“Him and that bitch Christine,” she said. “Will it be soon?”
“Soon, yeah. I think so.
“All right. I love you, Dennis.”
“I love you too.”
As it turned out, it ended the next day— Friday the 19th of January.
49
ARNIE
I was cruising in my Stingray late one night
When an XKE pulled up on the right,
He rolled down the window of his shiny new Jag
And challenged me then and there to a drag.
I said “You’re on, buddy, my mill’s runnin fine,
Let’s come off the line at Sunset and Vine,
But I’ll go you one better (if you got the nerve):
Let’s race all the way… to Deadman’s Curve.”
I began that long, terrible day by driving over to Jimmy Sykes’s house in my Duster. I had expected there might be some trouble from Jimmy’s mother, but that turned out to be okay. She was, if anything, mentally slower than her son. She invited me in for bacon and eggs (I declined—my stomach was tied in miserable knots) and clucked over my crutches while Jimmy hunted around in his room for his keyring. I made small-talk with Mrs Sykes, who was roughly the size of Mount Etna, while time passed and a dismal certainty rose inside me: Jimmy had lost his keys somewhere and the whole thing was off the rails before it could really begin.
He came back shaking his head. “Can’t find em,” he said, “Jeez, I guess I must have lost em somewhere. What a bummer.”
And Mrs Sykes, nearly three hundred pounds on the hoof in a faded housedress and her hair up in puffy pink rollers, said with blessed practicality, “Did you look in your pockets, Jim?”
A startled expression crossed Jimmy’s face. He rammed a hand into the pocket of his green chino workpants. Then, with a shamefaced grin, he pulled out a bunch of keys. They were on one of the keyrings they sell at the novelty shop in the Monroeville Mall—a large rubber fried egg. The egg was dark with grease.
“There you are, you little suckers,” he said.
“You watch your language, young man,” Mrs Sykes said. “Just show Dennis which key it is that opens the door and keep your dirty language in your head.”
Jimmy ended up handing three Schlage keys over to me, because they weren’t labelled and he couldn’t tell which was which. One of them opened the main overhead door, one opened the back overhead door, the one which gave on the long lot of junked cars, and one opened the door to Will’s office.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll have these back to you just as soon as I can, Jimmy.”
“Great,” Jimmy said. “Say hello to Arnie when you see him.”
“You bet,” I said.
“You sure you don’t want some bacon and eggs, Dennis?” Mrs Sykes asked. “There’s plenty.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I really ought to get going.” It was a quarter past eight; school started at nine. Arnie usually pulled in around eight-forty-five, Leigh had told me. I just had time. I got my crutches under me and got to my feet.
“Help him out, Jim,” Mrs Sykes commanded. “Don’t just stand there.”
I started to protest and she waved me away. “Wouldn’t want you to fall on your can getting back to your car, Dennis. Might break your leg all over again.” She laughed uproariously at this, and Jimmy, the soul of obedience, practically carried me back to my Duster.
The sky that day was a scummy, frowsy grey, and the radio was predicting more snow by late afternoon. I drove across town to Libertyville High, took the driveway which led to the student parking lot, and parked in the front row. I didn’t need Leigh to tell me that Arnie usually parked in the back row. I had to see him, had to strew the bait in front of his nose, but I wanted him as far from Christine as possible when I did it. Away from the car, LeBay’s hold seemed weaker.
I sat with the key turned over to ACCESSORY for the radio and looked at the football field. It seemed impossible that I had ever traded sandwiches with Arnie on those snowcovered bleachers. Impossible to believe that I had run and cavorted on that field myself, dressed up in padding, helmet, and tight pants, stupidly convinced of my own physical invulnerability… perhaps even of my own immortality.
I didn’t feel that way anymore, if I ever had.
Students were coming in, parking their cars, and heading for the building, chattering and laughing and horsing around. I slouched lower in my seat, not wanting to be recognized. A bus pulled up at the doors in the main turnaround and disgorged a load of kids. A small cluster of shivering boys and girls gathered out in the smoking area where Buddy had taken Arnie on that day last fall. That day also seemed impossibly distant now.
My heart was thumping in my chest and I was miserably tense. A craven part of me hoped that Arnie simply wouldn’t show up. And then I saw the familiar white-over-red shape of Christine turn in from School Street and cruise up the student drive, moving at a steady twenty, blowing a little plume of white exhaust from her pipe. Arnie was behind the wheel, wearing his school jacket. He didn’t look at me; he simply drove to his accustomed place at the back of the lot and parked.
Just stay slouched down and he won’t even see you, that craven, traitorous part of my mind whispered. He’ll walk right by you, like all the rest of them.
Instead, I opened my door and fumbled my crutches outside. Leaning my weight on them, I yanked myself out and stood there on the packed snow of the parking lot, feeling a little bit like Fred MacMurray in that old picture Double Indemnity. From the school came the burring of the first bell, made faint and unimportant by distance— Arnie was later than he had been in the old days. My mother had said that Arnie was almost disgustingly punctual. Maybe LeBay hadn’t been.
He came toward me, books under his arm, head down twisting in and out between the cars. He walked behind a van, passing out of my sight temporarily, and then came back into view. He looked up then, directly into my eyes.
Ms own eyes widened, and he made an automatic half-turn back toward Christine.
“Feel kind of naked when you’re not behind the wheel?” I asked.
He looked back at me. His lips drew slightly downward, as if he bad tasted something of unpleasant flavour.
“How’s your cunt, Dennis?” he asked.
George LeBay hadn’t said, but he had at least hinted that his brother was extraordinarily good at getting through to people, finding their soft spots.
I took two shuffling steps forward on my crutches while he stood there, smiling with the corners of his mouth down.
“How did you like it when Repperton called you Cuntface?” I asked him. “Did you like it so well you want to turn it around and use it on somebody else?”
Part of him seemed to flinch at that—something that was maybe only in his eyes—but the contemptuous, watchful smile remained on his lips. It was cold out. I hadn’t put on my gloves, and my hands, on the crossbars of the crutches, were getting numb. Our breath made little plumes… “Or what about in the fifth grade, when Tommy Deckinger used to call you Fart-Breath?” I asked, my voice rising. Getting angry at him hadn’t been part of the game-plan, but now it was here, shaking inside me. “Did you like that? And do you remember when Ladd Smythe
