unnatural, something that smacked of madness and worse than madness; it smacked of the grave, There were nights after love when we would lie together in bed, naked, belly to belly, and that thing would be between us: Roland D. LeBay’s face. I would be kissing her mouth or her breasts or her belly, warm with rising passion, and I would suddenly hear his voice: That’s about the finest smell in the world… except for pussy. And I would freeze, my passion all steam and ashes.
There were times, God knows, when I could see it in her face as well. The lovers don’t always live happily ever after, even when they’ve done what seemed right as well as they could do it. That’s something else it took four years to learn.
So we drifted apart. A secret needs two faces to bounce between; a secret needs to see itself in another pair of eyes. And although I did love her, all the kisses, all the endearments, all the walks arm-in-arm through blowing October leaves… none of those things could quite measure up to that magnificently simple act of tying her scarf around my arm.
Leigh left college to be married, and then it was goodbye Drew and hello Taos. I went to her wedding with hardly a qualm. Nice fellow. Drove a Honda Civic. No problems there.
I never had to worry about making the football squad. Drew doesn’t even have a football squad. Instead, I took an extra class each semester and went to summer school for two years, in the time when I would have been sweating under the August sun, hitting the tackling dummies, if things had happened differently. As a result, I graduated early—three semesters early, in fact.
If you met me on the street, you wouldn’t notice a limp, but if you walked with me four or five miles (I do at least three miles every day as a matter of course; that physical therapy stuff sticks), you’d notice me starting to pull to the right a little bit.
My left leg aches on rainy days. And on snowy nights.
And some times when I have my nightmares—they are not so frequent now—I wake up, sweating and clutching at that leg, where there is still a hard bulge of flesh above the knee. But all my worries about wheelchairs, braces, and built-up heels proved thankfully hollow. And I never liked football that well anyway.
Michael, Regina, and Arnie Cunningham were buried in a family plot in the Libertyville Heights cemetery—no one went out to the gravesite but members of the family: Regina’s people from Ligonier, some of Michael’s people from New Hampshire and New York, a few others.
The funeral was five days after that final hellish scene in the garage. The coffins were closed. The very fact of those three wooden boxes, lined up on a triple bier like soldiers, struck my heart like a shovelful of cold earth. The memory of the ant farms couldn’t stand against the mute testimony of those boxes. I cried a little.
Afterward, I rolled myself down the aisle toward them and put my hand tentatively on the one in the centre, not knowing if it was Arnie’s or not, not caring. I stayed that way for quite a while, head down, and then a voice said behind me, “Want a push back out to the vestry, Dennis?” I craned my neck around. It was Mercer, looking neat and lawyerly in a dark wool suit.
“Sure,” I said. “Just gimme a couple of seconds, okay?”
“Fine.”
I hesitated and then said, “The papers say Michael was killed at home. That the car rolled over him after he slipped on the ice, or something.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Your doing?”
Mercer hesitated. It makes things simpler. His gaze shifted to where Leigh was standing with my folks. She was talking with my mother but looking anxiously toward me. “Pretty girl,” he said. He had said it before, in the hospital.
“I’m going to marry her someday,” I said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you did,” Mercer replied. “Did anyone ever tell you that you’ve got the balls of a tiger?”
“I think Coach Puffer did,” I said, “Once.”
He laughed. “You ready for that push, Dennis? You’ve been down here long enough. Let it go.”
“Easier said than done.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I guess so.
“Will you tell me one thing?” I asked. “I have to know.”
“I will if I can.”
“What did—” I had to stop and clear my throat. “What did you do with the…the pieces?”
“Why, I saw to that myself,” Mercer said. His voice was light, almost joking, but his face was very, very serious. “I had two fellows from the local police run all those pieces through the crusher out back of Darnell’s Garage. Made a little cube about so big.” He held his hands about two feet apart. “One of those guys got a hell of a bad cut. Took stitches.”
Mercer suddenly smiled—it was the bitterest, coldest smile I’ve ever seen.
“He said it bit him.”
Then he pushed me up the, aisle to, where my family and my girl stood waiting for me.
So that’s my story. Except for the dreams.
I’m four years older, and Arnie’s face has grown hazy to me, a browning photograph from an old yearbook. I never would have believed that could happen, but it has. I made it through, made the transition from adolescence to manhood—whatever that is—somehow; I’ve got a college degree on which the ink is almost dry, and I’ve been teaching high school history. I started last year, and two of my original students—Buddy Repperton types, both of them—were older than I was. I’m single, but there are a few interesting ladies in my life, and I hardly think of Arnie at all.
Except in my dreams.
The dreams aren’t the only reason I’ve set all this down—there’s another, which I’ll tell you in a moment— but I would be lying if I said the dreams weren’t a big part of the reason. Maybe it’s an effort to lance the wound and clean it out. Or maybe it’s just that I’m not rich enough to afford a shrink.
In one of the dreams I am back where the funeral service was held. The three coffins are on their triple bier, but the church is empty except for me. In the dream I am on crutches again, standing at the foot of the central aisle, back by the door. I don’t want to go down there, but my crutches are pulling me along, moving by themselves. I touch the middle coffin. It springs open at my touch, and lying inside in the satin interior is not Arnie but Roland D. LeBay, a putreseent corpse in an Army uniform. As the bloated smell of gassy decay rushes out at me, the corpse opens its eyes; its rotting hands, black and slimy with some fungoid growth, grope upward and find my shirt before I can back away, and it pulls itself up until its glaring, reeking face is only inches from mine. And it begins to croak over and over again, Can’t beat the smell, can you? Nothing smells this good… except for pussy… except for pussy… except for pussy. I try to scream but I can’t scream, because LeBay’s hands have settled in a noxious, tightening ring around my throat.
In the other dream—and this one is somehow worse I’ve finished with a class or proctoring a study hall at Norton Junior High, where I teach. I pack my books into my briefcase, stuff in my papers, and leave the room for my next class. And there in the hall, packed in between the industrial-grey lockers lining it, is Christine—brand new and sparkling, sitting on four new whitewall tyres, a chrome Winged Victory hood ornament tilting toward me. She is empty, but her engine guns and falls off… guns and falls off… guns and falls off. In some of the dreams the voice from the radio is the voice of Richie Valens, killed long ago in a plane crash, with Buddy Holly and J. P. Richardson, The Big Bopper. Richie is screaming “La Bamba” to a Latin beat, and as Christine suddenly lunges toward me, laying rubber on the hall floor and tearing open locker doors on either side with her doorhandles, I see that there is a vanity plate on the front—a grinning white skull on a dead black field. Imprinted over the skull are the words ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE.
Then I wake up—sometimes screaming, always clutching my leg. But the dreams are less now. Something else I read in one of my psych classes—I took a lot of them, maybe hoping to understand things that can’t be understood—is that people dream less as they grow older. I think I am going to be all right now. Last Christmas season, when I sent Leigh her annual card, I added a line to my usual note on the back. Below my signature, on impulse, I scribbled: How are you dealing with it? Then I sealed the card up and mailed it before I could change my mind. I got a postcard back a month later. It showed the new Taos Center for the Performing Arts on the front. On the back was my address and a single flat line: Dealing with what? L.
