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3 THE MORNING AFTER
My poppa said "Son,
You're gonna drive me to drink
If you don't quit drivin that
Hot-rod Lincoln."
— Charlie Ryan
I cruised by Arnie's house the next morning at 6:30 A.M. and just parked at
the curb, not wanting to go in even though his mother and father would still
be in bed—there had been too many bad vibes flying around in that kitchen
the evening before for me to feel comfortable about the usual doughnut and
coffee before work.
Arnie didn't come out for almost five minutes, and I started to wonder if
maybe he hadn't made good on his threat to just take off. Then the back door
opened and he came down the driveway, his lunch bucket banging against one
leg.
He got in, slammed the door, and said, "Drive on, Jeeves." This was one of
Arnie's standard witticisms when he was in a good humor.
I drove on, looked at him cautiously, almost decided to say something, and
then decided I better wait for him to start… if he had anything to say at all.
For a long time it seemed that he didn't. We drove most of the way to work
with no conversation between us at all, nothing but the sound of WMDY, the
local rock-and-soul station. Arnie beat time absently against his leg.
At last he said, "I'm sorry you had to be in on that last night, man."
"That's okay, Arnie."
"Has it ever occurred to you," he said abruptly, "that parents are nothing but
overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually
kicking and screaming?"
I shook my head.
"Tell you what I think," he said. We were coming up on the construction site
now; the Carson Brothers trailer was only two rises over. The traffic this
early was light and somnolent. The sky was a sweet peach color. "I think that
part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids."
"That sounds very rational," I said. "Mine are always trying to kill me. Last
night it was my mother sneaking in with a pillow and putting it over my face.
Night before that it was Dad chasing my sister and me around with a
screwdriver." I was kidding, but I wondered what Michael and Regina might
think if they could hear this rap.
"I know it sounds a little crazy at first," Arnie said, unperturbed, "but there
are lots of things that sound nuts until you really consider them. Penis envy.
Oedipal conflicts. The Shroud of Turin."
"Sounds like horseshit to me," I said. "You had a fight with your folks, that's
all."
"I really believe it, though," Arnie said pensively. "Not that they know what
they're doing; I don't believe that at all. And do you know why?"
"Do tell," I said.
"Because as soon as you have a kid, you know for sure that you're going to
die. When you have a kid, you see your own gravestone."
"You know what, Arnie?"
"What?"
"I think that's fucking gruesome" I said, and we both burst out laughing.
"I don't mean it that way," he said.
We pulled into the parking lot and I turned off the engine. We sat there for a
moment or two.
"I told them I'd opt out of the college courses," he said. "Told them I'd sign up
for VT right across the board."
VT was vocational training. The same sort of thing the reform-school boys
get, except of course they don't go home at night. They have what you might
call a compulsory live-in program
"Arnie," I began, unsure of just how to go on. The way this thing had blown
up out of nothing still freaked me out. "Arnie, you're still a minor. They have
to sign your program—"
"Sure, of course," Arnie said. He smiled at me humorlessly, and in that cold
dawn light he looked at once older and much, much younger like a cynical
baby, somehow. "They have the power to cancel my entire program for
another year, if they want to, and substitute their own. They could sign me up
for Home Ec and World of Fashion, if they wanted to. The law says they can
do it. But no law says they can make me pass what they pick."
That brought it home to me—the distance he had gone, I mean. How could
that old clunker of a car have come to mean so much to him so damned
fast
?
In the following days that question kept coming at me in different ways, the
way I've always imagined a fresh grief would. When Arnie told Michael and
Regina he meant to have it, he sure hadn't been kidding. He had gone right to
that place where their expectations for him lived the most strongly, and he
had done it with a ruthless expediency that surprised me. I'm not sure that
lesser tactics would have worked against Regina, but that Arnie had actually
been able to do it surprised me. In fact, it surprised the shit out of me. What it
boiled down to was if Arnie spent his senior year in VT, college went out the
window. And to Michael and Regina, that was an impossibility.
"So they just… gave up?" It was close to punch-in time, but I couldn't let this
go until I knew everything.
"Not just like that, no. I told them I'd find garage space for it and that I
wouldn't try to have it inspected or registered until I had their approval."
"Do you think you're going to get that"?"
He flashed me a grim smile that was somehow both confident and scary. It
was the smile of a bulldozer operator lowering the blade of a D-9 Cat in
front of a particularly difficult stump.
"I'll get it," he said. "When I'm ready, I'll get it."
And you know what? I believed he would.
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