That was true.
But it wasn’t all, Leigh, was it? No. It wasn’t all.
In one way, nothing worse could have happened. Love slows down reaction time; it mutes the sense of danger. My conversation with George LeBay was twelve long days in the past, and thinking about the things he had said—and worse, the things he had suggested—no longer raised the hair on the back of my neck.
The same was true—or not true—of the few times I talked with Arnie or glimpsed him in the halls. In a strange way, we seemed to be back in September and October again, when we had grown apart simply because Arnie was so busy. When we did talk he seemed pleasant enough, although the grey eyes behind his specs were cool. I waited for a wailing Regina or a distraught Michael to call me on the phone with the news that Arnie had finally stopped toying with them and had given up the idea of college in the fall for certain.
That didn’t happen, and it was from Motormouth himself—our guidance counsellor—that I heard Arnie had taken home a lot of literature on the University of Pennsylvania, Drew University, and Penn State. Those were the schools Leigh was most interested in. I knew it, and Arnie knew it—too.
Two nights earlier, I had happened to overhear my mother and my sister Ellie in the kitchen.
“Why doesn’t Arnie ever come over anymore, Mom?” Ellie asked. “Did he and Dennis have a fight?”
“No, honey,” my mother answered. “I don’t think so. But when friends get older… sometimes they grow apart.”
“That’s never going to happen to me,” Ellie said, with all the awesome conviction of the just-turned-fifteen.
I sat in the other room, wondering if maybe that was really all it was—hallucination brought on by my long stay in the hospital, as LeBay had suggested, and a simple growing-apart, a developing space between two childhood friends. I could see a certain logic to it, even down to my fixation on Christine, the wedge that had come between us.
It ignored the hard facts, but it was comfortable. To believe such a thing would allow Leigh and me to pursue our ordinary lives—to get involved in school activities, to do a little extra cramming for the Scholastic Achievement Tests in March, and, of course, to jump into each other’s arms as soon as her parents or mine left the room. To neck like what we were, which was a couple of horny teenagers totally infatuated with each other.
Those things lulled me… lulled us both. We had been careful—as careful, in fact, as adulterers instead of a couple of kids—but today the cast had come off, today I had been able to use the keys to my Duster again instead of just looking at them, and on an impulse I had called Leigh up and asked her if she’d like to go out to the world-famous Colonel’s with me for a little of his world-famous Crunchy Style. She had been delighted.
So maybe you see how our attention waned, how we became the smallest bit indiscreet. We sat in the parking lot, the Duster’s engine running so we could have some heat, and we talked about putting an end to that old and infinitely clever she-monster like a couple of children playing cowboys.
Neither of us saw Christine when she pulled up behind us.
“He’s buckling down for a long siege, if that’s what it takes,” I said.
“What?”
“The colleges he applied to. Hasn’t it hit you yet?”
“I guess not,” she said, mystified.
“They’re the schools you’re most interested in,” I said patiently.
She looked at me. I looked back, trying to smile, not making it.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go over it one more time. Molotov cocktails are out. Dynamite looks risky, but in a pinch—”
Leigh’s harsh gasp stopped me right there—that, and the expression of startled horror on her face. She was staring out through the windscreen, eyes wide, mouth open. I turned in that direction, and what I saw was so stunning that for a moment I was immobilized too.
Arnie was standing in front of my Duster.
He had parked directly behind us and gone in to get his chicken without realizing who it was, and why should he? It was nearly dark, and one splashed and muddy four-year-old Duster looks pretty much like another. He had gone in, had gotten his chow, had come out again… and stared right in through the windscreen at Leigh and me, sitting close together, our arms around each other, looking deep into each other’s eyes, as the poets say. Nothing but a coincidence—a grisly, hideous coincidence. Except that even now a part of my mind is coldly convinced that it was Christine that even at that turn, Christine led him there.
There was a long, frozen moment. A little moan escaped Leigh’s throat. Arnie stood not quite halfway across the small parking lot, dressed in his high school jacket, faded jeans, boots. A plaid scarf was tied around his throat. The collar of his jacket was turned up, and its black wings framed a face that was slowly twisting from an expression of sick incredulity into a pallid grimace of hate, The red-and-white-striped bag with the Colonel’s smiling face on it slipped out of one of his gloved hands and thumped onto the packed snow of the parking lot.
“Dennis,” Leigh whispered. “Dennis, oh my God.”
He began to run. I thought he was coming to the car, probably to haul me out and work me over. I could see myself hopping feebly around on my not-so-good good leg under the parking-lot lights that had just come on while Arnie, whose life I had saved all those years going back to kindergarten, beat the living Jesus out of me. He ran, his mouth twisted down in a snarl I had seen before—but not on his face. It was LeBay’s face now.
He didn’t stop at my car; instead he ran right past. I twisted around, and that was when I saw Christine.
I got my door open and began to struggle out, grabbing onto the roof gutter for support. The cold numbed my fingers almost at once.
“Dennis, no!” Leigh cried.
I got on my feet just as Arnie raked open Christine’s door.
“Arnie!” I shouted. “Hey, man!”
His head jerked up. His eyes were wide and blank and glaring. A line of spittle was working its way down from one corner of his mouth. Christine’s grille seemed to be snarling too.
He raised both fists and shook them at me. “You shitter!” His voice was high and cracked. “Have her! You deserve her! She’s shit! You’re both shit! Have each other! You won’t for long!”
People had come to the plate-glass windows of the Kentucky Fried Chicken and the neighbouring Kowloon Express to see what was going on.
“Arnie! Let’s talk, man—”
He jumped in the car and slammed her door. Christine’s engine screamed and her headlights came on, the glaring white eyes of my dream, pinning me like a bug on a card. And over them, behind the glass, was Arnie’s terrible face, the face of a devil sick of sin. That face, both hateful and haunted, has lived in my dreams ever since. Then the face was gone. It was replaced by a skull, a grinning death’s head.
Leigh uttered a high, piercing scream. She had turned around to look, so I knew that it wasn’t just my imagination. She had seen it too.
Christine roared forward, her rear tyres spinning snow back. She didn’t come for the Duster, but for me. I think his intention was to grind me to jelly between his car and mine. It was only my bad left leg that saved me; it buckled and I fell back inside my Duster, bumping my right hip on the wheel and honking the horn.