he expected to be laughed at . . . or as if he were daring me to laugh at him. 'Christine,' he said, 'is what I always called her.'
'Christine,' Arnie said. 'I like it. Don't you, Dennis?'
Now he was talking about naming the damned thing. It was all getting to be a bit much.
'What do you think, Dennis, do you like it?'
'No, I said. 'If you've got to name it, Arnie, why don't you name it Trouble?'
He looked hurt at that, but I was beyond caring. I went back to my car to wait for him, wishing I had taken a different route home.
PART I: DENNIS - TEENAGE CAR-SONG Chapter 2 THE FIRST ARGUMENT
Just tell your hoodlum friends outside,
You ain't got time to take a ride!
(yakety-yak!)
Don't talk back!
- The Coasters
I drove Arnie to his house and went in with him to have a piece of cake and a glass of milk before going home. It was a decision I repented very quickly.
Arnie lived on Laurel Street, which is in a quiet residential neighbourhood on the west side of Libertyville. As far as that goes, most of Libertyville is quiet and residential. It isn't ritzy, like the neighbouring suburb of Fox Chapel (where most of the homes are estates like the ones you used to see every week on Columbo), but it isn't like Monroeville, either, with its miles of malls, discount tyre warehouses, and dirty book emporiums. There isn't any heavy industry -I it's mostly a bedroom community for the nearby universitv. Not ritzv, but sort of brainy, at least.
Arnie had been quiet and contemplative all the way home; I tried to draw him out, but he wouldn't be drawn, I asked him what he was going to do with the car. 'Fix it up,' he said absently, and lapsed back into silence.
Well, he had the ability; I wasn't questioning that. He was good with tools, he could listen, he could isolate. His hands were sensitive and quick with machinery; it was only when he was around other people, particularly girls, that they got clumsy and restless, wanting to crack knuckles or jam themselves in his pockets, or, worst of all, wander up to his face and run over the scorched-earth landscape of his cheeks and chin and forehead, drawing attention to it.
He could fix the car up, but the money he had earned that summer was earmarked for college. He had never owned a car before, and I didn't think he had any idea of the sinister way that old cars can suck money. They suck it the way a vampire is supposed to suck blood. He could avoid labour costs in most cases by doing the work himself, but the parts alone would half-buck him to death before he was through.
I said some of these things to him, but they just rolled off. His eyes were still distant, dreaming. I could not have told you what he was thinking.
Both Michael and Regina Cunningham were at home she was working one of an endless series of goofy jigsaw puzzles (this one was about six thousand different cogs and gears on a plain white background; it would have driven me out of my skull in about fifteen minutes), and he was playing his recorder in the living room.
It didn't take long for me to start wishing I had skipped the cake and milk. Arnie told them what he had done, showed them the receipt, and they both promptly went through the roof.
You have to understand that Michael and Regina were University people to the core. They were into doing good, and to them that meant being into protest. They had protested in favour of integration in the early '60s, had moved on to Vietnam, and when that gave out there was Nixon, questions of racial balance in the schools (they could quote you chapter and verse on the Ralph Bakke case until you fell asleep), police brutality, and parental brutality. Then there was the talk - all the talk. They were almost as much into talking as they were into protesting. They were ready to take part in an all-night bull-session on the space programme or a teach-in on the ERA or a seminar on possible alternatives to fossil fuels at the drop of an opinion. They had done time on God alone knew how many 'hotlines' - rape hotlines, drug hotlines, hotlines where runaway kids could talk to a friend, and good