that’s how upset I was. Hooking her up to the wrecker, I guess, but I don’t know for sure. At first it wasn’t too bad, then it got worse. Dr Mascia prescribed—Dennis, are you okay?”
With what felt like a fantastic effort, Dennis kept his voice even. He moved his features around into an expression which felt at least faintly like pleasant interest… and still there was that something dancing in Arnie’s eyes, dancing and dancing.
“You’ll shake it off,” Dennis said
“Sure, I imagine,” Arnie said, tucking his shirt back in around the back brace. “I’m just supposed to watch what I lift so I don’t do it again.”
He smiled at Dennis.
“If there was stilt a draft, it would keep me out of the Army,” he said.
Once again Dennis restrained himself from any movement that could be interpreted as surprise, but he put his arms under the bed’s top sheet. At the sight of that back brace, so like LeBay’s, they had broken out in gooseflesh.
Arnie’s eyes—like black water under thin grey March ice. Black water and glee dancing far down within them like the twisting, decomposing body of a drowned man. “Listen,” Arnie said briskly. “I gotta move. Hope you didn’t think I could hang around a lousy place like this all night.”
“That’s you, always in demand,” Dennis said. “Seriously, man, thanks. You cheered up a grim day.”
For one strange instant, he thought Arnie was going to weep. That dancing thing down deep in his eyes was gone and his friend was there—really there. Then Arnie smiled sincerely. “Just remember one thing, Dennis: nobody misses you. Nobody at all.”
“Eat me raw through a Flavour Straw,” Dennis said solemnly.
Arnie gave him the finger
The formalities were now complete; Arnie could leave He gathered up his brown shopping bag, considerably deflated, candle-holders and empty beer bottles clinking inside.
Dennis had a sudden inspiration. He rapped his knuckles on his leg cast. “Sign this, Arnie, would you?”
“I already did, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but it wore off. Sign it again?”
Arnie shrugged. “If you’ve got a pen.”
Dennis gave him one from the drawer of the night-table. Grinning, Arnie bent over the cast, which was hoisted to an angle over the bed with a series of weights and pulleys, found white space in the intaglio of names and mottoes, and scribbled:
He patted the cast when he was done and handed the pen back to Dennis. “Okay?”
“Yeah,” Dennis said. “Thanks. Stay loose, Arnie.”
“You know it. Happy Thanksgiving.”
“Same to you.”
Arnie left. Later on, Dennis’s mother and father came in; Ellie, apparently exhausted by the day’s hilarity, had gone home to bed, On their way home, the Guilders commented to each other on how withdrawn Dennis had seemed.
“He was in a blue study, all right,” Guilder said. “Holidays in the hospital aren’t any fun.”
As for Dennis himself, he spent a long and thoughtful time that evening examining two signatures. Arnie had indeed signed his cast, but at a time when both of Dennis’s legs had been in full-leg casts. That first time, he had signed the cast on the right leg, which had been up in the air when Arnie came in. Tonight he had signed the left.
Dennis buzzed for a nurse and used all his charm persuading her to lower his left leg so he could compare the two signatures, side by side. The cast on his right leg had been cut down, and would come off altogether in a week or ten days. Arnie’s signature had not rubbed off—that had been one of Dennis’s lies—but it had very nearly been cut off.
Arnie had not written a message on the right leg, only his signature. With some effort (and some pain), Dennis and the nurse were able to manoeuvre his legs close enough together so he could study the two signatures side by side. In a voice so dry and cracked he was hardly able to recognize it as his own, he asked the nurse, “Do they look the same to you?”
“No,” the nurse said. “I’ve beard of forging cheques, but never casts. Is it a joke?”
“Sure,” Dennis said, feeling an icy coldness rise from his stomach to his chest. “It’s a joke.” He looked at the signatures; he looked at them side by side and felt that rising coldness steal all through him, lowering his body temperature, making the hairs on the back of his neck stir and stiffen:
They were nothing alike.
Late that Thanksgiving night, a cold wind rose, first gusting, then blowing steadily. The clear eye of the moon stared down from a black sky. The last brown and withered leaves of autumn were ripped from the trees and then harried through the gutters. They made a sound like rolling bones.
Winter had come to Libertyville.
30
MOOCHIE WELCH
The night was dark, the sky was blue,
and down the alley an ice-wagon flew.
Door banged open,
Somebody screamed,
You oughtta heard just what I seen.
The Thursday after thanksgiving was the last day of November, the night that Jackson Browne played the Pittsburgh Civic Centre to a sellout crowd. Moochie Welch went up with Richie Trelawney and Nicky Biltingham but got separated from them even before the show began. He was spare-changing, and whether it was because the impending Browne concert had created some extremely mellow vibes or because he was becoming something of an endearing fixture (Moochie, a romantic, liked to believe the latter), he had had a remarkably good night. He had collected nearly thirty dollars” worth of “spare change”. It was distributed among all his pockets; Moochie jingled like a piggy bank. Thumbing home had been remarkably easy too, with all the traffic leaving the Civic Centre. The concert ended at eleven-forty, and he was back in Libertyville shortly after one-fifteen.
His last ride was with a young guy who was headed back to Prestonville on Route 63. The guy dropped him at the 376 ramp on JFK Drive. Moochie decided to walk up to Vandenberg’s Happy Gas and see Buddy. Buddy had a car, which meant that Moochie, who lived far out on Kingsfield Pike, wouldn’t have to walk home. It was hard work, hitching rides, once you got out in the boonies—and the Kingsfield Pike was Boondocks City. It meant he wouldn’t be home until well past dawn, but in cold weather a sure ride was not to be sneezed at. And Buddy might have a bottle.
He had walked a quarter of a mile from the 376 exit ramp in the deep single-number cold, his cleated heels clicking on the deserted sidewalk, his shadow waxing and waning under the eerie orange streetlamps, and had still perhaps a mile to go when he saw the car parked at the curb up ahead. Exhaust curled out of its twin pipes and hung in the perfectly still air, clouding it, before drifting lazily away in stacked layers. The grille, bright chrome highlighted with pricks of orange light, looked at him like a grinning idiot mouth. Moochie recognized the car. It was a two-tone Plymouth. In the light of the maximum-illumination streetlamps the two tones seemed to be ivory and dried blood. It was Christine.
Moochie stopped, and a stupid sort of wonder flooded through him—it was not fear, at least not at that moment. It couldn’t be Christine, that was impossible—they had punched a dozen holes in the radiator of Cuntface’s car, they had dumped a nearly full bottle of Texas Driver into the carb, and Buddy had produced a five- pound sack of Domino sugar, which he had tunnelled into the gas tank through Moochie’s cupped hands. And all of
