the only witticism I could think of, “it’s only flat on the bottom, Arnie. Right?”

He smiled wanly. “I got a slight problem, Dennis,” he said.

I knew what his problem was; he had no spare. Arnie dragged out his wallet again—it hurt me to see him do it—and looked inside. “I got to get a new tyre,” he said.

“Yeah, I guess you do. A remould—”

“No remoulds. I don’t want to start out that way.” I didn’t say anything, but I glanced back toward my Duster. I had two remoulds on it and I thought they were just fine.

“How much do you think a new Goodyear or Firestone would cost, Dennis?”

I shrugged and consulted the little automotive accountant, who guessed that Arnie could probably get a new no-frills blackwall for around thirty-five dollars.

He pulled out two twenties and handed them to me. “If it’s more—with the tax and everything—I’ll pay you back.”

I looked at him sadly. “Arnie, how much of your week’s pay you got left?”

His eyes narrowed and shifted away from mine. “Enough,” he said.

I decided to try one more time—you must remember that I was only seventeen and still under the impression that people could be shown where their best interest lay. “You couldn’t get into a nickel poker game,” I said. “You plugged just about the whole fucking wad into that car. Dragging out your wallet is going to become a very familiar action to you, Arnie. Please, man. Think it over.”

His eyes went flinty. It was an expression I had not seen before on his face, and although you’ll probably think I was the most naive teenager in America, I couldn’t really remember having seen it on any face before. I felt a mixture of surprise and dismay—I felt the way I might have felt if I suddenly discovered I was trying to have a rational conversation with a fellow who just happened to be a lunatic. I have seen the expression since, though; I imagine you have too. Total shutdown. It’s the expression a man gets on his face when you tell him the woman he loves is whoring around behind his back.

“Don’t get going on that, Dennis,” he said.

I threw my hands up in exasperation. “All right! All right!”

“And you don’t have to go after the damn tyre, either, if you don’t want to.” That flinty, obdurate, and—so help me, it’s true—stupidly stubborn expression was still on his face. “I’ll find a way.”

I started to reply, and I might have said something pretty hot, but then I happened to glance to my left. The two porky kids were there at the edge of their lawn. They were astride identical Big Wheels, their fingers smeared with chocolate. They were watching us solemnly.

“No big deal, man,” I said. “I’ll get the tyre.”

“Only if you want to, Dennis,” he said. “I know it’s getting late.”

“It’s cool,” I said.

“Mister?” the little boy said, licking chocolate off his fingers.

“What?” Arnie asked.

“My mother says that car is poopy.”

“That’s right,” the little girl chimed. “Poopy-kaka.”

“Poopy-kaka,” Arnie said. “Why, that’s very perceptive, isn’t it, kids? Is your mother a philosopher?”

“No,” the little boy said. “She’s a Capricorn. I’m a Libra. My sister is a—”

“I’ll be back quick as I can,” I said awkwardly.

“Sure.”

“Stay cool.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to punch anybody.”

I trotted to my car. As I slipped behind the wheel I heard the little girl ask Arnie loudly, “Why is your face all messy like that, mister?”

I drove a mile and a half down to JFK Drive, which according to my mother, who grew up in Libertyville used to be at the centre of one of the town’s most desirable neighbourhoods back around the time Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Maybe renaming old Barnswallow Drive for the slain President had been bad luck, because since the early sixties, the neighbourhood around the street had degenerated into an exurban strip. There was a drive-in movie, a McDonald’s, a Burger King, an Arby’s, and the Big Twenty Lanes. There were also eight or ten service stations, since JFK Drive leads to the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Getting Arnie’s tyre should have gone lickety-split, but the first two stations I came to were those self-service jobbies that don’t even sell oil; there’s just gas and a marginally retarded girl in a booth made of bullet-proof glass who sits in front of a computer console reading a National Enquirer and chewing a wad of Bubblicious Gum big enough to choke a Missouri mule.

The third one was a Texaco having a tyre sale. I was able to buy Arnie a blackwall that would fit his Plymouth (I could not bring myself then to call her Christine or even think of her—it—by that name) for just twenty-eight-fifty plus tax, but there was only one guy working there, and he had to put the new tyre on Arnie’s wheel-rim and pump gas at the same time. The operation stretched out over forty-five minutes. I offered to pump gas for the guy while he did it, but he said the boss would shoot him if he heard of it.

By the time I had the mounted tyre back in my boot and had paid the guy two bucks for the job, the early evening light had become the fading purple of late evening. The shadow of each bush was long and velvety, and as I cruised slowly back up the street I saw the day’s last light Streaming almost horizontally through the trash-littered space between the Arby’s and the bowling alley. That light, so much flooding gold, was nearly terrible in its strange, unexpected beauty.

I was surprised by a choking panic that climbed up in my throat like dry fire. It was the first time a feeling like that came over me that year—that long, strange year—but not the last. Yet it’s hard for me to explain, or even define. It had something to do with realising that it was August 11, 1978, that I was going to be a senior in high school next month, and that when school started again it meant the end of a long, quiet phase of my life. I was getting ready to be a grown-up, and I saw that somehow—saw it for sure, for the first time in that lovely but somehow ancient spill of golden light flooding down the alleyway between a bowling alley and a roast beef joint. And I think I understood then that what really scares people about growing up is that you stop trying on the life-mask and start trying on another one. If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.

The feeling passed, but in its wake I felt shaken and melancholy. Neither state was much like my usual self.

When I turned back onto Basin Drive I was feeling suddenly removed from Arnie’s problems and trying to cope with my own—thoughts of growing up had led naturally to such gigantic (at least they seemed gigantic to me) and rather unpleasant ideas as college and living away from home and trying to make the football team at State with sixty other qualified people competing for my position instead of only ten or twelve. So maybe you’re saying, Big deal, Dennis, I got some news for you: one billion Red Chinese don’t give a shit if you make the first squad as a college freshman. Fair enough. I’m just trying to say that those things seemed really real to me for the first time… and really frightening. Your mind takes you on trips like that sometimes—and if you don’t want to go, it takes you anyway.

Seeing that the be-pop queen’s husband had indeed arrived home, and that he and Arnie were standing almost nose to nose, apparently ready to start mixing it up at any second, didn’t help my mood at all.

The two little kids still sat solemnly astride their Big Wheels, their eyes shifting back and forth from Arnie to Daddy and back again to Arnie like spectators at some apocalyptic tennis match where the ref would cheerfully shoot the loser. They seemed to be waiting for the moment of combustion when Daddy would flatten my skinny friend and do the Cool Jerk all the way up and down his broken body.

I pulled over quickly and got out, almost running over to them.

“I’m done talkin atcha face!” Dads bellowed. “I’m telling you I want it out and I want it out right now!” He had a big flattened nose full of burst veins. His cheeks were flushed to the colour of new brick, and above his grey twill workshirt, corded veins stood out on his neck.

“I’m not going to drive it on the rim,” Arnie said. “I told you that. You wouldn’t do it if it was yours.”

“I’ll drive you on the rim, Pizza-face,” Daddy said, apparently intent on showing his children how big people solve their problems in the Real World. “You ain’t parking your cruddy hotrod in front of my house. Don’t you aggravate me, kiddo, or you’re gonna get hurt.”

“Nobody’s going to get hurt,” I said. “Come on, mister. Give us a break.”

Arnie’s eyes shifted gratefully to me, and I saw how scared he had been—how scared he still was. Always an out, he knew there was something about him, God knew what, that made a certain type of guy want to pound the living shit out of him. He must have been pretty well convinced it was going to happen again—but this time he wasn’t backing down.

The man’s eyes shifted to me. “Another one,” he said, as if marvelling that there could be so many assholes in the world. “You want me to take you both on? Is that what you want? Believe me, I can do it.”

Yes, I knew the type. Ten years younger and he would have been one of the guys at school who thought it was terribly amusing to slam Arnie’s books out of his arms when he was on his way to class or to throw him into the shower with all his clothes on after phys ed. They never change, those guys. They just get older and develop lung cancer from smoking too many Luckies or step out with a brain embolism at fifty-three or so.

“We don’t want to take you on,” I said. “He had a flat tyre, for God’s sake! Didn’t you ever have a flat?”

“Ralph, I want them out of here!” The porky wife was standing on the porch. Her voice was high and excited. This was better than the Phil Donahue Show. Other neighbours had come out to watch developments, and I thought “again with great weariness that if someone had not called the cops already, someone soon would.

“I never had a flat and left some old piece of junk sitting in front of someone’s house for three hours,” Ralph said loudly. His lips were pulled back and I could see spit shining on his teeth in the light of the setting sun.

“It’s been an hour,” I said quietly, “if that.”

“Don’t give me any of your smartmouth, kid,” Ralph said. “I ain’t interested. I ain’t like you guys. I work for a living. I come home tired, I ain’t got time to argue. I want it out and I want it out now.”

“I’ve got a spare right in my boot,” I said. “if we could just put it on—”

“And if you had any common decency—” Arnie began hotly.

That almost did it. If there was one thing our buddy Ralph wasn’t going to have impugned in front of his kids, it was his common decency. He swung on Arnie. I don’t know how it would have ended—with Arnie in jail, maybe, his precious car impounded—but somehow I was able to get my own hand up and catch Ralph’s hand by the wrist. The two of them coming together made a flat smacking sound in the dusk.

The porky little girl burst into whiny tears.

The porky little boy sat astride his Big Wheel with his lower jaw hanging almost to his chest.

Arnie, who had always scuttered past the smoking area at school like a hunted thing, never even flinched. He actually seemed to want it to happen.

Ralph whirled on me, his eyes bulging with fury.

“All right, you little shit,” he said. “You first.”

I held onto his hand, straining. “Come on, man,” I said in a low voice. “The tyre’s in my boot. Give us five minutes to change it and get out of your face. Please.”

Little by little the pressure of holding his hand back slacked off. He glanced at his kids, the little girl snivelling, the little boy wide-eyed, and that seemed to decide him.

“Five minutes,” he agreed. He looked at Arnie. “You’re just goddam lucky I ain’t calling the police on you. That thing’s uninspected and it ain’t got no tags, either.”

I waited for Arnie to say something else inflammatory and send the game into extra innings, but maybe he hadn’t forgotten everything he knew about discretion.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry if I got hot under the collar.”

Ralph grunted and tucked his shirt back into his pants with savage little jabs. He looked over at his kids again. “Get in the house!” he roared. “What you doing out here? You want me to put a bang-shang-a-lang on you?”

Oh God, what an onomatopoeic family, I thought. For Christ’s sake don’t put a bang-shang-a-lang on them, Pops—they might make poopy-kaka in their pants.

The kids fled to their mother, leaving their Big Wheels behind.

“Five minutes,” he repeated, looking at us balefully. And later tonight, when he was hoisting a few with the boys, he would be able to tell them how he had done his part to hold the line against the drugs-and-sex generation. Yessir, boys, I told em to get that fucking junk away from my house before I put a bang-shang-a-lang on them. And you want to believe they moved like their feet was on fire and their asses were catching. And then he would light up a Lucky. Or a Camel.

We put Amie’s jack under the bumper. Arnie hadn’t pumped the lever more than three times when the jack snapped in two. It made a dusty sound when it went, and rust puffed up. Arnie looked at me, his eyes at once humble and stricken.

“Never mind,” I said. “We’ll use mine.”

It was twilight now, starting to get dark. My heart was still beating too fast and my mouth was sour from the confrontation with the Big Cheese of 119 Basin Drive.

“I’m sorry, Dennis,” he said in a low voice. “I won’t get you involved with any of this again”

“Forget it. Let’s just get the tyre on.”

We used my jack to get the Plymouth up (for several horrible seconds I thought the rear bumper was just going to rip off in a screech of decaying metal) and pulled the dead tyre. We got the new one on, tightened the lug-nuts some, and then let it down. It was a great relief to have the car standing on the street again; the way that rotted bumper bent up under the jack had scared me.

“There,” Arnie said, clapping the ancient, dented hubcap back on over the lug-nuts.

I stood looking at the Plymouth, and the feeling I’d had in LeBay’s garage suddenly recurred. It was looking at the fresh new Firestone on the rear right that did it, The blackmail still had one of the manufacturer’s stickers on it and the bright yellow chalk-marks from the gas-jockey’s hurried wheel-balancing.

I shivered a little—but to convey the sudden weirdness I felt would be impossible. It was as if I had seen a snake that was almost ready to shed its old skin, that some of that old skin had already flaked away, revealing the glistening newness underneath.

Ralph was standing on his porch, glowering down at us. In one hand he was holding a drippy hamburger sandwich on Wonder Bread. His other hand was fisted around a can of Iron City.

“Handsome, ain’t he?” I muttered to Arnie as I slung his busted jack into the Plymouth’s boot.

“A regular Robert Deadford,” Arnie muttered back, and that was it—we both got the giggles, the way you sometimes will at the end of a long and tense situation.

Arnie threw the flat into the boot on top of the jack and then got snorting and holding his hands over his mouth. He looked like a kid who just got caught raiding the jam-jar. Thinking that made me break up all the way.

“What are you two punks laughing at?” Ralph roared. He came to the steps of his porch. “Huh? You want to try laughing on the other sides of your faces for a while? I can show you how, believe me!”

“Get out of here quick,” I said to Arnie, and bolted back to my Duster. Nothing could stop the laughter now; it just came rolling out. I fell into the front seat and keyed the engine, whinnying with laughter. In front of me, Arnie’s Plymouth started up with a bellowing roar and a huge stinking cloud of blue exhaust. Even over it, I could hear his high, helpless laughter, a sound that was close to hysteria.

Ralph came charging across his lawn, still holding his drippy burger and his beer.

“What are you laughing at, you punks? Huh?”

“You, you nerd!” Arnie shouted triumphantly, and pulled out with a rattling fusillade of backfires. I tromped the gas pedal of my own car and had to swerve sharply to avoid Ralph, who was now apparently intent on murder. I was still laughing, but it wasn’t good laughter anymore, if it ever had been—it was a shrill, breathless sound, almost like screaming.

“I’ll kill you, punk!” Ralph roared.

I goosed the accelerator again, and this time I almost tailgated Arnie.

I flipped Ralph the old El Birdo. “Jam it!” I yelled.

Then he was behind us. He tried to catch up; for a few seconds he came pounding along the sidewalk, and then he stopped, breathing hard and snarling.

“What a crazy day,” I said aloud, a little frightened by the shaky, teary quality of my own voice. That sour taste was back in my mouth. “What a crazy fucking day.”

Darnell’s Garage on Hampton Street was a long building with rusty corrugated-tin sides and a rusty corrugated-tin roof. Out front was a grease-caked sign which read: SAVE MONEY! YOUR KNOW-HOW, OUR TOOLS! Below that was another sign in smaller type, reading Garage Space Rented by the Week, Month, or Year.

The automobile junkyard was behind Darnell’s. It was a block-long space enclosed in five-foot-high strips of the same corrugated tin, Will Darnell’s apathetic nod toward the Town Zoning Board. Not that there was any way the Board was going to bring Wilt Darnell to heel, and not just because two of the three Zoning Board members were his friends. In Libertyville, Will Darnell knew just about everyone who counted. He was one of those fellows you find in almost any large town or small city, moving quietly behind any number of scenes.

I had heard that he was mixed up in the lively drug traffic at Libertyville High and Darby Junior High, and I had also heard that he was on a nodding acquaintance with the big-time crooks in Pittsburgh and Philly. I didn’t believe that stuff—at least, I didn’t think I did—but I knew that if you wanted firecrackers or cherry-bombs or bottle-rockets for the Fourth of July, Will Darnell would sell them to you. I had also heard, from my father, that Will had been indicted twelve years before, when I was but a lad of five, as one of the kingpins in a stolen-car ring that stretched from our part of the world east to New York City and all the way up to Bangor, Maine. Eventually the charges were dropped. But my dad also said he was pretty sure that Will Darnell might be up to his ears in other shenanigans; anything from truck hijackings to fake antiques.

A good place to stay away from, Dennis, my father had said. This had been a year ago, not long after I got my first clunker and had invested twenty dollars in renting one of Darnell’s Do-It-Yourself Garage bays to try and replace the carburettor, an experiment that had ended in dismal failure.

A good place to stay away from—and here I was, pulling in through the main gates behind my friend Arnie after dark, nothing left of the day but a tinge of furnace red on the horizon. My headlights picked out enough discarded auto-parts, wreckage, and general all-around dreck to make me feel more depressed and tired than ever. I realized I hadn’t called home, and that my mother and father would probably be wondering just where the hell I was.

Arnie drove up to a big garage door with a sign beside it reading HONK FOR ENTRY. There was a feeble light spilling out through a grime-coated window beside the door somebody was at home—and I barely restrained an impulse to lean out of my window and tell Arnie to drive his car over to my house for the night. I had a vision of us stumbling onto Will Darnell and his cronies inventorying hijacked colour TVs or repainting stolen Cadillacs. The Hardy Boys come to Libertyville.

Arnie just sat there, not honking, not doing anything and I was about to get out and ask him what was what when he came back to where I was parked. Even in the last of the failing light, he looked deeply embarrassed.

“Would you mind honking your horn for me, Dennis?” he said humbly. “Christine’s doesn’t seem to work.”

“Sure.”

“Thanks.”

I beeped my horn twice, and after a pause the big garage door went rattling up. Will Darnell himself was standing there, his belly pushing out over his belt. He waved Arnie inside impatiently.

I turned my car around, parked it facing out, and went inside myself.

The interior was huge, vaultlike, and terribly silent at the end of the day. There were as many as five dozen slant-parking stalls, each equipped with its own bolted-down toolbox for do-it-yourselfers who had ailing cars but no tools. The ceiling overhead was high, and crossed with naked, gantrylike beams.

Signs were plastered everywhere: ALL TOOLS MUST BE INSPECTED BEFORE YOU LEAVE and MAKE APPOINTMENT FOR LIFT-TIME IN ADVANCE and MOTOR MANUALS ON FIRST-COME FIRST-SERVE BASIS and NO PROFANITY OR SWEARING WILL BE TOLERATED. Dozens of others; everywhere you turned, one seemed to jump right out at you. A big sign-man was Will Darnell.

“Stall twenty! Stall twenty!” Darnell yelled at Arnie in his irritable, wheezy voice. “Get it over there and shut it off before we all choke!”

“We all” seemed to be a group of men at an oversized cardtable in the far corner. Poker-chips, cards, and bottles of beer were scattered across the table. They were looking at Arnie’s new acquisition with varying expressions of disgust and amusement.

Arnie drove across to stall twenty, parked it, and shut it off. Blue exhaust drifted in the huge, cavernous space.

Darnell turned to me. He was wearing a sail-like white shirt and brown khaki pants. Great rolls of fat bulged out his neck and hung in dewlaps from below his chin.

“Kiddo,” he said in that same wheezing voice, “if you sold him that piece of shit, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“I didn’t sell it to him.” For some absurd reason I felt I had to justify myself before this fat slob in a way I wouldn’t have done before my own father. “I tried to talk him out of it.”

“You should have talked harder.” He walked across to where Arnie was getting out of his car. He slammed the door; rust flaked down from the rocker panel on that side in a fine red shower.

Asthma or no asthma, Darnell walked with the graceful, almost feminine movements of a man who has been fat for a long time and sees a long future of fathood ahead of him. And he was yelling at Arnie before Arnie even got turned around, asthma or not. I guess you could say he was a man who hadn’t let his infirmities get him down.

Like the kids in the smoking area at school, like Ralph on Basin Drive, like Buddy Repperton (we’ll be talking about him all too soon, I’m afraid), he had taken an instant dislike to Arnie—it was a case of hate at first sight.

“Okay, that’s the last time you run that mechanical asshole in here without the exhaust hose!” he yelled. “I catch you doin it, you’re out, you understand?”

“Yes.” Arnie looked small and tired and whipped. Whatever wild energy had carried him this far was gone now. It broke my heart a little to see him looking that way. “I—”

Darnell didn’t let him get any further. “You want an exhaust hose, that’s two-fifty an hour if you reserve in advance. And I’m telling you something else right now, and you want to take it to heart, my young friend. I don’t take any shit from you kids. I don’t have to. This place is for working guys that got to keep their cars running so they can put bread on the table, not for rich college kids who want to go out dragging on the Orange Belt. I don’t allow no smoking in here. If you want a butt, you go outside in the junkyard.”

“I don’t sm—”

“Don’t interrupt me, son. Don’t interrupt me and don’t get smart,” Darnell said. Now he was standing in front of Arnie. Being both taller and wider, he blotted my friend out entirely.

I began to get angry again. I could actually feel my body moan in protest at the yo-yo string my emotions had been on ever since we pulled up to LeBay’s house and saw that the damned car wasn’t on the lawn anymore.

Kids are a downtrodden class; after a few years you learn to do your own version of an Uncle Tom routine on kid-baters like Will Darnell. Yessir, nosir, okay, you bet. But, Jesus, he was laying it on thick.

I suddenly grabbed Darnell’s arm. “Sir?”

He swung around on me. I find that the more I dislike adults, the more apt I am to call them Sir.

“What?”

“Those men over there are smoking. You better tell them to stop.” I pointed to the guys at the poker table. They had dealt out a fresh hand. Smoke hung over the table in a blue haze.

Darnell looked at them, then back at me. His face wag very solemn, “You trying to help your buddy right out of here, Junior?”

“No,” I said. “Sir.

“Then shut your pie-hole.”

He turned back to Arnie and put his meaty hands on his wide, well-padded hips.

“I know a creep when I see one,” he said, “and I think I’m looking at one right now. You’re on probation, kid. You screw around with me just one time and it don’t matter how much you paid up in front, I’ll put you out on your ass.”

Dull fury went up from my stomach to my head and made it throb. Inside I begged Arnie to tell this fat fuck to bore it and stroke it and then drive it straight up his old tan track just as fast and far as it would go. Of course then Darnell’s poker buddies would get into it and we’d both probably end this enchanting evening at the emergency room of Libertyville Community Hospital getting our heads stitched up… but it would almost be worth it.

Arnie, I begged inside, tell him to shove it and let’s get out of here. Stand up to him, Arnie. Don’t let him pull this shit on you. Don’t be a loser, Arnie—if you can stand up to your mother, you can stand up to this happy asshole. Just this once, don’t be a loser.

Arnie stood silent for a long time, his head down, and then he said, “Yessir.” The word was so low it was nearly inaudible. It sounded as if he was choking on it.

“What did you say?”

Arnie looked up.His face was deadly pale. His eye’s were swimming with tears. I couldn’t look at that. It hurt me too bad to look at that. I turned away. The poker players had suspended their game to watch developments over at stall twenty.

“I said, “Yessir,” Arnie said in a trembling voice. It was as if he had just signed his name to some terrible confession. I looked at the car again, the ’58 Plymouth, sitting in here when it should have been out back in the junkyard with the rest of Darnell’s rotten plugs, and I hated it all over again for what it was doing to Arnie.

“Arright, get out of here,” Darnell said. “We’re closed.”

Arnie stumbled away blindly. He would have walked right into a stack of old bald tyres if I hadn’t grabbed his arm and steered him away. Darnell went back the other way to the poker table. When he got there he said something to the others in his wheezy voice. They all roared with laughter.

“I’m all right, Dennis,” Arnie said, as if I had asked him. His teeth were locked together and his chest was heaving in quick, shallow breaths. “I’m all right, let go of me, I’m all right, I’m okay.”

I let go of his arm. We walked across to the door and Darnell hollered at us, “And you ain’t going to bring your hoodlum friends in here, or you’re out!”

One of the others chimed, “And leave your dope at home!”

Arnie cringed. He was my friend, but I hated him when he cringed that way.

We escaped into the cool darkness. The door rattled down behind us. And that’s how we got Christine to Darnell’s Garage. Some great time, huh?

6 OUTSIDE

We got into my car and I drove out of the yard. Somehow it had gotten around to past nine o’clock. How the time flies when you’re having fun. A half-moon stood out in the sky. That and the orange lights in the acres of parking lot at the Monroeville Mall took care of any wishing stars there might have been.

We drove the first two or three blocks in utter I silence, and then Arnie suddenly burst into a fury of weeping. I had thought he might cry, but the force of this frightened me. I pulled over immediately.

“Arnie—”

I gave up right there. He was going to do it until it was done. The tears and the sobs came in a shrill, bitter flood, and they came without restraint—Arnie had used up his quota of restraint for the day. At first it seemed to be nothing but reaction; I felt the same sort of thing myself, only mine had gone to my head, making it ache like a rotted tooth, and to my stomach, which was sickly clenched up.

So, yeah, at first I thought it was nothing but a reaction sort of thing, a spontaneous release, and maybe at first it was. But after a minute or two, I realised it was a lot more than that; it went a lot deeper than that. And I began to get words out of the sounds he was making: just a few at first, then strings of them.

“I’ll get them!” he shouted thickly through the sobs. “I’ll “get those fucking sons of bitches I’ll get them Dennis. I’ll make them sorry I’ll make those fuckers eat it… EAT IT… EAT IT!”

“Stop it,” I said, scared. “Arnie, quit it.”

But he wouldn’t quit it. He began to slam his fists down on the padded dashboard of my Duster, hard enough to make marks.

“I’ll get them you see if I don’t!”

In the dim glow of the moon and a nearby streetlight, his face looked ravaged and haglike. He was like a stranger to me then. He was off walking in whatever cold places of the universe a fun-loving God reserves for people like him. I didn’t know him. I didn’t want to know him. I could only sit there helplessly and hope that the Arnie I did know would come back. After a while, he did.

The hysterical words disappeared into sobs again. The hate was gone and he was only crying. It was a deep, bawling, bewildered sound.

I sat there behind the wheel of my car, not sure what I should do, wishing I was someplace else, anyplace else, trying on shoes at Thom McAn’s, filling out a credit application in a discount store, standing in front of a pay toilet stall with diarrhoea and no dime. Anyplace, man. It didn’t have to be Monte Carlo. Mostly I sat there wishing I was older. Wishing we were both older.

But that was a copout job. I knew what to do. Reluctantly, not wanting to, I slid across the seat and put my arms around him and held him. I could feel his face, hot and fevered, mashed against my chest. We sat that way for maybe five minutes, and then I drove him to his house and dropped him off. After that I went home myself. Neither of us talked about it later, me holding him like that. No one came along the sidewalk and saw us parked at the kerb. I suppose if someone had, we would have looked like a couple of queers, I sat there and held him and loved him the best I could and wondered how come it had to be that I was Arnie Cunningham’s only friend, because right then, believe me, I didn’t want to be his friend.

Yet, somehow—I realized it then, if only dimly—maybe Christine was going to be his friend now, too. I wasn’t sure if I liked that either, although we had been through the same shit-factory on her behalf that long crazy day.

When we rolled up to the kerb in front of his house I said, “You going to be all right, man?”

He managed a smile. “Yeah, I’ll be okay.” He looked at me sadly. “You know, you ought to find some other favourite charity. Heart Fund. Cancer Society. Something.”

“Ahh, get out of here.”

“You know what I mean.”

“If you mean you’re a wet end, you’re not telling me anything I didn’t know.”

The front porch light came on, and both Michael and Regina came flying out, probably to see if it was us or the State Police come to inform them that their only chick and child had been run over on the highway.

“Arnold?” Regina called shrilly.

“Bug out, Dennis,” Arnie said, grinning a little more honestly now. “This shit you don’t need.” He got out of the car and said dutifully, “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”

“Where have you been?” Michael asked. “You had your mother badly frightened, young man!”

Arnie was right. I could do without the reunion scene. I glanced back in the rearview mirror just briefly and saw him standing there, looking solitary and vulnerable—and then the two of them enfolded him and began shepherding him back to the $60,000 nest, no doubt turning the full force of all their latest parenting trips on him—Parent Effectiveness Training, est, who knows what else. They were so perfectly rational about it, that was the thing. They had played such a large part in what he was, and they were just too motherfucking (and fatherfucking) rational to see it.

I turned the radio on to FM-104, where the Block Party Weekend was continuing, and got Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band singing “Still the Same”. The serendipity was just a little too hideously perfect, and I dialled away to the Phillies game.

The Phillies were losing. That was all right. That was par for the course.

7 BAD DREAMS

When I got home, my dad and my sister were sitting in the kitchen eating brown-sugar sandwiches. I started feeling hungry right away and realised I’d never gotten any supper.

“Where you been, Boss?” Elaine asked, hardly looking up from her 16 or Creem or Tiger Beat or whatever it was. She had been calling me Boss ever since I discovered Bruce Springsteen the year before and became a fanatic. It was supposed to get under my skin.

At fourteen Elaine was beginning to leave her childhood behind and to turn into the full-fledged American beauty that she eventually became—tall, dark-haired, and blue-eyed. But in that late summer of 1978 she was the total teenaged crowd animal. She had begun with Donny and Marie at nine, then had gotten all moony for John Travolta at eleven (I made the mistake of calling him John Revolta one day and she scratched me so badly that I almost needed a stitch in my cheek—I supposed I deserved it, sort of). At twelve she was gone for Shaun. Then it was Andy Gibb. Just lately she had developed more ominous tastes: heavymetal rockers like Deep Purple and a new group, Styx.

“I was helping Arnie get his car squared away, I said, as much to my father as to Ellie. More, really.

“That creep.” Ellie sighed and turned the page of her magazine.

I felt a sudden and amazingly strong urge to rip the magazine out of her hands, tear it in two, and throw the pieces in her face. That went further toward showing me exactly how stressful the day had been than anything else could have done. Elaine doesn’t really think Arnie’s a creep; she just takes every possible opportunity to get under my skin. But maybe I had heard Arnie called a creep too often over the last few hours. His tears were still drying on the front of my shirt, for Christ’s sake, and maybe I felt a little bit creepy myself.

“What’s Kiss doing these days, dear?” I asked her sweetly. “Written any love-letters to Erik Estrada lately? “Oh, Erik, I’d die for you, I go into a total cardiac arrest every time I think of your thick, greasy lips squelching down on mine… ““

“You’re an animal,” she said coldly. “Just an animal, that’s all you are.”

“And I don’t know any better.”

“That’s right.” She picked up her magazine and her brown-sugar sandwich and flounced away into the living room.

“Don’t you get that stuff on the floor, Ellie,” Dad warned her, spoiling her exit a bit.

I went to the fridge and rummaged out some bologna and a tomato that didn’t look as if it was working. There was also half a package of processed cheese, but wild overindulgence in that shit as a grade-schooler had apparently destroyed my craving for it. I settled for a quart of milk to go with my sandwich and opened a can of Campbell’s Chunky Beef.

“Did he get it?” Dad asked me. My dad is a tax-consultant for H&R Block. He also does freelance tax work. In the old days he used to be a full-time accountant for the biggest architectural firm in Pittsburgh, but then he had a heart attack and got out. He’s a good man. “Yeah, he got it.”

“Still look as bad to you as it did?”

“Worse. Where’s Mom?”

“Her class,” he said.

His eyes met mine, and we both almost got the giggles. We immediately looked away in separate directions, ashamed of ourselves—but even being honestly ashamed didn’t seem to help much. My mom is forty-three and works as a dental hygienist. For a long time she didn’t work at her trade, but after Dad had his heart attack, she went back.

Four years ago she decided she was an unsung writer. She began to produce poems about flowers and stories about sweet old men in the October of their years. Every now and then she would get grittily realistic and do a story about a young girt who was tempted “to take a chance” and then decided it would be immeasurably better if she Saved It for the Marriage Bed. This summer she had signed up for a directed writing course at Horlicks—where Michael and Regina Cunningham taught, you will remember—and was putting all her themes and stories in a book she called Sketches of Love and Beauty.

Now you could be saying to yourself (and more power to you if you are) that there is nothing funny about a woman who has managed to hold a job and also to raise her family deciding to try something new, to expand her horizons a little. And of course you’d be right. Also you could be saying to yourself that my father and I had every reason to be ashamed of ourselves, that we were nothing more than a couple of male sexist pigs oinking it up in our kitchen, and again you’d be perfectly right. I won’t argue either point, although I will say that if you had been subjected to frequent oral readings from Sketches of Love and Beauty, as Dad and I—and also Elaine—had been, you might understand the source of the giggles a little better.

Well, she was and is a great mom, and I guess she is also a great wife for my father—at least I never heard him complain, and he’s never stayed out all night drinking and all I can say in our defence is that we never laughed to her face, either of us. That’s pretty poor, I know, but at least it’s better than nothing. Neither of us would have hurt her like that for the world.

I put a hand over my mouth and tried to squeeze the giggles off. Dad appeared to be momentarily choking on his bread and brown-sugar. I don’t know what he was thinking of, but what had lodged in my mind was a fairly recent essay entitled “Did Jesus Have a Dog?”

On top of the rest of the day, it was nearly too much.

I went to the cabinets over the sink and got a glass for my milk, and when I looked back, my father had himself under control again. That helped me do likewise.

“You looked sort of glum when you came in,” he said. “Is everything all right with Arnie, Dennis?”

“Arnie’s cool,” I said, dumping the soup into a saucepan and throwing it on the stove. “He just bought a car, and that’s a mess, but Arnie’s all right.” Of course Arnie wasn’t all right, but there are some things you can’t bring yourself to tell your dad, no matter how well he’s succeeding at the great American job of dadhood.

“Sometimes people can’t see things until they see them for themselves,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I hope he sees it soon. He’s got the car at Darnell’s for twenty a week because his folks didn’t want him to park it at home.”

“Twenty a week? For just a stall? Or a stall and tools?”

“Just a stall.”

“That’s highway robbery.”

“Yeah,” I said, noticing that my father didn’t follow up that judgement with an offer that Arnie could park it at our place.

“You want to play a game of cribbage?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Cheer up, Dennis. You can’t make other peoples mistakes for them.”

“Yeah, really.”

We played three or four games of cribbage, and he beat me every time—he almost always does, unless he’s very tired or has had a couple of drinks. That’s okay with me, though, The times that I do beat him mean more. We played cribbage, and after a while my mother came in, her colour high and her eyes glowing, looking too young to be my mom, her book of stories and sketches clasped to her breasts. She kissed my father—not her usual brush, but a real kiss that made me feel all of a sudden like I should be someplace else.

She asked me the same stuff about Arnie and his car, which was fast becoming the biggest topic of conversation around the house since my mother’s brother, Sid, went into bankruptcy and asked my dad for a loan. I went through the same song-and-dance. Then I went upstairs to bed. My ass was dragging, and it looked to me as if my mom and dad had business of their own to attend to… although that was a topic I never went into all that deeply in my mind, as I’m sure you’ll understand.

Elaine was in on her bed, listening to the latest K-Tel conglomeration of hits. I asked her to turn it down because I was going to bed. She stuck out her tongue at me. No way I allow that kind of thing. I went in and tickled her until she said she was going to puke. I said go ahead and puke, it’s your bed, and tickled her some more. Then she put on her “please don’t kid me Dennis because this is something terribly important” expression and got all solemn and asked me if it was really true you could light farts. One of her girlfriends, Carolyn Shambliss, said it was, but Carolyn lied about almost everything.

I told her to ask Milton Dodd, her dorky-looking boyfriend. Then Elaine really did get mad and tried to hit me and asked me why do you always have to be so awful, Dennis? So I told her yes, it was true you could light farts, and advised her not to try it, and then I gave her a hug (which I rarely did anymore—it made me uncomfortable since she started to get boobs, and so did the tickling, to tell the truth) and then I went to bed.

And undressing, I thought, The day didn’t end so bad, after all. There are people around here who think I’m a human being, and they think Arnie is, as well, I’ll get him to come over tomorrow or Sunday and we’ll just hang out, watch the Phillies on TV, maybe, or play some dumb board-game, Careers or Life or maybe that old standby, Clue, and get rid of the weirdness. Get feeling decent again.

So I went to bed with everything straight in my mind, and I should have gone right to sleep, but I didn’t. Because it wasn’t straight, and I knew it. Things get started, and sometimes you don’t know what the hell they are.

Engines. That’s something else about being a teenager. There are all these engines, and somehow you end up with the ignition keys to some of them and you start them up but you don’t know what the fuck they are or what they’re supposed to do. There are clues, but that’s all. The drug thing is like that, and the booze thing, and the sex thing, and sometimes other stuff too—a summer job that generates a new interest, a trip, a course in school. Engines. They give you the keys and some clues and they say, Start it up, see what it will do, and sometimes what it does is pull you along into a life that’s really good and fulfilling, and sometimes what it does is pull you right down the highway to hell and leave you all mangled and bleeding by the roadside.

Engines.

Big ones. Like the 382s they used to put in those old cars. Like Christine.

I lay there in the dark, twisting and turning until the sheet was pulled out and all balled up and messy, and I thought about LeBay saying, Her name is Christine. And somehow, Arnie had picked up on that. When we were little kids we had scooters and then bikes, and I named mine but Arnie never named his—he said names were for dogs and cats and guppies. But that was then and this was now. Now he was calling that Plymouth Christine, and, what was somehow worse, it was always “her” and “she” instead of “it”.

I didn’t like it, and I didn’t know why.

And even my own father had spoken of it as if, instead of buying an old junker, Arnie had gotten married. But it wasn’t like that. Not at all. Was it?

Stop the car, Dennis. Go back… I want to look at her again.

Simple as that.

No consideration at all, and that wasn’t like Arnie, who usually thought things out so carefully—his life had made him all too painfully aware of what happened to guys like him when they went off half-cocked and did something (gasp!) on impulse. But this time he had been like a man who meets a showgirl, indulges in a whirlwind courtship, and ends up with a hangover and a new wife on Monday morning.

It had been… well… like love at first sight.

Never mind, I thought. We’ll start over again. Tomorrow we’ll start over. We’ll get some perspective on this.

And so finally I went to sleep. And dreamed.

The whining spin of a starter in darkness.

Silence.

The starter, whining again.

The engineered, missed, then caught.

An engine running in darkness.

Then headlights came on, high beams, old-fashioned twin beams, spearing me like a bug on glass.

I was standing in the open doorway of Roland D. LeBay’s garage, and Christine sat inside—a new Christine with not a dent or a speck of rust on her. The clean, unblemished windscreen darkened to a polarized blue strip at the top. From the radio came the hard rhythmic sounds of Dale Hawkins doing “Susie-Q”—a voice from a dead age, full of a somehow frightening vitality.

The motor muttering words of power through dual glasspack silencers. And somehow I knew there was a Hurst gearbox inside, and Feully headers; the Quaker State oil had just been changed—it was a clean amber colour, automotive lifeblood.

The wipers suddenly start up, and that’s strange because there’s no one behind the wheel, the car is empty.

Come on, big guy. Let’s go for a ride. Let’s cruise.

I shake my head. I don’t want to get in there. I’m scared to get in there. I don’t want to cruise. And suddenly the engine begins to rev and fall off, rev and fall off; it’s a hungry sound, frightening, and each time the engine revs Christine seems to lunge forward a bit, like a mean dog on a weak leash… and I want to move… but my feet seem nailed to the cracked pavement of the driveway.

— Last chance, big guy.

And before I can answer—or even think of an answer—there is the terrible scream of rubber kissing off concrete and Christine lunges out at me, her grille snarling like an open mouth full of chrome teeth, her headlights glaring—

I screamed myself awake in the dead darkness of two in the morning, the sound of my own voice scaring me, the hurried, running thud of bare feet coming down the hall scaring me even worse. I had double handfuls of sheet in both hands. I’d pulled the sheet right out; it was all wadded up in the middle of the bed. My body was sweat-slippery.

Down the hall, Ellie cried out “What was that?” in her own terror.

My light flooded on and there was my mom in a shorty nightgown that showed more than she would have allowed except in the direst of emergencies, and right behind her, my dad, belting his bathrobe closed over nothing at all.

“Honey, what is it?” my mom asked me. Her eyes were wide and scared. I couldn’t remember the last time she had called me “honey” like that—when I was fourteen? twelve? ten, maybe? I don’t know.

“Dennis?” Dad asked.

Then Elaine was standing behind and between them, shivering.

“Go back to bed,” I said. “It was a dream, that’s all. Nothing.”

“Wow,” Elaine said, shocked into respect by the hour and the occasion. “Must have been a real horror-movie. What was it, Dennis?”

“I dreamed that you married Milton Dodd and then came to live with me,” I said.

“Don’t tease your sister,” Mom said. “What was it, Dennis?”

“I don’t remember, I said.

I was suddenly aware that the sheet was a mess, and there was a dark tuft of pubic hair poking out. I rearranged things in a hurry, with guilty thoughts of masturbation, wet dreams, God knows what else shooting through my head. Total dislocation. For that first spinning moment or two, I hadn’t even been sure if I was big or little—there was only that dark, terrifying, and overmastering image of the car lunging forward a little each time the engine revved, dropping back, lunging forward again, the hood vibrating over the engine-bucket, the grille like steel teeth—

Last chance, big guy.

Then my mother’s hand, cool and dry, was on my forehead, hunting fever.

“It’s all right, Mom,” I said. “It was nothing. Just a nightmare.”

“But you don’t remember—”

“No. It’s gone now.”

“I was scared,” she said, and then uttered a shaky little laugh. “I guess you don’t know what scared is until one of your kids screams in the dark.”

“Ugh, gross, don’t talk about it,” Elaine said.

“Go back to bed, little one,” Dad said, and gave her butt a light swat.

She went, not looking totally happy about it. Maybe once she was over her own initial fright, she was hoping I’d break down and have hysterics. That would have given her a real scoop with the training bra set down at the rec programme in the morning.

“You really okay?” my mother asked. “Dennis? Hon?” That word again, bringing back memories of knees scraped failing out of my red wagon; her face, lingering over my bed as it had while I lay in the feverish throes of all those childhood illnesses—mumps, measles, a bout of scarlet fever. Making me feel absurdly like crying. I had nine inches and seventy pounds on her.

“Sure,” I said.

“All right,” she said. “Leave the light on. Sometimes it helps.”

And with a final doubtful look at my dad, she went out. I had something to be bemused about—the idea that my mother had ever had a nightmare. One of those things that never occur to you, I guess. Whatever her nightmares were, none of them had ever found their way into Sketches of Love and Beauty.

My dad sat down on the bed. “You really don’t remember what it was about?”

I shook my head.

“Must have been bad, to make you yell like that Dennis.” His eyes were on mine, gravely asking if there was something he should know.

I almost told him—the car it was Amie’s goddam car, Christine the Rust Queen, twenty years old, ugly fucking thing. I almost told him. But then somehow it choked in my throat, almost as if to speak would have been to betray my friend. Good old Arnie, whom a fun-loving God had decided to swat with the ugly-stick.

“All right,” he said, and kissed my cheek. I could feel his beard, those stiff little bristles that only come out at night, I could smell his sweat and feel his love. I hugged him hard, and he hugged me back.

Then they were all gone, and I lay there with the bedtable lamp burning, afraid to go back to sleep. I got a book and lay back down, knowing that my folks were lying awake downstairs in their room, wondering if I was in some kind of a mess, or if I had gotten someone else—the cheerleader with the fantastic body, maybe—in some kind of a mess.

I decided sleep was an impossibility. I would read until daylight and catch a nap tomorrow afternoon, maybe, during the dull part of the ballgame. And thinking that, I fell asleep and woke up in the morning with the book lying unopened on the floor beside the bed.

8 FIRST CHANGES

I thought Arnie would turn up that Saturday, so I hung around the house—mowed the lawn, cleaned up the garage, even washed all three cars. My mother watched all this industry with some amazement and commented over a lunch of hotdogs and green salad that maybe I should have nightmares more often.

I didn’t want to phone Arnie’s house, not after all the unpleasantness I had seen there lately, but when the pre-game show came on and he still hadn’t shown, I took my courage in my hands and called. Regina answered, and although she was doing a good facsimile of nothing-has-changed, I thought I detected a new coolness in her voice. It made me feel sad. Her only son had been seduced by a baggy old whore named Christine, and old buddy Dennis must have been an accomplice. Maybe he had even pimped the deal. Arnie wasn’t home, she said. He was at Darnell’s Garage. He had been there since nine that morning.

“Oh,” I said lamely. “Oh, wow. I didn’t know that.” It sounded like a lie. Even more, it felt like a lie.

“No?” Regina said in that new cool way. “Goodbye, Dennis.”

The phone was dead in my hand. I looked at it awhile and then hung up.

Dad was parked in front of the TV in his gross purple Bermudas and his Jesus-shoes, a six-pack of Stroh’s crashed down in the cooler beside him. The Phillies were having a good day, belting the almighty hell out of Atlanta. My mom had gone out to visit one of her classmates (I think they read each other their sketches and poems and got exalted together). Elaine had gone over, to her friend Della’s house. Our place was quiet; outside, the sun played tag with a few benign white clouds. Dad gave me a beer, which he does only when he’s feeling extraordinarily mellow.

But Saturday still felt flat. I kept thinking of Arnie, not watching the Phillies or soaking up the rays, not even mowing the grass over at his house and getting his feet green. Arnie in the oily shadows of Will Darnell’s Do-It-Yourself Garage, playing games with that silent, rusting hulk while men shouted and tools clanged on the cement with that piercing white-metal sound, the machine-gun drill of pneumatic guns loosening old bolts. Will Darnell’s wheezy voice and asthmatic cough—

And goddammit, was I jealous? Was that what it was?

When the seventh inning came along I got up and started to go out.

“Where are you going?” my dad asked.

Yeah, just where was I going? Down there? To watch him, cluck over him, listen to Will Darnell get on his case? Heading for another dose of misery? Fuck it. Arnie was a big boy now.

“Noplace,” I said. I found a Twinkie tucked carefully away in the back of the breadbox and took it with a certain doleful glee, knowing how pissed Elaine was going to be when she shlepped out during one of the commercials on Saturday Night Live and found it gone. “Noplace at all.”

I came back into the living room and sat down and cadged another beer off my dad and ate Elaine’s Twinkie and even lapped the cardboard it had been on. We watched Philly finish the job of ruining Atlanta (“They roont em, Denny,” I could hear my grandfather, now five years dead, saying in his cackly old man’s voice, “they roont em good!”) and didn’t think about Arnie Cunningiiam at all.

Hardly at all.

He came over on his tacky old three-speed the next afternoon while Elaine and I were playing croquet on the back lawn. Elaine kept accusing me of cheating. She was on one of her rips. Elaine always went on “rips” when she was “getting her period”. Elaine was very proud of her period. She had been having one regularly all of fourteen months.

“Hey,” Arnie said, ambling round the corner of the house, “it’s either the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Bride of Frankenstein or Dennis and Ellie.”

“What do you say, man?” I asked. “Grab a mallet.”

“I’m not playing,” Elaine said, throwing her mallet down. “He cheats even worse than you do. Men!”

As she stalked off, Arnie said in a trembling affected voice, “That’s the first time she ever called me a man, Dennis.”

He fell to his knees, a look of exalted adoration on his face. I started laughing. He could do it good when he wanted to, Arnie could. That was one of the reasons I liked him as well as I did. And it was a kind of secret thing, you know. I don’t think anyone really saw that wit except me. I once heard about some millionaire who had a stolen Rembrandt in his basement where no one but him could see it. I could understand that guy. I don’t mean that Arnie was a Rembrandt, or even a world-class wit, but I could understand the attraction of knowing about something good… something that was good but still a secret.

We goofed around the croquet course for a while, not really playing, just whopping the Jesus out of each other’s balls. Finally, one went through the hedge into the Blackfords’ yard, and after I crawled through to get it, neither of us wanted to play anymore. We sat down in the lawn chairs. Pretty soon our cat, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Captain Beefheart’s replacement, came creeping out from under the porch, probably hoping to find some cute little chipmunk to murder slowly and nastily. His amber-green eyes glinted in the afternoon light, which was overcast and muted.

“Thought you’d be over for the game yesterday,” I said. “It was a good one.”

“I was at Darnell’s,” he said. “Heard it on the radio, though.” His voice went up three octaves and he did a very good imitation of my grandad. “They roont em! They roont em, Denny!”

I laughed and nodded. There was something about him that day—perhaps it was only the light, which was bright enough but still somehow gloomy and spare—something that looked different. He looked tired, for one thing there were circles under his eyes—but at the same time his complexion seemed a trifle better than it had been lately. He had been drinking a lot of Cokes on the job, knowing he shouldn’t, of course, but unable to help succumbing to temptation from time to time. His skin problems tended to go in cycles, as most teenagers’ do, depending on their moods—except in Arnie’s case, the cycles were usually from bad to worse and back to bad again.

Or maybe it was just the light.

“What’d you do on it?” I asked.

“Not much. Changed the oil. Looked the block over. It’s not cracked, Dennis, that’s one thing. LeBay or somebody left the drain plug out somewhere along the line, that’s all. A lot of the old oil had leaked out. I was lucky not to fry a piston driving it Friday night.”

“How’d you get lift-time? I thought you had to reserve that in advance.”

His eyes shifted away from mine. “No problem there,” he said, but there was deception in his voice. “I ran a couple of errands for Mr Darnell.”

I opened my mouth to ask what errands, and then I decided I didn’t want to hear. Probably the “couple of errands” boiled down to no more than running around the corner to Schirmer’s Luncheonette and bringing back coffee—and for the regulars or crating up various used auto parts for later sale, but I didn’t want to be involved in the Christine end of Arnie’s life, and that included how he was getting along (or not getting along) down at Darnell’s Garage.

And there was something else—a feeling of letting go. I either couldn’t define that feeling very well back then or didn’t want to. Now I guess I’d say it’s the way you feel when a friend of yours falls in love and marries a right high-riding, dyed-in-the-wool bitch. You don’t like the bitch and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the bitch doesn’t like you, so you just close the door on that room of your friendship. When the thing is done, you either let go of the subject… or you find your friend letting go of you, usually with the bitch’s enthusiastic approval.

“Let’s go to the movies,” Arnie said restlessly.

“What’s on?”

“Well, there’s one of those gross Kung-fu movies down at the State Twin, how does that sound? Heee-yah!” He pretended to administer a savage karate kick to Screaming Jay Hawkins, and Screaming Jay took off like a shot.

“Sounds pretty good. Bruce Lee?”

“Nah, some other guy.”

“What’s it called?”

“I don’t know. Fists of Danger. Flying Hands of Death. Or maybe it was Genitals of Fury, I don’t know. What do you say? We can come back and tell the gross parts to Ellie and make her puke.”

“All right,” I said. “If we can still get in for a buck each.”

“Yeah, we can until three.”

“Let’s go.”

We went. It turned out to be a Chuck Norris movie, not bad at all. And on Monday we went back to building the Interstate extension. I forgot about my dream. Gradually I realized that I wasn’t seeing as much of Arnie as I used to; again, it was the way you seem to fall out of touch with a guy who has just gotten married. Besides, my thing with the cheerleader began to heat up around then. My thing was heating up, all right—more than one night I brought her home from the submarine races at the drive-in with my balls throbbing so badly I could barely walk.

Arnie, meanwhile, was spending most of his evenings at Darnell’s.

9 BUDDY REPPERTON

Our last full week of work before school started was the week before Labor Day. When I pulled up to Arnie’s house to pick him up that morning, he came out with a great big blue-black shiner around one eye and an ugly scrape upside his face.

“What happened to you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said sullenly. “I had to talk to my parents about it until I thought I was gonna croak.” He tossed his lunch pail in the back and lapsed into a grim silence that lasted all the way to work. Some of the other guys ribbed him about his shiner, but Arnie just shrugged it off.

I didn’t say anything about it on the Way home, just played the radio and kept myself to myself. And I might not have heard the story at all if I hadn’t been waylaid by this greasy Irish wop named Gino just before we turned off Main Street.

Back then Gino was always waylaying me—he could reach right through a closed car window and do it. Gino’s Fine Italian Pizza is on the corner of Main and Basin Drive, and every time I saw that sign with the pizza going up in the air and all the i’s dotted with shamrocks (it flashed off and on at night, how funky can you get, am I right?), I’d feel the waylaying start again. And tonight my mother would be in class, which meant a pick-up supper at home. The prospect didn’t fill me with joy. Neither my dad nor I was much of a cook, and Ellie would burn water.

“Let’s get a pizza,” I said, pulling into Gino’s parking lot. “What do you say? A big greasy one that smells like armpits.”

“Jesus, Dennis, that’s gross!”

“Clean armpits,” I amended. “Come on.”

“Nah, I’m pretty low on cash,” Arnie said listlessly.

“I’ll buy. You can even have those horrible fucking anchovies on your half. What do you say?”

“Dennis, I really don’t—”

“And a Pepsi,” I said.

“Pepsi racks my complexion. You know that.”

“Yeah, I know. A great big Pepsi, Arnie.”

His grey eyes gleamed for the first time that day, “A great big Pepsi,” he echoed. “Think of that. You’re mean, Dennis. Really.”

“Two, if you want,” I said. It was mean, all right—like offering Hershey bars to the circus fat lady.

“Two,” he said, clutching my shoulder. “Two Pepsis, Dennis!” He began to flop around in the seat, clawing at his throat and screaming, “Two! Quick! Two! Quick!”

I was laughing so hard I almost drove into the cinderblock wall, and as we got out of the car, I thought, Why shouldn’t he have a couple of sodas? He sure must have been steering clear of them lately. The slight improvement in his complexion I’d noticed on that overcast Sunday two weeks ago was definite now. He still had plenty of bumps and craters, but not so many of them were—pardon me, but I must say it—oozing. He looked better in other ways too. A summer of road-ganging had left him deeply tanned and in better shape than he’d ever been in his life. So I thought he deserved his Pepsi. To the victor goes the spoils.

Gino’s is run by a wonderful Italian fellow named Pat Donahue. He has a sticker on his cash register which reads IRISH MAFIA, he serves green beer on St Patrick’s Day (on March 17th you can’t even get near Gino’s, and one of the cuts on the jukebox is Rosemary Clooney singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling), and affects a black derby hat, which he usually wears tipped far back on his head.

The juke is an old Wurtitzer bubbler, a holdover from the late forties, and all the records—not just Rosemary Clooney—are on the Prehistoric label. It may be the last jukebox in America where you can get three plays for a quarter. On the infrequent occasions when I smoke a little dope, it’s Gino’s I fantasize about—just walking in there and ordering three loaded pizzas, a quart of Pepsi, and six or seven of Pat Donahues home-made fudge brownies. Then I imagine just sitting down and scarfing everything up while a steady stream of Beach Boys and Rolling Stones hits pours out of that juke.

We went in, ordered up, and sat there watching the three pizza cooks fling the dough into the air and catch it. They were trading such pungent Italian witticisms as, “I seenya at the Shriners” dance last night, Howie, who was that skag your brother was wit?” “Oh, her? That was your sister.”

I mean, like, how Old World can you get?

People came in and went out, a lot of them kids from school. Before long I’d be seeing them in the halls again, and I felt a recurrence of that fierce nostalgia-in-advance and that sense of fright. In my head I could hear the home-room bell going off, but somehow its long bray sounded like an alarm: Here we go again, Dennis, last time, after this year you got to learn how to be a grown-up. I could hear locker doors crashing closed, could hear the steady ka-chonk, ka-chonk, ka-chonk, of linemen hitting the tackling dummies, could hear Marty Bellerman yelling exuberantly, “My ass and your face, Pedersen! Remember that! My ass and your face! It’s easier to tell the fuckin Bobbsey Twins apart!” The dry smell of chalk-dust in the classrooms in the Math Wing. The sound of the typewriters from the big secretarial classrooms on the second floor. Mr Meecham, the principal, giving the announcements at the end of the day in his dry, fussy voice. Lunch outdoors on the bleachers in good weather. A new crop of freshmen looking dorky and lost. And at the end of it all, you march down the aisle in this big purple bathrobe, and that’s it. High school’s over. You are released on an unsuspecting world.

“Dennis, do you know Buddy Repperton?” Arnie asked, pulling me out of my reverie. Our pizza had come.

“Buddy who?”

“Repperton.”

The name was familiar. I worked on my side of the pizza and tried to put a face with it. After a while, it came. I had had a run-in with him when I was one of the dorky little freshmen. It happened at a mixer dance. The band was taking a break and I was waiting in the cold-drink line to get a soda. “Repperton gave me a shove and told me freshmen had to wait until all the upperclassmen got drinks. He had been a sophomore then, a big, hulking, mean sophomore. He had a lantern jaw, a thick clot of greasy black hair, and little eyes set too close together. But those eyes were not entirely stupid; an unpleasant intelligence lurked in them. He was one of those guys who spend their high school time majoring in Smoking Area.

I had advanced the heretical opinion that class seniority didn’t mean anything in the refreshment line. Repperton invited me to come outside with him. By then the cold-drink line had broken up and rearranged itself into one of those cautious but eager little circles that so often presage a scuffle. One of the chaperones came along and broke it up. Repperton promised he would get me, but he never did. And that had been my only contact with him, except for seeing his name every now and then on the detention list that circulated to the home rooms at the end of the day. It seemed to me that he’d been dismissed from school a couple of times, too, and when that happened it was usually a pretty good sign that the guy wasn’t in the Young Christian League.

I told Arnie about my one experience with Repperton, and he nodded wearily. He touched the shiner, which was now turning a gruesome lemon colour. “He was the one.”

“Repperton messed up your face?”

“Yeah.”

Arnie told me he knew Repperton from the auto-shop courses. One of the ironies of Arnie’s rather hunted and certainly unhappy school life was that his interests and abilities took him into direct contact with the sort of people who feel it is their appointed duty to kick the stuffing out of the Arnie Cunninghams of this world.

When Arnie was a sophomore and taking a course called Engine Fundamentals (which used to be plain old Auto Shop I before the school got a whole bunch of vocational training money from the Federal government), a kid named Roger Gilman beat the living shit out of him. That’s pretty fucking vulgar, I know, but there’s just no fancy, elegant way to put it. Gilman just beat the living shit out of Arnie. The beating was bad enough to keep Arnie out of school for a couple of days, and Gilman got a one-week vacation, courtesy of the management. Gilman was now in prison on a hijacking charge. Buddy Repperton had been part of Roger Gilman’s circle of friends and had more or less inherited leadership of Gilman’s group.

For Arnie, going to class in the shop area was like visiting a demilitarized zone. Then, if he got back alive after period seven, he’d run all the way to the other end of the school with his chessboard and men under his arm for a chess club meeting or a game.

I remember going to a city chess tourney in Squirrel Hill one day the year before and seeing something which, to me, symbolized my friend’s schizo school-life. There he was, hunched gravely over his board in the thick, carved silence which is mostly what you hear at such affairs. After a long, thoughtful pause, he moved a rook with a hand into which grease and motor-oil had been so deeply grimed that not even Boraxo would take it all out.

Of course not all the shoppies were out to get him; there were plenty of good kids down that way, but a lot of them were either into their own tight circles of friends or permanently stoned. The ones in the tight little cliques were usually from the poorer section of Libertyville (and don’t ever let anyone tell you high school students aren’t tracked according to what part of town they come from; they are), very serious and so quiet you might make the mistake of dismissing them as stupid. Most of them looked like the leftovers from 1968 with their long hair tied back in ponytails and their jeans and their tie-dyed T-shirts, but in 1978 none of these guys wanted to overthrow the government; they wanted to grow up to be Mr Goodwrench.

And shop is still the final stopping place for the misfits and hardasses who aren’t so much attending school as they are being incarcerated there. And now that Arnie brought up Repperton’s name, I could think of several guys who circled him like a planetary system. Most of them were twenty and still struggling to get out of school. Don Vandenberg, Sandy Galton, Moochie Welch. Moochie’s real name was Peter, but the kids all called him Moochie because you always saw him outside of the rock concerts in Pittsburgh, spare-changing odd dimes from the crowd.

Buddy Repperton had come by a two-year-old blue Camaro that had been rolled over a couple of times out on Route 46 near Squantic Hills State Park—he picked it up from one of Darnell’s poker buddies, Arnie said. The engine was okay, but the body had really taken chong from the ton in the rollover. Repperton brought it into Darnell’s about a week after Arnie brought Christine in, although,Buddy had been hanging around even before then.

For the first couple of days, Repperton hadn’t appeared to notice Arnie at all, and Arnie, of course, was just as happy not to be noticed. Repperton was on good terms with Darnell, though. He seemed to have no trouble obtaining high-demand tools that were usually only available on a reserve basis.

Then Repperton had started getting on Arnie’s case. He’d walk by on his way back from the Coke machine or the bathroom and knocked a boxful of balljoint wrench attachments that Arnie was using all over the floor in Amie’s stall. Or if Arnie had a coffee on the shelf, Repperton would manage to hit it with his elbow and spill it. Then he’d bugle “Well ex-cuuuuuse… ME!” like Steve Martin, with this big shit-eating grin on his face. Darnell would holler over for Arnie to pick up those attachments before one of them went through a hole in the floor or something.

Soon Repperton was swerving out of his way to give Arnie a whistling clap on the back, accompanied by a bellowed “How ya doin, Cuntface?”

Arnie bore these opening salvoes with the stoicism of a guy who has seen it all before, been through it all before. He was probably hoping for one of two things—either that the harassment would reach a constant level of annoyance and stop there, or that Buddy Repperton would find some other victim and move on. There was a third possibility as well, one almost too good to hope for—it was always possible that Buddy would get righteously busted for something and just disappear from the scene, like his old buddy Roger Gilman.

It had come to blows on the Saturday afternoon just past Arnie was doing a grease-job on his car, mostly because he hadn’t yet accumulated sufficient funds to do any of the hundred other things the car cried out for. Repperton came by, whistling cheerfully, a Coke and a bag of peanuts in one hand, a jackhandle in the other. And as he passed stall twenty, he whipped the jackhandle out sidearm and broke one of Christine’s headlights.

“Smashed it to shit,” Arnie told me over our pizza.

“Oh, jeez, lookit what I did!” Buddy Repperton had said, an exaggerated expression of tragedy on his face. “Well, ex-cuuuuuu—”

But that was all he got out. The attack on Christine managed what the attacks on Arnie himself hadn’t been able to do—it provoked him into retaliation. He came around the side of the Plymouth, hands balled into fists, and struck out blindly. In a book or a movie, he probably would have socked Repperton right on the old knockout button and put him on the floor for a ten-count.

Things rarely work out that way in real life. Arnie didn’t get anywhere near Repperton’s chin. Instead he hit Repperton’s hand, knocked the bag of peanuts on the floor, and spilled Coca-Cola all over Repperton’s face and shirt.

“All right, you fucking little prick!” Repperton cried. He looked almost comically stunned. “There goes your ass!” He came for Arnie with the jackhandle.

Several of the other men ran over then, and one of them told Repperton to drop the jackhandle and fight fair. Repperton threw it away and waded in.

“Darnell never tried to put a stop to it? I asked Arnie.

“He wasn’t there, Dennis. He disappeared fifteen minutes or half an hour before it started. It’s like he knew it was going to happen.”

Arnie said that Repperton had done most of the damage right away. The black eye was first; the scrape on his face (made by the class ring Repperton had purchased during one of his many sophomore years) came directly afterward. “Plus assorted other bruises,” he said.

“What other bruises?”

We were sitting in one of the back booths. Arnie glanced round to make sure no one was looking at us and then raised his T-shirt. I hissed in breath at what I saw. A terrific sunset of bruises—yellow, red, purple, brown—covered Arnie’s chest and stomach. They were just starting to fade. How he had been able to come to work after getting mashed around like that I couldn’t begin to understand.

“Man, are you sure he didn’t spring any of your ribs?” I asked. I was really horrified. The shiner and the scrape looked tame next to this shit. I had seen high school scuffles, of course, had even been in a few, but I was looking at the results of a serious beating for the first time in my life.

“Pretty sure,” he said levelly. “I was lucky.”

“I guess you were.”

Arnie didn’t say a lot more, but a kid I knew named Randy Turner was there, and he filled me in on what had happened in more detail after school had started again. He said that Arnie might have gotten hurt a lot worse, but he came back at Buddy a lot harder and a lot madder than Buddy had expected.

In fact, Randy said, Arnie went after Buddy Repperton as if the devil had blown a charge of red pepper up his ass. His arms were windmilling, his fists were everywhere; He was yelling, cursing, Spraying spittle. I tried to imagine it and couldn’t—the picture I kept coming up with instead was Arnie slamming his fists down on my dashboard hard enough to make dents, screaming that he would make them eat it.

He drove Repperton halfway across the garage, bloodied his nose (more by good luck than good aim), and got one to Repperton’s throat that made him start to cough and gag and generally lose interest in busting Arnie Cunningham’s ass.

Buddy turned away, holding his throat and trying to puke and Arnie drove one of his steel-toed workboots into Repperton’s jeans-clad butt, knocking him flat on his belly and forearms. Repperton was still gagging and holding his throat with one hand, his nose was bleeding like mad, and (again, according to Randy Turner) Arnie was apparently gearing up to kick the son of a bitch to death when Will Darnell magically reappeared, hollering in his wheezy voice to cut the shit over there, cut the shit, cut the shit.

“Arnie thought that fight was going to happen,” I told Randy. “He thought it was a put-up job.”

Randy shrugged. “Maybe. Could be. It sure was funny, the way Darnell showed up when Repperton really started to lose.”

About seven guys grabbed Arnie and dragged him away. At first he fought them like a wildman, screaming for them to let him go, screaming that if Repperton didn’t pay for the broken headlight he’d kill him. Then he subsided, bewildered and hardly aware how it had happened that Repperton was down and he was still on his feet.

Repperton finally got up, his white T-shirt smeared with dirt and grease, his nose still bubbling blood. He made a lunge for Arnie. Randy said it looked like a pretty halfhearted lunge, mostly for form’s sake. Some of the other guys got hold of him and led him away. Darnell came over to Arnie and told him to hand in his toolbox key and get out.

“Jesus, Arnie! Why didn’t you call me Saturday afternoon?”

He sighed. “I was too depressed.”

We finisned our pizza, and I bought Arnie a third Pepsi. That stuff’s murder on your complexion, but it’s great for depression.

“I don’t know whether he meant get out just for Saturday or from then on,” Arnie said to me on our way home. “What do you think, Dennis? You think he kicked me out for good?”

“He asked for your toolbox key, you said.”

“Yeah. Yeah, he did. I never got kicked out of anyplace before.” He looked like he was going to cry.

“That place bites the root anyway. Will Darnell’s an asshole.”

“I guess it would be stupid to try and keep it there anymore anyway,” he said. “Even if Darnell lets me come back, Repperton’s there. I’d fight him again—”

I started to hum the theme from Rocky.

“Yeah, fuck you and the cayuse you rode in on, Range Rider,” he said, smiling a little. “I really would fight him. But Repperton might take after her with that jackhandle again when I wasn’t there. I don’t think Darnell would stop him if he did.”

I didn’t answer and maybe Arnie thought that meant I agreed with him, but I didn’t. I didn’t think his old rustbucket Plymouth Fury was the main target. And if Repperton felt that he couldn’t accomplish the demolition of the main target by himself, he would simply get by with a little help from his friends—Don Vandenberg, Moochie Welch, et al. Get on your motorhuckle boots, boys, we got plenty good stompin tonight.

It occurred to me that they could kill him. Not just kill him but really, honest-to-Christ kill him. Guys like that sometimes did. Things just went a little too far and some kid wound up dead. You read about it in the paper sometimes.

“—keep her?”

“Huh?” I hadn’t followed that. Up ahead, Arnie’s house was in view.

“I asked if you had any ideas about where I could keep her.”

The car, the car, the car that’s all he could talk about. He was starting to sound like a broken record. And, worse, it was always her, her, her. He was bright enough to see his growing obsession with her—it, damn it, it—but he wasn’t picking it up. He wasn’t picking it up at all.

“Arnie,” I said. “My man. You’ve got more important things to worry about than where to keep the car. I want to know where you’re going to keep you.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“I’m asking you what you’re going to do if Buddy and Buddy’s buddies decide they want to put you in traction.”

His face suddenly grew wise—it grew wise so suddenly that it was frightening to watch. It was wise and helpless and enduring. It was a face I recognized from the news when I was only eight or nine or so, the face of all those soldiers in black pajamas who had kicked the living shit out of the best-equipped and best-supported army in the world.

“Dennis,” he said, “I’ll do what I can.”

10 LeBAY PASSES

The movie version of Grease had just opened, and I took the cheerleader out to see it that night. I thought it was dumb. The cheerleader loved it. I sat there, watching these totally unreal teenagers dance and sing (if I want realistic teenagers—well, more or less—I’ll catch The Blackboard Jungle sometime on a revival), and my mind just drifted away. And suddenly I had a brainstorm, the way you sometimes will when you’re not thinking about anything in particular.

I excused myself and went into the lobby to use the pay-phone. I called Arnie’s house, dialling quick and sure, I’d had his number memorized since I was eight or so. I could have waited until the movie was over, but it just seemed like such a damned good idea.

Arnie answered himself. “Hello?”

“Arnie, it’s Dennis.”

“Oh. Dennis.”

His voice sounded so odd and flat that I got a little scared.

“Arnie? Are you all right?”

“Huh? Sure. I thought you were taking Roseanne to the movies.”

“That’s where I’m calling from.”

“It must not be that exciting,” Arnie said. His voice was still flat—flat and dreary.

“Roseanne thinks it’s great.”

I thought that would get a laugh out of him but there was only a patient, waiting silence.

“Listen,” I said, “I thought of the answer.”

“Answer?”

“Sure,” I said, “LeBay. LeBay’s the answer.”

“Le—” he said in a strange, high voice… and then there was more silence. I was starting to get more than a little scared. I’d never known him to be quite this way.

“Sure,” I babbled. “LeBay. LeBay’s got a garage, and I got the idea that he’d eat a dead-rat sandwich if the profit margin looked high enough. If you were to approach him on the basis of, say, sixteen or seventeen bucks a week—”

“Very funny, Dennis.” His voice was cold and hateful.

“Arnie, what—”

He hung up.

I stood there, looking at the phone, wondering what the hell it was about. Some new move from his parents? Or had he maybe gone back to Darnell’s and found some new damage to his car? Or—

A sudden intuition—almost a certainty—struck me. I put the telephone back in its cradle and walked over to the concession stand and asked if they had today’s paper. The candy-and-popcorn girl finally fished it out and then stood there snapping her gum while I thumbed to the back, where they print the obituaries. I guess she wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to perform some weird perversion on it, or maybe eat it.

There was nothing at all—or so I thought at first. Then I turned the page and saw the headline. LIBERTYVILLE VETERAN DIES AT 71. There was a picture of Roland D. LeBay in his Army uniform, looking twenty years younger and considerably more bright-eyed than he had on the occasions Arnie and I had seen him. The obit was brief. LeBay had died suddenly on Saturday afternoon, He was survived by a brother, George, and a sister, Marcia. Funeral services were scheduled for Tuesday at two.

Suddenly.

In the obits it’s always “after a long illness”, “after a short illness”, or “suddenly”. Suddenly can mean anything from a brain embolism to electrocuting yourself in the bathtub. I remembered something I had done to Ellie when she was hardly more than a baby—three, maybe. I scared the bejesus out of her with a Jack-in-the-box. There was the little handle going around in big brother Dennis’s hand, making music. Not bad. Kind of fun. And then—kaBONZO! Out comes this guy with grinning face and an ugly hooked nose, almost hitting her in the eye. Ellie went off bawling to find her mother and I sat there, looking glumly at Jack as he nodded back and forth, knowing I was probably going to get hollered at, knowing that I probably deserved to get hollered at—I had known it was going to scare her, coming out of the music like that, all at once, with an ugly bang.

Coming out so suddenly.

I gave the paper back and stood there, looking blankly at the posters advertising NEXT ATTRACTION and COMING SOON.

Saturday afternoon.

Suddenly.

Funny how things sometimes worked out. My brainstorm had been that maybe Arnie could take Christine back where she had come from; maybe he could pay LeBay for space. Now it turned out that LeBay was dead. He had died, as a matter of fact, on the same day that Arnie had gotten into it with Buddy Repperton—the same day Buddy had smashed Christine’s headlights

All at once I had an irrational picture of Buddy Repperton swinging the jackhandle and at the exact same moment, LeBay’s eye gushes blood, he keels over, and suddenly, very suddenly…

Cut the shit, Dennis, I lectured. Just cut the—

And then, somewhere deep in my mind, somewhere near the centre, a voice whispered Come on, big guy, let’s cruise—and then fell still.

The girl behind the counter popped her gum and said, “You’re missing the end of the picture. Ending’s the best part.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

I started back toward the door of the theatre and then detoured to the drinking fountain. My throat was very dry.

Before I’d finished getting my drink, the doors opened and people came streaming out. Beyond and above their bobbing heads, I could see the credit-roll. Then Roseanne came out, looking around for me. She caught many appreciative glances and fielded them cleanly in that dreamy, composed way of hers.

“Den-Den,” she said, taking my arm. Being called Den-Den isn’t the worst thing in the world—having your eyes put out with a hot poker or having a leg amputated with a chainsaw is probably worse—but I’ve never really dug it all that much. “Where were you? You missed the ending. Ending’s—”

“—the best part,” I finished with her. “Sorry. I just had this call of nature. It came on very suddenly.”

“I’ll tell you all about it if you take me up to the Embankment for a while,” she said, pressing my arm against the soft sideswell of her breast. “If you want to talk, that is.”

“Did it have a happy ending?”

She smiled up at me, her eyes wide and sweet and a little dazed, as they always were. She held my arm even more tightly against her breast.

“Very happy,” she said. “I like happy endings, don’t you, Den-Den?”

“Love them,” I said. I should maybe have been thinking about the promise of her breast, but instead I found myself thinking about Arnie.

That night I had a dream again, only in this one Christine was old—no, not just old; she was ancient, a terrible hulk of a car, something you’d expect to see in a Tarot deck: instead of the Hanged Man, the Death Car. Something you could almost believe was as old as the pyramids. The engine roared and missed and jetted filthy blue oilsmoke.

It wasn’t empty. Roland D. LeBay was lolling behind the wheel. His eyes were open but they were glazed and dead. Each time the engine revved and Christine’s rust-eaten body vibrated, he flopped like a ragdoll. His peeling skull nodded back and forth.

Then the tyres screamed their terrible scream, the Plymouth lunged out of the garage at me, and as it did the rust melted away, the old, bleary glass clarified, the chrome winked with savage newness, and the old, balding tyres suddenly bloomed into plump new Wide Ovals, each tread seemingly as deep as the Grand Canyon.

It screamed at me, headlights glaring white circles of hate, and as I raised my hands in a stupid, useless, warding-off gesture, I thought, God, it’s unending fury—

I woke up.

I didn’t scream. That night I kept the scream in my throat.

Just barely.

I sat up in my bed. A cold puddle of moonlight caught me in a lapful of sheet, and I thought, Died suddenly.

That night I didn’t get back to sleep so quickly.

11 THE FUNERAL

Brad Jeffries, our road-crew foreman, was in his midforties, balding, stocky, permanently sunburned. He liked to holler a lot—particularly when we were behind schedule—but he was a decent enough man. I went to see him during our coffee break to find out if Arnie had asked for part or all of the afternoon off.

“He asked for two hours, so he could go to a buryin,” Brad said. He took off his steel-rimmed glasses and massaged the red spots they had left on the sides of his nose. “Now don’t you ask—I’m losing you both at the end of the week anyway, and all the jerk-offs are staying.”

“Brad, I have to ask.”

“Why? Who is this guy? Cunningham said he sold him a car, that’s all. Christ, I didn’t think anyone went to a used car salesman’s funeral, except for his family.”

“It wasn’t a used car salesman, it was just a guy. Arnie’s having some problems about this, Brad. I feel like I ought to go with him.”

Brad sighed.

“Okay. Okay, okay, okay. You can have One to three, just like him. If you’ll agree to work through your lunch hour and stay on till six Thursday night.”

“Sure. Thanks, Brad.”

“I’ll punch you out just like regular,” Brad said. “And if anybody at Penn-DOT in Pittsburgh finds out about this, my ass is going to be grass.”

“They won’t.”

“Gonna be sorry to lose you guys,” he said. He picked up the paper and shook it out to the sports. Coming from Brad, that was high praise

“It’s been a good summer for us, too.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, Dennis. Now get out of here and let me read the paper.

I did.

At one o’clock I caught a ride up to the main construction shed on a grader. Arnie was inside, hanging up his yellow hardhat and putting on a clean shirt. He looked at me, startled.

“Dennis! What are you doing here?”

“Getting ready to go to a funeral,” I said. “Same as you.”

“No,” he said immediately, and it was more that word than anything else—the Saturdays he was no longer there, the coolness of Michael and Regina over the phone, the way he had been when I had called him from the movies that made me realise how much he had shut me out of his life, and how it had happened in just the same way LeBay had died. Suddenly.

“Yes,” I said. “Arnie, I dream about the guy. You hear me talking to you? I dream about him. I’m going. We can go separately or together, but I’m going.”

“You weren’t joking, were you?”

“Huh?”

“When you called me on the phone from that theatre. You really didn’t know he was dead.”

“Jesus Christ! You think I’d joke about something like that?”

“No,” he said, but not right away. He didn’t say no until he’d thought it over carefully. He saw the possibility of all hands being turned against him now. Will Darnell had done that to him, and Buddy Repperton, and I suppose his mother and father too. But it wasn’t just them, or even principally them, because none of them was the first cause. It was the car.

“You dream about him.”

“Yes.”

He stood there with his clean shirt in his hands, musing over that.

“The paper said Libertyville Heights Cemetery”, I said finally. “You going to take the bus or ride with me?”

“I’ll ride with you.”

“Good deal.”

We stood on a hill above the graveside service, neither daring or wanting to go down and join the handful of mourners. There were less than a dozen of them all told, half of them old guys in uniforms that looked old and carefully preserved—you could almost smell the mothballs. LeBay’s casket was on runners over the grave. There was a flag on it. The preacher’s words drifted up to us on a hot late-August breeze: man is like the grass which grows and then is cut down, man is like a flower which blooms in the spring and fades in the summer, man is in love, and loves what passes.

When the service ended, the flag was removed, and a man who looked to be in his sixties threw a handful of earth onto the coffin. Little particles trickled off and fell into the hole beneath. The obit had said he was survived by a brother and a sister. This had to be the brother; the resemblance wasn’t overwhelming, but it was there. The sister evidently hadn’t made it; there was no one but the boys down there around that hole in the ground.

Two of the American Legion types folded the flag into a cocked hat, and one of them handed it to LeBay’s brother. The preacher asked the Lord to bless them and keep them, to make His face shine upon them, to lift them up and give them peace. They started to drift away. I looked around for Arnie and Arnie wasn’t beside me anymore. He had gone a little distance away, He was standing under a tree. There were tears on his checks.

“You okay, Arnie?” I asked. It occurred to me that I sure as hell hadn’t seen any tears down there, and if Roland D. LeBay had known that Arnie Cunningham was going to be the only person to shed a tear for him at his small-time graveside ceremonies in one of Western Pennsylvania’s lesser-known boneyards, he might have knocked fifty bucks off the price of his shitty car. After all, Arnie still would have been paying a hundred and fifty more than it was worth.

He skidded the heels of his hands up the sides of his face in a gesture that was nearly savage. “Fine,” he said hoarsely. “Come on.”

“Sure.”

I thought he meant it was time to go, but he didn’t start back toward where I’d parked my Duster; he started down the hill instead. I started to ask him where he was going and then shut my mouth. I knew well enough; he wanted to talk to LeBay’s brother.

The brother was standing with two of the Legionnaire types, talking quietly, the flag under his arm. He was dressed in the suit of a man who is approaching retirement on a questionable income; it was a blue pinstripe with a slightly shiny seat. His tie was wrinkled at the bottom, and his white shirt had a yellowish tinge at the collar.

He glanced around at us.

“Pardon me,” Arnie said, “but you’re Mr LeBay’s brother, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.” He looked at Arnie questioningly and, I thought, a little warily.

Arnie put out his hand. “My name is Arnold Cunnningham. I knew your brother slightly. I bought a car from him a short while ago.”

When Arnie put his hand out, LeBay had automatically reached for it—with American men, the only gesture which may be more ingrained than the handshake response is checking your fly to make sure it’s zipped after you come out of a public restroom. But when Arnie went on to say he had bought a car from LeBay, the hand hesitated on its course. For a moment I thought the man was not going to shake after all, that he would pull back and just leave Arnie’s hand floating out there in the ozone.

But he didn’t do that… at least, not quite. He gave Arnie’s hand a single token squeeze and then dropped it.

“Christine,” he said in a dry voice. Yes, the family resemblance was there—in the way the brow shelved over the eyes, the set of the jaw, the light blue eyes. But this man’s face was softer, almost kind; I did not think he was ever going to have the lean and vulpine aspect that had been Roland D. LeBay’s. “The last note I got from Rollie said he’d sold her.”

Good Christ, he was using that damned female pronoun, too. And Rollie! It was hard to imagine LeBay, with his peeling skull and his pestiferous backbrace, as anyone’s Rollie. But his brother had spoken the nickname in the same dry voice. There was no love in that voice, at least none that I could hear.

LeBay went on: “My brother didn’t write often, but he had a tendency to gloat, Mr Cunningham. I wish there was a gentler word for it, but I don’t believe there is. In his note, Rollie spoke of you as a “sucker” and said he had given you what he called “a royal screwing”.”

My mouth dropped open. I turned to Arnie, half expecting another outburst of rage. But his face hadn’t changed at all.

“A royal screwing,” he said mildly, “is always in the eye of the beholder. Don’t you think so, Mr LeBay?”

LeBay laughed… a little reluctantly, I thought.

“This is my friend. He was with me the day I bought the car.”

I was introduced and shook George LeBay’s hand.

The soldiers had drifted away. The three of us, LeBay, Arnie and I, were left eyeing one another uncomfortably. LeBay shifted his brother’s flag from one hand to the other.

“Can I do something for you, Mr Cunningham?” LeBay asked at last.

Arnie cleared his throat. “I wag wondering about the garage,” he said finally. “You see, I’m working on the car, trying to get her street-legal again. My folks don’t want it at my house, and I was wondering—”

“No.”

“—if maybe I could rent the garage—”

“No, out of the question, it’s really—”

“I’d pay you twenty dollars a week, Arnie said “Twenty-five, if you wanted.” I winced. He was like a kid who has stumbled into quicksand and decides to cheer himself up by eating a few arsenic-laced brownies.

“—impossible.” LeBay was looking more and more distressed.

“Just the garage,” Arnie said, his calm starting to crack. “Just the garage where it originally was.”

“It can’t be done,” LeBay said. “I listed the house with Century 21, Libertyville Realty, and Pittsburgh Homes just this morning. They’ll be showing the house—”

“Yes, sure, in time, but until—”

“—and it wouldn’t do to have you tinkering around. You see, don’t you?” He bent toward Arnie a little. “Please don’t misunderstand me. I have nothing against teenagers in general—if I did, I’d probably be in a lunatic asylum now, because I’ve taught high school in Paradise Falls, Ohio, for almost forty years—and you seem to be a very intelligent, well-spoken example of the genus adolescent. But all I want to do here in Libertyville is sell the house and split whatever proceeds there may be with my sister in Denver. I want to be shut of the house, Mr Cunningham, and I want to be shut of my brother’s life.”

“I see,” Arnie said. “Would it make any difference if I promised to look after the place? Mow the grass? Repaint the trim? Make little repairs? I can be handy that way.”

“He really is good at stuff like that,” I chipped in. It wouldn’t hurt, I thought, for Arnie to remember later that I had been on his side… even if I wasn’t.

“I’ve already hired a fellow to keep an eye on the place and do a little maintenance,” he said. It sounded plausible, but I knew, suddenly and surely, that it was a lie. And I think Arnie knew it, too.

“All right. I’m sorry about your brother. He seemed like a… a very strong-willed man.” As he said it, I found myself remembering turning around and seeing LeBay with large, greasy tears on his cheeks. Well, that’s that. I’m shut of her, sonny.

“Strong-willed?” LeBay smiled cynically. “Oh, yes. He was a strong-willed son of a bitch.” He appeared not to notice Arnie’s shocked expression. “Excuse me, gentlemen. I’m afraid the sun has upset my stomach a little.”

He started to walk away. We stood not far from the grave and watched him go. All at once he stopped, and Arnie’s face brightened; he thought LeBay had suddenly changed his mind. For a moment LeBay just stood there on the grass, his head bent in the posture of a man thinking hard. Then he turned back to us.

“My advice to you is to forget the car,” he said to Arnie. “Sell her. If no one will buy her whole, sell her for parts. If no one will buy her for parts, junk her. Do it quickly and completely. Do it the way you would quit a bad habit. I think you will be happier.”

He stood there, looking at Arnie, waiting for Arnie to say something, but Arnie made no reply. He only held LeBay’s gaze with his own. His eyes had gone that peculiar slatey colour they got when his mind was made up and his feet were planted. LeBay read the look and nodded. He looked unhappy and a little ill.

“Gentlemen, good day.”

Arnie sighed. “I guess that’s that.” He eyed LeBay’s retreating back with some resentment.

“Yeah,” I said, hoping I sounded more unhappy than I felt. It was the dream. I didn’t like the idea of Christine back in that garage. It was too much like my dream.

We started back toward my car, neither of us speaking. LeBay nagged at me. Both LeBays nagged at me. I came to a sudden, impulsive decision—God only knows how much different things might have been if I hadn’t followed the impulse.

“Hey, man,” I said. “I gotta go take a whiz. Give me a minute or two, okay?”

“Sure,” he said, hardly looking up. He walked on, hands in his pockets and eyes on the ground.

I walked off to the left, where a small, discreet sign and an even smaller arrow pointed the way toward the restrooms. But when I was over the first rise and out of Arnie’s view, I cut to the right and started to sprint toward the parking lot. I caught George LeBay slowly folding himself behind the wheel of an extremely tiny Chevette with a Hertz sticker on the windscreen.

“Mr LeBay!” I puffed. “Mr LeBay?” He looked up curiously. “Pardon me,” I said. “Sorry to bother you again.”

“That’s all right,” he said, “but I’m afraid what I said to your friend still stands. I can’t let him garage the car here.”

“Good,” I said.

His bushy eyebrows went up.

“The car,” I said. “That Fury. I don’t like it.” He went on looking at me, not talking.

“I don’t think it’s been good for him. Maybe part of it’s being… I don’t know…”

“Jealous?” he asked me quietly. “Time he used to spend with you he now spends with her?”

“Well, yeah, right,” I said. “He’s been my friend for a long time. But I–I don’t think that’s all of it.”

“No?”

“No.” I looked around to see if Arnie was in sight, and while I wasn’t looking at him, I was finally able to come out with it. “Why did you tell him to junk it and forget it? Why did you say it was like a bad habit?”

He said nothing, and I was afraid he had nothing to say—at least, not to me. And then, almost too softly to hear, he asked, “Son, are you sure this is your business?”

“I don’t know.” Suddenly it seemed very important to meet his eyes. “But I care about Arnie, you know. I don’t want to see him get hurt. This car has already gotten him into trouble. I don’t want to see it get any worse.”

“Come by my motel this evening. It’s just off the Western Avenue exit from 376. Can you find that?”

“I hotpatched the sides of the ramp,” I said, and held out my hands. “Still got the blisters.”

I smiled, but he didn’t smile back. “Rainbow Motel. There are two at the foot of the exit. Mine is the cheap one.”

“Thanks,” I said awkwardly. “Listen really, th—”

“It may not be your business, or mine, or anyone’s,” LeBay said in his soft, schoolteacherish voice, so different from (but somehow so eerily similar to) his late brother’s wild croak.

(and that’s about the finest smell in the world… except maybe for pussy)

“But I can tell you this much right now. My brother was not a good man. I believe the only thing he ever truly loved in his whole life was that Plymouth Fury your friend has purchased. So the business may be between them and them alone, no matter what you tell me, or I tell you.”

He smiled at me. It wasn’t a pleasant smile, and in that instant I seemed to see Roland D. LeBay looking out through his eyes, and I shivered.

“Son, you’re probably too young to look for wisdom in anyone’s words but your own, but I’ll tell you this: love is the enemy.” He nodded at me slowly. “Yes. The poets continually and sometimes wilfully mistake love. Love is the old slaughterer. Love is not blind. Love is a cannibal with extremely acute vision. Love is insectile; it is always hungry.”

“What does it eat?” I asked, not aware I was going to ask anything at all. Every part of me but my mouth thought the entire conversation insane.

“Friendship,” George LeBay said. “It eats friendship. If I were you, Dennis, I would now prepare for the worst.”

He closed the door of the Chevette with a soft chuck! and started up its sewing-machine engine. He drove away, leaving me to stand there on the edge of the blacktop. I suddenly remembered that Arnie should see me coming from the direction of the comfort stations, so I headed that way as fast as I could.

As I went it occurred to me that the gravediggers or sextons or eternal engineers or whatever they were calling themselves these days would now be lowering LeBay’s coffin into the earth. The dirt George LeBay had thrown at the end of the ceremony would be splattered across the top like a conquering hand. I tried to dismiss the image, but another image, even worse, came in its place: Roland D. LeBay inside the silk-lined casket, dressed in his best suit and his best underwear—sans smelly, yellowing back brace, of course.

LeBay was in the ground, LeBay was in his coffin, his hands crossed on his chest… and why was I so sure that a large, shit-eating grin was on his face?

12 SOME FAMILY HISTORY

The Rainbow Motel was pretty bad, all right. It was one level high, the parking-lot paving was cracked, two of the letters in the neon sign were out. It was exactly the sort of place you’d expect to find an elderly English teacher. I know how depressing that sounds, but its true. And tomorrow he would turn in his Hertz car at the airport and fly home to Paradise Falls, Ohio.

The Rainbow Motel looked like a geriatric ward. There were old parties sitting outside their rooms in the lawnchairs the management supplied for that purpose, their bony knees crossed, their white socks pulled up over their hairy shins. The men all looked like aging alpinists, skinny and tough. Most of the women were blooming with the soft fat of post-fifty and no hope. Since then I’ve noticed that there are motels which seem filled up with nothing but people over fifty—it’s like they hear about these places on some Oldies but Goodies Hotline. Bring your Hysterectomy and Enlarged Prostate to the Not-So-Scenic Rainbow Motel. No Cable TV but We Do Have Magic Fingers, Just a Quarter a Shot. I saw no young people outside the units, and off to one side the rusty playground equipment stood empty, the swings casting long still shadows on the ground. Overhead, a neon rainbow arced over the sign. It buzzed like a swarm of flies caught in a bottle.

LeBay was sitting outside Unit 14 with a glass in his hand. I went over and shook hands with him.

“Would you like a soft drink?” he asked.

“No, thanks,” I said. I got one of the lawn-chairs from in front of an empty unit and sat down beside him.

“Then let me tell you what I can,” he said in his soft, cultured voice. “I am eleven years younger than Rollie, and I am still a man who is learning to be old.”

I shifted awkwardly in my chair and said nothing.

“There were four of us”, he said. “Rollie was the oldest, I am the youngest. Our brother Drew died in France in 1944. He and Rollie were both career Army. We grew up here, in Libertyville. Only Libertyville was much, much smaller then, you know, only a village. Small enough to have the ins and the outs. We were the outs. Poor folks. Shiftless. Wrong side of the tracks. Pick your cliché.”

He chuckled softly in the dusk and poured more 7-Up into his glass.

“I really remember only one constant thing about Rollie’s childhood—after all, he was in the fifth grade when I was born—but I remember that one thing very well.”

“What was it?”

“His anger,” LeBay said. “Rollie was always angry. He was angry that he had to go to school in castoff clothes, he was angry that our father was a drunkard who could not hold a steady job in any of the steel mills, he was angry that our mother could not make our father stop drinking. He was angry at the three smaller children—Drew, Marcia and myself—who made the poverty insurmountable.”

He held his arm out to me and pushed up the sleeve of his shirt to show me the withered, corded tendons of his old man’s arm which lay just below the surface of the shiny, stretched skin. A scar skidded down from his elbow toward his wrist, where it finally petered out.

“That was a present from Rollie,” he said. “I got it when I was three and he was fourteen. I was playing with a few painted blocks of wood that were supposed to be cars and trucks on the front walk when he slammed out on his way to school. I was in his way, I suppose. He pushed me on to the sidewalk, and then he came back and threw me. I landed with my arm stuck on one of the pickets of the fence that went around the bunch of weeds and sunflowers that my mother insisted on calling “the garden”. I bled enough to scare all of them into tears— all of them except Rollie, who just kept shouting, “You stay out of my way from now on, you goddam snotnose, stay out of my way, you hear?”

I looked at the old scar, fascinated, realizing that it looked like a skid because that small, chubby three-year-old’s arm had grown over the course of years into the skinny, shiny old man’s arm I was now looking at. A wound that had been an ugly gouge spilling blood everywhere in the year 1921 had slowly elongated into this silvery progression of marks like ladder-rungs. The wound had closed, but the scar had… spread.

A terrible, hopeless shudder twisted through me. I thought of Arnie slamming his fists down on the dashboard of my car, Arnie crying hoarsely that he would make them eat it, eat it, eat it.

George LeBay was looking at me. I don’t know what he saw on my face, but he slowly rolled his sleeve back down, and when he buttoned it securely over that scar, it was as if he had drawn the curtain on an almost unbearable past.

He sipped more 7-Up.

“My father came home that evening—he had been on one of the toots that he called “hunting up a job”—and when he heard what Rollie had done, he whaled the tar out of him. But Rollie would not recant. He cried, but he would not recant.” LeBay smiled a little. “At the end my mother was terrified, screaming for my father to stop before he killed him. The tears were rolling down Rollie’s face, and still he would not recant. “He was in my way,” Rollie said through his tears. “And if he gets in my way again I’ll do it again, and you can’t stop me, you damned old tosspot.” Then my father struck him in the face and made his nose bleed and Rollie fell on the floor with the blood squirting through his fingers. My mother was screaming, Marcia was crying, Drew was cringing in one corner, and I was bawling my head off, holding my bandaged arm. And Rollie went right on saying, “I’d do it again, you tosspot-tosspot-damned-old-tosspot!”

Above us, the stars had begun to come out. An old woman left a unit down the way, took a battered suitcase out of a Ford, and carried it back into her unit. Somewhere a radio was playing. It was not tuned to the rock sounds of FM-104.

“His unending fury is what I remember best,” LeBay repeated softly. “At school, he fought with anyone who made fun of his clothes or the way his hair was cut—he would fight anyone he even suspected of making fun. He was suspended again and again. Finally he left and joined the Army.

“It wasn’t a good time to be in the Army, the twenties. There was no dignity, no promotion, no flying flags and banners. There was no nobility. He went from base to base, first in the South and then in the Southwest. We got a letter every three months or so. He was still angry. He was angry at what he called “the shitters”. Everything was the fault of “the shatters”. The shitters wouldn’t give him the promotion he deserved, the shitters had cancelled a furlough, the shitters couldn’t find their own behinds with both hands and a flashlight. On at least two occasions, the shitters put him in the stockade.

“The Army held on to him because he was an excellent mechanic—he could keep the old and decrepit vehicles which were all Congress would allow the Army in some sort of running condition.”

Uneasily, I found myself thinking of Arnie—Arnie who was so clever with his hands.

LeBay leaned forward. “But that talent was just another wellspring for his anger, young man. And it was an anger that never ended until he bought that car that your friend now owns.”

“What do you mean?”

LeBay chuckled dryly. “He fixed Army convoy trucks, Army staff cars, Army weapons-supply vehicles. He fixed bulldozers and kept staff cars running with spit and baling wire. And once, when a visiting Congressman came to visit Fort Arnold in west Texas and had car trouble, he was ordered by his commanding officer, who was desperate to make a good impression, to fix the Congressman’s prized Bentley. Oh, yes, we got a four-page letter about that particular “shitter”—a four-page rant of Rollie’s anger and vitriol. It was a wonder the words didn’t smoke the page.

“All those vehicles… but Rollie never owned a car himself until after World War II. Even then the only thing he was able to afford was an old Chevrolet that ran poorly and was eaten up with rust. In the twenties and thirties there was never money enough, and during the war years he was too busy trying to stay alive.

“He was in the motor pool for all those years, and he fixed thousands of vehicles for the shitters and never once had one that was all his. It was Libertyville all over again. Even the old Chevrolet couldn’t assuage that, or the old Hudson Hornet he bought used the year after he got married.” “Married?”

“Didn’t tell you that did “he?” LeBay said. “He would have been happy to go on and on about his Army experiences—his war experiences and his endless confrontations with the shitters—for as long as you and your friend could listen without falling asleep… and him with his hand in your pocket feeling for your wallet the whole time. But he wouldn’t have bothered to tell you about Veronica or Rita.”

“Who were they?”

“Veronica was his wife,” LeBay said. “They were married in 1951, shortly before Rollie went to Korea. He could have stayed Stateside, you know. He was married, his wife was pregnant, he himself was approaching middle age. But he chose to go.”

LeBay looked reflectively at the dead playground equipment.

“It was bigamy, you know. By 1951 he was forty-four, and he was married already. He was married to the Army. And to the shitters.”

He fell silent again. His silence had a morbid quality.

“Are you all right?” I asked finally.

“Yes,” he said. “Just thinking. Thinking ill of the dead.” He looked at me calmly—except for the eyes; they were dark and wounded. “You know, all of his hurts me, young man… what did you say your name was? I don’t want to sit here and sing these sad old songs to someone I can’t call by his first name. Was it Donald?”

“Dennis,” I said. “Look, Mr LeBay—”

“It hurts more than I would have suspected,” he went on. “But now that it’s begun, let’s finish it, shall we? I only met Veronica twice. She was from West Virginia. Near Wheeling. She was what we then called shirt-tail southern, and she was not terribly bright. Rollie was able to dominate her and take her for granted, which was what he seemed to want. But she loved him, I think—at least until the rotten business with Rita. As for Rollie, I don’t think he really married a women at all. He married a kind of… of wailing wall.

“The letters that he sent us… well, you must remember that he left school very early. The letters, illiterate as they were, represented a tremendous effort for my brother. They were his suspension bridge, his novel, his symphony, his greatest effort. I don’t think he wrote them to get rid of the poison in his heart. I think he wrote them to spread it around.

Once he had Veronica, the letters stopped. He had his set of eternal ears, and he didn’t have to bother with us anymore. I suppose he wrote letters to her during the two years he was in Korea. I only got one during that period, and I believe Marcia got two. There was no pleasure over the birth of his daughter in early 1952, only a surly complaint that there was another mouth to feed at home and the shitters took a little more out of him.”

“Did he never advance in rank?” I asked. The year before I had seen part of a long TV show, one of those novels for television called Once an Eagle. I had seen the paperback book in the drugstore the next day and had picked it up, hoping for a good war story. As it turned out, I got both war and peace, and some new ideas about the armed services. One of them was that the old promotion train really gets rolling along in times of war. It was hard for me to understand how LeBay could have gone into the service in the early twenties, slogged through two wars, and still have been running junk when Ike became President.

LeBay laughed. “He was like Prewitt in From Here to Eternity. He would advance, and then he would be busted back down for something—insubordination or impertinence or drunkenness. I told you he had spent time in the stockade? One of those times was for pissing in the punchbowl at the Officers Club at Fort Dix before a party. He only did ten days for that offence, because I believe they must have looked into their own hearts and believed it was nothing more than a drunken joke, such as some of the officers themselves had probably played as fraternity boys—they didn’t, they couldn’t, have any idea of the hate and deadly loathing that lay behind that gesture. But I imagine that by then Veronica could have told them.”

I glanced at my watch. It was quarter past nine. LeBay had been talking for nearly an hour.

“My brother came home from Korea in 1953 to meet his daughter for the first time. I understand he looked her over for a minute or two, then handed her back to his wife, and went out to tinker on his old Chevrolet for the rest of the day… getting bored, Dennis?”

“No,” I said truthfully.

“All through those years, the one thing that Rollie really wanted was a brand-new car. Not a Cadillac or a Lincoln; he didn’t want to join the upper class, the officers, the shitters. He wanted a new Plymouth or maybe a Ford or a Dodge.

“Veronica wrote now and then, and she said that they spent most of their Sundays going round to car dealerships wherever Rollie was currently stationed. She and the baby would sit in the old Hornet Rollie bad and Veronica would read little storybooks to Rita while Rollie walked around dusty lot after dusty lot with salesman after salesman, talking about compression and horsepower and hemi heads and gear ratios… I think, sometimes, of the little girl growing up to the background sound of those plastic pennants whipping in the hot wind of half a dozen Army tank-towns, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

My thoughts turned back to Arnie again.

“Was he obsessed, would you say?”

“Yes. I would say he was obsessed. He began to give Veronica money to put away. Other than his failure to get promoted past Master Sergeant at any point in his career, my brother had a problem with drink. He wasn’t an alcoholic, but he went on periodic binges every six or eight months. What money he had would be gone when the binge was over. He was never sure where he spent it.

“Veronica was supposed to put a stop to that. It was one of the things he married her for. When the binges started, Rollie would come to her for the money. He threatened her with a knife once; held it to her throat. I got this from my sister, who sometimes talked to Veronica on the telephone. Veronica would not give him the money, which at that time, in 1955, totalled about eight hundred dollars. “Remember the car, honey,” she told him, with the point of his knife on her throat. “You’ll never get that new car if ’n you booze the money away.”

“She must have loved him, I said.

“Well, maybe she did. But please don’t make the romantic assumption that her love changed Rollie in any way. Water can wear away stone, but only over hundreds of years. People are mortal.”

He seemed to debate saying something else along that line and then to decide against it. The lapse struck me as peculiar.

“But he never put a mark on either of them,” he said. “And you must remember that he was drunk on the occasion when he held the knife to her throat. There is a great outcry about drugs in the schools now, and I don’t oppose that outcry because I think it’s obscene to think of children fifteen and sixteen years old reeling around full of dope, but I still believe alcohol is the most vulgar, dangerous drug ever invented—and it is legal.

“When my brother finally left the Army in 1957,Veronica had put away a little over twelve hundred dollars, Adding to it was a substantial disability pension for his back injury—he fought the shitters for it and won, he said.

“So the money was finally there. They got the house you and your friend visited, but before the house was even considered, of course, the car came. The car was always paramount. The visits to the car dealerships reached a fever pitch. And at last he settled upon Christine. I got a long letter about her. She was a 1958 Fury sport coups, and he gave me all the facts and figures in his letter. I don’t remember them, but I bet your friend could cite her vital statistics chapter and verse.”

“Her measurements,” I said.

LeBay smiled humourlessly. “Her measurements, yes. I do remember that he wrote her sticker price was just a tad under $3000, but he “jewed em down”, as he put it, to $2100 with the trade-in. He ordered her, paid ten per cent down, and when she came, he paid the balance in cash—ten- and twenty-dollar bills.

“The next year, Rita, who was then six, choked to death.”

I jumped in my chair and almost knocked it over. His soft, teacherish voice had a lulling quality, and I was tired; I had been half-asleep. That last had been like a dash of cold water in my face.

“Yes, that’s right,” he said to my questioning, startled glance. “They had been out “motorvating” for the day. That was what replaced the car-hunting expeditions. “Motorvating”. That was his word for it. He got that from one of those rock and roll songs he was always listening to. Every Sunday the three of them would go out “motorvating”. There were litterbags in the front and the back. The little girl was forbidden to drop anything on the floor, She was forbidden to make any messes. She knew that lesson well. She…”

He fell into that peculiar, thinking silence again and then came back on a new tack.

“Rollie kept the ashtrays clean. Always. He was a heavy smoker, but he’d poke his cigarette out the wing window instead of tapping it into the ashtray, and when he was done with a cigarette, he’d snuff it and toss it out the window. If he had someone with him who did use the ashtray, he’d dump the ashtray and then wipe it out with a paper towel when the drive was over. He washed her twice a week and Simonized her twice a year. He serviced her himself, buying time at a local garage.”

I wondered if it had been Darnell’s.

“On that particular Sunday, they stopped at a roadside stand for hamburgers on the way home—there were no McDonald’s in those days, you know, just roadside stands. And what happened was… simple enough, I suppose…”

That silence again, as if he wondered just how much he should tell me, or how to separate what he knew from his speculations.

“She choked to death on a piece of meat,” he said finally. “When she started to gag and put her hands to her throat, Rollie pulled over, dragged her out of the car, and thudded her on the back, trying to bring it up. Of course now they had a method—the Heimlich Manoeuvre—that works rather well in situations like that. A young girl, a student teacher, actually, saved a boy who was choking in the cafeteria at my school just last year by employing the Heimlich Manoeuvre. But in those days…

“My niece died by the side of the road. I imagine it was a filthy, frightening way to die.”

His voice had resumed that sleepy schoolroom cadence, but I no longer felt sleepy. Not at all.

“He tried to save her. I believe that. And I try to believe that it was only ill luck that she died. He had been in a ruthless business for a long time, and I don’t believe he loved his daughter very deeply, if at all. But sometimes, in mortal matters, a lack of love can be a saving grace. Sometimes ruthlessness is what is required.”

“But not this time,” I said.

“In the end he turned her over and held her by her ankles. He punched her in the belly, hoping to make her vomit. I believe he would have tried to do a tracheotomy on her with his pocket-knife if he had even the slightest idea of how to go about it. But of course he did not. She died.

“Marcia and her husband and family came to the funeral. So did I. It was our last family reunion. I remember thinking, He will have traded the car, of course. In an odd way, I was a little disappointed. It had figured so largely in Veronica’s letters and the few which Rollie wrote that I felt it was almost a member of their family. But he hadn’t. They pulled up to the Libertyville Methodist Church in it, and it was polished… and shining… and hateful. It was hateful.” He turned to look at me. “Do you believe that, Dennis?”

I had to swallow before I could answer. “Yes,” I said. “I believe it.”

LeBay nodded grimly. “Veronica was sitting in the passenger seat like a wax dummy. Whatever she had been whatever there was inside her—was gone. Rollie had had the car, she had had the daughter. She didn’t just grieve. She died.”

I sat there and tried to imagine it—tried to imagine what I would have done it if had been me. My daughter starts to choke and strangle in the back seat of my car and then dies by the side of the road. Would I trade the car away? Why? It wasn’t the car that killed her; it was whatever she strangled on, the bit of hamburger and bun that had blocked her windpipe. So why trade the car? Other than the small fact that I wouldn’t even be able to look at it, wouldn’t even be able to think of it, without horror and sorrow. Would I trade it? Man, does a bear shit in the woods?

“Did you ask him about it?”

“I asked him, all right. Marcia was with me. it was after the service. Veronica’s brother had come up from Glory, West Virginia, and he took her back to the house after the graveside ceremony—she was in a kind of walking swoon, anyway.

“We got him alone, Marcia and I. That was the real reunion. I asked him if he intended to trade the car. It was parked directly behind the hearse that had brought his daughter to the cemetery—the same cemetery where Rollie himself was buried today you know. It was red and white—Chrysler never offered the 1958 Plymouth Fury in those colours; Rollie had gotten it custom-painted. We were standing about fifty feet away from it, and I had the strangest feeling… the strangest urge… to move yet farther away, as if it could hear us.”

“What did you say?”

“I asked him if he was going to trade the car. That hard, mulish look came onto his face, that look I remember so well from my early childhood. It was the look that had been on his face when he threw me onto the picket fence. The look that was on his face when he kept calling my father a tosspot, even after my father made his nose bleed. He said, “I’d be crazy to trade her, George, she’s only a year old and she’s only got 11,000 miles on her. You know you never get your money out of a trade until a car’s three years old.”

I said, “If this is a matter of money to you, Rollie, someone stole what was left of your heart and replaced it with a piece of stone. Do you want your wife looking at it every day? Riding in it? Good God, man!”

“That look never changed. Not until he looked at the car, sitting there in the sunlight… sitting there behind the hearse. That was the only time his face softened. I remember wondering if he’d ever looked at Rita that way. I don’t suppose he ever did. I don’t think it was in him.”

He fell silent for a moment and then went on.

“Marcia told him all the same things. She was always afraid of Rollie, but that day she was more mad than afraid—she had gotten Veronica’s letters, remember, and she knew how much Veronica loved her little girl. She told him that when someone dies, you burn the mattress they slept on, you give their clothes to the Salvation Army, whatever, you put finish to the life any way you can so that the living can get on with their business. She told him that his wife was never going to be able to get on with her business as long as the car where her daughter died was still in the garage.

“Rollie asked her in that ugly, sarcastic way he had if she wanted him to douse his car with gasoline and touch a match to her just because his daughter had choked to death. My sister started to cry and told him she thought that was a fine idea. Finally I took her by the arm and led her away. There was no talking to Rollie, then or ever. The car was his, and he could talk on and on about keeping a car three years before you trade it, he could talk about mileage until he was blue in the face, but the simple fact was, he was going to keep her because he wanted to keep her.

“Marcia and her family went back to Denver on a Greyhound, and so far as I know, she never saw Rollie again or even wrote him a note. She didn’t come to Veronica’s funeral.”

His wife. First the kid, and then the wife. I knew, somehow that it had been just like that. Bang-bang. A kind of numbness crept up my legs to the pit of my stomach.

“She died six months later. In January of 1959.”

“But nothing to do with the car,” I said. “Nothing to do with the car, right?”

“It had everything to do with the car,” he said softly.

I don’t want to hear it, I thought But of course I would hear it. Because my friend owned that car now, and because it had become something that had grown out of all proportion to what it should have been in his life.

“After Rita died, Veronica went into a depression. She simply never came out of it. She had made some friends in Libertyville, and they tried to help her… help her find her way again, I guess one would say. But she was not able to find her way. Not at all.

“Otherwise, things were fine. For the first time in my brother’s life, there was plenty of money. He had his Army pension, his disability pension, and he had gotten a job as a night watchman at the tyre factory over on the west side of town. I drove over there after the funeral, but it’s gone.”

“It went broke twelve years ago,” I said. “I was just a kid, There’s a Chinese fast-food place there now.”

“They were paying off the mortgage at the rate of two payments a month. And, of course, they had no little girl to take care of any longer. But for Veronica, there was never any light or impulse toward recovery.

“She went about committing suicide quite coldbloodedly, from all that I have been able to find out. If there were textbooks for aspiring suicides, her own might be included as an example to emulate. She went down to the Western Auto store here in town—the same one where I got my first bicycle many many years ago—and bought twenty feet of rubber hose. She fitted one end over Christine’s exhaust pipe and put the other end in one of the back windows. She had never gotten a driver’s licence, but she knew how to start the car. That was really all she needed to know.”

I pursed my lips, wet them with my tongue, and heard my voice, little more than a rusty croak. “I think I’ll get that soda now.”

“Perhaps you’d be good enough to get me another,” he said. “It will keep me awake—they always do—but I suspect I’d be awake most of tonight anyway.”

I suspected I would be, too. I went to get the sodas in the motel office, and on my way back I stopped halfway across the parking lot. He was only a deeper shadow in front of his motel unit, his white socks glimmering like small ghosts. I thought, Maybe the car is cursed. Maybe that’s what it is. It sounds like a ghost story, all right. There’s a signpost up ahead… next stop, the Twilight Zone!

But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it?

Of course it was. I went on walking again. Cars didn’t carry curses any more than people carried them; that was horror-movie stuff, sort of amusing for a Saturday night at the drive-in, but very, very far from the day-to-day facts that make up reality.

I gave him his can of soda and heard the rest of his story, which could be summed up in one line: He lived unhappily ever after. The one and only Roland D. LeBay had kept his small tract house, and he had kept his 1958 Plymouth. In 1965 he had hung up his night watchman’s cap and his check-in clock. And somewhere around that same time he had stopped his painstaking efforts to keep Christine looking and running like new—he had let her run down the way a man might let a watch run down.

“You mean it just sat but there?” I asked. “Since 1965? For thirteen years?”

“No, he put it in the garage, of course,” LeBay said. “The neighbours would never have stood for a car just mouldering away out on someone’s lawn. In the country, maybe, but not in Suburbia, USA.”

“But it was out there when we—”

“Yes, I know. He put it out on the lawn with a FOR SALE sign in the window. I asked about that. I was curious, and so I asked. At the Legion. Most of them had lost touch with Rollie, but one of them said he thought he’d seen the car out there on the lawn for the first time this May.”

I started to say something and then fell silent. A terrible idea had come to me, and that idea was simply this: It was too convenient. Much too convenient. Christine had sat in that dark garage for years—four, eight, a dozen, more. Then—a few months before Arnie and I came alone and Arnie saw it—Roland LeBay had suddenly hauled it out and stuck a FOR SALE sign on it.

Later on—much later—I checked back through issues of the Pittsburgh papers and the Libertyville paper, the Keystone. He had never advertised the Fury, at least not in the papers, where you usually hawk a car you want to sell. He just put it out on his suburban street—not even a thoroughfore—and waited for a buyer to come along.

I did not completely realize the rest of the thought then—not in any logical, intellectual way, at least—but I had enough of it to feel a recurrence of that cold, blue feeling of fright. It was as if he knew a buyer would be coming. If not in May, then in June. Or July. Or August. Sometime soon.

No, I didn’t get this idea logically or rationally. What came instead was a wholly visceral image: a Venus-Flytrap at the edge of a swamp, its green jaws wide open, waiting for an insect to land.

The right insect.

“I remembering thinking he must have given it up because he didn’t want to take a chance of flunking the driver’s exam,” I said finally. “After you get so old, they make you take one every year or two. The renewal’s stops being automatic.”

George LeBay nodded. “That sounds like Rollie,” he said. “But…”

“But what?”

“I remember reading somewhere—and I can’t remember who said it, or wrote it, for the life of me—that there are “times” in human existence. That when it came to be steam-engine time, a dozen men invented steam engines. Maybe only one man got the patent, or the credit in the history books, but all at once there they were, all those people working on that one idea. How do you explain it? Just that it’s steam-engine time.”

LeBay took a drink of his soda and looked up at the sky.

“Comes the Civil War and all at once it’s “ironclad time”. Then it’s “machine-gun time”. Next thing you know it’s “electricity time” and “wireless time” and finally it’s atom-bomb time”. As if those ideas all come not from individuals but from some great wave of intelligence that always keeps flowing… some wave of intelligence that is outside of humanity.”

He looked at me.

“That idea scares me if I think about it too much, Dennis. There seems to be something… well, decidedly unchristian about it.”

“And for your brother there was “sell Christine time”?”

“Perhaps. Ecclesiastes says there’s a season for everything—a time to sow, a time to reap, a time for war, a time for peace, a time to put away the sling, and a time to gather stones together. A negative for every positive. So if there was “Christine time” in Rollie’s life, there might have come a time for him to put Christine away as well.

“If so, he would have known it. He was an animal, and animals listen very well to their instincts.

“Or maybe he finally just tired of it,” LeBay finished.

I nodded that that might be it, mostly because I was anxious to be gone, not because that explained it to my complete satisfaction. George LeBay hadn’t seen that car on the day Arnie had yelled at me go back. I had seen it though. The ’58 hadn’t looked like a car that had been resting peacefully in a garage. It had been dirty and dented, the windscreen cracked, one bumper mostly torn away. It had looked like a corpse that had been disinterred and left to decay in the sun.

I thought of Veronica LeBay and shivered.

As if reading my thoughts—part of them, anyway LeBay said, “I knew very little about how my brother may have lived or felt during the last years of his life, but I’m quite sure of one thing, Dennis. When he felt, in 1965 or whenever it was, that it was time to put the car away, he put it away. And when he felt it was time to put it up for sale, he put it up for sale.”

He paused.

“And I don’t think I have anything else to tell you except that I really believe your friend would be happier if he got rid of that car. I looked at him closely, your friend. He didn’t look like a particularly happy young man at the present. Am I wrong about that?”

I considered his question carefully. No, happiness wasn’t exactly Amie’s thing, and never had been. But until the thing had begun with the Plymouth, he had seemed at least content as if he had reached a modus vivendi with life. Not a completely happy one, but at least a workable one.

“No,” I said. “You’re not wrong.”

“I don’t believe my brother’s car will make him happy. If anything, just the opposite.” And as if he had just read my thoughts of a few minutes before, he went on: “I don’t believe in curses, you know. Nor in ghosts or anything precisely supernatural. But I do believe that emotions and events have a certain… lingering resonance. It may be that emotions can even communicate themselves in certain circumstances, if the circumstances are peculiar enough… the way a carton of milk will take the flavour of certain strongly spiced foods if it’s left open in the refrigerator. Or perhaps that’s only a ridiculous fancy on my part, Possibly it’s just that I would feel better knowing the car my niece choked in and my sister-in-law killed herself in had been pressed down into a cube of meaningless metal. Perhaps all I feel is a sense of outraged propriety.”

“Mr LeBay, you said you’d hired someone to take care of your brother’s house until it was sold. Was that true?”

He shifted a little in his chair. “No, it wasn’t. I lied on impulse. I didn’t like the thought of that car back in that garage… as if it had found its way home. If there are emotions and feelings that still live on, they would be there, as well as in the car herself.” And very quickly he corrected himself: “Itself.”

Not long after, I said my goodbyes and followed my headlights home through the dark, thinking over everything LeBay had told me. I wondered if it would make any difference to Arnie if I told him one person had had a mortal accident in his car and another had actually died in it. I pretty well knew that it wouldn’t; in his own way, Arnie could be every bit as stubborn as Roland LeBay himself. The lovely little scene over the car with his parents had shown that quite conclusively. The fact that he went on taking auto-shop courses down there in the Libertyville High version of the DMZ showed the same thing.

I thought of LeBay saying, I didn’t like the thought of that car back in that garage… as if it had found its way home.

He had also said that his brother took the car someplace to work on it. And the only do-it-yourself garage in Libertyville now was Will Darnell’s. Of course, there might have been another back in the ’50s, but I didn’t believe it. In my heart what I believed was that Arnie had been working on Christine in a place where she had been worked on before.

Had been. That was the operant phrase. Because of the fight with Buddy Repperton, Arnie was afraid to leave it there any longer, So maybe that avenue to Christine’s past was blocked off as well.

And, of course, there were no curses. Even LeBay’s idea about lingering emotions was pretty farfetched. I doubted if he really believed it himself. He had shown me an old scar, and he had used the word vengeance. And that was probably a lot closer to the truth than any phony supernatural bullshit. Of course.

No; I was seventeen years old, bound for college in another year, and I didn’t believe in such things as curses and emotions that linger and grow rancid, the spilled milk of dreams. I would not have granted you the power of the past to reach out horrid dead hands toward the living.

But I’m a little older now.

13 LATER THAT EVENING

My mother and Elaine had gone to bid, but my dad was up, watching the eleven o’clock news on TV. “Where you been, Dennis?” he asked.

“Bowling,” I said, the lie coming naturally and instinctively to my lips. I didn’t want my father to know any of this. Peculiar as it was, it really wasn’t peculiar enough to be more than moderately interesting. Or so I rationalized.

“Arnie called,” he said. “Asked me to have you call back if you got in before eleven-thirty or so.”

I glanced at my watch. It was only eleven-twenty. But hadn’t I had enough of Arnie and Arnie’s problems for one day?

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Are you going to call him?”

I sighed. “Yeah, I guess I will.”

I went into the kitchen, slapped together a cold chicken sandwich, poured myself a glass of Hawaiian punch—gross stuff, but I love it—and dialled Arnie’s house. He picked up the phone himself on the second ring. He sounded happy and excited.

“Dennis! Where you been?”

“Bowling,” I said.

“Listen, I went down to Darnell’s tonight, you know? And—this is great, Dennis—he gave Repperton the boot! Repperton’s gone and I can stay!”

That sensation of unformed dread in my belly again. I put my sandwich down. Suddenly I didn’t want it anymore.

“Arnie, do you think taking it back there is really such a good idea?”

What do you mean? Repperton’s gone. That doesn’t sound like a good idea to you?”

I thought about Darnell ordering Arnie to turn off his car before it polluted his cruddy garage, Darnell telling Arnie he didn’t take any shit from kids like him. I thought about the shamefaced way Arnie had cut his eyes away from mine when he told me he had gotten lift-time to change his oil by doing “a couple of errands”. I had an idea that Darnell might find it amusing to turn Arnie into his pet gofer. It would amuse the shit out of his other regulars and his poker buddies. Arnie goes out for coffee, Arnie goes out for doughnuts, Arnie changes the toilet paper rolls in the crapper and loads up the Nibroc dispenser with paper towels. Hey Will, who’s the four eyes swamping out the toilet in there?… Him? Name’s Cunningham. His folks teach up at the college. He’s taking a shithouse postgrad course down here. And they would laugh. Arnie would the local joke down at Darnell’s Garage on Hampton Street.

I thought about those things, but I didn’t say them. I figured Arnie could make up his own mind about whether he was treading water or shit. This couldn’t go on for ever Arnie was just too smart. Or so I hoped. He was ugly, but he wasn’t dumb.

“Repperton being gone sounds like a fine idea,” I said. “It was just that I thought Darnell’s was sort of a temporary measure. I mean, twenty a week, Arnie that’s pretty stiff on top of the tools fees and the lift fees and all that happy crappy.”

“That’s why I thought renting Mr LeBay’s garage would be so great,” Arnie said. “I figured that even at twenty-five a week I’d be better off.”

“Well, there you go. It you put an ad in the paper for garage space, I bet you’d—”

“No, no, let me finish,” Arnie said. He was still excited. “When I went down there this afternoon Darnell took me aside right away. Said he was sorry about the ragging I had to take from Repperton. He said he misjudged me.”

“He said that?” I guess I believed it, but I didn’t trust it.

“Yeah. He asked me how I’d like to work for him part-time. Ten, maybe twenty hours a week during school. Putting stuff away, oiling the lifts, that kind of thing. And I can have the space for ten a week, tools fees and lift fees at half. How does that sound?”

I thought it sounded too fucking good to be true.

“Watch your ass, Arnie.”

“What?”

“My dad says he’s a crook.”

“I haven’t seen any sign of it, I think that’s all just talk, Dennis. He’s a loudmouth, but I think that’s all.”

“I’m just telling you to stay loose, that’s all.” I switched the phone to my other ear and drank some Hawaiian Punch. “Keep your eyes open and move away quick if anything starts to look heavy.”

“Are you talking about anything specific?”

I thought of the vague stories about drugs, the more specific ones about hot cars.

“No,” I said. “I just don’t trust him.”

“Well…” he said doubtfully, trailing away, and then came back to the original subject: Christine. With him it always got back to Christine. “But it’s a break, a real break for me, Dennis, if it works out. Christine… she’s really hurting. I’ve been able to do some things with her, but for everything I do it looks like there’s four more. Some of it I don’t even know how to do, but I’m going to learn.”

“Yeah,” I said, and took a bite out of my sandwich. After my conversation with George LeBay, my enthusiasm for the subject of Arnie’s best girl Christine had passed zero and entered the negative regions.

“She needs a front-end alignment—hell, she needs a new front end—and new brake shoes… a ring-job… I may try to re-grind the pistons… but I can’t do any of that stuff with my fifty-four-buck Craftsman toolkit. You see what I mean, Dennis?”

He sounded like he was pleading for my approval. With a sinking in my stomach, I suddenly remembered a guy we had gone to school with. Freddy Darlington, his name had been. Freddy was no ball of fire, but he was an okay kid with a good sense of humour. Then he met some slut from Penn Hills—and I mean a real slut, one more than happy to stoop for the troops, bang for the gang, pick your pejorative. She had a mean, stupid face that reminded me of the back end of a Mack truck and she never stopped chewing gum. The stink of Juicy Fruit hung around her in a constant cloud. She got pregnant at about the same time Freddy got hung up on her. I always sort of figured he got hung up on her because she was the first girl to let him go all the way. So what happens is he drops out of school, gets a job in a warehouse, the princess has the baby, and he shows up with her at a party after the Junior Prom last December, wanting everything to seem the same when nothing is the same; she is looking at all of us guys with those dead, contemptuous eyes, her jaws are going up and down like the jaws of a cow working over a particularly tasty cud, and all of us have heard the news: she’s back at the bowling alley, she’s back at the Libertyville Rec, she’s back at Gino’s, she’s out cruising while Freddy is working, she’s back hard at work, banging for the gang and stooping for the troops. I know they say that a stiff dick has no conscience, but I tell you now that some cunts have teeth, and when I looked at Freddy, looking ten years older than he should have, I felt like I wanted to cry. And when he talked about her, he did it in that same pleading tone I had heard in Arnie’s voice just now—You really like her, guys, don’t you? She’s all right, isn’t she, guys? I didn’t fuck up too bad, did I, guys? I mean, this is probably just a bad dream and I’ll wake up pretty soon, right? Right? Right?

“Sure,” I said into the telephone. That whole stupid, ugly Freddy Darlington business had gone through my mind in maybe two seconds. “I see what you mean, Arnie.”

“Good,” he said, relieved.

“Just watch out for your ass. And that goes double when you get back to school. Keep away from Buddy Repperton.”

“Yeah. You bet.”

“Arnie—”

“What?”

I paused. I wanted to ask him if Darnell had said anything about Christine being in his shop before, if he had recognized her. Even more, I wanted to tell him what had happened to Mrs LeBay and to her small daughter, Rita. But I couldn’t. He would know right away where I had gotten the information. And in his touchy state over the damn car, he would be apt to think I had gone behind his back—and in a way I had. But to tell him I had might well mean the end of our friendship.

I had had enough of Christine, but I still cared for Arnie. Which meant that door had to be closed for good. No more creeping around and asking questions. No more lectures.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was just going to say that I guess you found a home for your rustbucket. Congratulations.”

“Dennis, are you eating something?”

“Yeah, a chicken sandwich. Why?”

“You’re chewing in my ear. It really sounds gross.”

I began to smack as loudly as I could. Arnie made puking sounds. We both got laughing, and it was good—it was like the old days before he married that numb fucking car.

“You’re an asshole, Dennis.”

“That’s right. I learned it from you.

“Get bent,” he said, and hung up.

I finished my sandwich and my Hawaiian Punch, rinsed the plate and the glass and went back into the living room, ready to shower and go to bed. I was beat.

Sometime during our phone conversation I had heard the TV go off and had assumed that my father had gone upstairs. But he hadn’t. He was sitting in his recliner chair with his shirt open. I noticed with some unease how grey the hair on his chest was getting, and the way the reading lamp beside him shone through the hair on his head and showed his pink scalp. Getting thinner up there. My father was no kid. I realized with greater unease that in five years, by the time I would theoretically finish college, he would be fifty and balding—a stereotype accountant. Fifty in five years if he didn’t just drop dead of another heart attack. The first one had not been bad—no myocardial scarring, he had told me on the one occasion I had asked. But he did not try to tell me that a second heart attack wasn’t likely. I knew it was, my mom knew it was, and he did too. Only Ellie still thought he was invulnerable—but hadn’t I seen a question in her eyes once or twice? I thought maybe I had.

Died suddenly.

I felt the hairs on my scalp stir. Suddenly. Straightening up at his desk, clutching his chest. Suddenly. Dropping his racket on the tennis court. You didn’t want to think those thoughts about your father, but sometimes they come. God knows they do.

“I couldn’t help overhearing some of that,” he said.

“Yeah?” Warily.

“Has Arnie Cunningham got his foot in a bucket of something warm and brown, Dennis?”

“I… I don’t know for sure,” I said slowly. Because, after all, what did I have? Vapours, that was all.

“You want to talk about it?”

“Not right now, Dad, if it’s okay.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “But if it… as you said on the phone, if it gets heavy, will you for God’s sake tell me what’s happening?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” I started for the Stairs and was almost there when he stopped me by saying, “I ran Will Darnell’s accounts and did his income-tax returns for almost fifteen years, you know.”

I turned back to him, really surprised.

“No. I didn’t know that.”

My father smiled. It was a smile I had never seen before, one I would guess my mother had seen only a few times, my sis maybe not at all. You might have thought it was a sleepy sort of smile at first, if you looked more closely you would have seen that it was not sleepy at all—it was cynical and hard and totally aware.

“Can you keep your mouth shut about something, Dennis?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

“Don’t just think so.”

“Yes. I can.”

“Better. I did his figures up until 1975, and then he got Bill Upshaw over in Monroeville.”

My father looked at me closely.

“I won’t say that Bill Upshaw is a crook, but I will say that his scruples are thin enough to read a newspaper through. And last year he bought himself a $300,000 English Tudor in Sewickley, Damn the interest rates, full speed ahead.”

He gestured at our own home with a small sweep of his right arm and then let it drop back into his own lap. He and my mother had bought it the year before I was born for $62,000—it was now worth maybe $150,000—and they had only recently gotten their paper back from the bank. We had a little party in the back yard late last summer; Dad lit the barbecue, put the pink slip on the long fork, and each of us got a chance at holding it over the coals until it was gone.

“No English Tudor here, huh, Denny?” he said.

“It’s fine,” I said. I came back and sat down on the couch.

“Darnell and I parted amicably enough,” my father went on, “not that I ever cared very much for him in a personal way. I thought he was a wretch.”

I nodded a little, because I liked that; it expressed my gut feelings about Will Darnell better than any profanity could.

“But there’s all the difference in the world between a personal relationship and a business relationship. You learn that very quickly in this business, or you give it up and start selling Fuller Brushes door-to-door. Our business relationship was good, as far as it went… but it didn’t go far enough. That was why I finally called it quits.”

“I don’t get you.”

“Cash kept showing up,” he said. “Large amounts of cash with no clear ancestry. At Darnell’s direction I invested in two corporations—Pennsylvania Solar Heating and New York Ticketing—that sounded like two of the dummiest dummy corporations I’ve ever heard of. Finally I went to see him, because I wanted all my cards on the table. I told him that my professional opinion was that, if he got audited either by the IRS or by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania tax boys, he was apt to have a great deal of explaining to do, and that before long I was going to know too much to be an asset to him.”

“What did he say?”

“He began to dance,” my father said, still wearing that sleepy, cynical smile. “In my business, you start to get familiar with the steps of the dance by the time you’re thirty-eight or so… if you’re good at your business, that is. And I’m not all that bad, The dance starts off with the guy asking you if you’re happy with your work, if it’s paying you enough. If you say you like the work but you sure could be doing better, the guy encourages you to talk about whatever you’re carrying on your back: your house, your car, your kids’ college education—maybe you’ve got a wife with a taste for clothes a little fancier than she can by rights afford… see?”

“Sounding you out?”

“It’s more like feeling you up,” he said, and then laughed. “But yeah. The dance is every bit as mannered as a minuet. There are all sorts of phrases and pauses and steps. After the guy finds out what sort of financial burdens you’d like to get rid of, he starts asking you what sort of things you’d like to have. A Cadillac, a summer place in the Catskills or the Poconos, maybe a boat.

I gave a little start at that, because I knew my dad wanted a boat about as badly as he wanted anything these days; a couple of times I had gone with him on sunny summer afternoons to marinas along King George Lake and Lake Passeeonkee. He’d price out the smaller yachts and I’d see the wistful look in his eyes. Now I understood it. They were out of his reach. Maybe if his life had taken a different turn—if he didn’t have kids to think about putting through college, for instance—they wouldn’t have been.

“And you said no?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I made it clear pretty early on that I didn’t want to dance. For one thing, it would have meant getting more involved with him on a personal level, and, as I said, I thought he was a skunk. For another thing, these guys are all fundamentally stupid about numbers—which is why so many of them have gone up on tax convictions. They think you can hide illegal income. They’re sure of it. He laughed. “They’ve all got this mystic idea that you can wash money like you wash clothes, when all you can really do is juggle it until something falls down and smashes all over your head.”

“Those were the reasons?”

“Two out of three.” He looked in my eyes. “I’m no fucking crook, Dennis.”

There was a moment of electric communication between us—even now, four years later, I get goosebumps thinking of it, although I’m by no means sure that I can get it across to you. It wasn’t that he treated me like an equal for the first time that night; it wasn’t even that he was showing me the wistful knight-errant still hiding inside the button-down man scrambling for a living in a dirty, hustling world. I think it was sensing him as a reality, a person who had existed long before I ever came onstage, a person who had eaten his share of mud. In that moment I think I could have imagined him making love to my mother, both of them sweaty and working hard to make it, and not have been embarrassed.

Then he dropped his eyes, grinned a defensive grin, and did his husky Nixon-voice, which he was very good at: “You people deserve to know if your father is a crook. Well, I am not a crook, I could have taken the money, but that… harrum!… that would have been wrong.”

I laughed too loud, a release of tension—I felt the moment passing, and although part of me didn’t want it to pass, part of me did; it was too intense. I think maybe he felt that, too.

“Shhh, you’ll wake your mother and she’ll give us both the devil for being up this late.”

“Yeah, sorry. Dad, do you know what he’s into? Darnell?”

“I didn’t know then; I didn’t want to know, because then I’d be a part of it. I had my ideas, and I’ve heard a few things. Stolen cars, I imagine—not that he’d run them through that garage on Hampton Street; he’s not a completely stupid man, and only an idiot shits where he eats. Maybe hijacking as well.”

“Guns and stuff?” I asked, sounding a little hoarse.

“Nothing so romantic. If I had to guess, I’d guess cigarettes, mostly—cigarettes and booze, the two old standbys. Contraband like fireworks. Maybe a shipment of microwave ovens or colour TVs every once in a while, if the risk looked low. Enough to keep him busy these many years.”

He looked at me soberly.

“He’s played the odds good, but he’s also been lucky for a long time, Dennis. Oh, maybe he hasn’t really needed luck here in town—if it was just Libertyville, I guess he could go on for ever, or at least until he dropped dead of a heart attack—but the state tax boys are sand sharks and the feds are Great Whites. He’s been lucky, but one of these days they’re going to fall on him like the Great Wall of China.”

“Have you… have you heard things?”

“Not a whisper. Nor am I apt to. But I like Arnie Cunningham a great deal, and I know you’ve been worried about this car thing.”

“Yeah. He’s… he’s not acting healthy about it, Dad. Everything’s the car, the car, the car.”

“People who have not had a great deal tend to do that,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a car, sometimes it’s a girl, sometimes it’s a career or a musical instrument or an unhealthy obsession with some famous person. I went to college with a tall, ugly fellow we all called Stork. With Stork it was his model train set… he’d been hooked on model trains ever since the third grade, and his set was pretty damn near the eighth wonder of the world. He flunked out of Brown the second semester of his freshman year. His grades were going to hell, and what it came down to was a choice between college and his Lionels. Stork picked the trains.”

“What happened to him?”

“He killed himself in 1961,” my father said, and stood up “My point is just that good people can sometimes get blinded, and it’s not always their fault. Probably Darnell will forget all about him—he’ll just be another guy tinkering around under his car on a crawlie-gator. But if Darnell tries to use him, you be his eyes, Dennis. Don’t let him get pulled into the dance.”

“All right. I’ll try. But there may not be that much I can do.”

“Yeah. How well I know it. Want to go up?”

“Sure.”

We went up, and, tired as I was, I lay awake a long time. It had been an eventful day. Outside, a night wind tapped a branch softly against the side of the house, and far away, downtown, I heard some kid’s rod peeling rubber—it made a sound in the night like an hysterical woman’s desperate laughter.

14 CHRISTINE AND DARNELL

Between working on the construction project days and working on Christine nights, Arnie hadn’t been seeing much of his folks. Relations there had been getting pretty strained and abrasive. The Cunningham house, which had always been pleasant and low-key in the past, was now an armed camp. It is a state of affairs a lot of people can remember from their teenage years, guess; too many, maybe. The kid is egotistical enough to think he or she is the first person in the world to discover some particular thing (usually it’s a girl, but it doesn’t have to be), and the parents are too scared and stupid and possessive to want to let go of the halter. Sins on both sides. Sometimes it gets painful and outrageous—no war is as dirty and bitter as a civil war. And it was particularly painful in Arnie’s case because the split had come so late, and his folks had gotten much too used to having their own way. It wouldn’t be unfair to say that they had blueprinted his life.

So when Michael and Regina proposed a four-day weekend at their lakeshore cottage in upstate New York before school started again, Arnie said yes even though he badly wanted those last four days to work on Christine. More and more often at work he had told me how he was going to “show them”; he was going to turn Christine into a real street-rod and “show them all”. He had already planned to restore the car to its original bright red and ivory after the bodywork was done.

But he went off with them, determined to yassuh and tug his forelock for the whole four days and have a good time with his folks—or a reasonable facsimile. I got over the evening before they left and was relieved to find they had both absolved me of blame in the affair of Arnie’s car (which they still hadn’t even seen). They had apparently decided it was a private obsession. That was fine by me.

Regina was busy packing. Arnie and Michael and I got their Oldtown canoe on top of their Scout and tied it down. When it was done, Michael suggested to his son—with the air of a powerful king conferring an almost unbelievable favour on two of his favourite subjects—that Arnie go in and get a few beers.

Arnie, affecting both the expression and the tones of amazed gratitude, said that would be super. As he left, he dropped a wink my way.

Michael leaned against the Scout and lit a cigarette. “Is he going to get tired of this car business, Denny?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You want to do me a favour?”

“Sure, if I can,” I said cautiously I was pretty sure he was going to ask me to go to Arnie, act the Dutch uncle part, and try to “talk him out of it”.

But instead he said, “If you get a chance, go down to Darnell’s while we’re gone and see what sort of progress he’s making. I’m interested.”

“Why is that?” I asked, thinking immediately it was a pretty damn rude question—but by then it was already out.

“Because I want him to succeed,” he said simply, and glanced at me. “Oh, Regina’s still dead set against it. If he has a car, that means he’s growing up. And if he’s growing up, that means… all sorts of things,” he finished lamely. “But I’m not so down on it. You couldn’t characterize me as dead set against it anyway, at least not anymore. Oh, he caught me by surprise at first… I had visions of some dead dog sitting out in front of our house until Arnie went off to college—that or him choking to death on the exhaust some night.”

The thought of Veronica LeBay jumped into my head, all unbidden.

“But now…” He shrugged, glanced at the door between the garage and the kitchen, dropped his cigarette, and scuffed it out. “He’s obviously committed. He’s got his sense of self-respect on the line. I’d like to see him at least get it running.”

Maybe he saw something in my face; when he went on he sounded defensive.

“I haven’t quite forgotten everything about being young,” he said. “I know a car is important to a kid Arnie’s age. Regina can’t see that quite so clearly. She always got picked up. She was never faced with the problems of being the picker-upper. I remember that a car is important… if a kid’s ever going to have any dates.”

So that’s where he thought it was at. He saw Christine as a means to an end rather than as the end itself. I wondered what he’d think if I told him that I didn’t think Arnie had ever looked any further than getting the Fury running and legal. I wondered if that would make him more or less uneasy.

The thump of the kitchen door closing.

“Would you go take a look?”

“I guess so,” I said. “If you want.”

“Thanks.”

Arnie came back with the beers. “What’s the thanks for?” he asked Michael. His voice was light and humorous, but his eyes flicked between us carefully. I noticed again that his complexion was really clearing, and his face seemed to have strengthened. For the first time, the two thoughts Arnie and dates didn’t seem mutually exclusive. It occurred to me that his face was almost handsome—not in any jut-jawed lifeguard king-of-the-prom way, but in an interesting, thoughtful way. He would never be Roseanne’s type, but…

“For helping with the canoe,” Michael said casually.

“Oh.”

We drank our beers. I went home. The next day the happy threesome went off together to New York, presumably to rediscover the family unity that had been lost over the latter third of the summer.

The day before they were due back I took a ride down to Darnell’s Garage—as much to satisfy my own curiosity as Michael Cunningham’s.

The garage, standing in front of the block-long lot of junked cars, looked just as attractive in daylight as it had on the evening we had brought Christine—it had all the charm of a dead gopher.

I pulled into a vacant slot in front of the speed shop that Darnell also ran—well stocked with such items as Feully heads, Hurst gearboxes, and Ram-Jett superchargers (for all those working men who had to keep their old cars running so they could continue to put bread on the table, no doubt), not to mention a wide selection of huge mutant tyres and a variety of spinner hubcaps. Looking through the window of Darnell’s speed shop was like looking into a crazy automotive Disneyland.

I got out and walked back across the tarmac toward the garage and the clanging sound of tools, shouts, the machine-gun blast of pneumatic wrenches. A sleazy-looking guy in a cracked leather jacket was dorking around with an old BSA bike by one of the garage bays, either removing the bike’s manifold or putting it back on. There was a stutter of road-rash down his left cheek. The back of his jacket displayed a skull wearing a Green Beret and the charming motto KILL EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT EM OUT.

He looked up at me with bloodshot and lunatic Rasputin eyes, then looked back at what he was doing. He had a surgical array of tools spread out beside him, each one die-stamped with the words DARNELL’s GARAGE.

Inside, the world was full of the echoey, evocative bang of tools and the sound of men working on cars and hollering profanity at the rolling iron they were working on. Always the profanity, and always female in gender: come offa there you bitch, come loose, you cunt, come on over here, Rick, and help me get this twat off.

I looked around for Darnell and didn’t see him any place. No one took any particular notice of me, so I walked over to stall twenty where Christine sat, now pointing nose-out, just like I had every right in the world to be there. In the stall to the right, two fat guys in bowling league shirts were putting a camper cap on the back of a pickup truck that had seen better days. The stall on the other side was deserted.

As I approached Christine, I felt that chill coming back. There was no reason for it, but I seemed helpless to stop it—and without even thinking, I moved a bit to the left, toward the empty stall. I didn’t want to be in front of her.

My first thought was that Arnie’s complexion had improved in tandem with Christine’s. My second thought was that he was making his improvements in a strangely haphazard way… and Arnie was usually so methodical.

The twisted, broken aerial had been replaced with a straight new one that glimmered under the fluorescent bars. Half the Fury’s front grille had been replaced; the other half was still flecked and pitted with rust. And there was something else…

I walked along her flank right to the rear bumper, frowning.

Well, it was on the other side, that’s all, I thought.

So I walked around to the other side, and it wasn’t there, either.

I stood by the back wall, still frowning, trying to remember. I was pretty sure that when we first saw her standing on LeBay’s lawn, with a FOR SALE sign propped against her windscreen, there had been a good-sized rusty dent on one side or the other, near the rear end—the sort of deep dent that my grandfather always called a “hoss-kick”. We’d be driving along the turnpike and we’d go by a car with a big dent in it somewhere and Grampy would say, “Hey, Denny, take a look there! Hoss kicked that one!” My grandfather was the sort of guy who had a downhome phrase for everything.

I started to think I must have imagined it, and then gave my head a little shake. That was sloppy thinking. It had been there; I remembered it clearly. Just because it wasn’t here now didn’t mean it hadn’t been then. Arnie had obviously knocked it out, and had done a damn good piece of bodywork covering it up.

Except…

There was no sign that he had done anything. There was no primer paint, no grey body fill, no flaked paint. Just Christine’s dull red and dirty white.

But it had been there, goddammit! A deep dimple filled with a snarl of rust, on one side or the other.

But it sure was gone now.

I stood there in the clatter and thud of tools and machinery and felt very alone and suddenly very scared. It was all wrong, it was all crazy. He had replaced the radio aerial when the exhaust was practically dragging on the ground. He had replaced one half of the grille but not the other. He had talked to me about doing a front-end job, but inside he had replaced the ripped and dusty back seat cover with a bright red new one. The front seat cover was still a dusty wreck with a spring peeking through the passenger side.

I didn’t like it at all. It was crazy and it wasn’t like Arnie.

Something came to me, a trace of memory, and without even thinking about it, I stood back and looked at the entire car—not just one thing here and one thing there, but everything. And I had it; it clicked into place, and the chill came back.

That night when we had brought it here. The flat tyre. The replacement. I had looked at that new tyre on that old car and thought it was as if a little bit of the old car had been scratched away and that the new car—fresh, resplendent, just off the assembly line in a year when Ike had been President and Batista had still been in charge of Cuba—was peeking through.

What I was seeing now was like that… only instead of just a single new tyre, there were all sorts of things—the aerial, a wink of new chrome from the grille, one taillight that was a bright deep red, that new seat cover in the back.

In its turn, that brought back something else from childhood. Arnie and I had gone to Vacation Bible School together for two weeks each summer, and every day the teacher would tell a Bible story and leave it unfinished. Then she would give each kid a blank sheet of “magic paper”. And if you scraped the edge of a coin or the side of your pencil over it, a picture would gradually emerge out of the white—the dove bringing the olive branch back to Noah, the walls of Jericho tumbling down, good miracle stuff like that. It used to fascinate both of us, seeing the pictures gradually emerge. At first just lines floating in the void… and then the lines would connect with other lines they would take on coherence… take on meaning…

I looked at Arnie’s Christine with growing horror, trying to shake the feeling that in her I was seeing something terribly similar to those magic miracle pictures.

I wanted to look under the hood.

Suddenly it seemed very important that I look under the hood.

I went around to the front (I didn’t like to stand in front of it—no good reason why not, I just didn’t) and fumbled around for the hood release. I couldn’t get it. Then I realised that it was probably inside.

I started to go around, and then I saw something else, something that scared me shitless. I could have been wrong about the hoss-kick, I suppose. I knew I wasn’t, but at least technically…

But this was something else entirely.

The web of cracks in the windscreen was smaller.

I was positive it was smaller.

My mind raced back to that day a month ago when I had wandered into LeBay’s garage to look at the car while Arnie went into the house with the old man to do the deal. The entire left side of the windscreen had been a spider’s web of cracks radiating out from one central, zigzagging fault that had probably been caused by a flying stone.

Now the spider’s web seemed smaller, simpler—you could see into the car from that side, and you hadn’t been able to before, I was sure of that (just a trick of the light, that’s all, my mind whispered).

Yet I had to be wrong—because it was impossible. Simply impossible. You could replace a windscreen; that was no problem if you had the money. But to make a webbing of cracks shrink—

I laughed a little. It was a shaky sound, and one of the guys working on the camper cap looked up at me curiously and said something to his buddy. It was a shaky sound, but maybe better than no sound at all. Of course it was the light, and nothing more. I had seen the car for the first time with the westering sun shining fully on the flawed windscreen, and I had seen it the second time in the shadows of LeBay’s garage. Now I was seeing it under these high-set fluorescent tubes. Three different kinds of light, and all it added up to was an optical illusion.

Still, I wanted to look under the hood. More than ever,

I went around to the driver’s side door and gave it a yank. The door didn’t open. It was locked. Of course it was; all four of the door-lock buttons were down, Arnie wouldn’t be apt to leave it unlocked in here, so anybody could get inside and poke around. Maybe Repperton was gone, but genus Creepus was weed-common. I laughed again—silly old Dennis—but this time it sounded even more shrill and shaky. I was starting to feel spaced-out, the way I sometimes felt the morning after I smoked a little too much pot.

Locking the Fury’s doors was a very natural thing to do, all right. Except that, when I walked around the car the first time, I thought I had noticed the door-lock buttons had all been up.

I stepped slowly backward again, looking at the car. It sat there, still little more than a rusting hulk. I was not thinking any one thing specific—I am quite sure of that—except maybe it was as if it knew that I wanted to get inside and pull the release.

And because it didn’t want me to do that, it had locked its own doors?

That was really a very humorous idea. So humorous that I had another laugh (several people were glancing at me now, the way that folks always glance at people who laugh for no apparent reason when they are by themselves).

A big hand fell on my shoulder and turned me around. It was Darnell, with a dead stub of cigar stuck in the side of his mouth. The end of it was wet and pretty gross-looking. He was wearing small half-specs, and the eyes behind them were coldly speculative.

“What are you doing, kiddo?” he asked. “This ain’t your property.”

The guys with the camper cap were watching us avidly. One of them nudged the other and whispered something.

“It belongs to a friend of mine,” I said. “I brought it in with him. Maybe you remember me. I was the one with the large skin-tumour on the end of my nose and the—”

“I don’t give a shit if you wheeled it in on a skateboard,” he said. “It ain’t your property. Take your bad jokes and get lost, kid. Blow.”

My father was right—he was a wretch. And I would have been more than happy to blow; I could think of at least six thousand places I’d rather be on this second-to-last day of my summer vacation. Even the Black Hole of Calcutta would have been an improvement. Not a big one, maybe, yet an improvement, all the same. But the car bothered me. A lot of little things, all adding up to a big itch that needed to be scratched. Be his eyes, my father had said, and that sounded good. The problem was I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

“My name is Dennis Guilder,” I said “My dad used to do your books, didn’t he?”

He looked at me for a long time with no expression at all in his cold little pig eyes, and I was suddenly sure he was going to tell me he didn’t give a fuck who my father was, that I’d better blow and let these working men go about the business of fixing their cars so they could go on putting bread on their tables. Et cetera.

Then he smiled—but the smile didn’t touch his eyes at all. “You’re Kenny Guilder’s boy?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

He patted the hood of Arnie’s car with one pale, fat hand—there were two rings on it, and one of them looked like a real diamond. Still, what does a kid like me know?

“I guess you’re straight enough, then. If you’re Kenny’s kid.” There was a second when I thought he was going to ask for some identification.

The two guys next to us had gone back to work on their camper, apparently having decided nothing interesting was going to transpire.

“Come on into the office and let’s have a talk,” he said, then turned away and moved across the floor without even a glance backward. That I would comply was taken for granted. He moved like a ship under full sail, his white shirt billowing, the girth of his hips and backside amazing, improbable. Very fat people always affect me that way, with a feeling of distinct improbability, as if I were looking at a very good optical illusion—but then, I come from a long line of skinny people. For my family I’m a heavyweight.

He paused here and there on his way back to his office, which had a glass wall looking out onto the garage. Darnell reminded me a little bit of Moloch, the god we read about in my Origins of Literature class—he was the one who was supposed to be able to see everywhere with his one red eye. Darnell bawled at one guy to get the hose on his exhaust before he threw him out; yelled something to another guy about how “Nicky’s back was acting up on him again” (this inspired a fuming, ferocious burst of laughter from both of them); hollered at another guy to pick up those fucking Pepsi-Cola cans, was he born in a dump? Apparently Will Darnell didn’t know anything about what my mother always called “a normal tone of voice”.

After a moment’s hesitation, I followed him. Curiosity killed the cat, I suppose.

His office was done in Early American Carburettor—it was every scuzzy garage office from coast to coast in a country that runs on rubber and amber gold. There was a greasy calendar with a pin-up of a blond goddess in short-shorts and an open blouse climbing over a fence in the country. There were unreadable plaques from half a dozen companies which sold auto parts. Stacks of ledgers. An ancient adding machine. There was a photograph, God save us, of Will Darnell wearing a Shriner’s fez and mounted on a miniature motorcycle that looked about to collapse under his bulk. And there was the smell of long-departed cigars and sweat.

Darnell sat down in a swivel chair with wooden arms. The cushion wheezed beneath him. It sounded tired but resigned. He leaned back. He took a match from the hollow head of a ceramic Negro jockey. He struck it on a strip of sandpaper that ran along one edge of his desk and fired up the wet stub of cigar. He coughed long and hard, his big, loose chest heaving up and down. Directly behind him, tacked to the wall, was a picture of Garfield the Cat. “Want a trip to Loose-Tooth City?” Garfield was enquiring over one cocked paw. It seemed to sum up Will Darnell, Wretch in Residence, perfectly.

“Want a Pepsi, kid?”

“No, thank you,” I said, and sat down in the straight chair opposite him.

He looked at me—that cold look of appraisal again and then nodded. “How’s your dad, Dennis? His ticker still okay?”

“He’s fine. When I told him Arnie had his car here, he remembered you right off. He says Bill Upshaw’s doing your figures now.”

“Yeah. Good man. Good man. Not as good as your dad, but good.”

I nodded. A silence fell between us, and I began to feel uneasy. Will Darnell didn’t look uneasy; he didn’t look anything at all. That cold look of appraisal never changed.

“Did your buddy send you to find out if Repperton was really gone?” he asked me, so suddenly that I jumped.

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

“Well, you tell him he is,” Darnell went on, ignoring what I’d just said. “Little wiseass. I tell em when they run their junk in here: get along or get out. He was working for me, doing a little of this and a little of that, and I guess he thought he had the gold key to the crapper or something. Little wiseass punk.”

He started coughing again and it was a long time before he stopped. It was a sick sound, I was beginning to feel claustrophobic in the office, even with the window looking out on the garage.

“Arnie’s a good boy,” Darnell said presently, still measuring me with his eyes, Even while he was coughing, that expression hadn’t changed. “He’s picked up the slack real good.”

Doing what? I wanted to ask, and just didn’t dare.

Darnell told me anyway. Cold glance aside, he was apparently feeling expansive. “Sweeps the floor, takes the crap out of the garage bays at the end of the day, keeps the tools inventoried, along with Jimmy Sykes. Have to be careful with tools around here, Dennis. They got a way of walkin away when your back’s turned.” He laughed, and the laugh turned into a wheeze. “Got him started strippin parts out back, as well. He’s got good hands. Good hands and bad taste in cars. I ain’t seen such a dog as that ’58 in years.”

“Well, I guess he sees it as a hobby,” I said.

“Sure,” Darnell said expansively. “Sure he does. Just as long as he doesn’t want to ramrod around with it like that punk, that Repperton. But not much chance of that for a while, huh?”

“I guess not. It looks pretty wasted.”

“What the fuck is he doing to it?” Darnell asked. He leaned forward suddenly, his big shoulders going up all the way to his hairline. His brows pulled in, and his eyes disappeared except for small twin gleams. “What the fuck is he up to? I been in this business all my life, and I never seen anyone go at fixing a car up the crazy-ass way he is. Is it a joke? A game?”

“I’m not getting you,” I said, although I was—I was getting him perfectly.

“Then I’ll draw you a pitcher,” Darnell said. “He brings it in, and at first he’s doing all the things I’d expect him to do. What the fuck, he ain’t got money falling out of his asshole, right? If he did, he wouldn’t be here. He changes the oil. He changes the filter. Grease-job, lube, I see one day he’s got two new Firestones for the front to go with the two on the back.”

Two on the back? I wondered, and then decided he’d just bought three new tyres to go with the original new one I’d gotten the night we were bringing it over here.

“Then I come in one day and see he’s replaced the windscreen wipers,” Darnell continued “Not so strange, except that the car’s not going to be going anywhere—rain or shine—for a long time. Then it’s a new aerial for the radio, and I think, He’s gonna listen to the radio while he’s working on it and drain his battery. Now he’s got one new seat cover and half a grille. So what is it? A game?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Did he buy the replacement parts from you?”

“No,” Darnell said, sounding aggravated. “I don’t know where he gets them. That grille—there isn’t a spot of rust on it. He must have ordered it from somewhere. Custom Chrysler in New Jersey or someplace like that, But where’s the other half? Up his ass? I never even heard of a grille that came in two pieces.”

“I don’t know. Honest.”

He jammed the cigar out, “Don’t tell me you’re not curious, though. I saw the way you was lookin at that car.” I shrugged. “Arnie doesn’t talk about it much,” I said.

“No, I bet he doesn’t. He’s a close-mouthed sonofabitch. He’s a fighter, though. That Repperton pushed the wrong button when he started in on Cunningham. If he works out okay this fall, I might find a steady job for him this winter. Jimmy Sykes is a good boy, but he ain’t much in the brains department.” His eyes measured me. “Think he’s a pretty good worker, Dennis?”

“He’s okay.”

“I got lots of irons in the fire,” he said. “Lot of irons. I rent out flatbeds to guys that need to haul their stockers up to Philadelphia City. I haul away the junkets after races. I can always use help. Good, trustworthy help.”

I began to have a horrid suspicion that I was being asked to dance. I got up hurriedly, almost knocking over the straight chair. “I really ought to get going,” I said. “And… Mr Darnell… I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention to Arnie that I was here. He’s… a little touchy about the car. To tell you the truth, his father was curious about how he was coming along.”

“Took a little shit on the home front, did he?” Darnell’s right eye closed shrewdly in something that was not quite a wink, “Folks ate a few pounds of Ex-Lax and then stood over him with their legs spread, did they?”

“Yeah, well, you know.”

“You bet I know.” He was up in one smooth motion and clapped me on the back hard enough to stagger me on my feet. Wheezy respiration and cough or not, he was strong.

“Wouldn’t mention it,” he said, walking me toward the door. His hand was still on my shoulder, and that also made me feel nervous—and a little disgusted.

“I tell you something else that bothers me,” he said. “I must see a hundred thousand cars a year in this place well, not that many, but you know what I mean—and I got an eye for em. You know, I could swear I’ve seen that one before. When it wasn’t such a dog. Where did he get it?”

“From a man named Roland LeBay,” I said, thinking of LeBay’s brother telling me that LeBay did all the maintenance himself at some do-it-yourself garage. “He’s dead now.”

Darnell stopped cold. “LeBay? Rollie LeBay?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Army? Retired?”

“Yes.”

“Holy Christ, sure! He brought it in here just as regular as clockwork for six maybe eight years, then he stopped coming. A long time ago. What a bastard that man was. If you poured boiling water down that whoremaster’s throat, he would have peed ice cubes. He couldn’t get along with a living soul.” He gripped my shoulder harder. “Does your friend Cunningham know LeBay’s wife committed suicide in that car?”

“What?” I said, acting surprised—I didn’t want him to know I’d been interested enough to talk to LeBay’s brother after the funeral. I was afraid Darnell might repeat the information to Arnie—complete with his source.

Darnell told me the whole story. First the daughter, then the mother.

“No,” I said when he was done. “I’m pretty sure Arnie doesn’t know that. Are you going to tell him?” The eyes, appraising again. “Are you?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t see any reason to.

“Then neither do I.” He opened the door, and the greasy air of the garage smelled almost sweet after the cigar smoke in the office. “That sonofabitch LeBay, I’ll be damned. I hope he’s doing right-face-left-face and to-the-rear-march down in hell.” His mouth turned down viciously for just a moment, and then he glanced over at where Christine sat in stall twenty with her old, rusting paint and her new radio aerial and half a grille. “That bitch back again,” he said, and then he glanced at me. “Well, they say bad pennies always turn up, huh?”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess they do.”

“So long, kid,” he said, sticking a fresh cigar in his mouth. “Say hi to your dad for me.”

“I will.”

“And tell Cunningham to keep an eye out for that punk Repperton. I got an idea he might be the sort who’d hold a grudge.”

“Me too,” I said.

I walked out of the garage, pausing once to glance back but looking in from the glare, Christine was little more than a shadow among shadows. Bad pennies always turn up, Darnell said. It was a phrase that followed me home.

15 FOOTBALL WOES

School started, and nothing much happened for a week or two. Arnie didn’t find out I’d been down to the garage, and I was glad. I don’t think he would have taken kindly to the news. Darnell kept his mouth shut as he had promised (probably for his own reasons). I called Michael one afternoon after school when I knew Arnie would be down at the garage. I told him Arnie had done some stuff to the car, but it was nowhere near street-legal. I told him my impression was that Arnie was mostly farting around. Michael greeted this news with a mixture of relief and surprise, but that ended it… for a while.

Arnie himself flickered in and out of my view, like something you see from the corner of your eye. He was around the halls, and we had three classes together, and he sometimes came over after school or on weekends. There were times when it really seemed as if nothing had changed. But he was at Darnell’s a lot more than he was at my house, and on Friday nights he went out to Philly Plains—the stock-car track—with Darnell’s half-bright handyman, Jimmy Sykcs. They ran out sportsters and charger-class racers, mostly Camaros and Mustangs with all their glass knocked out and roll bars installed. They took them out on Darnell’s flatbed and came back with fresh junk for the automobile graveyard.

It was around that time that Arnie hurt his back. It wasn’t a serious injury—or so he claimed—but my mother noticed that something was wrong with him almost right away. He came over one Sunday to watch the Phillies, who were pounding down the home-stretch to moderate glory that year, and happened to get up during the third inning to pour us each a glass of orange juice. My mother was sitting on the couch with my father, reading a book. She glanced up when Arnie came back in and said, “You’re limping, Arnie.”

I thought I saw a surprising, unexpected expression on Arnie’s face for a second or two—a furtive, almost guilty look. I could have been wrong. If it was there, it was gone a second later.

“I guess I strained my back out at the Plains last night,” he said, giving me my orange juice. “Jimmy Sykes stalled out the last of the clunks we were loading just when it was almost up on the bed of the truck. I could see it rolling back down and then the two of us goofing around for another two hours, trying to get it started again. So I gave it a shove. Guess I shouldn’t have.”

It seemed like an elaborate explanation for a simple little limp, but I could have been wrong about that too.

“You have to be more careful of your back,” my mother said severely. “The Lord—”

“Mom, could we watch the game now?” I asked.

“—only gives you one,” she finished.

“Yes, Mrs Guilder,” Arnie said dutifully.

Elaine wandered in. “Is there any more juice, or did you two coneheads drink it all?”

“Come on, give me a break!” I yelled. There had been some sort of disputed play at second and I had missed the whole thing.

“Don’t shout at your sister, Dennis,” my father muttered from the depths of The Hobbyist magazine he was reading.

“There’s a lot left, Ellie,” Arnie told her.

“Sometimes, Arnie,” Elaine told him, “you strike as almost human.” She flounced out to the kitchen.

“Almost human, Dennis!” Arnie whispered to me, apparently on the verge of grateful tears. “Did you hear that? Almost hyooooman.”

And perhaps it is also only retrospection—or imagination—that makes me think his humour was forced, unreal, only a façade. False memory or true one, the subject of his back passed off, although that limp came and went all through the fall.

I was pretty busy in myself. The cheerleader and I had broken it off, but I could usually find someone to step out with on Saturday nights… if I wasn’t too tired from the constant football practice.

Coach Puffer wasn’t a wretch like Will Darnell, but he was no rose; like half the smalltown high school coaches in America, he had patterned his coaching techniques on those of the late Vince Lombardi, whose chief scripture was that winning wasn’t everything, it was the only thing. You’d be surprised how many people who should know better believe that half-baked horseshit.

A summer of working for Carson Brothers had left me in rugged shape and I think I could have cruised through the season—if it had been a winning season. But by the time Arnie and I had the ugly confrontation near the smoking area behind the shop with Buddy Repperton—and I think that was during the third week of classes—it was pretty clear we weren’t going to have a Winning season. That made Coach Puffer extremely hard to live with, because in his ten years at LHS, he had never had a losing season. That was the year Coach Puffer had to learn a bitter humility. It was a hard lesson for him… and it wasn’t so easy for us, either.

Our first game, away against the Luneburg Tigers, was September 9th. Now, Luneburg is just that—a burg. It’s a little piss-ant rural high school at the extreme west end of our district, and over my years at Libertyville, the usual battle cry after Luneburg’s bumbling defence had allowed yet another touchdown was TELL-US-HOW-IT-FEELSTO-HAVE-COWSHIT-ON-YOUR-HEELS! Followed by a big, sarcastic cheer: RAAAAYYYYYY, LUUUUNEBURG!

It had been over twenty years since Luneburg beat a Libertyville team, but that year they rose up and smote us righteously. I was playing left end, and by halftime I was morally sure that I was going to have cleat-mark scars all over my back for the rest of my life. By then the score was 17-3. It ended up 30–10. The Luneburg fans were delirious; they tore down the goalposts as if it had been the Regional Championship game and carried their players off the field on their shoulders.

Our fans, who had come up in buses specially laid on, sat huddled on the visitors” bleachers in the blaring early September heat, looking blank. In the dressing room, Coach Puffer, looking stunned and pallid, suggested we get down on our knees and pray for guidance in the weeks to come. I knew then that the hurting had not ended but was just beginning.

We got down on our knees, aching, bruised and battered, wanting nothing but to get into the shower and start washing that loser smell off ourselves, and listened as Coach Puffer explained the situation to God in a ten-minute peroration that ended with a promise that we would do our part if He would do His.

The next week, we practised three hours a day (instead of the customary ninety minutes to two hours) under the broiling sun. I tumbled into bed nights and dreamed of his bellowing voice: “Hit that sucker! Hit! HIT!”

I ran windsprints until I began to feel that my legs were going to undergo spontaneous decomposition (at the same instant my lungs burst into flames, probably). Lenny Barongg, one of our tailbacks, had a mild sunstroke and was mercifully—for him, at least—excused for the rest of the week.

So I saw Arnie, and he came over and took dinner with my folks and Ellie and me on Thursday or Friday nights, he checked out a ballgame or two with us on Sunday afternoons, but beyond that I lost sight of him almost completely. I was too busy hauling my aches and pains to class, to practice, then home to my room to do my assignments.

Going back to my football woes—I think the worst thing was the way people looked at me, and Lenny, and the rest of the team, in the hallways. Now that “school spirit” business is mostly a lot of bullshit made up by school administrators who remember having a helluva time at the Saturday-aftemoon gridiron contests of their youth but have conveniently forgotten that a lot of it resulted from being drunk, horny, or both. If you had held a rally in favour of legalizing marijuana, you would have seen some school spirit. But about football, basketball, and track, most of the student body didn’t give a shit. They were too busy trying to get into college or someone’s pants or trouble. Business as usual.

All the same, you get used to being a winner—you start to take it for granted. Libertyville had been fielding killer football teams for a long time; the last time the school had had a losing record—at least, before my senior year—was twelve years before, in 1966. So in the week after the loss of Luneburg, while there was no weeping and gnashing of teeth, there were hurt, puzzled looks in the hall and some booing at the regular Friday afternoon rally at the end of period seven. The boos made Coach Puffer turn nearly purple, and he invited those “poor sports and fair-weather friends” to turn out Saturday afternoon to watch the comeback of the century.

I don’t know if the poor sports and fair-weather friends turned out or not, but I was there. We were at home, and our opponents were t e Ridge Rock Bears. Now Ridge Rock is a mining town, and while the kids going to Ridge Rock High are hicks, they are not soft hicks. They are mean, ugly, touch hicks. The year before, Libertyville’s football team had barely edged them out for the regional title, and one of the local sports commentators had said it wasn’t because Libertyville had a better team but because it had more warm bodies to draw on. Coach Puffer had hit the ceiling over that, too I, I can tell you,

This, however, was the Bears” year. They steamrollered us. Fred Dann went out of the game with a concussion in the first period. In the second period, Norman Aleppo got a ride to the Libertyville Community Hospital with a broken arm. And in the last period, the Bears scored three consecutive touchdowns, two on punt returns. The final score was 40-6. All false modesty aside, I’ll tell you that I scored the six. But I won’t put realism aside with the modesty: I was lucky.

So… another week of hell on the practice field. Another week of Coach yelling Hit that sucker. One day we practised for nearly four hours, and when Lenny suggested to Coach that it might be nice to have some time left for doing homework, I thought—just for an instant—that Puffer was going to belt him one. He had taken to jingling his keys constantly from hand to hand, reminding me of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, I believe that how you lose is a much better index into character than how you win. Puffer, who had never been 0–2 in his coaching career, reacted with baffled, pointless fury, like a caged tiger being teased by cruel children.

The next Friday afternoon—that would have been September 22nd—the usual rally during the last fifteen minutes of period seven was cancelled. I didn’t know any of the players who minded; standing up there and being introduced by twelve prancing cheerleaders for the umptyumpth time was sort of a bore. It was an ominous sign, all the same. That night we were invited back to the gym by Coach Puffer, where we went to the movies for two hours, watching our humiliation by the Tigers and the Bears in the game films. Perhaps this was supposed to fire us up, but it only depressed me.

That night, before our second home game of the year, I had a peculiar dream. It was not exactly a nightmare, not like the one where I woke the house screaming, certainly, but it was… uncomfortable. We were playing the Philadelphia City Dragons, and a strong wind was blowing. The sounds of the cheers, the blaring, distorted voice of Chubby McCarthy from the loudspeaker as he announced downs and yards, even the sounds of players hitting other players, all sounded weird and echoey in that constant, flat wind.

The faces in the stands seemed yellow and oddly shadowed, like the faces of Chinese masks. The cheerleaders danced and capered like jerky automatons. The sky was a queer grey, running with clouds. We were being badly beaten. Coach Puffer was yelling in plays, but no one could hear him. The Dragons were running away from us. The ball was always theirs. Lenny Barongg looked as if he was playing with terrible pain; his mouth was drawn down in a trembling bow like a mask of tragedy.

I was hit, knocked down, run over. I lay on the playing field, far behind the line of scrimmage, writhing, trying to get my breath back. I looked up and there, parked in the middle of the track field, behind the visitors” bleachers, was Christine. Once more she was sparkling and brand-new, as if she had rolled out of the showroom only an hour before.

Arnie was sitting on the roof, crosslegged like Buddha, looking at me expressionlessly. He hollered something at me, but the steady howl of the wind almost buried it. It sounded as if he said: Don’t worry, Dennis. We’ll take care of everything. So don’t worry. All is cool.

Take care of what? I wondered as I lay there on the dream playing field (which my dreaming self had, for some reason, converted into Astro-Turf), struggling for breath with my jock digging cruelly into the fork of my thighs just below my testicles. Take care of what?

Of what?

No answer. Only the baleful shine of Christine’s yellow headlamps and Arnie sitting serenely crosslegged on her roof in that steady, rushing wind.

The next day we got out there and did battle for good old Libertyville High again, It wasn’t as bad as it had been in my dream—that Saturday no one got hurt, and for a brief while in the third quarter it even looked as though we might have a chance—but then the Philadelphia City quarterback got lucky with a couple of long passes—when things start to go wrong, everything goes wrong—and we lost again.

After the game, Coach Puffer just sat there on the bench. He wouldn’t look at any of us. There were eleven games left on our schedule, but he was already a beaten man.

16 ENTER LEIGH, EXIT BUDDY

It was, I am quite sure, the Tuesday after our loss to the Philadelphia City Dragons that things began moving again. That would have been the 26th of September.

Arnie and I had three classes together, and one of them was Topics in American History, a block course, period four. The first nine weeks were being taught by Mr Thompson, the head of the department. The subject of that first nine weeks was Two Hundred Years of Boom and Bust. Arnie called it a boing-boing-going-going class, because it was right before lunch and everybody’s stomach seemed to be doing something interesting.

When the class was over that day, a girl came over to Arnie and asked him if he had the English assignment. He did. He dug it out of his notebook carefully, and while he did, this girl watched him seriously with her dark blue eyes, never taking them off his face. Her hair was a darkish blond, the colour of fresh honey—not the strained stuff, but honey the way it first comes from the comb—and held back with a wide blue band that matched her eyes. Looking at her, my stomach did a happy little flip-flop. As she copied the assignment down, Arnie looked at her.

That wasn’t the first time I had seen Leigh Cabot, of course; she had transferred from a town in Massachusetts to Libertyville three weeks ago, so she had been around. Somebody had told me her father worked for 3-M, the people who make Scotch tape.

It wasn’t even the first time I had noticed her, because Leigh Cabot was, to put it with perfect simplicity, a beautiful girl. In a work of fiction, I’ve noticed that writers always invent a flaw here or a flaw there in the women and girls they make up, maybe because they think real beauty is a stereotype Or because they think a flaw or two makes the lady more realistic. So she’ll be beautiful except her lower lip is too long, or in spite of the fact that her nose is a little too sharp, or maybe she’s flat-chested. It’s always something.

But Leigh Cabot was just beautiful, with no qualifications. Her skin was fair and perfect, usually with a touch of perfectly natural colour. She stood about five feet eight, tall for a girt but not too tall, and her figure was lovely—firm, high breasts, a small waist that looked as if you could almost put your hands around it (anyway, you longed to try), nice hips, good legs. Beautiful face, sexy, smooth figure—artistically dull, I suppose, without a too-long lower lip or a sharp nose or a wrong bump or bulge anywhere (not even an endearing crooked tooth—she must have had a great orthodontist, too), but she sure didn’t feel dull when you were looking at her.

A few guys had tried to date her and had been pleasantly turned down. It was assumed she was probably carrying a torch for some guy back in Andover or Braintree or wherever it was she had come from, and that she’d probably come around in time. Two of the classes I had with Arnie I also had with Leigh, and I had only been biding my time before making my own move.

Now, watching them steal glances at each other as Arnie found the assignment and she wrote it carefully down, I wondered if I was going to have a chance to make my move. Then I had to grin at myself. Arnie Cunningham, Ole Pizza-Face himself, and Leigh Cabot, That was totally ridiculous. That was—

Then the interior smile sort of dried up. I noticed for the third time—the definitive time—that Arnie’s complexion was taking care of itself with almost stunning rapidity. The blemishes were gone. Some of them had left those small, pitted scars along his checks, true, but if a guy’s face is a strong one, those pits don’t seem to matter as much—in a crazy sort of way they can even add character.

Leigh and Arnie studied each other surreptitiously and I studied Arnie surreptitiously, wondering exactly when and how this miracle had taken place. The sunlight slanted strongly through the windows of Mr Thompson’s room, delineating the lines of my friend’s face clearly. He looked… older. As if he had beaten the blemishes and the acne not only by regular washing or the application of some special cream, but by somehow turning the clock ahead about three years. He was wearing his hair differently, too—it was shorter, and the sideburns he had affected ever since he could grow them (that was since about eighteen months ago) were gone.

I thought back to that overcast afternoon when we had gone to see the Chuck Norris Kung-fu picture. That was the first time I had noticed an improvement, I decided. Right around the time he had bought the car. Maybe that was it. Teenagers of the world, rejoice. Solve painful acne problems forever. Buy an old car and it will—

The interior grin, which had been surfacing once more, suddenly went sour.

Buy an old car and it will what? Change your head, your way of thinking, and thus change your metabolism? Liberate the real you? I seemed to hear Stukey James, our old high school math teacher, whispering his oft-repeated refrain in my own head: If we follow this line of reasoning to the bitter end, ladies and gentlemen, where does it take us?

Where indeed?

“Thank you, Arnie,” Leigh said in her soft clear voice. She had folded the assignment into her notebook.

“Sure,” he said.

Their eyes met then—they were looking at each other instead of just sneaking glances at each other—and even I could feel the spark jump.

“See you period six,” she said, and walked away, hips undulating gently under a green knitted skirt, hair swinging against the back of her sweater.

“What have you got with her period six?” I asked. I had a study hall that period—and one proctored by the formidable Miss Raypach, whom all the kids called Miss Rat-Pack… but never to her face, you can believe that.

“Calculus,” he said in this dreamy, syrupy voice that was so unlike his usual one that I got giggling. He looked around at me, brows drawing together. “What are you laughing at, Dennis?”

“Cal-Q-lussss,” I said. I rolled my eyes and flapped my hands and laughed harder.

He made as if to punch me. “You better watch it, Guilder,” he said.

“Off my case, potato-face.”

“They put you on varsity and look what happens to the fucking football team.”

Mr Hodder, who teaches freshmen the finer points of grammar (and also how to jerk off, some wits said) happened to be passing by just then, and he frowned impressively at Arnie. “Watch your language in the halls,” he said, and passed onward, a briefcase in one hand and a hamburger from the hot-lunch line in the other.

Arnie had gone beet-red; he always does when a teacher speaks to him (it was such an automatic reaction that when we were in grammar school he would end up getting punished for things he hadn’t done just because he looked guilty). It probably says something about the way Michael and Regina brought him up—I’m okay, you’re okay, I’m a person, you’re a person, we all respect each other to the hilt, and whenever anybody does anything wrong, you’re going to get what amounts to an allergic guilt reaction. All part of growing up liberal in America, I guess.

“Watch your language, Cunningham,” I said. You in a heap o trouble.”

Then he got laughing too. We walked down the echoing, banging hallway together. People rushed here and there or leaned up against their lockers, eating. You weren’t supposed to eat in the hallways, but lots of people did.

“Did you bring your lunch?” I asked.

“Yeah, brown-bagging it.”

“Go get it. Let’s eat out on the bleachers.

“Aren’t you sick of that football field by now?” Arnie asked. “If you’d spent much more time on your belly last Saturday, I think one of the custodians would have planted you.”

“I don’t mind. We’re playing away this week. And I want to get out of here.”

“All right, meet you out there.”

He walked away, and I went to my locker to get my lunch. I had four sandwiches, for starters. Since Coach Puffer had started his marathon practice sessions, it seemed as if I was always hungry.

I walked down the hall, thinking about Leigh Cabot and how it would pretty much stand everyone on their car if they started going out together, High school society is very conservative, you know. No big lecture, but it is. The girls all wear the latest nutty fashions, the boys sometimes wear their hair most of the way down to their assholes, everyone is smoking a little dope or sniffing a little coke—but all of that is just the outward patina, the defence you put up while you try and figure out exactly what’s happening with your life. It’s like a mirror—what you use to reflect sunlight back into the eyes of teachers and parents, hoping to confuse them before they can confuse you even more than you already are. At heart, most high school kids are about as funky as a bunch of Republican bankers at a church social. There are girls who might have every album Black Sabbath ever made, but if Ozzy Osbourne went to their school and asked one of them for a date, that girl (and all of her friends) would laugh herself into a haemorrhage at the very idea.

With his acne and pimples gone, Arnie looked okay—in fact, he looked more than okay. But there wasn’t a girl who had gone to school with him when his face was at its running worst that would go out with him, I guessed. They didn’t really see him the way he was now; they saw a memory of him. But Leigh was different. Because she was a transfer, she had no idea of how really gross Arnie had looked his first three years at LHS. Of course she would if she got last year’s Libertonian and took a look at the picture of the chess club, but oddly enough, that same Republican tendency would almost surely make her disregard it. What’s now is for ever—ask any Republican banker and he’ll tell you that’s just the way the world ought to run.

High school kids and Republican bankers when you’re little you take it for granted that everything changes constantly. When you’re a grown-up, you take it for granted that things are going to change no matter how much you try to maintain the status quo (even Republican bankers know that—they may not like it, but they know it). It’s only when you’re a teenager that you talk about change constantly and believe in your heart that it never really happens.

I went outside with my gigantic bag lunch in one hand and angled across the parking lot toward the shop building. It is a long, barnlike structure with corrugated metal sides painted blue—not very different in design from Will Darnell’s garage, but much neater. It houses the wood shop, the auto shop, and the graphic arts department. Supposedly the smoking area is around at the rear, but on nice days during the lunch break, there are usually shoppies lined up along both sides of the building with their motorcycle boots or their pointy-toed Cuban shitkickers cocked up against the building, smoking and talking to their girlfriends. Or feeling them up.

Today there was nobody at all along the right side of the building, and that should have told me something was up, but it didn’t. I was lost in my own amusing thoughts about Arnie and Leigh and the psychology of the Modern American High School Student.

The real smoking area—the “designated” smoking area is in a small cul-de-sac behind the auto shop. And beyond the shops, fifty or sixty yards away, is” the football field, dominated with the big electric scoreboard with GO GET THEM TERRIERs emblazoned across the top.

There was a group of people just beyond the smoking area, twenty or thirty of them in a tight little circle. That pattern usually means a fight or what Arnie likes to call a “pushy-pushy”—two guys who aren’t really mad enough to fight sort of shoving each other around and whacking each other on the shoulders and trying to protect their macho reputations.

I glanced that way, but with no real interest. I didn’t want to watch a fight; I wanted to eat my lunch and find out if anything was going on between Arnie and Leigh Cabot. If there was a little something happening there, it might take his mind off his obsession with Christine. One thing was for sure: Leigh Cabot didn’t have “any rust on her rocker panels.

Then some girl screamed and someone else yelled,” Hey, no! Put that away, man!” That sounded very much ungood. I changed direction to see what was going on.

I pushed my way through the crowd and saw Arnie in the circle, standing with his hands held out a little in front of him at chest level. He looked pale and scared, but not quite panicked. A little distance to his left was his lunch-sack, squashed flat. There was a large sneaker-print in the middle of it. Standing opposite him, in jeans and a white Hanes T-shirt that clung to every ripple and bulge of his chest, was Buddy Repperton. He had a switchblade knife in his right hand and he was moving it slowly back and forth in front of his face like a magician making mystic passes.

He was tall and broad-shouldered. His hair was long and black. He wore it tied back in a ponytail with a hank of rawhide. His face was heavy and stupid and mean-looking. He was smiling just a little. What I felt was an unmanning mixture of dismay and cold fear. He didn’t look just stupid and mean; he looked crazy.

“Told you I was gonna getcha, man,” he said softly to Arnie. He tilted the knife and jabbed softly at the air with it in Arnie’s direction. Arnie flinched back a little. The switchblade had an ivory handle with a little chrome button to flick out the blade set into it. The blade itself looked to be about eight inches long—it wasn’t a knife at all, it was a fucking bayonet.

“Hey, Buddy, brand im!” Don Vandenberg yelled happily, and I felt my mouth go dry.

I looked around at the kid next to me, some nerdy freshman I didn’t know. He looked absolutely hypnotised, all eyes. “Hey,” I said, and when he didn’t look around I slammed my elbow into his side. “Hey!”

He jumped and looked around at me in terror

“Go get Mr Casey. He eats his lunch in the wood-shop office. Go get him right now.”

Repperton glanced at me, then glanced at Arnie. “Come on, Cunningham,” he said. “What do you say, you want to go for it?”

“Put down the knife and I will, you shitter,” Arnie said. His voice was perfectly calm. Shitter, where had I heard that word before? From George LeBay, hadn’t it been? Sure. It had been his brother’s word.

It apparently wasn’t a word Repperton cared for. He flushed and stepped closer to Arnie. Arnie circled away. I thought something was going to happen pretty quick maybe one of those things the call for stitches and leave a scar.

“You go get Casey now,” I told the nerdy-looking freshman, and he went. But I thought everything would probably go down before Mr Casey got back… unless I could maybe slow things down a little.

“Put down the knife, Repperton,” I said.

His glance came over my way again. “Whit you know,” he said. “It’s Cuntface’s friend, You want to make me put it down?”

“You’ve got a knife and he doesn’t, I said. “In my book that makes you a fucking chicken-shit.”

The flush deepened. Now his concentration was broken. He looked at Arnie, then over at me. Arnie flashed me a glance of pure gratitude—and moved a little closer to Repperton. I didn’t like that.

“Put it down,” someone yelled at Repperton. And then someone else: “Put it down!” They started to chant: “Put it down, put it down, put it down!”

Repperton didn’t like it. He didn’t mind being the centre of attention, but this was the wrong sort of attention. His glance began to flicker around nervously, first at Arnie, then at me, then at the others. A hank of hair fell across his forehead, and he tossed it back.

When he looked my way again, I made a move as if to go for him. The knife swivelled in my direction, and Arnie moved—he moved faster than I would have believed. He brought the side of his right hand down in a half-assed but effective karate chop. He hit Repperton’s wrist hard and knocked the knife out of his hand. It clattered onto the butt-littered hottop. Repperton bent and grabbed for it. Arnie timed it with a deadly accuracy and when Repperton’s hand came all the wav to the asphalt, Arnie stamped on it. Hard. Repperton screamed.

Don Vandenberg moved in then, quickly, hauled Arnie off, and threw him to the ground. Hardly aware that I was going to do it, I stepped into the ring and kicked Vandenberg in the ass just as hard as I could—I brought my foot up rather than pistoning it out; I kicked him as if I were punting a football.

Vandenberg, a tall, thin guy who was either nineteen or twenty at that time, began to scream and dance around holding his butt. He forgot all about helping his Buddy; he ceased to be a factor in things. To me it’s amazing that I didn’t paralyse him. I never kicked anyone or anything harder, and my friend, it sho” did feel fine.

Just then an arm locked itself around my windpipe and there was a hand between my legs. I realised what was going to happen just a second too late to wholly prevent it. My balls were given a good, firm squeeze that sent sick pain bellowing and raving up from my crotch and into my stomach and down into my legs, unmanning them so that when the arm around my windpipe let go. I simply collapsed in a puddle on the smoking-area tarmac.

“How did you like that, dickface?” a squarish guy with bad teeth asked me. He was wearing small and rather delicate wire-frame glasses that looked absurd on his wide, blocky face. This was Moochie Welch, another of Buddy’s friends.

Suddenly the circle of watchers began to melt away and I heard a man’s voice yelling, “Break it up! Break it up right now! You kids take a walk! Take a walk, dammit!”

It was Mr Casey. Finally, Mr Casey.

Buddy Repperton snatched his switchblade off the pavement. He retracted the blade and shoved the knife into the hip pocket of his jeans in one quick motion. His hand was scraped and bleeding, and it looked as if it was going to swell. The miserable sonofabitch, I hoped it would swell,until it looked like one of those gloves Donald Duck wears in the funnypages.

Moochie Welch backed away from me, glanced toward the sound of Mr Casey’s voice, and touched the corner of his mouth delicately with his thumb. “Later, dickface,” he said.

Don Vandenberg was dancing more slowly now, but he was still rubbing the affected part. Tears of pain were spilling down his face

Then Arnie was beside me, getting an arm around me, helping me up. There was a lot of dirt smeared across his shirt from where Vandenberg had thrown him down. There were cigarette butts squashed into the knees of his jeans.

“You okay, Dennis? What’d he do to you?”

“Gave my balls a little squeeze. I’ll be all right.”

At least I hoped I would be. If you’re a man and you’ve slammed your nuts a good one at some point (and what man has not), you know. If you’re a woman, you don’t—can’t. The initial agony is only the start; it fades, to be replaced by a dull, throbbing feeling of pressure that coils in the pit of the stomach. And what that feeling says is Hi, there! Good to be here, just sitting around in the pit of your stomach and making you feel like you’re going to simultaneously blow lunch and shit your pants! I guess I’ll just hang around for a while, okay? How does half an hour or so sound? Great! Getting your nuts squeezed is not one of life’s great thrills.

Mr Casey shoved his wav through the loosening knot of spectators and took in the situation. He wasn’t a big guy like Coach Puffer; he didn’t even look particularly rugged. He was of medium height and age, and going bald. Big horn-rimmed glasses sat squarely on his face. He favoured plain white shirts—no tie—and he was wearing one of them now. He wasn’t a big guy, but Mr Casey got respect. Nobody fucked around with him, because he wasn’t afraid of kids deep down the way so many teachers are. The kids knew it, too. Buddy and Don and Moochie knew it; it was in the sullen way they dropped their eyes and shuffled their feet.

“Get lost,” Mr Casey said briskly to the few remaining spectators. They started to drift away. Moochie Welch decided to try and drift with them. “Not you, Peter,” Mr Casey said.

“Aw, Mr Casey, I ain’t been doing nothing,” Moochie said.

“Me neither,” Don said. “How come you always pick on, us?”

Mr Casey came over to where I was still leaning on Arnie” for support. “Are you all right, Dennis?”

I was finally beginning to get over it—I wouldn’t have been if one of my thighs hadn’t partially blocked Welch’s hand. I nodded.

Mr Casey walked back to where Buddy Repperton, Moochie Welch, and Don Vandenberg stood in a shuffling, angry line. Don hadn’t been joking; he had been speaking for all of them. They really did feel picked on.

“This is cute, isn’t it?” Mr Casey said finally. “Three on two. That the way you like to do things, Buddy? Those odds don’t seem stacked enough for you.”

Buddy looked up, threw Casey a smouldering, ugly glance, and then dropped his eyes again. “They started it. Those guys.”

“That’s not true—” Arnie began.

“Shut up, cuntface,” Buddy said. He started to add something, but before he could get it out, Mr Casey grabbed him and threw him up against the back wall of the shop. There was a tin sign there which read SMOKING HERE ONLY. Mr Casey began to slam Buddy Repperton against that sign, and every time he did it, the sign jangled, like dramatic punctuation. He handled Repperton the way you or I might have handled a great big ragdoll. I guess he had muscles somewhere, all right.

“You want to shut your big mouth,” he said, and slammed Buddy against the sign. “You want to shut your mouth or clean up your mouth. Because I don’t have to listen to that stuff coming from you, Buddy.”

He let go of Repperton’s shirt. It had pulled out of his jeans, showing his white, untanned belly. He looked back at Arnie. “What were you saying?”

“I came past the smoking area on my way out to the bleachers to eat my lunch,” Arnie said. “Repperton was smoking with his friends there. He came over and knocked my lunchbag out of my hand and then stepped on it. He squashed it.” He seemed about to say something more, struggled with it, and swallowed it again. “That started the fight.”

But I wasn’t going to leave it at that. I’m no stoolie or tattletale, not under ordinary circumstances, but Repperton had apparently decided that more than a good beating was required to avenge himself for getting kicked out of Darnell’s. He could have punched a hole in Arnie’s intestines, maybe killed him.

“Mr Casey,” I said.

He looked at me. Behind him, Buddy Repperton’s green eyes flashed at me balefully—a warning. Keep your mouth shut, this is between us. Even a year before, some twisted sense of pride might have forced me to go along with him and play the game, but not now.

“What is it, Dennis?”

“He’s had it in for Arnie since the summmer. He’s got a knife, and he looked like he was planning to stick it in.”

Arnie was looking at me, his grey eyes opaque and unreadable. I thought about him calling Repperton a shitter—LeBay’s word—and felt a prickle of goosebumps on my back.

“You fucking liar!” Repperton cried dramatically. “I ain’t got no knife!”

Casey looked at him without saying anything. Vandenberg and Welch looked extremely uncomfortable now—scared. Their possible punishment for this little scuffle had progressed beyond detention, which they were used to, and suspension, which they had experienced, toward the outer limits of expulsion.

I only had to say one more word. I thought about it. I almost didn’t. But it had been Arnie, and Arnie was my friend, and inside where it mattered, I didn’t just think he had meant to stick Arnie with that blade; I knew it. I said the word.

“It’s a switchblade.”

Now Repperton’s eyes did not just flash; they blazed, promising hellfire, damnation, and a long period in traction. “That’s bullshit, Mr Casey,” he said hoarsely. “He’s lying. I swear to God.”

Mr Casey still said nothing. He looked slowly at Arnie.

“Cunningham,” he said. “Did Repperton here pull a knife on you?”

Arnie wouldn’t answer at first. Then in a low voice that was little more than a sigh, he said, “Yeah.”

Now Repperton’s blazing glance was for both of us.

Casey turned to Moochie Welch and Don Vandenberg. All at once I could see that his method of handling this had changed he had begun to move slowly and carefully, as if testing the footing beneath carefully each time he moved a step forward. Mr Casey had already grasped the consequences.

“Was there a knife involved?” he asked them.

Moochie and Vandenberg looked at their feet and would not answer. That was answer enough.

“Turn out your pockets, Buddy,” Mr Casey said.

“Fuck I will!” Buddy said. His voice went shrill. “You can’t make me!”

“If you mean I don’t have the authority, you’re wrong,” Mr Casey said. “If you mean I can’t turn your pockets out for myself if I decide to try it, that’s also wrong. But—”

“Yeah, try it,” Buddy shouted at him. “I’ll knock you through that wall, you little bald fuck!”

My stomach was rolling helplessly. I hated stuff like this, ugly confrontation scenes, and this was the worst one I’d ever been a part of.

But Mr Casey had things under control, and he never deviated from his course.

“But I’m not going to do it,” he finished. “You’re going to turn out your pockets yourself.”

“Fat fucking chance,” Buddy said. He was standing against the back wall of the shop so that the bulge in his hip pocket wouldn’t show. His shirt-tail hung in two wrinkled flaps over the crotch of his jeans. His eyes darted here and there like the eyes of an animal brought to bay.

Mr Casey glanced at Moochie and Don Vandenberg. You two boys go up to the office and stay there until I come up,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere else; you’ve got enough trouble without that.”

They walked away slowly, close together, as if for protection. Moochie threw one glance back. In the main building the bell went off. People started to stream back inside: some of them giving us curious glances. We had missed lunch. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t hungry anymore.

Mr Casey turned his attention back to Buddy.

“You’re on school grounds right now,” he said. “You should thank God you are, because if you do have a knife, Buddy, and if you pulled it, that’s assault with a deadly weapon. They send you to prison for that.”

“Prove it, prove it!” Buddy shouted. His cheeks were flaming, his breath coming in quick, nervous little gasps.

“If you don’t turn out your pockets right now, I’m going to write a dismissal slip on you. Then I’m going to call the cops and the minute you step outside the main gate, they’ll grab you. You see the bind you’re in?” He looked grimly at Buddy. “We keep our own house here,” he said. “But if I have to write you a dismissal, Buddy, your ass belongs to them. Of course if you have no knife, you’re okay. But if you do and they find it…”

There was a moment of silence. The four of us stood in tableau. I didn’t think he was going to do it; he would take his dismissal and try to ditch the knife somewhere quickly. Then he must have realised that the cops would hunt for it and probably find it, because he pulled the knife out of his back pocket and threw it down on the tarmac. It landed on the go-button. The blade popped out and winked wickedly in the afternoon sunlight, eight inches of chromed steel.

Arnie looked at it and wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand.

“Go up to the office, Buddy,” Mr Casey said quietly. “Wait until I get up there.”

“Screw the office!” Buddy cried. His voice was thin and hysterical with anger. Hair had fallen across his forehead again, and he flipped it back. “I’m getting out of this fucking pigsty.”

“Yes, all right, fine,” Mr Casey said, with no more inflection or excitement in his voice than he would have shown if Buddy had offered him a cup of coffee. I knew then that Buddy was all finished at Libertyville High. No detention or three-day vacation; his parents would be receiving the stiff blue expulsion form in the mail—the form would explain why their son was being expelled and would inform them of their rights and legal options in the matter.

Buddy looked at Arnie and me—and he smiled. “I’ll fix you,” he said. “I’ll get even. You’ll wish you were never fucking born.” He kicked the knife away, spinning and flashing. It came to rest on the edge of the hottop, and Buddy walked off, the cleats on the heels of his motorcycle boots clicking and scraping.

Mr Casey looked at us; his face was sad and tired. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“That’s okay,” Arnie replied.

“Do you boys want dismissal slips? I’ll write them for you if you feet you’d like to go home for the rest of the day.” I glanced at Arnie, who was brushing off his shirt. He shook his head.

“No, that’s okay,” I said.

“All right. Just late slips then.

We went into Mr Casey’s room and he wrote us late slips for our next class, which happened to be one we shared together—Advanced Physics. Coming into the physics lab, a lot of people looked at us curiously, and there was some whispering behind hands.

The afternoon absence slip circulated at the end of period six. I checked it and saw the names Repperton, Vandenberg, and Welch, each with a (D) after his name. I thought that Arnie and I would be called to the office at the end of school to tell Ms Lothrop, the discipline officer, what had happened. But we weren’t.

I looked for Arnie after school, thinking we’d ride home together and talk it over a little, but I was wrong about that too. He’d already left for Darnell’s Garage to work on Christine.

17 CHRISTINE ON THE STREET AGAIN

I didn’t get a chance to really talk to Arnie until after the football game the following Saturday. And that was also the first time since the day be had bought her that Christine was out on the street.

The team went up to Hidden Hills, about sixteen miles away, on the quietest school-activity bus ride I’ve ever been on. We might have been going to the guillotine instead of to a football game. Even the fact that their record, 1–2, was only slightly better than ours, didn’t cheer anybody up much. Coach Puffer sat in the seat behind the bus driver, pale and silent, as if he might be suffering from a hangover.

Usually a trip to an away game was a combination caravan and circus. A second bus, loaded up with the cheerleaders, the band, and all the LHS kids who had signed up as “rooters” (“rooters”, dear God! if we hadn’t all been through high school, who the hell would believe it?), trundled along behind the team bus. Behind the two buses would be a line of fifteen or twenty cars, most of them full of teenagers, most with THUMP EM TERRIERS bumper stickers—beeping, flashing their lights, all that stuff you probably remember from your own high school days.

But on this trip there was only the cheerleader/band bus (and that wasn’t even full—in a winning year if you didn’t sign up for the second bus by Tuesday, you were out of luck) and three or four cars behind that. The fair-weather friends had already bailed out. And I was sitting on the team bus next to Lenny Barongg, glumly wondering if I was going to get knocked out of my jock that afternoon, totally unaware that one of the few cars behind the bus today was Christine.

I saw it when we got out of the bus in the Hidden Hills High School parking lot. Their band was already out on the field, and the thud from the big drum came clearly, oddly magnified under the lowering, cloudy sky. It was going to be the first really good Saturday for football, cool, overcast, and fallish.

Seeing Christine parked beside the band bus was surprise enough, but when Arnie got out on one side and Leigh Cabot got out on the other, I was downright stunned—and more than a little jealous. She was wearing a clinging pair of brown woollen slacks and a white cableknit pullover, her blond hair spilling gorgeously over her shoulders.

“Arnie,” I said. “Hey, man!”

“Hi, Dennis,” he said a little shyly.

I was aware that some of the players getting off the bus were also doing double-takes; here was Pizza-Face Cunningham with the gorgeous transfer from Massachusetts. How in God’s name did that happen?

“How are you?”

“Good,” he said, “Do you know Leigh Cabot?

“From class,” I said. “Hi, Leigh.”

“Hi, Dennis. Are you going to win today?”

I lowered my voice to a hoarse whisper. “It’s all been fixed. Bet your ass off.”

Arnie blushed a little at that, but Leigh cupped her hand to her mouth and giggled.

“We’re going to try, but I don’t know,” I said.

“We’ll root you on to victory,” Arnie said. “I can see it in tomorrow’s paper now—Guilder Becomes Airborne, Breaks Conference TD Record.”

“Guilder Taken to Hospital with Fractured Skull, that’s more likely,” I said. “How many kids came up? Ten? Fifteen?”

“More room on the bleachers for those of us that did,” Leigh said. She took Arnie’s arm—surprising and pleasing him, I think. Already I liked her. She could have been a bitch or mentally fast asleep—it seems to me that a lot of really beautiful girls are one or the other—but she was neither.

“How’s the rolling iron?” I asked, and walked over to the car.

“Not too bad.” He followed me over, trying not to grin too widely.

The work had progressed, and now there was enough done on the Fury so that it didn’t look quite so crazy and helter-skelter. The other half of the old, rusted front grille had been replaced, and the nest of cracks in the windscreen was tot ally gone.

“You replaced the windscreen,” I said.

Arnie nodded.

“And the bonnet.”

The bonnet was clean; brand-spanking new, in sharp contrast to the rust-flecked sides. It was a deep fire-engine red. Sharp-looking. Arnie touched it possessively, and the touch turned into a caress.

“Yeah. I put that on myself.

Something about that jagged on me. He had done it all himself, hadn’t he?

“You said you were going to turn it into a showpiece,” I said. “I think I’m starting to believe you.” I walked around to the driver’s side. The upholstery on the insides of the doors and floor was still dirty and scuffed up, but now the front seat cover had been replaced as well as the back one.

“It’s going to be beautiful,” Leigh said, but there was a flat note in her voice—it wasn’t as naturally bright and effervescent as it had been when we were talking about the game—and that made me glance at her. A glance was all it took. She didn’t like Christine. I realized it just like that completely and absolutely, as if I had plucked one of her brainwaves out of the air. She would try to like the car because she liked Arnie. But… she wasn’t ever going to really like it.

“So you got it street-legal,” I said.

“Well…” Arnie looked uncomfortable. “It isn’t. Quite.”

“What do you mean?”

“The horn doesn’t work, and sometimes the tail-lights go out when I step on the brake. It’s a dead short somewhere, I think, but so far I haven’t been able to chase it out.”

I glanced at the new windscreen—there was a new inspection sticker on it, Arnie followed my glance and managed to look both embarrassed and a bit truculent at the same time. “Will gave me my sticker. He knows it’s ninety per cent there.” And besides, I thought, you had this hot date, right?

“It’s not dangerous, is it?” Leigh asked, addressing the question somewhere between Arnie and me. Her brow had creased slightly—I think maybe she sensed a sudden cold current between Arnie and me.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. When you ride with Arnie you’re riding with the original Old Creeping Jesus anyway.”

That broke the odd little pocket of tension that had built up. From the playing field there was a discordant shriek of brass, and then the band instructor’s voice, carrying to us, thin but perfectly clear under the low sky: “Again, please! This is Rodgers and Hammerstein, not rock and ro-ool! Again, please!”

The three of us looked at each other. Arnie and I started to laugh, and after a moment Leigh joined in. Looking at her, I felt that momentary jealousy again. I wanted nothing but the best for my friend Arnie, but she was really something—seventeen going on eighteen, gorgeous, perfect, healthy, alive to everything in her world. Roseanne was beautiful in her way, but Leigh made Roseanne look like a tree-sloth taking a nap.

Was that when I started to want her? When I started to want my best friend’s girl? Yeah, I suppose it was. But I swear to you, I never would have put a move on her if things had happened differently. I just don’t think they were meant to happen differently. Or maybe I just have to feel that way.

We better go, Arnie, or we won’t get a good seat in the visitors” bleachers,” Leigh said with ladylike sarcasm.

Arnie smiled. She was still holding his arm lightly, and he looked rather bowled over by it all. Why not? If it had been me, having my first experience with a live girl, and one as pretty as Leigh, I would have been three-quarters to being in love with her already. I wished him nothing but well with her. I guess I want you to believe that, even if you don’t believe anything else I have to tell you from here on out. If anyone deserved a little happiness, it was Arnie.

The rest of the team had gone into the visitors” dressing rooms at the back of the gymnasium wing of the school, and now Coach Puffer poked his head out.

“Do you think you could favour us with your presence, Mr Guilder?” he called. “I know it’s a lot to ask, and I hope you’ll forgive me if you had something more important to do, but if you don’t, would you get your tail down into this locker room?”

I muttered to Arnie and Leigh, “This is Rodgers and Hammerstein, not rock and ro-ool,” and trotted toward the building.

I walked toward the dressing rooms—Coach had popped back inside—and Arnie and Leigh started across to the bleachers. Halfway to the doors I stopped and went back to Christine. Late to suit up or not, I approached her in a circle; that absurd prejudice against walking in front of the car still held.

On the rear end I saw a Pennsylvania dealer plate held on with a spring. I flipped it down and saw a Dymo tape stuck to the back side: THIS PLATE PROPERTY OF DARNELL’s GARAGE, LIBERTYVILLE, PA.

I let the plate snap back and stood up, frowning. Darnell had given him a sticker while his car was still a ways from being street-legal; Darnell had loaned him a dealer plate so he could use the car to bring Leigh to the game. Also, he had stopped being “Darnell” to Arnie; today he had called him “Will”. Interesting, but not very comforting.

I wondered if Arnie was dumb enough to think that the Will Darnells of this world ever did favours out of the goodness of their hearts. I hoped he wasn’t, but I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure of much about Arnie anymore. He had changed a lot in the last few weeks.

We surprised the hell out of ourselves and won the game—as it turned out, that was one of only two we won that whole season… not that I was with the team when the season ended.

We had no right to win; we went out on the field feeling like losers, and we lost the toss. The Hillmen (dumb name for a team, but what’s so bright about being known as the Terriers when you get right down to it?) went forty yards on their first two plays, going through our defensive line like cheese through a goose. Then, on the third play—their third first-and-ten in a row—their quarterback coughed up the ball. Gary Tardiff grabbed it up and rambled sixty yards for the score, a great big grin on his face.

The Hillmen and their coach went bananas protesting that the ball had been dead at the line of scrimmage, but the officials disagreed and we led 6–0. From my place on the bench I was able to look across at the visitors” bleachers and could see that the few Libertyville fans there were going crazy. I guess they had a right to; it was the first time we’d led in a game all season. Arnie and Leigh were waving Terriers pennants. I waved at them. Leigh saw me, waved back, then elbowed Arnie. He waved back too. They looked as if they were getting pretty chummy up there, which made me grin.

As for the game, we never looked back after that first flukey score. We had that mystic thing, momentum, on our side—maybe for the only time that year. I didn’t break the Conference touchdown record as Arnie had predicted, but I scored three times, one of them on a ninety-yard runback, the longest I ever made. At halftime it was 17-0, and Coach was a new man. He saw a complete turnaround ahead of us, the greatest comeback in the history of the Conference. Of course that turned out to be a fool’s dream, but he surely was excited that day, and I felt good for him, as I had for Arnie and Leigh, getting to know each other so profitably and easily.

The second half was not so good; our defence resumed the mostly prone posture it had assumed in our first three games, but it was still never really close. We won 27–18.

Coach had taken me out halfway through the fourth quarter to put in Brian McNally, who would be replacing me next year—actually even earlier than that, as it turned out. I showered and changed up, then came back out just as the two-minute warning went off.

The parking lot was full of cars but empty of people. Wild cheering came from the field as the Hillmen fans urged their team to do the impossible in the last two minutes of play. From this distance it all seemed as unimportant as it undoubtedly was”

I walked over toward Christine.

There she sat with her rust-flecked sides and her new bonnet and her tailfins that seemed a thousand miles along. A dinosaur from the dark ditty-bop days of the ’50s when all the oil millionaires were from Texas and the Yankee dollar was kicking the shit out of the Japanese yen instead of the other way around. Back in the days when Carl Perkins was singing about pink pedal pushers and Johnny Horton was singing about dancing all night on a honky-tonk hardwood floor and the biggest teen idol in the country was Edd “Kookie” Byrnes.

I touched Christine. I tried to caress it as Arnie had done, to like it for Arnie’s sake as Leigh had done. Surely if anyone should be able to make himself like it, it should be me. Leigh had only known Arnie a month. I had known him my whole life.

I slipped my hand along the rusty surface and I thought of George LeBay, and Veronica and Rita LeBay, and somewhere along the line the hand that was supposed to be caressing closed into a fist and I suddenly slammed it down on Christine’s flank as hard as I could—plenty hard enough to hurt my hand and make myself utter a defensive little laugh and wonder what the hell I thought I was doing.

The sound of rust sitting down onto the hottop in small flakes.

The sound of a bass drum from the football field, like a giant’s heartbeat.

The sound of my own heartbeat.

I tried the front door.

It was locked.

I licked my lips and realized I was scared.

It was almost as if—this was very funny, this was hilarious—it was almost as if this car didn’t like me, as if it suspected me of wanting to come between it and Arnie, and that the reason I didn’t want to walk in front of it was because—

I laughed again and then remembered my dream and stopped laughing. This was too much like it for comfort. It wasn’t Chubby McCarthy blaring over the PA, of course, not in Hidden Hills, but the rest of it brought on a dreamy, unpleasant sense of déjà vu—the sound of the cheers, the sound of padded body contact, the wind hissing through trees that looked like cutouts under an overcast sky.

The engine would gun. The car would lurch forward, drop back, lurch forward, drop back. And then the tyres would scream as it roared right at me—

I shook the thought off. It was time to stop pandering to myself with all of this crazy shit. It was time—and overtime—to get my imagination under control. This was a car, not a she but an it, not really Christine at all but only a 1958 Plymouth Fury that had rolled off an assembly line in Detroit along with about four hundred thousand others.

It worked… at least temporarily. Just to demonstrate how little afraid of it I was, I got down on my knees and looked under it. What I saw there was even crazier than the haphazard way the car was being rebuilt on top. There were three new Pleasurizer shocks, but the fourth was a dark, oil-caked ruin that looked as if it had been on there for ever. The exhaust was so new it was still silvery, but the silencer looked at least middle-aged and the header pipe was in very bad shape. Looking at the header, thinking about exhaust fumes that could leak into the car from it, made me flash on Veronica LeBay again. Because exhaust fumes can kill. They—

“Dennis, what are you doing?”

I guess I was still more uneasy than I thought, because I was up from my knees like a shot with my heart beating in my throat. It was Arnie. He looked cold and angry.

Because I was looking at his car? Why should that make him mad? Good question. But it had, that was obvious.

“I was looking over your mean machine,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Where’s Leigh?”

“She had to go to the Ladies”, he said, dismissing her. His grey eyes never left my face. “Dennis, you’re the best friend I’ve got, the best friend I’ve ever had. You might have saved me a trip to the hospital the other day when Repperton pulled that knife, and I know it. But don’t you go behind my back, Dennis. Don’t you ever do that.”

From the playing field there was a tremendous cheer the Hillmen had just made the final score of the game, with less than thirty seconds to play.

“Arnie, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” I said, but I felt guilty. I felt guilty the way I had felt being introduced to Leigh, sizing her up, wanting her a little wanting the girl he so obviously wanted himself. But… going behind his back? Was that what I had been doing?

I suppose he could have seen it that way. I had known that his irrational—interest, obsession, put it however you like—his irrational thing about the car was the locked room in the house of our friendship, the place I could not go without inviting all sorts of trouble. And if he hadn’t caught me trying to jimmy the door, he had at least come upon me trying to peek through a keyhole.

“I think you know exactly what I’m talking about,” he said, and I saw with a tired sort of dismay that he was not just a little mad; he was furious. “You and my father and mother are all spying on me “for my own good”, that’s the way it is, isn’t it? They sent you down to Darnell’s Garage, to snoop around, didn’t they?”

“Hey, Arnie, wait just a—”

“Boy, did you think I wouldn’t find out? I didn’t say anything then—because we’re friends. But I don’t know, Dennis. There has to be a line, and I think I’m drawing it. Why don’t you just leave my car alone and stop butting in where you don’t belong?”

“First of all,” I said, “it wasn’t your father and your mother. Your father got me alone and asked me if I’d take a look at what you were doing with the car. I said sure I would, I was curious myself. Your dad has always been okay to me. What was I supposed to say?”

“You were supposed to say no.”

“You don’t get it. He’s on your side. Your mother still hopes it doesn’t come to anything—that was the idea I got—but Michael really hopes you get it running. He said so.”

“Sure, that’s the way he’d come on to you.” He was almost sneering. “Really all he’s interested in is making sure I’m still hobbled. That’s what they’re both interested in. They don’t want me to grow up because then they’d have to face getting old.”

“That’s too hard, man.”

“Maybe you think so. Maybe coming from a halfway-normal family makes you soft in the head, Dennis. They offered me a new car for high school graduation, did you know that? All I had to do was give up Christine, make all A’s, and agree to go to Horlicks… where they could keep me in direct view for another four years.”

I didn’t know what to say. That was pretty crass, all right.

“So just butt out of it, Dennis. That’s all I’m saying. We’ll both be better off.”

“I didn’t tell him anything, anyhow,” I said. “Just that you were doing a few things here and there. He seemed sort of relieved.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet.”

“I didn’t have any idea it was as close to street-legal as it is. But it isn’t all the way yet. I looked underneath, and that header pipe’s a mess. I hope you’re driving with your windows open.”

“Don’t tell me how to drive it! I know more about what makes cars run than you ever will!”

That was when I started to get pissed off at him. I didn’t like it—I didn’t want to have an argument with Arnie, especially not now, when Leigh would be joining him in another moment—but I could feel somebody upstairs in the brain-room starting to pull those red switches, one by one.

“That’s probably true,” I said, controlling my voice. “But I’m not sure how much you know about people. Will Darnell gave you an improper sticker—if you got picked up he could lose his state inspection certificate. He gave you a dealer plate. Why did he do those things, Arnie?”

For the first time Arnie seemed defensive. “I told you. He knows I’m doing the work.”

“Don’t be a numbskull. That guy wouldn’t give a crippled crab a crutch unless there was something in it for him, and you know it.”

“Dennis, will you leave it alone, for God’s sake?”

“Man,” I said, stepping toward him, “I don’t give a fuck if you have a car. I just don’t want you in a bind over it. Sincerely.”

He looked at me uncertainly.

“I mean, what are we yelling at each other about? Because I looked underneath your car to see how the exhaust-pipe was hanging?”

But that hadn’t been all I was doing. Some… but not quite all. And I think we both knew it.

On the playing field, the final gun went off with a flat bang. A slight drizzle had started to come down, and it was getting cold. We turned toward the sound of the gun and saw Leigh coming toward us, carrying her pennant and Arnie’s. She waved. We waved back.

“Dennis, I can take care of myself,” he said.

“Okay,” I said simply. “I hope you can.” Suddenly I wanted to ask him how deep he was in with Darnell. And that was a question I couldn’t ask; that would bring on an even more bitter argument. Things would be said that could maybe never be repaired.

“I can,” he repeated. He touched his car, and the hard look in his eyes softened.

I felt a mixture of relief and dismay—the relief because we weren’t going to have a fight after all; we had both managed to avoid saying anything completely irreparable. But it also seemed to me that it wasn’t just one room of our friendship that had been closed off; it was a whole damn wing. He had rejected what I’d had to say with complete totality and had made the conditions for continuing the friendship pretty clear: everything will be okay as long as you do it my way.

Which was also his parents’ attitude, if only he could have seen it. But then, I suppose he had to learn it somewhere.

Leigh came up, drops of rain gleaming in her hair. Her colour was high, her eyes sparkling with good health and good excitement. She exuded a naive and untested sexuality that made me feel a little light-headed. Not that I was the main object of her attention; Arnie was.

“How did it end?” Arnie asked.

“Twenty-seven to eighteen,” she said, and then added gleefully, “We destroyed them. Where were you two?”

“Just talking cars,” I said, and Arnie shot me an amused glance—at least his sense of humour hadn’t disappeared with his common sense. And I thought there was some cause for hope in the way he looked at her. He was falling for her, head over heels. The tumble was slow right now, but it would almost surely speed up if things went right. I was really curious about how it had happened, the two of them getting together. Arnie’s complexion had cleared up and he looked pretty good, but in a rather bookish, bespectacled sort of way. He wasn’t the sort of guy you’d have expected Leigh Cabot to want to be with; you’d expect her to be hanging from the arm of the American high school version of Apollo.

People were streaming back across the field now, our players and theirs, our fans and theirs.

“Just talking cars,” Leigh repeated, mocking softly. She turned her face up to Arnie’s and smiled. He smiled back, a sappy, dopey smile that did my heart a world of good. I could tell, just looking at him, that whenever Leigh smiled at him that way, Christine was the farthest thing from his mind; she was demoted back to her proper place as an it, a means of transportation.

I liked that just fine.

18 ON THE BLEACHERS

I saw Arnie and Leigh in the halls a lot over the first 6 weeks in October, first leaning against his locker or hers, talking before the home-room bell; then holding hands; then going out after school with their arms around each other. It had happened. In high school parlance, they were “going together”. I thought it was more than that. I thought they were in love.

I hadn’t seen Christine since the day we beat Hidden Hills. She had apparently gone back to Darnell’s for more work—maybe that was part of the agreement Arnie had struck with Darnell when Darnell issued the dealer plate and the illegal sticker that day. I didn’t see the Fury, but I saw a lot of Leigh and Arnie… and heard a lot about them. They were a hot item of school gossip. Girls wanted to know what she saw in him, for heaven’s sake; boys, always more practical and prosaic, only wanted to know if my runt friend had managed to get into her pants. I didn’t care about either of those things, but I did wonder from time to time what Regina and Michael thought of their son’s extreme case of first love.

One Monday in mid-October, Arnie and I ate our lunch together on the bleachers by the football field, as we had been Tanning to do on the day Buddy Repperton had pulled the knife—Repperton had indeed been expelled for that. Moochie and Don had gotten three-day vacations. They were currently being pretty good boys. And, in the not-so-sweet meanwhile, the football team had been run over twice more. Our record was now 1–5, and Coach Puffer had lapsed back into morose silence.

My lunchbag wasn’t as full as it had been on the day of Repperton and the knife; the only virtue I could see of being 1–5 was that we were now so far behind the Bears of Ridge Rock (they were 5–0–1) that it would be impossible for us to do anything in the Conference unless their team bus went over a cliff.

We sat in the mellow October sunshine—the time for the little spooks in their bedsheets and rubber masks and Woolworth’s Darth Vader costumes wasn’t far off—munching and not saving too much. Arnie had a devilled egg and swapped it for one of my cold meatloaf sandwiches. Parents know very little about the secret lives of their children, I guess. Every Monday since first grade, Regina Cunningham had put a devilled egg in Arnie’s lunchbag, and every day after we had a meatloaf dinner (which was usually Sunday suppers), I had a cold meatloaf sandwich in mine. Now I have always hated cold meatloaf and Arnie has always hated devilled eggs, although I never saw him turn one down done any other way. And I’ve often wondered what our mothers would think if they knew how few of the hundreds of devilled eggs and dozens of cold meatloaf sandwiches that went into our respective lunch-sacks had actually been eaten by him for whom each was intended.

I got down to my cookies and Arnie got down to his fig-bars. He glanced over at me to make sure I was watching and then crammed all six fig-bars into his mouth at once and crunched down on them. His cheeks puffed out grotesquely.

“Oh, Jesus, what a gross-out!” I cried.

“Ung-ung-gooth-ung,” Arnie replied.

I started to poke my fingers at his sides, where he’s always been extremely ticklish, screaming “Side-noogies! Look out, Arnie, I got side-noogies onya!”

Arnie started to laugh, spraying out little wads of munched-up fig-bars. I know how obnoxious that must sound, but it was really funny.

“Quit it, Dennith!” Arnie said, his mouth still full of fig-bars.

“What was that? I can’t understand you, you fucking barbarian.” I kept poking my fingers at him, giving him what we used to call “side-noogies” when we were little kids (for some reason now lost in the sands of time), and he kept wiggling and twisting and laughing.

He swallowed mightily, then belched.

“You’re so fucking gross, Cunningham,” I said.

“I know.” He seemed really pleased by it. Probably was so far as I know, he’d never pulled the six-fig-bars-at-once trick in front of anyone else. If he had done it in front of his parents, I figure Regina would have had a kitty and Michael possibly a brain-haemorrhage.

“What’s the most you ever did?” I asked him.

“I did twelve once,” he said. “But I thought I was going to choke.”

I snorted laughter. “Have you done it for Leigh yet?”

“I’m holding it back for the prom,” he said. “I’ll give her a few side-noggies too.” We got laughing over that, and I realized how much I missed Arnie sometimes—I had football, student council, a new girlfriend who would (I hoped) consent to give me a hand-job before the drive-in season ended. I had little hope of getting her to do more than that; she was a little too enchanted with herself. Still, it was fun trying.

Even with all of that going on, I had missed Arnie. First there had been Christine, now there was Leigh and Christine. In that order, I hoped.

“Where is she today?” I asked.

“Sick,” he said. “She got her period, and I guess it really hurts.”

I raised a set of mental eyebrows. If she was discussing her female problems with him, they were getting chummy indeed.

“How did you happen to ask her to the football game that day?” I asked. “The day we played Hidden Hills?”

He laughed. “The only football game I’ve been to since my sophomore year. We brought you luck, Dennis.”

“You just called her up and asked her to go?”

“I almost didn’t. That was the first date I ever had.” He glanced over at me shyly. “I don’t think I slept more than two hours the night before. After I called her up and she said she’d go with me, I was scared to death I’d make an asshole of myself, or that Buddy Repperton would show up and want to fight, or something else would happen.”

“You seemed to have everything under control.”

“Did I?” He looked pleased. “Well, that’s good. But I was scared. She’d talk to me in the halls, you know—ask me about assignments and stuff like that. She joined the chess club even though she wasn’t very good… but she’s getting better. I’m teaching her.”

I’ll bet you are, you dog, I thought, but didn’t quite dare say it—I still remembered the way he had blown up at me that same day at Hidden Hills. Besides, I wanted to hear this. I was pretty curious; captivating a girl as stunning as Leigh Cabot had been a real coup.

“So after a while I started to think maybe she was interested in me,” Arnie went on. “It probably took a lot longer for the penny to drop for me than it would for some other guys—guys like you, Dennis.”

“Sure, I’m a smoothie,” I said. “What James Brown used to call “a sex machine.”

“No, you’re no sex machine, but you know about girls,” he said seriously. “You understand them. I was always just scared of them. Never knew what to say. Still don’t, I guess. Leigh’s different.

“I was afraid to ask her out.” He seemed to consider this. “I mean, she’s a beautiful girl, really beautiful. Don’t you think so, Dennis?”

“Yes. As far as I can tell, she’s the prettiest girl in school.”

He smiled, pleased. “I think so, too… but I thought, maybe it’s only because I love her that I think that way.”

I looked at my friend, hoping he wasn’t going to get into more trouble than he could handle. At that point, of course, I had no idea what trouble meant.

“Anyway, I heard these two guys talking one day in chem lab—Lenny Barongg and Ned Stroughman—and Ned was telling Lenny that he’d asked her out and she’d said no, but in a nice way… like maybe if he asked her again she might try it out. And I had this picture of her going steady with Ned by spring, and I started to feel really jealous. It’s ridiculous. I mean, she told him no and I’m feeling jealous, you dig what I’m saying?”

I smiled and nodded. Out on the field the cheerleaders were trying out some new routines. I didn’t think they would help our team very much, but it was pleasant to watch them. Their shadows puddled at their heels on the green grass in the bright noontime.

“The other thing that got me was that Ned didn’t sound pissed off or… or ashamed… or rejected, or anything like that. He tried for a date and got turned down, that was all. I decided I could do that, too. Still, when I called her up on the phone I was sweating all over. Man, that was bad. I kept imagining her laughing at me and saying something like, “Me go out with you, you little creep? You must be dreaming! I’m not that hard up yet!”

“Yeah,” I said. “I can’t figure out why she didn’t.”

He poked me in the stomach. “Gut-noogies, Dennis! Make you puke!”

“Never mind,” I said. “Tell me the rest.”

He shrugged. “Not much else to tell. Her mother answered the phone when I called and said she’d get her. I heard the phone go clunking down on the table, and I almost hung up.” Arnie held up two fingers a quarter of an inch apart. “I came this close to hanging up. No shit.”

“I know the feeling,” I said, and I did—you worry about the laughter, you imagine the contempt to some degree or other, no matter if you’re a football player or some pimply little four-eyed runt—but I don’t think I could understand the degree to which Arnie must have felt it. What he had done had taken monumental courage. It’s a small thing, a date, but in our society there are all sorts of charged forces swirling behind that simple concept—I mean, there are kids who go all the way through high school and never get up enough courage to ask a girl for a date. Never once, in all four years. And that isn’t just one or two kids, it’s lots of them. And there are lots of sad girls who never get asked. It’s a shitty way to run things, when you stop to think about it. A lot of people get hurt. I could dimly imagine the naked terror Arnie must have felt, waiting for Leigh to come to the phone; the sense of dread amazement at the idea that he was not planning to ask just any girl out but the prettiest girl in school.

“She answered,” Arnie went on. “She said “Hello?” and, man, I couldn’t say anything. I tried and nothing came out but this little whistle of air. So she said “Hello, who is this?” like it might be some kind of practical joke, you know, and I thought, This is ridiculous. If I can talk to her in the hall, I should be able to talk to her on the goddam phone, all she can say is no, I mean slid can’t shoot me or anything if I ask her for a date. So I said hi, this is Arnie Cunningham, and she said hi, and blah-blah-blahdy-blah, bullshit-builshit-bullshit, and then I realized I didn’t even know where the hell I wanted to ask her to go, and we’re running out of things to say, pretty soon she’s going to hang up. So I asked her the first thing I could think of, would she want to go to the football game on Saturday. She said she’d love to go, right off like that, like she had just been waiting for me to ask her, you know?”

“Probably she was.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Arnie considered this, bemused.

The bell rang, signifying five minutes to period five. Arnie and I got up. The cheerleaders trotted off the field, their little skirts flipping saucily.

We climbed down the bleachers, tossed our lunchbags in one of the trash barrels painted with the school colours orange and black, talk about Halloween—and walked toward the school.

Arnie was still smiling, recalling the way it had worked itself out, that first time with Leigh. “Asking her to the game was sheer desperation.”

“Thank a lot,” I said. “That’s what I get for playing my heart out every Saturday afternoon, huh?”

“You know what I mean. Then, after she said she’d go with me, I had this really horrible thought and called you remember?”

Suddenly I did. He had called to ask me if that game was at home or away and had seemed absurdly crushed when I told him it was at Hidden Hills.

“So there I was, I’ve got a date with the prettiest girl in school, I’m crazy about her, and it turns out to be an away game and my car’s in Will’s garage.”

“You could have taken the bus.”

“I know that now, but I didn’t then. The bus always used to be full up a week before the game. I didn’t know so many people would stop coming to the games if the team started losing.”

“Don’t remind me,” I said.

“So I went to Will. I knew Christine could do it, but no way she was street-legal. I mean, I was desperate.”

How desperate? I wondered coldly and suddenly.

“And he came through for me. Said he understood how important it was, and if…” Arnie paused; seemed to consider. “And that’s the story of the big date,” he finished gracelessly.

And if…

But that wasn’t my business,

Be his eyes, my father had said.

But I pushed that away too.

We were walking past the smoking area now, deserted except for three guys and two girls, hurriedly finishing a joint. They had it in a makeshift matchbook roachclip, and the evocative odour of pot, so similar to the aroma of slowly burning autumn leaves, slipped into my nostrils.

“Seen Buddy Repperton around?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “And don’t want to. You?”

I had seen him once, hanging out at Vandenberg’s Happy Gas, an extra-barrel service station out on Route 22 in Monroeville. Don Vandenberg’s dad owned it, and the place had been on the ragged edge of going bust ever since the Arab oil embargo in ’73. Buddy hadn’t seen me; I was just cruising by.

“Not to talk to.”

“You mean he can talk?” Arnie said with a scorn that wasn’t like him. “What a shitter.”

I started. That word again. I thought about it, told myself what the fuck, and asked him where he had gotten that particular term.

He looked at me thoughtfully. The second bell rang suddenly, braying out from the side of the building. We were going to be late to class, but right then I didn’t care at all.

“You remember that day I bought the car?” he said. “Not the day I put the deposit on it, but the day I actually bought it?”

“Sure.”

“I went in with LeBay while you stayed outside. He had this tiny kitchen with a red-checked tablecloth on the table. We sat down and he offered me a beer. I figured I better take it. I really wanted the car, and I didn’t want to, you know, offend him somehow. So we each had a beer and he got off, on this long, rambling… what would you call it? Rant, I guess. This rant about how all the shitters were against him. It was his word, Dennis. The shitters. He said it was the shitters that were making him sell his car.”

“What did he mean?”

“I guess he meant that he was too old to drive, but he wouldn’t put it that way. It was all their fault. The shitters. The shitters wanted him to take a driver’s road-test every two years and an eye exam every year. It was the eye exam that bothered him. And he said they didn’t like him on the street—no one did. So someone threw a stone at the car.

“I understand all that. But I don’t understand why…” Arnie paused in the doorway, oblivious of the fact that we were late for class. His hands were shoved into the back pockets of his jeans and he was frowning. “I don’t understand why he let Christine go to rack and ruin like that, Dennis. Like she was when I bought her. Mostly he talked about her like he really loved her—I know you thought it was just part of his sales-pitch but it wasn’t—and then near the end, when he was counting the money, he sort of growled, “That shitting car, I’ll be fucked if I know why you want it, boy. It’s the ace of spades.” And I said something like I thought I could fix it up really nice. And he said, “All that and more. If the shitters will let you.”

We went inside. Mr Leheureux, the French teacher, was going someplace fast, his bald head gleaming under the fluorescent lights. “You boys are late,” he said in a harried voice that reminded me of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. We hurried up until he was out of sight and then we slowed down again.

Arnie said, “When Buddy Repperton got after me like that, I was really scared.” He lowered his voice, smiling but serious “I almost pissed my pants, if you want to know the truth. Anyway, I guess I used LeBay’s word without even thinking about it. In Repperton’s case it fits, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes.”

“I gotta go,” Arnie said. “Calculus, then Auto Shop III. I think I’ve learned the whole course on Christine the last two months anyway.”

He hurried off and I just stood there in the hall for a minute, watching him go. I had a study-hall with Miss Rat-Pack period six on Mondays, and I thought I could slip in the back unnoticed… I had done it before. Besides, seniors get away with murder, as I was rapidly learning.

I stood there, trying to shake a feeling of fright that would never be so amorphous or un-concrete again. Something was wrong, something was out of place, out of joint. There was a chill, and not all the bright October sunshine spilling through all the high school windows in the world would dispel it. Things were as they always had been, but they were getting ready to change—I felt it.

I stood there trying to get myself in gear, trying to tell myself that the chill was no more than my fears about my own future, and that it was the change coming that I was uneasy about. Maybe that was part of it. But it wasn’t all. That shitting car, I’ll be fucked if I know why you want it, boy. It’s the ace of spades. I saw Mr Leheureux coming back from the office, and I started moving.

I think that everybody has a backhoe in his or her head, and at moments of stress or trouble you can fire it up and simply push everything into a great big slit-trench in the floor of your conscious mind. Get rid of it. Bury it. Except that that slit-trench goes down into the subconscious, and sometimes, in dreams, the bodies stir and walk. I dreamed of Christine again that night, Arnie behind the wheel this time, the decomposing corpse of Roland D. LeBay lolling obscenely in the shotgun seat as the car roared out of the garage at me, pinning me with the savage circles of its headlights.

I woke up with my pillow crammed against my mouth to stifle the screams.

19 THE ACCIDENT

That was the last time I talked to Arnie—really talked to him—until Thanksgiving, because the following Saturday was the day I got hurt. That was the day we played the Ridge Rock Bears again, and this time we lost by the truly spectacular score of 46–3. I wasn’t around at the end of the game, however. About seven minutes into the third quarter I got into the open, took a pass, and was setting myself to run when I was hit simultaneously by three Bears defensive linemen. There was an instant of terrible pain—a bright flare, as if I had been caught on ground zero of a nuclear blast. Then there was a lot of darkness.

Things stayed dark for a fairly long time, although it didn’t seem long to me. I was unconscious for about fifty hours, and when I woke up late on the afternoon of Monday the twenty-third of October, I was in Libertyville Community Hospital. My dad and mom were there. So was Ellie, looking pale and strained. There were dark brown circles under her eyes, and I was absurdly touched; she had found it in her heart to cry for me in spite of all the Twinkies and Yodels I had hooked out of the breadbox after she went to bed, in spite of the time, when she was twelve, that I had given her a little bag of Vigoro after she had spent about a week looking at herself sideways in the mirror with her tightest T-shirt on so she could see if her boobs were getting any bigger (she had burst into tears and my mother had been super-pissed at me for almost two weeks), in spite of all the teasing and the shitty little I’m-one-up-on-you sibling games.

Arnie wasn’t there when I woke up, but he joined my family shortly; he and Leigh had been down in the waiting room. That evening my aunt and uncle from Albany showed up, and the rest of that week was a steady parade of family and friends—the entire football team showed up, including Coach Puffer, who looked as if he had aged about twenty years. I guess he had found out there were worse things than a losing season. Coach was the one who broke the news to me that I was never going to play football again, and I don’t know what he expected—for me to bust out crying or maybe have hysterics, from the drawn, tense look on his face. But I didn’t have much of a reaction at all, inwardly or outwardly. I was just glad to be alive and to know I would walk again, eventually.

If I had been hit just once, I probably could have bounced right up and gone back for more. But the human body was never meant to get creamed from three different angles at the same time. Both of my legs were broken, the left in two places. My right arm had whipped around behind me when I went down, and I had sustained a nasty greenstick fracture of the forearm. But all of that was really only the icing on the cake. I had also gotten a fractured skull and sustained what the doctor in charge of my case kept calling “a lower spinal accident”, which seemed to mean that I had come within about a centimetre of being paralysed from the waist down for the rest of my life.

I got a lot of visitors, a lot of flowers, a lot of cards. All of it was, in some ways, very enjoyable—like being alive to help celebrate your own wake.

But I also got a lot of pain and a lot of nights when I couldn’t sleep; I got an arm suspended over my body by weights and pulleys, likewise a leg (they both seemed to itch all the time under the casts), and a temporary cast what is called a “presser cast”—around my lower back. Also, of course, I got the prospect of a long hospital stay and endless trips in a wheelchair to that chamber of horrors so innocently labelled the Therapy Wing.

Oh and one other thing—I got a lot of time.

I read the paper; I asked questions of my visitors; and on more than a few occasions, as things went on and my suspicions began to get out of hand, I asked myself if I might not be losing my mind.

I was in the hospital until Christmas, and by the time I got home, my suspicions had almost taken their final shape. I was finding it more and more difficult to deny that monstrous shape, and I knew damned well I wasn’t losing my mind. In some ways it would have been better—more comforting—if I could have believed that. By then I was badly frightened, and more than half in love with my best friend’s girl, as well.

Time to think… too much time.

Time to call myself a hundred names for what I was thinking about Leigh. Time to took up at the ceiling of my room and wish I had never heard of Arnie Cunningham… or Leigh Cabot… or of Christine.