Arnie answered himself. “Hello?”
“Arnie, it’s Dennis.”
“Oh. Dennis.”
His voice sounded so odd and flat that I got a little scared.
“Arnie? Are you all right?”
“Huh? Sure. I thought you were taking Roseanne to the movies.”
“That’s where I’m calling from.”
“It must not be that exciting,” Arnie said. His voice was still flat—flat and dreary.
“Roseanne thinks it’s great.”
I thought that would get a laugh out of him but there was only a patient, waiting silence.
“Listen,” I said, “I thought of the answer.”
“Answer?”
“Sure,” I said, “LeBay. LeBay’s the answer.”
“Le—” he said in a strange, high voice… and then there was more silence. I was starting to get more than a little scared. I’d never known him to be quite this way.
“Sure,” I babbled. “LeBay. LeBay’s got a garage, and I got the idea that he’d eat a dead-rat sandwich if the profit margin looked high enough. If you were to approach him on the basis of, say, sixteen or seventeen bucks a week—”
“Very funny, Dennis.” His voice was cold and hateful.
“Arnie, what—”
He hung up.
I stood there, looking at the phone, wondering what the hell it was about. Some new move from his parents? Or had he maybe gone back to Darnell’s and found some new damage to his car? Or—
A sudden intuition—almost a certainty—struck me. I put the telephone back in its cradle and walked over to the concession stand and asked if they had today’s paper. The candy-and-popcorn girl finally fished it out and then stood there snapping her gum while I thumbed to the back, where they print the obituaries. I guess she wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to perform some weird perversion on it, or maybe eat it.
There was nothing at all—or so I thought at first. Then I turned the page and saw the headline. LIBERTYVILLE VETERAN DIES AT 71. There was a picture of Roland D. LeBay in his Army uniform, looking twenty years younger and considerably more bright-eyed than he had on the occasions Arnie and I had seen him. The obit was brief. LeBay had died suddenly on Saturday afternoon, He was survived by a brother, George, and a sister, Marcia. Funeral services were scheduled for Tuesday at two.
Suddenly.
In the obits it’s always “after a long illness”, “after a short illness”, or “suddenly”. Suddenly can mean anything from a brain embolism to electrocuting yourself in the bathtub. I remembered something I had done to Ellie when she was hardly more than a baby—three, maybe. I scared the bejesus out of her with a Jack-in-the-box. There was the little handle going around in big brother Dennis’s hand, making music. Not bad. Kind of fun. And then—kaBONZO! Out comes this guy with grinning face and an ugly hooked nose, almost hitting her in the eye. Ellie went off bawling to find her mother and I sat there, looking glumly at Jack as he nodded back and forth, knowing I was probably going to get hollered at, knowing that I probably deserved to get hollered at—I had known it was going to scare her, coming out of the music like that, all at once, with an ugly bang.
Coming out so suddenly.
I gave the paper back and stood there, looking blankly at the posters advertising NEXT ATTRACTION and COMING SOON.
Saturday afternoon.
Suddenly.
Funny how things sometimes worked out. My brainstorm had been that maybe Arnie could take Christine back where she had come from; maybe he could pay LeBay for space. Now it turned out that LeBay was dead. He had died, as a matter of fact, on the same day that Arnie had gotten into it with Buddy Repperton—the same day Buddy had smashed Christine’s headlights
All at once I had an irrational picture of Buddy Repperton swinging the jackhandle and at the exact same moment, LeBay’s eye gushes blood, he keels over, and suddenly, very suddenly…
Cut the shit, Dennis, I lectured. Just cut the—
And then, somewhere deep in my mind, somewhere near the centre, a voice whispered Come on, big guy, let’s cruise—and then fell still.
The girl behind the counter popped her gum and said, “You’re missing the end of the picture. Ending’s the best part.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
I started back toward the door of the theatre and then detoured to the drinking fountain. My throat was very dry.
Before I’d finished getting my drink, the doors opened and people came streaming out. Beyond and above their bobbing heads, I could see the credit-roll. Then Roseanne came out, looking around for me. She caught many appreciative glances and fielded them cleanly in that dreamy, composed way of hers.
“Den-Den,” she said, taking my arm. Being called Den-Den isn’t the worst thing in the world—having your eyes put out with a hot poker or having a leg amputated with a chainsaw is probably worse—but I’ve never really dug it all that much. “Where were you? You missed the ending. Ending’s—”
“—the best part,” I finished with her. “Sorry. I just had this call of nature. It came on very suddenly.”
“I’ll tell you all about it if you take me up to the Embankment for a while,” she said, pressing my arm against the soft sideswell of her breast. “If you want to talk, that is.”
“Did it have a happy ending?”
She smiled up at me, her eyes wide and sweet and a little dazed, as they always were. She held my arm even more tightly against her breast.
“Very happy,” she said. “I like happy endings, don’t you, Den-Den?”
“Love them,” I said. I should maybe have been thinking about the promise of her breast, but instead I found myself thinking about Arnie.
That night I had a dream again, only in this one Christine was old—no, not just old; she was ancient, a terrible hulk of a car, something you’d expect to see in a Tarot deck: instead of the Hanged Man, the Death Car. Something you could almost believe was as old as the pyramids. The engine roared and missed and jetted filthy blue oilsmoke.
It wasn’t empty. Roland D. LeBay was lolling behind the wheel. His eyes were open but they were glazed and dead. Each time the engine revved and Christine’s rust-eaten body vibrated, he flopped like a ragdoll. His peeling skull nodded back and forth.
Then the tyres screamed their terrible scream, the Plymouth lunged out of the garage at me, and as it did the rust melted away, the old, bleary glass clarified, the chrome winked with savage newness, and the old, balding tyres suddenly bloomed into plump new Wide Ovals, each tread seemingly as deep as the Grand Canyon.
It screamed at me, headlights glaring white circles of hate, and as I raised my hands in a stupid, useless, warding-off gesture, I thought, God, it’s unending fury—
I woke up.
I didn’t scream. That night I kept the scream in my throat.
Just barely.
I sat up in my bed. A cold puddle of moonlight caught me in a lapful of sheet, and I thought, Died suddenly.
That night I didn’t get back to sleep so quickly.
11
THE FUNERAL
Eldorado fins, whitewalls and skirts,
Rides just like a little bit of heaven here on earth,
Well buddy when I die throw my body in the back
And drive me to the junkyard in my Cadillac.
Brad Jeffries, our road-crew foreman, was in his midforties, balding, stocky, permanently sunburned. He liked to holler a lot—particularly when we were behind schedule—but he was a decent enough man. I went to see him during our coffee break to find out if Arnie had asked for part or all of the afternoon off.
“He asked for two hours, so he could go to a buryin,” Brad said. He took off his steel-rimmed glasses and massaged the red spots they had left on the sides of his nose. “Now don’t you ask—I’m losing you both at the end of the week anyway, and all the jerk-offs are staying.”