“Dennis! Where are you?”
“The Libertyville Lunch. Are you alone?”
“Yes. Dad’s at work and Mom went grocery shopping. Dennis, I… I almost told her everything. I started thinking about her parking at the A&P and crossing the parking lot, and… I don’t know, what you said about Arnie leaving town didn’t seem to matter. It still made sense, but it didn’t seem to matter. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking about giving Ellie a lift down to Tom’s the night before, even though my leg was aching like hell by then. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“Dennis, it can’t go on like this. I’ll go crazy. Are we still going to try your idea?”
“Yes,” I said. “Leave your mom a note, Leigh. Tell her you have to be gone for a little while. Don’t say any more than that. When you’re not home for supper, your folks will probably call mine. Maybe they’ll decide we ran off and eloped.”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” she said, and laughed in a way that gave me prickles. “I’ll see you.”
“Hey, one other thing. Is there any pain-killer in your house? Darvon? Anything like that?”
“There’s some Darvon from the time Dad threw his back out,” she said. “Is it your leg, Dennis?”
“It hurts a little.”
“How much is a little?”
“It’s really okay.”
“No B.S.?”
“No B.S. And after tonight I’ll give it a nice long rest, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Get here as quick as you can.”
She came in as I was ordering a second cup of coffee, wearing a fur-fringed parka and a pair of faded jeans. The jeans were tucked into battered Frye boots. She managed to look both sexy and practical. Heads turned.
“Looking good,” I said, and kissed her temple.
She passed me a bottle of grey and pink gel capsules.
“You don’t look so hot, though, Dennis. Here.”
The waitress, a woman of about fifty with iron-grey hair, came over with my coffee. The cup sat placidly, an island in a small brown pond in the saucer. “Why aren’t you kids in school?” she asked.
“Special dispensation,” I said gravely. She stared at me.
“Coffee, please,” Leigh said, pulling off her gloves. As the waitress went back behind the counter with an audible sniff, she leaned toward me and said, “It would be pretty funny if we got picked up by the truant officer, wouldn’t it?”
“Hilarious,” I said, thinking that, in spite of the radiance the cold had given her, Leigh really wasn’t looking all that good. I didn’t think either of us really would be until this thing was over. There were small strain-lines around her eyes, as if she had slept poorly the night before.
“So what do we do?”
“We get rid of it,” I said. “Wait until you see your chariot, madam.”
“My God!” Leigh said, staring at Petunia’s hot-pink magnificence. It bulked silently in the Western Auto parking lot, dwarfing a Chevy van on one side and a Volkswagen on the other. “What is it?”
“Kaka sucker,” I said with a straight face.
She looked at me, puzzled… and then she burst into hysterical gales of laughter. I wasn’t sorry to see it happen. When I had told her about my confrontation with Arnie in the student parking lot that morning, those strain-lines on her face had grown deeper and deeper, her lips whitening as they pressed together.
“I know that it looks sort of ridiculous—” I said now.
“That’s putting it mildly,” she replied, still giggling and hiccupping.
“—but it’ll do the job, if anything will.”
“Yes. Yes, I suppose it should. And… it’s not exactly unfitting, is it?”
I nodded. “I had that thought.”
“Well, let’s get in,” she said. “I’m cold.”
She climbed up into the cab ahead of me, her nose wrinkling. “Ag,” she said.
I smiled. “You get used to it.” I handed her my crutches and climbed laboriously up behind the wheel. The pain in my left leg had subsided from a series of sharp clawings to a dull throb again; I had taken two Darvon back in the restaurant.
“Dennis, is your leg going to be all right?”
“It’ll have to be,” I said, and slammed the door.
51
CHRISTINE
As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking,—
John I sd, which was not his name,
the darkness surrounds us, what can we do against it,
or else, shall we & why not,
buy a goddam big car,
drive, he sd, for christ’s sake,
look out where yr going.
It was eleven-thirty or so when we pulled out of the Western Auto parking lot. The first spats of snow were coming down. I drove across town to the Sykes’s house, changing gear more easily now as the Darvon took hold.
The house was dark and locked, Mrs Sykes maybe at work, Jimmy maybe off collecting his unemployment or something. Leigh found a crumpled-up envelope in her handbag, scratched off her address and wrote Jimmy Sykes across the front in her slanting, pretty hand. She put Jimmy’s keyring into the envelope, folded in the flap, and slipped it through the letter-slot in the front door. While she did that, I let Petunia idle in neutral, resting my leg.
“What now?” she asked, climbing back into the cab.
“Another phone call,” I said.
Out near the intersection of JFK Drive and Crescent Avenue, I found a telephone booth. I got carefully out of the truck, holding on until Leigh handed down my crutches. Then I made my way carefully through the thickening snow to the booth. Seen through the dirty phone-booth glass and the swirling snow, Petunia looked like some strange pink dinosaur.
I called Horlicks University and went through the switchboard to get Michael’s office. Arnie had told me once that his dad was a real office drone, always brown-bagging it at lunch and staying in. Now, as the phone was picked up on the second ring, I blessed him for it.
“Dennis! I tried to reach you at home! Your mom said—”
“Where’s he going?” My stomach was cold. It wasn’t until then—at that exact moment—that all of it began to seem completely real to me, and I began to think that this crazy confrontation was going to come off.
“How did you know he was going? You’ve got to tell me—”
“I don’t have time for questions, and I couldn’t answer them anyway. Where is he going?”
Slowly, he said, “He and Regina are going to Penn State this afternoon right after school. Arnie called her this morning and asked her if she’d go with him. He said…” He paused, thinking. “He said he felt as if he’d suddenly come to his senses. He said it just sort of hit him as he was going to school this morning that if he didn’t do something definite about college, it might slip away from him. He told her he’d decided Penn State was the best bet and asked her if she’d like to go up with him and help talk to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and to some of the people in the history and philosophy departments.”
The booth was cold. My hands were starting to go numb. Leigh was high up in Petunia’s wheelhouse, watching me anxiously. How well you arranged things, Arnie, I thought. Still the chess-player. He was manipulating his mother, putting her on strings and making her dance. I felt some pity for her, but not as much as I might have felt. How many times had Regina herself been the manipulator, dancing others across her stage like so many Punch and Judys? Now, white she was half-distracted with fear and shame, LeBay had dangled in front of her eyes the one thing absolutely guaranteed to make her come running: the possibility that things might just be returning to normal.
“And did all that ring true to you?” I asked Michael.
“Of course not!” he burst out. “It wouldn’t have rung true to her, if she was thinking straight! With college admissions what they are today, Penn State would enrol him in July, if he had the money for tuition and the College Board scores—and Arnie has both. He talked as if this were the fifties instead of the seventies!”