“You are, dummy,” she whispered.
“I know. My life, my mother’s, my father’s, my sister’s.”
“How will we know if he leaves?”
“I’ll take care of that. You’re going to be sick tomorrow. You’re not going to school.”
“I’m sick right now,” she said in a low voice. “Dennis, what’s going to happen? What are you planning?”
“I’ll call you later tonight,” I said, and kissed her. Her lips were cold.
When I got home, Elaine was struggling into her parka and muttering black imprecations at people who sent other people down to Tom’s for milk and bread just when Dance Fever was coming on TV. She was prepared to be grumpy at me as well, but she cheered up when I offered to give her a lift down to the market and back. She also gave me a suspicious look, as if this unexpected kindness to the little sister might be the onset of some disease. Herpes, maybe. She asked me if I felt all right. I only smiled blandly and told her to hop in before I changed my mind, although by now my right leg was aching and my left was throbbing fiercely. I could talk on and on to Leigh about how Christine wouldn’t roll as long as Arnie was in Libertyville, and intellectually I knew that was right… but it didn’t change the instinctive rolling in my guts when I thought of Ellie walking the two blocks to Tom’s and crossing the dark suburban sidestreets in her bright yellow parka. I kept seeing Christine parked down one of those streets, crouched in the dark like an old bitch hunting dog.
When we got to Tom’s, I gave her a buck. “Get us each a Yodel and a Coke,” I said.
“Dennis, are you feeling all right?”
“Yes. And if you put my change in that Asteroids game, I’ll break your arm.”
That seemed to set her mind at rest. She went in, and I sat slumped behind the wheel of my Duster, thinking about what a terrible box we were in. We couldn’t talk to anyone—that was the nightmare. That was where Christine was so strong. Was I going to grab my dad down in his toy-shop and tell him that what Ellie called “Arnie Cunningham’s pukey old red car” was now driving itself? Was I going to call the cops and tell them that a dead guy wanted to kill my girlfriend and myself? No. The only thing on our side, other than the fact that the car couldn’t move until Arnie had an alibi, was the fact that it would want no witnesses—Moochie Welch, Don Vandenberg and Will Darnell had been killed alone, late at night; Buddy Repperton and his two friends had been killed out in the boonies.
Elaine came back with a bag clutched to her budding bosom, got in, gave me my Coke and my Yodel.
“Change,” I said.
“You’re such a boogersnot,” she said, but put some twenty-odd cents in my outstretched hand.
“I know, but I love you anyway,” I said. I pushed her hood back, ruffled her hair, and then kissed her ear. She looked surprised and suspicious—and then she smiled. She wasn’t such a bad sort, my sister Ellie. The thought of her being run down in the street simply because I fell in love with Leigh Cabot after Arnie went mad and left her… I simply wasn’t going to let that happen.
At home, I worked my way upstairs after saying hi to my mom. She wanted to know how the leg was doing, and I told her it was in good shape. But when I got upstairs, I made the bathroom medicine cabinet my first stop. I swallowed a couple of aspirin for the sake of my legs, which were now singing Ave Maria. Then I went down to my folks’ bedroom, where the upstairs phone is, and sat down in Mom’s rocking chair with a sigh.
I picked up the phone and made the first of my calls.
“Dennis Guilder, scourge of the turnpike extension project!” Brad Jeffries said heartily. “Good to hear from you, kiddo. When you gonna come over and watch the Penguins with me again?”
“I dunno,” I said. “I get tired of watching handicapped people play hockey after a while. Now if you got interested in a good team, like the Flyers—”
“Christ, have I got to listen to this from a kid that isn’t even mine?” Brad asked. “The world really is going to hell, I guess.”
We chatted for a while longer, just kicking things back and forth, and then I told him why I had called.
He laughed. “What the fuck, Denny? You goin into business for yourself?”
“You might say so.” I thought of Christine. “For a limited time only.”
“Don’t want to talk about it?”
“Well, not just yet. Do you know someone who might have an item like that for rent?”
“I’ll tell you, Dennis. There’s only one guy I know who might do business with you on anything like that. Johnny Pomberton. Lives out on the Ridge Road. He’s got more rolling stock than Carter’s got liver pills.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Brad.”
“How’s Arnie?”
“All right, I guess. I don’t see as much of him as I used to.”
“Funny guy, Dennis. I never in my wildest dreams thought he’d last out the summer the first time I set eyes on him. But he had one hell of a lot of determination.”
“Yeah,” I said. “All of that and then some.”
“Say hi to him when you see him.”
“I’ll do it, Brad. Stay loose.”
“Can’t live if you do anything else, Denny. Come an over some night and peel a few cans with me.”
“I will. Good night.”
“Night.”
I hung up and then hesitated over the phone for a minute or two, not really wanting to make this next call. But it had to be done; it was central to the whole sorry, stupid business. I picked the telephone up and dialled the Cunninghams’ number from memory. If Arnie answered, I would simply hang up without speaking. But my luck was in; it was Michael who answered.
“Hello?” His voice sounded tired and a bit slurred.
“Michael, this is Dennis.”
“Hey, hi!” He sounded genuinely pleased.
“Is Arnie there?”
“Upstairs. He came home from somewhere and went right to his room. He looked pretty thundery, but that’s far from unusual these days. Want me to call him?”
“No,” I said. “That’s okay. It was really you I wanted to talk to, anyhow. I need a favour.”
“Well, sure. Name it.” I realized what that slur in his voice was—Michael Cunningham was at least halfway snookered. “You did us a helluva favour, talking some sense to him about college.”
“Michael, I don’t think he listened to a thing I said.”
“Well, something sure happened. He’s applied to three schools just this month. Regina thinks you walk on water, Dennis. And just between me and thee, she’s pretty ashamed of the way she treated you when Arnie first told us about his car. But you know Regina. She’s never been able to say “I’m sorry”.”
I knew that, all right. And what Regina would think, I wondered, if she knew that Arnie
“Listen, Michael,” I said. “I’d like you to call me if Arnie decides to go out of town for some reason. Especially in the next day or two, or over the weekend. Day or night. I have to know if Arnie’s going to leave Libertyville. And I have to know before he leaves. It’s very important.”
“Why?”
“I’d just as soon not go into that. It’s complicated, and it would… well, it would sound crazy.”
There was a long, long silence, and when Arnie’s dad spoke again, his voice was a near-whisper. “It’s that goddam car of his, isn’t it?”
How much did he suspect? How much did he know? If he was like most people I knew, he probably suspected a little more drunk than sober. How much? Even now I don’t know for sure. But what I believe is that he suspected more than anyone—except maybe Will Darnell.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s the car.”
“I knew it,” he said dully. “I knew. What’s happening, Dennis? How is he doing it? Do you know?”
“Michael, I can’t say any more. Will you tell me if he plans a trip tomorrow or the next day?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, all right.”
“Thanks.”
“Dennis,” he said. “Do you think I’ll ever have my son back?”
He deserved the truth. That poor, devilled man deserved the truth. “I don’t know,” I said, and bit at my lower lip until it hurt. “I think… that it may have gone too far for that.”
“Dennis,” he almost wailed, “what is it? Drugs? Some kind of drugs?”
“I’ll tell you when I can,” I said. “That’s all I can promise you. I’m sorry. I’ll tell you when I can.”
Johnny Pomberton was easier to talk to.
He was a lively, garrulous man, and any fears I’d had that he wouldn’t do business with a kid soon went by the board. I got the feeling that Johnny Pomberton would have done business with Satan freshly risen from hell with the smell of brimstone still on him, if he had good old legal tender.
“Sure,” he kept saying. “Sure, sure.” You’d no more than started some proposition before Johnny Pomberton was agreeing with you. It was a little unnerving. I had a cover story, but I don’t think he even listened to it. He simply quoted me a price—a very reasonable one, as it turned out.
“That sounds fine,” I said.
“Sure,” he agreed. “What time, you coming by?”
“Well, how would nine-thirty tomorrow m—”
“Sure,” he said. “See you then.”
“One other question, Mr Pomberton…”
“Sure. And make it Johnny.”
“Okay, Johnny, then. What about automatic transmission?”
Johnny Pemberton laughed heartily—so heartily that I held the phone away from my ear a bit, feeling glum. That laugh was answer enough.
“On one of these babies? You got to be kidding. Why? Can’t you run a manual shift?”
“Yes, that’s what I learned on,” I said.
“Sure! So you got no problems, right?”
“I guess not,” I said, thinking of my left leg, which would be running the clutch—or trying to. Simply shifting it around a little tonight had made it ache like hell, I hoped that Arnie would wait a few days before taking his trip out of town, but somehow I didn’t think that was on the cards. It would be tomorrow, over the weekend at the latest, and my left leg would simply have to bear up as best it could. “Well, good night, Mr Pomberton. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Sure. Thanks for calling, kid. I got one all picked out in my mind for you. You’ll like her, see if you don’t. And if you don’t start calling me Johnny, I’m gonna double the price.”
“Sure,” I said, and hung up on his laughter.
You’ll like her. See if you don’t.
Her again—I was becoming morbidly aware of that casual form of referral… and getting damned sick of it.
Then I made my last preparatory call. There were four Sykeses in the phone book. I got the one I wanted on my second try; Jimmy himself answered the phone. I introduced myself as Arnie Cunningham’s friend, and Jimmy’s voice brightened. He liked Arnie, who hardly ever teased him and never “punched on him” as Buddy Repperton had done when Buddy worked for Will. He wanted to know how Arnie was, and, lying again, I told him Arnie was fine.
“Jeez, that’s good,” he said. “He really had his butt in a sling there for a while. I knew them fireworks and cigarettes was no good for him.”
“It’s Arnie I’m calling for,” I said. “You remember when Will got arrested and they shut down the garage, Jimmy?”
“Sure do.” Jimmy sighed. “Now poor old Will’s dead and I’m out of a job. My ma keeps sayin I got to go to the vocational-technical school, but I wouldn’t be no good at that. I guess I’ll go for bein a janitor, or somethin like that. My Uncle Fred’s a janitor up at the college, and he says there’s an op-nin, because this other Janitor, he disappeared, just took off or somethin, and—”
“Arnie says when they closed down the garage, he lost his whole socket-wrench kit,” I broke in. “It was up behind some of those old tyres, you know, on the overhead racks. He put them up there so no one would rip him off.”
“Still there?” Jimmy asked.
“I guess so.”
“What a bummer!”
“You know it. That set of boltfuckers was worth a hundred dollars.”
“Holy crow! I bet they ain’t there anymore anyway, though. I bet one of them cops got it.”
“Arnie thinks they might still be there. But he’s not supposed to go near the garage because of the trouble he’s in.” This was a lie, but I didn’t think Jimmy would catch it and he didn’t. Putting one over on a fellow who was borderline retarded didn’t add a thing to my self-esteem, however.
“Aw, shit! Well, listen—I’ll go down and look for ’em. Yessir! Tomorrow morning, first thing. I still got my keys.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t Arnie’s mythical set of socket wrenches that I wanted; I wanted Jimmy’s keys.
“I’d like to get them, Jimmy, that’s the thing. As a surprise. And I know right where he put them. You might hunt around all day and still not find them.”
“Oh, yeah, for sure. I was never no good at finding things, that’s what Will said. He always said I couldn’t find my own bee-hind with both hands and a flashlight.”
“Aw, man, he was just putting you down. But really—I’d like to do it.”
“Well, sure.”
“I thought I’d come by tomorrow and borrow your keys. I could get that set of wrenches and have your keys back to you before dark.”
“Gee, I dunno. Will said to never loan out my keys—”
“Sure, before, but the place is empty now except for Arnie’s tools and a bunch of junk out back. The estate will be putting it up for sale pretty soon, contents complete, and if I take them after that, it would like stealing.”
“Oh! Well, I guess it’d be okay. If you bring my keys back.” And then he said an absurdly touching thing: “See, they’re all I got to remember Will by.”
“It’s a promise.”
“Okay,” he said. “If it’s for Arnie, I guess it’s okay.”
Just before bed, now downstairs, I made one final call—to a very sleepy-sounding Leigh.
“One of these next few nights we’re going to end it. You game?”
“Yes,” she said. “I am. I think I am. What have you got planned, Dennis?”
So I told her, going through it step by step, half-expecting her to poke a dozen holes in my idea. But when I was done, she simply said, “What if it doesn’t work?”
“You make the honour roll. I don’t think you need me to draw you a picture.”
“No,” she said. “I guess not.”
“I’d keep you out of it if I could, I said. “But LeBay is going to suspect a trap, so the bait has to be good.”
“I wouldn’t let you leave me out of it,” she said. Her voice was steady. “This is my business too. I loved him. I really did. And once you start loving someone… I don’t think you ever really get over it completely. Do you, Dennis?”
I thought of the years. The summers of reading and swimming and playing games: Monopoly, Scrabble, Chinese checkers. The ant farms. The times I had kept him from getting killed in all the ways kids like to kill the outsider, the one who’s a little bit strange, a little bit off the beat. There had been times when I had gotten pretty fucking sick of keeping him from getting killed, times when I had wondered if my life wouldn’t be easier, better, if I simply let Arnie go, let him drown. But it wouldn’t have been better. I had needed Arnie to make me better, and he had. We had traded fair all the way down the line, and oh shit, this was very bitter, very fucking bitter indeed.
“No,” I said, and I suddenly had to put my hand over my eyes. “I don’t think you ever do. I loved him too. And maybe it isn’t too late for him, even now. That’s what I would have prayed: Dear God, let me keep Arnie from getting killed just one more time. Just this one last time.
“It’s not him I hate,” she said, her voice low. “It’s that man LeBay… did we really see that thing this afternoon, Dennis? In the car?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think we did.”
“Him and that bitch Christine,” she said. “Will it be soon?”
“Soon, yeah. I think so.
“All right. I love you, Dennis.”
“I love you too.”
As it turned out, it ended the next day— Friday the 19th of January.
ARNIE
I was cruising in my Stingray late one night
When an XKE pulled up on the right,
He rolled down the window of his shiny new Jag
And challenged me then and there to a drag.
I said “You’re on, buddy, my mill’s runnin fine,
Let’s come off the line at Sunset and Vine,
But I’ll go you one better (if you got the nerve):
Let’s race all the way… to Deadman’s Curve.”
— Jan and Dean
I began that long, terrible day by driving over to Jimmy Sykes’s house in my Duster. I had expected there might be some trouble from Jimmy’s mother, but that turned out to be okay. She was, if anything, mentally slower than her son. She invited me in for bacon and eggs (I declined—my stomach was tied in miserable knots) and clucked over my crutches while Jimmy hunted around in his room for his keyring. I made small-talk with Mrs Sykes, who was roughly the size of Mount Etna, while time passed and a dismal certainty rose inside me: Jimmy had lost his keys somewhere and the whole thing was off the rails before it could really begin.
He came back shaking his head. “Can’t find em,” he said, “Jeez, I guess I must have lost em somewhere. What a bummer.”
And Mrs Sykes, nearly three hundred pounds on the hoof in a faded housedress and her hair up in puffy pink rollers, said with blessed practicality, “Did you look in your pockets, Jim?”
A startled expression crossed Jimmy’s face. He rammed a hand into the pocket of his green chino workpants. Then, with a shamefaced grin, he pulled out a bunch of keys. They were on one of the keyrings they sell at the novelty shop in the Monroeville Mall—a large rubber fried egg. The egg was dark with grease.
“There you are, you little suckers,” he said.
“You watch your language, young man,” Mrs Sykes said. “Just show Dennis which key it is that opens the door and keep your dirty language in your head.”
Jimmy ended up handing three Schlage keys over to me, because they weren’t labelled and he couldn’t tell which was which. One of them opened the main overhead door, one opened the back overhead door, the one which gave on the long lot of junked cars, and one opened the door to Will’s office.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll have these back to you just as soon as I can, Jimmy.”
“Great,” Jimmy said. “Say hello to Arnie when you see him.”
“You bet,” I said.
“You sure you don’t want some bacon and eggs, Dennis?” Mrs Sykes asked. “There’s plenty.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I really ought to get going.” It was a quarter past eight; school started at nine. Arnie usually pulled in around eight-forty-five, Leigh had told me. I just had time. I got my crutches under me and got to my feet.
“Help him out, Jim,” Mrs Sykes commanded. “Don’t just stand there.”
I started to protest and she waved me away. “Wouldn’t want you to fall on your can getting back to your car, Dennis. Might break your leg all over again.” She laughed uproariously at this, and Jimmy, the soul of obedience, practically carried me back to my Duster.
The sky that day was a scummy, frowsy grey, and the radio was predicting more snow by late afternoon. I drove across town to Libertyville High, took the driveway which led to the student parking lot, and parked in the front row. I didn’t need Leigh to tell me that Arnie usually parked in the back row. I had to see him, had to strew the bait in front of his nose, but I wanted him as far from Christine as possible when I did it. Away from the car, LeBay’s hold seemed weaker.
I sat with the key turned over to ACCESSORY for the radio and looked at the football field. It seemed impossible that I had ever traded sandwiches with Arnie on those snowcovered bleachers. Impossible to believe that I had run and cavorted on that field myself, dressed up in padding, helmet, and tight pants, stupidly convinced of my own physical invulnerability… perhaps even of my own immortality.
I didn’t feel that way anymore, if I ever had.
Students were coming in, parking their cars, and heading for the building, chattering and laughing and horsing around. I slouched lower in my seat, not wanting to be recognized. A bus pulled up at the doors in the main turnaround and disgorged a load of kids. A small cluster of shivering boys and girls gathered out in the smoking area where Buddy had taken Arnie on that day last fall. That day also seemed impossibly distant now.
My heart was thumping in my chest and I was miserably tense. A craven part of me hoped that Arnie simply wouldn’t show up. And then I saw the familiar white-over-red shape of Christine turn in from School Street and cruise up the student drive, moving at a steady twenty, blowing a little plume of white exhaust from her pipe. Arnie was behind the wheel, wearing his school jacket. He didn’t look at me; he simply drove to his accustomed place at the back of the lot and parked.
Just stay slouched down and he won’t even see you, that craven, traitorous part of my mind whispered. He’ll walk right by you, like all the rest of them.
Instead, I opened my door and fumbled my crutches outside. Leaning my weight on them, I yanked myself out and stood there on the packed snow of the parking lot, feeling a little bit like Fred MacMurray in that old picture Double Indemnity. From the school came the burring of the first bell, made faint and unimportant by distance—Arnie was later than he had been in the old days. My mother had said that Arnie was almost disgustingly punctual. Maybe LeBay hadn’t been.
He came toward me, books under his arm, head down twisting in and out between the cars. He walked behind a van, passing out of my sight temporarily, and then came back into view. He looked up then, directly into my eyes.
Ms own eyes widened, and he made an automatic half-turn back toward Christine.
“Feel kind of naked when you’re not behind the wheel?” I asked.
He looked back at me. His lips drew slightly downward, as if he had tasted something of unpleasant flavour.
“How’s your cunt, Dennis?” he asked.
George LeBay hadn’t said, but he had at least hinted that his brother was extraordinarily good at getting through to people, finding their soft spots.
I took two shuffling steps forward on my crutches while he stood there, smiling with the corners of his mouth down.
“How did you like it when Repperton called you Cuntface?” I asked him. “Did you like it so well you want to turn it around and use it on somebody else?”
Part of him seemed to flinch at that—something that was maybe only in his eyes—but the contemptuous, watchful smile remained on his lips. It was cold out. I hadn’t put on my gloves, and my hands, on the crossbars of the crutches, were getting numb. Our breath made little plumes… “Or what about in the fifth grade, when Tommy Deckinger used to call you Fart-Breath?” I asked, my voice rising. Getting angry at him hadn’t been part of the game-plan, but now it was here, shaking inside me. “Did you like that? And do you remember when Ladd Smythe was a patrol-boy and he pushed you down in the street and I pulled his hat off and stuffed it down his pants? Where you been, Arnie? This guy LeBay is a Johnny-come-lately. Me, I was here all along.”
That flinch again. This time he half-turned away, the smile faltering, his eyes searching for Christine the way your eyes might search for a loved one in a crowded terminal or bus-station. Or the way a junkie might took for his pusher.
“You need her that bad?” I asked. “Man, you’re hooked right through the fucking bag, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said hoarsely. “You stole my girl. Nothing is going to change that. You went behind my back… you cheated… you’re just a shitter, like all the rest of them.” He was looking at me now, his eyes wide and hurt and blazing with anger. “I thought I could trust you, and you turned out to be worse than Repperton or any of them!” He took a step toward me and cried out in a perfect fury of loss, “You stole her, you shitter!”
I lurched forward another step on my crutches; one of them slid a little bit in the packed snow underfoot. We were like two reluctant gunslingers approaching each other.
“You can’t steal what’s been given away,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the night she choked in your car. The night Christine tried to kill her. You told her you didn’t need her. You told her to fuck off.”
“I never did! That’s a lie! That’s a goddam lie!”
“Who am I talking to?” I asked.
“Never mind!” His grey eyes were huge behind his spectacles. “Never mind who the fuck you’re talking to! That’s nothing but a dirty lie! No more than I’d expect from that stinking bitch!”
Another step closer. His pale face was marked with flaring red patches of colour.
“When you write your name, it doesn’t look like your signature anymore, Arnie.”
“You shut up, Dennis.”
“Your father says it’s like having a stranger in the house.”
“I’m warning you, man.”
“Why bother?” I asked brutally. “I know what’s going to happen. So does Leigh. The same thing that happened to Buddy Repperton and Will Darnell and all the others. Because you’re not Arnie at all anymore. Are you in there, LeBay? Come on out and let me see you. I’ve seen you before. I saw you on New Year’s Eve, I saw you yesterday at the chicken place. I know you’re in there; why don’t you stop fucking around and come out?”
And he did… but in Arnie’s face this time, and that was more terrible than all the skulls and skeletons and comic-book horrors ever thought of. Arnie’s face changed. A sneer bloomed on his lips like a rancid rose. And I saw him as he must have been back when the world was young and a car was all a young man needed to have; everything else would just automatically follow. I saw George LeBay’s big brother.
I only remember one thing about him, but I remember that one thing very well. His anger. He was always angry.
He came toward me, closing the distance between where he had been and where I stood propped on my crutches. His eyes were filmy and beyond all reach. That sneer was stamped on his face like the mark of a branding-iron.
I had time to think of the scar on George LeBay’s forearm, skidding from his elbow to his wrist. He pushed me and then he came back and threw me. I could hear that fourteen-year-old LeBay shouting, You stay out of my way from now on, you goddam snotnose, stay out of my way, you hear?
It was LeBay I was facing now, and he was not a man who took losing easily. Check that: he didn’t take losing at all.
“Fight him, Arnie,” I said. “He’s had his own way too long. Fight him, kill him, make him stay d—”
He swung his foot and kicked my right crutch out from under me. I struggled to stay up, tottered, almost made it… and then he kicked the left crutch away. I fell down on the cold packed snow. He took another step and stood above me, his face hard and alien.
“You got it coming, and you’re going to get it,” he said remotely.
“Yeah, right,” I gasped. “You remember the ant farms, Arnie? Are you in there someplace? This dirty sucker never had a fucking ant farm in his life. He never had a friend in his life.”
And suddenly the calm hardness broke. His face—his face roiled. I don’t know how else to describe it. LeBay was there, furious at having to put down a kind of internal mutiny. Then Arnie was there—drawn, tired, ashamed, but, most of all, desperately unhappy. Then LeBay again, and his foot drew back to kick me as I lay on the snow groping for my crutches and feeling helpless and useless and dumb. Then it was Arnie again, my friend Arnie, brushing his hair back off his forehead in that familiar, distracted gesture; it was Arnie saying, “Oh, Dennis… Dennis… I’m sorry… I’m so sorry.”
“It’s too late for sorry, man,” I said.
I got one crutch and then the other. I pulled myself up little by little, slipping twice before I could get the crutches under me again. Now my hands felt like pieces of furniture. Arnie made no move to help me; he stood with his back against the van, his eyes wide and shocked.
“Dennis, I can’t help it,” he whispered. “Sometimes I feel like I’m not even here anymore. Help me, Dennis. Help me.”
“Is LeBay there?” I asked him.
“He’s always here,” Arnie groaned. “Oh God, always! Except—”
“The car?”
“When Christine… when she goes, then he’s with her. That’s the only time he’s… he’s…”
Arnie fell silent. His head slipped over to one side. His chin rolled on his chest in a boneless pivot. His hair dangled toward the snow. Spit ran out of his mouth and splattered on his boots. And then he began to scream thinly and beat his gloved fists on the van behind him:
“Go away! Go away! Go awaaaaay!”
Then nothing for maybe five seconds nothing except the shuddering of his body, as if a basket of snakes had been dumped inside his clothes; nothing except that slow, horrible roll of his chin on his chest.
I thought maybe he was winning, that he was beating the dirty old sonofabitch. But when he looked up, Arnie was gone. LeBay was there.
“It’s all going to happen just like he said,” LeBay told me. “Let it go, boy. Maybe I won’t drive over you.”
Come on over to Darnell’s tonight, I said. My voice was harsh, my throat as dry as sand. “We’ll play. I’ll bring Leigh. You bring Christine.”
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