He wished Rudolph Junkins was dead.
“Pull over, Chrysler! I’m not talking to hear my own voice! Pull over right now!”
Can’t say anything, Arnie thought incoherently as he veered over into the breakdown lane. His balls were crawling, his stomach churning madly. He could see his own eyes in the rearview, wall-eyed with fear behind his glasses—not for him, though. Not for him. Christine. He was afraid for Christine. What they might do to Christine.
His panic-stricken mind spun up a kaleidoscope of jumbled images. College application forms with the words REJECTED—CONVICTED FELON stamped across them. Prison bars, blued steel. A judge bending down from a high bench, his face white and accusing. Big bull queers in a prison yard looking for fresh meat. Christine riding the conveyor into the car-crusher in the junkyard behind the garage.
And then, as he stopped the Chrysler and put it in park, the State Police car pulling in behind him (and another, appearing like magic, pulling in ahead of him), a thought came from nowhere, full of cold comfort: Christine can take care of herself.
Another thought came as the cops got out and came toward him, one holding a search warrant in his hand. It also seemed to come from nowhere, but it reverberated in Roland D. LeBay’s raspy, old man’s tones:
And she’ll take care of you, boy. All you got to do is go on believing in her and she’ll take care of you.
Arnie opened the car door and got out a moment before one of the cops could open it.
“Arnold Richard Cunningham? one of the cops asked. “Yes, indeed,” Arnie said calmly. “Was I speeding?”
“No, son,” one of the others said. “But you are in a world of hurt, all the same.”
The first cop stepped forward as formally as a career Army officer. “I have a duly executed document here permitting the search of this 1966 Chrysler Imperial in the name of the People of New York State and of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and of the United States of America. Further
“Well, that just about covers the motherfucking waterfront, doesn’t it?” Arnie said. His back flared dully, and he jammed his hands against it.
The cop’s eyes widened slightly at the old voice coming out of this kid, but then he went on.
“Further, to seize any contraband found in the course of this search in the name of the People of New York State and of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and of the United States of America.”
“Fine,” Arnie said. None of it seemed real. Blue lights flashed a confusion. People passing in their cars turned to look, but he found he had no desire to turn from them, to hide his face, and that was something of a relief.
“Give me the keys, kid,” one of the cops said.
“Why don’t you just get them yourself, you shitter?” Arnie said.
“You’re not helping yourself, kiddo,” the cop said, but he looked startled and a little fearful all the same; for a moment the kid’s voice had deepened and roughened and he had sounded forty years older and a pretty tough customer—nothing like the skinny runt he saw before him at all.
He leaned in, got the keys, and three of the cops immediately headed for the boot. They know, Arnie thought, resigned. At least this had nothing to do with Junkins’s obsession with Buddy Repperton and Moochie Welch and the others (at least not directly, he amended cautiously); this smelled like a well-planned and well- coordinated operation against Will’s smuggling operations from Libertyville into New York and New England.
“Kid,” one of the cops said, “would you like to answer some questions or make a statement? If you think you would, I’ll read you the Miranda right now.”
“No,” Arnie said calmly. “I don’t have anything to say.”
“Things could go a lot easier with you.”
“That’s coercion,” Arnie said, smiling a little. “Watch out or you’ll put a big fat hole in your own case.”
The cop flushed. “If you want to be an asshole, that’s your lookout.”
The Chrysler boot was open. They bad pulled out the spare tyre, the jack, and several boxes of small parts springs, nuts, bolts, and the like. One of the cops was almost entirely in the boot; only his blue-grey-clad legs stuck out. For a moment Arnie hoped vaguely that they wouldn’t find the under-compartment; then he dismissed the thought—it was just the childish part of him, the part he now wished burned away, because all that part of him did lately was hurt. They would find it. The quicker they found it, the quicker this nasty roadside scene would end.
As if some god had heard his wish and decided to grant it posthaste, the cop in the boot called triumphantly, “Cigarettes!”
“All right,” the cop who had read the warrant said. “Close it up.” He turned to Arnie and read him the Miranda warning. “Do you understand your rights as I have read them to you?”
“Yes,” Arnie said.
“Do you want to make a statement?”
“No.”
“Get in the car, son. You’re under arrest.”
I’m under arrest, Arnie thought, and almost brayed laughter, the thought was so foolish. This was all a dream and he would wake up soon. Under arrest. Being hustled to a State Police cruiser. People looking at him—
Desperate, childish tears, hot salt, welled up in his throat and closed it.
His chest hitched—once, twice.
The cop who had read him his rights touched his shoulder and Arnie shrugged it off with a kind of desperation. He felt that if he could get deep down inside himself quickly enough, he would be okay—but sympathy might drive him mad,
“Don’t touch me!”
“You do it the way you want to do it, son,” the cop said, removing his hand. He opened the cruiser’s rear door for Arnie and handed him in.
Do you cry in dreams? Of course you could—hadn’t he read about people waking up from sad dreams with tears on their cheeks? But, dream or no dream, he wasn’t going to cry.
Instead he would think of Christine. Not of his mother or father, not of Leigh or Will Darnell, not of Slawson—all the miserable shitters who had betrayed him.
He would think of Christine.
Arnie closed his eyes and leaned his pale, gaunt face, forward into his hands and did just that. And as always, thinking about Christine made things better. After a while he was able to straighten up and look out at the passing scenery and think about his position.
Michael Cunningham put the telephone back into its cradle slowly—with infinite care—as if to do less might cause it to explode and spray his upstairs study with jagged black hooks of shrapnel.
He sat back in the swivel chair behind his desk, on which there sat his IBM Correcting Selectric II typewriter, an ashtray with the blue-and-gold legend HORLICKS UNIVERSITY barely legible across the dirty bottom, and the manuscript of his third book, a study of the ironclads Monitor and Merrimac. He had been halfway through a page when the telephone rang. Now he flipped the paper release on the right side of the typewriter and pulled the page bonelessly out from under the roller, observing its slight curve clinically. He put it down on top of the manuscript, which was now little more than a jungle of pencilled-in corrections.
Outside, a cold wind whined around the house. The morning’s cloudy warmth had given way to a frigid, clear December evening. The earlier melt had frozen tight, and his son was being held in Albany on charges of what amounted to smuggling: no Mr Cunningham it is not marijuana it is cigarettes, two hundred cartons of Winston cigarettes with no tax stamps.
From downstairs he could hear the whir of Regina’s sewing machine. He would have to get up now, go to the door and open it, go down the hall to the stairs, walk down the stairs, walk into the dining room, then into the plant-lined little room that had once been a laundry but which was now a sewing room, and stand there while Regina looked up at him (she would be wearing her half-glasses for the close work), and say “Regina, Arnie has been arrested by the New York State Police.”
Michael attempted to begin this process by getting up from his desk chair, but the chair seemed to sense he was temporarily off-guard. It swivelled and rolled backward on its casters at the same moment, and Michael had to clutch the edge of his desk to keep from failing. He slipped heavily back into the chair, heart thudding with
