Conversation lapsed a little, both of them lost in their own thoughts.
At last Dennis said, “Leigh came by yesterday. Told me, about Christine. I’m sorry, man. Bummer.”
Arnie looked up, and his expression of thoughtful melancholy was lost in a cheerful smile that Dennis didn’t really believe.
“Yeah,” he said. “It was crude. But I went way overboard about it.”
“Anyone would,” Dennis said, aware that he had become suddenly watchful, hating it but unable to help it. The friendship part was over; it had been here, warming the room and filling it, and now it had simply slipped away like the ephemeral, delicate thing it was. Now they were just dancing. Arnie’s cheerful eyes were also opaque and—he would have sworn to it—watchful.
“Sure. I gave my mother a hard time. Leigh too, I guess. It was just the shock of seeing all that work… all that work down the tubes.” He shook his head. “Bad news.”
“Are you going to be able to do anything with it?” Arnie brightened immediately—really brightened this time, Dennis felt. “Sure! I already have. You wouldn’t believe it, Dennis, if you’d seen the way it looked in that parking lot. They made them tough in those days, not like now when all the stuff that looks like metal is really just shiny plastic. That car is nothing but a damn tank. The glass was the worst part. And the tyres, of course. They slashed the tyres.”
“What about the engine?”
“Never got at it,” Arnie said promptly, and that was the first lie. They had been at it, all right. When Arnie and Leigh had gotten to Christine that afternoon, the distributor cap had been lying on the pavement. Leigh had recognized it and had told Dennis about it. What else had they done under the hood, Dennis wondered. The radiator? If someone was going to use a tyre iron to punch holes in the bodywork, might they not be apt to use the same tool to spring the radiator in a few places? What about the plugs? The voltage regulator? The carburettor?
Arnie, why are you lying to me?
“So what are you doing with it now?” Dennis asked.
“Spending money on it, what else?” Arnie said, and laughed his almost-genuine laugh. Dennis might even have accepted it as genuine if he hadn’t heard the real article once or twice over the Thanksgiving supper Arnie had brought. “New tyres, new glass. Got some bodywork to do, and then it will be as good as new.”
As good as new. But Leigh had said that they had found something that was little more than a smashed hulk, a carny three-swings-for-a-quarter derelict.
Why are you lying?
For a cold moment he found himself wondering if maybe Arnie hadn’t gone a little crazy—but no, that wasn’t the impression he gave. The feeling Dennis got from him was one of… furtiveness. Craftiness. Then, for the first time, the crazy thought came to him, the thought that maybe Arnie was only half-lying, trying to lay a groundwork of plausibility for… for what? A case of spontaneous regeneration? That was pretty crazy, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
It was indeed, Dennis thought, unless you had happened to see a mass of cracks in a windscreen seem to shrink between one viewing and the next.
Just a trick of the light. That’s what you thought then, and you were right.
But a trick of the light didn’t explain the haphazard way Arnie had gone about rebuilding Christine, the hopscotch of old and new parts. It didn’t explain that weird feeling Dennis had gotten sitting behind the wheel of Christine in LeBay’s garage, or the sense, after the new tyre had been put on en route to Darnell’s, that he was looking at an old-car picture with a new-car picture directly underlying it, and that a hole had been cut out of the old-car picture at the spot where one of the old-car tyres had been.
And nothing explained Arnie’s lie now… or the narrow, thoughtful way he was watching Dennis to see if his lie was going to be accepted. So he smiled… a big, easy, relieved grin. “Well, that’s great,” he said.
Arnie’s narrow, evaluating expression held for a moment longer; then he smiled an aw-shucks grin and shrugged. “Luck,” he said. “When I think of the things they could have done sugar in the gas tank, molasses in the carb—they were stupid. Lucky for me.”
“Repperton and his merry crew?” Dennis asked quietly.
The suspicious look, so dark and unlike Arnie, appeared again and then sank from sight. Arnie looked grim now. Grim and morose. He seemed to speak, then sighed instead. “Yeah,” he said. “Who else?”
“But you didn’t report it.”
“My dad did.”
“That’s what Leigh said.”
“What else did she tell you?” Arnie asked sharply.
“Nothing, and I didn’t ask,” Dennis said, holding his hand out. “Your business, Arnie. Peace.”
“Sure.” He laughed a little and then passed a hand over his face. “I’m still not over it. Fuck. I don’t think I’m ever going to be over it, Dennis. Coming into that parking lot with Leigh, feeling like I was on top of the world, and seeing—”
“Won’t they just do it again if you fix her up again?” Arnie’s face went dead-cold, set. “They won’t do it again,” he said. His grey eyes were like March ice, and Dennis found himself suddenly very glad he wasn’t Buddy Repperton.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll be parking it at home, that’s what I mean,” he said, and once more his face broke into that large, cheerful, unnatural grin. “What did you think I meant?”
“Nothing,” Dennis said. The image of ice remained. Now it was a feeling of thin ice, creaking uneasily under his feet. Beneath that, black, cold water. “But I don’t know, Arnie. You seem awful sure that Buddy wants to let this go.”
“I’m hoping he’ll see it as a standoff,” Arnie said quietly. “We got him expelled from school
“He got himself expelled!” Dennis said hotly. “He pulled a knife—hell, it wasn’t even a knife, it was a goddam pigsticker!”
I’m just telling it the way he’ll see it,” Arnie said, then held out his hand and laughed. “Peace.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“We got him expelled—or more accurately, I did—and he and his buddies beat hell out of Christine. Evens. The end.”
“Yeah, if he sees it that way.”
“I think he will,” Arnie said. “The cops questioned him and Moochie Welch and Richie Trelawney. Scared them. And almost got Sandy Galton to confess, I guess.” Arnie’s lip curled. “Fucking crybaby.”
This was so unlike Arnie—the old Arnie—that Dennis sat up in bed without thinking and then winced at the pain in his back and lay down again quickly. “Jesus, man, you sound like you want him to stonewall it!”
“I don’t care what he or any of those shitters do,” Arnie said, and then, in a strangely offhand voice he added, “It doesn’t matter anymore anyhow.”
Dennis said, “Arnie, are you all right?”
And for a moment a look of desperate sadness passed over Arnie’s face—more than sadness. He looked harried and haunted. It was the face, Dennis thought later (it is so easy to see these things later; too much later) of someone so bewildered and entangled and weary of struggling that he hardly knows anymore what it is he is doing.
Then that expression, like that other look of dark suspicion, was gone.
“Sure,” he said. “I’m great. Except that you’re not the only one with a hurt back. You remember when I strained it at Philly Plains?”
Dennis nodded.
“Check this out.” He stood up and pulled his shirt out of his pants. Something seemed to dance in his eyes. Something flipping and turning at a black depth.
He lifted his shirt. It wasn’t old-fashioned like LeBay’s; it was cleaner, too—a neat, seemingly unbroken band of Lycra about twelve inches across. But, Dennis thought, a brace was a brace. It was too close to LeBay for comfort.
“I put another hurt on it getting Christine back to Will’s,” Arnie said. “I don’t even remember how I did it,
