by Steven King
“I’ll get to school,” he said. “I’ll take some fresh clothes in a pack and I’ll even shower so I don’t smell offensive to anyone in homeroom. Then, after school’s out, I’ll go back down to Darnell’s. There’s a lot of work to be done, but I can do it … I know I can … it’s going to eat up a lot of my savings, though. Plus, I’ll have to keep on top of the stuff I’m doing for Will.”
“Your homework… your studies!”
“Oh. Those.” He smiled the dead, mechanical smile of a clockwork figure. “They’ll suffer, of course. Can’t kid you about that. I can’t promise you a ninety-three average anymore, either. But I’ll get by. I can make C’s. Maybe some B’s.”
“No! You’ve got college to think about!”
He came back to the table, limping again, quite badly. He planted his hands on the table before her and leaned slowly down. She thought: A stranger … my son is a stranger to me. Is this really my fault? Is it? Because I only wanted what was best for him? Can that be? Please, God, make this a nightmare I’ll wake up from with tears on my cheeks because it was so real.
“Right now,” he said softly, holding her gaze, “the only things I care about are Christine and Leigh and staying on the good side of Will Darnell so I can get her fixed up as good as new. I don’t give a shit about college. And if you don’t get off my case, I’ll drop out of high school. That ought to shut you up if nothing else will.”
“You can’t,” she said, meeting his gaze. “You understand that, Arnold. Maybe I deserve your … your cruelty … but I’ll fight this self-destructive streak of yours with everything I have. So don’t you talk about dropping out of school.”
“But I’ll really do it,” he answered. “I don’t want you to even kid yourself into thinking I won’t. I’ll be eighteen in February, and I’ll do it on my own then if you don’t stay out of this from now on. Do you understand me?”
“Go to bed,” she said tearfully. “Go to bed, you’re breaking my heart.”
“Am I?” Shockingly, he laughed. “Hurts, doesn’t it? I know.”
He left then, walking slowly, the limp pulling his body slightly to the left. Shortly she heard the heavy, tired clump of his shoes on the stairs—also a sound terribly reminiscent of her childhood, when she had thought to herself, The ogre’s going to bed.
She burst into a fresh spasm of weeping, got up clumsily, and went out the back door to do her crying in private. She held herself—thin comfort, but better than none—and looked up at a horned moon that was quadrupled through the film of her tears. Everything had changed, and it had happened with the speed of a cyclone. Her son hated her; she had seen it in his face—it wasn’t a tantrum, a temporary pique, a passing squall of adolescence. He hated her, and this wasn’t the way it was supposed to go with her good boy, not at all.
Not at all.
She stood on the stoop and cried until the tears began to run their course and the sobs became occasional hitchings and gasps. The cold gnawed her bare ankles above her mules and bit more bluntly through her housecoat. She went inside and upstairs. She stood outside Arnie’s room indecisively for almost a minute before going in.
He had fallen asleep on the coverlet of his bed. His pants were still on. He seemed more unconscious than asleep, and his face looked horribly old. A trick of the light, coming from the hall and falling into the room from over her shoulder, made it seem for a moment to her that his hair was thinning, that his sleep-gaping mouth was without teeth. A small squeal of horror strained itself through the hand clapped to her mouth and she hurried toward him.
Her shadow, which had been on the bed, moved with her and she saw it was only Arnie, the impression of age no more than the light and her own exhausted confusion.
She looked at his clock-radio and saw that it was set for 4:30 A.M. She thought of turning the alarm off; she even stretched her hand out to do it. Ultimately she found she couldn’t.
Instead she went down to her bedroom, sat down at the phone table, and picked up the handset. She held it for a moment, debating. If she called Mike in the middle of the night, he would think that…
That something terrible had happened?
She giggled. Well, hadn’t it? It surely had. And it was still happening.
She dialled the number of the Ramada Inn in Kansas City where her husband was staying, vaguely aware that she was, for the first time since she had left the grim and grimy three-story house in Rocksburg for college twenty-seven years before, calling for help.
28
Leigh Makes a Visit
She got through most of the story okay, sitting in one of the two visitors’ chairs with her knees pressed firmly together and her ankles crossed, neatly dressed in a multicolored wool sweater and a brown corduroy skirt. It was not until the end that she began to cry, and she couldn’t find a handkerchief. Dennis Guilder handed her the box of tissues from the table beside the bed.
“Take it easy, Leigh,” he said.
“I cuh-cuh-can’t! He hasn’t been to see me … and in school he just seems so tired … and you s-said he hasn’t been here—”
“He’ll come if he needs me,” Dennis said.
“You’re full of muh-macho b-bull-sh-sh-shit!” she said, and then looked comically stunned at what she had said. The tears had cut tracks in the light makeup she was wearing. She and Dennis looked at each other for a moment, and then they laughed. But it was brief laughter, and not really that good.
“Has Motormouth seen him?” Dennis asked.
“Who?”
“Motormouth. That’s what Lenny Barongg calls Mr. Vickers. The guidance counsellor.”
“Oh! Yes, I think he has. He was called to the guidance office the day before yesterday—Monday. But he didn’t say anything. And I didn’t dare ask him anything. He won’t talk. He’s gotten so strange.”
Dennis nodded. Although he didn’t think Leigh realized it—she was deep in her own trouble and confusion—he felt a sense of impotence and a deepening fear for Arnie. From the reports that had filtered into his room over the last few days, Arnie sounded on the verge of a nervous breakdown; Leigh’s report was only the most recent and the most graphic. He had never wanted to be out as badly as he did now. Of course, he could call Vickers and ask him if there was anything he could do. And he could call Arnie … except, from what Leigh had said, Arnie was now always at school, at Darnell’s, or sleeping. His father had come home early from some sort of convention and there had been another fight, Leigh had told him. Although Arnie had not come right out and said so, Leigh told Dennis she believed that he had come very close to simply leaving home.
Dennis didn’t want to talk to Arnie at Darnell’s.
“What can I do?” she asked him. “What would you do, in my place?”
“Wait,” Dennis said. “I don’t know what else you can do.”
“But that’s hardest,” she answered in a voice so low it was almost inaudible. Her hands were clenching and unclenching on the Kleenex, shredding it, dotting her brown skirt with speckles of lint. “My folks want me to stop seeing him—to drop him. They’re afraid … that Repperton and those other boys will do something else.”
“You’re pretty sure it was Buddy and his friends, huh?”
“Yes. Everybody is. Mr. Cunningham called the police even though Arnie told him not to. He said he’d settle the score in his own way, and that scared them both. It scares me, too. The police picked up Buddy Repperton, and one of his friends, the one they call Moochie … do you know who I mean?”
“Yes.”
“And the boy who works nights at the airport parking lot, they picked him up, too. Galton, his name is—”
“Sandy.”
“They thought he must have been in on it, that maybe he let them in.”
“He runs with them, all right,” Dennis said, “but he’s not quite as degenerate as the rest of them. I’ll say this, Leigh—if Arnie didn’t talk to you, someone sure did.”
“First Mrs. Cunningham and then
his father. I don’t think either of them knew the other one had talked to me. They’re …”
“Upset,” Dennis suggested.
She shook her head. “It’s more than that,” she said. “They both look like they were just … just mugged, or something. I can’t really feel sorry for her—all she wants is her own way, I think—but I could cry for Mr. Cunningham. He just seems so … so …” She trailed off and then began again. “When I got there yesterday afternoon after school, Mrs. Cunningham—she asked me to call her Regina, but I just can’t seem to do it—”
Dennis grinned.
“Can you do it?” Leigh asked.
“Well, yeah—but I’ve had a lot more practice.”
She smiled, the first good one of her visit. “Maybe that would make a difference. Anyway, when I went over, she was there but Mr. Cunningham was still at school … the University, I mean.”
“Yeah.”
“She took the whole week off—what there is of it. She said she couldn’t go back, even for the three days before Thanksgiving.”
“How does she look?”
“She looks shattered,” Leigh said, and reached for a fresh Kleenex. She began shredding the edges. “She looks ten years older than when I first met her a month ago.”
“And him? Michael?”
“Older, but tougher,” Leigh said hesitantly. “As if this had somehow … somehow gotten him into gear.”
Dennis was silent. He had known Michael Cunningham for thirteen years and had never seen him in gear, so he wouldn’t know. Regina had always been the one in gear; Michael trailed along in her wake and made the drinks at the parties (mostly faculty parties) the Cunninghams hosted. He played his recorder, he looked melancholy … but by no stretch of the imagination could Dennis say he had ever seen the man “in gear.”
The final triumph, Dennis’s father had said once, standing at the window and watching Regina lead Arnie by the hand down the Guilders’ walk to where Michael waited behind the wheel of the car. Arnie and Dennis had been perhaps seven then. Momism supreme. I wonder if she’ll make the poor slob wait in the car when Arnie gets married. Or maybe she can—
Dennis’s mother had frowned at her husband and shushed him by cutting her eyes at Dennis in a little-pitchers-have-big-ears gesture. He never forgot the gesture or what his father had said—at seven he hadn’t understood all of it, but even at seven he knew perfectly well what a “poor slob” was. And even at seven he vaguely understood why his father might think Michael Cunningham was one. He had felt sad for Michael Cunningham … and that feeling had held, off and on, right up to the present.
“He came in around the time she was finishing her story,” Leigh went on. “They asked me to stay for supper—Arnie has been eating down at Darnell’s—but I told them I really had to get back. So Mr. Cunningham offered me a ride, and I got his side on the way home.”
“Are they on different sides?”
“Not exactly, but … Mr. Cunningham was the one who went to see the police, for instance. Arnie didn’t want to, and Mrs. Cunningham—Regina—couldn’t bring herself to do it.”
Dennis asked cautiously, “He’s really trying to put Humpty back together again, huh?”
“Yes,” she whispered, and then burst out shrilly: “But that’s not all! He’s in deep with that guy Darnell, I know he is! Yesterday in period three study hall he told me he was going to drop a new front end into her—into his car—this afternoon and this evening, and I said won’t that be awfully expensive Arnie, and he said not to worry about it because his credit was good—”
“Slow down.”
She was crying again. “His credit was good because he and someone named Jimmy Sykes were going to do some errands for Will Friday and Saturday. That’s what he said. And … I don’t think the errands he does for that sonofabitch are legal!”
“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 b
y 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.”
