by Steven King
Maybe it had been. But the guy hadn’t even tried to persuade him to stay, that was the thing. He should have at least tried, because Arnie was the best the LHS chess club had to offer, and Slawson knew it. If he had tried, maybe Arnie would have changed his mind. The truth was, he did have a little more time now that Christine was … was …
What?
… well, fixed up again. If Mr. Slawson had said something like Hey Arnie, don’t be so rash, let’s think this over, we could really use you … if Mr. Slawson had said something like that, why, he might have reconsidered. But not Slawson. Just we’ll be right here in Room 30 if you change your mind, and blah-blah and yak-yak, what a fucking shitter, just like the rest of them. It wasn’t his fault that LHS had been knocked out in the semi-final round; he had won four games before that and would have won in the finals if he had gotten a chance. It was those two shitters Barry Qualson and Mike Hicks that had lost it for them; both of them played chess as if maybe they thought Ruy Lopez was some new kind of soft drink or something… .
He stripped the wrapper and the foil from a stick of gum, folded the gum into his mouth, balled the wrapper, and flicked it into the litterbag hanging from Christine’s ashtray with neat accuracy. “Right up the little tramp’s ass,” he muttered, and then grinned. It was a hard, spitless grin. Above it, his eyes moved restlessly from side to side, looking mistrustfully out at a world full of crazy drivers and stupid pedestrians and general idiocy.
Arnie cruised aimlessly around Libertyville, his thoughts continuing to run on in this softly paranoid and bitterly comforting fashion. The radio spilled out a steady flood of golden oldies, and today all of them seemed to be instrumentals—“Rebel Rouser,” “Wild Weekend,” “Telstar,” Sandy Nelson’s jungle-driven “Teen Beat,” and “Rumble” by Line Wray, the greatest of them all. His back nagged, but in a low key. The flurry intensified briefly to a dark gray cloud of snow. He popped on his headlights, and just as quickly the snow tapered off and the clouds broke, spilling through bars of remote and coldly beautiful late-afternoon winter sun.
He cruised.
He came out of his thoughts—which now were that Repperton had maybe come to a perfectly fitting end after all—and was shocked to realize that it was nearly quarter of six, and dark. Gino’s Pizza was coming up on the left, the little green neon shamrocks shimmering in the dark. Arnie pulled over to the curb and got out. He started to cross the street, then realized he had left his keys in Christine’s ignition.
He leaned in to get them … and suddenly the smell assaulted him, the smell Leigh had told him about, the smell he had denied.
It was here now, as if it had come out when he left the car—a high, rotten, meaty smell that made his eyes water and his throat close. He snatched the keys and stood back, trembling, looking at Christine with something like horror.
Arnie, there was a smell. A horrible, rotten smell … you know what I’m talking about.
No, I don’t have the slightest idea … you’re imagining things.
But if she was, so was he.
Arnie turned suddenly and ran across the street to Gino’s as if the devil was on his tail.
• • •
Inside, he ordered a pizza he didn’t really want, changed some quarters for dimes, and slipped into the telephone booth beside the juke. It was thumping some current tune Arnie had never heard before.
He called home first. His father answered, his voice oddly toneless—Arnie had never heard Michael’s voice quite that way before, and his unease deepened. His father sounded like Mr. Slawson. This Thursday afternoon and evening were taking on the maroon tones of nightmare. Beyond the glass walls of the booth, strange faces drifted dreamily past, like untethered balloons on which someone had crudely drawn human faces. God at work with a Magic Marker.
Shitters, he thought disjointedly. All a bunch of shitters.
“Hello, Dad,” he said uncertainly. “Look, I—uh, I kind of lost track of the time here. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right,” Michael said. His voice was almost a drone, and Arnie felt his unease deepen into something like fright. “Where are you, the garage?”
“No—uh, Gino’s. Gino’s Pizza. Dad, are you okay? You sound funny.”
“I’m fine,” Michael said. “Just scraped your dinner down the garbage disposal, your mother’s upstairs crying again, and you’re having a pizza. I’m fine. Enjoying your car, Arnie?”
Arnie’s throat worked, but no sound came out.
“Dad,” he managed finally, “I don’t think that’s very fair.”
“I don’t think I’m very interested anymore in what you think is fair and what you don’t think is fair,” Michael said. “You had some justification for your behavior at first, perhaps. But in the last month or so you’ve turned into someone I don’t understand at all, and something is going on that I understand even less. Your mother doesn’t understand it either, but she senses it, and it’s hurting her very badly. I know she brought part of the hurt on herself, but I doubt if that changes the quality of the pain.”
“Dad, I just lost track of the time!” Arnie cried. “Stop making such a big thing out of it!”
“Were you driving around?”
“Yes, but—”
“I notice that’s when it usually happens,” Michael said. “Will you be home tonight?”
“Yes, early,” Arnie said. He wet his lips. “I just want to go by the garage, I have some information Will asked me to get while I was in Philly—”
“I’m not interested in that either, pardon me,” Michael said. His voice was still polite, chillingly disconnected.
“Oh,” Arnie said in a very small voice. He was very scared now, almost trembling.
“Arnie?”
“What?” Arnie nearly whispered.
“What is going on?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Please. That detective came by to see me at my office. He was after Regina, as well. He upset her very badly. I don’t think he meant to, but—”
“What was it this time?” Arnie asked fiercely. “That fucker, what was it this time? I’ll—”
“You’ll what?”
“Nothing.” He swallowed something that tasted like a lump of dust. “What was it this time?”
“Repperton,” his father said. “Repperton and those other two boys. What did you think it was? The geopolitical situation in Brazil?”
“What happened to Repperton was an accident,” Arnie said. “Why did he want to talk to you and Mom about something that was an accident, for Christ’s sake?”
“I don’t know.” Michael Cunningham paused. “Do you?”
“How would I?” Arnie yelled. “I was in Philadelphia, how would I know anything about it? I was playing chess, not … not… not anything else,” he finished lamely.
“One more time,” Michael Cunningham said. “Is something going on, Arnie?”
He thought of the smell, the high, rotting stink. Leigh choking, digging at her throat, turning blue. He had tried to thump her on the back because that’s what you did when someone was choking, there was no such thing as a Heimlich Maneuver because it hadn’t been invented yet, and besides, this was how it was supposed to end, only not in the car … beside the road … in his arms….
He closed his eyes and the whole world seemed to tilt and swirl sickly.
“Arnie?”
“There is nothing going on,” he said through clenched teeth and without opening his eyes. “Nothing but a lot of people who are on my case because I finally got something of my own and did it all by myself.”
“All right,” his father said, his lackluster voice once more terribly reminiscent of Mr. Slawson’s. “If you want to talk about it, I’m here. I always have been, although I didn’t always make that as clear as I should have. Be sure to kiss your mother when you come in, Arnie.”
“Yeah, I will. Listen, Mi—”
Click.
He stood in the booth, lis
tening stupidly to the sound of nothing at all. His father was gone. There wasn’t even a dial tone because it was a dumb … fucking … phone booth.
He dug into his pocket and spread his change out on the little metal shelf where he could look at it. He picked up a dime, almost dropped it, and at last got it into the slot. He felt sick and overheated. He felt as if he had been very efficiently disowned.
He dialled Leigh’s number from memory.
Mrs. Cabot picked the phone up and recognized his voice immediately. Her pleasant and rather sexy come-hither-thou-fascinating-stranger phone voice became instantly hard. Arnie had had his last chance with her, that voice said, and he had blown it.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you and she doesn’t want to see you,” she said.
“Mrs. Cabot, please, if I could just—”
“I think you’ve done enough,” Mrs. Cabot said coolly. “She came in crying the other night and she’s been crying off and on ever since. She had some sort of a … an experience with you the last time you and she went out, and I only pray it wasn’t what I thought it was. I—”
Arnie felt hysterical laughter bubbling up inside him. Leigh had almost choked to death on a hamburger, and her mother was afraid Arnie had tried to rape her.
“Mrs. Cabot, I have to talk to her.”
“I’m afraid not.”
He tried to think of something else to say, some way to get past the dragon at the gate. He felt a little like a Fuller Brush salesman trying to get in to see the lady of the house. His tongue wouldn’t move. He would have made a lousy salesman. There was going to be that hard click and then smooth silence again.
Then he heard the telephone change hands. Mrs. Cabot said something in sharp protest, and Leigh said something back; it was too muffled for him to catch. Then Leigh’s voice said, “Arnie?”
“Hi,” he said. “Leigh, I just wanted to call and tell you how sorry I was about—”
“Yes,” Leigh said. “I know you were, and I accept your apology, Arnie. But I won’t—I can’t go out with you anymore. Unless things change.”
“Ask me something easy,” he whispered.
“That’s all I—” Her voice sharpened, moved slightly away from the telephone. “Mom, please stop hanging over me!” Her mother said something that sounded disgruntled, there was a pause, and then Leigh’s voice again, low. “That’s all I can say, Arnie. I know how crazy it sounds, but I still think your car tried to kill me the other night. I don’t know how something like that could be, but no matter how I work it over in my mind, it comes out seeming that that was how it was. I know that’s how it was. It’s got you, doesn’t it?”
“Leigh, if you’ll pardon my French, that’s pretty fucking stupid. It’s a car! Can you spell that? C-A-R, car! There’s nothing—”
“Yes,” she said, and now her voice was wavering toward tears. “It’s got you, she’s got you, and I guess nobody can get you free except you.”
His back suddenly awoke and began to throb, sending pain out in a sickish radiation that seemed to echo and amplify in his head.
“Isn’t that the truth of it, Arnie?”
He didn’t, couldn’t, answer.
“Get rid of it,” Leigh said. “Please. I read about that Repperton boy in the paper this morning, and—”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Arnie croaked. And for the second time: “That was an accident.”
“I don’t know what it was. Maybe I don’t want to know. But it isn’t us I’m worried about anymore. It’s you, Arnie. I’m scared for you. You ought to—no, you have to get rid of it.”
Arnie whispered, “Just say you won’t dump me, Leigh. Okay?”
Now she was even closer to crying—or perhaps she was already doing it. “Promise me, Arnie. You have to promise me and then you have to do it. Then we … we can see. Promise me you’ll get rid of that car. It’s all I want from you, nothing else.”
He closed his eyes and saw Leigh walking home from school. And a block down, idling at the curb, was Christine. Waiting for her.
He opened his eyes quickly, as if he had seen a fiend in a dark room.
“I can’t do that,” he said.
“Then we don’t have much to talk about, do we?”
“Yes! Yes, we do. We—”
“No. Goodbye, Arnie. I’ll see you in school.”
“Leigh, wait!”
Click. And dead smooth silence.
A moment of nearly total rage came over him. He had a sudden deadly impulse to swing the black phone receiver around and around his head like an Argentinian bolas, shattering the glass in this goddam torture-chamber of a telephone booth. They had run out on him, all of them. Rats deserting a sinking ship.
You have to be ready to help yourself before anyone else can help you.
Fuck that bullshit! They were rats deserting a sinking ship. Not one of them, from that shitter Slawson with his thick horn-rimmed glasses and his weird poached-egg eyes to his rotten shitting old man who was so fucking pussywhipped that he ought to just give that cunt he was married to a razor and invite her to cut it off to that cheap bitch in her fancy house with her legs crossed probably she’d been having her period and that’s why she choked on the goddam hamburger and those shitters with their fancy goddam cars and the trunks full of golf-clubs those goddam officers I’d like to bend them over this here lathe I’d play some golf with them I could find the right hole to put those little white balls in you bet your ass but when I get out of here no one’s going to tell me what to do it’s gonna be my way my way mine mine mine mine mine MINE—
Arnie came back to himself suddenly, scared and wide-eyed, breathing hard. What had been happening to him? He had seemed like someone else there for a moment, someone on a crazed rant against humanity in general—
Not just someone. It was LeBay.
No! That’s not true at all!
Leigh’s voice: Isn’t that the truth of it, Arnie?
Suddenly something very like a vision rose in his tired, confused mind. He was hearing a minister’s voice: Arnold, do you take this woman to be your loving—
But it wasn’t a church; it was a used-car lot with bright multicolored plastic pennants fluttering in a stiff breeze. Camp chairs had been set up. It was Will Darnell’s lot, and Will was standing beside him in the best man’s position. There was no girl beside him. Christine was parked beside him, shining in a spring sun, even her whitewalls seeming to glow.
His father’s voice: Is there something going on?
The preacher’s voice: Who giveth this woman to this man?
Roland D. LeBay rose from one of the camp chairs like the prow of a skeletal ghost-ship from Hades. He was grinning—and for the first time Arnie saw who had been sitting around him: Buddy Repperton, Richie Trelawney, Moochie Welch. Richie Trelawney was black and charred, most of his hair burned off. Blood had poured down Buddy Repperton’s chin and had caked his shirt like hideous vomit. But Moochie Welch was the worst; Moochie Welch had been ripped open like a laundry bag. They were smiling. All of them were smiling.
I do, Roland D. LeBay croaked. He grinned, and a tongue slimed with graveyard mould lolled from the stinking hole of his mouth. I give her, and he’s got the receipt to prove it. She’s all his. The bitch is the ace of spades … and she’s all his.
• • •
Arnie became aware that he was moaning in the telephone booth, clutching the receiver against his chest. With a tremendous effort he pulled himself all the way out of the daze—vision, whatever it had been—and got hold of himself.
This time when he reached for the change on the ledge, he spilled half of it onto the floor. He plugged a dime into the slot and scrabbled through the telephone book until he found the hospital number. Dennis. Dennis would be there, Dennis always had been. Dennis wouldn’t let him down. Dennis would help.
The switchboard girl answered, and Arnie said, “Room Two-forty, please.”
The connection was made. The phone began t
o ring. It rang … and rang … and rang. Just as he was about to give up, a brisk female voice said, “Second floor, C Wing, who were you trying to reach?”
“Guilder,” Arnie said. “Dennis Guilder.”
“Mr. Guilder’s in Physical Therapy right now,” the female voice said. “You could reach him at eight o’clock.”
Arnie thought of telling her it was important—very important—but suddenly he was overwhelmed with a need to get out of the phone booth. Claustrophobia was like a giant’s hand pushing down on his chest. He could smell his own sweat. The smell was sour, bitter.
“Sir?”
“Yeah, okay, I’ll call back,” Arnie said. He broke the connection and nearly burst out of the booth, leaving his change scattered on the ledge and the floor. A few people turned around to look at him, mildly interested, and then turned back to their food again.
“Pizza’s ready,” the counterman said.
Arnie glanced up at the clock and saw he had been in the booth for almost twenty minutes. There was sweat all over his face. His armpits felt like a jungle. His legs were trembling—the muscles in his thighs felt as if they might simply give out and spill him onto the floor.
He paid for the pizza, nearly dropping his wallet as he tucked his three dollars in change back in.
“You okay?” the counterman asked. “You look a little white around the gills.”
“I’m fine,” Arnie said. Now he felt as if he might vomit. He snatched the pizza in its white box with the word GINO’S emblazoned across the top and fled into the cold sharp clarity of the night. The last of the clouds had blown away, and the stars twinkled like chipped diamonds. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking first at the stars and then at Christine, parked across the street, waiting faithfully.
She would never argue or complain, Arnie thought. She would never demand. You could enter her anytime and rest on her plush upholstery, rest in her warmth. She would never deny. She—she—
She loved him.
Yes; he sensed that was true. Just as he sometimes sensed that LeBay would not have sold her to anyone else, not for two hundred and fifty, not for two thousand. She had been sitting there waiting for the right buyer. One who would …