“Motormouth. That’s what Lenny Barongg calls Mr Vickers. The guidance counsellor.”
“Oh! Yes. I think he has. He was called to the guidance office the day before yesterday Monday. But he didn’t say anything. And I didn’t dare ask him anything. He won’t talk. He’s gotten so strange.”
Dennis nodded. Although he didn’t think Leigh realized it—she was deep in her own trouble and confusion —he felt a sense of impotence and a deepening fear for Arnie. From the reports that had filtered into his room over the last few days, Arnie sounded on the verge of a nervous breakdown; Leigh’s report was only the most recent and the most graphic. He had never wanted to be out as badly as he did now. Of course, he could call Vickers and ask him if there I was anything he could do. And he could call Arnie… except, from what Leigh had said, Arnie was now always at school, at Darnell’s, or sleeping. His father had come home early from some sort of convention and there had been another fight, Leigh had told him. Although Arnie had not come right out and said so, Leigh told Dennis she believed that he had come very close to simply leaving home.
Dennis didn’t want to talk to Arnie at Darnell’s.
“What can I do?” she asked him. “What would you do, in my place?”
“Wait,” Dennis said. “I don’t know what else you can do.”
“But that’s hardest,” she answered in a voice so low it was almost inaudible. Her hands were clenching and unclenching on the Kleenex, shredding it, dotting her brown skirt with speckles of lint. “My folks want me to stop seeing him—to drop him. They’re afraid… that Repperton and those other boys will do something else.”
“You’re, pretty sure it was Buddy and his friends, huh?”
“Yes. Everybody is. Mr Cunningham called the police even though Arnie told him not to. He said he’d settle the score in his own way, and that scared them both. It scares me, too, The police picked up Buddy Repperton, and one of his friends, the one they call Moochie… do you know who I mean?”
“Yes.”
“And the boy who works nights at the airport parking lot, they picked him up, too. Galton, his name is —”
“Sandy.”
“They thought he must have been in on it, that maybe he let them in.”
“He runs with them, all right,” Dennis said, “but he’s not quite as degenerate as the rest of them. I’ll say this, Leigh—if Arnie didn’t talk to someone sure did.”
“First Mrs Cunningham and then his father. I don’t think either of them knew the other one had talked to me. They’re…”
“Upset,” Dennis suggested.
She shook her head. “It’s more than that,” she said. “They both look like they were just… just mugged, or something. I can’t really feel sorry for her—all she wants is her own way, I think—but I could cry for Mr Cunningham. He just seems so… so… “She trailed off and began again. “When I got there yesterday afternoon after school, Mrs Cunningham—she asked me to call her Regina, but I just can’t seem to do it—”
Dennis grinned
“Can you do it?” Leigh asked.
“Well, yeah—but I’ve had a lot more practice.”
She smiled, the first good one of her visit. “Maybe that would make a difference. Anyway, when I went over, she was there but Mr Cunningham was still at school… the University, I mean.”
“Yeah.”
“She took the whole week off—what there is of it. She said couldn’t go back, even for the three days before Thanksgiving.”
“How does she look?”
“She looks shattered,” Leigh said, and reached for a fresh Kleenex. She began shredding the edges. “She looks ten years older than when I first met her a month ago.”
“And him? Michael?”
“Older but tougher,” Leigh said hesitantly.” As if this had somehow… somehow gotten him into gear.
Dennis was silent. He had known Michael Cunningham for thirteen years and had never seen him in gear, so he wouldn’t know. Regina had always been the one in gear; Michael trailed along in her wake and made the drinks at the parties (mostly faculty parties) the Cunninghams hosted. He played his recorder, he looked melancholy… but by no stretch of the imagination could Dennis say he had ever seen the man “in gear”.
The final triumph, Dennis’s father had said once, standing at the window and watching Regina lead Arnie by the hand down the Guilders” walk to where Michael waited behind the wheel of the car. Arnie and Dennis had been perhaps seven then. Momism supreme. I wonder if she’ll make the poor slob wait in the car when Arnie gets married. Or maybe she can—
Dennis’s mother had frowned at her husband and shushed him by cutting her eyes at Dennis in a little- pitchers-have-big-ears gesture. He never forgot the gesture or what his father had said—at seven he hadn’t understood all of it, but even at seven he knew perfectly well what a “poor slob” was. And even at seven he vaguely understood why his father might think Michael Cunningham was one. He had felt sad for, Michael Cunningham… and that feeling had held, off and on, right up to the present.
“He came in around the time she was finishing her story, Leigh went on. “They asked me to stay for supper—Arnie has been eating down at Darnell’s—but I told them I really had to get back. So Mr Cunningham offered me a ride, and I got his side on the way home.”
“Are they on different sides?”
“Not exactly, but… Mr Cunningham was the one who went to see the police, for instance. Arnie didn’t want to, and Mrs Cunningham—Regina—couldn’t bring herself to do it.”
Dennis asked cautiously, “He’s really trying to put Humpty back together again, huh?”
“Yes,” she whispered, and then burst out shrilly: “But that’s not all! He’s in deep with that guy Darnell, I know he is! Yesterday in period three study hall he told me he was going to drop a new front end into her—into his car—this afternoon and this evening, and I said won’t that be awfully expensive Arnie, and he said not to worry about it because his credit was good—”
“Slow down.”
She was crying again. “His credit was good because he and someone named Jimmy Sykes were going to do some errands for Will Friday and Saturday. That’s what he said. And… I don’t think the errands he does for that sonofabitch are legal!”
“What did he tell the police when they came to ask about Christine?”
“He told them about finding it… that way. They asked him if he had any ideas who might have done it, and Arnie said no. They asked him if it wasn’t true that he had gotten into a fight with Buddy Repperton, that Repperton had pulled a knife and had been expelled for it. Arnie said that Repperton had knocked his bag lunch out of his hand and stepped on it, then Mr Casey came over from the shop and broke it up. They asked him if Repperton hadn’t said he would get him for it, and Arnie said he might have said something like that, but talk was cheap.”
Dennis was silent, looking out his window at a dull November sky, considering this. He found it ominous. If Leigh had the interview with the police right, then Arnie hadn’t told a single lie… but he had edited things to make what had happened in the smoking area sound like your ordinary pushy-pushy.
Dennis found that extremely ominous.
“Do you know what Arnie might be doing for that man Darnell?” Leigh asked.
“No,” Dennis answered, but he had some ideas. A little internal tape recorder started up, and he heard his father saying, I’ve heard a few things… stolen cars… cigarettes and booze… contraband like fireworks… He’s been lucky for a long time, Dennis.
He looked at Leigh’s face, too pale, her makeup cut open by her tears. She was hanging on, hanging onto Arnie as best she could. Maybe she was learning something about being tough that she wouldn’t have learned otherwise, with her looks, for another ten years. But that didn’t make it any easier, and it didn’t necessarily make it right. It occurred to him suddenly, almost randomly, that he had first noticed the improvement in Arnie’s face more than a month before Arnie and Leigh clicked… but after Arnie and Christine had clicked.
“I’ll talk to him,” he promised.
“Good,” she said. She stood up. “I–I don’t want things to be like they were before, Dennis. I know that nothing ever is. But I still love him, and… and I just wish you’d tell him that.”
