Christine

I struggled to keep my poker face. “Does she know that?”

He laughed. “No way! Not yet. But she will. Soon enough. I love her, and nothing’s going to get in the way of that.” The laughter died away. “What did she say about Christine?”

Another mine.

“She said she didn’t like her. I think… that maybe she was a little jealous.”

It was the right thing again. He relaxed even more. “Yeah, she sure was. But she’ll come around, Dennis. The course of true love never runs smooth, but she’ll come around, don’t worry. If you see her again, tell her I’m going to call. Or talk to her when school starts again.”

I considered telling him that Leigh was in California right now and decided not to. And I wondered what this new suspicious Arnie would do if he knew I had kissed the girl he thought he was going to marry, had held her… was failing in love with her.

“Look, Dennis!” Arnie cried, and pointed at the TV.

They had switched to Times Square again. The crowd was a huge—but still swelling—organism. It was just past eleven-thirty. The old year was guttering.

“Look at those shitters!” He cackled his shrill, excited laugh, finished his beer, and went downstairs for a fresh six-pack. I sat in my chair and thought about Welch and Repperton, Trelawney, Stanton, Vandenberg, Darnell. I thought about how Arnie—or whatever Arnie had become—thought that he and Leigh had just had an unimportant lovers” spat and how they would end the school year getting married, just like in those greasy love-ballads from the Nifty Fifties.

And oh God I had such a case of the creeps.

We saw the New Year in.

Arnie produced a couple of noisemakers and party favours—the kind that go bang and then release a cloud of tiny crepe streamers. We toasted 1979 and talked a little more on neutral subjects such as the Phillies” disappointing collapse in the playoffs and the Steelers” chances of going all the way to the Super Bowl.

The bowl of popcorn was down to the old maids and the burny-bottoms when I took myself in hand and asked one of the questions I had been avoiding. “Arnie? What do you think happened to Darnell?”

He glanced at me sharply, then glanced back at the TV, where couples with New Year’s confetti in their hair were dancing. He drank some more beer. “The people he was doing business with shut him up before he could talk too much. That’s what I think happened.”

“The people he was working for?”

“Will used to say the Southern Mob was bad,” Arnie said, “but that the Colombians were even worse.”

“Who are the

“The Colombians?” Arnie laughed cynically. “Cocaine cowboys, that’s who the Colombians are. Will used to claim they’d kill you if you even looked at one of their women the wrong way—and sometimes if you looked at her the right way. Maybe it was the Colombians. It was messy enough to be them.”

“Were you running coke for Darnell?”

He shrugged. “I was running stuff for Will. I only moved coke for him once or twice, and I thank Christ that I didn’t have anything worse than untaxed cigarettes when they picked me up. They caught me dead-bang. Bad shit. But if the situation was the same, I’d probably do it again. Will was a dirty, scuzzy old sonofabitch, but in some ways he was okay.” His eyes grew veiled, strange. “Yeah, in some ways he was okay. But he knew too much. That’s why he got wasted. He knew too much… and sooner or later he would have said something, Probably it was the Colombians. Crazy fuckers.”

“I don’t get you. And it’s not my business, I suppose.”

He looked at me, grinned, and winked. “It was Vietnam,” he said. “At least, it was supposed to be. There was a guy named Henry Buck. He was supposed to rat on me. I was supposed to rat on Will. And then—the big casino—Will was supposed to rat on the people down South that were selling him the dope and the fireworks and cigarettes and booze. Those were the people Ju—the cops really wanted, Especially the Colombians.”

“And you think they killed him?”

He looked at me flatly. “Them or the Southern Mob, sure. Who else?”

I shook my head.

“Well,” he said, “Let’s have another beer and then I’ll give you a lift home. I enjoyed this, Dennis, I really did.” There was a ring of truth in that, but Arnie would never have made a dorky comment like “I enjoyed this, I really did.” Not the old Arnie.

“Yeah, me too, man.”

I didn’t want another beer, but I took one anyway. I wanted to put off the inevitable moment of getting into Christine. This afternoon it had seemed a necessary step to sample the atmosphere of that car itself… if there was any atmosphere to sample. Now it seemed a frightening and crazy idea. I felt the secret of what Leigh and I were becoming to each other like a large, breakable egg in my head.

Tell me, Christine, can you read minds?

I felt a crazy laugh coming up my throat and dumped beer on it.

“Listen,” I said. “I can call my dad to come and get me, if you want, Arnie. He’ll still be up.”

“No problem,” Arnie said. “I could walk two miles of straight line, don’t worry.”

“I just thought—”