'You make the honour roll. I don't think you need me to draw you a picture.'
'No,' she said. 'I guess not.'
'I'd keep you out of it if I could, I said. 'But LeBay is going to suspect a trap, so the bait has to be good.'
'I wouldn't let you leave me out of it,' she said. Her voice was steady. 'This is my business too. I loved him. I really did. And once you start loving someone . . . I don't think you ever really get over it completely. Do you, Dennis?'
I thought of the years. The summers of reading and swimming and playing games: Monopoly, Scrabble, Chinese checkers. The ant farms. The times I had kept him from getting killed in all the ways kids like to kill the outsider, the one who's a little bit strange, a little bit off the beat. There had been times when I had gotten pretty fucking sick of keeping him from getting killed, times when I had wondered if my life wouldn't be easier, better, if I simply let Arnie go, let him drown. But it wouldn't have been better. I had needed Arnie to make me better, and he had. We had traded fair all the way down the line, and oh shit, this was very bitter, very fucking bitter indeed.
'No,' I said, and I suddenly had to put my hand over my eyes. 'I don't think you ever do. I loved him too. And maybe it isn't too late for him, even now. That's what I would have prayed: Dear God, let me keep Arnie from getting killed just one more time. Just this one last time.
'It's not him I hate,' she said, her voice low. 'It's that man LeBay . . . did we really see that thing this afternoon, Dennis? In the car?'
'Yes,' I said. 'I think we did.'
'Him and that bitch Christine,' she said. 'Will it be soon?'
'Soon, yeah. I think so.
'All right. I love you, Dennis.'
'I love you too.'
As it turned out, it ended the next day - Friday the 19th of January.
PART III: CHRISTINE - TEENAGE DEATH-SONGS Chapter 49 ARNIE
I was cruising in my Stingray late one night
When an XKE pulled up on the right,
He rolled down the window of his shiny new Jag
And challenged me then and there to a drag.
I said 'You're on, buddy, my mill's runnin fine,
Let's come off the line at Sunset and Vine,
But I'll go you one better (if you got the nerve):
Let's race all the way . . .
to Deadman's Curve.'
- Jan and Dean
I began that long, terrible day by driving over to Jimmy Sykes's house in my Duster. I had expected there might be some trouble from Jimmy's mother, but that turned out to be okay. She was, if anything, mentally slower than her son. She invited me in for bacon and eggs (I declined - my stomach was tied in miserable knots) and clucked over my crutches while Jimmy hunted around in his room for his keyring. I made small-talk with Mrs Sykes, who was roughly the size of Mount Etna, while time passed and a dismal certainty rose inside me: Jimmy had lost his keys somewhere and the whole thing was off the rails before it could really begin.
He came back shaking his head. 'Can't find em,' he said, 'Jeez, I guess I must have lost em somewhere. What a bummer.'
And Mrs Sykes, nearly three hundred pounds on the hoof in a faded housedress and her hair up in puffy pink rollers, said with blessed practicality, 'Did you look in your pockets, Jim?'
A startled expression crossed Jimmy's face. He rammed a hand into the pocket of his green chino workpants. Then, with a shamefaced grin, he pulled out a bunch of keys. They were on one of the keyrings they sell at the novelty shop in the Monroeville Mall - a large rubber fried egg. The egg was dark with grease.
'There you are, you little suckers,' he said.
'You watch your language, young man,' Mrs Sykes said. 'Just show Dennis which key it is that opens the door and keep your dirty language in your head.'
Jimmy ended up handing three Schlage keys over to me, because they weren't labelled and he couldn't tell which was which. One of them opened the main overhead door, one opened the back overhead door, the one which gave on the long lot of junked cars, and one opened the door to Will's office.