“Rumble” by Line Wray, the greatest of them all. His back nagged, but in a low key. The flurry intensified briefly to a dark grey cloud of snow. He popped on his headlights, and just as quickly the snow tapered off and the clouds broke, spilling through bars of remote and coldly beautiful late-afternoon winter sun.
He cruised.
He came out of his thoughts which now were that Repperton had maybe come to a perfectly fitting end after all—and was shocked to realize that it was nearly quarter of six, and dark. Gino’s Pizza was coming up on the left, the little green neon shamrocks shimmering in the dark. Arnie pulled over to the kerb and got out. He started to cross the street, then realized he had left his keys in Christine’s ignition.
He leaned in to get them… and suddenly the smell assaulted him, the smell Leigh had told him about, the smell he had denied.
It was here now, as if it had come out when he left the car—a high, rotten, meaty smell that made his eyes water and his throat close. He snatched the keys and stood back, trembling, looking at Christine with something like horror.
Arnie, there was a smell. A horrible, rotten smell… you know what I’m talking about.
No, I don’t have the slightest idea… you’re imagining things.
But if she was, so was he.
Arnie turned suddenly and ran across the street to Gino’s as if the devil was on his tail.
Inside, he ordered a pizza he didn’t really want, changed some quarters for dimes, and slipped into the telephone booth beside the juke. It was thumping some current tune Arnie had not heard before.
He called home first. His father answered, his voice oddly toneless—Arnie had never heard Michael’s voice quite that way before, and his unease deepened. His father sounded like Mr Slawson. This Thursday afternoon and evening were taking on the maroon tones of nightmare. Beyond the glass walls of the booth, strange faces drifted dreamily past, like untethered balloons on which someone had crudely drawn human faces, God at work with a Magic Marker.
Shitters,he thought disjointedly. All a bunch of shitters.
“Hello, Dad,” he said uncertainly. “Look, I—uh, I kind of lost track of the time here, I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right,” Michael said. His voice was almost a drone, and Arnie felt his unease deepen into something like fright. “Where are you, the garage?”
“No—uh, Gino’s. Gino’s Pizza. Dad, are you okay? You sound funny.”
“I’m fine,” Michael said. “Just scraped your dinner down the garbage disposal, your mother’s upstairs crying again, and you’re having a pizza. I’m fine. Enjoying your car, Arnie?”
Arnie’s throat worked, but no sound came out.
“Dad,” he managed finally, “I don’t think that’s very fair.”
“I don’t think I’m very interested anymore in what you think is fair and what you don’t think is fair,” Michael said. “You had some justification for your behaviour at first, perhaps. But in the last month or so you’ve turned into someone I don’t understand at all, and something is going on that I understand even less. Your mother doesn’t understand it either, but she senses it, and it’s hurting her very badly. I know she brought part of the hurt on herself, but I doubt if that changes the quality of the pain.”
“Dad, I just lost track of the time!” Arnie cried. “Stop making such a big thing out of it!”
“Were you driving around?”
“Yes, but—”
“I notice that’s when it usually happens, Michael said. “Will you be home tonight?”
“Yes, early,” Arnie said. He wet his lips. “I just want to go by the garage, I have some information Will asked me to get while I was in Philly
“I’m not very interested in that either, pardon me,” Michael said. His voice was still polite, chillingly disconnected.
“Oh,” Arnie said in a very small voice. He was very scared now, almost trembling.
“Arnie?”
“What?” Arnie nearly whispered.
“What is going on?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Please. That detective came by to see me at my office. He was after Regina, as well. He upset her very badly. I don’t think he meant to, but—”
“What was it this time?” Arnie asked” fiercely. “That fucker, what was it this time? I’ll—”
“You’ll what?”
“Nothing.” He swallowed something that tasted like a lump of dust. “What was it this time?”
“Repperton,” his father said. “Repperton and those other two boys. What did you think it was? The geopolitical situation in Brazil?”
“What happened to Repperton was an accident,” Arnie said. “Why did he want to talk to you and Mom about something that was an accident, for Christ’s sake?”
“I don’t know.” Michael Cunningham paused. “Do you?”
“How would I?” Arnie yelled. “I was in Philadelphia, how would I know anything about it? I was playing chess, not… not… not anything else,” he finished lamely.
“One more time,” Michael Cunningham said. “Is something going on, Arnie?”
He thought of the smell, the high, rotting stink. Leigh choking, digging at her throat, turning blue. He had tried to thump her on the back because that’s what you did when someone was choking, there was no such thing as a Heimlich Manoeuvre because it hadn’t been invented yet, and besides, that was how it was supposed to end, only not in the car… beside the road… in his arms…
He closed his eyes and the whole world seemed to tilt and swirl sickly.
“Arnie?”
“There is nothing going on,” he said through clenched teeth and without opening his eyes. “Nothing but a lot of people who are on my case because I finally got something of my own and did it all by myself.”
“All right,” his father said, his lacklustre voice once more terribly reminiscent of Mr Slawson’s. “If you want to talk about it, I’m here. I always have been, although I didn’t always make that as clear as I should have. Be sure to kiss your mother when you come in, Arnie.”
“Yeah, I will. Listen, Mi—”
Click.
He stood in the booth, listening stupidly to the sound of nothing at all. His father was gone. There wasn’t even a dial tone because it was a dumb fucking… phone booth.
He dug into his pocket and spread his change out on the little metal shelf where he could look at it. He picked up a dime, almost dropped it, and at last got it into the slot. He felt sick and overheated. He felt as if he had been very efficiently disowned.
He dialled Leigh’s number from memory.
Mrs Cabot picked the phone up and recognized his voice immediately. Her pleasant and rather sexy come- hither-thou-fascinating-stranger phone voice became instantly hard. Arnie had had his last chance with her, that voice said, and he had blown it.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you and she doesn’t want to see you,” she said.
“Mrs Cabot, please, if I could just—”
“I think you’ve done enough,” Mrs Cabot said coolly. “She came in crying the other night and she’s been crying off and on ever since. She had some sort of a… an experience with you the last time you and she went out, and I only pray it wasn’t what I thought it was. I—”
Arnie felt hysterical laughter bubbling up inside him. Leigh had almost choked to death on a hamburger, and her mother was afraid Arnie had tried to rape her.
“Mrs Cabot, I have to talk to her.”
“I’m afraid not.”
He tried to think of something else to say, some way to get past the dragon at the gate. He felt a little like a Fuller Brush salesman trying to get in to see the lady of the house. His tongue wouldn’t move. He would have made a lousy salesman. There was going to be that hard click and then smooth silence again.
Then he heard the telephone change hands, Mrs Cabot said something in sharp protest, and Leigh said
