"How about to college?" I asked quietly.
He looked at me sullenly, his earlier good humor gone like magic. "I should
have known she'd fill you full of that garbage. My mother is one woman who
never stuck at getting low to get what she wants. You know that, Dennis.
She'd kiss the devil's ass if that's what it took."
I put my beer-can down, still full. "Well, she didn't kiss my ass. She just said
you weren't making any applications and she was worried."
"It's my life," Arnie said. His lips twisted, changing his face, making it
extraordinarily ugly. "I'll do what I want."
"And college isn't it?"
"Yeah, I'll go. But in my own time. You tell her that, if she asks. In my own
time. Not this year. Definitely not. If she thinks I'm going to go off to Pitt or
Horlicks or Rutgers and put on a freshman beanie and go boola-boola at the
home football games, she's out of her mind. Not after the shitstorm I've been
through this year. No way, man."
"What
are
you going to do?"
"I'm taking off," he said. "I'm going to get in Christine and we're going to
motorvate right the Christ out of this one-timetable town. You understand?"
His voice began to rise, to become shrill, and I felt horror sweep over me
again. I was helpless against that unmanning fear and could only hope that it
didn't show on my face. Because it wasn't just LeBay's voice now; now it
was even LeBay's
face
, swimming under Arnie's like some dead thing
preserved in Formalin. "It's been nothing but a shitstorm, and I think that
goddam Junkins is still after me full steam ahead, and he better watch out or
somebody just might junk
him
—"
"Who's Junkins?" I asked.
"Never mind," he said. "It's not important." Behind him, the Wesson Oil had
begun to sizzle. A kernel of corn popped—
ponk!
—against the underside of
the lid. "I've got to go shake that, Dennis. Do you want to make a toast or not?
Makes no difference to me."
"All right," I said. "How about to us?"
He smiled, and the constriction in my chest eased a little. "Us, yeah, that's a
good one, Dennis. To us. Gotta be that, huh?"
"Gotta be," I said, and my voice hoarsened a little. "Yeah, gotta be."
We clicked the Bud cans together and drank.
Arnie went over to the stove and began shaking the pan, where the corn was
picking up speed. I let a couple of swallows of beer slide down my throat.
Beer was still a fairly new thing to me then, and I had never been drunk on it
because I liked the taste quite well, and friends—Lenny Barongg was the
chief of them—had told me that if you got falling-down, standing-up,
ralphing-down-your-shirt shitfaced, you couldn't even look at the stuff for
weeks. Sadly, I have found out since that that isn't completely true.
But Arnie was drinking like they were going to reinstitute Prohibition on
January first; he had finished his first can before the popcorn had finished
popping. He crimped the empty, winked at me, and said, "Watch me put it up
the little tramp's ass, Dennis." The allusion escaped me, so I just smiled
noncommitally as he tossed the can toward the wastebasket. It banged the
wall over it and dropped in.
"Two points," I said.
"That's right," he said. "Hand me another one, would you?"
I did, figuring what the hell—my folks were planning to see the New Year in
at home, and if Arnie got really drunk and passed out, I could give my dad a
call. Arnie might say things drunk that he wouldn't say sober, and I didn't
want to ride home in Christine anyway.
But the beer didn't seem to affect him. He finished popping the corn, dumped
it into a big plastic bowl, melted half a stick of margarine, poured it over the
top, salted it, and said, "Let's go in the living room and watch some tube.
What do you say?"
"Fine by me." I got my crutches, seated them in my armpits—which just lately
felt as if they might be growing callouses and then groped for the three beers
still on the table.
"I'll come back for them," Arnie said. "Come on. Before you break
everything all over again. He smiled at me, and for that moment he was
nobody but Arnie Cunningham, so much so that it broke my heart a little bit to
look at him.
There was some dorky New Year's Eve special on. Donny and Marie
Osmond were singing. both of them showing their giant white teeth in
friendly but somehow sha,rklike grins. We let the TV play and talked. I told
Arnie about the physical therapy sessions, and how I was working out with
weights, and after two beers I confessed that I was sometimes afraid that I
would never walk right again. Not playing football in college didn't bother
me, but that did. He nodded calmly and sympathetically through it all.
I may as well stop right here and tell you that I have never spent such a
peculiar evening in my life. Worse things were waiting, but nothing that was
so strange, so… so
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