And oh God I had such a case of the creeps.
We saw the New Year in.
Arnie produced a couple of noisemakers and party favours—the kind that go bang and then release a cloud of tiny crepe streamers. We toasted 1979 and talked a little more on neutral subjects such as the Phillies’ disappointing collapse in the playoffs and the Steelers’ chances of going all the way to the Super Bowl.
The bowl of popcorn was down to the old maids and the burny-bottoms when I took myself in hand and asked one of the questions I had been avoiding. “Arnie? What do you think happened to Darnell?”
He glanced at me sharply, then glanced back at the TV, where couples with New Year’s confetti in their hair were dancing. He drank some more beer. “The people he was doing business with shut him up before he could talk too much. That’s what I think happened.”
“The people he was working for?”
“Will used to say the Southern Mob was bad,” Arnie said, “but that the Colombians were even worse.”
“Who are the “The Colombians?” Arnie laughed cynically. “Cocaine cowboys, that’s who the Colombians are. Will used to claim they’d kill you if you even looked at one of their women the wrong way—and sometimes if you looked at her the right way. Maybe it was the Colombians. It was messy enough to be them.”
“Were you running coke for Darnell?”
He shrugged. “I was running stuff for Will. I only moved coke for him once or twice, and I thank Christ that I didn’t have anything worse than untaxed cigarettes when they picked me up. They caught me dead-bang. Bad shit. But if the situation was the same, I’d probably do it again. Will was a dirty, scuzzy old sonofabitch, but in some ways he was okay.” His eyes grew veiled, strange. “Yeah, in some ways he was okay. But he knew too much. That’s why he got wasted. He knew too much… and sooner or later he would have said something, Probably it was the Colombians. Crazy fuckers.”
“I don’t get you. And it’s not my business, I suppose.”
He looked at me, grinned, and winked. “It was Vietnam,” he said. “At least, it was supposed to be. There was a guy named Henry Buck. He was supposed to rat on me. I was supposed to rat on Will. And then—the big casino—Will was supposed to rat on the people down South that were selling him the dope and the fireworks and cigarettes and booze. Those were the people Ju—the cops really wanted, Especially the Colombians.”
“And you think they killed him?”
He looked at me flatly. “Them or the Southern Mob, sure. Who else?”
I shook my head.
“Well,” he said, “Let’s have another beer and then I’ll give you a lift home. I enjoyed this, Dennis, I really did.” There was a ring of truth in that, but Arnie would never have made a dorky comment like “I enjoyed this, I really did.” Not the old Arnie.
“Yeah, me too, man.”
I didn’t want another beer, but I took one anyway. I wanted to put off the inevitable moment of getting into Christine. This afternoon it had seemed a necessary step to sample the atmosphere of that car itself… if there was any atmosphere to sample. Now it seemed a frightening and crazy idea. I felt the secret of what Leigh and I were becoming to each other like a large, breakable egg in my head.
Tell me, Christine, can you read minds?
I felt a crazy laugh coming up my throat and dumped beer on it.
“Listen,” I said. “I can call my dad to come and get me, if you want, Arnie. He’ll still be up.”
“No problem,” Arnie said. “I could walk two miles of straight line, don’t worry.”
“I just thought—”
“Bet you’re anxious to be able to drive yourself around again, huh?”
“Yeah, I am.”
“There’s nothing finer than being behind the wheel of your own car,” Arnie said, and then his left eye slipped down in a bleary old roué’s wink. “Except maybe pussy.”
The time came. Arnie snapped off the TV and I crutched my way across the kitchen and worked into my old ski parka, hoping that Michael and Regina would come in from their party and delay things a while longer—maybe Michael would smell beer on Arnie’s breath and offer me a ride. The memory of the afternoon I had slipped behind Christine’s wheel, when Arnie was in LeBay’s house, dickering with the old sonofabitch, was all too clear in my mind.
Arnie had gotten a couple of beers from the fridge—“for the road”, he said. I considered telling him that if he got picked up DWI while he was on bail, he’d probably go to jail before he could turn around. Then I decided I better keep my mouth shut. We went out.
The first early morning of 1979 was deeply, clearly cold, the kind of cold that makes the moisture in your nose freeze in seconds. The snowbanks ringing the driveway glittered with billions of diamond crystals. And there sat Christine, her black windows cauled with frost. I stared at her. The Mob, Arnie had said. The Southern Mob or the Colombians. It sounded melodramatic but possible—no, more; it sounded plausible. But the Mob shot people, pushed them out of windows, strangled them. According to legend, Al Capone had disposed of one poor sucker with a lead-cored baseball bat. But to drive a car over some guy’s snow covered lawn and slam it through the side of his house and into his living room?
The Colombians, maybe. Arnie said the Colombians are crazy. But that crazy? I didn’t think so.
She glittered in the light from the house and the stars, and what if it was her? And what if she found out that Leigh and I had our suspicions? Worse yet, what if she found out that we had been fooling around?
“You need help on the steps, Dennis?” Arnie asked, startling me.
“No, I can handle the steps,” I said. “You might have to give me a hand on the path.”
“No problem, man.”
I got down the kitchen steps sidesaddle, clutching the railing in one hand and my crutches in the other. On the path, I set them under me, got out a couple of steps, and then slipped. A dull thud of pain rumbled up my left leg, the one that still wasn’t worth doodly-squat. Arnie grabbed me.
“Thanks,” I said, glad of a chance to sound shaky.
“No sweat.”
We got over to the car, and Arnie asked if I could get in by myself. He left me and crossed around the front of Christine’s hood. I got hold of the doorhandle with one gloved hand, and a hopeless feeling of dread and revulsion swept over me. It wasn’t until then that I really began to believe it, deep inside, where a person lives. Because that doorhandle felt alive under my hand. It felt like some living beast that was asleep. The doorhandle didn’t feel like chromed steel; dear Christ, it felt like skin. It seemed as if I could squeeze it and wake the beast up, roaring.
Beast?
Okay, what beast?
What was it? Some sort of afreet? An ordinary car that had somehow become the dangerous, stinking dwelling-place of a demon? A weird manifestation of LeBay’s lingering personality, a hellish haunted house that rolled on Goodyear rubber? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I was scared, terrified. I didn’t think I could go through with this.
“Hey, you okay?” Arnie asked. “Can you make it?”
“I can make it,” I said hoarsely, and jammed my thumb down on the button below the handle. I opened the door, turned my back on the seat, and let myself fall backward onto it, left leg extending stiffly. I got hold of my leg and swung it in. It was like moving a piece of furniture. My heart was triphammering in my chest. I pulled the door shut.
Arnie turned the key and the motor rumbled to life—as if the engine were hot instead of dead cold. And the smell assaulted me, seeming to come from everywhere, but most of all seeming to pour up from the upholstery: the sick, rotten smell of death and decay.
I don’t know how to tell you about that ride home, that three-mile ride that lasted no more than ten or twelve minutes, without sounding like an escapee from a lunatic asylum. There is no way to be objective about it; just sitting here and trying is enough to make me feel cold and hot at the same time, feverish and ill. There is no way to separate what was real and what my mind might have manufactured; no dividing line between objective and subjective, between the truth and horrified hallucination. But it wasn’t drunkenness; if I can assure you of nothing else, I can assure you of that. Any mild high I retained from the beer evaporated immediately. What followed was a cold-sober tour of the country of the damned.