also been broken. Holes had been punched through the sides of the body at waist-level in ragged, wavering lines. It looked as if some sharp, heavy instrument—maybe the pry-end of a tyre iron—had been used. The passenger door hung open, and she saw that all the dashboard glass had been broken. Tufts and wads of stuffing were everywhere. The speedometer needle lay on the driver’s side floormat.
Arnie walked slowly around his car, noting all of this. Leigh spoke to him twice. He didn’t answer either time. Now the leaden colour of his face was broken by two hectic, burning spots of flush riding high up on his cheekbones. He picked up the octopus-thing that a been lying on the pavement and she saw it was a distributor cap—her father had pointed that out to her once when he had been tinkering with their car.
He looked at it for a moment, as if examining an exotic zoological specimen, and then threw it down. Broken glass gritted under their heels. She spoke to him again. He didn’t answer, and now, as well as a terrible pity for him, she began to feel afraid, too. She told Dennis Guilder later that it seemed—at least at the time— perfectly possible that he might have lost his mind.
He booted a piece of chrome trim out of his way. It struck the cyclone fence at the back of the lot with a little tinkling sound. The tail-lights had been smashed, more trumpery gems, this time rubies, this time on the pavement instead of the seat.
“Arnie—” she tried again.
He stopped. He was looking in through the hole in the driver’s side window. A terrible low sound began to come from his chest, a jungle sound. She looked over his shoulder, saw, and suddenly felt a crazy need to laugh and scream and faint all at the same time. On the dashboard… she hadn’t noticed at first; in the midst of the general destruction she hadn’t noticed what was on the dashboard. And she wondered, with vomit suddenly rising in her throat, who could be so low, so completely low, as to do such a thing, to…
“Shitters!” Arnie cried, and his voice was not his own. It was high and shrill and cracked with fury.
Leigh turned around and threw up, holding blindly onto the car next to Christine, seeing small white dots in front of her eyes that expanded like puffed rice. Dimly she thought of the county fair—every year they’d haul an old junk car up onto a plank platform and lean a sledgehammer against it and you got three swings for a quarter. The idea was to demolish the car. But not… not to…
“You goddam shitters!” Arnie screamed. “I’ll get you! I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I do! If it’s the last motherfucking thing I ever do!”
Leigh threw up again and for one terrible moment found herself wishing that she had never ever met Arnie Cunningham.
27
ARNIE AND REGINA
Would you like to go riding
In my Buick ’59? I said, would you like to go riding
In my Buick ’59? It’s got two carburettors
And a supercharger up the side.
He let himself into the house that night at quarter of twelve. The clothes he had been wearing with the shopping trip to Pittsburgh in mind were grease- and sweat-stained. His hands were more deeply grimed, and a shallow cut corkscrewed across the back of the left like a brand. His face looked haggard and stunned. There were dark circles under his eyes.
His mother sat at the table, a game of solitaire laid out in front of her. She had been waiting for him to come home and dreading it deeply at the same time. Leigh had called and told her what had happened. The girl, who had impressed Regina as being quite a nice girl (if perhaps not quite good enough for her son), sounded as if she had been crying.
Regina, alarmed, had hung up as quickly as she could and had dialled Darnell’s Garage. Leigh had told her Arnie had called for a tow-truck from there and bad ridden in with the driver. He had put her in a taxi, over her protests. The phone had rung twice and then a wheezy yet gravelly voice had said, “Yuh. Darnell’s.”
She had hung up, realizing it would be a mistake to talk to him there—and it looked as if she and Mike had already made enough mistakes about Arnie and his car. She would wait until he came home. Say what she had to say looking him in the face.
She said it now. “Arnie, I’m sorry.”
It would have been better if Mike could be here, too. But he was in Kansas City, attending a symposium on trade and the beginnings of free enterprise in the Middle Ages. He wouldn’t be back until Sunday, unless this brought him home early. She thought it might. She realized—not without some rue—that she might just be awakening to the full seriousness of this situation.
“Sorry,” Arnie echoed in a flat, accentless voice.
“Yes, I—that is, we—” She couldn’t go on. There was something terrible in the deadwood of his expression. His eyes were blanks. She could only look at him and shake her head, her eyes brimming, the hateful taste of tears in her nose and throat. She hated to cry. Strong-willed, one of two girls in a Catholic family that consisted of, her blue-collar construction-worker father, her washed-out mother, and seven brothers, hellbent on college in spite of her father’s belief that the only things girls learned there were how to stop being virgins and how to throw over the church, she had shed her fair share of tears and more. And if her own family thought she was hard sometimes, it was because they didn’t understand that when you went through hell you came out baked by the fire. And when you had to burn to have your own way, you always wanted to have it.
“You know something?” Arnie asked.
She shook her head, still feeling the hot, slithery burn of the tears tinder her lids.
“You’d make me laugh, if I wasn’t so tired I could hardly stand up. You could have been out there swinging the tyre irons and the hammers along with the guys that did it. You’re probably happier about it than they are.”
“Arnie, that’s not fair!”
“It is fair!” he roared at her, his eyes suddenly blazing with a horrible fire. For the first time in her life she was afraid of her son. “Your idea to get it out of the driveway! His idea to put it in the airport lot! Who do you think is to blame here? Just who do you think? Do you think it would have happened if it had been here? Huh?”
He took a step toward her, fists clenched at his sides, and she had all she could do to keep from flinching backward.
“Arnie, can’t we even talk about this?” she asked. “Like two rational human beings?”
“One of them took a shit on the dashboard of my car,” he said coldly. “How’s that for rational, Mom?”
She had honestly believed she had the tears under control, but this news—news of such a stupid, irrational fury—brought them back. She cried. She cried in grief for what her son had seen. She lowered her head and cried in bewilderment and pain and fear.
All her life as a mother she had felt secretly superior to the women around her who had children older than Arnie. When he was one, those other mothers had shaken their heads dolefully and told her to wait until he was five—that was when the trouble started, that was when they were old enough to say “shit” in front of their grandmothers and play with matches when left alone. But Arnold, as good as gold at one, had still been as good as gold at five. Then the other mothers had rolled their eyes and said wait until he’s ten; and then it had been fifteen, that was when it really got sticky, what with the dope and the rock concerts and girls that would do anything and—God forbid—stealing hubcaps and those… well, diseases.
And through it all she had continued to smile inside because it was all working out according to plan, it was all working out the way she felt her own childhood should have. Her son had warm, supportive parents who cared about him, who would give him anything (within reason), who would gladly send him to the college of his choice (as long as it was a good one), thereby finishing the game/ business/vocation of Parenting with a flourish. If you had suggested that Arnie had few friends and was often bullyragged by the others, she would have starchily
