A little silence fell between us. At last he slapped his hands down on his thighs with a brisk sound and got to his feet. “Well!” he said. “Your folks will be waiting to visit you, no doubt.”
“Probably, yeah.”
He took out his wallet and produced small white business card with his name and number on it. “I can usually be reached here, or someone will throw me a relay. When you speak to Leigh Cabot again, would you tell her what you’ve told me and ask her to get in touch?”
“Yes, if you want. I’ll do that.”
“Will she corroborate your story.”
“Yes.”
He looked at me fixedly. “I’ll tell you this much, Dennis,” he said. “If you’re lying, you don’t know you are.”
He left. I only saw him once more, and that was at the triple funeral for Arnie and his parents. The papers reported a tragic and bizarre fairy tale—father killed in driveway car accident while mother and son are killed on Pennsylvania Turnpike. Paul Harvey used it on his programme.
No mention was made of Christine being at Darnell’s Garage.
My family came to visit that night, and by then I was feeling much easier in my mind—part of it was baring my bosom to Mercer, I think (he was what one of my psych profs in college called “an interested outsider”, the sort it’s often easiest to talk to), but a great lot of the way I felt was due to a flying late-afternoon visit by Dr Arroway. He was out of temper and irascible with me, suggesting that next time I just take a chainsaw to the goddam leg and save us all a lot of time and trouble… but he also informed me (grudgingly, I think) that no lasting damage had been done. He thought. He warned me that I had not improved my chances of ever running in the Boston Marathon and left.
So the family visit was a gay one—due mostly to Ellie, who prattled on and on about that upcoming cataclysm, her First Date. A pimply, bullet-headed nerd named Brandon Hurling had invited her to go roller skating with him. My dad was going to drive them. Pretty cool.
My mother and father joined in, but my mother kept throwing anxious don’t-forget glances at Dad, and he lingered after Mom had taken Elaine out.
“What happened?” he asked me. “Leigh told her father some crazy story about cars driving themselves and little girls who were dead and I don’t know whatall. He’s damn near wild.”
I nodded. I was tired, but I didn’t want Leigh catching hell from her folks—or have them thinking she was either lying or nuts. If she was going to cover me with Mercer, I would have to cover her with her mother and father.
“All right,” I said. “It’s a bit of a story. You want to send Mom and Ellie around for a malt, or something? Or maybe you better tell them to go to a movie.”
“That long?”
“Yeah. That long.”
He looked at me, his gaze troubled. “Okay,” he said.
Shortly after, I told my story a second time. Now I’ve told it a third; and third time, so they say, pays for all.
Rest in peace, Arnie.
I love you, man.
EPILOGUE
I guess if this was a made-up story I would end it by telling you how the broken-legged knight of Darnell’s Garage wooed and won the lady fair… she of the pink nylon scarf and the arrogant Nordic cheekbones. But that never happened. Leigh Cabot is Leigh Ackerman now; she’s in Taos, New Mexico, married to an IBM customer service rep. She sells Amway in her spare time. She had two little girls, identical twins, so I guess she probably doesn’t have all that much spare time. I keep up on her doings after a fashion; my affection for the lady never really faded. We trade cards at Christmas, and I also send her a card on her birthday because she never forgets mine. That sort of thing. There are times when it seems a lot longer than four years.
What happened to us? I don’t really know. We went together for two years, slept together (very satisfactorily), went to school together (Drew), and were friends with each other. Her father shut up about our crazy story after my father talked with him, although he always regarded me after that as something of a dubious person. I think that both he and Mrs Cabot were relieved when Leigh and I went our separate ways.
I could feel it when we started to drift apart, and it hurt me—it hurt a lot. I craved her in a way you continue to crave some substance on which you have no more physical dependency… candy, tobacco, Coca-Cola. I carried a torch for her, but I’m afraid I carried it self-consciously and dropped it with an almost unseemly haste.
And maybe I do know what happened. What happened that night in Darnell’s Garage was a secret between us, and of course lovers need their secrets… but this wasn’t a good one to have. It was something cold and unnatural, something that smacked of madness and worse than madness; it smacked of the grave, There were nights after love when we would lie together in bed, naked, belly to belly, and that thing would be between us: Roland D. LeBay’s face. I would be kissing her mouth or her breasts or her belly, warm with rising passion, and I would suddenly hear his voice: That’s about the finest smell in the world… except for pussy. And I would freeze, my passion all steam and ashes.
There were times, God knows, when I could see it in her face as well. The lovers don’t always live happily ever after, even when they’ve done what seemed right as well as they could do it. That’s something else it took four years to learn.
So we drifted apart. A secret needs two faces to bounce between; a secret needs to see itself in another pair of eyes. And although I did love her, all the kisses, all the endearments, all the walks arm-in-arm through blowing October leaves… none of those things could quite measure up to that magnificently simple act of tying her scarf around my arm.
Leigh left college to be married, and then it was goodbye Drew and hello Taos. I went to her wedding with hardly a qualm. Nice fellow. Drove a Honda Civic. No problems there.
I never had to worry about making the football squad. Drew doesn’t even have a football squad. Instead, I took an extra class each semester and went to summer school for two years, in the time when I would have been sweating under the August sun, hitting the tackling dummies, if things had happened differently. As a result, I graduated early—three semesters early, in fact.
If you met me on the street, you wouldn’t notice a limp, but if you walked with me four or five miles (I do at least three miles every day as a matter of course; that physical therapy stuff sticks), you’d notice me starting to pull to the right a little bit.
My left leg aches on rainy days. And on snowy nights.
And some times when I have my nightmares—they are not so frequent now—I wake up, sweating and clutching at that leg, where there is still a hard bulge of flesh above the knee. But all my worries about wheelchairs, braces, and built-up heels proved thankfully hollow. And I never liked football that well anyway.
Michael, Regina, and Arnie Cunningham were buried in a family plot in the Libertyville Heights cemetery—no one went out to the gravesite but members of the family: Regina’s people from Ligonier, some of Michael’s people from New Hampshire and New York, a few others.
The funeral was five days after that final hellish scene in the garage. The coffins were closed. The very fact of those three wooden boxes, lined up on a triple bier like soldiers, struck my heart like a shovelful of cold earth. The memory of the ant farms couldn’t stand against the mute testimony of those boxes. I cried a little.
Afterward, I rolled myself down the aisle toward them and put my hand tentatively on the one in the centre, not knowing if it was Arnie’s or not, not caring. I stayed that way for quite a while, head down, and then a voice said behind me, “Want a push back out to the vestry, Dennis?” I craned my neck around. It was Mercer, looking neat and lawyerly in a dark wool suit.