Christine - Stephen King [209]
He looked at me sullenly, his earlier good humour gone like magic. 'I should have known she'd fill you full of that garbage. My mother is one woman who never stuck at getting low to get what she wants. You know that, Dennis. She'd kiss the devil's ass if that's what it took.'
I put my beer-can down, still full. 'Well, she didn't kiss my ass. She just said you weren't making any applications and she was worried.'
'It's my life,' Arnie said. His lips twisted, changing his face, making it extraordinarily ugly. 'I'll do what I want.'
'And college isn't it?'
'Yeah, I'll go. But in my own time. You tell her that, if she asks. In my own time. Not this year. Definitely not. If she thinks I'm going to go off to Pitt or Horlicks or Rutgers and put on a freshman beanie and go boola-boola at the home football games, she's out of her mind. Not after the shitstorm I've been through this year. No way, man.'
'What are you going to do?'
'I'm taking off,' he said.'I'm going to get in Christine and we're going to motorvate right the Christ out of this one-timetable town. You understand?' His voice began to rise, to become shrill, and I felt horror sweep over me again. I was helpless against that unmanning fear and could only hope that it didn't show on my face. Because it wasn't just LeBay's voice now; now it was even LeBay's face, swimming under Arnie's like some dead thing preserved in Formalin. 'It's been nothing but a shitstorm, and I think that goddam Junkins is still after me full steam ahead, and he better watch out or somebody just might junk him - '
'Who's Junkins?' I asked.
'Never mind,' he said. 'It's not important.' Behind him, the Wesson Oil had begun to sizzle. A kernel of corn popped - ponk! - against the underside of the lid. 'I've got to go shake that, Dennis. Do you want to make a toast or not? Makes no difference to me.'
'All right,' I said. 'How about to us?'
He smiled, and the constriction in my chest eased a little. 'Us, yeah, that's a good one, Dennis. To us. Gotta be that, huh?'
'Gotta be,' I said, and my voice hoarsened a little. 'Yeah, gotta be.'
We clicked the Bud cans together and drank.
Arnie went over to the stove and began shaking the pan, where the corn was picking up speed. I let a couple of swallows of beer slide down my throat. Beer was still a fairly new thing to me then, and I had never been drunk on it because I liked the taste quite well, and friends - Lenny Barongg was the chief of them - had told me that if you got falling-down, standing-up, ralphing-down-your-shirt shitfaced, you couldn't even look at the stuff for weeks. Sadly, I have found out since that that isn't completely true.
But Arnie was drinking like they were going to reinstitute Prohibition on January lst; he had finished his first can before the popcorn had finished popping. He crimped the empty, winked at me, and said, 'Watch me put it up the little tramp's ass, Dennis.' The allusion escaped me, so I just smiled noncommitally as he tossed the can toward the wastebasket. It banged the wall over it and dropped in.
'Two points,' I said.
'That's right,' he said. 'Hand me another one, would you?'
I did, figuring what the hell - my folks were planning to see the New Year in at home, and if Arnie got really drunk and passed out, I could give my dad a call. Arnie might say things drunk that he wouldn't say sober, and I didn't want to ride home in Christine anyway.
But the beer didn't seem to affect him. He finished popping the corn, dumped it into a big plastic bowl, melted half a stick of margarine, poured it over the top, salted it, and said, 'Let's go in the living room and watch some tube. What do you say?'
'Fine by me.' I got my crutches, seated them in my armpits - which just lately felt as if they might be growing callouses and then groped for the three beers still on the table.
'I'll come back for them,' Arnie said. 'Come on. Before you break everything all over again. He smiled at me, and for that moment he was nobody but Arnie Cunningham, so much so that it broke my heart a little