Dennis nodded.
“But it’s all so… so mad! His parents offered to buy him a good used car to replace Christine, and he said no. Then Mr Cunningham told me on the ride home that he offered to buy Arnie a new car… to cash in some bonds he’s held ever since 1955. Arnie said no, he couldn’t just take a present like that. And Mr Cunningham said he could understand that, and it didn’t have to be a present, that Arnie could pay him back, that he’d even take interest if that was what Arnie wanted… Dennis, do you see what I’m saying?”
“Yeah,” Dennis said. “It can’t be just any car. It’s got to be that car. Christine.”
“But to me that seems obsessive. He’s found one object and fixed on it. Isn’t that what an obsession is? I’m scared, and sometimes I feel hateful… but it’s not him I’m scared of. It’s not him I hate. It’s that frig—no, it’s that fucking car. That bitch Christine.”
High colour bloomed in her cheeks. Her eyes narrowed. The corners of her mouth turned down. Her face was suddenly no longer beautiful, not even pretty; the light on it was pitiless, changing it into something that was ugly but all the same striking, compelling. Dennis realized for the first time why they called it the monster, the green-eyed monster.
I’ll tell you what I wish would happen,” Leigh said. “I wish somebody would take his precious fucking Christine out back some night by mistake, out where they put the junks from Philly Plains.” Her eyes sparkled venomously. “And the next day I wish that crane with the big round magnet would come and pick it up and put it in the crusher and I wish someone would push the button and what would come out would be a little cube of metal about three by three by three. Then this would be over, wouldn’t it?”
Dennis didn’t answer, and after a moment he could almost see the monster turn around and wrap its scaly tail around itself and steal out of her face. Her shoulders sagged.
“Guess that sounds pretty horrible, doesn’t it? Like saying I wish those hoods had finished the job.”
“I understand how you feel.”
“Do you?” she challenged.
Dennis thought of Arnie’s look as he had pounded his fists on the dashboard. The kind of maniacal light that came into his eyes when he was around her. He thought of sitting behind the wheel in LeBay’s garage, and the kind of vision that had come over him.
Last of all, he thought of his dream: headlights bearing down on him in the high womanscream of burning rubber.
“Yes,” he said. “I think I do.”
They looked at each other in the hospital room.
29
THANKSGIVING
Two-three hours passed us by,
Altitude dropped to 505,
Fuel consumption way too thin,
Let’s get home before we run out of gas.
Now you can’t catch me—
No, baby, you can’t catch me—
’Cause if you get too close,
I’m gone like a cooool breeze.
At the hospital they served Thanksgiving dinner in shifts from eleven in the morning until one in the afternoon. Dennis got his at quarter past twelve: three careful slices of white turkey breast, one careful ladleful of brown gravy, a scoop of instant mashed potatoes the exact size and shape of a baseball (lacking only the red stitches, he thought with sour amusement), a like scoop of frozen squash that was an arrogant fluorescent orange, and a small plastic container of cranberry jelly. For dessert there was ice cream. Resting on the corner of his tray was a small blue card.
Wise to the ways of the hospital by now—once you have been treated for the first set of bedsores to crop up on your ass, Dennis had discovered, you’re wiser to the ways of the hospital than you ever wanted to be—he asked the candy-striper who came to take away his tray what the yellow and red cards got for their Thanksgiving dinner. It turned out that the yellow cards got two pieces of turkey, no gravy, potato, no squash, and Jell-O for dessert. The red cards got one slice of white meat, pureed, and potato. Fed to them, in most cases.
Dennis found it all pretty depressing. It was only too easy to imagine his mother bringing a great big crackling capon to the dining-room table around four in the afternoon, his father sharpening his carving knife, his sister, flushed with importance and excitement, a red velvet ribbon in her hair, pouring each of them a glass of good red wine. It was also easy to imagine the good smells, the laughter as they sat down.
Easy to imagine… but probably a mistake.
It was, in fact, the most depressing Thanksgiving of his life. He drifted off into an unaccustomed early afternoon nap (no Physical Therapy because of the holiday) and dreamed an unsettling dream in which several candy-stripers walked through the IC ward and slapped turkey decals onto the life-support machinery and IV drips.
His mother, father, and sister had come over to visit for an hour in the morning, and for the first time he had sensed in Ellie an anxiousness to be gone. They had been invited over to the Callisons” for a light Thanksgiving brunch, and Lou Callison, one of the three Callison boys, was fourteen and “cute”. Her racked-up brother had become boring. They hadn’t discovered a rare and tragic form of cancer breeding in his bones. He wasn’t going to be paralysed for the rest of his life. There was no movie-of-the-week in him.
They had called him from the Callisons” around twelve-thirty and his father sounded a bit drunk—Dennis guessed he was maybe on his second bloody Mary and was maybe getting some disapproving looks from Mom. Dennis himself had just been finishing up his dietician-approved bluecarded Thanksgiving dinner—the only such dinner he had ever been able to finish in fifteen minutes—and he did a good job of sounding cheerful, not wanting to spoil their good time. Ellie came on the wire briefly, sounding giggly and rather screamy. Maybe it was talking to Ellie that had tired him out enough to need a nap.
He had fallen asleep (and had his unsettling dream) around two o’clock. The hospital was unusually quiet today, running on a skeleton staff. The usual babble of TVs and transistor radios from the other rooms was muted. The candy-striper who took his tray smiled brightly and said I she hoped he had enjoyed his “special dinner.” Dennis assured her that he had. After all, it was Thanksgiving for her, too.
And so he dreamed, and the dream broke up and became a darker sleep, and when he woke up it was nearly five o’clock and Arnie Cunningham was sitting in the hard plastic contour chair where his girl had sat only the day before.
Dennis was not at all surprised to see him there; he simply assumed that it was a new dream.
“Hi, Arnie,” he said. “How’s it hanging?”
“Hanging good,” Arnie said, “but you look like you’re still asleep, Dennis. Want some head-noogies? That’ll wake you up.”
There was a brown bag on his lap, and Dennis’s sleepy mind thought: Got his lunch after all. Maybe Repperton didn’t squash it as bad as we thought. He tried to sit up in the bed, hurt his back, and used the control panel to get into what was almost a sitting position. The motor whined. “Jesus, it’s really you!”
“Were you expecting Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster?” Arnie asked amiably.
“I was sleeping. I guess I thought I still was.” Dennis rubbed his forehead hard, as if to get rid of the steep behind it. “Happy Thanksgiving, Arnie.”
“You bet,” Arnie said. “Same to you. Did they feed you turkey with all the trimmings?”
Dennis laughed. “I got something that looked like those play-dinners that came with Ellie’s Happy-Time Cafeteria when she was about seven. Remember?”
Arnie put his cupped hands to his mouth and made ralphing noises. “I remember. What a gross-out.”
“I’m really glad you came,” Dennis said, and for a moment he was perilously close to tears. Maybe he hadn’t realized just how depressed he had been, He redoubled his determination to be home by Christmas. If he was here on Christmas Day, he’d probably commit suicide.