“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.”
“Yeah, okay.”
They were both embarrassed, and neither of them could say anything for a long, long moment. Dennis was thinking that this would be the point, in a c & w song, where the Best Friend steps in. And a sneaking, mean (and randy) part of him wouldn’t be averse to that. Not at all. He was still powerfully attracted to her, more attracted than he had been to any girl in a long time. Maybe ever. Let Arnie run bottle-rockets and cherry-bombs over to Burlington and fuck around with his car. He and Leigh could get to know each other better in the meantime. A little aid and comfort. You know how it is.
And he had a feeling at just that awkward moment, after her profession of love for Arnie, that he could do it; she was vulnerable. She was maybe learning how to be tough, but it’s not a school anyone goes to willingly. He could say something—the right something, maybe only Come here—and she would come, sit on the edge of the bed, they would talk some more, maybe about pleasanter things, and maybe he would kiss her. Her mouth was lovely and full, sensual, made to kiss and be kissed. Once for comfort. Twice out of friendship. And three times pays for all. Yes, he felt with an instinct that had so far been quite reliable that it could be done.
But he didn’t say any of the things that could have started those things happening, and neither did Leigh. Arnie was between them, and almost surely always would be. Arnie and his lady. If it hadn’t been so ludicrously ghastly, he could have laughed.
“When are they letting you out?” she asked.
“On an unsuspecting public?” he asked, and began to giggle. After a moment she joined him in his laughter “Yes, something like that,” Leigh said, and then snickered again. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Dennis said. “People have been laughing at me all my life. I’m used to it. They say I’m stuck here until January, but I’m going to fool them. I’m going home for Christmas. I’m working my buns off down in the torture chamber.”
“Torture chamber?”
“Physical therapy. My back’s looking good. The other bones are knitting busily—the itch is terrible sometimes. I’m gobbling rosehips by the bushel basket. Dr Arroway says that’s nothing but a folk-tale, but Coach Puffer swears by them, and he checks the bottle every time he comes to visit.”
“Does he come often? The Coach?”
“Yeah, he does. Now he’s got me half-believing that stuff about rosehips making your broken bones knit faster.” Dennis paused. “Of course, I’m not going to be playing any more football, not ever. I’m going to be on crutches for a while, and then, with luck, I’ll graduate to a cane. Cheerful old Dr Arroway tells me I’m going to limp for maybe a couple of years. Or maybe I’ll always limp.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said in a low voice. “I’m sorry it had to happen to a nice guy like you, Dennis, but part of it’s selfish. I just wonder if all the rest of this, all this horrible stuff with Arnie, if it would have happened if you’d been up and around.”
“That’s right,” Dennis said, rolling his eyes dramatically, “blame it on me.”
But she didn’t smile. “I’ve started to worry about his sanity, did you know that? That’s the one thing I haven’t told my folks or his folks. But I think his mother… that she might… I don’t know what he said to her that night, after we found the car all smashed up, but… I think they must have really put their claws into each other.”
Dennis nodded.
“But it’s all so… so mad! His parents offered to buy him a good used car to replace Christine, and he said no. Then Mr Cunningham told me on the ride home that he offered to buy Arnie a new car… to cash in some bonds he’s held ever since 1955. Arnie said no, he couldn’t just take a present like that. And Mr Cunningham said he could understand that, and it didn’t have to be a present, that Arnie could pay him back, that he’d even take interest if that was what Arnie wanted… Dennis, do you see what I’m saying?”
“Yeah,” Dennis said. “It can’t be just any car. It’s got to be that car. Christine.”
“But to me that seems obsessive. He’s found one object and fixed on it. Isn’t that what an obsession is? I’m scared, and sometimes I feel hateful… but it’s not him I’m scared of. It’s not him I hate. It’s that frig—no, it’s that fucking car. That bitch Christine.”
High colour bloomed in her cheeks. Her eyes narrowed. The corners of her mouth turned down. Her face was suddenly no longer beautiful, not even pretty; the light on it was pitiless, changing it into something that was ugly but all the same striking, compelling. Dennis realized for the first time why they called it the monster, the green-eyed monster.
I’ll tell you what I wish would happen,” Leigh said. “I wish somebody would take his precious fucking Christine out back some night by mistake, out where they put the junks from Philly Plains.” Her eyes sparkled venomously. “And the next day I wish that crane with the big round magnet would come and pick it up and put it in the crusher and I wish someone would push the button and what would come out would be a little cube of metal about three by three by three. Then this would be over, wouldn’t it?”
Dennis didn’t answer, and after a moment he could almost see the monster turn around and wrap its scaly tail around itself and steal out of her face. Her shoulders sagged.
“Guess that sounds pretty horrible, doesn’t it? Like saying I wish those hoods had finished the job.”
“I understand how you feel.”
“Do you?” she challenged.
Dennis thought of Arnie’s look as he had pounded his fists on the dashboard. The kind of maniacal light that came into his eyes when he was around her. He thought of sitting behind the wheel in LeBay’s garage, and the kind of vision that had come over him.
Last of all, he thought of his dream: headlights bearing down on him in the high womanscream of burning rubber.
“Yes,” he said. “I think I do.”
They looked at each other in the hospital room.
THANKSGIVING
Two-three hours passed us by,
Altitude dropped to 505,
Fuel consumption way too thin,
Let’s get home before we run out of gas.
Now you can’t catch me—
No, baby, you can’t catch me—
’Cause if you get too close,
I’m gone like a cooool breeze.
— Chuck Berry
At the hospital they served Thanksgiving dinner in shifts from eleven in the morning until one in the afternoon. Dennis got his at quarter past twelve: three careful slices of white turkey breast, one careful ladleful of brown gravy, a scoop of instant mashed potatoes the exact size and shape of a baseball (lacking only the red stitches, he thought with sour amusement), a like scoop of frozen squash that was an arrogant fluorescent orange, and a small plastic container of cranberry jelly. For dessert there was ice cream. Resting on the corner of his tray was a small blue card.
Wise to the ways of the hospital by now—once you have been treated for the first set of bedsores to crop up on your ass, Dennis had discovered, you’re wiser to the ways of the hospital than you ever wanted to be—he asked the candy-striper who came to take away his tray what the yellow and red cards got for their Thanksgiving dinner. It turned out that the yellow cards got two pieces of turkey, no gravy, potato, no squash, and Jell-O for dessert. The red cards got one slice of white meat, pureed, and potato. Fed to them, in most cases.
Dennis found it all pretty depressing. It was only too easy to imagine his mother bringing a great big crackling capon to the dining-room table around four in the afternoon, his father sharpening his carving knife, his sister, flushed with importance and excitement, a red velvet ribbon in her hair, pouring each of them a glass of good red wine. It was also easy to imagine the good smells, the laughter as they sat down.
Easy to imagine… but probably a mistake.
It was, in fact, the most depressing Thanksgiving of his life. He drifted off into an unaccustomed early afternoon nap (no Physical Therapy because of the holiday) and dreamed an unsettling dream in which several candy-stripers walked through the IC ward and slapped turkey decals onto the life-support machinery and IV drips.
His mother, father, and sister had come over to visit for an hour in the morning, and for the first time he had sensed in Ellie an anxiousness to be gone. They had been invited over to the Callisons” for a light Thanksgiving brunch, and Lou Callison, one of the three Callison boys, was fourteen and “cute”. Her racked-up brother had become boring. They hadn’t discovered a rare and tragic form of cancer breeding in his bones. He wasn’t going to be paralysed for the rest of his life. There was no movie-of-the-week in him.
They had called him from the Callisons” around twelve-thirty and his father sounded a bit drunk—Dennis guessed he was maybe on his second bloody Mary and was maybe getting some disapproving looks from Mom. Dennis himself had just been finishing up his dietician-approved bluecarded Thanksgiving dinner—the only such dinner he had ever been able to finish in fifteen minutes—and he did a good job of sounding cheerful, not wanting to spoil their good time. Ellie came on the wire briefly, sounding giggly and rather screamy. Maybe it was talking to Ellie that had tired him out enough to need a nap.
He had fallen asleep (and had his unsettling dream) around two o’clock. The hospital was unusually quiet today, running on a skeleton staff. The usual babble of TVs and transistor radios from the other rooms was muted. The candy-striper who took his tray smiled brightly and said I she hoped he had enjoyed his “special dinner.” Dennis assured her that he had. After all, it was Thanksgiving for her, too.
And so he dreamed, and the dream broke up and became a darker sleep, and when he woke up it was nearly five o’clock and Arnie Cunningham was sitting in the hard plastic contour chair where his girl had sat only the day before.
Dennis was not at all surprised to see him there; he simply assumed that it was a new dream.
“Hi, Arnie,” he said. “How’s it hanging?”
“Hanging good,” Arnie said, “but you look like you’re still asleep, Dennis. Want some head-noogies? That’ll wake you up.”
There was a brown bag on his lap, and Dennis’s sleepy mind thought: Got his lunch after all. Maybe Repperton didn’t squash it as bad as we thought. He tried to sit up in the bed, hurt his back, and used the control panel to get into what was almost a sitting position. The motor whined. “Jesus, it’s really you!”
“Were you expecting Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster?” Arnie asked amiably.
“I was sleeping. I guess I thought I still was.” Dennis rubbed his forehead hard, as if to get rid of the steep behind it. “Happy Thanksgiving, Arnie.”
“You bet,” Arnie said. “Same to you. Did they feed you turkey with all the trimmings?”
Dennis laughed. “I got something that looked like those play-dinners that came with Ellie’s Happy-Time Cafeteria when she was about seven. Remember?”
Arnie put his cupped hands to his mouth and made ralphing noises. “I remember. What a gross-out.”
“I’m really glad you came,” Dennis said, and for a moment he was perilously close to tears. Maybe he hadn’t realized just how depressed he had been, He redoubled his determination to be home by Christmas. If he was here on Christmas Day, he’d probably commit suicide.
“Your folks didn’t come?”
“Sure they did,” Dennis said, “and they’ll be back again tonight—Mom and Dad will be, anyway—but it’s not the same. You know.”
“Yeah. Well, I brought some stuff. Told the lady downstairs I had your bathrobe.” Arnie giggled a little.
“What is that?” Dennis asked, nodding at the bag. It wasn’t just a lunchbag, he saw; it was a shopping bag.
“Aw, I raided the fridge after we et the bird,” Arnie said. “My mom and dad went around visiting their friends from the University—they do that every year on Thanksgiving afternoon. They won’t even be back until around eight.”
As he talked, he took things out of the bag. Dennis watched, amazed. Two pewter candle-holders. Two candles. Arnie slammed the candles into the holders, lit them with a matchbook advertising Darnell’s Garage, and turned off the overhead light. Then four sandwiches, clumsily wrapped in waxed paper.
“The way I recall it,” Arnie said, “you always said that scarfing up a couple of turkey sandwiches around eleven-thirty Thursday night was better than Thanksgiving dinner, anyway. Because the pressure was off.”
“Yeah,” Dennis said. “Sandwiches in front of the TV, Carson or some old movie. But, honest to God, Arnie, you didn’t have to—”
“Ali, shit, I haven’t even been around to see you in almost three weeks. Good thing for me you were sleeping when I came in or you probably would have shot me.” He tapped Dennis’s two sandwiches. “Your favourite, I think. White meat and mayo on Wonder Bread.”
Dennis got giggling at that, then laughing, then roaring. Arnie could see it hurt his back, but he couldn’t stop. Wonder Bread had been one of Arnie and Dennis’s great common secrets as children. Both of their mothers had been very serious about the subject of bread; Regina bought Diet-Thin loaves, with an occasional side-trip into the Land of Stone-Ground Rye. Dennis’s mother favoured Roman Meal and pumpernickel loaves. Arnie and Dennis ate what was given them—but both were secret Wonder Bread freaks, and more than one occasion they had pooled their money and instead of buying sweets they had gotten a loaf of Wonder and a jar of French’s Mustard. They would then slink out into Arnie’s garage (or Dennis’s tree-house, sadly demolished in a windstorm almost nine years before) and gobble mustard sandwiches and read Richie Rich comic books until the whole loaf was gone.
Arnie joined him in his laughter, and for Dennis that was the best part of Thanksgiving.
Dennis had been between room-mates for almost ten days, and so had the semi-private room to himself. Arnie closed the door and produced a six-pack of Busch beer from the brown bag.
“Wonders will never cease,” Dennis said, and had to laugh again at the unintentional pun,
“No,” Arnie said, “I don’t think they ever will.” He toasted
Dennis over the candles with a bottle of beer. “Prosit.”
“Live for ever,” Dennis responded. They drank.
After they had finished the thick turkey sandwiches, Arnie produced two plastic Tupperware pie-wedges from his apparently bottomless bag and prised off the lids. Two pieces of home-made apple pie rested within.
“No, man, I can’t,” Dennis said. “I’ll bust.”
“Eat,” Arnie commanded.
“I really can’t,” Dennis said, taking the Tupperware container and a fresh plastic fork. He finished the slice of pie in four huge bites and then belched. He upended the remainder of his second beer and belched again. “In Portugal, that’s a compliment to the cook,” he said. His head was buzzing pleasantly from the beer.
“Whatever you say,” Arnie responded with a grin. He got up, turned on the overhead fluorescent, and snuffed the candles. Outside a steady rain had begun to beat against the windows; it looked and sounded cold. And for Dennis, some of the warm spirit of friendship and real Thanksgiving seemed to go out with the candles.
“I’m gonna hate you tomorrow,” Dennis said. “I’ll probably have to sit on that john in there for an hour. And it hurts my back.”
“You remember the time Elaine got the farts?” Arnie asked, and they both laughed. “We teased her until your mother gave us holy old hell.”
“They didn’t smell, but they sure were loud,” Dennis said, smiling.
“Like gunshots,” Arnie agreed, and they both laughed a little—but it was a sad sort of laughter, if there is such a thing. A lot of water under the bridge. The thought that Ellie’s attack of the farts had happened seven years ago was somehow more unsettling than it was amusing. There was a breath of mortality in the realization that seven years could steal past with such smooth and unobtrusive ease.
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, 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.
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