by Steven King
I wondered if Arnie was dumb enough to think that the Will Darnells of this world ever did favors out of the goodness of their hearts. I hoped he wasn’t, but I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure of much about Arnie anymore. He had changed a lot in the last few weeks.
• • •
We surprised the hell out of ourselves and won the game—as it turned out, that was one of only two we won that whole season . .. not that I was with the team when the season ended.
We had no right to win; we went out on the field feeling like losers, and we lost the toss. The Hillmen (dumb name for a team, but what’s so bright about being known as the Terriers when you get right down to it?) went forty yards on their first two plays, going through our defensive line like cheese through a goose. Then, on the third play—their third first-and-ten in a row—their quarterback coughed up the ball. Gary Tardiff grabbed it up and rambled sixty yards for the score, a great big grin on his face.
The Hillmen and their coach went bananas protesting that the ball had been dead at the line of scrimmage, but the officials disagreed and we led 6-0. From my place on the bench I was able to look across at the visitors’ bleachers and could see that the few Libertyville fans there were going crazy. I guess they had a right to; it was the first time we’d led in a game all season. Arnie and Leigh were waving Terriers pennants. I waved at them. Leigh saw me, waved back, then elbowed Arnie. He waved back too. They looked as if they were getting pretty chummy up there, which made me grin.
As for the game, we never looked back after that first flukey score. We had that mystic thing, momentum, on our side—maybe for the only time that year. I didn’t break the Conference touchdown record as Arnie had predicted, but I scored three times, one of them on a ninety-yard runback, the longest I ever made. At halftime it was 17-0, and Coach was a new man. He saw a complete turnaround ahead of us, the greatest comeback in the history of the Conference. Of course that turned out to be a fool’s dream, but he surely was excited that day, and I felt good for him, as I had for Arnie and Leigh, getting to know each other so profitably and easily.
The second half was not so good; our defense resumed the mostly prone posture it had assumed in our first three games, but it was still never really close. We won 27-18.
Coach had taken me out halfway through the fourth quarter to put in Brian McNally, who would be replacing me next year—actually even earlier than that, as it turned out. I showered and changed up, then came back out just as the two-minute warning went off.
The parking lot was full of cars but empty of people. Wild cheering came from the field as the Hillmen fans urged their team to do the impossible in the last two minutes of play. From this distance it all seemed as unimportant as it undoubtedly was.
I walked over toward Christine.
There she sat with her rust-flecked sides and her new hood and her tailfins that seemed a thousand miles long. A dinosaur from the dark ditty-bop days of the 50s when all the oil millionaires were from Texas and the Yankee dollar was kicking the shit out of the Japanese yen instead of the other way around. Back in the days when Carl Perkins was singing about pink pedal pushers and Johnny Horton was singing about dancing all night on a honky-tonk hardwood floor and the biggest teen idol in the country was Edd “Kookie” Byrnes.
I touched Christine. I tried to caress it as Arnie had done; to like it for Arnie’s sake as Leigh had done. Surely if anyone should be able to make himself like it, it should be me. Leigh had only known Arnie a month. I had known him my whole life.
I slipped my hand along the rusty surface and I thought of George LeBay, and Veronica and Rita LeBay, and somewhere along the line the hand that was supposed to be caressing closed into a fist and I suddenly slammed it down on Christine’s flank as hard as I could—plenty hard enough to hurt my hand and make myself utter a defensive little laugh and wonder what the hell I thought I was doing.
The sound of rust sifting down onto the hottop in small flakes.
The sound of a bass drum from the football field, like a giant’s heartbeat.
The sound of my own heartbeat.
I tried the front door.
It was locked.
I licked my lips and realized I was scared.
It was almost as if—this was very funny, this was hilarious—it was almost as if this car didn’t like me, as if it suspected me of wanting to come between it and Arnie, and that the reason I didn’t want to walk in front of it was because—
I laughed again and then remembered my dream and stopped laughing. This was too much like it for comfort. It wasn’t Chubby McCarthy blaring over the PA, of course, not in Hidden Hills, but the rest of it brought on a dreamy, unpleasant sense of déjà vu—the sound of the cheers, the sound of padded body contact, the wind hissing through the trees that looked like cutouts under an overcast sky.
The engine would gun. The car would lurch forward, drop back, lurch forward, drop back. And then the tires would scream as it roared right at me—
I shook the thought off. It was time to stop pandering to myself with all of this crazy shit. It was time—and overtime—to get my imagination under control. This was a car, not a she but an it, not really Christine at all but only a 1958 Plymouth Fury that had rolled off an assembly line in Detroit along with about four hundred thousand others.
It worked … at least temporarily. Just to demonstrate how little afraid of it I was, I got down on my knees and looked under it. What I saw there was even crazier than the haphazard way the car was being rebuilt on top. There were three new Pleasurizer shocks, but the fourth was a dark, oil-caked ruin that looked as if it had been on there forever. The tailpipe was so new it was still silvery, but the muffler looked at least middle-aged and the header pipe was in very bad shape. Looking at the header, thinking about exhaust fumes that could leak into the car from it, made me flash on Veronica LeBay again. Because exhaust fumes can kill. They—
“Dennis, what are you doing?”
I guess I was still more uneasy than I thought, because I was up from my knees like a shot with my heart beating in my throat. It was Arnie. He looked cold and angry.
Because I was looking at his car? Why should that make him mad? Good question. But it had, that was obvious.
“I was looking over your mean machine,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Where’s Leigh?”
“She had to go to the Ladies’,” he said, dismissing her. His gray eyes never left my face. “Dennis, you’re the best friend I’ve got, the best friend I’ve ever had. You might have saved me a trip to the hospital the other day when Repperton pulled that knife, and I know it. But don’t you go behind my back, Dennis. Don’t you ever do that.”
From the playing field there was a tremendous cheer—the Hillmen had just made the final score of the game, with less than thirty seconds to play.
“Arnie, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” I said, but I felt guilty. I felt guilty the way I had felt being introduced to Leigh, sizing her up, wanting her a little—wanting the girl he so obviously wanted himself. But … going behind his back? Was that what I had been doing?
I suppose he could have seen it that way. I had known that his irrational—interest, obsession, put it however you like—his irrational thing about the car was the locked room in the house of our friendship, the place I could not go without inviting all sorts of trouble. And if he hadn’t caught me trying to jimmy the door, he had at least come upon me trying to peek through a keyhole.
“I think you know exactly what I’m talking about,” he said, and I saw with a tired sort of dismay that he was not just a little mad; he was furious. “You and my father and mother are all spying on me ‘for my own good,’ that’s the way it is, isn’t it? They sent you down to Darnell’s Garage to snoop around, didn’t they?”
“Hey, Arnie, wait just a—”
“Boy, did you think I wouldn’t find out? I didn’t say anything then—because we’re friends. But I don’t know, Dennis. There has to be a line, and I th
ink I’m drawing it. Why don’t you just leave my car alone and stop butting in where you don’t belong?”
“First of all,” I said, “it wasn’t your father and your mother. Your father got me alone and asked me if I’d take a look at what you were doing with the car. I said sure I would, I was curious myself. Your dad has always been okay to me. What was I supposed to say?”
“You were supposed to say no.”
“You don’t get it. He’s on your side. Your mother still hopes it doesn’t come to anything—that was the idea I got—but Michael really hopes you get it running. He said so.”
“Sure, that’s the way he’d come on to you.” He was almost sneering. “Really all he’s interested in is making sure I’m still hobbled. That’s what they’re both interested in. They don’t want me to grow up because then they’d have to face getting old.”
“That’s too hard, man.”
“Maybe you think so. Maybe coming from a halfway-normal family makes you soft in the head, Dennis. They offered me a new car for high school graduation, did you know that? All I had to do was give up Christine, make all A’s, and agree to go to Horlicks … where they could keep me in direct view for another four years.”
I didn’t know what to say. That was pretty crass, all right.
“So just butt out of it, Dennis. That’s all I’m saying. We’ll both be better off.”
“I didn’t tell him anything, anyhow,” I said. “Just that you were doing a few things here and there. He seemed sort of relieved.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet.”
“I didn’t have any idea it was as close to street-legal as it is. But it isn’t all the way yet. I looked underneath, and that header pipe’s a mess. I hope you’re driving with your windows open.”
“Don’t tell me how to drive it! I know more about what makes cars run than you ever will!”
That was when I started to get pissed off at him. I didn’t like it—I didn’t want to have an argument with Arnie, especially not now, when Leigh would be joining him in another moment—but I could feel somebody upstairs in the brain-room starting to pull those red switches, one by one.
“That’s probably true,” I said, controlling my voice. “But I’m not sure how much you know about people. Will Darnell gave you an improper sticker—if you got picked up he could lose his state inspection certificate. He gave you a dealer plate. Why did he do those things, Arnie?”
For the first time Arnie seemed defensive. “I told you. He knows I’m doing the work.”
“Don’t be a numbskull. That guy wouldn’t give a crippled crab a crutch unless there was something in it for him, and you know it.”
“Dennis, will you leave it alone, for God’s sake?”
“Man,” I said, stepping toward him. “I don’t give a fuck if you have a car. I just don’t want you in a bind over it. Sincerely.”
He looked at me uncertainly.
“I mean, what are we yelling at each other about? Because I looked underneath your car to see how the exhaust pipe was hanging?”
But that hadn’t been all I was doing. Some … but not quite all. And I think we both knew it.
On the playing field, the final gun went off with a flat bang. A slight drizzle had started to come down, and it was getting cold. We turned toward the sound of the gun and saw Leigh coming toward us, carrying her pennant and Arnie’s. She waved. We waved back.
“Dennis, I can take care of myself,” he said.
“Okay,” I said simply. “I hope you can.” Suddenly I wanted to ask him how deep he was in with Darnell. And that was a question I couldn’t ask; that would bring on an even more bitter argument. Things would be said that could maybe never be repaired.
“I can,” he repeated. He touched his car, and the hard look in his eyes softened.
I felt a mixture of relief and dismay—the relief because we weren’t going to have a fight after all; we had both managed to avoid saying anything completely irreparable. But it also seemed to me that it wasn’t just one room of our friendship that had been closed off; it was a whole damn wing. He had rejected what I’d had to say with complete totality and had made the conditions for continuing the friendship pretty clear: everything will be okay as long as you do it my way.
Which was also his parents’ attitude, if only he could have seen it. But then, I suppose he had to learn it somewhere.
Leigh came up, drops of rain gleaming in her hair. Her color was high, her eyes sparkling with good health and good excitement. She exuded a naive and untested sexuality that made me feel a little light-headed. Not that I was the main object of her attention; Arnie was.
“How did it end?” Arnie asked.
“Twenty-seven to eighteen,” she said, and then added gleefully, “We destroyed them. Where were you two?”
“Just talking cars,” I said, and Arnie shot me an amused glance—at least his sense of humor hadn’t disappeared with his common sense. And I thought there was some cause for hope in the way he looked at her. He was falling for her, head over heels. The tumble was slow right now, but it would almost surely speed up if things went right. I was really curious about how it had happened, the two of them getting together. Arnie’s complexion had cleared up and he looked pretty good, but in a rather bookish, bespectacled sort of way. He wasn’t the sort of guy you’d have expected Leigh Cabot to want to be with; you’d expect her to be hanging from the arm of the American high school version of Apollo.
People were streaming back across the field now, our players and theirs, our fans and theirs.
“Just talking cars,” Leigh repeated, mocking softly. She turned her face up to Arnie’s and smiled. He smiled back, a sappy, dopey smile that did my heart a world of good. I could tell, just looking at him, that whenever Leigh smiled at him that way, Christine was the farthest thing from his mind; she was demoted back to her proper place as an it, a means of transportation.
I liked that just fine.
18
On the Bleachers
I saw Arnie and Leigh in the halls a lot over the first two weeks in October, first leaning against his locker or hers, talking before the homeroom bell; then holding hands; then going out after school with their arms around each other. It had happened. In high school parlance, they were “going together.” I thought it was more than that. I thought they were in love.
I hadn’t seen Christine since the day we beat Hidden Hills. She had apparently gone back to Darnell’s for more work—maybe that was part of the agreement Arnie had struck with Darnell when Darnell issued the dealer plate and the illegal sticker that day. I didn’t see the Fury, but I saw a lot of Leigh and Arnie … and heard a lot about them. They were a hot item of school gossip. Girls wanted to know what she saw in him, for heaven’s sake; boys, always more practical and prosaic, only wanted to know if my runt friend had managed to get into her pants. I didn’t care about either of those things, but I did wonder from time to time what Regina and Michael thought of their son’s extreme case of first love.
One Monday in mid-October, Arnie and I ate our lunch together on the bleachers by the football field, as we had been planning to do on the day Buddy Repperton had pulled the knife—Repperton had indeed been expelled for that. Moochie and Don had gotten three-day vacations. They were currently being pretty good boys. And, in the not-so-sweet meanwhile, the football team had been run over twice more. Our record was now 1-5, and Coach Puffer had lapsed back into morose silence.
My lunchbag wasn’t as full as it had been on the day of Repperton and the knife; the only virtue I could see of being 1-5 was that we were now so far behind the Bears of Ridge Rock (they were 5-0-1) that it would be impossible for us to do anything in the Conference unless their team bus went over a cliff.
We sat in the mellow October sunshine—the time for the little spooks in their bedsheets and rubber masks and Woolworth’s Darth Vader costumes wasn’t far off—munching and not saying too much. Arnie had a devilled egg and swapped it for one of my cold meatloaf
sandwiches. Parents know very little about the secret lives of their children, I guess. Every Monday since first grade, Regina Cunningham had put a devilled egg in Arnie’s lunchbag, and every day after we had a meatloaf dinner (which was usually Sunday suppers), I had a cold meatloaf sandwich in mine. Now I have always hated cold meatloaf and Arnie has always hated devilled eggs, although I never saw him turn one down done any other way. And I’ve often wondered what our mothers would think if they knew how few of the hundreds of devilled eggs and dozens of cold meatloaf sandwiches that went into our respective lunch-sacks had actually been eaten by him for whom each was intended.
I got down to my cookies and Arnie got down to his fig-bars. He glanced over at me to make sure I was watching and then crammed all six fig-bars into his mouth at once and crunched down on them. His cheeks puffled out grotesquely.
“Oh, Jesus, what a gross-out!” I cried.
“Ung-ung-gooth-ung,” Arnie replied.
I started to poke my fingers at his sides, where he’s always been extremely ticklish, screaming, “Side-noogies! Look out, Arnie, I got side-noogies onya!”
Arnie started to laugh, spraying out little wads of munched-up fig-bars. I know how obnoxious that must sound, but it was really funny.
“Quit it, Dennith!” Arnie said, his mouth still full of fig-bars.
“What was that? I can’t understand you, you fucking barbarian.” I kept poking my fingers at him, giving him what we used to call “side-noogies” when we were little kids (for some reason now lost in the sands of time), and he kept wiggling and twisting and laughing.
He swallowed mightily, then belched.
“You’re so fucking gross, Cunningham,” I said.
“I know.” He seemed really pleased by it. Probably was; so far as I know, he’d never pulled the six-fig-bars-at-once trick in front of anyone else. If he had done it in front of his parents, I figure Regina would have had a kitty and Michael possibly a brain-hemorrhage.
