“Sure,” I said. “Just gimme a couple of seconds, okay?”
“Fine.”
I hesitated and then said, “The papers say Michael was killed at home. That the car rolled over him after he slipped on the ice, or something.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Your doing?”
Mercer hesitated. It makes things simpler. His gaze shifted to where Leigh was standing with my folks. She was talking with my mother but looking anxiously toward me. “Pretty girl,” he said. He had said it before, in the hospital.
“I’m going to marry her someday,” I said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you did,” Mercer replied. “Did anyone ever tell you that you’ve got the balls of a tiger?”
“I think Coach Puffer did,” I said, “Once.”
He laughed. “You ready for that push, Dennis? You’ve been down here long enough. Let it go.”
“Easier said than done.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“Will you tell me one thing?” I asked. “I have to know.”
“I will if I can.”
“What did—” I had to stop and clear my throat. “What did you do with the…the pieces?”
“Why, I saw to that myself,” Mercer said. His voice was light, almost joking, but his face was very, very serious. “I had two fellows from the local police run all those pieces through the crusher out back of Darnell’s Garage. Made a little cube about so big.” He held his hands about two feet apart. “One of those guys got a hell of a bad cut. Took stitches.”
Mercer suddenly smiled—it was the bitterest, coldest smile I’ve ever seen.
“He said it bit him.”
Then he pushed me up the aisle to where my family and my girl stood waiting for me.
So that’s my story. Except for the dreams.
I’m four years older, and Arnie’s face has grown hazy to me, a browning photograph from an old yearbook. I never would have believed that could happen, but it has. I made it through, made the transition from adolescence to manhood—whatever that is—somehow; I’ve got a college degree on which the ink is almost dry, and I’ve been teaching high school history. I started last year, and two of my original students—Buddy Repperton types, both of them—were older than I was. I’m single, but there are a few interesting ladies in my life, and I hardly think of Arnie at all.
Except in my dreams.
The dreams aren’t the only reason I’ve set all this down—there’s another, which I’ll tell you in a moment—but I would be lying if I said the dreams weren’t a big part of the reason. Maybe it’s an effort to lance the wound and clean it out. Or maybe it’s just that I’m not rich enough to afford a shrink.
In one of the dreams I am back where the funeral service was held. The three coffins are on their triple bier, but the church is empty except for me. In the dream I am on crutches again, standing at the foot of the central aisle, back by the door. I don’t want to go down there, but my crutches are pulling me along, moving by themselves. I touch the middle coffin. It springs open at my touch, and lying inside in the satin interior is not Arnie but Roland D. LeBay, a putreseent corpse in an Army uniform. As the bloated smell of gassy decay rushes out at me, the corpse opens its eyes; its rotting hands, black and slimy with some fungoid growth, grope upward and find my shirt before I can back away, and it pulls itself up until its glaring, reeking face is only inches from mine. And it begins to croak over and over again, Can’t beat the smell, can you? Nothing smells this good… except for pussy… except for pussy… except for pussy. I try to scream but I can’t scream, because LeBay’s hands have settled in a noxious, tightening ring around my throat.
In the other dream—and this one is somehow worse I’ve finished with a class or proctoring a study hall at Norton Junior High, where I teach. I pack my books into my briefcase, stuff in my papers, and leave the room for my next class. And there in the hall, packed in between the industrial-grey lockers lining it, is Christine—brand new and sparkling, sitting on four new whitewall tyres, a chrome Winged Victory hood ornament tilting toward me. She is empty, but her engine guns and falls off… guns and falls off… guns and falls off. In some of the dreams the voice from the radio is the voice of Richie Valens, killed long ago in a plane crash, with Buddy Holly and J. P. Richardson, The Big Bopper. Richie is screaming “La Bamba” to a Latin beat, and as Christine suddenly lunges toward me, laying rubber on the hall floor and tearing open locker doors on either side with her doorhandles, I see that there is a vanity plate on the front—a grinning white skull on a dead black field. Imprinted over the skull are the words ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE.
Then I wake up—sometimes screaming, always clutching my leg. But the dreams are less now. Something else I read in one of my psych classes—I took a lot of them, maybe hoping to understand things that can’t be understood—is that people dream less as they grow older. I think I am going to be all right now. Last Christmas season, when I sent Leigh her annual card, I added a line to my usual note on the back. Below my signature, on impulse, I scribbled: How are you dealing with it? Then I sealed the card up and mailed it before I could change my mind. I got a postcard back a month later. It showed the new Taos Center for the Performing Arts on the front. On the back was my address and a single flat line: Dealing with what? L.
One way or another I guess we find out things we have to know.
Around the same time—it seems as though it’s around Christmas that my thoughts turn to it the most often—I dropped Rick Mercer a note, because the question had been on my mind more and more, gnawing at me. I wrote and asked him what had become of the block of scrap metal that had once been Christine.
I got no answer.
But time is teaching me how to deal with that too. I think about it less—I really do.
So here I am, at the tag end of everything, old memories and old nightmares all bundled into a neat sheaf of pages. Soon I will put them in a folder and put the folder in my file cabinet and lock that drawer and that will be the end.
But I told you there was something else, didn’t I? Some other reason for writing it all down.
His single-minded purpose. His unending fury.
I read it in the paper a few weeks ago—just an item that got put on the AP wire because it was bizarre, I suppose. Be honest, Guilder, I can hear Arnie saying, so I will. It was that item that got me going, more than all the dreams and old memories.
The news item was about a guy named Sander Galton, whose nickname, one would logically assume, must have been Sandy.
This Sander Galton was killed out in California, where he was working at a drive-in movie theatre in LA. He was apparently alone, closing up shop for the night after the movie had ended. He was in the snack-bar, A car ripped right through one of the walls, ploughed through the counter, smashed the popcorn machine, and got him as he was trying to unlock the door to the projection booth. The cops knew that was what he was doing when the car ran him down because they found the key in his hand. I read that item, headed BIZARRE MURDER BY CAR IN LOS ANGELES—and I thought of what Mercer had told me, that last thing: He said it bit him.
Of course it’s impossible, but it was all impossible to start with.
I keep thinking of George LeBay in Ohio.
His sister in Colorado.