hurting. I’ve been able to do some things with her, but for everything I do it looks like there’s four more. Some of it I don’t even know how to do, but I’m going to learn.”
“Yeah,” I said, and took a bite out of my sandwich. After my conversation with George LeBay, my enthusiasm for the subject of Arnie’s best girl Christine had passed zero and entered the negative regions.
“She needs a front-end alignment—hell, she needs a new front end—and new brake shoes… a ring-job… I may try to re-grind the pistons… but I can’t do any of that stuff with my fifty-four-buck Craftsman toolkit. You see what I mean, Dennis?”
He sounded like he was pleading for my approval. With a sinking in my stomach, I suddenly remembered a guy we had gone to school with. Freddy Darlington, his name had been. Freddy was no ball of fire, but he was an okay kid with a good sense of humour. Then he met some slut from Penn Hills—and I mean a real slut, one more than happy to stoop for the troops, bang for the gang, pick your pejorative. She had a mean, stupid face that reminded me of the back end of a Mack truck and she never stopped chewing gum. The stink of Juicy Fruit hung around her in a constant cloud. She got pregnant at about the same time Freddy got hung up on her. I always sort of figured he got hung up on her because she was the first girl to let him go all the way. So what happens is he drops out of school, gets a job in a warehouse, the princess has the baby, and he shows up with her at a party after the Junior Prom last December, wanting everything to seem the same when nothing is the same; she is looking at all of us guys with those dead, contemptuous eyes, her jaws are going up and down like the jaws of a cow working over a particularly tasty cud, and all of us have heard the news: she’s back at the bowling alley, she’s back at the Libertyville Rec, she’s back at Gino’s, she’s out cruising while Freddy is working, she’s back hard at work, banging for the gang and stooping for the troops. I know they say that a stiff dick has no conscience, but I tell you now that some cunts have teeth, and when I looked at Freddy, looking ten years older than he should have, I felt like I wanted to cry. And when he talked about her, he did it in that same pleading tone I had heard in Arnie’s voice just now—You really like her, guys, don’t you? She’s all right, isn’t she, guys? I didn’t fuck up too bad, did I, guys? I mean, this is probably just a bad dream and I’ll wake up pretty soon, right? Right? Right?
“Sure,” I said into the telephone. That whole stupid, ugly Freddy Darlington business had gone through my mind in maybe two seconds. “I see what you mean, Arnie.”
“Good,” he said, relieved.
“Just watch out for your ass. And that goes double when you get back to school. Keep away from Buddy Repperton.”
“Yeah. You bet.”
“Arnie—”
“What?”
I paused. I wanted to ask him if Darnell had said anything about Christine being in his shop before, if he had recognized her. Even more, I wanted to tell him what had happened to Mrs LeBay and to her small daughter, Rita. But I couldn’t. He would know right away where I had gotten the information. And in his touchy state over the damn car, he would be apt to think I had gone behind his back—and in a way I had. But to tell him I had might well mean the end of our friendship.
I had had enough of Christine, but I still cared for Arnie. Which meant that door had to be closed for good. No more creeping around and asking questions. No more lectures.
“Nothing,” I said. “I was just going to say that I guess you found a home for your rustbucket. Congratulations.”
“Dennis, are you eating something?”
“Yeah, a chicken sandwich. Why?”
“You’re chewing in my ear. It really sounds gross.”
I began to smack as loudly as I could. Arnie made puking sounds. We both got laughing, and it was good— it was like the old days before he married that numb fucking car.
“You’re an asshole, Dennis.”
“That’s right. I learned it from you.
“Get bent,” he said, and hung up.
I finished my sandwich and my Hawaiian Punch, rinsed the plate and the glass and went back into the living room, ready to shower and go to bed. I was beat.
Sometime during our phone conversation I had heard the TV go off and had assumed that my father had gone upstairs. But he hadn’t. He was sitting in his recliner chair with his shirt open. I noticed with some unease how grey the hair on his chest was getting, and the way the reading lamp beside him shone through the — hair on his head and showed his pink scalp. Getting thinner up there. My father was no kid. I realized with greater unease that in five years, by the time I would theoretically finish college, he would be fifty and balding—a stereotype accountant. Fifty in five years if he didn’t just drop dead of another heart attack. The first one had not been bad— no myocardial scarring, he had told me on the one occasion I had asked. But he did not try to tell me that a second heart attack wasn’t likely. I knew it was, my mom knew it was, and he did too. Only Ellie still thought he was invulnerable—but hadn’t I seen a question in her eyes once or twice? I thought maybe I had.
Died suddenly.
I felt the hairs on my scalp stir. Suddenly. Straightening up at his desk, clutching his chest. Suddenly. Dropping his racket on the tennis court. You didn’t want to think those thoughts about your father, but sometimes they come. God knows they do.
“I couldn’t help overhearing some of that,” he said.
“Yeah?” Warily.
“Has Arnie Cunningham got his foot in a bucket of something warm and brown, Dennis?”
“I… I don’t know for sure,” I said slowly. Because, after all, what did I have? Vapours, that was all.
“You want to talk about it?”
“Not right now, Dad, if it’s okay.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “But if it… as you said on the phone, if it gets heavy, will you for God’s sake tell me what’s happening?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” I started for the Stairs and was almost there when he stopped me by saying, “I ran Will Darnell’s accounts and did his income-tax returns for almost fifteen years, you know.”
I turned back to him, really surprised.
“No. I didn’t know that.”
My father smiled. It was a smile I had never seen before, one I would guess my mother had seen only a few times, my sis maybe not at all. You might have thought it was a sleepy sort of smile at first, if you looked more closely you would have seen that it was not sleepy at all—it was cynical and hard and totally aware.
“Can you keep your mouth shut about something, Dennis?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”
“Don’t just think so.”
“Yes. I can.”
“Better. I did his figures up until 1975, and then he got Bill Upshaw over in Monroeville.”
My father looked at me closely.
“I won’t say that Bill Upshaw is a crook, but I will say that his scruples are thin enough to read a newspaper through. And last year he bought himself a $300,000 English Tudor in Sewickley, Damn the interest rates, full speed ahead.”
He gestured at our own home with a small sweep of his right arm and then let it drop back into his own lap. He and my mother had bought it the year before I was born for $62,000—it was now worth maybe $150,000—and they had only recently gotten their paper back from the bank. We had a little party in the back yard late last summer; Dad lit the barbecue, put the pink slip on the long fork, and each of us got a chance at holding it over the coals until it was gone.
“No English Tudor here, huh, Denny?” he said.
“It’s fine,” I said. I came back and sat down on the couch.
“Darnell and I parted amicably enough,” my father went on, “not that I ever cared very much for him in a personal way. I thought he was a wretch.”
I nodded a little, because I liked that; it expressed my gut feelings about Will Darnell better than any
