'No remoulds. I don't want to start out that way.' I didn't say anything, but I glanced back toward my Duster. I had two remoulds on it and I thought they were just fine.
'How much do you think a new Goodyear or Firestone would cost, Dennis?'
I shrugged and consulted the little automotive accountant, who guessed that Arnie could probably get a new no-frills blackwall for around thirty-five dollars.
He pulled out two twenties and handed them to me. 'If it's more - with the tax and everything - I'll pay you back.'
I looked at him sadly. 'Arnie, how much of your week's pay you got left?'
His eyes narrowed and shifted away from mine. 'Enough,' he said.
I decided to try one more time - you must remember that I was only seventeen and still under the impression that people could be shown where their best interest lay. 'You couldn't get into a nickel poker game,' I said. 'You plugged just about the whole fucking wad into that car. Dragging out your wallet is going to become a very familiar action to you, Arnie. Please, man. Think it over.'
His eyes went flinty. It was an expression I had not seen before on his face, and although you'll probably think I was the most naive teenager in America, I couldn't really remember having seen it on any face before. I felt a mixture of surprise and dismay - I felt the way I might have felt if I suddenly discovered I was trying to have a rational conversation with a fellow who just happened to be a lunatic. I have seen the expression since, though; I imagine you have too. Total shutdown. It's the expression a man gets on his face when you tell him the woman he loves is whoring around behind his back.
'Don't get going on that, Dennis,' he said.
I threw my hands up in exasperation. 'All right! All right!'
'And you don't have to go after the damn tyre, either, if you don't want to.' That flinty, obdurate, and - so help me, it's true - stupidly stubborn expression was still on his face. 'I'll find a way.'
I started to reply, and I might have said something pretty hot, but then I happened to glance to my left. The two porky kids were there at the edge of their lawn. They were astride identical Big Wheels, their fingers smeared with chocolate. They were watching us solemnly.
'No big deal, man,' I said. 'I'll get the tyre.'
'Only if you want to, Dennis,' he said. 'I know it's getting late.'
'It's cool,' I said.
'Mister?' the little boy said, licking chocolate off his fingers.
'What?' Arnie asked.
'My mother says that car is poopy.'
'That's right,' the little girl chimed. 'Poopy-kaka.'
'Poopy-kaka,' Arnie said. 'Why, that's very perceptive, isn't it, kids? Is your mother a philosopher?'
'No,' the little boy said. 'She's a Capricorn. I'm a Libra. My sister is a - '
'I'll be back quick as I can,' I said awkwardly.
'Sure.'
'Stay cool.'
'Don't worry, I'm not going to punch anybody.'
I trotted to my car. As I slipped behind the wheel I heard the little girl ask Arnie loudly, 'Why is your face all messy like that, mister?'
I drove a mile and a half down to JFK Drive, which according to my mother, who grew up in Libertyville used to be at the centre of one of the town's most desirable neighbourhoods back around the time Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Maybe renaming old Barnswallow Drive for the slain President had been bad luck, because since the early sixties, the neighbourhood around the street had degenerated into an exurban strip. There was a drive-in movie, a McDonald's, a Burger King, an Arby's, and the Big Twenty Lanes. There were also eight or ten service stations, since JFK Drive leads to the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Getting Arnie's tyre should have gone lickety-split, but the first two stations I came to were those self-service jobbies that don't even sell oil; there's just gas and a marginally retarded girl in a booth made of bullet-proof glass who sits in front of a computer console reading a National Enquirer and chewing a wad of Bubblicious Gum big enough to choke a Missouri mule.
The third one was a Texaco having a tyre sale. I was able to buy Arnie a blackwall that would fit his Plymouth (I could not bring myself then to call her Christine or even think of her - it - by that name) for just twenty-eight-fifty plus tax, but there was only one