damned shadows. It was probably nothing, nothing at all, but it glowed in his mind like a baleful neon sign that simply would not shut off. Had his son looked guilty and scared? Or had it just been the light? Unless he could resolve that, sleep would be a long time coming tonight and it might not come at all.
'I got up around one,' Regina said, and then hurried to add, 'Just to use the bathroom. I checked in on him.' She laughed a little wistfully. 'Old habits die hard, don't they?'
'Yes,' Michael said. 'I guess they do.'
'He was sleeping deeply then. I wish I could get him to wear pyjamas in cold weather.'
'He was in his skivvies?'
'Yes.'
He settled back, immeasurably relieved and more than a little ashamed of himself as well. But it was better to know . . . for sure. It was all very well for him to tell Arnie that he knew the boy could no more commit a murder than he could walk on water. But the mind, that perverse monkey the mind can conceive of anything and seems to take a perverse delight in doing so. Just maybe, Michael thought, lacing his hands behind his head and looking up at the dark ceiling, just maybe that's the peculiar damnation of the living. In the mind a wife can rut, laughing, with a best friend, a best friend can cast plots against you and plan backstabbings, a son can commit murder by auto.
Better to be ashamed and put the monkey to sleep.
Arnie had been here at one o'clock. It was unlikely Regina was mistaken about the time because of the digital clock-radio on their bureau - it told the time in numbers that were big and blue and unmistakable. His son had been here at one o'clock, and the Welch boy had been run down three miles away twenty-five minutes later. Impossible to believe that Arnie could have dressed, gone out (without Regina, who had surely been lying wakeful, hearing him), gone down to Darnell's, gotten Christine, and driven out to where Moochie Welch had been killed. Physically impossible.
Not that he had ever believed it to begin with.
The mind-monkey was satisfied. Michael rolled over on his right side, slept, and dreamed that he and his nine-year old son were playing miniature golf on an endless series of small Astro-Turfed greens where windmills turned and tiny water-hazards lay in wait . . . and he dreamed that they were alone, all alone in the world, because his son's mother had died in childbirth - very sad; people still remarked on how inconsolable Michael had been - but when they went home, he and his son, the house would be theirs alone, they would eat spaghetti right from the pot like a couple of bachelor slobs, and when the dishes were washed they would sit at a kitchen table hidden beneath spread newspapers and build model cars with harmless plastic engines.
In his sleep Michael Cunningham smiled. Beside him, in the other bed, Regina did not. She lay awake and waited for the sound of the door that would tell her that her son had come in from the world outside.
When she heard the door open and close . . . when she heard his step on the stairs . . . then she would be able to sleep.
Maybe.
PART II: ARNIE - TEENAGE LOVE-SONGS Chapter 33 JUNKINS
I think you better slow down and drive
with me, baby . . .
You say what?
Hush up and mind my own bidness?
But Baby, you are my bidness!
You gooood bidness, baby,
And I love good bidness!
What kind of car am I drivin?
I'm drive a '48 Cadillac
With Thunderbird wings
I tell you, baby, she's a movin thing,
Ride on, Josephine, ride on . . .
- Ellas McDaniel
Junkins turned up at Darnell's around eight-forty-five that evening. Arnie had just finished with Christine for the night. He had replaced the radio aerial that Repperton's gang had snapped off with a new one, and for the last fifteen minutes or so he had been sitting behind the wheel, listening to WDIL's Friday Night Cavalcade of Gold.
He had meant to do no more than turn the radio on and dial across once, making sure that he had hooked up the aerial plug properly and that there was no static. But he had run onto WDIL's strong signal and had sat there, looking straight through the windscreen, his grey eyes musing and far away, as Bobby Fuller sang 'I Fought the Law', as