The funeral was five days after that final hellish scene in the garage. The coffins were closed. The very fact of those three wooden boxes, lined up on a triple bier like soldiers, struck my heart like a shovelful of cold earth. The memory of the ant farms couldn't stand against the mute testimony of those boxes. I cried a little.
Afterward, I rolled myself down the aisle toward them and put my hand tentatively on the one in the centre, not knowing if it was Arnie's or not, not caring. I stayed that way for quite a while, head down, and then a voice said behind me, 'Want a push back out to the vestry, Dennis?' I craned my neck around. It was Mercer, looking neat and lawyerly in a dark wool suit.
'Sure,' I said. 'Just gimme a couple of seconds, okay?'
'Fine.'
I hesitated and then said, 'The papers say Michael was killed at home. That the car rolled over him after he slipped on the ice, or something.'
'Yes,' he said.
'Your doing?'
Mercer hesitated. It makes things simpler. His gaze shifted to where Leigh was standing with my folks. She was talking with my mother but looking anxiously toward me. 'Pretty girl,' he said. He had said it before, in the hospital.
'I'm going to marry her someday,' I said.
'I wouldn't be surprised if you did,' Mercer replied. 'Did anyone ever tell you that you've got the balls of a tiger?'
'I think Coach Puffer did,' I said, 'Once.'
He laughed. 'You ready for that push, Dennis? You've been down here long enough. Let it go.'
'Easier said than done.'
He nodded. 'Yeah. I guess so.
'Will you tell me one thing?' I asked. 'I have to know.'
'I will if I can.'
'What did - ' I had to stop and clear my throat. 'What did you do with the . . .the pieces?'
'Why, I saw to that myself,' Mercer said. His voice was light, almost joking, but his face was very, very serious. 'I had two fellows from the local police run all those pieces through the crusher out back of Darnell's Garage. Made a little cube about so big.' He held his hands about two feet apart. 'One of those guys got a hell of a bad cut. Took stitches.'
Mercer suddenly smiled - it was the bitterest, coldest smile I've ever seen.
'He said it bit him.'
Then he pushed me up the, aisle to, where my family and my girl stood waiting for me.
So that's my story. Except for the dreams.
I'm four years older, and Arnie's face has grown hazy to me, a browning photograph from an old yearbook. I never would have believed that could happen, but it has. I made it through, made the transition from adolescence to manhood - whatever that is - somehow; I've got a college degree on which the ink is almost dry, and I've been teaching high school history. I started last year, and two of my original students - Buddy Repperton types, both of them - were older than I was. I'm single, but there are a few interesting ladies in my life, and I hardly think of Arnie at all.
Except in my dreams.
The dreams aren't the only reason I've set all this down - there's another, which I'll tell you in a moment - but I would be lying if I said the dreams weren't a big part of the reason. Maybe it's an effort to lance the wound and clean it out. Or maybe it's just that I'm not rich enough to afford a shrink.
In one of the dreams I am back where the funeral service was held. The three coffins are on their triple bier, but the church is empty except for me. In the dream I am on crutches again, standing at the foot of the central aisle, back by the door. I don't want to go down there, but my crutches are pulling me along, moving by themselves. I touch the middle coffin. It springs open at my touch, and lying inside in the satin interior is not Arnie but Roland D. LeBay, a putreseent corpse in an Army uniform. As the bloated smell of gassy decay rushes out at me, the corpse opens its eyes; its rotting hands, black and slimy with some fungoid growth, grope upward and find my shirt before I can back away, and it pulls itself up until its glaring, reeking face is only inches from mine. And it begins to croak over and over again, Can't