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 programme
'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 programme - '
'Sure, of course,' Arnie said. He smiled at me humourlessly, 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 programme 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.
PART I: DENNIS - TEENAGE CAR-SONG Chapter 4 ARNIE GETS MARRIED
I remember the day
When I chose her over all those other
junkers,
Thought I could tell
Under the coat of rust she was gold,
No clunker . . .
- The Beach Boys
We could have had two hours of overtime that Friday evening, but we declined it. We picked up our cheques in the office and drove down to the Libertyville branch of Pittsburgh Savings and Loan and cashed them. I dumped most of mine into my savings account, put fifty into my