by Steven King
“What’s the most you ever did?” I asked him.
“I did twelve once,” he said. “But I thought I was going to choke.”
I snorted laughter. “Have you done it for Leigh yet?”
“I’m holding it back for the prom,” he said. “I’ll give her a few side-noogies too.” We got laughing over that, and I realized how much I missed Arnie sometimes—I had football, student council, a new girlfriend who would (I hoped) consent to give me a hand-job before the drive-in season ended. I had little hope of getting her to do more than that; she was a little too enchanted with herself. Still, it was fun trying.
Even with all of that going on, I had missed Arnie. First there had been Christine, now there was Leigh and Christine. In that order, I hoped.
“Where is she today?” I asked.
“Sick,” he said. “She got her period, and I guess it really hurts.”
I raised a set of mental eyebrows. If she was discussing her female problems with him, they were getting chummy indeed.
“How did you happen to ask her to the football game that day?” I asked. “The day we played Hidden Hills?”
He laughed. “The only football game I’ve been to since my sophomore year. We brought you luck, Dennis.”
“You just called her up and asked her to go?”
“I almost didn’t. That was the first date I ever had.” He glanced over at me shyly. “I don’t think I slept more than two hours the night before. After I called her up and she said she’d go with me, I was scared to death I’d make an asshole of myself, or that Buddy Repperton would show up and want to fight, or something else would happen.”
“You seemed to have everything under control.”
“Did I?” He looked pleased. “Well, that’s good. But I was scared. She’d talk to me in the halls, you know—ask me about assignments and stuff like that. She joined the chess club even though she wasn’t very good … but she’s getting better. I’m teaching her.”
I’ll bet you are, you dog, I thought, but didn’t quite dare say it—I still remembered the way he had blown up at me the same day at Hidden Hills. Besides, I wanted to hear this. I was pretty curious; captivating a girl as stunning as Leigh Cabot had been a real coup.
“So after a while I started to think maybe she was interested in me,” Arnie went on. “It probably took a lot longer for the penny to drop for me than it would for some other guys—guys like you, Dennis.”
“Sure, I’m a smoothie,” I said. “What James Brown used to call ‘a sex machine.’ ”
“No, you’re no sex machine, but you know about girls,” he said seriously. “You understand them. I was always just scared of them. Never knew what to say. Still don’t, I guess. Leigh’s different.
“I was afraid to ask her out.” He seemed to consider this. “I mean, she’s a beautiful girl, really beautiful. Don’t you think so, Dennis?”
“Yes. As far as I can tell, she’s the prettiest girl in school.”
He smiled, pleased. “I think so, too … but I thought, maybe it’s only because I love her that I think that way.”
I looked at my friend, hoping he wasn’t going to get into more trouble than he could handle. At that point, of course, I had no idea what trouble meant.
“Anyway, I heard these guys talking one day in chem lab—Lenny Barongg and Ned Stroughman—and Ned was telling Lenny that he’d asked her out and she’d said no, but in a nice way … like maybe if he asked her again she might try it out. And I had this picture of her going steady with Ned by spring, and I started to feel really jealous. It’s ridiculous. I mean, she told him no and I’m feeling jealous, you dig what I’m saying?”
I smiled and nodded. Out on the field the cheerleaders were trying out some new routines. I didn’t think they would help our team very much, but it was pleasant to watch them. Their shadows puddled at their heels on the green grass in the bright noontime.
“The other thing that got me was that Ned didn’t sound pissed off or … or ashamed … or rejected, or anything like that. He tried for a date and got turned down, that was all. I decided I could do that, too. Still, when I called her up on the phone I was sweating all over. Man, that was bad. I kept imagining her laughing at me and saying something like, ‘Me go out with you, you little creep? You must he dreaming! I’m not that hard up yet!’ ”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can’t figure out why she didn’t.”
He poked me in the stomach. “Gut-noogies, Dennis! Make you puke!”
“Never mind,” I said. “Tell me the rest.”
He shrugged. “Not much else to tell. Her mother answered the phone when I called and said she’d get her. I heard the phone go clunking down on the table, and I almost hung up.” Arnie held up two fingers a quarter of an inch apart. “I came this close to hanging up. No shit.”
“I know the feeling,” I said, and I did—you worry about the laughter, you imagine the contempt to some degree or other, no matter if you’re a football player or some pimply little four-eyed runt—but I don’t think I could understand the degree to which Arnie must have felt it. What he had done had taken monumental courage. It’s a small thing, a date, but in our society there are all sorts of charged forces swirling behind that simple concept—I mean, there are kids who go all the way through high school and never get up enough courage to ask a girl for a date. Never once, in all four years. And that isn’t just one or two kids, it’s lots of them. And there are lots of sad girls who never get asked. It’s a shitty way to run things, when you stop to think about it. A lot of people get hurt. I could dimly imagine the naked terror Arnie must have felt, waiting for Leigh to come to the phone; the sense of dread amazement at the idea that he was not planning to ask just any girl out but the prettiest girl in school.
“She answered,” Arnie went on. “She said ‘Hello?’ and, man, I couldn’t say anything. I tried and nothing came out but this little whistle of air. So she said ‘Hello, who is this?’ like it might be some kind of practical joke, you know, and I thought, This is ridiculous. If I can talk to her in the hall, I should be able to talk to her on the goddam phone, all she can say is no, I mean she can’t shoot me or anything if I ask her for a date. So I said hi, this is Arnie Cunningham, and she said hi, and blah-blah-blahdy-blah, bullshit-bullshit-bullshit, and then I realized I didn’t even know where the hell I wanted to ask her to go, and we’re running out of things to say, pretty soon she’s going to hang up. So I asked her the first thing I could think of, would she want to go to the football game on Saturday. She said she’d love to go, right off like that, like she had just been waiting for me to ask her, you know?”
“Probably she was.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Arnie considered this, bemused.
The bell rang, signifying five minutes to period five. Arnie and I got up. The cheerleaders trotted off the field, their little skirts flipping saucily.
We climbed down the bleachers, tossed our lunchbags in one of the trash barrels painted with the school colors—orange and black, talk about Halloween—and walked toward the school.
Arnie was still smiling, recalling the way it had worked itself out, that first time with Leigh. “Asking her to the game was sheer desperation.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said. “That’s what I get for playing my heart out every Saturday afternoon, huh?”
“You know what I mean. Then, after she said she’d go with me, I had this really horrible thought and called you—remember?”
Suddenly I did. He had called to ask me if that game was at home or away and had seemed absurdly crushed when I told him it was at Hidden Hills.
“So there I was, I’ve got a date with the prettiest girl in school, I’m crazy about her, and it turns out to be an away game and my car’s in Will’s garage.”
“You could have taken the bus.”
“I know that now, but I didn’t then. The bus always used to be full up a week before the game. I didn’t know so many people would stop coming to the games if the tea
m started losing.”
“Don’t remind me,” I said.
“So I went to Will. I knew Christine could do it, but no way she was street-legal. I mean, I was desperate.”
How desperate? I wondered coldly and suddenly.
“And he came through for me. Said he understood how important it was, and if …” Arnie paused; seemed to consider. “And that’s the story of the big date,” he finished gracelessly.
And if …
But that wasn’t my business.
Be his eyes, my father had said.
But I pushed that away too.
We were walking past the smoking area now, deserted except for three guys and two girls, hurriedly finishing a joint. They had it in a makeshift matchbook roachclip, and the evocative odor of pot, so similar to the aroma of slowly burning autumn leaves, slipped into my nostrils.
“Seen Buddy Repperton around?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “And don’t want to. You?”
I had seen him once, hanging out at Vandenberg’s Happy Gas, an extra-barrel service station out on Route 22 in Monroeville. Don Vandenberg’s dad owned it, and the place had been on the ragged edge of going bust ever since the Arab oil embargo in ’73. Buddy hadn’t seen me; I was just cruising by.
“Not to talk to.”
“You mean he can talk?” Arnie said with a scorn that wasn’t like him. “What a shitter.”
I started. That word again. I thought about it, told myself what the fuck, and asked him where he had gotten that particular term.
He looked at me thoughtfully. The second bell rang suddenly, braying out from the side of the building. We were going to be late to class, but right then I didn’t care at all.
“You remember that day I bought the car?” he said. “Not the day I put the deposit on it, but the day I actually bought it?”
“Sure.”
“I went in with LeBay while you stayed outside. He had this tiny kitchen with a red-checked tablecloth on the table. We sat down and he offered me a beer. I figured I better take it. I really wanted the car, and I didn’t want to, you know, offend him somehow. So we each had a beer and he got off on this long, rambling … what would you call it? Rant, I guess. This rant about how all the shitters were against him. It was his word. Dennis. The shitters. He said it was the shitters that were making him sell his car.”
“What did he mean?”
“I guess he meant that he was too old to drive, but he wouldn’t put it that way. It was all their fault. The shitters. The shitters wanted him to take a driver’s road-test every two years and an eye exam every year. It was the eye exam that bothered him. And he said they didn’t like him on the street—no one did. So someone threw a stone at the car.
“I understand all that. But I don’t understand why …” Arnie paused in the doorway, oblivious of the fact that we were late for class. His hands were shoved into the back pockets of his jeans and he was frowning. “I don’t understand why he let Christine go to rack and ruin like that, Dennis. Like she was when I bought her. Mostly he talked about her like he really loved her—I know you thought it was just part of his sales-pitch but it wasn’t—and then near the end, when he was counting the money, he sort of growled, ‘That shitting car, I’ll be fucked if I know why you want it, boy. It’s the ace of spades.’ And I said something like I thought I could fix it up really nice. And he said, ‘All that and more. If the shitters will let you.’ ”
We went inside. Mr. Leheureux, the French teacher, was going someplace fast, his bald head gleaming under the fluorescent lights. “You boys are late,” he said in a harried voice that reminded me of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. We hurried up until he was out of sight and then we slowed down again.
Arnie said, “When Buddy Repperton got after me like that, I was really scared.” He lowered his voice, smiling but serious. “I almost pissed my pants, if you want to know the truth. Anyway, I guess I used LeBay’s word without even thinking about it. In Repperton’s case it fits, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes.”
“I gotta go,” Arnie said. “Calculus, then Auto Shop III. I think I’ve learned the whole course on Christine the last two months anyway.”
He hurried off and I just stood there in the hall for a minute, watching him go. I had a study hall with Miss Rat-Pack period six on Mondays, and I thought I could slip in the back unnoticed … I had done it before. Besides, seniors get away with murder, as I was rapidly learning.
I stood there, trying to shake a feeling of fright that would never be so amorphous or un-concrete again. Something was wrong, something was out of place, out of joint. There was a chill, and not all the bright October sunshine spilling through all the high school windows in the world would dispel it. Things were as they always had been, but they were getting ready to change—I felt it.
I stood there trying to get myself in gear, trying to tell myself that the chill was no more than my fears about my own future, and that was the change coming that I was uneasy about. Maybe that was part of it. But it wasn’t all. That shitting car, I’ll be fucked if I know why you want it, boy. It’s the ace of spades. I saw Mr. Leheureux coming back from the office, and I started moving.
• • •
I think that everybody has a backhoe in his or her head, and at moments of stress or trouble you can fire it up and simply push everything into a great big slit-trench in the floor of your conscious mind. Get rid of it. Bury it. Except that that slit-trench goes down into the subconscious, and sometimes, in dreams, the bodies stir and walk. I dreamed of Christine again that night, Arnie behind the wheel this time, the decomposing corpse of Roland D. LeBay lolling obscenely in the shotgun seat as the car roared out of the garage at me, pinning me with the savage circles of its headlights.
I woke up with my pillow crammed against my mouth to stifle the screams.
19
The Accident
That was the last time I talked to Arnie—really talked to him—until Thanksgiving, because the following Saturday was the day I got hurt. That was the day we played the Ridge Rock Bears again, and this time we lost by the truly spectacular score of 46-3. I wasn’t around at the end of the game, however. About seven minutes into the third quarter I got into the open, took a pass, and was setting myself to run when I was hit simultaneously by three Bears defensive linemen. There was an instant of terrible pain—a bright flare, as if I had been caught on ground zero of a nuclear blast. Then there was a lot of darkness.
Things stayed dark for a fairly long time, although it didn’t seem long to me. I was unconscious for about fifty hours, and when I woke up late on the afternoon of Monday the twenty-third of October, I was in Libertyville Community Hospital. My dad and mom were there. So was Ellie, looking pale and strained. There were dark brown circles under her eyes, and I was absurdly touched; she had found it in her heart to cry for me in spite of all the Twinkies and Yodels I had hooked out of the breadbox after she went to bed, in spite of the time, when she was twelve, that I had given her a little bag of Vigoro after she had spent about a week looking at herself sideways in the mirror with her tightest T-shirt on so she could see if her boobs were getting any bigger (she had burst into tears and my mother had been super-pissed at me for almost two weeks), in spite of all the teasing and the shitty little I’m-one-up-on-you sibling games.
Arnie wasn’t there when I woke up, but he joined my family shortly; he and Leigh had been down in the waiting room. That evening my aunt and uncle from Albany showed up, and the rest of that week was a steady parade of family and friends—the entire football team showed up, including Coach Puffer, who looked as if he had aged about twenty years. I guess he had found out there were worse things than a losing season. Coach was the one who broke the news to me that I was never going to play football again, and I don’t know what he expected—for me to bust out crying or maybe have hysterics, from the drawn, tense look on his face. But I didn’t have much of a reaction at all, inwardly or outwardly. I was just
glad to be alive and to know I would walk again, eventually.
If I had been hit just once, I probably could have bounced right up and gone back for more. But the human body was never meant to get creamed from three different angles at the same time. Both of my legs were broken, the left in two places. My right arm had whipped around behind me when I went down, and I had sustained a nasty greenstick fracture of the forearm. But all of that was really only the icing on the cake. I had also gotten a fractured skull and sustained what the doctor in charge of my case kept calling “a lower spinal accident,” which seemed to mean that I had come within about a centimeter of being paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of my life.
I got a lot of visitors, a lot of flowers, a lot of cards. All of it was, in some ways, very enjoyable—like being alive to help celebrate your own wake.
But I also got a lot of pain and a lot of nights when I couldn’t sleep; I got an arm suspended over my body by weights and pulleys, likewise a leg (they both seemed to itch all the time under the casts), and a temporary cast—what is called a “presser cast”—around my lower back. Also, of course, I got the prospect of a long hospital stay and endless trips in a wheelchair to that chamber of horrors so innocently labelled the Therapy Wing.
Oh, and one other thing—I got a lot of time.
I read the paper; I asked questions of my visitors; and on more than a few occasions, as things went on and my suspicions began to get out of hand, I asked myself if I might not be losing my mind.
I was in the hospital until Christmas, and by the time I got home, my suspicions had almost taken their final shape. I was finding it more and more difficult to deny that monstrous shape, and I knew damned well I wasn’t losing my mind. In some ways it would have been better—more comforting—if I could have believed that. By then I was badly frightened, and more than half in love with my best friend’s girl, as well.
Time to think… too much time.