Christine (18 page)

"Yes."

"Okay." I started for the Stairs and was almost there when he stopped me by saying, "I ran Will Darnell's accounts and did his income-tax returns for almost fifteen years, you know."

I turned back to him, really surprised.

"No. I didn't know that."

My father smiled. It was a smile I had never seen before, one I would guess my mother had seen only a few times, my sis maybe not at all. You might have thought it was a sleepy sort of smile at first, if you looked more closely you would have seen that it was not sleepy at all—it was cynical and hard and totally aware.

"Can you keep your mouth shut about something, Dennis?"

"Yes," I said. "I think so."

"Don't just think so."

"Yes. I can."

"Better. I did his figures up until 1975, and then he got Bill Upshaw over in Monroeville."

My father looked at me closely.

"I won't say that Bill Upshaw is a crook, but I will say that his scruples are thin enough to read a newspaper through. And last year he bought himself a $300,000 English Tudor in Sewickley, Damn the interest rates, full speed ahead."

He gestured at our own home with a small sweep of his right arm and then let it drop back into his own lap. He and my mother had bought it the year before I was born for $62,000—it was now worth maybe $150,000—and they had only recently gotten their paper back from the bank. We had a little party in the back yard late last summer; Dad lit the barbecue, put the pink slip on the long fork, and each of us got a chance at holding it over the coals until it was gone.

"No English Tudor here, huh, Denny?" he said.

"It's fine," I said. I came back and sat down on the couch.

"Darnell and I parted amicably enough," my father went on, "not that I ever cared very much for him in a personal way. I thought he was a wretch."

I nodded a little, because I liked that; it expressed my gut feelings about Will Darnell better than any profanity could.

"But there's all the difference in the world between a personal relationship and a business relationship. You learn that very quickly in this business, or you give it up and start selling Fuller Brushes door-to-door. Our business relationship was good, as far as it went… but it didn't go far enough. That was why I finally called it quits."

"I don't get you."

"Cash kept showing up," he said. "Large amounts of cash with no clear ancestry. At Darnell's direction I invested in two corporations—Pennsylvania Solar Heating and New York Ticketing—that sounded like two of the dummiest dummy corporations I've ever heard of. Finally I went to see him, because I wanted all my cards on the table. I told him that my professional opinion was that, if he got audited either by the IRS or by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania tax boys, he was apt to have a great deal of explaining to do, and that before long I was going to know too much to be an asset to him."

"What did he say?"

"He began to dance," my father said, still wearing that sleepy, cynical smile. "In my business, you start to get familiar with the steps of the dance by the time you're thirty-eight or so if you're good at your business, that is. And I'm not all that bad, The dance starts off with the guy asking you if you're happy with your work, if it's paying you enough. If you say you like the work but you sure could be doing better, the guy encourages you to talk about whatever you're carrying on your back: your house, your car, your kids' college education—maybe you've got a wife with a taste for clothes a little fancier than she can by rights afford… see?"

"Sounding you out?"

"It's more like feeling you up," he said, and then laughed. "But yeah. The dance is every bit as mannered as a minuet. There are all sorts of phrases and pauses and steps. After the guy finds out what sort of financial burdens you'd like to get rid of, he starts asking you what sort of things you'd like to have. A Cadillac, a summer place in the Catskills or the Poconos, maybe a boat.

I gave a little start at that, because I knew my dad wanted a boat about as badly as he wanted anything these days; a couple of times I had gone with him on sunny summer afternoons to marinas along King George Lake and Lake Passeeonkee. He'd price out the smaller yachts and I'd see the wistful look in his eyes. Now I understood it. They were out of his reach. Maybe if his life had taken a different turn—if he didn't have kids to think about putting through college, for instance—they wouldn't have been.

"And you said no?" I asked him.

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 color 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

He said he heard about a couple

living in the USA,

He said they traded in their baby

for a Chevrolet:

Let's talk about the future now,

We've put the past away…

— Elvis Costello

Between working on the construction project days and working on Christine nights, Arnie hadn't been seeing much of his folks. Relations there had been getting pretty strained and abrasive. The Cunningham house, which had always been pleasant and low-key in the past, was now an armed camp. It is a state of affairs a lot of people can remember from their teenage years, guess; too many, maybe. The kid is egotistical enough to think he or she is the first person in the world to discover some particular thing (usually it's a girl, but it doesn't have to be), and the parents are too scared and stupid and possessive to want to let go of the halter. Sins on both sides. Sometimes it gets painful and outrageous—no war is as dirty and bitter as a civil war. And it was particularly painful in Arnie's case because the split had come so late, and his folks had gotten much too used to having their own way. It wouldn't be unfair to say that they had blueprinted his life.

So when Michael and Regina proposed a four-day weekend at their lakeshore cottage in upstate New York before school started again, Arnie said yes even though he badly wanted those last four days to work on Christine. More and more often at work he had told me how he was going to "show them"; he was going to turn Christine into a real street-rod and "show them all". He had already planned to restore the car to its original bright red and ivory after the bodywork was done.

But he went off with them, determined to yassuh and tug his forelock for the whole four days and have a good time with his folks—or a reasonable facsimile. I got over the evening before they left and was relieved to find they had both absolved me of blame in the affair of Arnie's car (which they still hadn't even seen). They had apparently decided it was a private obsession. That was fine by me.

Regina was busy packing. Arnie and Michael and I got their Oldtown canoe on top of their Scout and tied it down. When it was done, Michael suggested to his son—with the air of a powerful king conferring an almost unbelievable favor on two of his favorite subjects—that Arnie go in and get a few beers.

Arnie, affecting both the expression and the tones of amazed gratitude, said that would be super. As he left, he dropped a wink my way.

Michael leaned against the Scout and lit a cigarette. "Is he going to get tired of this car business, Denny?"

"I don't know," I said.

"You want to do me a favor?"

"Sure, if I can," I said cautiously I was pretty sure he was going to ask me to go to Arnie, act the Dutch uncle part, and try to "talk him out of it".

But instead he said, "If you get a chance, go down to Darnell's while we're gone and see what sort of progress he's making. I'm interested."

"Why is that?" I asked, thinking immediately it was a pretty damn rude question—but by then it was already out.

"Because I want him to succeed," he said simply, and glanced at me. "Oh, Regina's still dead set against it. If he has a car, that means he's growing up. And if he's growing up, that means… all sorts of things," he finished lamely. "But I'm not so down on it. You couldn't characterize me as dead set against it anyway, at least not anymore. Oh, he caught me by surprise at first… I had visions of some dead dog sitting out in front of our house until Arnie went off to college—that or him choking to death on the exhaust some night."

The thought of Veronica LeBay jumped into my head, all unbidden.

"But now…" He shrugged, glanced at the door between the garage and the kitchen, dropped his cigarette, and scuffed it out. "He's obviously committed. He's got his sense of self-respect on the line. I'd like to see him at least get it running."

Maybe he saw something in my face; when he went on he sounded defensive.

"I haven't quite forgotten everything about being young," he said. "I know a car is important to a kid Arnie's age. Regina can't see that quite so clearly. She always got picked up. She was never faced with the problems of being the picker-upper. I remember that a car is important… if a kid's ever going to have any dates."

So that's where he thought it was at. He saw Christine as a means to an end rather than as the end itself. I wondered what he'd think if I told him that I didn't think Arnie had ever looked any further than getting the Fury running and legal. I wondered if that would make him more or less uneasy.

The thump of the kitchen door closing.

"Would you go take a look?"

"I guess so," I said. "If you want."

"Thanks."

Arnie came back with the beers. "What's the thanks for?" he asked Michael. His voice was light and humorous, but his eyes flicked between us carefully. I noticed again that his complexion was really clearing, and his face seemed to have strengthened. For the first time, the two thoughts
Arnie
and
dates
didn't seem mutually exclusive. It occurred to me that his face was almost handsome—not in any jut-jawed lifeguard king-of-the-prom way, but in an interesting, thoughtful way. He would never be Roseanne's type, but…