flinch at that - something that was maybe only in his eyes - but the contemptuous, watchful smile remained on his lips. It was cold out. I hadn't put on my gloves, and my hands, on the crossbars of the crutches, were getting numb. Our breath made little plumes. . 'Or what about in the fifth grade, when Tommy Deckinger used to call you Fart-Breath?' I asked, my voice rising. Getting angry at him hadn't been part of the game-plan, but now it was here, shaking inside me. 'Did you like that? And do you remember when Ladd Smythe was a patrol-boy and he pushed you down in the street and I pulled his hat off and stuffed it down his pants? Where you been, Arnie? This guy LeBay is a Johnny-come-lately. Me, I was here all along.'
That flinch again. This time he half-turned away, the smile faltering, his eyes searching for Christine the way your eyes might search for a loved one in a crowded terminal or bus-station. Or the way a junkie might took for his pusher.
'You need her that bad?' I asked. 'Man, you're hooked right through the fucking bag, aren't you?'
'I don't know what you're talking about,' he said hoarsely. 'You stole my girl. Nothing is going to change that. You went behind my back . . . you cheated . . . you're just a shitter, like all the rest of them.' He was looking at me now, his eyes wide and hurt and blazing with anger. 'I thought I could trust you, and you turned out to be worse than Repperton or any of them!' He took a step toward me and cried out in a perfect fury of loss, 'You stole her, you shitter!'
I lurched forward another step on my crutches; one of them slid a little bit in the packed snow underfoot. We were like two reluctant gunslingers approaching each other.
'You can't steal what's been given away,' I said.
'What are you talking about?'
'I'm talking about the night she choked in your car. The night Christine tried to kill her. You told her you didn't need her. You told her to fuck off.'
'I never did! That's a lie! That's a goddam lie!'
'Who am I talking to?' I asked.
'Never mind!' His grey eyes were huge behind his spectacles. 'Never mind who the fuck you're talking to! That's nothing but a dirty lie! No more than I'd expect from that stinking bitch!'
Another step closer. His pale face was marked with flaring red patches of colour.
'When you write your name, it doesn't look like your signature anymore, Arnie.'
'You shut up, Dennis.'
'Your father says it's like having a stranger in the house.'
'I'm warning you, man.'
'Why bother?' I asked brutally. 'I know what's going to happen. So does Leigh. The same thing that happened to Buddy Repperton and Will Darnell and all the others. Because you're not Arnie at all anymore. Are you in there, LeBay? Come on out and let me see you. I've seen you before. I saw you on New Year's Eve, I saw you yesterday at the chicken place. I know you're in there; why don't you stop fucking around and come out?'
And he did . . . but in Arnie's face this time, and that was more terrible than all the skulls and skeletons and comic-book horrors ever thought of. Arnie's face changed. A sneer bloomed on his lips like a rancid rose. And I saw him as he must have been back when the world was young and a car was all a young man needed to have; everything else would just automatically follow. I saw George LeBay's big brother.
I only remember one thing about him, but I remember that one thing very well His anger. He was always angry.
He came toward me, closing the distance between where he had been and where I stood propped on my crutches. His eyes were filmy and beyond all reach. That sneer was stamped on his face like the mark of a branding-iron.
I had time to think of the scar on George LeBay's forearm, skidding from his elbow to his wrist. He pushed me and then he came back and threw me. I could hear that fourteen-year-old LeBay shouting, You stay out of my way from now on, you goddam snotnose, stay out of my way, you hear?
It was LeBay I was facing now, and he was not a man who took losing easily. Check that: he didn't take losing at all.