Okay, Arnie, we'll be right here in
Room 30 if you change your mind.
Mr Slawson had looked at him with his
faded blue eyes that his thick glasses magnified to the size of repulsive
boiled eggs, and there had been something in them—was it reproach?
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
Lopex 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
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