Franz Kafka might have written them. My father bent over me and said in a voice like thunder reverberating through cotton batting: “How did Michael get there, Dennis?” That’s what they really wanted to know: how Michael got there. Oh, I thought, oh my friends, I could tell you stories…
Then Mr Cabot was saying, “What did you get my daughter into, boy?” I seem to remember replying, “It’s not what I got her into, it’s what she got you out of,” which I still think was pretty witty under the circumstances, doped up the way I was and all.
Elaine was there briefly, and she seemed to be holding a Yodel or a Twinkie or something mockingly out of my reach. Leigh was there, holding her filmy nylon scarf out and asking me to raise my arm so she could tie it on. But I couldn’t; my arm was like a lead bar.
Then Arnie was there, and of course that had to be a dream.
Thanks, man, he said, and I noticed with something like terror that the left lens of his glasses was shattered. His face was okay, but that broken lens… it scared me. Thanks. You did okay. I feel better now. I think things are going to be okay now.
No sweat, Arnie, I said—or tried to say—but he was gone.
It was the next day not the 20th, but Sunday, January 21st—that I started to come back a little. My left leg was in a cast up in its old familiar position again amid all the pulleys and weights. There was a man I had never seen before sitting to the left of my bed, reading a paperback John D. MacDonald story. He saw me looking at him and lowered his book.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, Dennis,” he said mildly, and deliberately marked his place in the book with a matchbook cover. He put the book in his lap and folded his hands over it.
“Are you a doctor?” I asked. He sure wasn’t Dr Arroway, who had taken care of me last time; this guy was twenty years younger and at least fifty pounds leaner. He looked tough.
“State Police Inspector,” he said. “Richard Mercer is my name. Rick, if you like.” He held out his hand, and stretching awkwardly and carefully I touched it. I couldn’t really shake it. My head ached and I was thirsty.
“Look,” I said. “I don’t really mind talking to you, and I’ll answer all of your questions, but I’d like to see a doctor.” I swallowed. He looked at me, concerned, and I blurted out, “I need to know if I’m ever going to walk again.”
“If what that fellow Arroway says is the truth,” Mercer said, “You’ll be able to get around in four to six weeks. You didn’t break it again, Dennis. You severely strained it; that was what he said. It swelled up like a sausage. He also said you were lucky to get off so cheap.”
“What about Arnie?” I asked. “Arnie Cunningham? Do you know—”
His eyes flickered.
“What is it?” I asked. “What is it about Arnie?”
“Dennis,” he said, and then hesitated. “I don’t know if this is the time.”
“Please. Is Arnie… is he dead?”
Mercer sighed. “Yes, he’s dead. He and his mother had an accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in the snow. If it was an accident.”
I tried to talk and couldn’t. I motioned for the pitcher of water on the bedtable, thinking how dismal it was to be in a hospital room and know exactly where everything was. Mercer poured me a glass and put the straw with the elbow-bend in it. I drank, and it got a little bit better. My throat, that is. Nothing else seemed better at all.
“What do you mean, if it was an accident?”
Mercer said, “It was Friday evening, and the snow just wasn’t that heavy. The turnpike classification was two bare and wet, reduced visibility, use appropriate caution. We guess, from the force of impact, that they weren’t doing much more than forty-five. The car veered across the median and struck a semi. It was Mrs Cunningham’s Volvo wagon. It exploded.”
I closed my eyes. “Regina?”
“Also DOA. For whatever it’s worth, they probably didn’t—”
“—suffer,” I finished. “Bullshit. They suffered plenty.” I felt tears and choked them back. Mercer said nothing. “All three of them,” I muttered. “Oh Jesus Christ, all three.”
“The driver of the truck broke his arm. That was the worst of it for him. He said that there were three people in the car, Dennis.”
“Three!”
“Yes. And he said they appeared to be struggling.” Mercer looked at me frankly. “We’re going on the theory that they picked up a bad-news hitchhiker who escaped after the accident and before the troopers arrived.”
But that was ridiculous, if you knew Regina Cunningham, I thought. She would no more pick up a hitchhiker than she would wear slacks to a faculty tea. The things you did and those you never did were firmly set in Regina Cunningham’s mind. As if in cement, you could say.
It had been LeBay. He couldn’t be both places at once, that was the thing. And at the end, when he saw how things were going in Darnell’s Garage, he had abandoned Christine and had tried to go back to Arnie. What had happened then was anyone’s guess. But I thought then—and do now—that Arnie fought him… and earned at least a draw.
“Dead,” I said, and now the tears did come. I was too weak and low to stop them. I hadn’t been able to keep him from getting killed, after all. Not the last time, not when it really mattered. Others, maybe, but not Arnie.
“Tell me what happened,” Mercer said. He put his book on the bedtable and leaned forward. “Tell me everything you know, Dennis, from first to last.”
“What has Leigh said?” I asked. “And how is she?”
“She spent Friday night here under observation, Mercer told me. “She had a concussion and a scalp laceration that took a dozen stitches to close. No marks on her face. Lucky. She’s a very pretty girl.”
“She’s more than that,” I said. “She’s beautiful.”
“She won’t say anything,” Mercer said, and a reluctant grin—of admiration, I think—slanted his face to the left. “Not to me, not to her father. He is, shall we say, in a state of high pissoff about the whole thing. She says it’s your business what to tell and when to tell.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “Because, she says, you’re the one who ended it.”
I didn’t do such a great job,” I muttered. I was still trying to cope with the idea that Arnie could possibly be dead. It was impossible, wasn’t it? We had gone to Camp Winnesko in Vermont together when we were twelve, and I got homesick and told him I was going to call and tell my parents they had to come get me. Arnie said if I did, he’d tell everybody at school that the reason I came home early was that they caught me eating boogers in my bunk after lights out and expelled me. We climbed the tree in my back yard to the very top fork and carved our initials there. He used to sleep over at my house and we’d stay up late watching Shock Theatre, crouched together on the sofa under an old quilt. We ate all those clandestine Wonder Bread sandwiches. When he was fourteen Arnie came to me, scared and ashamed because he was having these sexy dreams and he thought they were making him wet the bed. But it was the ant farms my mind kept coming back to. How could he be dead when we had made those ant farms together? Dear Christ, it seemed like only a week or two ago, those ant farms. So how could he be dead? I opened my mouth to tell Mercer that Arnie couldn’t be dead those ant farms made the very idea absurd. Then I closed my mouth again. I couldn’t tell him that. He was just a guy.
Arnie, I thought. Hey, man—it’s not true, is it? Jesus Christ, we still got too much to do. We never even double-dated at the drive-in yet.
“What happened?” Mercer asked again. “Tell me, Dennis.”
“You’d never believe it,” I said thickly.
“You might be surprised what I’d believe,” he said. “And you might be surprised what we know. A fellow named Junkins was the chief investigator on this case. He was killed not so very far from here. He was a friend of mine. A good friend. A week before he died he told me that he thought something was going on in Libertyville that
