He couldn’t quite lose the feeling he was somehow involved.
Leigh had stopped talking to him since the argument. Arnie didn’t call her—partly out of pride, partly out of shame, partly out of a wish that she would call him first and things could go back to what they had been… before.
Before what? his mind whispered. Well, before she almost choked to death in your car, for one thing. Before you tried to punch out the guy who saved her life.
But she wanted him to sell Christine. And that was simply impossible… wasn’t it? How could he do that after he had put so much time and effort and blood and—yes, it was true—even tears into it?
It was an old rap, and he didn’t want to think about it. The final bell rang on that seemingly endless Thursday, and he went out to the student parking lot—almost ran out and nearly dived into Christine.
He sat there behind the wheel and drew a long, shuddering breath, watching the first snowflakes of an afternoon flurry twist and skirl across the bright bonnet. He dug for his keys, pulled them out of his pocket, and started Christine up. The motor hummed confidently and he pulled out, tyres rolling and cruching over the packed snow. He would have to put snow tyres on eventually, he supposed, but the truth was, Christine didn’t seem to need them. She had the best traction of any car he had ever driven.
He felt for the radio knob and turned on WDIL. Sheb Wooley was singing “The Purple People Eater.” That raised a smile on his face at last.
Just being behind Christine’s wheel, in control, made everything seem better. It made everything seem manageable. Hearing about Repperton and Trelawney and the little shitter stepping out that way had been a terrible shock, naturally, and after the hard feelings of the late summer and this fall, it was probably natural enough for him to feel a little guilty. But the simple truth was, he had been in Philly. He hadn’t had anything to do with it; it was impossible.
He had just been feeling low about things in general. Dennis was in the hospital. Leigh was behaving stupidly as if his car had grown hands and jammed that piece of hamburger down her throat, for Christ’s sake. And he had quit the chess club today.
Maybe the worst part of that had been the way Mr Slawson, the faculty advisor, had accepted his decision without even trying to change his mind, Arnie had given him a lot of guff about how little time he had these days, and how he was simply going to have to cut back on some of his activities, and Mr Slawson had simply nodded and said, Okay, Arnie, we’ll be right here in Room 30 if you change your mind. Mr Slawson had looked at him with his faded blue eyes that his thick glasses magnified to the size of repulsive boiled eggs, and there had been something in them—was it reproach?
Maybe it had been. But the guy hadn’t even tried to persuade him to stay, that was the thing. He should have at least tried, because Arnie was the best the LHS chess club had to offer, and Slawson knew it. If he had tried, maybe Arnie would have changed his mind. The truth was, he did have a little more time now that Christine was… was… What?
… well, fixed up again. If Mr Slawson had said something like Hey Arnie, don’t be so rash, let’s think this over, we could really use you… if Mr Slawson had said something like that, why, he might have reconsidered. But not Slawson. Just we’ll be right here in Room 30 if you change your mind, and blah-blah and yak-yak, what a fucking shitter, just like the rest of them. It wasn’t his fault that LHS had been knocked out in the semi-final round; he had won four games before that and would have won in the finals if he had gotten a chance. It was those two shitters Barry Qualson and Mike Hicks that had lost it for them; both of them played chess as if maybe they thought Ruy Lopex was some new kind of soft drink or something…
He stripped the wrapper and the foil from a stick of gum, folded the gum into his mouth, balled the wrapper, and flicked it into the litterbag hanging from Christine’s ashtray with neat accuracy, “Right up the little tramp’s ass,” he muttered, and then grinned. It was a hard, spitless grin. Above it, his eyes moved restlessly from side to side, looking mistrustfully out at a world full of crazy drivers and stupid pedestrians and general idiocy.
Arnie cruised aimlessly around Libertyville, his thoughts continuing to run on in this softly paranoid and bitterly comforting fashion. The radio spilled out a steady flood of golden oldies, and today all of them seemed to be instrumentals—“Rebel Rouser”, “Wild Weekend”, “Telstar”, Sandy Nelson’s jungle-driven “Teen Beat”, and “Rumble” by Line Wray, the greatest of them all. His back nagged, but in a low key. The flurry intensified briefly to a dark grey cloud of snow. He popped on his headlights, and just as quickly the snow tapered off and the clouds broke, spilling through bars of remote and coldly beautiful late-afternoon winter sun.
He cruised.
He came out of his thoughts which now were that Repperton had maybe come to a perfectly fitting end after all—and was shocked to realize that it was nearly quarter of six, and dark. Gino’s Pizza was coming up on the left, the little green neon shamrocks shimmering in the dark. Arnie pulled over to the kerb and got out. He started to cross the street, then realized he had left his keys in Christine’s ignition.
He leaned in to get them… and suddenly the smell assaulted him, the smell Leigh had told him about, the smell he had denied.
It was here now, as if it had come out when he left the car—a high, rotten, meaty smell that made his eyes water and his throat close. He snatched the keys and stood back, trembling, looking at Christine with something like horror.
Arnie, there was a smell. A horrible, rotten smell… you know what I’m talking about.
No, I don’t have the slightest idea… you’re imagining things.
But if she was, so was he.
Arnie turned suddenly and ran across the street to Gino’s as if the devil was on his tail.
Inside, he ordered a pizza he didn’t really want, changed some quarters for dimes, and slipped into the telephone booth beside the juke. It was thumping some current tune Arnie had not heard before.
He called home first. His father answered, his voice oddly toneless—Arnie had never heard Michael’s voice quite that way before, and his unease deepened. His father sounded like Mr Slawson. This Thursday afternoon and evening were taking on the maroon tones of nightmare. Beyond the glass walls of the booth, strange faces drifted dreamily past, like untethered balloons on which someone had crudely drawn human faces, God at work with a Magic Marker.
Shitters,he thought disjointedly. All a bunch of shitters.
“Hello, Dad,” he said uncertainly. “Look, I—uh, I kind of lost track of the time here, I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right,” Michael said. His voice was almost a drone, and Arnie felt his unease deepen into something like fright. “Where are you, the garage?”
“No—uh, Gino’s. Gino’s Pizza. Dad, are you okay? You sound funny.”
“I’m fine,” Michael said. “Just scraped your dinner down the garbage disposal, your mother’s upstairs crying again, and you’re having a pizza. I’m fine. Enjoying your car, Arnie?”
Arnie’s throat worked, but no sound came out.
“Dad,” he managed finally, “I don’t think that’s very fair.”
“I don’t think I’m very interested anymore in what you think is fair and what you don’t think is fair,” Michael said. “You had some justification for your behaviour at first, perhaps. But in the last month or so you’ve turned into someone I don’t understand at all, and something is going on that I understand even less. Your mother doesn’t understand it either, but she senses it, and it’s hurting her very badly. I know she brought part of the hurt on herself, but I doubt if that changes the quality of the pain.”