Just a trick of the light. That’s what you thought then, and you were right.
But a trick of the light didn’t explain the haphazard way Arnie had gone about rebuilding Christine, the hopscotch of old and new parts. It didn’t explain that weird feeling Dennis had gotten sitting behind the wheel of Christine in LeBay’s garage, or the sense, after the new tyre had been put on en route to Darnell’s, that he was looking at an old-car picture with a new-car picture directly underlying it, and that a hole had been cut out of the old-car picture at the spot where one of the old-car tyres had been.
And nothing explained Arnie’s lie now… or the narrow, thoughtful way he was watching Dennis to see if his lie was going to be accepted. So he smiled… a big, easy, relieved grin. “Well, that’s great,” he said.
Arnie’s narrow, evaluating expression held for a moment longer; then he smiled an aw-shucks grin and shrugged. “Luck,” he said. “When I think of the things they could have done sugar in the gas tank, molasses in the carb—they were stupid. Lucky for me.”
“Repperton and his merry crew?” Dennis asked quietly.
The suspicious look, so dark and unlike Arnie, appeared again and then sank from sight. Arnie looked grim now. Grim and morose. He seemed to speak, then sighed instead. “Yeah,” he said. “Who else?”
“But you didn’t report it.”
“My dad did.”
“That’s what Leigh said.”
“What else did she tell you?” Arnie asked sharply.
“Nothing, and I didn’t ask,” Dennis said, holding his hand out. “Your business, Arnie. Peace.”
“Sure.” He laughed a little and then passed a hand over his face. “I’m still not over it. Fuck. I don’t think I’m ever going to be over it, Dennis. Coming into that parking lot with Leigh, feeling like I was on top of the world, and seeing—”
“Won’t they just do it again if you fix her up again?” Arnie’s face went dead-cold, set. “They won’t do it again,” he said. His grey eyes were like March ice, and Dennis found himself suddenly very glad he wasn’t Buddy Repperton.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll be parking it at home, that’s what I mean,” he said, and once more his face broke into that large, cheerful, unnatural grin. “What did you think I meant?”
“Nothing,” Dennis said. The image of ice remained. Now it was a feeling of thin ice, creaking uneasily under his feet. Beneath that, black, cold water. “But I don’t know, Arnie. You seem awful sure that Buddy wants to let this go.”
“I’m hoping he’ll see it as a standoff,” Arnie said quietly. “We got him expelled from school.”
“He got himself expelled!” Dennis said hotly. “He pulled a knife—hell, it wasn’t even a knife, it was a goddam pigsticker!”
I’m just telling it the way he’ll see it,” Arnie said, then held out his hand and laughed. “Peace.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“We got him expelled—or more accurately, I did—and he and his buddies beat hell out of Christine. Evens. The end.”
“Yeah, if he sees it that way.”
“I think he will,” Arnie said. “The cops questioned him and Moochie Welch and Richie Trelawney. Scared them. And almost got Sandy Galton to confess, I guess.” Arnie’s lip curled. “Fucking crybaby.”
This was so unlike Arnie—the old Arnie—that Dennis sat up in bed without thinking and then winced at the pain in his back and lay down again quickly. “Jesus, man, you sound like you want him to stonewall it!”
“I don’t care what he or any of those shitters do,” Arnie said, and then, in a strangely offhand voice he added, “It doesn’t matter anymore anyhow.”
Dennis said, “Arnie, are you all right?”
And for a moment a look of desperate sadness passed over Arnie’s face—more than sadness. He looked harried and haunted. It was the face, Dennis thought later (it is so easy to see these things later; too much later) of someone so bewildered and entangled and weary of struggling that he hardly knows anymore what it is he is doing.
Then that expression, like that other look of dark suspicion, was gone.
“Sure,” he said. “I’m great. Except that you’re not the only one with a hurt back. You remember when I strained it at Philly Plains?”
Dennis nodded.
“Check this out.” He stood up and pulled his shirt out of his pants. Something seemed to dance in his eyes. Something flipping and turning at a black depth.
He lifted his shirt. It wasn’t old-fashioned like LeBay’s; it was cleaner, too—a neat, seemingly unbroken band of Lycra about twelve inches across. But, Dennis thought, a brace was a brace. It was too close to LeBay for comfort.
“I put another hurt on it getting Christine back to Will’s,” Arnie said. “I don’t even remember how I did it, that’s how upset I was. Hooking her up to the wrecker, I guess, but I don’t know for sure. At first it wasn’t too bad, then it got worse. Dr Mascia prescribed—Dennis, are you okay?”
With what felt like a fantastic effort, Dennis kept his voice even. He moved his features around into an expression which felt at least faintly like pleasant interest… and still there was that something dancing in Arnie’s eyes, dancing and dancing.
“You’ll shake it off,” Dennis said.
“Sure, I imagine,” Arnie said, tucking his shirt back in around the back brace. “I’m just supposed to watch what I lift so I don’t do it again.”
He smiled at Dennis.
“If there was stilt a draft, it would keep me out of the Army,” he said.
Once again Dennis restrained himself from any movement that could be interpreted as surprise, but he put his arms under the bed’s top sheet. At the sight of that back brace, so like LeBay’s, they had broken out in gooseflesh.
Arnie’s eyes—like black water under thin grey March ice. Black water and glee dancing far down within them like the twisting, decomposing body of a drowned man. “Listen,” Arnie said briskly. “I gotta move. Hope you didn’t think I could hang around a lousy place like this all night.”
“That’s you, always in demand,” Dennis said. “Seriously, man, thanks. You cheered up a grim day.”
For one strange instant, he thought Arnie was going to weep. That dancing thing down deep in his eyes was gone and his friend was there—really there. Then Arnie smiled sincerely. “Just remember one thing, Dennis: nobody misses you. Nobody at all.”
“Eat me raw through a Flavour Straw,” Dennis said solemnly.
Arnie gave him the finger.
The formalities were now complete; Arnie could leave. He gathered up his brown shopping bag, considerably deflated, candle-holders and empty beer bottles clinking inside.
Dennis had a sudden inspiration. He rapped his knuckles on his leg cast. “Sign this, Arnie, would you?”
“I already did, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but it wore off. Sign it again?”
Arnie shrugged. “If you’ve got a pen.”
Dennis gave him one from the drawer of the night-table. Grinning, Arnie bent over the cast, which was hoisted to an angle over the bed with a series of weights and pulleys, found white space in the intaglio of names and mottoes, and scribbled:
He patted the cast when he was done and handed the pen back to Dennis. “Okay?”
“Yeah,” Dennis said. “Thanks. Stay loose, Arnie.”
“You know it. Happy Thanksgiving.”
“Same to you.”
Arnie left. Later on, Dennis’s mother and father came in; Ellie, apparently exhausted by the day’s hilarity, had gone home to bed, On their way home, the Guilders commented to each other on how withdrawn Dennis had seemed.
“He was in a blue study, all right,” Guilder said. “Holidays in the hospital aren’t any fun.”
As for Dennis himself, he spent a long and thoughtful time that evening examining two signatures. Arnie had indeed signed his cast, but at a time when both of Dennis’s legs had been in full-leg casts. That first time, he had signed the cast on the right leg, which had been up in the air when Arnie came in. Tonight he had signed the left.