"Tell me what happened," Mercer said. He put his book on the bedtable and leaned forward. "Tell me everything you know, Dennis, from first to last."
"What has Leigh said?" I asked. "And how is she?"
"She spent Friday night here under observation," Mercer told me. "She had a concussion and a scalp laceration that took a dozen stitches to close. No marks on her face. Lucky. She's a very pretty girl."
"She's more than that," I said. "She's beautiful."
"She won't say anything," Mercer said, and a reluctant grin--of admiration, I think--slanted his face to the left. "Not to me, not to her father. He is, shall we say, in a state of high pissoff about the whole thing. She says it's your business what to tell and when to tell." He looked at me thoughtfully. "Because, she says, you're the one who ended it."
"I didn't do such a great job," I muttered. I was still trying to cope with the idea that Arnie could possibly be dead. It was impossible, wasn't it? We had gone to Camp Winnesko in Vermont together when we were twelve, and I got homesick and told him I was going to call and tell my parents they had to come get me. Arnie said if I did, he'd tell everybody at school that the reason I came home early was that they caught me eating boogers in my bunk after lights out and expelled me. We climbed the tree in my back yard to the very top fork and carved our initials there. He used to sleep over at my house and we'd stay up late watching Shock Theater, crouched together on the sofa under an old quilt. We ate all those clandestine Wonder Bread sandwiches. When he was fourteen Arnie came to me, scared and ashamed because he was having these sexy dreams and he thought they were making him wet the bed. But it was the ant farms my mind kept coming back to. How could he be dead when we had made those ant farms together? Dear Christ, it seemed like only a week or two ago, those ant farms. So how could he be dead? I opened my mouth to tell Mercer that Arnie couldn't be dead--those ant farms made the very idea absurd. Then I closed my mouth again. I couldn't tell him that. He was just a guy.
Arnie, I thought. Hey, man--it's not true, is it? Jesus Christ, we still got too much to do. We never even double-dated at the drive-in yet.
"What happened?" Mercer asked again. "Tell me, Dennis."
"You'd never believe it," I said thickly.
"You might be surprised what I'd believe," he said. "And you might be surprised what we know. A fellow named Junkins was the chief investigator on this case. He was killed not so very far from here. He was a friend of mine. A good friend. A week before he died he told me that he thought something was going on in Libertyville that nobody would believe. Then he was killed. With me that makes it personal."
I shifted positions cautiously. "He didn't tell you any more?"
"He told me that he believed he had uncovered an old murder," Mercer said, still not taking his eyes from mine. "But it didn't much matter, he said, because the perpetrator was dead."
"LeBay," I muttered, and thought that if Junkins had known about that, it was no wonder Christine had killed him. Because if Junkins had known that, he had been much too close to the whole truth.
Mercer said, "LeBay was the name he mentioned." He leaned closer. "And I'll tell you something else, Dennis--Junkins was one hell of a driver. When he was younger, before he got married, he used to run stackers at Philly Plains, and he won his share of checkered flags. He went off the road doing better than a hundred and twenty in a Dodge cruiser with a hemi engine. Whoever was chasing him--and we know someone was--had to be one hell of a driver."
"Yeah," I said. "He was."
"I came by myself. I've been here for two hours, waiting for you to wake up. I was here until they kicked me out last night. I don't have a stenographer with me, I don't have a tape recorder, and I assure you that I'm not wearing a wire. When you make a statement--if you ever have to--that'll be a different ballgame. But for now, it's you and me. I have to know. Because I see Rudy Junkins's wife and Rudy Junkins's kids from time to time. You dig?"
I thought it over. For a long time I thought it over--nearly five minutes. He sat there and let me do it At last I nodded. "Okay. But you're still not going to believe it."
"We'll see," he said.
I opened my mouth with no idea of what was going to come out "He was a loser, you know," I said. "Every high school has to have at least two, it's like a national law. Everyone's dumping ground. Only sometimes . . . sometimes they find something to hold onto and they survive. Arnie had me. And then he had Christine."
I looked at him, and if I had seen the slightest wrong flicker in those gray eyes that were so unsettlingly like Arnie's . . . well, if I had seen that, I think I would have clammed up right there and told him to put it on his books in whatever way seemed the most plausible and to tell Rudy Junkins's kids whatever the hell he pleased.
But he only nodded, watching me closely.
"I just wanted you to understand that," I said, and then a lump rose in my throat and I couldn't say what I maybe should have said next: Leigh Cabot came later.
I drank some more water and swallowed hard. I talked for the next two hours.
At last I finished. There was no big climax; I simply dried up, my throat sore from so much talking. I didn't ask if he believed me; I didn't ask him if he was going to have me locked up in a loonybin or give me a liars' medal. I knew that he believed a great deal of it, because what I knew dovetailed too well with what he knew. What he thought about the rest of it--Christine and LeBay and the past reaching out its hands toward the present--that I didn't know. And don't to this day. Not really.
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. "Weill" he said. "Your folks will be waiting to visit you, no doubt."
"Probably, yeah."
He took out his wallet and produced a 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 program.
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 fat
her.
"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 has 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 selfconsciously 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 he 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 sometimes, 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 center, 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.
"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 junior-high 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 the 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 pulli
ng 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 putrescent 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 that 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 back 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-gray lockers lining it, is Christine--brand new and sparkling, sitting on four new whitewall tires, 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 fewer now. Something 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.