Christine, Page 26

  "And him? Michael?"

  "Older, but tougher," Leigh said hesitantly. "As if this had somehow . . . somehow gotten him into gear."

  Dennis was silent. He had known Michael Cunningham for thirteen years and had never seen him in gear, so he wouldn't know. Regina had always been the one in gear; Michael trailed along in her wake and made the drinks at the parties (mostly faculty parties) the Cunninghams hosted. He played his recorder, he looked melancholy . . . but by no stretch of the imagination could Dennis say he had ever seen the man "in gear."

  The final triumph, Dennis's father had said once, standing at the window and watching Regina lead Arnie by the hand down the Guilders' walk to where Michael waited behind the wheel of the car. Arnie and Dennis had been perhaps seven then. Momism supreme. I wonder if she'll make the poor slob wait in the car when Arnie gets married. Or maybe she can--

  Dennis's mother had frowned at her husband and shushed him by cutting her eyes at Dennis in a little-pitchers-have-big-ears gesture. He never forgot the gesture or what his father had said--at seven he hadn't understood all of it, but even at seven he knew perfectly well what a "poor slob" was. And even at seven he vaguely understood why his father might think Michael Cunningham was one. He had felt sad for Michael Cunningham . . . and that feeling had held, off and on, right up to the present.

  "He came in around the time she was finishing her story," Leigh went on. "They asked me to stay for supper--Arnie has been eating down at Darnell's--but I told them I really had to get back. So Mr. Cunningham offered me a ride, and I got his side on the way home."

  "Are they on different sides?"

  "Not exactly, but. . . Mr. Cunningham was the one who went to see the police, for instance. Arnie didn't want to, and Mrs. Cunningham-- Regina--couldn't bring herself to do it."

  Dennis asked cautiously, "He's really trying to put Humpty back together again, huh?"

  "Yes," she whispered, and then burst out shrilly: "But that's not all! He's in deep with that guy Darnell, I know he is! Yesterday in period three study hall he told me he was going to drop a new front end into her--into his car--this afternoon and this evening, and I said won't that be awfully expensive Arnie, and he said not to worry about it because his credit was good--"

  "Slow down."

  She was crying again. "His credit was good because he and someone named Jimmy Sykes were going to do some errands for Will Friday and Saturday. That's what he said. And . . . I don't think the errands he does for that sonofabitch are legal!"

  "What did he tell the police when they came to ask about Christine?"

  "He told them about finding it . . . that way. They asked him if he had any ideas who might have done it, and Arnie said no. They asked him if it wasn't true that he had gotten into a fight with Buddy Repperton, that Repperton had pulled a knife and had been expelled for it. Arnie said that Repperton had knocked his bag lunch out of his hand and stepped on it, then Mr. Casey came over from the shop and broke it up. They asked him if Repperton hadn't said he would get him for it, and Arnie said he might have said something like that, but talk was cheap."

  Dennis was silent, looking out his window at a dull November sky, considering this. He found it ominous. If Leigh had the interview with the police right, then Arnie hadn't told a single lie . . . but he had edited things to make what had happened in the smoking area sound like your ordinary pushy-pushy.

  Dennis found that extremely ominous.

  "Do you know what Arnie might be doing for that man Darnell?" Leigh asked.

  "No," Dennis answered, but he had some ideas. A little internal tape recorder started up, and he heard his father saying, I've heard a few things . . . stolen cars . . . cigarettes and booze . . . contraband like fireworks . . . He's been lucky for a long time, Dennis.

  He looked at Leigh's face, too pale, her makeup cut open by her tears. She was hanging on, hanging onto Arnie as best she could. Maybe she was learning something about being tough that she wouldn't have learned otherwise, with her looks, for another ten years. But that didn't make it any easier, and it didn't necessarily make it right. It occurred to him suddenly, almost randomly, that he had first noticed the improvement in Arnie's face more than a month before Arnie and Leigh clicked . . . but after Arnie and Christine had clicked.

  "I'll talk to him," he promised.

  "Good," she said. She stood up. "I--I don't want things to be like they were before, Dennis. I know that nothing ever is. But I still love him, and . . . and I just wish you'd tell him that."

  "Yeah, okay."

  They were both embarrassed, and neither of them could say anything for a long, long moment. Dennis was thinking that this would be the point, in a c & w song, where the Best Friend steps in. And a sneaking, mean (and randy) part of him wouldn't be averse to that. Not at all. He was still powerfully attracted to her, more attracted than he had been to any girl in a long time. Maybe ever. Let Arnie run bottle-rockets and cherry-bombs over to Burlington and fuck around with his car. He and Leigh could get to know each other better in the meantime. A little aid and comfort. You know how it is.

  And he had a feeling at just that awkward moment, after her profession of love for Arnie, that he could do it; she was vulnerable. She was maybe learning how to be tough, but it's not a school anyone goes to willingly. He could say something--the right something, maybe only Come here--and she would come, sit on the edge of the bed, they would talk some more, maybe about pleasanter things, and maybe he would kiss her. Her mouth was lovely and full, sensual, made to kiss and be kissed. Once for comfort. Twice out of friendship. And three times pays for all. Yes, he felt with an instinct that had so far been quite reliable that it could be done.

  But he didn't say any of the things that could have started those things happening, and neither did Leigh. Arnie was between them, and almost surely always would be. Arnie and his lady. If it hadn't been so ludicrously ghastly, he could have laughed.

  "When are they letting you out?" she asked.

  "On an unsuspecting public?" he asked, and began to giggle. After a moment she joined him in his laughter.

  "Yes, something like that," Leigh said, and then snickered again. "Sorry."

  "Don't be," Dennis said. "People have been laughing at me all my life. I'm used to it. They say I'm stuck here until January, but I'm going to fool them. I'm going home for Christmas. I'm working my buns off down in the torture chamber."

  "Torture chamber?"

  "Physical therapy. My back's looking good. The other bones are knitting busily--the itch is terrible sometimes. I'm gobbling rosehips by the bushel basket. Dr. Arroway says that's nothing but a folk-tale, but Coach Puffer swears by them, and he checks the bottle every time he comes to visit."

  "Does he come often? The Coach?"

  "Yeah, he does. Now he's got me half-believing that stuff about rosehips making your broken bones knit faster." Dennis paused. "Of course, I'm not going to be playing any more football, not ever. I'm going to be on crutches for a while, and then, with luck, I'll graduate to a cane. Cheerful old Dr. Arroway tells me I'm going to limp for maybe a couple of years. Or maybe I'll always limp."

  "I'm so sorry," she said in a low voice. "I'm sorry it had to happen to a nice guy like you, Dennis, but part of it's selfish. I just wonder if all the rest of this, all this horrible stuff with Arnie, if it would have happened if you'd been up and around."

  "That's right," Dennis said, rolling his eyes dramatically, "blame it on me."

  But she didn't smile. "I've started to worry about his sanity, did you know that? That's the one thing I haven't told my folks or his folks. But I think his mother . . . that she might. . . I don't know what he said to her that night, after we found the car all smashed up, but . . . I think they must have really put their claws into each other."

  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 A
rnie 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 color 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.

  --Chuck Berry

  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 paralyzed 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 blue-carded 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 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 sleep 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.

  "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 wen
t 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--"

  "Ah, 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 favorite, 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 favored Roman Meal and pumpernickel loaves. Arnie and Dennis ate what was given them--but both were secret Wonder Bread freaks, and on 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 roommates 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.