The Secret History - Donna Tartt [218]
“Yes, I am.”
Charles turned to stare, lips parted, his expression as blank and trancelike as a twelve-year-old’s.
“It’ll be five hundred dollars you can pay it at the window down the hall to your left,” said the judge in a bored monotone. “You’ll have to appear again in two weeks and I suggest you bring a lawyer. Do you have a job for which you need your vehicle?”
One of the shabby middle-aged men at the front spoke up. “It’s not his car, Your Honor.”
The judge glowered at Charles, suddenly fierce. “Is that correct?” he said.
“The owner was contacted. A Henry Winter. Goes to school up at the college. He says he lent the vehicle to Mr. Macaulay for the evening.”
The judge snorted. To Charles he said gruffly: “Your license is suspended pending resolution and have Mr. Winter here on the twenty-eighth.”
The whole business was amazingly quick. We were out of the courthouse by ten after nine.
The morning was damp and dewy, cold for May. Birds chattered in the black treetops. I was reeling with fatigue.
Charles hugged himself. “Christ, it’s cold,” he said.
Across the empty streets, across the square, they were just pulling the blinds up at the bank. “Wait here,” I said. “I’ll go call a cab.”
He caught me by the arm. He was still drunk, but his night of boozing had done more damage to his clothes than to anything else; his face was fresh and flushed as a child’s. “Richard,” he said.
“What?”
“You’re my friend, aren’t you?”
I was in no mood to stand around on the courthouse steps and listen to this sort of thing. “Sure,” I said, and tried to disengage my arm.
But he only clutched me tighter. “Good old Richard,” he said. “I know you are. I’m so glad it was you who came. I just want you to do me this one little favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t take me home.”
“What do you mean?”
“Take me to the country. To Francis’s. I don’t have the key but Mrs. Hatch could let me in or I could bust a window or something—no, listen. Listen to this. I could get in through the basement. I’ve done it millions of times. Wait,” he said as I tried to interrupt again. “You could come, too. You could swing by school and get some clothes and—”
“Hold on,” I said, for the third time. “I can’t take you anywhere. I don’t have a car.”
His face changed, and he let go my arm. “Oh, right,” he said with sudden bitterness. “Thanks a lot.”
“Listen to me. I can’t. I don’t have a car. I came down here in a taxicab.”
“We can go in Henry’s.”
“No we can’t. The police took the keys.”
His hands were shaking. He ran them through his disordered hair. “Then come home with me. I don’t want to go home by myself.”
“All right,” I said. I was so tired I was seeing spots. “All right. Just wait. I’ll call a cab.”
“No. No cab,” he said, lurching backward. “I don’t feel so hot. I think I’d rather walk.”
This walk, from the courthouse steps to Charles’s apartment in North Hampden, was not an inconsiderable one. It was three miles, at least. A good portion of it lay along a stretch of highway.
Cars whooshed past in a rush of exhaust. I was dead tired. My head ached and my feet were like lead. But the morning air was cool and fresh and it seemed to bring Charles around a little. About halfway, he stopped at the dusty roadside window of a Tastee Freeze, across the highway from the Veterans Hospital, and bought an ice cream soda.
Our feet crunched on the gravel. Charles smoked a cigarette and drank his soda through a red-and-white-striped straw. Black-flies whined around our ears.
“So you and Henry had an argument,” I said, just for something to say.
“Who told you? Him?”
“Yes.”
“I couldn’t remember. It doesn’t matter. I’m tired of him telling me what to do.”
“You know what I wonder,” I said.
“What?”
“Not why he tells us what to do. But why we always do what he says.”
“Beats me,” said Charles. “It’s not as if much good has come of it.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Are you kidding? The idea of that fucking bacchanal in the first place—who thought of that? Whose idea was it to take Bunny to Italy? Who the hell wrote that diary and left it lying