“Your folks didn’t come?”
“Sure they did,” Dennis said, “and they’ll be back again tonight—Mom and Dad will be, anyway—but it’s not the same. You know.”
“Yeah. Well, I brought some stuff. Told the lady downstairs I had your bathrobe.” Arnie giggled a little.
“What is that?” Dennis asked, nodding at the bag. It wasn’t just a lunchbag, he saw; it was a shopping bag.
“Aw, I raided the fridge after we et the bird,” Arnie said. “My mom and dad went around visiting their friends from the University—they do that every year on Thanksgiving afternoon. They won’t even be back until around eight.”
As he talked, he took things out of the bag. Dennis watched, amazed. Two pewter candle-holders. Two candles. Arnie slammed the candles into the holders, lit them with a matchbook advertising Darnell’s Garage, and turned off the overhead light. Then four sandwiches, clumsily wrapped in waxed paper.
“The way I recall it,” Arnie said, “you always said that scarfing up a couple of turkey sandwiches around eleven-thirty Thursday night was better than Thanksgiving dinner, anyway. Because the pressure was off.”
“Yeah,” Dennis said. “Sandwiches in front of the TV, Carson or some old movie. But, honest to God, Arnie, you didn’t have to—”
“Ali, shit, I haven’t even been around to see you in almost three weeks. Good thing for me you were sleeping when I came in or you probably would have shot me.” He tapped Dennis’s two sandwiches. “Your favourite, I think. White meat and mayo on Wonder Bread.”
Dennis got giggling at that, then laughing, then roaring. Arnie could see it hurt his back, but he couldn’t stop. Wonder Bread had been one of Arnie and Dennis’s great common secrets as children. Both of their mothers had been very serious about the subject of bread; Regina bought Diet-Thin loaves, with an occasional side-trip into the Land of Stone-Ground Rye. Dennis’s mother favoured Roman Meal and pumpernickel loaves. Arnie and Dennis ate what was given them—but both were secret Wonder Bread freaks, and more than one occasion they had pooled their money and instead of buying sweets they had gotten a loaf of Wonder and a jar of French’s Mustard. They would then slink out into Arnie’s garage (or Dennis’s tree-house, sadly demolished in a windstorm almost nine years before) and gobble mustard sandwiches and read Richie Rich comic books until the whole loaf was gone.
Arnie joined him in his laughter, and for Dennis that was the best part of Thanksgiving.
Dennis had been between room-mates for almost ten days, and so had the semi-private room to himself. Arnie closed the door and produced a six-pack of Busch beer from the brown bag.
“Wonders will never cease,” Dennis said, and had to laugh again at the unintentional pun,
“No,” Arnie said, “I don’t think they ever will.” He toasted
Dennis over the candles with a bottle of beer. “Prosit.”
“Live for ever,” Dennis responded. They drank.
After they had finished the thick turkey sandwiches, Arnie produced two plastic Tupperware pie-wedges from his apparently bottomless bag and prised off the lids. Two pieces of home-made apple pie rested within.
“No, man, I can’t,” Dennis said. “I’ll bust.”
“Eat,” Arnie commanded.
“I really can’t,” Dennis said, taking the Tupperware container and a fresh plastic fork. He finished the slice of pie in four huge bites and then belched. He upended the remainder of his second beer and belched again. “In Portugal, that’s a compliment to the cook,” he said. His head was buzzing pleasantly from the beer.
“Whatever you say,” Arnie responded with a grin. He got up, turned on the overhead fluorescent, and snuffed the candles. Outside a steady rain had begun to beat against the windows; it looked and sounded cold. And for Dennis, some of the warm spirit of friendship and real Thanksgiving seemed to go out with the candles.
“I’m gonna hate you tomorrow,” Dennis said. “I’ll probably have to sit on that john in there for an hour. And it hurts my back.”
“You remember the time Elaine got the farts?” Arnie asked, and they both laughed. “We teased her until your mother gave us holy old hell.”
“They didn’t smell, but they sure were loud,” Dennis said, smiling.
“Like gunshots,” Arnie agreed, and they both laughed a little—but it was a sad sort of laughter, if there is such a thing. A lot of water under the bridge. The thought that Ellie’s attack of the farts had happened seven years ago was somehow more unsettling than it was amusing. There was a breath of mortality in the realization that seven years could steal past with such smooth and unobtrusive ease.
Conversation lapsed a little, both of them lost in their own thoughts.
At last Dennis said, “Leigh came by yesterday. Told me, about Christine. I’m sorry, man. Bummer.”
Arnie looked up, and his expression of thoughtful melancholy was lost in a cheerful smile that Dennis didn’t really believe.
“Yeah,” he said. “It was crude. But I went way overboard about it.”
“Anyone would,” Dennis said, aware that he had become suddenly watchful, hating it but unable to help it. The friendship part was over; it had been here, warming the room and filling it, and now it had simply slipped away like the ephemeral, delicate thing it was. Now they were just dancing. Arnie’s cheerful eyes were also opaque and—he would have sworn to it—watchful.
“Sure. I gave my mother a hard time. Leigh too, I guess. It was just the shock of seeing all that work… all that work down the tubes.” He shook his head. “Bad news.”
“Are you going to be able to do anything with it?” Arnie brightened immediately—really brightened this time, Dennis felt. “Sure! I already have. You wouldn’t believe it, Dennis, if you’d seen the way it looked in that parking lot. They made them tough in those days, not like now when all the stuff that looks like metal is really just shiny plastic. That car is nothing but a damn tank. The glass was the worst part. And the tyres, of course. They slashed the tyres.”
“What about the engine?”
“Never got at it,” Arnie said promptly, and that was the first lie. They had been at it, all right. When Arnie and Leigh had gotten to Christine that afternoon, the distributor cap had been lying on the pavement. Leigh had recognized it and had told Dennis about it. What else had they done under the hood, Dennis wondered. The radiator? If someone was going to use a tyre iron to punch holes in the bodywork, might they not be apt to use the same tool to spring the radiator in a few places? What about the plugs? The voltage regulator? The carburettor?
Arnie, why are you lying to me?
“So what are you doing with it now?” Dennis asked.
“Spending money on it, what else?” Arnie said, and laughed his almost-genuine laugh. Dennis might even have accepted it as genuine if he hadn’t heard the real article once or twice over the Thanksgiving supper Arnie had brought. “New tyres, new glass. Got some bodywork to do, and then it will be as good as new.”
As good as new. But Leigh had said that they had found something that was little more than a smashed hulk, a carny three-swings-for-a-quarter derelict.
Why are you lying?
For a cold moment he found himself wondering if maybe Arnie hadn’t gone a little crazy—but no, that wasn’t the impression he gave. The feeling Dennis got from him was one of… furtiveness. Craftiness. Then, for the first time, the crazy thought came to him, the thought that maybe Arnie was only half-lying, trying to lay a groundwork of plausibility for… for what? A case of spontaneous regeneration? That was pretty crazy, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
It was indeed, Dennis thought, unless you had happened to see a mass of cracks in a windscreen seem to shrink between one viewing and the next.