I almost told him—the car it was Amie’s goddam car, Christine the Rust Queen, twenty years old, ugly fucking thing. I almost told him. But then somehow it choked in my throat, almost as if to speak would have been to betray my friend. Good old Arnie, whom a fun-loving God had decided to swat with the ugly-stick.
“All right,” he said, and kissed my cheek. I could feel his beard, those stiff little bristles that only come out at night, I could smell his sweat and feel his love. I hugged him hard, and he hugged me back.
Then they were all gone, and I lay there with the bedtable lamp burning, afraid to go back to sleep. I got a book and lay back down, knowing that my folks were lying awake downstairs in their room, wondering if I was in some kind of a mess, or if I had gotten someone else—the cheerleader with the fantastic body, maybe—in some kind of a mess.
I decided sleep was an impossibility. I would read until daylight and catch a nap tomorrow afternoon, maybe, during the dull part of the ballgame. And thinking that, I fell asleep and woke up in the morning with the book lying unopened on the floor beside the bed.
8
FIRST CHANGES
If I had money
I will tell you what I’d do,
I would go downtown and buy a Mercury or two,
I would buy me a Mercury,
And cruise up and down this road.
I thought Arnie would turn up that Saturday, so I hung around the house—mowed the lawn, cleaned up the garage, even washed all three cars. My mother watched all this industry with some amazement and commented over a lunch of hotdogs and green salad that maybe I should have nightmares more often.
I didn’t want to phone Arnie’s house, not after all the unpleasantness I had seen there lately, but when the pre-game show came on and he still hadn’t shown, I took my courage in my hands and called. Regina answered, and although she was doing a good facsimile of nothing-has-changed, I thought I detected a new coolness in her voice. It made me feel sad. Her only son had been seduced by a baggy old whore named Christine, and old buddy Dennis must have been an accomplice. Maybe he had even pimped the deal. Arnie wasn’t home, she said. He was at Darnell’s Garage. He had been there since nine that morning.
“Oh,” I said lamely. “Oh, wow. I didn’t know that.” It sounded like a lie. Even more, it felt like a lie.
“No?” Regina said in that new cool way. “Goodbye, Dennis.”
The phone was dead in my hand. I looked at it awhile and then hung up.
Dad was parked in front of the TV in his gross purple Bermudas and his Jesus-shoes, a six-pack of Stroh’s crashed down in the cooler beside him. The Phillies were having a good day, belting the almighty hell out of Atlanta. My mom had gone out to visit one of her classmates (I think they read each other their sketches and poems and got exalted together). Elaine had gone over, to her friend Della’s house. Our place was quiet; outside, the sun played tag with a few benign white clouds. Dad gave me a beer, which he does only when he’s feeling extraordinarily mellow.
But Saturday still felt flat. I kept thinking of Arnie, not watching the Phillies or soaking up the rays, not even mowing the grass over at his house and getting his feet green. Arnie in the oily shadows of Will Darnell’s Do-It-Yourself Garage, playing games with that silent, rusting hulk while men shouted and tools clanged on the cement with that piercing white-metal sound, the machine-gun drill of pneumatic guns loosening old bolts. Will Darnell’s wheezy voice and asthmatic cough—
And goddammit, was I jealous? Was that what it was?
When the seventh inning came along I got up and started to go out.
“Where are you going?” my dad asked.
Yeah, just where was I going? Down there? To watch him, cluck over him, listen to Will Darnell get on his case? Heading for another dose of misery? Fuck it. Arnie was a big boy now.
“Noplace,” I said. I found a Twinkie tucked carefully away in the back of the breadbox and took it with a certain doleful glee, knowing how pissed Elaine was going to be when she shlepped out during one of the commercials on Saturday Night Live and found it gone. “Noplace at all.”
I came back into the living room and sat down and cadged another beer off my dad and ate Elaine’s Twinkie and even lapped the cardboard it had been on. We watched Philly finish the job of ruining Atlanta (“They roont em, Denny,” I could hear my grandfather, now five years dead, saying in his cackly old man’s voice, “they roont em good!”) and didn’t think about Arnie Cunningiiam at all.
Hardly at all.
He came over on his tacky old three-speed the next afternoon while Elaine and I were playing croquet on the back lawn. Elaine kept accusing me of cheating. She was on one of her rips. Elaine always went on “rips” when she was “getting her period”. Elaine was very proud of her period. She had been having one regularly all of fourteen months.
“Hey,” Arnie said, ambling round the corner of the house, “it’s either the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Bride of Frankenstein or Dennis and Ellie.”
“What do you say, man?” I asked. “Grab a mallet.”
“I’m not playing,” Elaine said, throwing her mallet down. “He cheats even worse than you do. Men!”
As she stalked off, Arnie said in a trembling affected voice, “That’s the first time she ever called me a man, Dennis.”
He fell to his knees, a look of exalted adoration on his face. I started laughing. He could do it good when he wanted to, Arnie could. That was one of the reasons I liked him as well as I did. And it was a kind of secret thing, you know. I don’t think anyone really saw that wit except me. I once heard about some millionaire who had a stolen Rembrandt in his basement where no one but him could see it. I could understand that guy. I don’t mean that Arnie was a Rembrandt, or even a world-class wit, but I could understand the attraction of knowing about something good… something that was good but still a secret.
We goofed around the croquet course for a while, not really playing, just whopping the Jesus out of each other’s balls. Finally, one went through the hedge into the Blackfords’ yard, and after I crawled through to get it, neither of us wanted to play anymore. We sat down in the lawn chairs. Pretty soon our cat, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Captain Beefheart’s replacement, came creeping out from under the porch, probably hoping to find some cute little chipmunk to murder slowly and nastily. His amber-green eyes glinted in the afternoon light, which was overcast and muted.
“Thought you’d be over for the game yesterday,” I said. “It was a good one.”
“I was at Darnell’s,” he said. “Heard it on the radio, though.” His voice went up three octaves and he did a very good imitation of my grandad. “They roont em! They roont em, Denny!”
I laughed and nodded. There was something about him that day—perhaps it was only the light, which was bright enough but still somehow gloomy and spare—something that looked different. He looked tired, for one thing there were circles under his eyes—but at the same time his complexion seemed a trifle better than it had been lately. He had been drinking a lot of Cokes on the job, knowing he shouldn’t, of course, but unable to help succumbing to temptation from time to time. His skin problems tended to go in cycles, as most teenagers’ do, depending on their moods—except in Arnie’s case, the cycles were usually from bad to worse and back to bad again.
Or maybe it was just the light.
“What’d you do on it?” I asked.
“Not much. Changed the oil. Looked the block over. It’s not cracked, Dennis, that’s one thing. LeBay or somebody left the drain plug out somewhere along the line, that’s all. A lot of the old oil had leaked out. I was lucky not to fry a piston driving it Friday night.”