Christine (11 page)

"No?" Regina said in that new cool way. "Goodbye, Dennis."

The phone was dead in my hand. I looked at it awhile and then hung up.

Dad was parked in front of the TV in his gross purple Bermudas and his Jesus-shoes, a six-pack of Stroh's crashed down in the cooler beside him. The Phillies were having a good day, belting the almighty hell out of Atlanta. My mom had gone out to visit one of her classmates (I think they read each other their sketches and poems and got exalted together). Elaine had gone over, to her friend Della's house. Our place was quiet; outside, the sun played tag with a few benign white clouds. Dad gave me a beer, which he does only when he's feeling extraordinarily mellow.

But Saturday still felt flat. I kept thinking of Arnie, not watching the Phillies or soaking up the rays, not even mowing the grass over at his house and getting his feet green. Arnie in the oily shadows of Will Darnell's Do-It-Yourself Garage, playing games with that silent, rusting hulk while men shouted and tools clanged on the cement with that piercing white-metal sound, the machine-gun drill of pneumatic guns loosening old bolts. Will Darnell's wheezy voice and asthmatic cough—

And goddammit, was I
jealous?
Was that what it was?

When the seventh inning came along I got up and started to go out.

"Where are you going?" my dad asked.

Yeah, just where was I going? Down there? To watch him, cluck over him, listen to Will Darnell get on his case? Heading for another dose of misery? Fuck it. Arnie was a big boy now.

"Noplace," I said. I found a Twinkie tucked carefully away in the back of the breadbox and took it with a certain doleful glee, knowing how pissed Elaine was going to be when she shlepped out during one of the commercials on
Saturday Night Live
and found it gone. "Noplace at all."

I came back into the living room and sat down and cadged another beer off my dad and ate Elaine's Twinkie and even lapped the cardboard it had been on. We watched Philly finish the job of ruining Atlanta ("They roont 'em, Denny," I could hear my grandfather, now five years dead, saying in his cackly old man's voice, "they roont 'em good!") and didn't think about Arnie Cunningham at all.

Hardly at all.

He came over on his tacky old three-speed the next afternoon while Elaine and I were playing croquet on the back lawn. Elaine kept accusing me of cheating. She was on one of her rips. Elaine always went on "rips" when she was "getting her period". Elaine was very proud of her period. She had been having one regularly all of fourteen months.

"Hey," Arnie said, ambling round the corner of the house, "it's either the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Bride of Frankenstein or Dennis and Ellie."

"What do you say, man?" I asked. "Grab a mallet."

"I'm not playing," Elaine said, throwing her mallet down. "He cheats even worse than you do.
Men!"

As she stalked off, Arnie said in a trembling affected voice, "That's the first time she ever called me a man, Dennis."

He fell to his knees, a look of exalted adoration on his face. I started laughing. He could do it good when he wanted to, Arnie could. That was one of the reasons I liked him as well as I did. And it was a kind of secret thing, you know. I don't think anyone really saw that wit except me. I once heard about some millionaire who had a stolen Rembrandt in his basement where no one but him could see it. I could understand that guy. I don't mean that Arnie was a Rembrandt, or even a world-class wit, but I could understand the attraction of knowing about something good… something that was good… but still a secret.

We goofed around the croquet course for a while, not really playing, just whopping the Jesus out of each other's balls. Finally, one went through the hedge into the Blackfords' yard, and after I crawled through to get it, neither of us wanted to play anymore. We sat down in the lawn chairs. Pretty soon our cat, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Captain Beefheart's replacement, came creeping out from under the porch, probably hoping to find some cute little chipmunk to murder slowly and nastily. His amber-green eyes glinted in the afternoon light, which was overcast and muted.

"Thought you'd be over for the game yesterday," I said. "It was a good one."

"I was at Darnell's," he said. "Heard it on the radio, though." His voice went up three octaves and he did a very good imitation of my grandad. "They roont 'em! They roont 'em, Denny!"

I laughed and nodded. There was something about him that day—perhaps it was only the light, which was bright enough but still somehow gloomy and spare—something that looked different. He looked tired, for one thing there were circles under his eyes—but at the same time his complexion seemed a trifle better than it had been lately. He had been drinking a lot of Cokes on the job, knowing he shouldn't, of course, but unable to help succumbing to temptation from time to time. His skin problems tended to go in cycles, as most teenagers' do, depending on their moods—except in Arnie's case, the cycles were usually from bad to worse and back to bad again.

Or maybe it was just the light.

"What'd you do on it?" I asked.

"Not much. Changed the oil. Looked the block over. It's not cracked, Dennis, that's one thing. LeBay or somebody left the drain plug out somewhere along the line, that's all. A lot of the old oil had leaked out. I was lucky not to fry a piston driving it Friday night."

"How'd you get lift-time? I thought you had to reserve that in advance."

His eyes shifted away from mine. "No problem there," he said, but there was deception in his voice. "I ran a couple of errands for Mr Darnell."

I opened my mouth to ask what errands, and then I decided I didn't want to hear. Probably the "couple of errands" boiled down to no more than running around the corner to Schirmer's Luncheonette and bringing back coffee-and for the regulars or crating up various used auto parts for later sale, but I didn't want to be involved in the Christine end of Arnie's life, and that included how he was getting along (or not getting along) down at Darnell's Garage.

And there was something else—a feeling of letting go. I either couldn't define that feeling very well back then or didn't want to. Now I guess I'd say it's the way you feel when a friend of yours falls in love and marries a right high-riding, dyed-in-the-wool bitch. You don't like the bitch and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the bitch doesn't like you, so you just close the door on that room of your friendship. When the thing is done, you either let go of the subject… or you find your friend letting go of you, usually with the bitch's enthusiastic approval.

"Let's go to the movies," Arnie said restlessly.

"What's on?"

"Well, there's one of those gross Kung-fu movies down at the State Twin, how does that sound?
Heee-yah!"
He pretended to administer a savage karate kick to Screaming Jay Hawkins, and Screaming Jay took off like a shot.

"Sounds pretty good. Bruce Lee?"

"Nah, some other guy."

"What's it called?"

"I don't know. Fists of Danger. Flying Hands of Death. Or maybe it was Genitals of Fury, I don't know. What do you say? We can come back and tell the gross parts to Ellie and make her puke."

"All right," I said. "If we can still get in for a buck each."

"Yeah, we can until three."

"Let's go."

We went. It turned out to be a Chuck Norris movie, not bad at all. And on Monday we went back to building the Interstate extension. I forgot about my dream. Gradually I realized that I wasn't seeing as much of Arnie as I used to; again, it was the way you seem to fall out of touch with a guy who has just gotten married. Besides, my thing with the cheerleader began to heat up around then. My thing was heating up, all right—more than one night I brought her home from the submarine races at the drive-in with my balls throbbing so badly I could barely walk.

Arnie, meanwhile, was spending most of his evenings at Darnell's.

9 BUDDY REPPERTON

And I know, no matter what the cost,

Oooooh, that dual exhaust

Makes my motor cry,

My baby's got the Cadillac Walk.

— Moon Martin

Our last full week of work before school started was the week before Labor Day. When I pulled up to Arnie's house to pick him up that morning, he came out with a great big blue-black shiner around one eye and an ugly scrape upside his face.

"What happened to you?"

"I don't want to talk about it," he said sullenly. "I had to talk to my parents about it until I thought I was gonna croak." He tossed his lunch pail in the back and lapsed into a grim silence that lasted all the way to work. Some of the other guys ribbed him about his shiner, but Arnie just shrugged it off.

I didn't say anything about it on the Way home, just played the radio and kept myself to myself. And I might not have heard the story at all if I hadn't been waylaid by this greasy Irish wop named Gino just before we turned off Main Street.

Back then Gino was always waylaying me—he could reach right through a closed car window and do it. Gino's Fine Italian Pizza is on the corner of Main and Basin Drive, and every time I saw that sign with the pizza going up in the air and all the i's dotted with shamrocks (it flashed off and on at night, how funky can you get, am I right?), I'd feel the waylaying start again. And tonight my mother would be in class, which meant a pick-ip supper at home. The prospect didn't fill me with joy. Neither my dad nor I was much of a cook, and Ellie would burn water.

"Let's get a pizza," I said, pulling into Gino's parking lot. "What do you say? A big greasy one that smells like armpits."

"Jesus, Dennis, that's gross!"

"Clean
armpits," I amended. "Come on."

"Nah, I'm pretty low on cash," Arnie said listlessly.

"I'll buy. You can even have those horrible fucking anchovies on your half. What do you say?"

"Dennis, I really don't—"

"And a Pepsi," I said.

"Pepsi racks my complexion. You know that."

"Yeah, I know. A great
big
Pepsi, Arnie."

His gray eyes gleamed for the first time that day, "A great
big
Pepsi," he echoed. "Think of that. You're mean, Dennis. Really."

"Two, if you want," I said. It was mean, all right—like offering Hershey bars to the circus fat lady.

"Two," he said, clutching my shoulder. "Two Pepsis, Dennis!" He began to flop around in the seat, clawing at his throat and screaming, "Two! Quick! Two! Quick!"

I was laughing so hard I almost drove into the cinderblock wall, and as we got out of the car, I thought, Why shouldn't he have a couple of sodas? He sure must have been steering clear of them lately. The slight improvement in his complexion I'd noticed on that overcast Sunday two weeks ago was definite now. He still had plenty of bumps and craters, but not so many of them were—pardon me, but I must say it—oozing. He looked better in other ways too. A summer of road-ganging had left him deeply tanned and in better shape than he'd ever been in his life. So I thought he deserved his Pepsi. To the victor goes the spoils.

Gino's is run by a wonderful Italian fellow named Pat Donahue. He has a sticker on his cash register which reads IRISH MAFIA, he serves green beer on St Patrick's Day (on March 17th you can't even get near Gino's, and one of the cuts on the jukebox is Rosemary Clooney singing "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling"), and affects a black derby hat, which he usually wears tipped far back on his head.

The juke is an old Wurtitzer bubbler, a holdover from the late forties, and all the records—not just Rosemary Clooney—are on the Prehistoric label. It may be the last jukebox in America where you can get three plays for a quarter. On the infrequent occasions when I smoke a little dope, it's Gino's I fantasize about—just walking in there and ordering three loaded pizzas, a quart of Pepsi, and six or seven of Pat Donahues home-made fudge brownies. Then I imagine just sitting down and scarfing everything up while a steady stream of Beach Boys and Rolling Stones hits pours out of that juke.

We went in, ordered up, and sat there watching the three pizza cooks fling the dough into the air and catch it. They were trading such pungent Italian witticisms as, "I seen ya at the Shriners' dance last night, Howie, who was that skag your brother was wit?" "Oh,
her?
That was your sister."

I mean, like, how Old World can you get?

People came in and went out, a lot of them kids from school. Before long I'd be seeing them in the halls again, and I felt a recurrence of that fierce nostalgia-in-advance and that sense of fright. In my head I could hear the home-room bell going off, but somehow its long bray sounded like an alarm:
Here we go again, Dennis, last time, after this year you got to learn how to be a grown-up.
I could hear locker doors crashing closed, could hear the steady
ka-chonk, ka-chonk, ka-chonk,
of linemen hitting the tackling dummies, could hear Marty Bellerman yelling exuberantly, "My ass and your face, Pedersen! Remember that! My ass and your face! It's easier to tell the fuckin Bobbsey Twins apart!" The dry smell of chalk-dust in the classrooms in the Math Wing. The sound of the typewriters from the big secretarial classrooms on the second floor. Mr Meecham, the principal, giving the announcements at the end of the day in his dry, fussy voice. Lunch outdoors on the bleachers in good weather. A new crop of freshmen looking dorky and lost. And at the end of it all, you march down the aisle in this big purple bathrobe, and that's it. High school's over. You are released on an unsuspecting world.

"Dennis, do you know Buddy Repperton?" Arnie asked, pulling me out of my reverie. Our pizza had come.

"Buddy who?"

"Repperton."

The name was familiar. I worked on my side of the pizza and tried to put a face with it. After a while, it came. I had had a run-in with him when I was one of the dorky little freshmen. It happened at a mixer dance. The band was taking a break and I was waiting in the cold-drink line to get a soda. "Repperton gave me a shove and told me freshmen had to wait until all the upperclassmen got drinks. He had been a sophomore then, a big, hulking, mean sophomore. He had a lantern jaw, a thick clot of greasy black hair, and little eyes set too close together. But those eyes were not entirely stupid; an unpleasant intelligence lurked in them. He was one of those guys who spend their high school time majoring in Smoking Area.