A good place to stay away from—and here I was, pulling in through the main gates behind my friend Arnie after dark, nothing left of the day but a tinge of furnace red on the horizon. My headlights picked out enough discarded auto-parts, wreckage, and general all-around dreck to make me feel more depressed and tired than ever. I realized I hadn’t called home, and that my mother and father would probably be wondering just where the hell I was.

Arnie drove up to a big garage door with a sign beside it reading HONK FOR ENTRY. There was a feeble light spilling out through a grime-coated window beside the door somebody was at home—and I barely restrained an impulse to lean out of my window and tell Arnie to drive his car over to my house for the night. I had a vision of us stumbling onto Will Darnell and his cronies inventorying hijacked colour TVs or repainting stolen Cadillacs. The Hardy Boys come to Libertyville.

Arnie just sat there, not honking, not doing anything and I was about to get out and ask him what was what when he came back to where I was parked. Even in the last of the failing light, he looked deeply embarrassed.

“Would you mind honking your horn for me, Dennis?” he said humbly. “Christine’s doesn’t seem to work.”

“Sure.”

“Thanks.”

I beeped my horn twice, and after a pause the big garage door went rattling up. Will Darnell himself was standing there, his belly pushing out over his belt. He waved Arnie inside impatiently.

I turned my car around, parked it facing out, and went inside myself.

The interior was huge, vaultlike, and terribly silent at the end of the day. There were as many as five dozen slant-parking stalls, each equipped with its own bolted-down toolbox for do-it-yourselfers who had ailing cars but no tools. The ceiling overhead was high, and crossed with naked, gantrylike beams.

Signs were plastered everywhere: ALL TOOLS MUST BE INSPECTED BEFORE YOU LEAVE and MAKE APPOINTMENT FOR LIFT-TIME IN ADVANCE and MOTOR MANUALS ON FIRST-COME FIRST-SERVE BASIS and NO PROFANITY OR SWEARING WILL BE TOLERATED. Dozens of others; everywhere you turned, one seemed to jump right out at you. A big sign-man was Will Darnell.

“Stall twenty! Stall twenty!” Darnell yelled at Arnie in his irritable, wheezy voice. “Get it over there and shut it off before we all choke!”

“We all” seemed to be a group of men at an oversized cardtable in the far corner. Poker-chips, cards, and bottles of beer were scattered across the table. They were looking at Arnie’s new acquisition with varying expressions of disgust and amusement.

Arnie drove across to stall twenty, parked it, and shut it off. Blue exhaust drifted in the huge, cavernous space.

Darnell turned to me. He was wearing a sail-like white shirt and brown khaki pants. Great rolls of fat bulged out his neck and hung in dewlaps from below his chin.

“Kiddo,” he said in that same wheezing voice, “if you sold him that piece of shit, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“I didn’t sell it to him.” For some absurd reason I felt I had to justify myself before this fat slob in a way I wouldn’t have done before my own father. “I tried to talk him out of it.”

“You should have talked harder.” He walked across to where Arnie was getting out of his car. He slammed the door; rust flaked down from the rocker panel on that side in a fine red shower.

Asthma or no asthma, Darnell walked with the graceful, almost feminine movements of a man who has been fat for a long time and sees a long future of fathood ahead of him. And he was yelling at Arnie before Arnie even got turned around, asthma or not. I guess you could say he was a man who hadn’t let his infirmities get him down.

Like the kids in the smoking area at school, like Ralph on Basin Drive, like Buddy Repperton (we’ll be talking about him all too soon, I’m afraid), he had taken an instant dislike to Arnie—it was a case of hate at first sight.

“Okay, that’s the last time you run that mechanical asshole in here without the exhaust hose!” he yelled. “I catch you doin it, you’re out, you understand?”

“Yes.” Arnie looked small and tired and whipped. Whatever wild energy had carried him this far was gone now. It broke my heart a little to see him looking that way. “I—”

Darnell didn’t let him get any further. “You want an exhaust hose, that’s two-fifty an hour if you reserve in advance. And I’m telling you something else right now, and you want to take it to heart, my young friend. I don’t take any shit from you kids. I don’t have to. This place is for working guys that got to keep their cars running so they can put bread on the table, not for rich college kids who want to go out dragging on the Orange Belt. I don’t allow no smoking in here. If you want a butt, you go outside in the junkyard.”

“I don’t sm—”

“Don’t interrupt me, son. Don’t interrupt me and don’t get smart,” Darnell said. Now he was standing in front of Arnie. Being both taller and wider, he blotted my friend out entirely.

I began to get angry again. I could actually feel my body moan in protest at the yo-yo string my emotions had been on ever since we pulled up to LeBay’s house and saw that the damned car wasn’t on the lawn anymore.

Kids are a downtrodden class; after a few years you learn to do your own version of an Uncle Tom routine on kid-baters like Will Darnell. Yessir, nosir, okay, you bet. But, Jesus, he was laying it on thick.

I suddenly grabbed Darnell’s arm. “Sir?”

He swung around on me. I find that the more I dislike adults, the more apt I am to call them Sir.

“What?”

“Those men over there are smoking. You better tell them to stop.” I pointed to the guys at the poker table. They had dealt out a fresh hand. Smoke hung over the table in a blue haze.

Darnell looked at them, then back at me. His face wag very solemn, “You trying to help your buddy right out of here, Junior?”

“No,” I said. “Sir.

“Then shut your pie-hole.”

He turned back to Arnie and put his meaty hands on his wide, well-padded hips.

“I know a creep when I see one,” he said, “and I think I’m looking at one right now. You’re on probation, kid. You screw around with me just one time and it don’t matter how much you paid up in front, I’ll put you out on your ass.”

Dull fury went up from my stomach to my head and made it throb. Inside I begged Arnie to tell this fat fuck to bore it and stroke it and then drive it straight up his old tan track just as fast and far as it would go. Of course then Darnell’s poker buddies would get into it and we’d both probably end this enchanting evening at the emergency room of Libertyville Community Hospital getting our heads stitched up… but it would almost be worth it.

Arnie, I begged inside, tell him to shove it and let’s get out of here. Stand up to him, Arnie. Don’t let him pull this shit on you. Don’t be a loser, Arnie—if you can stand up to your mother, you can stand up to this happy asshole. Just this once, don’t be a loser.

Arnie stood silent for a long time, his head down, and then he said, “Yessir.” The word was so low it was nearly inaudible. It sounded as if he was choking on it.

“What did you say?”

Arnie looked up.His face was deadly pale. His eye’s were swimming with tears. I couldn’t look at that. It hurt me too bad to look at that. I turned away. The poker players had suspended their game to watch developments over at stall twenty.

“I said, “Yessir,” Arnie said in a trembling voice. It was as if he had just signed his name to some terrible confession. I looked at the car again, the ’58 Plymouth, sitting in here when it should have been out back in the junkyard with the rest of Darnell’s rotten plugs, and I hated it all over again for what it was doing to Arnie.

“Arright, get out of here,” Darnell said. “We’re closed.”

Arnie stumbled away blindly. He would have walked right into a stack of old bald tyres if I hadn’t grabbed his arm and steered him away. Darnell went back the other way to the poker table. When he got there he said something to the others in his wheezy voice. They all roared with laughter.