the New York State line with a bootful of contraband cigarettes. It was Regina's nightmare.
Arnie went home in the custody of his parents - bailed for a thousand dollars - after a brief detour to jail. It was all nothing but a big shitting game of Monopoly, really. His parents had come up with the Get Out of Jail Free card. As expected.
'What are you smiling' about, Arnie?' Regina asked him. Michael was driving the wagon along at fast walking speed, looking through the swirls of snow for Steve and Vicky's ranchhouse.
'Was I smiling?'
'Yes,' she said, and touched her hair.
'I don't really remember,' he said remotely, and she took her hand away.
They had come home on Sunday and his parents had left him pretty much alone, either because they didn't know how to talk to him or because they were utterly disgusted with him . . . or perhaps it was a combination of the two. He didn't give a crap which, and that was the truth. He felt washed out, exhausted, a ghost of himself. His mother had gone to bed and slept all that afternoon, after taking the telephone off the hook. His father puttered aimlessly in his workroom, running his electric planer periodically and then shutting it off.
Arnie sat in the living room watching a football playoff doubleheader, not knowing who was playing, not caring, content to watch the players run around, first in bright warm California sunshine, later in a mixture of rain and sleet that turned the playing field to churned-up mud and erased the lines.
Around six o'clock he dozed off.
And dreamed.
He dreamed again that night and the next, in the bed where he had slept since earliest childhood, the elm outside casting its old familiar shadow (a skeleton each winter that gained miraculous new flesh each May). These dreams were not like the dream of the giant Will looming over the slotcar track. He could not remember these dreams at all more than a few moments after waking. Perhaps that was just as well. A figure by the roadside; a fleshless finger tapping a decayed palm in a lunatic parody of instruction; an uneasy sense of freedom and . . . escape? Yes, escape. Nothing else except . . .
Yes, he escaped from these dreams and back into reality with one repeating image: he was behind the wheel of Christine, driving slowly through a howling blizzard, snow so thick that he could literally see no farther than the end of her hood. The wind was not a scream; it was a lower, more sinister sound a basso roar. Then the image had changed. The snow wasn't snow any longer; it was tickertape. The roar of the wind was the roar of a great crowd lining both sides of Fifth Avenue. They were cheering him. They were cheering Christine. They were cheering because he and Christine had . . . had . . .
Escaped.
Each time this confused dream retreated, he thought, When this is over I'm getting out . Getting out for sure. Going to drive to Mexico. And Mexico, as he imagined its steady sun and its rural quiet, seemed more real than the dreams.
Shortly after awakening from the last of these dreams, the idea of spending Christmas with Aunt Vicky and Uncle Steve, just like in the old days, had come to him. He awoke with it, and it clanged in his head with a peculiar persistence. The idea seemed to be an awfully good one, an all-important one. To get out of Libertyville before . . .
Well, before Christmas. What else?
So he began talking to his mother and father about it, coming down particularly hard on Regina. On Wednesday, she abruptly gave in and agreed. He knew she had talked to Vicky, and Vicky hadn't been inclined to lord it over her, so it was all right.
Now, on Christmas Eve, he felt that everything would soon be all right.
'There it is, Mike,' Regina said, 'and you're going to drive right by it, just like you do every time we come here.'
Michael grunted and turned into the driveway. 'I saw it,' he said in the perpetually defensive tone he always seemed to use around his wife. He's a donkey, Arnie thought. She talks to him like a donkey, she rides him like a donkey, and he brays like a donkey.
'You're smiling again,' Regina said.
'I was just thinking about how much I love you both,' Arnie said. His father looked at him, surprised and