behind the wheel in LeBay's garage, and the kind of vision that had come over him.
Last of all, he thought of his dream: headlights bearing down on him in the high womanscream of burning rubber.
'Yes,' he said. 'I think I do.'
They looked at each other in the hospital room.
PART II: ARNIE - TEENAGE LOVE-SONGS Chapter 29 THANKSGIVING
Two-three hours passed us by,
Altitude dropped to 505,
Fuel consumption way too thin,
Let's get home before we run out of gas.
Now you can't catch me -
No, baby, you can't catch me -
'Cause if you get too close,
I'm gone like a cooool breeze.
- Chuck Berry
At the hospital they served Thanksgiving dinner in shifts from eleven in the morning until one in the afternoon. Dennis got his at quarter past twelve: three careful slices of white turkey breast, one careful ladleful of brown gravy, a scoop of instant mashed potatoes the exact size and shape of a baseball (lacking only the red stitches, he thought with sour amusement), a like scoop of frozen squash that was an arrogant fluorescent orange, and a small plastic container of cranberry jelly. For dessert there was ice cream. Resting on the corner of his tray was a small blue card.
Wise to the ways of the hospital by now - once you have been treated for the first set of bedsores to crop up on your ass, Dennis had discovered, you're wiser to the ways of the hospital than you ever wanted to be - he asked the candy-striper who came to take away his tray what the yellow and red cards got for their Thanksgiving dinner. It turned out that the yellow cards got two pieces of turkey, no gravy, potato, no squash, and Jell-O for dessert. The red cards got one slice of white meat, pureed, and potato. Fed to them, in most cases.
Dennis found it all pretty depressing. It was only too easy to imagine his mother bringing a great big crackling capon to the dining-room table around four in the afternoon, his father sharpening his carving knife, his sister, flushed with importance and excitement, a red velvet ribbon in her hair, pouring each of them a glass of good red wine. It was also easy to imagine the good smells, the laughter as they sat down.
Easy to imagine . . . but probably a mistake.
It was, in fact, the most depressing Thanksgiving of his life. He drifted off into an unaccustomed early afternoon nap (no Physical Therapy because of the holiday) and dreamed an unsettling dream in which several candy-stripers walked through the IC ward and slapped turkey decals onto the life-support machinery and IV drips.
His mother, father, and sister had come over to visit for an hour in the morning, and for the first time he had sensed in Ellie an anxiousness to be gone. They had been invited over to the Callisons' for a light Thanksgiving brunch, and Lou Callison, one of the three Callison boys, was fourteen and 'cute'. Her racked-up brother had become boring. They hadn't discovered a rare and tragic form of cancer breeding in his bones. He wasn't going to be paralysed for the rest of his life. There was no movie-of-the-week in him.
They had called him from the Callisons' around twelve-thirty and his father sounded a bit drunk - Dennis guessed he was maybe on his second bloody Mary and was maybe getting some disapproving looks from Mom. Dennis himself had just been finishing up his dietician-approved bluecarded Thanksgiving dinner - the only such dinner he had ever been able to finish in fifteen minutes - and he did a good job of sounding cheerful, not wanting to spoil their good time. Ellie came on the wire briefly, sounding giggly and rather screamy. Maybe it was talking to Ellie that had tired him out enough to need a nap.
He had fallen asleep (and had his unsettling dream) around two o'clock. The hospital was unusually quiet today, running on a skeleton staff. The usual babble of TVs and transistor radios from the other rooms was muted. The candy-striper who took his tray smiled brightly and said I she hoped he had enjoyed his 'special dinner.' Dennis assured her that he had. After all, it was Thanksgiving for her, too.
And so he dreamed, and the dream broke up and became a darker sleep, and when he woke up it was nearly five o'clock and Arnie Cunningham was sitting in the hard plastic contour chair where his girl had sat only the day before.