“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
