nobody would believe. Then he was killed. With me that makes it personal.”
I shifted positions cautiously. “He didn’t tell you any more?”
“He told me that he believed he had uncovered an old murder,” Mercer said, still not taking his eyes from mine. “But it didn’t much matter, he said, because the perpetrator was dead.”
“LeBay,” I muttered, and thought that if Junkins had known about that, it was no wonder Christine had killed him. Because if Junkins had known that, he had been much too close to the whole truth.
Mercer said, “LeBay was the name he mentioned. He leaned closer. “And I’ll tell you something else, Dennis—Junkins was one hell of a driver. When he was younger, before he got married, he used to run stockers at Philly Plains, and be won his share of checkered flags. He went off the road doing better than a hundred and twenty in a Dodge cruiser with a hemi engine. Whoever was chasing him and we know someone was—had to be one hell of a driver.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He was.”
“I came by myself. I’ve been here for two hours waiting for you to wake up. I was here until they kicked me out last night. I don’t have a stenographer with me, I don’t have a tape recorder, and I assure you that I’m not wearing a wire. When you make a statement—if you ever have to—that’ll be a different ballgame. But for now, it’s you and me. I have to know. Because I see Rudy Junkins’s wife and Rudy Junkins’s kids from time to time. You dig?”
I thought it over. For a long time I thought it over nearly five minutes. He sat there and let me do it. At last I nodded. “Okay. But you’re still not going to believe it.”
“We’ll see, — ” he said.
I opened my mouth with no idea of what was going to come out. “He was a loser, you know,” I said. “Every high school has to have at least two, it’s like a national law. Everyone’s dumping ground. Only sometimes… sometimes they find something to hold onto and they survive. Arnie had me. And then he had Christine.”
I looked at him, and if I had seen the slightest wrong flicker in those grey eyes that were so unsettlingly like Arnie’s… well, if I had seen that, I think I would have clammed up right there and told him to put it on his books in whatever way seemed the most plausible and to tell Rudy Junkins’s kids whatever the hell he pleased.
But he only nodded, watching me closely.
“I just wanted you to understand that,” I said, and then a lump rose in my throat and I couldn’t say what I maybe should have said next: Leigh Cabot came later.
I drank some more water and swallowed hard. I talked for the next two hours.
At last I finished. There was no big climax; I simply dried up, my throat sore from so much talking. I didn’t ask if he believed me; I didn’t ask him if he was going to have me locked up in a loonybin or give me a liars” medal. I knew that he believed a great deal of it, because what I knew dovetailed too well with what he knew. What he thought about the rest of it—Christine and LeBay and the past reaching out its hands toward the present—that I didn’t know. And don’t to this day. Not really.
A little silence fell between us. At last he slapped his hands down on his thighs with a brisk sound and got to his feet. “Well!” he said. “Your folks will be waiting to visit you, no doubt.”
“Probably, yeah.”
He took out his wallet and produced small white business card with his name and number on it. “I can usually be reached here, or someone will throw me a relay. When you speak to Leigh Cabot again, would you tell her what you’ve told me and ask her to get in touch?”
“Yes, if you want. I’ll do that.”
“Will she corroborate your story.”
“Yes.”
He looked at me fixedly. “I’ll tell you this much, Dennis,” he said. “If you’re lying, you don’t know you are.”
He left. I only saw him once more, and I that was at the triple funeral for Arnie and his parents. The papers reported a tragic and bizarre fairy tale—father killed in driveway car accident while mother and son are killed on Pennsylvania Turnpike. Paul Harvey used it on his programme.
No mention was made of Christine being at Darnell’s Garage.
My family came to visit that night, and by then I was feeling much easier in my mind—part of it was baring my bosom to Mercer, I think (he was what one of my psych profs in college called “an interested outsider”, the sort it’s often easiest to talk to), but a great lot of the way I felt was due to a flying late-afternoon visit by Dr Arroway. He was out of temper and irascible with me, suggesting that next time I just take a chainsaw to the goddam leg and save us all a lot of time and trouble… but he also informed me (grudgingly, I think) that no lasting damage had been done. He thought. He warned me that I had not improved my chances of ever running in the Boston Marathon and left.
So the family visit was a gay one—due mostly to Ellie, who prattled on and on about that upcoming cataclysm, her First Date. A pimply, bullet-headed nerd named Brandon Hurling had invited her to go roller skating with him. My dad was going to drive them. Pretty cool.
My mother and father joined in, but my mother kept throwing anxious don’t-forget glances at Dad, and he lingered after Mom had taken Elaine out.
“What happened?” he asked me. “Leigh told her father some crazy story about cars driving themselves and little girls who were dead and I don’t know whatall. He’s damn near wild.”
I nodded. I was tired, but I didn’t want Leigh catching hell from her folks—or have them thinking she was either lying or nuts. If she was going to cover me with Mercer, I would have to cover her with her mother and father.
“All right,” I said. “It’s a bit of a story. You want to send Mom and Ellie around for a malt, or something? Or maybe you better tell them to go to a movie.”
“That long?”
“Yeah. That long.”
He looked at me, his gaze troubled. “Okay,” he said.
Shortly after, I told my story a second time. Now I’ve told it a third; and third time, so they say, pays for all.
Rest in peace, Arnie.
I love you, man.
EPILOGUE
I guess if this was a made-up story I would end it by telling you how the broken-legged knight of Darnell’s Garage wooed and won the lady fair… she of the pink nylon scarf and the arrogant Nordic cheekbones. But that never happened. Leigh Cabot is Leigh Ackerman now; she’s in Taos, New Mexico, married to an IBM customer service rep. She sells Amway in her spare time. She had two little girls, identical twins, so I guess she probably doesn’t have all that much spare time. I keep up on her doings after a fashion; my affection for the lady never really faded. We trade cards at Christmas, and I also send her a card on her birthday because she never forgets mine. That sort of thing. There are times when it seems a lot longer than four years.
What happened to us? I don’t really know. We went together for two years, slept together (very satisfactorily), went to school together (Drew), and were friends with each other. Her father shut up about our crazy story after my father talked with him, although he always regarded me after that as something of a dubious person. I think that both he and Mrs Cabot were relieved when Leigh and I went our separate ways.
I could feel it when we started to drift apart, and it hurt me—it hurt a lot. I craved her in a way you continue to crave some substance on which you have no more physical dependency… candy, tobacco, Coca-Cola. I carried a torch for her, but I’m afraid I carried it self-consciously and dropped it with an almost unseemly haste.
And maybe I do know what happened. What happened that night in Darnell’s Garage was a secret between us, and of course lovers need their secrets… but this wasn’t a good one to have. It was something cold and
