Christine

He shrugged. “I made it clear pretty early on that I didn’t want to dance. For one thing, it would have meant getting more involved with him on a personal level, and, as I said, I thought he was a skunk. For another thing, these guys are all fundamentally stupid about numbers—which is why so many of them have gone up on tax convictions. They think you can hide illegal income. They’re sure of it. He laughed. “They’ve all got this mystic idea that you can wash money like you wash clothes, when all you can really do is juggle it until something falls down and smashes all over your head.”

“Those were the reasons?”

“Two out of three.” He looked in my eyes. “I’m no fucking crook, Dennis.”

There was a moment of electric communication between us—even now, four years later, I get goosebumps thinking of it, although I’m by no means sure that I can get it across to you. It wasn’t that he treated me like an equal for the first time that night; it wasn’t even that he was showing me the wistful knight-errant still hiding inside the button-down man scrambling for a living in a dirty, hustling world. I think it was sensing him as a reality, a person who had existed long before I ever came onstage, a person who had eaten his share of mud. In that moment I think I could have imagined him making love to my mother, both of them sweaty and working hard to make it, and not have been embarrassed.

Then he dropped his eyes, grinned a defensive grin, and did his husky Nixon-voice, which he was very good at: “You people deserve to know if your father is a crook. Well, I am not a crook, I could have taken the money, but that… harrum!… that would have been wrong.”

I laughed too loud, a release of tension—I felt the moment passing, and although part of me didn’t want it to pass, part of me did; it was too intense. I think maybe he felt that, too.

“Shhh, you’ll wake your mother and she’ll give us both the devil for being up this late.”

“Yeah, sorry. Dad, do you know what he’s into? Darnell?”

“I didn’t know then; I didn’t want to know, because then I’d be a part of it. I had my ideas, and I’ve heard a few things. Stolen cars, I imagine—not that he’d run them through that garage on Hampton Street; he’s not a completely stupid man, and only an idiot shits where he eats. Maybe hijacking as well.”

“Guns and stuff?” I asked, sounding a little hoarse.

“Nothing so romantic. If I had to guess, I’d guess cigarettes, mostly—cigarettes and booze, the two old standbys. Contraband like fireworks. Maybe a shipment of microwave ovens or colour TVs every once in a while, if the risk looked low. Enough to keep him busy these many years.”

He looked at me soberly.

“He’s played the odds good, but he’s also been lucky for a long time, Dennis. Oh, maybe he hasn’t really needed luck here in town—if it was just Libertyville, I guess he could go on for ever, or at least until he dropped dead of a heart attack—but the state tax boys are sand sharks and the feds are Great Whites. He’s been lucky, but one of these days they’re going to fall on him like the Great Wall of China.”

“Have you… have you heard things?”

“Not a whisper. Nor am I apt to. But I like Arnie Cunningham a great deal, and I know you’ve been worried about this car thing.”

“Yeah.” He’s… he’s not acting healthy about it, Dad. Everything’s the car, the car, the car.”

“People who have not had a great deal tend to do that,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a car, sometimes it’s a girl, sometimes it’s a career or a musical instrument or an unhealthy obsession with some famous person. I went to college with a tall, ugly fellow we all called Stork. With Stork it was his model train set… he’d been hooked on model trains ever since the third grade, and his set was pretty damn near the eighth wonder of the world. He flunked out of Brown the second semester of his freshman year. His grades were going to hell, and what it came down to was a choice between college and his Lionels. Stork picked the trains.”

“What happened to him?”

“He killed himself in 1961,” my father said, and stood up “My point is just that good people can sometimes get blinded, and it’s not always their fault. Probably Darnell will forget all about him—he’ll just be another guy tinkering around under his car on a crawlie-gator. But if Darnell tries to use him, you be his eyes, Dennis. Don’t let him get pulled into the dance.”

“All right. I’ll try. But there may not be that much I can do.”

“Yeah. How well I know it. Want to go up?”

“Sure.”

We went up, and” tired as I was, I lay awake a long time. It had been an eventful day. Outside, a night wind tapped a branch softly against the side of the house, and far away, downtown, I heard some kid’s rod peeling rubber—it made a sound in the night like an hysterical woman’s desperate laughter.

14 CHRISTINE AND DARNELL