was a patrol-boy and he pushed you down in the street and I pulled his hat off and stuffed it down his pants? Where you been, Arnie? This guy LeBay is a Johnny-come-lately. Me, I was here all along.”
That flinch again. This time he half-turned away, the smile faltering, his eyes searching for Christine the way your eyes might search for a loved one in a crowded terminal or bus-station. Or the way a junkie might took for his pusher.
“You need her that bad?” I asked. “Man, you’re hooked right through the fucking bag, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said hoarsely. “You stole my girl. Nothing is going to change that. You went behind my back… you cheated… you’re just a shitter, like all the rest of them.” He was looking at me now, his eyes wide and hurt and blazing with anger. “I thought I could trust you, and you turned out to be worse than Repperton or any of them!” He took a step toward me and cried out in a perfect fury of loss, “You stole her, you shitter!”
I lurched forward another step on my crutches; one of them slid a little bit in the packed snow underfoot. We were like two reluctant gunslingers approaching each other.
“You can’t steal what’s been given away,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the night she choked in your car. The night Christine tried to kill her. You told her you didn’t need her. You told her to fuck off.”
“I never did! That’s a lie! That’s a goddam lie!”
“Who am I talking to?” I asked.
“Never mind!” His grey eyes were huge behind his spectacles. “Never mind who the fuck you’re talking to! That’s nothing but a dirty lie! No more than I’d expect from that stinking bitch!”
Another step closer. His pale face was marked with flaring red patches of colour.
“When you write your name, it doesn’t look like your signature anymore, Arnie.”
“You shut up, Dennis.”
“Your father says it’s like having a stranger in the house.”
“I’m warning you, man.”
“Why bother?” I asked brutally. “I know what’s going to happen. So does Leigh. The same thing that happened to Buddy Repperton and Will Darnell and all the others. Because you’re not Arnie at all anymore. Are you in there, LeBay? Come on out and let me see you. I’ve seen you before. I saw you on New Year’s Eve, I saw you yesterday at the chicken place. I know you’re in there; why don’t you stop fucking around and come out?”
And he did… but in Arnie’s face this time, and that was more terrible than all the skulls and skeletons and comic-book horrors ever thought of. Arnie’s face changed. A sneer bloomed on his lips like a rancid rose. And I saw him as he must have been back when the world was young and a car was all a young man needed to have; everything else would just automatically follow. I saw George LeBay’s big brother.
I only remember one thing about him, but I remember that one thing very well His anger. He was always angry.
He came toward me, closing the distance between where he had been and where I stood propped on my crutches. His eyes were filmy and beyond all reach. That sneer was stamped on his face like the mark of a branding-iron.
I had time to think of the scar on George LeBay’s forearm, skidding from his elbow to his wrist. He pushed me and then he came back and threw me. I could hear that fourteen-year-old LeBay shouting, You stay out of my way from now on, you goddam snotnose, stay out of my way, you hear?
It was LeBay I was facing now, and he was not a man who took losing easily. Check that: he didn’t take losing at all.
“Fight him, Arnie,” I said. “He’s had his own way too long. Fight him, kill him, make him stay d—”
He swung his foot and kicked my right crutch out from under me. I struggled to stay up, tottered, almost made it… and then he kicked the left crutch away. I fell down on the cold packed snow. He took another step and stood above me, his face hard and alien.
“You got it coming, and you’re going to get it,” he said remotely.
“Yeah, right,” I gasped. “You remember the ant farms, Arnie? Are you in there someplace? This dirty sucker never had a fucking ant farm in his life. He never had a friend in his life.”
And suddenly the calm hardness broke. His face—his face roiled. I don’t know how else to describe it. LeBay was there, furious at having to put down a kind of internal mutiny. Then Arnie was there—drawn, tired, ashamed, but, most of all, desperately unhappy. Then LeBay again, and his foot drew back to kick me as I lay on the snow groping for my crutches and feeling helpless and useless and dumb. Then it was Arnie again, my friend Arnie, brushing his hair back off his forehead in that familiar, distracted gesture; it was Arnie saying, “Oh, Dennis… Dennis… I’m sorry… I’m so sorry.”
“It’s too late for sorry, man,” I said.
I got one crutch and then the other. 1 pulled myself up little by little, slipping twice before I could get the crutches under me again. Now my hands felt like pieces of furniture. Arnie made no move to help me; he stood with his back against the van, his eyes wide and shocked.
“Dennis, I can’t help it,” he whispered. “Sometimes I feel like I’m not even here anymore. Help me, Dennis. Help me.”
“Is LeBay there?” I asked him.
“He’s always here,” Arnie groaned. “Oh God, always! Except—”
“The car?”
“When Christine… when she goes, then he’s with her. That’s the only time he’s… he’s…”
Arnie fell silent. His head slipped over to one side. His chin rolled on his chest in a boneless pivot. His hair dangled toward the snow. Spit ran out of his mouth and splattered on his boots. And then he began to scream thinly and beat his gloved fists on the van behind him:
“Go away! Go away! Go awaaaaay!”
Then nothing for maybe five seconds nothing except the shuddering of his body, as if a basket of snakes had been dumped inside his “clothes; nothing except that slow, horrible roll of his chin on his chest.
I thought maybe he was winning, that he was beating the dirty old sonofabitch. But when he looked up, Arnie was gone. LeBay was there.
“It’s all going to happen just like he said,” LeBay told me. “Let it go, boy. Maybe I won’t drive over you.”
Come on over to Darnell’s tonight, I said. My voice was harsh, my throat as dry as sand. “We’ll play. I’ll bring Leigh. You bring Christine.”
“I’ll pick my own time and place,” LeBay said, and grinned with Arnie’s mouth, showing Arnie’s teeth, which were young and strong—a mouth still years from the indignity of dentures. “You won’t know when or where. But you’ll know… when the time comes.”
“Think again,” I said, almost casually. “Come to Darnell’s tonight, or she and I start talking tomorrow.”
He laughed, an ugly contemptuous sound. “And where will that get you? The asylum over at Reed City?”
“Oh, we won’t be taken seriously at first,” I said. “I give you that. But that stuff about how they put you in the loonybin as soon as you start talking about ghosts and demons… uh-uh, LeBay. Maybe in your day, before flying saucers and The Exorcist and that house in Amityville. These days a hell of a lot of people believe in that stuff.”
He was still grinning, but his eyes looked at me with narrow suspicion. That, and something else. I thought that something else was the first sparkle of fear.
“And what you don’t seem to realize is how many people know something is wrong.”
His grin faltered. Of course he must have realized that, and been worried about it. But maybe killing gets to be a fever; maybe after a while you are simply unable to stop and count the cost.
“Whatever weird, filthy kind of life you still have is all wrapped up in that car,” I said. “You knew it, and you planned to use Arnie from the very beginning—except that “planned” is the wrong word, because you never really planned anything, did you? You just followed your intuitions.”
He made a snarling sound and turned to go.
“You really want to think about it,” I called after him. “Arnie’s father knows something is rotten. So does
