Oh and one other thing—I got a lot of time.
I read the paper; I asked questions of my visitors; and on more than a few occasions, as things went on and my suspicions began to get out of hand, I asked myself if I might not be losing my mind.
I was in the hospital until Christmas, and by the time I got home, my suspicions had almost taken their final shape. I was finding it more and more difficult to deny that monstrous shape, and I knew damned well I wasn’t losing my mind. In some ways it would have been better—more comforting—if I could have believed that. By then I was badly frightened, and more than half in love with my best friend’s girl, as well.
Time to think… too much time.
Time to call myself a hundred names for what I was thinking about Leigh. Time to took up at the ceiling of my room and wish I had never heard of Arnie Cunningham… or Leigh Cabot… or of Christine.
Part II
ARNIE—TEENAGE LOVE-SONGS
20
THE SECOND ARGUMENT
The Dealer came up to me and said, “Trade in your Fo’d, And I’ll put you in a car that’ll Eat up the road! Just tell me what you want and Sign that line, I’ll have it brought down to you In an hour’s time.” I’m gonna get me a car And I’ll be headed on down the road; Then I won’t have to worry about That broken-down, ragged Ford.
Arnie Cunningham’s 1958 Plymouth became street-legal on the afternoon of November 1, 1978. He finished the process, which had really begun the night he and Dennis Guilder had changed that first flat tyre, by paying an excise tax fee of $8.50, a municipal road tax of $2.00 (which also enabled him to park free at the meters in the downtown area), and a licence-plate fee of $15.00. He was issued Pennsylvania plate HY-6241-J at the Motor Vehicle Bureau in Monroeville.
He drove back from the MVB in a car Will Darnell had loaned him and rolled out of Darnell’s Do-It-Yourself Garage behind the wheel of Christine. He drove her home.
His father and mother arrived together from Horlicks University an hour or so later. The fight started almost at once.
“Did you see it?” Arnie asked, speaking to them both but perhaps a little more to his father. “I registered it just afternoon.”
He was proud; he had reason to be. Christine had just been washed and waxed, and she gleamed in the late afternoon autumn sunlight. There was still a lot of rust on her, but she looked a thousand times better than she had on the day Arnie bought her. The rocker panels, like the bonnet and the back seat, were brand new. The interior was spick and span and neat as a pin. The glass and the chrome gleamed.
“Yes, I—” Michael began.
“Of course we saw it,” Regina snapped. She was making a drink, spinning a swizzle-stick in a Waterford glass in furious counter-clockwise circles. “We almost ran into it. I don’t want it parked here. The place looks like a used-car lot.”
“Mom!” Arnie said, stunned and hurt. He looked to Michael, but Michael had left to make a drink of his own perhaps he had decided he was going to need it.
“Well it does,” Regina Cunningham said, Her face was a trifle paler than usual; the rouge on her cheeks stood out almost like clown-colour. She knocked back half of her gin and tonic at a swallow, grimacing the way people grimace at the taste of bad medicine. “Take it back where you had it. I don’t want it here and I won’t have it here, Arnie. That’s final.”
“Take it back?” Arnie said, now angry as well as hurt. “That’s great, isn’t it? It’s costing me twenty bucks a week there!”
“It’s costing you a lot more than that,” Regina said. She drained her drink and set the glass down. She turned to look at him. “I took a look at your bankbook the other day—”
“You did what?” Arnie’s eyes widened.
She flushed a little but did not drop her eyes. Michael came back and stood in the doorway, looking unhappily from his wife to his son.
“I wanted to know how much you’d been spending on that damned car,” she said. “Is that so unnatural? You have to go to college next year, So far as I know they’re not giving away many free college educations in Pennsylvania.”
“So you just went into my room and hunted around until you found my bankbook?” Arnie said. His grey eyes were hard with anger, “Maybe you were hunting for pot, too. Or girlie books. Or maybe come-stains on the sheets.”
Regina’s mouth dropped open. She had perhaps expected hurt and anger from him, but not this utter, no-holds-barred fury.
“Arnie!” Michael roared.
“Well, why not?” Arnie shouted back. “I thought that was my business! God knows you spent enough time telling me how it was my responsibility, the both of you!”
Regina said, “I’m very disappointed that you feel that way, Arnold. Disappointed and hurt. You’re behaving like—”
“Don’t tell me how I’m behaving! How do you think I feel? I work my ass off getting the car street-legal—over two and a half months I worked on it—and when I bring it home, the first thing you say is get it out of the driveway. How am I supposed to feel? Happy?”
“There’s no reason to take that tone to your mother,” Michael said. In spite of the words, the tone was one of awkward conciliation. “Or to use that sort of language.” Regina held her glass out to her husband. “Make me another drink. There’s a fresh bottle of gin in the pantry.”
“Dad, stay here,” Arnie said. “Please, Let’s get this over.”
Michael Cunningham looked at his wife; his son; at his wife again. He saw flint in both places. He retreated to the kitchen clutching his wife’s glass.
Regina turned grimly back to her son. The wedge had been in the door since late last summer; she had perhaps recognized this as her last chance to kick it back out again.
“This July you had almost four thousand dollars in the bank,” she said. “About three-quarters of all the money you’ve made since ninth grade, plus interest—”
“Oh, you’ve really been keeping track, haven’t you?” Arnie said. He sat down suddenly, gazing at his mother. His tone was one of disgusted surprise. “Mom—why didn’t you just take the damn money and put it in an account under your own name?”
“Because,” she said, “until recently, you seemed to understand what the money was for. In the last couple of months it’s all been car-car-car and more recently girl-girl-girl. It’s as if you’ve gone insane on both subjects.”
“Well, thanks. I can always use a nice, unprejudiced opinion on the way I’m conducting my life.”
“This July you had almost four thousand dollars. For your education, Arnie. For your education. Now you have just over twenty-eight hundred. You can go on about snooping all you want—and I admit it hurts a little—but that’s a fact. You’ve gone through twelve hundred dollars in two months. Maybe that’s why I don’t want to look at that car. You ought to be able to understand that. To me it looks like—”
“Listen—”
“—like a great big dollar bill flying away.”
“Can I tell you a couple of things?”
“No, I don’t think so, Arnie,” she said with finality. “I really don’t think so.”
Michael had come back with her glass, half full of gin. He added tonic at the bar and handed it to her. Regina drank, making that bitter grimace of distaste again. Arnie sat in the chair near the TV, looking at her thoughtfully.
“You teach college?” he said. “You teach college and that’s your attitude?”
“I have spoken. The rest of you can just shut up.”
“Great. I pity your students.”
“You watch it, Arnie,” she said, pointing a finger at him. “Just watch it.”