Christine

20 THE SECOND ARGUMENT

Arnie Cunningham’s 1958 Plymouth became street-legal on the afternoon of November 1, 1978. He finished the process, which had really begun the night he and Dennis Guilder had changed that first flat tyre, by paying an excise tax fee of $8.50, a municipal road tax of $2.00 (which also enabled him to park free at the meters in the downtown area), and a licence-plate fee of $15.00. He was issued Pennsylvania plate HY-6241-J at the Motor Vehicle Bureau in Monroeville.

He drove back from the MVB in a car Will Darnell had loaned him and rolled out of Darnell’s Do-It-Yourself Garage behind the wheel of Christine. He drove her home.

His father and mother arrived together from Horlicks University an hour or so later. The fight started almost at once.

“Did you see it?” Arnie asked, speaking to them both but perhaps a little more to his father. “I registered it just afternoon.”

He was proud; he had reason to be. Christine had just been washed and waxed, and she gleamed in the late afternoon autumn sunlight. There was still a lot of rust on her, but she looked a thousand times better than she had on the day Arnie bought her. The rocker panels, like the bonnet and the back seat, were brand new. The interior was spick and span and neat as a pin. The glass and the chrome gleamed.

“Yes, I—” Michael began.

“Of course we saw it,” Regina snapped. She was making a drink, spinning a swizzle-stick in a Waterford glass in furious counter-clockwise circles. “We almost ran into it. I don’t want it parked here. The place looks like a used-car lot.”

“Mom!” Arnie said, stunned and hurt. He looked to Michael, but Michael had left to make a drink of his own perhaps he had decided he was going to need it.

“Well it does,” Regina Cunningham said, Her face was a trifle paler than usual; the rouge on her cheeks stood out almost like clown-colour. She knocked back half of her gin and tonic at a swallow, grimacing the way people grimace at the taste of bad medicine. “Take it back where you had it. I don’t want it here and I won’t have it here, Arnie. That’s final.”

“Take it back?” Arnie said, now angry as well as hurt. “That’s great, isn’t it? It’s costing me twenty bucks a week there!”

“It’s costing you a lot more than that,” Regina said. She drained her drink and set the glass down. She turned to look at him. “I took a look at your bankbook the other day—”

“You did what?” Arnie’s eyes widened.

She flushed a little but did not drop her eyes. Michael came back and stood in the doorway, looking unhappily from his wife to his son.

“I wanted to know how much you’d been spending on that damned car,” she said. “Is that so unnatural? You have to go to college next year, So far as I know they’re not giving away many free college educations in Pennsylvania.”

“So you just went into my room and hunted around until you found my bankbook?” Arnie said. His grey eyes were hard with anger, “Maybe you were hunting for pot, too. Or girlie books. Or maybe come-stains on the sheets.”

Regina’s mouth dropped open. She had perhaps expected hurt and anger from him, but not this utter, no-holds-barred fury.

“Arnie!” Michael roared.

“Well, why not?” Arnie shouted back. “I thought that was my business! God knows you spent enough time telling me how it was my responsibility, the both of you!”

Regina said, “I’m very disappointed that you feel that way, Arnold. Disappointed and hurt. You’re behaving like—”

“Don’t tell me how I’m behaving! How do you think I feel? I work my ass off getting the car street-legal—over two and a half months I worked on it—and when I bring it home, the first thing you say is get it out of the driveway. How am I supposed to feel? Happy?”

“There’s no reason to take that tone to your mother,” Michael said. In spite of the words, the tone was one of awkward conciliation. “Or to use that sort of language.” Regina held her glass out to her husband. “Make me another drink. There’s a fresh bottle of gin in the pantry.”

“Dad, stay here,” Arnie said. “Please, Let’s get this over.”

Michael Cunningham looked at his wife; his son; at his wife again. He saw flint in both places. He retreated to the kitchen clutching his wife’s glass.

Regina turned grimly back to her son. The wedge had been in the door since late last summer; she had perhaps recognized this as her last chance to kick it back out again.

“This July you had almost four thousand dollars in the bank,” she said. “About three-quarters of all the money you’ve made since ninth grade, plus interest—”

“Oh, you’ve really been keeping track, haven’t you?” Arnie said. He sat down suddenly, gazing at his mother. His tone was one of disgusted surprise. “Mom—why didn’t you just take the damn money and put it in an account under your own name?”

“Because,” she said, “until recently, you seemed to understand what the money was for. In the last couple of months it’s all been car-car-car and more recently girl-girl-girl. It’s as if you’ve gone insane on both subjects.”

“Well, thanks. I can always use a nice, unprejudiced opinion on the way I’m conducting my life.”

“This July you had almost four thousand dollars. For your education, Arnie. For your education. Now you have just over twenty-eight hundred. You can go on about snooping all you want—and I admit it hurts a little—but that’s a fact. You’ve gone through twelve hundred dollars in two months. Maybe that’s why I don’t want to look at that car. You ought to be able to understand that. To me it looks like—”

“Listen—”

“—like a great big dollar bill flying away.”

“Can I tell you a couple of things?”

“No, I don’t think so, Arnie,” she said with finality. “I really don’t think so.”

Michael had come back with her glass, half full of gin. He added tonic at the bar and handed it to her. Regina drank, making that bitter grimace of distaste again. Arnie sat in the chair near the TV, looking at her thoughtfully.

“You teach college?” he said. “You teach college and that’s your attitude?”

“I have spoken. The rest of you can just shut up.”

“Great. I pity your students.”

“You watch it, Arnie,” she said, pointing a finger at him. “Just watch it.”

“Can I tell you a couple of things or not?”

“Go ahead. But it won’t make any difference.”

Michael cleared his throat. “Reg, I think Arnie’s right, that’s hardly a constructive atti—”

She turned on him like a cat. “Not one word from you, either!”

Michael flinched back.

“The first thing is this,” Arnie said. “If you gave my savings passbook more than a cursory look—and I’m sure you did—you must have noticed that my total savings went down to an all-time low of twenty-two hundred dollars the first week of September. I had to buy a whole new front-end kit for Christine.”

“You speak as if you’re proud of it,” she said angrily.

“I am.” He met her eyes levelly. “I put that front-end kit in myself, with no help from anybody. And I did a really good job. You wouldn’t”—here his voice seemed to falter momentarily, and then firmed again—“you wouldn’t be able to tell it from the original. But my point is, the total savings are back up six hundred dollars from then. Because Will Darnell liked my work and took me on. If I can add six hundred dollars to my savings account every two months and I might do better if he puts me on the run over to Albany where he buys his used cars—there’ll be forty-six hundred dollars in my account by the time school ends. And if I work there full-time next summer, I’ll be starting college with nearly seven thousand dollars. And you can lay it all at the door of the car you hate so much.”

“That won’t do any good if you can’t get into a good school,” she countered, shifting her ground deftly as she had in so many department committee meetings when someone dared to question one of her opinions… which was not often. She did not concede the point; she simply passed on to something else. “Your grades have slipped.”

“Not enough to matter,” Arnie said.

“What do you mean, “not enough to matter”? You got deficient in Calculus! We got the red-card just a week ago!” Red-cards, sometimes known as flunk-cards by the student body, were issued halfway through each marking period to students who had posted a 75-average grade or lower during the first five weeks of the quarter.

“That was based on a single examination,” Arnie said calmly. “Mr Fenderson is famous for giving so few exams in the first half of a quarter that you can bring home a red-card with an F on it because you didn’t understand one basic concept, and end up with an A for the whole marking period. All of which I would have told you, if you’d asked. You didn’t. Also, that’s only the third red-card I’ve gotten since I started high school. My overall average is still 93, and you know how good that is—”

“It’ll go lower!” she said shrilly, and stepped toward him. “It’s this goddam obsession with the car! You’ve got a girlfriend; I think that’s fine, wonderful, super! But this car thing is insane! Even Dennis says—”

Arnie was up, and up fast, so close to her that she took a step backward, surprised out of her anger, at least momentarily, by his. “You leave Dennis out of this,” he said in a deadly soft voice. “This is between us.”

“All right,” she said, shifting ground once more. “The simple fact is that your grades are going to go down. I know it, and your father knows it, and that mathematics red-card is an indication of it.”

Arnie smiled confidently, and Regina looked wary.

“Good,” he said. “I tell you what. Let me keep the car here until the marking period ends. If I’ve got any grade lower than a C, I’ll sell it to Darnell. He’ll buy it; he knows he could get a grand for it in the shape it’s in now. The value’s not going to do anything but go up.”

Arnie considered.

“I’ll go you one better. If I’m not on the semester honour roll, I’ll also get rid of it. That means I’m betting my car I’ll get a B in Calculus not just for the quarter but for the whole semester. What do you say?”

“No,” Regina said immediately, She shot a warning look at her husband—Stay out of this. Michael, who had opened his mouth, closed it with a snap.

“Why not?” Arnie asked with deceptive softness.

“Because it’s a trick, and you know it’s a trick!” Regina shouted at him, her fury suddenly total and uncontained. “And I’m not going to stand here any longer chewing this rag and listening to a lot of insolence from you! I–I changed your dirty diapers! I said get it out of here, drive it if you have to, but don’t you leave it where I have to look at it! That’s it! The end!”

“How do you feel, Dad?” Arnie asked, shifting his gaze.

Michael opened his mouth again to speak.

“He feels as I do,” Regina said.

Arnie looked back at her. Their eyes, the same shade of grey, met.

“It doesn’t matter what I say, does it?”

“I think this has gone quite far e—”

She began to turn away, her mouth still hard and determined, her eyes oddly confused. Arnie caught her arm just above the elbow.

“It doesn’t, does it? Because when you’ve made up your mind about something, you don’t see, you don’t hear, you don’t think.”

“Arnie, stop it!” Michael shouted at him.

Arnie looked at her and Regina looked back at him. Their eyes were frozen, locked.

“I’ll tell you why you don’t want to look at it,” he said in the same soft voice. “It isn’t the money, because the car’s let me connect with a job that I’m good at and will end up making me money. You know that. It isn’t my grades, either. They’re no worse than they ever were. You know that, too. It’s because you can’t stand not to have me under your thumb, the way your department is, the way he is”—he jerked a thumb at Michael, who managed to look angry and guilty and miserable all at the same time—“the way I always was.”

Now Arnie’s face was flushed, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.

“All that liberal bullshit about how the family decided things together, discussed things together, worked things out together, But the fact is, you were always the one who picked out my school-clothes, my school-shoes, who I was supposed to play with and who I couldn’t, you decided where we were going on vacation, you told him when to trade cars and what to trade for. Well, this is one thing you can’t run, and you fucking hate it, don’t you?”

She slapped his face. The sound was like a pistol-shot in the living room. Outside, dusk had fallen and cars cruised by, indistinct, their headlights like yellow eyes. Christine sat in the Cunninghams’ asphalted driveway as she had once sat on Roland D. LeBay’s lawn, but looking considerably better now than she had then—she looked cool and above all this ugly, undignified family bickering. She had, perhaps, come up in the world.

Abruptly, shockingly, Regina Cunningham began to cry. This was a phenomenon, akin to rain in the desert, that Arnie had seen only four or five times in his entire life and on none of the other occasions had he been the cause of the tears.

Her tears were frightening, he told Dennis later, by virtue of the simple fact that they were there. That was enough, but there was more—the tears made her look old in a single terrifying stroke, as if she had made a quantum leap from forty-five to sixty in a space of seconds. The hard grey shine in her gaze turned blurry and weak, and suddenly the tears were spilling down her cheeks, cutting through her make-up.

She fumbled on the mantelpiece for her drink, jogged the glass instead with the tips of her fingers. It fell onto the hearth and shattered. A kind of incredulous silence held among the three of them, an amazement that things had come this far.

And somehow, even through the weakness of the tears, she managed to say, “I won’t have it in our garage or in this driveway, Arnold.”

He answered coldly, “I wouldn’t have it here, Mother.” He walked to the doorway, turned back, and looked at them both. “Thanks. For being so understanding. Thanks a lot, both of you.”

He left.

21 ARNIE AND MICHAEL

Michael caught Arnie in the driveway, headed for Christine. He put a hand on Arnie’s shoulder. Arnie shook it off and went on digging for his car-keys.

“Arnie. Please.”

Arnie turned around fast. For a moment he seemed on the verge of making that evening’s blackness total by striking his father. Then some of the tenseness in his body subsided and he leaned back against the car, touching it with his left hand, stroking it, seeming to draw strength from it.

“All right,” he said. “What do you want?”

Michael opened his mouth and then seemed unsure how to proceed. An expression of helplessness—it would have been funny if it hadn’t been so grimly awful—spread over his face. He seemed to have aged, to have gone grey and haggard around the edges.

“Arnie,” he said, seeming to force the words out against some great weight of opposing inertia, “Arnie, I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah,” Arnie said, and turned away again, opening the driver’s side door. A pleasant smell of well-cared-for car drifted out. “I could see that from the way you stood up for me.”

“Please,” he said. “This is hard for me. Harder than you know.”

Something in his voice made Arnie turn back. His father’s eyes were desperate and unhappy.

“I didn’t say I wanted to stand up for you,” Michael said. “I see her side as well, you know. I see the way you pushed her, determined to have your own way at any cost—”

Arnie uttered a harsh laugh. “Just like her, in other words.”

“Your mother is going through the change of life,” Michael said quietly. “It’s been extremely difficult for her.”

Arnie blinked at him, at first not even sure what he had heard. It was as if his father had suddenly said something to him in igpay atinlay; it seemed to have no more relevance to what they were talking about than baseball scores.

“W-What?”

“The change. She’s frightened, and she’s drinking too much, and sometimes she’s in physical pain. Not often,” he said, seeing the alarmed look on Arnie’s face, “and she’s been to the doctor, and the change is all it is. But she’s in an emotional uproar. You’re her only child, and the way she is now, all she can see is that she wants things to be right for you, no matter what the cost.”

“She wants things her way. And that isn’t anything new. She’s always wanted things her way.”

“That she thinks the right thing for you is whatever she thinks the right thing is goes without saying,” Michael said. “But what makes you think you are so different? Or better? You were after her ass in there, and she knew it. So did I.”

“She started it—”

“No, you started it when you brought the car home. You knew how she felt. And she’s right about another thing. You’ve changed. From the first day you came home with Dennis and said you’d bought a car; that’s when it started. Do you think that hasn’t upset her? Or me? To have your kid start exhibiting personality traits you didn’t even know existed?”

“Hey, Dad, come on! That’s a little—”

“We never see you, you’re always working on your car or out with Leigh.”

“You’re starting to sound just like her.”

Michael suddenly grinned—but it was a sad grin “You’re wrong about that. Just as wrong as you can be. She sounds like her, and you sound like her, but I just sound like the guy in charge of some dumb UN peacekeeping force that’s about to get its collective ass shot off.”

Arnie slumped a little; his hand found the car again and began caressing, caressing.

“All right,” he said. “I guess I see what you mean. I don’t know why you want to let her push you around like that, but okay.”

The sad, humiliated grin remained, a little like the grin of a dog that has chased a woodchuck a long time on a hot summer day. “Maybe some things get to be a way of life. And maybe there are compensations that you can’t understand and I can’t explain. Like… well, I love her, you know.”

Arnie shrugged. “So… what now?”

“Can we go for a ride?”

Arnie looked surprised, then pleased. “Sure. Hop in. Any place in particular?”

“The airport.”

Arnie’s eyebrows went up. “The airport? Why?”

“I’ll tell you as we go.”

“What about Regina?”

“Your mother’s gone to bed,” Michael said quietly, and Arnie had the good grace to flush a little himself.

Arnie drove firmly and well. Christine’s new sealed-beam headlights cut the early dark in a clean, deep tunnel of light. He passed the Guilders’ house, then turned left onto Elm Street at the stop sign and started out toward JFK Drive. I-376 took them to I-278 and then out toward the airport. Traffic was light. The engine muttered softly through new pipes. The dashboard instrument panel glowed a mystic green.

Arnie turned on the radio and found WDIL, the AM station from Pittsburgh that plays only oldies. Gene Chandler was chanting “The Duke of Earl”.

“This thing runs like a dream,” Michael Cunningham said. He sounded awed.

“Thanks,” Arnie said, smiling.

Michael inhaled. “It smells new.”

“A lot of it is. These seat covers set me back eighty bucks. Part of the money Regina was bitching about. I went to the library and got a lot of books and tried to copy everything the best I could. But it hasn’t been as easy as people might think.”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one thing, the ’58 Plymouth Fury wasn’t anybody’s idea of a classic car, so no one wrote much about it, even in the car retrospective volumes—American Car, American Classics, Cars of the 1950s, things like that. The ’58 Pontiac was a classic, only the second year Pontiac made the Bonneville model; and the ’58 T-Bird with the rabbit-ear fins, that was the last really great Thunderbird, I think; and—”

“I had no idea you knew so much about old cars,” Michael said. “How long have you been harbouring this interest, Arnie?”

He shrugged vaguely. “Anyway, the other problem was just that LeBay himself customized the original Detroit rolling stock—Plymouth didn’t offer a Fury in, red and white, for one thing—and I’ve been trying to restore the car more the way he had it than the way Detroit meant it to be. So I’ve just been sort of flying by the seat of my pants.”

“Why do you want to restore it the way LeBay had it?”

That vague shrug again. “I don’t know. It just seems like the right thing to do.”

“Well, I think you’re doing a hell of a job.”

“Thank you.”

His father leaned toward him, looking at the instrument panel.

“What are you looking at?” Arnie asked, a little sharply.

“I’ll be damned,” Michael said. “I’ve never seen that before.”

“What? Arnie glanced down. “Oh. The milometer.”

“It’s running backward, isn’t it?”

The milometer was indeed running backward; at that time, on the evening of November 1, it read 79,500 and some odd miles. As Michael watched, the tenths-of-a-mile indicator rolled from 2 to. 1 to 0. As it went back to.9, the actual miles slipped back by one.

Michael laughed. “That’s one thing you missed, son.”

Arnie smiled—a small smile. “That’s right,” he said. “Will says there’s a wire crossed in there someplace. I don’t think I’ll fool with it. It’s sort of neat, having a milometer that runs backward.”

“Is it accurate?”

“Huh?”

“Well, if you go from our house to Station Square, would it subtract five miles from the total?”

“Oh,” Arnie said. “I get you. No, it’s not accurate at all. Turns back two or three miles for every actual mile travelled. Sometimes more. Sooner or later the speedometer cable will break, and when I replace that, it’ll take care of itself.”

Michael, who had had a speedometer cable or two break on him in his time, glanced at the needle for the characteristic jitter that indicated trouble there. But the needle hung dead still just above forty. The speedometer seemed fine; it was only the milometer that had gotten funky. And did Arnie really believe that the speedometer and milometer ran off the same cables? Surely not.

He laughed and said, “That’s weird, son.”

“Why the airport?” Arnie asked.

“I’m going to treat you to a thirty-day parking stub,” Michael said. “Five dollars. Cheaper than Darnell’s garage. And you can get your car out whenever you want it. The airport’s a regular stop on the bus run. End of the line, in fact.”

“Holy Christ, that’s the craziest thing I ever heard!” Arnie shouted. He pulled into the turnaround drive of a darkened dry cleaner’s shop. “I’m to take the bus twenty miles out to the airport to get my car when I need it? It’s like something out of Catch-22! No! No way!”

He was about to say something more, when he was suddenly grabbed by the neck.

“You listen,” Michael said. “I’m your father, so you listen to me. Your mother was right, Arnie. You’ve gotten unreasonable—more than unreasonable—in the last couple of months. You’ve gotten downright peculiar.”

“Let go of me,” Arnie said, struggling in his father’s grip.

Michael didn’t let go, but he loosened up. “I’ll put it in perspective for you,” he said. “Yes, the airport is a long way to come, but the same quarter that would take you to Darnell’s will take you out here. There are parking garages closer in, but there are more incidents of theft and vandalism in the city. The airport is, by contrast, quite safe.”

“No public parking lot is safe.”

“Second, it’s cheaper than a downtown garage and much cheaper than Darnell’s.”

“That’s not the point, and you know it!”

“Maybe you’re right,” Michael said. “But you’re missing something too, Arnie. You’re missing the real point.”

“Well suppose you tell me what the real point is.”

“All right. I will.” Michael paused for a moment, looking steadily at his son. When he spoke his voice was low and even, almost as musical as his recorder. “Along with any sense of what is reasonable, you seem to have totally lost your sense of perspective. You’re almost eighteen, in your last year at public school. I think you’ve made up your mind not to go to Horlicks; I’ve seen the college brochures you’ve brought home—”

“No, I’m not going to Horlicks,” Arnie said. He sounded a little calmer now. “Not after all of this. You have no idea how badly I want to get away. Or maybe you do.”

“Yes. I do. And maybe that’s best. Better than this constant abrasion between you and your mother. All I ask is that you not tell her yet; wait until you have to submit the application papers.”

Arnie shrugged, promising nothing either way.

“You’ll be taking your car to school, that is if it’s still running—”

“It’ll be running.”

“—and if it’s a school that allows freshmen to have cars on campus.”

Arnie turned toward his father, surprised out of his smouldering anger—surprised and uneasy. This was a possibility he had never considered.

“I won’t go to a school that says I can’t have my wheels,” he said. His tone was one of patient instruction, the sort of voice an instructor with a class of mentally retarded children might use.

“You see?” Michael asked. “She’s right. Basing your choice of a college on the school’s policy concerning freshmen and cars is totally irrational. You’ve gotten obsessed with this car.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

Michael pressed his lips together for a moment.

“Anyway, what’s running out to the airport on the bus to pick up your car, if you want to take Leigh out? It’s an inconvenience, granted, but not really a major one. It means you won’t use it unless you have to, for one thing, and you’ll save gas money. Your mother can have her little victory, she won’t have to look at it.” Michael paused and then smiled his sad grin again. “She doesn’t see it as money flying away, both of us know that. She sees it as your first decisive step away from her… from us, I guess she… oh, shit, I don’t know.”

He stopped, looking at his son. Arnie looked back thoughtfully.

“Take it to college with you; even if you choose a campus that doesn’t allow freshmen to have cars on campus, there are ways to get around—”

“Like parking it at the airport?”

“Yes. Like that. When you come home for weekends, Regina will be so glad to see you she’ll never mention the car. Hell, she’ll probably get out there in the driveway and help you wash it and Turtlewax it just so she can find out what you’re doing. Ten months. Then it’ll be over. We can have peace in the family again. Go on, Arnie. Drive.”

Arnie pulled out of the dry cleaner’s and back into traffic.

“Is this thing insured?” Michael asked abruptly.

Arnie laughed. “Are you kidding? If you don’t have liability insurance in this state and you get in an accident, the cops kill you. Without liability, it’d be your fault even if the other car fell out of the sky and landed on top of you. It’s one of the ways the shitters keep kids off the roads in Pennsylvania.”

Michael thought of telling Arnie that a disproportionate number of fatal accidents in Pennsylvania—41 per cent—involved teenage drivers (Regina had read the statistic to him as part of a Sunday supplement article, rolling that figure out in slow, apocalyptic tones: “For-ty one per cent!” shortly after Arnie bought his car), and decided it wasn’t anything Arnie would want to hear… not in his present mood.

“Just liability?”

They were passing under a reflecting sign which read LEFT LANE FOR AIRPORT. Arnie put on his blinker and changed lanes. Michael seemed to relax a little.

“You can’t get collision insurance until you’re twenty-one. I mean that; those shitting insurance companies are all as rich as Croesus, but they won’t cover you unless the odds are stacked outrageously in their favour.” There was a bitter, somehow weakly peevish note in Arnie’s voice that Michael had never heard there before, and although he said nothing, he was startled and a little dismayed by his son’s choice of words—he had assumed Arnie used that sort of language with his peers (or so he later told Dennis Guilder, apparently totally unaware of the fact that, up until his senior year, Arnie had really had no peers except for Guilder), but he had never used it in front of Regina and himself.

“Your driving record and whether or not you had driver ed don’t have anything to do with it,” Arnie went on. “The reason you can’t get collision is because their fucking actuarial tables say you can’t get collision. You can get it at twenty-one only if you’re willing to spend a fortune—usually the premiums end up being more than the car books for until you’re twenty-three or so, unless you’re married. Oh, the shitters have got it all figured out. They know how to walk it right to you, all right.”

Up ahead the airport lights glowed, runways outlined in mystic parallels of blue light. “If anyone ever asks me what the lowest form of human life is, I’ll tell them it’s an insurance agent.”

“You’ve made quite a study of it,” Michael commented. He didn’t quite dare to say anything else; Arnie seemed only waiting to fly into a fresh rage.

“I went around to five different companies. In spite of what Mom said, I’m not anxious to throw my money away.”

“And straight liability was the best you could do?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Six hundred and fifty dollars a year.”

Michael whistled.

“That’s right,” Arnie agreed.

Another twinkling sign, advising that the two left-hand lanes were for parking, the right lanes for departures. At the entrance to the parking lot, the way split again. To the right was an automated gate where you took a ticket for short-term parking. To the left was the glass booth where the parking-lot attendant sat, watching a small black-and-white TV and smoking a cigarette.

Arnie sighed. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe this is the best solution all the way around.”

“Of course it is,” Michael said, relieved. Arnie sounded more like his old self now, and that hard light had died out of his eyes at last. “Ten months, that’s all.”

“Sure.”

He drove up to the booth, and the attendant, a young guy in a black-and-orange high school sweater with the Libertyville logo on the pockets, pushed back the glass partition and leaned out. “Help ya?”

“I’d like a thirty-day ticket,” Arnie said, digging for his wallet.

Michael put his hand over Arnie’s. “This one’s my treat,” he said.

Arnie pushed his hand away gently but firmly and took his wallet out. “It’s my car,” he said. “I’ll pay my own way.”

“I only wanted—” Michael began.

“I know,” Arnie said. “But I mean it.”

Michael sighed. “I know you do. You and you mother. Everything will be fine if you do it my way.”

Arnie’s lips tightened momentarily, and then he smiled. “Well… yeah,” he said.

They looked at each other and both burst out laughing.

At the instant that they did, Christine stalled. Up until then the engine had been ticking over with unobtrusive perfection. Now it just quit; the oil and amp dash lamps came on.

Michael raised his eyebrows. “Say what?”

“I don’t know,” Arnie answered, frowning. “It never did that before.”

He turned the key, and the engine started at once.

“Nothing, I guess,” Michael said.

“I’ll want to check the timing later in the week,” Arnie muttered. He gunned the engine and listened carefully. And in that instant, Michael thought that Arnie didn’t look like his son at all. He looked like someone else, someone much older and harder. He felt a brief but extremely nasty lance of fear in his chest.

“Hey, do you want this ticket or are you just gonna sit there all night talkin about your timing?” the parking-lot attendant asked. He looked vaguely familiar to Arnie, the way people do when you’ve seen them moving around in the corridors at school but don’t have anything else to do with them.

“Oh yeah. Sorry.” Arnie passed him a five-dollar bill, and the attendant gave him a time-ticket.

“Back of the lot,” the attendant said. “Be sure to revalidate it five days before the end of the month if you want the same space again.”

“Right.”

Arnie drove to the back of the lot, Christine’s shadow growing and shrinking as they passed under the hooded arc-sodium lights. He found a vacant space and backed Christine in. As he turned off the key, he grimaced and put a hand to his lower back.

“That still bothering you?” Michael asked.

“Only a little,” Arnie said. “I was almost over it, and it came back on me yesterday. I must have lifted something wrong. Don’t forget to lock your door.”

They got out and locked up. Once out of the car, Michael felt better—he felt closer to his son, and, maybe just as important, he felt less that he had played the impotent fool with his jingling cap of bells in the argument that had taken place earlier. Once out of the car, he felt as if he might have salvaged something—maybe a lot—out of the night.

“Let’s see how fast that bus really is,” Arnie said, and they began to walk across the parking lot toward the terminal, companionably close together.

Michael had formed an opinion of Christine on the ride out to the airport. He was impressed with the job of restoration Arnie had done, but he disliked the car itself disliked it intensely. He supposed it was ridiculous to hold such feelings about an inanimate object, but the dislike was there all the same, big and unmistakable, like a lump in the throat.

The source of the dislike was impossible to isolate. It had caused bitter trouble in the family, and he supposed that was the real reason… but it wasn’t all. He hadn’t liked the way Arnie seemed when he was behind the wheel: somehow arrogant and petulant at the same time, like a weak king. The impotent way he had railed about the insurance… his use of that ugly and striking word “shitters”… even the way the car had stalled when they laughed together.

And it had a smell. You didn’t notice it right away, but it was there. Not the smell of new seat covers, that was quite pleasant; this was an undersmell, bitter, almost (but not quite) secret. It was an old smell. Well, Michael told himself, the car is old, why in God’s name do you expect it to smell new? And that made undeniable sense. In spite of the really fantastic job Arnie had done of restoring it, the Fury was twenty years old. That bitter, mouldy smell might be coming from old carpeting in the boot, or old matting under the new floormats; perhaps it was coming from the original padding under the bright new seat covers. Just a smell of age.

And yet that undersmell, low and vaguely sickening, bothered him. It seemed to come and go in waves, sometimes very noticeable, at other times completely undetectable. It seemed to have no specific source. At its worst, it smelled like the rotting corpse of some small animal—a cat, a woodchuck, maybe a squirrel—that had gotten into the boot—or maybe crawled up into the frame and then died there.

Michael was proud of what his son had accomplished… and very glad to get out of his son’s car.

22 SANDY

The parking-lot-attendant that night—every night from six until ten, as a matter of fact—was a young man named Sandy Galton, the only one of Buddy Repperton’s close circle of hoodlum friends who had not been in the smoking area on the day Repperton had been expelled from school. Arnie didn’t recognize him, but Galton recognized Arnie.

Buddy Repperton, out of school and with no interest in initiating the procedures that might have gotten him readmitted at the beginning of the spring semester in January, had gone to work at the gas station run by Don Vandenberg’s father. In the few weeks he had been there, he had already begun a number of fairly typical scams—shortchanging gas customers who looked as if they might be in too big a hurry to count the bills he gave back to them, running the remould game (which consists of charging the customer for a new tyre and then actually putting on a remould and pocketing the fifteen- to sixty-dollar difference), running the similar used-parts game, plus selling inspection stickers to kids from the high school and nearby Horlicks—kids desperate to keep their death-traps on the road.

The station was open twenty-four hours a day, and Buddy worked the late shift, from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. Around eleven o’clock, Moochie Welch and Sandy Galton were apt to drop by in Sandy’s old dented Mustang; Richie Trelawney might come by in his Firebird; and Don, of course, was in and out almost all the time—when he wasn’t goofing off at school. By midnight on any given weekend there might be six or eight guys sitting around in the office, drinking beer out of dirty teacups, passing around a bottle of Buddy’s Texas Driver, doing a joint or maybe a little hash, farting, telling dirty jokes, swapping lies about how much pussy they were getting, and maybe helping Buddy fiddle around with whatever was up on the lift.

During one of these late-night gatherings in early November, Sandy happened to mention that Arnie Cunningham was parking his machine in the long-term lot out at the airport. He had, in fact, bought a thirty-day ticket.

Buddy, whose usual demeanour during these late-night bull-sessions was one of sullen withdrawal, tipped his cheap contour-plastic chair abruptly back down on all four legs and put his bottle of Driver down on the windscreen-wiper cabinet with a bang.

“What did you say?” he asked. “Cunningham? Ole Cuntface?”

“Yeah,” Sandy said, surprised and a little uneasy. “That’s him.”

“You sure? The guy who got me kicked out of school?” Sandy looked at him with mounting alarm. “Yeah. Why?”

“And he’s got a thirty-day ticket, which means he’s parked in the long-term lot?”

“Yeah. Maybe his folks didn’t want him to have it at…”

Sandy trailed off. Buddy Repperton had begun to smile. It was not a pleasant sight, that smile, and not only because the teeth it revealed were already going rotten. It was as if, somewhere, some terrible machinery had just whined into life and was beginning to cycle up and up to full running speed.

Buddy looked around from Sandy to Don to Moochie Welch to Richie Trelawney. They looked back at him, interested and a little scared.

“Cuntface,” he said in a soft, marvelling voice. “Ole Cuntface got his machine street-legal and his funky folks have got him parking it out at the airport.”

He laughed.

Moochie and Don exchanged a glance that was somehow both uneasy and eager.

Buddy leaned toward them, elbows on the knees of his jeans.

“Listen,” he said.

23 ARNIE AND LEIGH

WDIL was on the car radio and Dion was singing “Run-around Sue” in his tough, streetwise voice, but neither of them was listening.

His hand had slipped up under the T-shirt she was wearing and had found the soft glory of her breasts, capped with nipples that were tight and hard with excitement. Her breath came in short, steep gasps. And for the first time her hand had gone where he wanted it, where he needed it, into his lap, where it pressed and turned and moved, without experience but with enough desire to make up for the lack.

He kissed her and her mouth opened wide, her tongue was there, and the kiss was like inhaling the clean aroma/taste of a rain forest. He could feel excitement and arousal coming off her like a glow.

He leaned toward her, strained toward her, all of him, and for a moment he could feel her respond with a pure, clean passion.

Then she was gone.

Arnie sat there, dazed and stupefied, a little to the right of the steering wheel, as Christine’s dome-tight came on. It was brief; the passenger door clunked solidly shut and the light clicked off again.

He sat a moment longer, not sure what had happened, momentarily not even sure of where he was. His body was in a complete stew—a helter-skelter array of emotions and erratic physical reactions that were half wonderful and half terrible. His glands hurt; his penis was hard iron; his balls throbbed dully. He could feel adrenalin whipping rapidly through his bloodstream, up and down and all around.

He made a fist and brought it down on his leg, hard. Then he slid across the seat, opened the door, and went after her.

Leigh was standing on the very edge of the Embankment, looking down into the darkness. Within a bright rectangle in the middle of that darkness, Sylvester Stallone strode across the night in the costume of a young labour leader from the 1930s. Again Arnie had that feeling of living in some marvellous dream that might at any moment skew off into nightmare… perhaps it had already begun to happen.

She was too close to the edge—he took her arm and pulled her gently backward. The ground up here was dry and crumbly. There was no fence or guardrail. If the earth at the edge let go, Leigh would be gone; she would land somewhere in the suburban development loosely scattered around the Liberty Hill Drive-In.

The Embankment had been the local lovers” lane since time out of mind. It was at the end of Stanson Road, a long, meandering stretch of two-lane blacktop that first curved out of town and then hooked back toward it, dead-ending on Libertyville Heights, where there had once been a farm.

It was November 4, and the rain that had begun earlier that Saturday night had turned to a light sleet. They had the Embankment and the free (if silent) view of the drive-in to themselves. He got her back into the car—she came willingly enough—thinking it was sleet on her cheeks. It was only inside, by the ghostly green glow of the dashboard lights, that he saw for sure she was crying.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

She shook her head and cried harder.

“Did I… was it something you didn’t want to do?” He swallowed and made himself say it. “Touch me like that?”

She shook her head again, but he wasn’t sure what that meant. Arnie held her, clumsy and worried. And in the back of his mind he was thinking about the sleet, the trip back down, and the fact that he had no snow tyres on Christine as yet.

“I never did that for any boy,” she said against his shoulder. “That’s the first time I ever touched… you know. I did it because I wanted to. Because I wanted to, that’s all.”

“Then what is it?”

“I can’t… here.” The words came out slowly and painfully, one at a time, with an almost awful reluctance.

“The Embankment?” Arnie said, gazing around, thinking stupidly that maybe she thought he had really brought them up here so they would watch F.I.S.T free.

“In this car!” she shouted at him suddenly. “I can’t make love to you in this car!”

“Huh?” He stared at her, thunderstruck. “What are you talking about? Why not?”

“Because, because… I don’t know!” She struggled to say something else and then burst into fresh tears. Arnie held her again until she quieted.

“It’s just that I don’t know which you love more,” Leigh said when she was able.

“That’s…” Arnie paused, shook his head, smiled. “Leigh, that’s crazy.”

“Is it?” she asked, searching his face. “Which of us do you spend more time with? Me… or her?”

“You mean Christine?” He looked around him, smiling that puzzled smile that she could find either lovely and lovable or horridly hateful—sometimes both at once.

“Yes,” she said tonelessly. “I do.” She looked down at her hands, lying lifelessly on her blue woollen slacks. “I suppose it’s stupid.”

“I spend a lot more time with you,” Arnie said. He shook his head. “This is crazy. Or maybe it’s normal—maybe it just seems crazy to me because I never had a girl before.” He reached out and touched the fall of her hair where it spilled over one shoulder of her open coat. The T-shirt beneath read GIVE ME LIBERTYVILLE OR GIVE ME DEATH, and her nipples poked at the thin cotton cloth in a sexy way that made Arnie feel a little delirious.

“I thought girls were supposed to be jealous of other girls. Not cars.”

Leigh laughed shortly. “You’re right. It must be because you’ve never had a girl before. Cars are girls. Didn’t you know that?”

“Oh, come, on—”

“Then why don’t you call this Christopher?” And she suddenly slammed her open palm down on the seat, hard. Arnie winced.

“Come on, Leigh. Don’t.”

“Don’t like me slapping your girl?” she asked with sudden and unexpected venom. Then she saw the hurt look in his eyes. “Arnie, I’m sorry.”

“Are you?” he asked, looking at her expressionlessly. “Seems like nobody likes my car these days—you, my dad and mom, even Dennis. I worked my ass off on it, and it means zero to everybody.”

“It means something to me,” she said softly. “The effort it took.”

“Yeah,” he said morosely. The passion, the heat, had fled. He felt cold and a little sick to his stomach. “Look, we better get going. I don’t have any snow tyres. Your folks’d think it was cute, us going bowling and then getting racked up on Stanson Road.”

She giggled. “They don’t know where Stanson Road ends up.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her, some of his good humour returning. “That’s what you think,” he said.

He drove back down toward town slowly, and Christine managed the twisting, steeply descending road with easy surefootedness. The sprinkle of earth-stars that was Libertyville and Monroeville grew larger and drew closer together and then ceased to have any pattern at all. Leigh watched this a little sadly, feeling that the best part of potentially wonderful evening had somehow slipped away. She felt irritated, chafed, out of sorts with herself—unfulfilled, she supposed. There was a dull ache in her breasts. She didn’t know if she had meant to let him go what was euphemistically known as “all the way” or not, but after things had reached a certain point, nothing had gone as she had hoped… all because she had to open her big fat mouth.

Her body was in a mess, and her thoughts were the same way. Again and again on the mostly silent drive back down she opened her mouth to try to clarify how she felt… and then closed it again, afraid of being misunderstood, because she didn’t understand how she felt herself.

She didn’t feel jealous of Christine… and yet she did. About that Arnie hadn’t told the truth. She had a good idea of how much time he spent tinkering on the car, but was that so wrong? He was good with his hands, he liked to work on it, and it ran like a watch… except for that funny little glitch with the milometer numbers running backward.

Cars are girls, she had said. She hadn’t been thinking of what she was saying; it had just popped out of her mouth. And it certainly wasn’t always true; she didn’t think of their family sedan as having any particular gender; it was just a Ford.

But—

Forget it, get rid of all the hocus-pocus and phony stuff. The truth was much more brutal and even crazier, wasn’t it? She couldn’t make love to him, couldn’t touch him in that intimate way, much less think about bringing him to a climax that way (or the other, the real way—she had turned that over and over in her mind as she lay in her narrow bed, feeling a new and nearly amazing excitement steal over her), in the car.

Not in the car.

Because the really crazy part was that she felt Christine was watching them. That she was jealous, disapproving, maybe hating. Because there were times (like tonight, as Arnie skated the Plymouth so smoothly and delicately across the building scales of sleet) when she felt that the two of them—Arnie and Christine—were welded together in a disturbing parody of the act of love. Because Leigh did not feel that she rode in Christine; when she got in to go somewhere with Arnie she felt swallowed in Christine. And the act of kissing him, making love to him, seemed a perversion worse than voyeurism or exhibitionism—it was like making love inside the body of her rival.

The really crazy part of it was that she hated Christine.

Hated her and feared her. She had developed a vague dislike of walking in front of the new grille, or closely behind the boot; she had vague thoughts of the emergency brake letting go or the gearstick popping out of park and into neutral for some reason. Thoughts she had never had about the family sedan.

But mostly it was not wanting to do anything in the car… or even go anywhere in the car, if she could help it. Arnie seemed somehow different in the car, a person she didn’t really know. She loved the feel of his hands on her body—her breasts, her thighs (she had not yet allowed him to touch the centre of her, but she wanted his hands there; she thought if he touched her there she would probably just melt). His touch always brought a coppery taste of excitement to her mouth, a feeling that every sense was alive and deliciously attuned. But in the car that feeling seemed blunted… maybe because in the car Arnie seemed less honestly passionate and somehow more lecherous.

She opened her mouth again as they turned onto her street, wanting to explain some of this, and again nothing would come. Why should it? There was really nothing to explain—it was all vapours. Nothing but vague burnouts.

Well… there was one thing. But she couldn’t tell him that; it would hurt him too badly. She didn’t want to hurt him because she thought she was beginning to love him.

But it was there.

The smell—a rotten, thick smell under the aromas of new seat covers and the cleaning fluid he had used on the floormats. It was there, faint but terribly unpleasant. Almost stomach-turning.

As if, at some time, something had crawled into the car and died there.

He kissed her good night on her doorstep, the sleet shining silver in the cone of yellow light thrown by the carriage lamp at the foot of the porch steps. It shone in her dark blond hair like jewels. He would have liked to have really kissed her, but the fact that her parents might be watching from the living room—probably were, in fact—forced him to kiss her almost formally, as you might kiss a dear cousin.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was silly.”

“No,” Arnie said, obviously meaning yes.

“It’s just that”—and her mind supplied her with something that was a curious hybrid of the truth and a lie—“that it doesn’t seem right in the car. Any car. I want us to be together, but not parked in the dark at the end of a dead-end road. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he said. Up at the Embankment, in the car, he had felt a little angry with her… well, to be honest, he had been pretty goddam pissed off. But now, standing here on her stoop, he thought he could understand—and marvel that he could want to deny her anything or cross her will in any way. “I know exactly what you mean.”

She hugged him, her arms locked around his neck. Her coat was still open, and he could feel the soft, maddening weight of her breasts.

“I love you,” she said for the first time, and then slipped inside to leave him standing there on the porch momentarily, agreeably stunned, and much warmer than he should have been in the ticking, pattering sleet of late autumn.

The idea that the Cabots might find it peculiar if he stood on their front stoop much longer in the sleet at last percolated down into his bemused brain. Arnie went back down the walk through the tick and patter, snapping his fingers and grinning. He was riding the rollercoaster now, the one that’s the best ride, the one they really only let you take once.

Near the place where the concrete path joined the sidewalk, he stopped, the smile fading off his face. Christine stood at the kerb, drops of melted sleet pearling her glass, smearing the red dash lights from the inside. He had left Christine running, and she had stalled. This was the second time.

“Wet wires,” he muttered under his breath. “That’s all.” It couldn’t be plugs; he had put in a whole new set just the day before yesterday, at Will’s. Eight new Champions and—

Which of us do you spend more time with? Me… or her?

The smile returned, but this time it was uneasy. Well, he spent more time around cars in general—of course. That came of working for Will. But it was ridiculous to think that…

You lied to her. That’s the truth, isn’t it?

No, he answered himself uneasily. No, I don’t think you could say I really lied to her…

No? Then just what do you call it?

For the first and only time since he had taken her to the football game at Hidden Hills, he had told her a big fat lie. Because the truth was, he spent more time with Christine, and he hated having her parked in the thirty-day section of the airport parking lot, out in the wind and the rain, soon to be snow—

He had lied to her.

He spent more time with Christine.

And that was—

Was—

“Wrong,” he croaked, and the word was almost lost in the slick, mysterious sound of the falling sleet.

He stood on the walk, looking at his stalled car, marvellously resurrected time traveller from the era of Buddy Holly and Khrushchev and Laika the Space Dog, and suddenly he hated it. It had done something to him, he wasn’t sure what. Something.

The dash lights, blurred into football-shaped red eyes by the moisture on the window, seemed to mock him and reproach him at the same time.

He opened the driver’s side door, slipped behind the wheel, and pulled the door shut again. He closed his eyes. Peace flowed over him and things seemed to come back together. He had lied to her, yes, but it was a little lie. A mostly unimportant lie. No—a completely unimportant lie.

He reached out without opening his eyes and touched the leather rectangle the keys were attached to—old and scuffed, the initials R.D.L. burned into it. He had seen no need to get a new keyring, or a piece of leather with his own initials on it.

But there was something peculiar about the leather tab the keys were attached to, wasn’t there? Yes. Quite peculiar indeed.

When he had counted out the cash on LeBay’s kitchen table and LeBay had skittered the keys across the red-and-white-checked oilcloth to him, the rectangle of leather had been scuffed and nicked and darkened by age, the initials almost obliterated by time and the constant friction of rubbing against the change in the old man’s pocket and the material of the pocket itself.

Now the initials stood out fresh and clear again. They had been renewed.

But, like the lie, that was really unimportant. Sitting inside the metal shell of Christine’s body, he felt very strongly that that was true.

He knew it. Quite unimportant, all of it.

He turned the key. The starter whined, but for a long time the engine wouldn’t catch. Wet wires. Of course that was what it was.

“Please,” he whispered. “It’s all right, don’t worry, everything is the same.”

The engine fired, missed. The starter whined on and on. Sleet ticked coldly on the glass. It was safe in here; it was dry and warm. If the engine would start.

“Come on,” Arnie whispered. “Come on, Christine. Come on, hon.”

The engine fired again, caught. The dash lights flickered and went out. The IGN light pulsed weakly again as the motor stuttered, then went out for good as the beat of the engine smoothed out into a clean hum.

The heater blew warm air gently around his legs, negating the winter chill outside.

It seemed to him that there were things Leigh could not understand, things she could never understand. Because she hadn’t been around. The pimples. The cries of Hey Pizza-Face! The wanting to speak, the wanting to reach out to other people, and the inability. The impotence. It seemed to him that she couldn’t understand the simple fact that, had it not been for Christine, he never would have had the courage to call her on the phone even if she had gone around with I WANT TO DATE ARNIE CUNNINGHAM tattooed on her forehead. She couldn’t understand that he sometimes felt thirty years older than his age—no! more like fifty! and not a boy at all but some terribly hurt veteran back from an undeclared war.

He caressed the steering wheel. The green cats’ eyes of the dash instruments glowed back at him comfortingly.

“Okay,” he said. Almost sighed.

He dropped the gearshift into big D and flicked on the radio. Dee Dee Sharp singing “Mashed Potato Time”; mystic nonsense on the radio waves coming out of the dark.

He pulled out, planning to head for the airport, where he would park his car and catch the bus that ran back to town on the hour. And he did that, but not in time to take the 11:00 p.m. bus as he had intended. He took the midnight bus instead, and it was not until he was in bed that night recalling Leigh’s warm kisses instead of the way Christine wouldn’t fire up, that it occurred to him that somewhere that evening, after leaving the Cabot house and before arriving at the airport, he had lost an hour. It was so obvious that he felt like a man who has turned the house upside down looking for a vital bit of correspondence, only to discover that he has been holding it in his other hand all along. Obvious… and a little scary.

Where had he been?

He had a blurry memory of drawing away from the kerb in front of Leigh’s and then just…

… just cruising.

Yeah. Cruising. That was all. No big deal.

Cruising through the thickening sleet, cruising empty streets that were plated with the stuff, cruising without snow tyres (and yet Christine, incredibly surefooted, never missed her way or skidded around a corner, Christine seemed to find the safe and secure way as if by magic, the ride as solid as it would have been if the car had been on trolley-tracks), cruising with the radio on, spilling out a constant stream of oldies that seemed to consist solely of girls” names: Peggy Sue, Carol, Barbara-Ann, Susie Darlin”.

It seemed to him that at some point he had gotten a little frightened and had punched one of the chrome buttons on the converter he’d installed, but instead of FM-104 and the Block Party Weekend he got WDIL all over again, only now the disc jockey sounded crazily like Alan Freed, and the voice that followed was that of Screamin” Jay Hawkins, hoarse and chanting: “I put a spell on youuu… because you’re miiiiiine…”

And then at last there had been the airport with its foul-weather lights pulsing sequentially like a visible heartbeat. Whatever had been on the radio faded to a meaningless jumble of static and he had turned it off. Getting out of the car he had felt a sweaty, incomprehensible sort of relief.

Now he lay in bed, needing to sleep but unable, The sleet had thickened and curdled into fat white splats of snow.

It wasn’t right.

Something had been started, something was going on. He couldn’t even lie to himself and say that he didn’t know about it. The car—Christine—several people had commented on how beautifully he had restored her. He had driven it to school and the kids from auto shop were all over it; they were underneath it on crawlers to look at the new exhaust system, the new shocks, the bodywork. They were waist-deep in the engine compartment, checking out the belts and the radiator, which was miraculously free of the corrosion and the green gunk that is the residue of years of antifreeze, checking out the generator and the tight, gleaming pistons socketed in their valves. Even the air cleaner was new, with the numbers 318 painted across-the top, raked backward to indicate speed.

Yes, he had become something of a hero to his fellow shoppies, and he had taken all the comments and the compliments with just the night deprecatory grin. But even then, hadn’t the confusion been there, somewhere deep inside? Sure.

Because he couldn’t remember what he had done to Christine and what he hadn’t.

The time spent working on her at Darnell’s was nothing but a blur now, like his ride out to the airport earlier this evening had been. He could remember starting the bodywork on the dented rear end, but he couldn’t remember finishing it. He could remember painting the hood—covering the windscreen and mudguards with masking tape and donning the white mask in the paint-shop out back—but exactly when he had replaced the springs he couldn’t remember. Nor could he remember where he had gotten them. All he could remember for sure was sitting behind the wheel for long periods, stupefied with happiness… feeling the way he had felt when Leigh whispered “I love you” before slipping in her front door. Sitting there after most of the guys who worked on their cars at Darnell’s had gone home to get their suppers. Sitting there and sometimes turning on the radio to listen to the oldies on WDIL.

Maybe the windscreen was the worst.

He hadn’t bought a new windscreen for Christine, he was sure of that. His bankbook would be dented a lot more than it was if he’d bought one of those fancy wrap jobs. And wouldn’t he have a receipt? He had even hunted for such a receipt once in the desk-file marked CAR STUFF that he kept in his room. But he hadn’t found one, and the truth was, he had hunted rather halfheartedly.

Dennis had said something—that the snarl of cracks had looked smaller, less serious. Then, that day at Hidden Hills, it had just been… well, gone. The windscreen had been clean and unflawed.

But when had it happened? How had it happened?

He didn’t know.

He finally fell asleep and dreamed unpleasantly, twisting the covers into a ball as the scud of clouds blew away and the autumnal stars shone coldly down.

24 SEEN IN THE NIGHT

It was a dream—she was sure, almost until the very end, that it must be a dream.

In the dream she awoke from a dream of Arnie, making love to Arnie not in the car but in a very cool blue room that was unfurnished except for a deep blue shag rug and a scatter of throw-pillows covered in a lighter blue satin… she awoke from this dream to her room in the small hours of Sunday morning.

She could hear a car outside. She went to the window and looked out and down.

Christine was standing at the kerb. She was running—Leigh could see exhaust raftering up from the pipes—but was empty. In the dream she thought that Arnie must be at the door, although there was no knock as yet. She ought to go down, and quickly. If her father woke up and found Arnie here at four in the morning, he would be furious.

But she didn’t move. She looked down at the car and thought how much she hated it—and feared it.

And it hated her, too.

Rivals, she thought, and the thought—in this dream—was not grim and hotly jealous but rather despairing and afraid. There it sat at the kerb, there it was—there she was—parked outside her house in the dead trench of morning, waiting for her. Waiting for Leigh. Come on down, honey. Come on. We’ll cruise, and we’ll talk about who needs him more, who cares for him more, and who will be better for him in the long run. Come on… you’re not scared, are you?

She was terrified.

It’s not fair, she’s older, she knows the tricks, she’ll beguile him—

“Get out,” Leigh whispered fiercely in the dream, and rapped softly on the glass with her knuckles. The glass felt cold to her touch; she could see the small, crescent-shaped marks her knuckles left in the frost. It was amazing how real some dreams could be.

But it had to be a dream. It had to be because the car heard her. The words were no more than out of her mouth when the wipers suddenly started up, flicking wet snow off the windscreen in somehow contemptuous swipes. And then it—or she—drew smoothly away from the kerb and was gone up the street—

With no one driving it.

She was sure of that… as sure as one can be of anything in a dream. The passenger window had been dusted with snow but was not opaque with it. She had been able to see inside, and there was no one behind the wheel. So of course it had to be a dream.

She drifted back to her bed (into which she had never brought a lover; like Arnie, she had never had a lover at all) thinking of a Christmas quite long ago—twelve, maybe even fourteen years ago. Surely she could have been no more than four at the time. She and her mother had been in one of the big. department stores in Boston, Filene’s maybe…

She put her head down on her pillow and fell asleep (in her dream) with her eyes open, looking at the faint gleam of early light in the window, and then—in dreams anything could happen—she saw the Filene’s toy department on the other side of the window: tinsel, glitter, lights.

They were looking for something for Bruce, Mother and Dad’s only nephew. Somewhere a department-store Santa Claus was ho-ho-ho-ing into a PA system, and the amplified sound was not jolly but somehow ominous, the laughter of a maniac who had come in the night not with presents but with a meat cleaver.

She had held out her hand toward one of the displays, had pointed and told her mother that she wanted Santa Claus to bring her that.

No, honey, Santa can’t bring you that. That’s a boy-toy.

But I want it!

Santa will bring you a nice doll, maybe even a Barbie—

Want that—!

Only boy elves make those, Lee-Lee my love-love. For boys. The nice girl elves make nice dolls—

I don’t want a DOLL! I don’t want a BARBIE! I… want… THAT!

If you’re going to throw a tantrum, I’ll have to take you home, Leigh. I mean it, now.

So she had submitted, and Christmas had brought her not only Malibu Barbie but also Malibu Ken, and she had enjoyed them (she supposed), but still she remembered the red Remco racing car on its green surface of painted hills, running without a cord along a painted road so perfect that there were even tiny metal guardrails—a road whose essential illusion was given away only by its pointless circularity. Ali, but it ran fast, that car, and was it bright red magic in her eye and her mind? It was. And the car’s essential illusion was also magic. That illusion was somehow so captivating that it stole her heart. The illusion, of course, was that the car was driving itself. She knew that a store employee was really controlling it from a booth to the right, pushing buttons on a square wireless device. Her mother told her that was how it was happening, and so it must be so, but her eyes denied it,

Her heart denied it.

She stood fascinated, her small gloved hands on the rail of the display area, watching it race around and around, moving fast, driving itself, until her mother pulled her gently away.

And over everything, seeming to cause the very tinsel strung along the ceiling to vibrate, the ominous laughter of the department-store Santa.

Leigh slept more deeply, dreams and memories slowly fading, and outside daylight came creeping in like cold milk, illuminating a street that was Sunday-morning empty and Sunday-morning silent. The season’s first fall of snow was unmarred except for the tyre tracks that swerved to the kerb in front of the Cabot house and then moved smoothly away again, toward the intersection at the end of this suburban block.

She didn’t rise until nearly ten o’clock (her mother, who didn’t believe in slugabeds, finally called for her to come down and have breakfast before lunch), and by then the day had already warmed up to nearly sixty degrees—in western Pennsylvania, early November is apt to be every bit as capricious as early April. So by ten o’clock the snow had melted. And the tracks were gone.

25 BUDDY VISTS THE AIRPORT

One night some ten days later, as cardboard turkeys and construction-paper cornucopias were beginning to appear in grammar school windows, a blue Camaro, so radically jacked in the back that its nose seemed almost to scrape the road, slid into the long-term parking lane at the airport.

Sandy Galton looked out from his glass booth nervously. From the driver’s side of the Ford the happy smiling face of Buddy Repperton tilted up toward him. Buddy’s face was scrubbed with a week-old beard and his eyes held a maniacal glitter that was more cocaine than Thanksgiving cheer—he and the boys had scored a pretty good gram that evening. All in all, Buddy looked quite a bit like a depraved Clint Eastwood.

“How are they hanging, Sandy?” Buddy asked.

Dutiful laughter from the Camaro greeted this sally. Don Vandenberg, Moochie Welch, and Richie Trelawney were with Buddy, and between the gram of coke and the six bottles of Texas Driver Buddy had procured for the occasion, they were feeling pretty much reet and compleet. They had come to do a little dirty boogie on Arnie Cunningham’s Plymouth.

“Listen, if you guys get caught, I’m gonna lose my job,” Sandy said nervously. He was the only one cold sober, and he was regretting ever having mentioned that Cunningham was parking his heap here. The thought that he might go to jail as well had fortunately not occurred to him.

“If you or any of your Mission Imfuckingpossible force are caught, the Secretary will disavow you ever fuckin lived,” Moochie said from the back seat, and there was more laughter.

Sandy looked around for other cars—witnesses—but there were no planes due for more than an hour and the parking lot was as deserted as the mountains of the moon. The weather had turned very cold, and a wind as keen as a fresh razor-blade whined across the runways and taxi-ways and hooted miserably between the ranks of empty cars. Above and to his left, the Apco sign banged restlessly back and forth.

“You can laugh, you retard,” Sandy said. “I never saw you, that’s all. If you get caught, I’ll say I was takin a crap.”

“Jesus, what a baby,” Buddy said. He looked sorrowful. “I never thought you were such a baby, Sandy. Honest.”

“Arf! Arf!” Richie barked, and there was more laughter. “Roll over and play dead for Daddy Warbucks, Sandy!”

Sandy flushed. “I don’t care,” he said. “Just be careful.”

“We will, man,” Buddy said sincerely. He had saved back a seventh bottle of Texas Driver and a pretty decent toot of nose-candy. Now he handed both up to Sandy. “Here. Enjoy yourself.”

Sandy grinned in spite of himself. “Okay,” he said, and added, just so they’d know he was no sad sack: “Do a good job.”

Buddy’s smile hardened, became metallic. The light went out of his eyes; they became dull and dead and frightening. “Oh, we will,” he said. “We will.”

The Camaro drifted into the parking lot. For a while Sandy could follow its progress toward the back by the moving tail-lights, and then Buddy doused them. The sound of the motor, burbling through twin glasspack mufflers, came back for a few moments on the wind, and then that sound was gone, too.

Sandy dumped the coke out on the counter by his portable TV and tooted it with a rolled-up dollar bill. Then he got into the Texas Driver. He knew that being discovered drunk on the job would also get him canned, but he didn’t much care. Being drunk was better than being cat-jumpy and always staring around for one of the two grey Airport Security cars.

The wind was blowing toward him, and he could hear too much, he could hear.

A tinkle of breaking glass, muffled laughter, a loud metallic thonk.

More breaking glass.

A pause.

Low voices drifting to him on the cold wind. He was unable to pick up the individual words; they were distorted.

Suddenly there was a perfect fusillade of blows; Sandy winced at the sound. More breaking glass in the dark, and a tinkle of metal falling on the pavement—chrome or something, he supposed. He found himself wishing Buddy had brought more coke. Coke was sort of cheery stuff, and he sure could use some cheering up right about now. It sounded as if some pretty bad stuff was going on down at the far end of that parking lot.

And then a louder voice, urgent and commanding, Buddy’s for sure:

“Do it there!”

A mutter of protest.

Buddy again: “Never mind that! On the dashboard, I said!”

Another mutter.

Buddy: “I don’t give a shit!”

And for some reason this produced a stifle of laughter.

Sweaty now in spite of the knifing cold, Sandy suddenly slid his glass window shut and snapped on the TV. He drank deeply, grimacing at the heavy taste of the mixed fruit juice and cheap wine. He didn’t care for it, but Texas Driver was what they all drank when they weren’t drinking Iron City beer, and what was he supposed to do? Make out he was better than them, or something? That would get him fried, sooner or later. Buddy didn’t like wimps.

He drank, and began to feel a little better or at least a little drunker. When one of the Airport Security cars did pass, he hardly even flinched. The cop raised a hand to Sandy. Sandy raised a hand right back, just as cool as you could want.

About fifteen minutes after it had cruised toward the back of the lot, the blue Camaro reappeared, this time in the exit lane. Buddy sat cool and relaxed behind the wheel, a three-quarters-empty bottle of Driver propped in his crotch. He was smiling, and Sandy noted uneasily how bloodshot and weird his eyes looked. That wasn’t just wine, and it wasn’t just coke, either. Buddy Repperton was no one to fuck with; Cunningham would find that out, if nothing else.

“All taken care of, my good man” Buddy said.

“Good,” Sandy said, and tried a smile. It felt a little sick. He had no feelings about Cunningham one way or another, and he was not a particularly imaginative person, but he could make a good guess about how Cunningham was going to feel when he saw what had come of all his careful work restoring that red and white Plymouth. Still, it was Buddy’s business, not his.

“Good,” he said again.

“Keep your jock on, man,” Richie said, and giggled.

“Sure,” Sandy said. He was glad they were going. Maybe he wouldn’t hang around Vandenberg’s Happy Gas so much after this. Maybe after this he didn’t want to. This was heavy shit. Too heavy, maybe. And maybe he would pick up a couple of night courses, too. He’d have to give this job up, but maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, either—it was a pretty dull fucking job.

Buddy was still looking at him, smiling that hard, gonzo smile, and Sandy took a big drink of Texas Driver. He nearly gagged. For an instant he had an image of puking down into Buddy’s upturned face, and his unease became terror.

“If the cops get in on it,” Buddy said, “you don’t know nothing, you didn’t see nothing. Like you said, you had to go in and take a crap around nine-thirty.”

“Sure, Buddy.”

“We all wore our wittle mittens. We didn’t leave any prints.”

“Sure.”

“Stay cool, Sandy, Buddy said softly.

“Yeah, okay.”

The Camaro began to roll again. Sandy raised the gate with the manual button. The car headed toward the airport exit road at a sedate pace.

Someone called “Arf! Arf!” The sound drifted back to Sandy against the wind.

Troubled, he sat down to watch TV.

Shortly before the rush of customers who had come in on the ten-forty from Cleveland began to arrive, he poured the rest of the Driver out of the window and onto the ground. He didn’t want it anymore.

26 CHRISTINE LAID LOW

The next day Arnie and Leigh rode out to the airport together after school to pick up Christine. They were planning on a trip to Pittsburgh to do some early Christmas shopping, and they were looking forward to doing it together—it seemed somehow terribly adult.

Arnie was in a fine mood on the bus, making up fanciful little vignettes about their fellow passengers and making her laugh in spite of her period, which was usually depressing and almost always painful. The fat lady in the man’s workshoes was a lapsed nun, he said. The kid in the cowboy hat was a hustler. And on and on. She got into the spirit of the thing but was not as good at it as he. It was amazing, the way he had come out of his shell… the way he had bloomed. That was really the only word for it. She felt the smug, pleased satisfaction of a prospector who has suspected the presence of gold by certain signs and has been proved correct. She loved him, and she had been right to love him.

They got off the bus at the terminal stop together and walked across the access road to the parking lot hand in hand.

“This isn’t bad,” Leigh said. It was the first time she had come out with him to pick up Christine. “Twenty-five minutes from school.”

“Yeah, it’s okay,” Arnie said. “It keeps peace in the family, that’s the important thing. I’m telling you, when my mom got home that night and saw Christine in the driveway, she went totally bullshit.”

Leigh laughed, and the wind flipped her hair out behind her. The temperature had moderated from last night’s bitter mid-teens, but it was still chilly. She was glad. Without a certain chill in the air, it didn’t feel like Christmas shopping. Bad enough the decorations in Pittsburgh wouldn’t be up yet. But it wasn’t bad; it was good. And suddenly she was glad about everything, most of all glad to be alive. And in love.

She had thought about it, the way she loved him. She had had crushes before, and once, in Massachusetts, she had thought she might be in love, but about this boy there was simply no question. He troubled her sometimes—his interest in the car seemed almost obsessive—but even her occasional unease played a part in her feelings, which were richer than anything she had ever known. And part of it, she admitted to herself, was of course selfish—she had, in weeks only, begun to make him over… to complete him.

They cut between the cars, headed for the thirty-day section of the parking lot. Overhead, a USAir jet was coming in on its final approach, the thunder of its engines rolling away in great flat waves of sound. Arnie was saying something, but the plane obliterated his voice altogether after the first few words—something about Thanksgiving dinner—and she turned to look at his face, secretly amused by his silently moving mouth,

Then, quite suddenly, his mouth stopped moving. He stopped walking, His eyes opened wider… and then seemed to bulge. His mouth began to twist, and the hand holding Leigh’s suddenly clamped down ruthlessly, grinding her fingerbones painfully together.

“Arnie—”

The jet-roar was fading, but he seemed not to have heard. His hand clamped tighter. His mouth had slammed shut now, and it was knotted into an awful grimace of surprise and terror. She thought, He’s having a heart attack… stroke… something.

“Arnie, what’s wrong?” she cried. “Arnie… ooowwwhoww, that hurts!”

For one unbearable moment the pressure on the hand he had been holding so lightly and lovingly just before increased until it seemed that the bones would actually splinter and break. The high colour in his cheeks was gone, and his skin was as leaden as a slate headstone.

He said one word—“Christine!”— and suddenly let go of her. He ran, thumping his leg against the bumper of a Cadillac, spinning away, almost falling, catching himself, and running forward again.

She realized at last it was something about the car—the ear, the car, always it was the goddam car—and a bitter anger rose in her that was both total and despairing. For the first time she wondered if it would be possible to love him; if Arnie would allow it.

Her anger was quenched the instant she really looked… and saw.

Arnie ran to what remained of his car, hands out, and stopped so abruptly in front of it that the gesture seemed almost to be a horrified warding-off; the classic movie pose of the hit-and-run victim an instant before the lethal collision.

He stood that way for a moment, as if to stop the car, or the whole world. Then he lowered his arms. His adam’s apple lurched up and down twice as he struggled to swallow something back—a moan, a cry—and then his throat seemed to lock solid, every muscle standing out, each cord standing out, even the blood-vessels standing out in perfect relief. It was the throat of a man trying to lift a piano.

Leigh walked slowly toward him. Her hand still throbbed, and tomorrow it would be swollen and virtually useless, but for now she had forgotten it. Her heart went out to him and seemed to find him; she felt his sorrow and shared it or it seemed to her that she did. It was only later that she realized how much Arnie shut her out that day—how much of his suffering he elected to do alone, and how much of his hate he hid away.

“Arnie, who did it?” she asked, her voice breaking with grief for him. No, she had not liked the car, but to see it reduced to this made her understand fully what Arnie’s commitment had been, and she could hate it no longer—or so she thought.

Arnie made no answer. He stood looking at Christine, his eyes burning, his head slightly down.

The windscreen had been smashed through in two places; handfuls of safety glass fragments were strewn across the slashed seat covers like trumpery diamonds. Half of the front bumper had been pried off and now dragged on the pavement, near a snarl of black wires like octopus tentacles. Three of the four side windows had also been broken. Holes had been punched through the sides of the body at waist-level in ragged, wavering lines. It looked as if some sharp, heavy instrument—maybe the pry-end of a tyre iron—had been used. The passenger door hung open, and she saw that all the dashboard glass had been broken. Tufts and wads of stuffing were everywhere. The speedometer needle lay on the driver’s side floormat.

Arnie walked slowly around his car, noting all of this. Leigh spoke to him twice. He didn’t answer either time. Now the leaden colour of his face was broken by two hectic, burning spots of flush riding high up on his cheekbones. He picked up the octopus-thing that a been lying on the pavement and she saw it was a distributor cap—her father had pointed that out to her once when he had been tinkering with their car.

He looked at it for a moment, as if examining an exotic zoological specimen, and then threw it down. Broken glass gritted under their heels. She spoke to him again. He didn’t answer, and now, as well as a terrible pity for him, she began to feel afraid, too. She told Dennis Guilder later that it seemed—at least at the time—perfectly possible that he might have lost his mind.

He booted a piece of chrome trim out of his way. It struck the cyclone fence at the back of the lot with a little tinkling sound. The tail-lights had been smashed, more trumpery gems, this time rubies, this time on the pavement instead of the seat.

“Arnie—” she tried again.

He stopped. He was looking in through the hole in the driver’s side window. A terrible low sound began to come from his chest, a jungle sound. She looked over his shoulder, saw, and suddenly felt a crazy need to laugh and scream and faint all at the same time. On the dashboard… she hadn’t noticed at first; in the midst of the general destruction she hadn’t noticed what was on the dashboard. And she wondered, with vomit suddenly rising in her throat, who could be so low, so completely low, as to do such a thing, to…

“Shitters!” Arnie cried, and his voice was not his own. It was high and shrill and cracked with fury.

Leigh turned around and threw up, holding blindly onto the car next to Christine, seeing small white dots in front of her eyes that expanded like puffed rice. Dimly she thought of the county fair—every year they’d haul an old junk car up onto a plank platform and lean a sledgehammer against it and you got three swings for a quarter. The idea was to demolish the car. But not… not to…

“You goddam shitters!” Arnie screamed. “I’ll get you! I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I do! If it’s the last motherfucking thing I ever do!”

Leigh threw up again and for one terrible moment found herself wishing that she had never ever met Arnie Cunningham.

27 ARNIE AND REGINA

He let himself into the house that night at quarter of twelve. The clothes he had been wearing with the shopping trip to Pittsburgh in mind were grease- and sweat-stained. His hands were more deeply grimed, and a shallow cut corkscrewed across the back of the left like a brand. His face looked haggard and stunned. There were dark circles under his eyes.

His mother sat at the table, a game of solitaire laid out in front of her. She had been waiting for him to come home and dreading it deeply at the same time. Leigh had called and told her what had happened. The girl, who had impressed Regina as being quite a nice girl (if perhaps not quite good enough for her son), sounded as if she had been crying.

Regina, alarmed, had hung up as quickly as she could and had dialled Darnell’s Garage. Leigh had told her Arnie had called for a tow-truck from there and bad ridden in with the driver. He had put her in a taxi, over her protests. The phone had rung twice and then a wheezy yet gravelly voice had said, “Yuh. Darnell’s.”

She had hung up, realizing it would be a mistake to talk to him there—and it looked as if she and Mike had already made enough mistakes about Arnie and his car. She would wait until he came home. Say what she had to say looking him in the face.

She said it now. “Arnie, I’m sorry.”

It would have been better if Mike could be here, too. But he was in Kansas City, attending a symposium on trade and the beginnings of free enterprise in the Middle Ages. He wouldn’t be back until Sunday, unless this brought him home early. She thought it might. She realized—not without some rue—that she might just be awakening to the full seriousness of this situation.

“Sorry,” Arnie echoed in a flat, accentless voice.

“Yes, I—that is, we—” She couldn’t go on. There was something terrible in the deadwood of his expression. His eyes were blanks. She could only look at him and shake her head, her eyes brimming, the hateful taste of tears in her nose and throat. She hated to cry. Strong-willed, one of two girls in a Catholic family that consisted of, her blue-collar construction-worker father, her washed-out mother, and seven brothers, hellbent on college in spite of her father’s belief that the only things girls learned there were how to stop being virgins and how to throw over the church, she had shed her fair share of tears and more. And if her own family thought she was hard sometimes, it was because they didn’t understand that when you went through hell you came out baked by the fire. And when you had to burn to have your own way, you always wanted to have it.

“You know something?” Arnie asked.

She shook her head, still feeling the hot, slithery burn of the tears tinder her lids.

“You’d make me laugh, if I wasn’t so tired I could hardly stand up. You could have been out there swinging the tyre irons and the hammers along with the guys that did it. You’re probably happier about it than they are.”

“Arnie, that’s not fair!”

“It is fair!” he roared at her, his eyes suddenly blazing with a horrible fire. For the first time in her life she was afraid of her son. “Your idea to get it out of the driveway! His idea to put it in the airport lot! Who do you think is to blame here? Just who do you think? Do you think it would have happened if it had been here? Huh?”

He took a step toward her, fists clenched at his sides, and she had all she could do to keep from flinching backward.

“Arnie, can’t we even talk about this?” she asked. “Like two rational human beings?”

“One of them took a shit on the dashboard of my car,” he said coldly. “How’s that for rational, Mom?”

She had honestly believed she had the tears under control, but this news—news of such a stupid, irrational fury—brought them back. She cried. She cried in grief for what her son had seen. She lowered her head and cried in bewilderment and pain and fear.

All her life as a mother she had felt secretly superior to the women around her who had children older than Arnie. When he was one, those other mothers had shaken their heads dolefully and told her to wait until he was five—that was when the trouble started, that was when they were old enough to say “shit” in front of their grandmothers and play with matches when left alone. But Arnold, as good as gold at one, had still been as good as gold at five. Then the other mothers had rolled their eyes and said wait until he’s ten; and then it had been fifteen, that was when it really got sticky, what with the dope and the rock concerts and girls that would do anything and—God forbid—stealing hubcaps and those… well, diseases.

And through it all she had continued to smile inside because it was all working out according to plan, it was all working out the way she felt her own childhood should have. Her son had warm, supportive parents who cared about him, who would give him anything (within reason), who would gladly send him to the college of his choice (as long as it was a good one), thereby finishing the game/ business/vocation of Parenting with a flourish. If you had suggested that Arnie had few friends and was often bullyragged by the others, she would have starchily pointed out that she had gone to a parochial school in a tough neighbourhood where girls” cotton panties were sometimes torn off for a joke and then set on fire with Zippo lighters engraved with the crucified body Jesus. And if you had suggested that her own attitudes toward child-rearing differed only in terms of material goals from the attitudes of her hated father, she would have been furious and pointed out her good son as her final vindication.

But now her good son stood before her, pale, exhausted, and greased to the elbows, seeming to thrum with the same sort of barely chained anger that had been his grandfather’s trademark, even looking like him. Everything seemed to have fallen into a shambles.

“Arnie, we’ll talk about what’s to be done in the morning,” she said, trying to pull herself together and beat back the tears. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

“Not unless you get up real early,” he said, seeming to lose interest. “I’m going upstairs to catch about four hours, and then I’m going down to the garage again.”

“What for?”

He uttered a crazy laugh and flapped his arms under the kitchen’s fluorescent bars as if he would fly. “What do you think for? I got a lot of work to do! More work than you’d believe!”

“No, you have school tomorrow… I… I forbid it, Arnie, I absolutely—”

He turned to look at her, study her, and she flinched again. This was like some grinding nightmare that was just going to go on and on.

“I’ll get to school,” he said. “I’ll take some fresh clothes in a pack and I’ll even shower so I don’t smell offensive to anyone in home room. Then, after school’s out, I’ll go back down to Darnell’s. There’s a lot of work to be done, but I can do it… I know I can… it’s going to eat up a lot of my savings, though. Plus, I’ll have to keep on top of the stuff I’m doing for Will.”

“Your homework… your studies”

“Oh. Those.” He smiled the dead, mechanical smile of a clockwork figure. “They’ll suffer, of course, Can’t kid you about that. I can’t promise you a ninety-three average anymore, either. But I’ll get by. I can make C’s. Maybe some B’s.”

“No! You’ve got college to think about!”

He came back to the table, limping again, quite badly. He planted his hands on the table before her and leaned slowly down. She thought: A stranger… my son is a stranger to me. Is this really my fault? Is it? Because I only wanted what was best for him? Can that be? Please, God, make this a nightmare I’ll wake up from with tears on my cheeks because it was so real.

“Right now,” he said softly, holding her gaze, “the only things I care about are Christine and Leigh and staying on the good side of Will Darnell so I can get her fixed up as good as new. I don’t give a shit about college. And if you don’t get off my case, I’ll drop out of high school. That ought to shut you up if nothing else will.”

“You can’t,” she said, meeting his gaze. “You understand that, Arnold. Maybe I deserve your… your cruelty… but I’ll fight this self-destructive streak of yours with everything I have. So don’t you talk about dropping out of school.”

“But I’ll really do it,” he answered. “I don’t want you to even kid yourself into thinking I won’t. I’ll be eighteen in February, and I’ll do it on my own then if you don’t stay out of this from now on. Do you understand me?”

“Go to bed,” she said tearfully. “Go to bed, you’re breaking my heart.”

“Am I?” Shockingly, he laughed, “Hurts, doesn’t it? I know.”

He left then, walking slowly, the limp pulling his body slightly to the left. Shortly she heard the heavy, tired clump of his shoes on the stairs—also a sound terribly reminiscent of her childhood, when she had thought to herself, The ogre’s going to bed.

She burst into a fresh spasm of weeping, got up clumsily, and went out the back door to do her crying in private. She held herself—thin comfort, but better than none—and looked up at a horned moon that was quadrupled through the film of her tears. Everything had changed, and it had happened with the speed of a cyclone. Her son hated her; she had seen it in his face—it wasn’t a tantrum, a temporary pique, a passing squall of adolescence. He hated her, and this wasn’t the way it was supposed to go with her good boy, not at all.

Not at all.

She stood on the stoop and cried until the tears began to run their course and the sobs became occasional hatchings and gasps. The cold gnawed her bare ankles above her mules and bit more bluntly through her housecoat. She went inside and upstairs. She stood outside Arnie’s room indecisively for almost a minute before going in.

He had fallen asleep on the coverlet of his bed. His pants were still on. He seemed more unconscious than asleep, and his face looked horribly old. A trick of the light, coming from the hall and falling into the room from over her shoulder, made it seem for a moment to her that his hair was thinning, that his sleep-gaping mouth was without teeth. A small squeal of horror strained itself through the hand clapped to her mouth and she hurried toward him.

Her shadow, which had been on the bed, moved with her and she saw it was only Arnie, the impression of age no more than the light and her own exhausted confusion,

She looked at his clock-radio and saw that it was set for 4:30 A.M. She thought of turning the alarm off; she even stretched her hand out to do it. Ultimately she found she couldn’t.

Instead she went down to her bedroom, sat down at the phone table, and picked up the handset. She held it for a moment, debating. If she called Mike in the middle of the night, he would think that…

That something terrible had happened?

She giggled. Well, hadn’t it? It surely had. And it was still happening.

She dialled the number of the Ramada Inn in Kansas City where her husband was staying, vaguely aware that she was, for the first time since she had left the grim and grimy three-storey house in Rocksburg for college twenty-seven years before, calling for help.

28 LEIGH MAKES A VISIT

She got through most of the story okay sitting in one of the two visitors” chairs with her knees pressed firmly together and her ankles crossed, neatly dressed in a multicoloured wool sweater and a brown corduroy skirt. It was not until the end that she began to cry, and she couldn’t find a handkerchief. Dennis Guilder handed her the box of tissues from the table beside the bed.

“Take it easy, Leigh,” he said.

“I cuh-cuh-can’t! He hasn’t been to see me and in school be just seems so tired… and you s-said he hasn’t been here—”

“He’ll come if he needs me,” Dennis said.

“You’re full of muh-macho b-bull-sh-sh-shit!” she said, and then looked comically stunned at what she had said. The tears had cut tracks in the light makeup she was wearing. She and Dennis looked at each other for a moment, and then they laughed. But it was brief laughter, and not really that good.

“Has Motormouth seen him?” Dennis asked.

“Who?”

“Motormouth. That’s what Lenny Barongg calls Mr Vickers. The guidance counsellor.”

“Oh! Yes. I think he has. He was called to the guidance office the day before yesterday Monday. But he didn’t say anything. And I didn’t dare ask him anything. He won’t talk. He’s gotten so strange.”

Dennis nodded. Although he didn’t think Leigh realized it—she was deep in her own trouble and confusion—he felt a sense of impotence and a deepening fear for Arnie. From the reports that had filtered into his room over the last few days, Arnie sounded on the verge of a nervous breakdown; Leigh’s report was only the most recent and the most graphic. He had never wanted to be out as badly as he did now. Of course, he could call Vickers and ask him if there I was anything he could do. And he could call Arnie… except, from what Leigh had said, Arnie was now always at school, at Darnell’s, or sleeping. His father had come home early from some sort of convention and there had been another fight, Leigh had told him. Although Arnie had not come right out and said so, Leigh told Dennis she believed that he had come very close to simply leaving home.

Dennis didn’t want to talk to Arnie at Darnell’s.

“What can I do?” she asked him. “What would you do, in my place?”

“Wait,” Dennis said. “I don’t know what else you can do.”

“But that’s hardest,” she answered in a voice so low it was almost inaudible. Her hands were clenching and unclenching on the Kleenex, shredding it, dotting her brown skirt with speckles of lint. “My folks want me to stop seeing him—to drop him. They’re afraid… that Repperton and those other boys will do something else.”

“You’re, pretty sure it was Buddy and his friends, huh?”

“Yes. Everybody is. Mr Cunningham called the police even though Arnie told him not to. He said he’d settle the score in his own way, and that scared them both. It scares me, too, The police picked up Buddy Repperton, and one of his friends, the one they call Moochie… do you know who I mean?”

“Yes.”

“And the boy who works nights at the airport parking lot, they picked him up, too. Galton, his name is—”

“Sandy.”

“They thought he must have been in on it, that maybe he let them in.”

“He runs with them, all right,” Dennis said, “but he’s not quite as degenerate as the rest of them. I’ll say this, Leigh—if Arnie didn’t talk to someone sure did.”

“First Mrs Cunningham and then his father. I don’t think either of them knew the other one had talked to me. They’re…”

“Upset,” Dennis suggested.

She shook her head. “It’s more than that,” she said. “They both look like they were just… just mugged, or something. I can’t really feel sorry for her—all she wants is her own way, I think—but I could cry for Mr Cunningham. He just seems so… so… “She trailed off and began again. “When I got there yesterday afternoon after school, Mrs Cunningham—she asked me to call her Regina, but I just can’t seem to do it—”

Dennis grinned

“Can you do it?” Leigh asked.

“Well, yeah—but I’ve had a lot more practice.”

She smiled, the first good one of her visit. “Maybe that would make a difference. Anyway, when I went over, she was there but Mr Cunningham was still at school… the University, I mean.”

“Yeah.”

“She took the whole week off—what there is of it. She said couldn’t go back, even for the three days before Thanksgiving.”

“How does she look?”

“She looks shattered,” Leigh said, and reached for a fresh Kleenex. She began shredding the edges. “She looks ten years older than when I first met her a month ago.”

“And him? Michael?”

“Older but tougher,” Leigh said hesitantly.” As if this had somehow… somehow gotten him into gear.

Dennis was silent. He had known Michael Cunningham for thirteen years and had never seen him in gear, so he wouldn’t know. Regina had always been the one in gear; Michael trailed along in her wake and made the drinks at the parties (mostly faculty parties) the Cunninghams hosted. He played his recorder, he looked melancholy… but by no stretch of the imagination could Dennis say he had ever seen the man “in gear”.

The final triumph, Dennis’s father had said once, standing at the window and watching Regina lead Arnie by the hand down the Guilders” walk to where Michael waited behind the wheel of the car. Arnie and Dennis had been perhaps seven then. Momism supreme. I wonder if she’ll make the poor slob wait in the car when Arnie gets married. Or maybe she can—

Dennis’s mother had frowned at her husband and shushed him by cutting her eyes at Dennis in a little-pitchers-have-big-ears gesture. He never forgot the gesture or what his father had said—at seven he hadn’t understood all of it, but even at seven he knew perfectly well what a “poor slob” was. And even at seven he vaguely understood why his father might think Michael Cunningham was one. He had felt sad for, Michael Cunningham… and that feeling had held, off and on, right up to the present.

“He came in around the time she was finishing her story, Leigh went on. “They asked me to stay for supper—Arnie has been eating down at Darnell’s—but I told them I really had to get back. So Mr Cunningham offered me a ride, and I got his side on the way home.”

“Are they on different sides?”

“Not exactly, but… Mr Cunningham was the one who went to see the police, for instance. Arnie didn’t want to, and Mrs Cunningham—Regina—couldn’t bring herself to do it.”

Dennis asked cautiously, “He’s really trying to put Humpty back together again, huh?”

“Yes,” she whispered, and then burst out shrilly: “But that’s not all! He’s in deep with that guy Darnell, I know he is! Yesterday in period three study hall he told me he was going to drop a new front end into her—into his car—this afternoon and this evening, and I said won’t that be awfully expensive Arnie, and he said not to worry about it because his credit was good—”

“Slow down.”

She was crying again. “His credit was good because he and someone named Jimmy Sykes were going to do some errands for Will Friday and Saturday. That’s what he said. And… I don’t think the errands he does for that sonofabitch are legal!”

“What did he tell the police when they came to ask about Christine?”

“He told them about finding it… that way. They asked him if he had any ideas who might have done it, and Arnie said no. They asked him if it wasn’t true that he had gotten into a fight with Buddy Repperton, that Repperton had pulled a knife and had been expelled for it. Arnie said that Repperton had knocked his bag lunch out of his hand and stepped on it, then Mr Casey came over from the shop and broke it up. They asked him if Repperton hadn’t said he would get him for it, and Arnie said he might have said something like that, but talk was cheap.”

Dennis was silent, looking out his window at a dull November sky, considering this. He found it ominous. If Leigh had the interview with the police right, then Arnie hadn’t told a single lie… but he had edited things to make what had happened in the smoking area sound like your ordinary pushy-pushy.

Dennis found that extremely ominous.

“Do you know what Arnie might be doing for that man Darnell?” Leigh asked.

“No,” Dennis answered, but he had some ideas. A little internal tape recorder started up, and he heard his father saying, I’ve heard a few things… stolen cars… cigarettes and booze… contraband like fireworks… He’s been lucky for a long time, Dennis.

He looked at Leigh’s face, too pale, her makeup cut open by her tears. She was hanging on, hanging onto Arnie as best she could. Maybe she was learning something about being tough that she wouldn’t have learned otherwise, with her looks, for another ten years. But that didn’t make it any easier, and it didn’t necessarily make it right. It occurred to him suddenly, almost randomly, that he had first noticed the improvement in Arnie’s face more than a month before Arnie and Leigh clicked… but after Arnie and Christine had clicked.

“I’ll talk to him,” he promised.

“Good,” she said. She stood up. “I–I don’t want things to be like they were before, Dennis. I know that nothing ever is. But I still love him, and… and I just wish you’d tell him that.”

“Yeah, okay.”

They were both embarrassed, and neither of them could say anything for a long, long moment. Dennis was thinking that this would be the point, in a c & w song, where the Best Friend steps in. And a sneaking, mean (and randy) part of him wouldn’t be averse to that. Not at all. He was still powerfully attracted to her, more attracted than he had been to any girl in a long time. Maybe ever. Let Arnie run bottle-rockets and cherry-bombs over to Burlington and fuck around with his car. He and Leigh could get to know each other better in the meantime. A little aid and comfort. You know how it is.

And he had a feeling at just that awkward moment, after her profession of love for Arnie, that he could do it; she was vulnerable. She was maybe learning how to be tough, but it’s not a school anyone goes to willingly. He could say something—the right something, maybe only Come here—and she would come, sit on the edge of the bed, they would talk some more, maybe about pleasanter things, and maybe he would kiss her. Her mouth was lovely and full, sensual, made to kiss and be kissed. Once for comfort. Twice out of friendship. And three times pays for all. Yes, he felt with an instinct that had so far been quite reliable that it could be done.

But he didn’t say any of the things that could have started those things happening, and neither did Leigh. Arnie was between them, and almost surely always would be. Arnie and his lady. If it hadn’t been so ludicrously ghastly, he could have laughed.

“When are they letting you out?” she asked.

“On an unsuspecting public?” he asked, and began to giggle. After a moment she joined him in his laughter “Yes, something like that,” Leigh said, and then snickered again. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Dennis said. “People have been laughing at me all my life. I’m used to it. They say I’m stuck here until January, but I’m going to fool them. I’m going home for Christmas. I’m working my buns off down in the torture chamber.”

“Torture chamber?”

“Physical therapy. My back’s looking good. The other bones are knitting busily—the itch is terrible sometimes. I’m gobbling rosehips by the bushel basket. Dr Arroway says that’s nothing but a folk-tale, but Coach Puffer swears by them, and he checks the bottle every time he comes to visit.”

“Does he come often? The Coach?”

“Yeah, he does. Now he’s got me half-believing that stuff about rosehips making your broken bones knit faster.” Dennis paused. “Of course, I’m not going to be playing any more football, not ever. I’m going to be on crutches for a while, and then, with luck, I’ll graduate to a cane. Cheerful old Dr Arroway tells me I’m going to limp for maybe a couple of years. Or maybe I’ll always limp.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said in a low voice. “I’m sorry it had to happen to a nice guy like you, Dennis, but part of it’s selfish. I just wonder if all the rest of this, all this horrible stuff with Arnie, if it would have happened if you’d been up and around.”

“That’s right,” Dennis said, rolling his eyes dramatically, “blame it on me.”

But she didn’t smile. “I’ve started to worry about his sanity, did you know that? That’s the one thing I haven’t told my folks or his folks. But I think his mother… that she might… I don’t know what he said to her that night, after we found the car all smashed up, but… I think they must have really put their claws into each other.”

Dennis nodded.

“But it’s all so… so mad! His parents offered to buy him a good used car to replace Christine, and he said no. Then Mr Cunningham told me on the ride home that he offered to buy Arnie a new car… to cash in some bonds he’s held ever since 1955. Arnie said no, he couldn’t just take a present like that. And Mr Cunningham said he could understand that, and it didn’t have to be a present, that Arnie could pay him back, that he’d even take interest if that was what Arnie wanted… Dennis, do you see what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” Dennis said. “It can’t be just any car. It’s got to be that car. Christine.”

“But to me that seems obsessive. He’s found one object and fixed on it. Isn’t that what an obsession is? I’m scared, and sometimes I feel hateful… but it’s not him I’m scared of. It’s not him I hate. It’s that frig—no, it’s that fucking car. That bitch Christine.”

High colour bloomed in her cheeks. Her eyes narrowed. The corners of her mouth turned down. Her face was suddenly no longer beautiful, not even pretty; the light on it was pitiless, changing it into something that was ugly but all the same striking, compelling. Dennis realized for the first time why they called it the monster, the green-eyed monster.

I’ll tell you what I wish would happen,” Leigh said. “I wish somebody would take his precious fucking Christine out back some night by mistake, out where they put the junks from Philly Plains.” Her eyes sparkled venomously. “And the next day I wish that crane with the big round magnet would come and pick it up and put it in the crusher and I wish someone would push the button and what would come out would be a little cube of metal about three by three by three. Then this would be over, wouldn’t it?”

Dennis didn’t answer, and after a moment he could almost see the monster turn around and wrap its scaly tail around itself and steal out of her face. Her shoulders sagged.

“Guess that sounds pretty horrible, doesn’t it? Like saying I wish those hoods had finished the job.”

“I understand how you feel.”

“Do you?” she challenged.

Dennis thought of Arnie’s look as he had pounded his fists on the dashboard. The kind of maniacal light that came into his eyes when he was around her. He thought of sitting behind the wheel in LeBay’s garage, and the kind of vision that had come over him.

Last of all, he thought of his dream: headlights bearing down on him in the high womanscream of burning rubber.

“Yes,” he said. “I think I do.”

They looked at each other in the hospital room.

29 THANKSGIVING

At the hospital they served Thanksgiving dinner in shifts from eleven in the morning until one in the afternoon. Dennis got his at quarter past twelve: three careful slices of white turkey breast, one careful ladleful of brown gravy, a scoop of instant mashed potatoes the exact size and shape of a baseball (lacking only the red stitches, he thought with sour amusement), a like scoop of frozen squash that was an arrogant fluorescent orange, and a small plastic container of cranberry jelly. For dessert there was ice cream. Resting on the corner of his tray was a small blue card.

Wise to the ways of the hospital by now—once you have been treated for the first set of bedsores to crop up on your ass, Dennis had discovered, you’re wiser to the ways of the hospital than you ever wanted to be—he asked the candy-striper who came to take away his tray what the yellow and red cards got for their Thanksgiving dinner. It turned out that the yellow cards got two pieces of turkey, no gravy, potato, no squash, and Jell-O for dessert. The red cards got one slice of white meat, pureed, and potato. Fed to them, in most cases.

Dennis found it all pretty depressing. It was only too easy to imagine his mother bringing a great big crackling capon to the dining-room table around four in the afternoon, his father sharpening his carving knife, his sister, flushed with importance and excitement, a red velvet ribbon in her hair, pouring each of them a glass of good red wine. It was also easy to imagine the good smells, the laughter as they sat down.

Easy to imagine… but probably a mistake.

It was, in fact, the most depressing Thanksgiving of his life. He drifted off into an unaccustomed early afternoon nap (no Physical Therapy because of the holiday) and dreamed an unsettling dream in which several candy-stripers walked through the IC ward and slapped turkey decals onto the life-support machinery and IV drips.

His mother, father, and sister had come over to visit for an hour in the morning, and for the first time he had sensed in Ellie an anxiousness to be gone. They had been invited over to the Callisons” for a light Thanksgiving brunch, and Lou Callison, one of the three Callison boys, was fourteen and “cute”. Her racked-up brother had become boring. They hadn’t discovered a rare and tragic form of cancer breeding in his bones. He wasn’t going to be paralysed for the rest of his life. There was no movie-of-the-week in him.

They had called him from the Callisons” around twelve-thirty and his father sounded a bit drunk—Dennis guessed he was maybe on his second bloody Mary and was maybe getting some disapproving looks from Mom. Dennis himself had just been finishing up his dietician-approved bluecarded Thanksgiving dinner—the only such dinner he had ever been able to finish in fifteen minutes—and he did a good job of sounding cheerful, not wanting to spoil their good time. Ellie came on the wire briefly, sounding giggly and rather screamy. Maybe it was talking to Ellie that had tired him out enough to need a nap.

He had fallen asleep (and had his unsettling dream) around two o’clock. The hospital was unusually quiet today, running on a skeleton staff. The usual babble of TVs and transistor radios from the other rooms was muted. The candy-striper who took his tray smiled brightly and said I she hoped he had enjoyed his “special dinner.” Dennis assured her that he had. After all, it was Thanksgiving for her, too.

And so he dreamed, and the dream broke up and became a darker sleep, and when he woke up it was nearly five o’clock and Arnie Cunningham was sitting in the hard plastic contour chair where his girl had sat only the day before.

Dennis was not at all surprised to see him there; he simply assumed that it was a new dream.

“Hi, Arnie,” he said. “How’s it hanging?”

“Hanging good,” Arnie said, “but you look like you’re still asleep, Dennis. Want some head-noogies? That’ll wake you up.”

There was a brown bag on his lap, and Dennis’s sleepy mind thought: Got his lunch after all. Maybe Repperton didn’t squash it as bad as we thought. He tried to sit up in the bed, hurt his back, and used the control panel to get into what was almost a sitting position. The motor whined. “Jesus, it’s really you!”

“Were you expecting Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster?” Arnie asked amiably.

“I was sleeping. I guess I thought I still was.” Dennis rubbed his forehead hard, as if to get rid of the steep behind it. “Happy Thanksgiving, Arnie.”

“You bet,” Arnie said. “Same to you. Did they feed you turkey with all the trimmings?”

Dennis laughed. “I got something that looked like those play-dinners that came with Ellie’s Happy-Time Cafeteria when she was about seven. Remember?”

Arnie put his cupped hands to his mouth and made ralphing noises. “I remember. What a gross-out.”

“I’m really glad you came,” Dennis said, and for a moment he was perilously close to tears. Maybe he hadn’t realized just how depressed he had been, He redoubled his determination to be home by Christmas. If he was here on Christmas Day, he’d probably commit suicide.

“Your folks didn’t come?”

“Sure they did,” Dennis said, “and they’ll be back again tonight—Mom and Dad will be, anyway—but it’s not the same. You know.”

“Yeah. Well, I brought some stuff. Told the lady downstairs I had your bathrobe.” Arnie giggled a little.

“What is that?” Dennis asked, nodding at the bag. It wasn’t just a lunchbag, he saw; it was a shopping bag.

“Aw, I raided the fridge after we et the bird,” Arnie said. “My mom and dad went around visiting their friends from the University—they do that every year on Thanksgiving afternoon. They won’t even be back until around eight.”

As he talked, he took things out of the bag. Dennis watched, amazed. Two pewter candle-holders. Two candles. Arnie slammed the candles into the holders, lit them with a matchbook advertising Darnell’s Garage, and turned off the overhead light. Then four sandwiches, clumsily wrapped in waxed paper.

“The way I recall it,” Arnie said, “you always said that scarfing up a couple of turkey sandwiches around eleven-thirty Thursday night was better than Thanksgiving dinner, anyway. Because the pressure was off.”

“Yeah,” Dennis said. “Sandwiches in front of the TV, Carson or some old movie. But, honest to God, Arnie, you didn’t have to—”

“Ali, shit, I haven’t even been around to see you in almost three weeks. Good thing for me you were sleeping when I came in or you probably would have shot me.” He tapped Dennis’s two sandwiches. “Your favourite, I think. White meat and mayo on Wonder Bread.”

Dennis got giggling at that, then laughing, then roaring. Arnie could see it hurt his back, but he couldn’t stop. Wonder Bread had been one of Arnie and Dennis’s great common secrets as children. Both of their mothers had been very serious about the subject of bread; Regina bought Diet-Thin loaves, with an occasional side-trip into the Land of Stone-Ground Rye. Dennis’s mother favoured Roman Meal and pumpernickel loaves. Arnie and Dennis ate what was given them—but both were secret Wonder Bread freaks, and more than one occasion they had pooled their money and instead of buying sweets they had gotten a loaf of Wonder and a jar of French’s Mustard. They would then slink out into Arnie’s garage (or Dennis’s tree-house, sadly demolished in a windstorm almost nine years before) and gobble mustard sandwiches and read Richie Rich comic books until the whole loaf was gone.

Arnie joined him in his laughter, and for Dennis that was the best part of Thanksgiving.

Dennis had been between room-mates for almost ten days, and so had the semi-private room to himself. Arnie closed the door and produced a six-pack of Busch beer from the brown bag.

“Wonders will never cease,” Dennis said, and had to laugh again at the unintentional pun,

“No,” Arnie said, “I don’t think they ever will.” He toasted

Dennis over the candles with a bottle of beer. “Prosit.”

“Live for ever,” Dennis responded. They drank.

After they had finished the thick turkey sandwiches, Arnie produced two plastic Tupperware pie-wedges from his apparently bottomless bag and prised off the lids. Two pieces of home-made apple pie rested within.

“No, man, I can’t,” Dennis said. “I’ll bust.”

“Eat,” Arnie commanded.

“I really can’t,” Dennis said, taking the Tupperware container and a fresh plastic fork. He finished the slice of pie in four huge bites and then belched. He upended the remainder of his second beer and belched again. “In Portugal, that’s a compliment to the cook,” he said. His head was buzzing pleasantly from the beer.

“Whatever you say,” Arnie responded with a grin. He got up, turned on the overhead fluorescent, and snuffed the candles. Outside a steady rain had begun to beat against the windows; it looked and sounded cold. And for Dennis, some of the warm spirit of friendship and real Thanksgiving seemed to go out with the candles.

“I’m gonna hate you tomorrow,” Dennis said. “I’ll probably have to sit on that john in there for an hour. And it hurts my back.”

“You remember the time Elaine got the farts?” Arnie asked, and they both laughed. “We teased her until your mother gave us holy old hell.”

“They didn’t smell, but they sure were loud,” Dennis said, smiling.

“Like gunshots,” Arnie agreed, and they both laughed a little—but it was a sad sort of laughter, if there is such a thing. A lot of water under the bridge. The thought that Ellie’s attack of the farts had happened seven years ago was somehow more unsettling than it was amusing. There was a breath of mortality in the realization that seven years could steal past with such smooth and unobtrusive ease.

Conversation lapsed a little, both of them lost in their own thoughts.

At last Dennis said, “Leigh came by yesterday. Told me, about Christine. I’m sorry, man. Bummer.”

Arnie looked up, and his expression of thoughtful melancholy was lost in a cheerful smile that Dennis didn’t really believe.

“Yeah,” he said. “It was crude. But I went way overboard about it.”

“Anyone would,” Dennis said, aware that he had become suddenly watchful, hating it but unable to help it. The friendship part was over; it had been here, warming the room and filling it, and now it had simply slipped away like the ephemeral, delicate thing it was. Now they were just dancing. Arnie’s cheerful eyes were also opaque and—he would have sworn to it—watchful.

“Sure. I gave my mother a hard time. Leigh too, I guess. It was just the shock of seeing all that work… all that work down the tubes.” He shook his head. “Bad news.”

“Are you going to be able to do anything with it?” Arnie brightened immediately—really brightened this time, Dennis felt. “Sure! I already have. You wouldn’t believe it, Dennis, if you’d seen the way it looked in that parking lot. They made them tough in those days, not like now when all the stuff that looks like metal is really just shiny plastic. That car is nothing but a damn tank. The glass was the worst part. And the tyres, of course. They slashed the tyres.”

“What about the engine?”

“Never got at it,” Arnie said promptly, and that was the first lie. They had been at it, all right. When Arnie and Leigh had gotten to Christine that afternoon, the distributor cap had been lying on the pavement. Leigh had recognized it and had told Dennis about it. What else had they done under the hood, Dennis wondered. The radiator? If someone was going to use a tyre iron to punch holes in the bodywork, might they not be apt to use the same tool to spring the radiator in a few places? What about the plugs? The voltage regulator? The carburettor?

Arnie, why are you lying to me?

“So what are you doing with it now?” Dennis asked.

“Spending money on it, what else?” Arnie said, and laughed his almost-genuine laugh. Dennis might even have accepted it as genuine if he hadn’t heard the real article once or twice over the Thanksgiving supper Arnie had brought. “New tyres, new glass. Got some bodywork to do, and then it will be as good as new.”

As good as new. But Leigh had said that they had found something that was little more than a smashed hulk, a carny three-swings-for-a-quarter derelict.

Why are you lying?

For a cold moment he found himself wondering if maybe Arnie hadn’t gone a little crazy—but no, that wasn’t the impression he gave. The feeling Dennis got from him was one of… furtiveness. Craftiness. Then, for the first time, the crazy thought came to him, the thought that maybe Arnie was only half-lying, trying to lay a groundwork of plausibility for… for what? A case of spontaneous regeneration? That was pretty crazy, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?

It was indeed, Dennis thought, unless you had happened to see a mass of cracks in a windscreen seem to shrink between one viewing and the next.

Just a trick of the light. That’s what you thought then, and you were right.

But a trick of the light didn’t explain the haphazard way Arnie had gone about rebuilding Christine, the hopscotch of old and new parts. It didn’t explain that weird feeling Dennis had gotten sitting behind the wheel of Christine in LeBay’s garage, or the sense, after the new tyre had been put on en route to Darnell’s, that he was looking at an old-car picture with a new-car picture directly underlying it, and that a hole had been cut out of the old-car picture at the spot where one of the old-car tyres had been.

And nothing explained Arnie’s lie now… or the narrow, thoughtful way he was watching Dennis to see if his lie was going to be accepted. So he smiled… a big, easy, relieved grin. “Well, that’s great,” he said.

Arnie’s narrow, evaluating expression held for a moment longer; then he smiled an aw-shucks grin and shrugged. “Luck,” he said. “When I think of the things they could have done sugar in the gas tank, molasses in the carb—they were stupid. Lucky for me.”

“Repperton and his merry crew?” Dennis asked quietly.

The suspicious look, so dark and unlike Arnie, appeared again and then sank from sight. Arnie looked grim now. Grim and morose. He seemed to speak, then sighed instead. “Yeah,” he said. “Who else?”

“But you didn’t report it.”

“My dad did.”

“That’s what Leigh said.”

“What else did she tell you?” Arnie asked sharply.

“Nothing, and I didn’t ask,” Dennis said, holding his hand out. “Your business, Arnie. Peace.”

“Sure.” He laughed a little and then passed a hand over his face. “I’m still not over it. Fuck. I don’t think I’m ever going to be over it, Dennis. Coming into that parking lot with Leigh, feeling like I was on top of the world, and seeing—”

“Won’t they just do it again if you fix her up again?” Arnie’s face went dead-cold, set. “They won’t do it again,” he said. His grey eyes were like March ice, and Dennis found himself suddenly very glad he wasn’t Buddy Repperton.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll be parking it at home, that’s what I mean,” he said, and once more his face broke into that large, cheerful, unnatural grin. “What did you think I meant?”

“Nothing,” Dennis said. The image of ice remained. Now it was a feeling of thin ice, creaking uneasily under his feet. Beneath that, black, cold water. “But I don’t know, Arnie. You seem awful sure that Buddy wants to let this go.”

“I’m hoping he’ll see it as a standoff,” Arnie said quietly. “We got him expelled from school.”

“He got himself expelled!” Dennis said hotly. “He pulled a knife—hell, it wasn’t even a knife, it was a goddam pigsticker!”

I’m just telling it the way he’ll see it,” Arnie said, then held out his hand and laughed. “Peace.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“We got him expelled—or more accurately, I did—and he and his buddies beat hell out of Christine. Evens. The end.”

“Yeah, if he sees it that way.”

“I think he will,” Arnie said. “The cops questioned him and Moochie Welch and Richie Trelawney. Scared them. And almost got Sandy Galton to confess, I guess.” Arnie’s lip curled. “Fucking crybaby.”

This was so unlike Arnie—the old Arnie—that Dennis sat up in bed without thinking and then winced at the pain in his back and lay down again quickly. “Jesus, man, you sound like you want him to stonewall it!”

“I don’t care what he or any of those shitters do,” Arnie said, and then, in a strangely offhand voice he added, “It doesn’t matter anymore anyhow.”

Dennis said, “Arnie, are you all right?”

And for a moment a look of desperate sadness passed over Arnie’s face—more than sadness. He looked harried and haunted. It was the face, Dennis thought later (it is so easy to see these things later; too much later) of someone so bewildered and entangled and weary of struggling that he hardly knows anymore what it is he is doing.

Then that expression, like that other look of dark suspicion, was gone.

“Sure,” he said. “I’m great. Except that you’re not the only one with a hurt back. You remember when I strained it at Philly Plains?”

Dennis nodded.

“Check this out.” He stood up and pulled his shirt out of his pants. Something seemed to dance in his eyes. Something flipping and turning at a black depth.

He lifted his shirt. It wasn’t old-fashioned like LeBay’s; it was cleaner, too—a neat, seemingly unbroken band of Lycra about twelve inches across. But, Dennis thought, a brace was a brace. It was too close to LeBay for comfort.

“I put another hurt on it getting Christine back to Will’s,” Arnie said. “I don’t even remember how I did it, that’s how upset I was. Hooking her up to the wrecker, I guess, but I don’t know for sure. At first it wasn’t too bad, then it got worse. Dr Mascia prescribed—Dennis, are you okay?”

With what felt like a fantastic effort, Dennis kept his voice even. He moved his features around into an expression which felt at least faintly like pleasant interest… and still there was that something dancing in Arnie’s eyes, dancing and dancing.

“You’ll shake it off,” Dennis said.

“Sure, I imagine,” Arnie said, tucking his shirt back in around the back brace. “I’m just supposed to watch what I lift so I don’t do it again.”

He smiled at Dennis.

“If there was stilt a draft, it would keep me out of the Army,” he said.

Once again Dennis restrained himself from any movement that could be interpreted as surprise, but he put his arms under the bed’s top sheet. At the sight of that back brace, so like LeBay’s, they had broken out in gooseflesh.

Arnie’s eyes—like black water under thin grey March ice. Black water and glee dancing far down within them like the twisting, decomposing body of a drowned man. “Listen,” Arnie said briskly. “I gotta move. Hope you didn’t think I could hang around a lousy place like this all night.”

“That’s you, always in demand,” Dennis said. “Seriously, man, thanks. You cheered up a grim day.”

For one strange instant, he thought Arnie was going to weep. That dancing thing down deep in his eyes was gone and his friend was there—really there. Then Arnie smiled sincerely. “Just remember one thing, Dennis: nobody misses you. Nobody at all.”

“Eat me raw through a Flavour Straw,” Dennis said solemnly.

Arnie gave him the finger.

The formalities were now complete; Arnie could leave. He gathered up his brown shopping bag, considerably deflated, candle-holders and empty beer bottles clinking inside.

Dennis had a sudden inspiration. He rapped his knuckles on his leg cast. “Sign this, Arnie, would you?”

“I already did, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, but it wore off. Sign it again?”

Arnie shrugged. “If you’ve got a pen.”

Dennis gave him one from the drawer of the night-table. Grinning, Arnie bent over the cast, which was hoisted to an angle over the bed with a series of weights and pulleys, found white space in the intaglio of names and mottoes, and scribbled:

He patted the cast when he was done and handed the pen back to Dennis. “Okay?”

“Yeah,” Dennis said. “Thanks. Stay loose, Arnie.”

“You know it. Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Same to you.”

Arnie left. Later on, Dennis’s mother and father came in; Ellie, apparently exhausted by the day’s hilarity, had gone home to bed, On their way home, the Guilders commented to each other on how withdrawn Dennis had seemed.

“He was in a blue study, all right,” Guilder said. “Holidays in the hospital aren’t any fun.”

As for Dennis himself, he spent a long and thoughtful time that evening examining two signatures. Arnie had indeed signed his cast, but at a time when both of Dennis’s legs had been in full-leg casts. That first time, he had signed the cast on the right leg, which had been up in the air when Arnie came in. Tonight he had signed the left.

Dennis buzzed for a nurse and used all his charm persuading her to lower his left leg so he could compare the two signatures, side by side. The cast on his right leg had been cut down, and would come off altogether in a week or ten days. Arnie’s signature had not rubbed off—that had been one of Dennis’s lies—but it had very nearly been cut off.

Arnie had not written a message on the right leg, only his signature. With some effort (and some pain), Dennis and the nurse were able to manoeuvre his legs close enough together so he could study the two signatures side by side. In a voice so dry and cracked he was hardly able to recognize it as his own, he asked the nurse, “Do they look the same to you?”

“No,” the nurse said. “I’ve heard of forging cheques, but never casts. Is it a joke?”

“Sure,” Dennis said, feeling an icy coldness rise from his stomach to his chest. “It’s a joke.” He looked at the signatures; he looked at them side by side and felt that rising coldness steal all through him, lowering his body temperature, making the hairs on the back of his neck stir and stiffen:

They were nothing alike.

Late that Thanksgiving night, a cold wind rose, first gusting, then blowing steadily. The clear eye of the moon stared down from a black sky. The last brown and withered leaves of autumn were ripped from the trees and then harried through the gutters. They made a sound like rolling bones.

Winter had come to Libertyville.

30 MOOCHIE WELCH

The Thursday after thanksgiving was the last day of November, the night that Jackson Browne played the Pittsburgh Civic Centre to a sellout crowd. Moochie Welch went up with Richie Trelawney and Nicky Biltingham but got separated from them even before the show began. He was spare-changing, and whether it was because the impending Browne concert had created some extremely mellow vibes or because he was becoming something of an endearing fixture (Moochie, a romantic, liked to believe the latter), he had had a remarkably good night. He had collected nearly thirty dollars’ worth of “spare change”. It was distributed among all his pockets; Moochie jingled like a piggy bank. Thumbing home had been remarkably easy too, with all the traffic leaving the Civic Centre. The concert ended at eleven-forty, and he was back in Libertyville shortly after one-fifteen.

His last ride was with a young guy who was headed back to Prestonville on Route 63. The guy dropped him at the 376 ramp on JFK Drive. Moochie decided to walk up to Vandenberg’s Happy Gas and see Buddy. Buddy had a car, which meant that Moochie, who lived far out on Kingsfield Pike, wouldn’t have to walk home. It was hard work, hitching rides, once you got out in the boonies—and the Kingsfield Pike was Boondocks City. It meant he wouldn’t be home until well past dawn, but in cold weather a sure ride was not to be sneezed at. And Buddy might have a bottle.

He had walked a quarter of a mile from the 376 exit ramp in the deep single-number cold, his cleated heels clicking on the deserted sidewalk, his shadow waxing and waning under the eerie orange streetlamps, and had still perhaps a mile to go when he saw the car parked at the curb up ahead. Exhaust curled out of its twin pipes and hung in the perfectly still air, clouding it, before drifting lazily away in stacked layers. The grille, bright chrome highlighted with pricks of orange light, looked at him like a grinning idiot mouth. Moochie recognized the car. It was a two-tone Plymouth. In the light of the maximum-illumination streetlamps the two tones seemed to be ivory and dried blood. It was Christine.

Moochie stopped, and a stupid sort of wonder flooded through him—it was not fear, at least not at that moment. It couldn’t be Christine, that was impossible—they had punched a dozen holes in the radiator of Cuntface’s car, they had dumped a nearly full bottle of Texas Driver into the carb, and Buddy had produced a five-pound sack of Domino sugar, which he had tunnelled into the gas tank through Moochie’s cupped hands. And all of that was just for starters. Buddy had demonstrated a kind of furious invention when it came to destroying Cuntface’s car; it had left Moochie feeling both delighted and uneasy. All in all, that car should not have moved under its own power for six months, if ever. So this could not be Christine. It was some other ’58 Fury.

Except it was Christine. He knew it.

Moochie stood there on the deserted early-morning sidewalk, his numb ears poking out from beneath his long hair, his breath pluming frostily on the air.

The car sat at the curb facing him, engine growling softly. It was impossible to tell who, if anyone, was behind the wheel; it was parked directly beneath one of the streetlights, and the orange globe burned across the glass of the unmarred windshield like a waterproof jack-o’-lantern seen deep down in dark water.

Moochie began to be afraid.

He slicked his tongue over dry lips and looked around. To his left was JFK Drive, six lanes wide and looking like a dry riverbed at this empty hour of the morning. To his right was a photography shop, orange letters outlined in red spelling KODAK across its window.

He looked back at the car. It just sat there, idling.

He opened his mouth to speak and produced no sound. He tried again and got a croak. “Hey. Cunningham.”

The car sat, seeming to brood. Exhaust curled up. The engine rumbled, idling fast on high-octane gas.

“That you, Cunningham?”

He took one more step. A cleat scraped on cement. His heart was thudding in his neck. He looked around at the street again; surely another car would come, JFK Drive couldn’t be totally deserted even at one-twenty-five in the morning, could it? But there were no cars, only the flat orange glare of the streetlights.

Moochie cleared his throat.

“You ain’t mad, are you?”

Christine’s duals suddenly came on, pinning him in harsh white light. The Fury ripped toward him, peeling out, the tyres screaming black slashes of rubber onto the pavement. It came with such sudden power that the rear end seemed to squat, like the haunches of a dog preparing to spring—a dog or a she-wolf. The onside wheels jumped up on the pavement and it ran at Moochie that way, offside wheels down, onside wheels up over the curb, canted at an angle. The undercarriage scraped and shrieked and shot off a swirling flicker of sparks.

Moochie screamed and tried to sidestep. The edge of Christine’s bumper barely flicked his left calf and took a chunk of meat. Warm wetness coursed down his leg and puddled in his shoe. The warmth of his own blood made him realize in a confused way just how cold the night was.

He thudded hip-first into the doorway of the photo shop, barely missing the plate-glass window. A foot to the left and he would have crashed right through, landing in a litter of Nikons and Polaroid One-Steps.

He could hear the car’s engine, suddenly revving up. That horrible, unearthly shrieking of the undercarriage on the cement again. Moochie turned around, panting harshly. Christine was reversing back up the gutter, and as it passed him, he saw. He saw.

There was no one behind the wheel.

Panic began to pound in his head. Moochie took to his heels. He ran out into JFK Drive, sprinting for the far side. There was an alley over there between a market and a dry-cleaning place. Too narrow for the car. If he could get in there—

Change jingled madly in his pants pockets and in the five or six pockets of his Army-surplus duffel coat. Quarters, nickels, dimes. A jingling silver carillon. He pumped his knees almost to his chin. His cleated engineer boots drummed the pavement. His shadow chased him.

The car somewhere behind him revved again, fell off, revved again, fell off, and then the motor began to shriek. The tyres wailed, and Christine shot at Moochie Welch’s back, crossing the lanes of JFK Drive at right angles. Moochie screamed and could not hear himself scream because the car was still peeling rubber, the car was still shrieking like an insanely angry, murderous woman, and that shriek filled the world.

His shadow was no longer chasing him. It was leading him and getting longer. In the window of the dry-cleaning shop he saw great yellow eyes blossom.

It wasn’t even close.

At the very last moment Moochie tried to jig left, but Christine jigged with him as if she had read his final desperate thought. The Plymouth hit him squarely, still accelerating, breaking Moochie Welch’s back and knocking him spang out of his engineer’s boots. He was thrown forty feet into the brick siding of the little market, again narrowly missing a plunge through a plate-glass window.

The force of his strike was hard enough to cause him to rebound into the street again, leaving a splash of blood on the brick like an inkblot. A picture of it would appear the next day on the front page of the Libertyville Journal-Standard.

Christine reversed, screeched to a skidding, sliding stop, and roared forward again. Moochie lay near the curbing, trying to get up. He couldn’t get up. Nothing seemed to work. All the signals were scrambled.

Bright white light washed over him.

“No,” he whispered through a mouthful of broken teeth. “N—”

The car roared forward and over him. Change flew everywhere. Mooche was pulled and rolled first one way and then the other as Christine reversed into the street again. She stood there, engine revving and falling off to a rich idle, then revving again. She stood there as if thinking.

Then she came at him again. She hit him, jumped the curb, skidded around, and then reversed again, thumping back down.

She screamed forward.

And back.

And forward.

Her headlights glared. Her exhaust pipes jetted hot blue smoke.

The thing in the street no longer looked like a human being; it looked like a scattered bundle of rags.

The car reversed a final time, skidded around in a half-circle, and accelerated, roaring over the bleeding bundle in the street again and going down the Drive, the blast of its engine, still winding up to full rev, rocketing off the walls of the sleeping buildings—but not entirely sleeping now; lights were beginning to flick on, people who lived over their stores were going to their windows to see what all the racket had been about, and if there had been an accident.

One of Christine’s headlights had been shattered. Another flickered unsteadily off and on, bleared with a thin wash of Moochie’s blood. The grille had been bent inward, and the dents in it approximated the shape and size of Moochie’s torso with all the gruesome perfection of a deathmask. Blood was splashed across the hood in fans that spread out as windspeed increased. The exhaust had taken on a heavy, blatting sound; one of Christine’s two silencers had been destroyed.

Inside, on the instrument panel, the milometer continued to run backward, as if Christine were somehow slipping back into time, leaving not only the scene of the hit-and-run behind but the actual fact of the hit-and-run.

The silencer was the first thing.

Suddenly that heavy, blatting sound diminished and smoothed out.

The fans of blood on the hood began to run toward the front of the car again in spite of the wind—as if a movie film had been reversed.

The flickering headlight suddenly shone steadily, and a tenth of a mile later the deadlight became a headlight again. With an unimportant tinkling sound—no more than the sound of a small boy’s boot breaking the thin scum of ice on a mudpuddle—the glass reassembled itself from nowhere.

There was a hollow punk! punk! punk! sound from the front end, the sound of denting metal, the sound you sometimes get when you squeeze a beer-can. But instead of denting, Christine’s grille was popping back out—a bodyshop veteran with fifty years’ experience in putting fender-benders right could not have done it more neatly.

Christine turned onto Hampton Street even before the first of those awakened by the screaming of her tyres had reached Moochie’s remains. The blood was gone. It had reached the front of the hood and disappeared. The scratches were gone. As she rolled quietly toward the garage door with its HONK FOR ENTRY sign, there was one final punk! as the last dimple—this one in the left front bumper, the spot where Christine had struck Moochie’s calf—popped back out.

Christine looked like new.

The car stopped in front of the large garage door in the middle of the darkened, silent building. There was a small plastic box clipped to the driver’s side sun-visor. This was a little doodad Will Darnell had given Arnie when Arnie began to run cigarettes and booze over into New York State for him—it was, perhaps, Darnell’s version of a gold key to the crapper.

In the still air the door-opener hummed briefly, and the garage door rattled obediently up. Another circuit was made by the rising door, and a few interior rights came on, burning weakly.

The headlight knob on the dashboard suddenly went in, and Christine’s duals went out. She rolled inside and whispered across the oil-stained concrete to stall twenty. Behind her, the overhead door, which had been set on a thirty-second timer, rolled back down. The light circuit was broken, and the garage was dark again.

In Christine’s ignition switch, the keys dangling down suddenly turned to the left. The engine died. The leather patch with the initials R.D.L. branded into it swung back and forth in decreasing arcs and was finally still.

Christine sat in the dark, and the only sound in Darnell’s Do-It-Yourself Garage was the slow tick of her cooling engine.

31 THE DAY AFTER

Arnie Cunningham did not go to school the next day. He said he thought he might be coming down with the flu. But that evening he told his parents that he felt enough improved to go down to Darnell’s and do some work on Christine.

Regina protested—although she did not come right out and say so, she thought Arnie looked like death warmed over. His face was now entirely free of acne and blemishes, but there was a trade-off: it was much too pale, and there were dark circles under his eyes, as if he hadn’t been sleeping. In addition, he was still limping. She wondered uneasily if her son could be using some sort of drug, if perhaps he had hurt his back worse than he had let on and had started taking pills so he could go on working on the goddamned car. Then she dismissed the thought. Obsessed as he might be with the car, Arnie could not be that stupid.

“I’m really fine, Mom,” he said.

“You don’t look fine. And you hardly touched your supper.”

“I’ll get some chow later on.”

“How’s your back? You’re not lifting a lot of heavy stuff down there, are you?”

“No, Mom.” This was a lie. And his back had hurt terribly all day long. This was the worst it had been since the original injury at Philly Plains (oh, was that where it started? His mind whispered, oh really? Are you sure?). He had taken the brace off for a while, and his back had throbbed fit to kill him. He had put it on again after only fifteen minutes, cinching it tighter than ever. Now his back really was a little better. And he knew why. He was going to her. That was why.

Regina looked at him, worried and at a loss. For the first time in her life she simply did not know how to proceed. Arnie was beyond her control now. Knowing it brought on a horrible feeling of despair that sometimes crept up on her and filled her brain with an awful, empty, rotten coldness. At these times a depression so total she could barely credit it would steal through her, making her wonder exactly what it was she had lived her life for—so her son could fall in love with a girl and a car all in the same terrible fall? Was that it? So she could see exactly how hateful to him she had become when she looked in his grey eyes? Was that it? And it really didn’t have anything to do with the girl at all, did it? No. In her mind, it always came back to the car. Her rest had become broken and uneasy, and for the first time since her miscarriage nearly twenty years before, she had found herself considering making an appointment with Dr Mascia to see if he would give her some pill for the stress and the depression and the attendant insomnia. She thought about Arnie on her long sleepless nights, and about mistakes that could never be rectified; she thought about how time had a way of swinging the balance of power on its axis, and how old age had a way of sometimes looking through a dressing-table mirror like the hand of a corpse poking through eroded earth.

“Will you be back early?” she asked, knowing this was the last breastwork of the truly powerless parent, hating it, unable—now—to change it.

“Sure,” he said, but she didn’t much trust the way he said it.

“Arnie, I wish you’d stay home. You really don’t look good at all.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Got to be. I have to run some auto parts over to Jamesburg for Will tomorrow.”

“Not if you’re sick,” she said. “That’s nearly a hundred and fifty miles.”

“Don’t worry.” He kissed her cheek—the passionless kiss-on-the-cheek-of cocktail-party acquaintances.

He was opening the kitchen door to go out when Regina asked, “Did you know the boy who was run down last night on Kennedy Drive?”

He turned back to look at her, his face expressionless. “What?”

“The paper said he went to Libertyville.”

“Oh, the hit-and-run that’s what you’re talking about.”

“Yes.”

“I had a class with him when I was a freshman,” Arnie said. “I think. No, I really didn’t know him, Mom.”

“Oh.” She nodded, pleased. “That’s good. The paper said there were residues of drugs in his system. You’d never take drugs, would you, Arnie?”

Arnie smiled gently at her pallid, watchful face. “No, Mom,” he said.

“And if your back started to hurt you—I mean, if it really started to hurt you—you’d go see Dr Mascia about it, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t buy anything from a… a drug-pusher, would you?”

“No, Mom,” he repeated, and went out.

There had been more snow. Another thaw had melted most of it, but this time it had not disappeared completely; it had only withdrawn into the shadows, where it formed a white rime under hedges, the bases of trees, the overhang of the garage. But in spite of the snow around the edges—or maybe because of it—their lawn looked oddly green as Arnie stepped out into the twilight, and his father looked like a strange refugee from summer as he raked the last of the autumn leaves.

Arnie raised his hand briefly to his father and made as if to go past without speaking. Michael called him over. Arnie went reluctantly. He didn’t want to be late for his bus.

His father had also aged in the storms that had blown up over Christine, although other things had undoubtedly played a part. He had made a bid for the chairmanship of the History Department at Horlicks late in the summer and had been rebuffed quite soundly. And during his annual October checkup, the doctor had pointed out an incipient phlebitis problem—phlebitis, which had nearly killed Nixon; phlebitis, an old folks’ problem. As that late fall moved toward another grey western-Pennsylvania winter, Michael Cunningham looked gloomier than ever.

“Hi, Dad. Listen, I’ve got to hurry if I’m going to catch—”

Michael looked up from the little pile of frozen brown leaves he had managed to get together; the sunset caught the planes of his face and appeared to make them bleed. Arnie stepped back involuntarily, a little shocked. His father’s face was haggard.

“Arnold,” he said, “where were you last night?”

“What—?” Arnie gaped, then closed his mouth slowly. “Why, here. Here, Dad. You know that.”

“All night?”

“Of course. I went to bed at ten o’clock. I was bushed. Why?”

“Because I had a call from the police today,” Michael said. “About that boy who was run over on JFK Drive last night.”

“Moochie Welch,” Arnie said. He looked at his father with calm eyes that were deeply circled and socketed for all their calmness. If the son had been shocked by the father’s appearance, the father was also dully shocked by his son’s to Michael, the boy’s eyesockets looked nearly like a skull’s vacant orbs in the failing light.

“The last name was Welch, yes.”

“They would be in touch. I suppose. Mom doesn’t know—that he might have been one of the guys that trashed Christine?”

“Not from me.”

“I didn’t tell her either. I’d be glad if she didn’t find that out,” Arnie said.

“She may find it out eventually,” Michael said. “In fact, she almost certainly will. She’s an extremely intelligent woman, in case you’ve never noticed. But she won’t find it out from me.”

Arnie nodded, then smiled humourlessly.

“Where were you last night?”

“Your trust is touching, Dad.”

Michael flushed, but his eyes didn’t drop. “Maybe if you’d been standing outside yourself these last couple of months,” he said, “you’d understand why I asked.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You know damn well. It hardly even bears discussing anymore. We just go around and around the same old mulberry bush. Your entire life is jittering apart and you stand there and ask me what I’m talking about.”

Arnie laughed. It was a hard, contemptuous sound. Michael seemed to shrivel a little before it. “Mom asked me if I was on drugs. Maybe you want to check that one out, too.” Arnie made as if to push up the sleeves of his warmup jacket. “Want to check for needle-tracks?”

“I don’t need to ask if you’re on drugs,” Michael said. “You’re only on one I know of, and that’s enough. It’s that goddam car.”

Arnie turned as if to go, and Michael pulled him back.

“Get your hand off my arm.”

Michael dropped his hand. “I wanted you to be aware,” he said. “I no more think you’d kill someone than I think you could walk across the Symonds’ swimming pool. But the police are going to question you, Arnie, and people can look surprised when the police turn up suddenly. To them, surprise can look like guilt.”

“All of this because some drunk ran over that shitter Welch?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Michael said. “I got that much out of this fellow Junkins who called me up on the phone. Whoever killed the Welch boy ran him down and then backed over him and ran over him again and backed up again and—”

“Stop it,” Arnie said. He suddenly looked sick and frightened, and Michael had much the same feeling Dennis had had on Thanksgiving evening: that in this tired unhappiness the real Arnie was suddenly close to the surface, perhaps reachable.

“It was… incredibly brutal,” Michael said. “That’s what Junkins said. You see, it doesn’t look like an accident at all. It looks like murder.”

“Murder,” Arnie said, dazed. “No, I never—”

“What?” Michael asked sharply. He grabbed Arnie’s jacket again. “What did you say?”

Arnie looked at his father. His face was masklike again. “I never thought it could be that,” he said. “That’s all I was going to say.”

“I just wanted you to know,” he said. “They’ll be looking for someone with a motive, no matter how thin. They know what happened to your car, and that the Welch boy might have been involved, or that you might think he was involved. Junkins may be around to talk to you.”

“I don’t have anything to hide.”

“No, of course not,” Michael said. “You’ll miss your bus.”

“Yeah,” Arnie said. “Gotta go.” But he stayed a moment longer, looking at his father.

Michael suddenly found himself thinking of Arnie’s ninth birthday. He and his son had gone to the little zoo in Philly Plains, had eaten lunch out, and had finished the day by playing eighteen holes at the indoor miniature golf course on outer Basin Drive. That place had burned down in 1975. Regina had not been able to come, she had been flat on her back with bronchitis. The two of them had had a fine time. For Michael, that had been his son’s best birthday, the one that symbolized for him above all others his son’s sweet and uneventful American boyhood. They had gone to the zoo and come back and nothing much had happened except that they had had a great time—Michael and his son, who had been and who still was so dear to him.

He wet his lips and said, “Sell her, Arnie, why don’t you? When she’s completely restored, sell her away. You could get a lot of money. A couple—three thousand, maybe.”

Again that frightened, tired look seemed to sweep over Arnie’s face, but Michael couldn’t tell for sure. The sunset had faded to a bitter orange line on the western horizon, and the little yard was dark. Then the look—if it had been there at all—went away.

“No, I couldn’t do that, Dad,” Arnie said gently, as if speaking to a child. “I couldn’t do that now. I’ve put too much into her. Way too much.”

And then he was gone, cutting across the yard to the sidewalk, joining the other shadows, and there was only the sound of his footfalls coming back, soon lost.

Put too much into her? Have you? Exactly what, Arnie? What have you put into her?

Michael looked down at the leaves, then around at his yard. Beneath the hedge and under the overhang of the garage, cold snow glimmered in the coming dark, livid and stubbornly waiting for reinforcements. Waiting for winter.

32 REGINA AND MICHAEL

Regina was tired—she tired more easily these days, it seemed—and they went to bed together around nine, long before Arnie came in. They made love that was dutiful and joyless (lately they made love a lot, it was almost always dutiful and joyless, and Michael had begun having the unpleasant feeling that his wife was using his penis as a sleeping pill), and as they lay in their twin beds after, Michael asked casually: “How did you sleep last night?”

“Quite well,” Regina said candidly, and Michael knew she was lying. Good.

“I came up around eleven and Arnie seemed restless,” Michael said, still keeping his voice casual. He was deeply uneasy now—there had been something in Arnie’s face tonight, something he hadn’t been able to read because of the damned shadows. It was probably nothing, nothing at all, but it glowed in his mind like a baleful neon sign that simply would not shut off. Had his son looked guilty and scared? Or had it just been the light? Unless he could resolve that, sleep would be a long time coming tonight and it might not come at all.

“I got up around one,” Regina said, and then hurried to add, “Just to use the bathroom. I checked in on him.” She laughed a little wistfully. “Old habits die hard, don’t they?”

“Yes,” Michael said. “I guess they do.”

“He was sleeping deeply then. I wish I could get him to wear pyjamas in cold weather.”

“He was in his skivvies?”

“Yes.”

He settled back, immeasurably relieved and more than a little ashamed of himself as well. But it was better to know… for sure. It was all very well for him to tell Arnie that he knew the boy could no more commit a murder than he could walk on water. But the mind, that perverse monkey the mind can conceive of anything and seems to take a perverse delight in doing so. Just maybe, Michael thought, lacing his hands behind his head and looking up at the dark ceiling, just maybe that’s the peculiar damnation of the living. In the mind a wife can rut, laughing, with a best friend, a best friend can cast plots against you and plan backstabbings, a son can commit murder by auto.

Better to be ashamed and put the monkey to sleep.

Arnie had been here at one o’clock. It was unlikely Regina was mistaken about the time because of the digital clock-radio on their bureau—it told the time in numbers that were big and blue and unmistakable. His son had been here at one o’clock, and the Welch boy had been run down three miles away twenty-five minutes later. Impossible to believe that Arnie could have dressed, gone out (without Regina, who had surely been lying wakeful, hearing him), gone down to Darnell’s, gotten Christine, and driven out to where Moochie Welch had been killed. Physically impossible.

Not that he had ever believed it to begin with.

The mind-monkey was satisfied. Michael rolled over on his right side, slept, and dreamed that he and his nine-year old son were playing miniature golf on an endless series of small Astro-Turfed greens where windmills turned and tiny water-hazards lay in wait… and he dreamed that they were alone, all alone in the world, because his son’s mother had died in childbirth—very sad; people still remarked on how inconsolable Michael had been—but when they went home, he and his son, the house would be theirs alone, they would eat spaghetti right from the pot like a couple of bachelor slobs, and when the dishes were washed they would sit at a kitchen table hidden beneath spread newspapers and build model cars with harmless plastic engines.

In his sleep Michael Cunningham smiled. Beside him, in the other bed, Regina did not. She lay awake and waited for the sound of the door that would tell her that her son had come in from the world outside.

When she heard the door open and close… when she heard his step on the stairs… then she would be able to sleep.

Maybe.

33 JUNKINS

Junkins turned up at Darnell’s around eight-forty-five that evening. Arnie had just finished with Christine for the night. He had replaced the radio aerial that Repperton’s gang had snapped off with a new one, and for the last fifteen minutes or so he had been sitting behind the wheel, listening to WDIL’s Friday Night Cavalcade of Gold.

He had meant to do no more than turn the radio on and dial across once, making sure that he had hooked up the aerial plug properly and that there was no static. But he had run onto WDIL’s strong signal and had sat there, looking straight through the windscreen, his grey eyes musing and far away, as Bobby Fuller sang “I Fought the Law”, as Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers sang “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”, as Eddie Cochran sang “C’mon, Everybody”, and Buddy Holly sang “Rave On”. There were no commercials on WDIL Friday nights, and no deejays. Just the sounds. Gone from the charts but not from our hearts. Every now and then a soothing female voice would break in and tell him what he already knew—that he was listening to WDIL Pittsburgh, the sound of Blue Suede Radio.

Arnie sat dreaming behind the wheel, the red dash lights glowing, tapping his fingers lightly. The aerial was fine. Yes. He had done a good job. It was like Will said; he had a light touch, Look at Christine; Christine proved it. She had been a hunk of junk sitting on LeBay’s lawn and he had brought her back; then she had been a hunk of junk sitting in the long-term lot out at the airport and he had brought her back again. He had…

Rave on… rave on and tell me… Tell me… not to be lonely…

He had what?

Replaced the aerial, yes. And he had popped so — me of the dents, he could remember that. But he hadn’t ordered any glass (although it was all replaced), he hadn’t ordered any new seat covers (but they were all replaced, too), and he had only looked closely under the hood once before slamming it back down in horror at the damage they had done to Christine’s mill.

But now the radiator was whole, the engine block clean and glowing, the pistons moving free and clear. And it purred like a cat.

But there had been dreams.

He had dreamed of LeBay behind the wheel of Christine, LeBay dressed in an Army uniform that was spotted and splotched with blue-grey patches of graveyard mould, LeBay’s flesh had sloughed and run. White, gleaming bone poked through in places. The sockets where LeBay’s eyes had once been were empty and dark (but something was squirming in there, ah, yes, something). And then Christine’s headlights had come on and someone had been pinned there, pinned like a bug on a white square of cardboard. Someone familiar.

Moochie Welch?

Maybe. But as Christine suddenly rocketed forward, tyres screaming, it had seemed to Arnie that the terrified face out there on the street ran like tallow, changing even as the Plymouth bore down on it: now it was Repperton’s face, now Sandy Galton’s, now it was Will Darnell’s heavy moon face.

Whoever was out there had jumped aside, but LeBay had thrown Christine into reverse, working the gear lever with black rotting fingers—a wedding ring hung on one, as loose as a hoop thrown over the branch of a dead tree—and then he threw it back into drive as the figure raced for the far side of the street. And as Christine bore down again, the head had turned, throwing a terrified glance backward, and Arnie had seen the face of his mother… the face of Dennis Guilder… Leigh’s face, all eyes under a floating cloud of dark-blond hair… and finally his own face, the twisted mouth forming the words No! No! No!

Overriding everything, even the heavy thunder of the exhaust (something underneath had been damaged for sure), was LeBay’s rotting, triumphant voice, coming from a decayed larynx, passing lips that were already shrivelled away from the teeth and tattooed with a delicate spidering of dark green mould, LeBay’s triumphant, shrieking voice:

Here you go, you shitter! See how you like it!

There had been the heavy, mortal thud of Christine’s bumper striking flesh, the gleam of a pair of spectacles rising in the night air, turning over and over, and then Arnie had awakened in his room, curled into a trembling ball and clutching his pillow. It had been quarter of two in the morning, and his first feeling had been a great and terrible relief, relief that he was still alive. He was alive, LeBay was dead, and Christine was safe. The only three things in the world that mattered.

Oh but Arnie, how did you hurt your back?

Some voice inside, sly and insinuating—asking a question he was afraid to answer.

I hurt it at Philly Plains, he had told everyone. One of the junkers started to slip back down the ramp of Will’s flatbed and I pushed it back up—didn’t think about it; I just did it. Strained something really bad. So he had said. And one of the junkers had started to slip, and he had pushed it back up, but that hadn’t been how he hurt his back, had it? No.

That night after he and Leigh had found Christine smashed to hell in the parking lot, sitting on four slashed tyres… that night at Darnell’s, after everyone was gone… he had tuned the radio in Will’s office to the oldies on WDIL. Will trusted him now, why not? He was running cigarettes across the state line into New York, he was running fireworks all the way over to Burlington, and twice he had run something wrapped in flat brown-paper packages into Wheeling, where a young guy in an old Dodge Challenger traded him another, slightly larger, brown-paper package, for it. Arnie thought maybe he was trading cocaine for money, but he didn’t want to know for sure.

He drove a boat on these trips, Will’s private car, a 1966 Imperial as black as midnight in Persia. It was whisper-quiet, and the boot had a false bottom. If you kept to the speed limit, it was no problem. Why should it be? The important thing was that he now had the keys to the garage. He could come in after everyone else was gone. Like he had that night. And he had turned on WDIL and he had… he had…

Hurt his back somehow.

What had he been doing to hurt his back?

A strange phrase came to him in answer, floating up from his subconscious: It’s just a funny little glitch.

Did he really want to know? He didn’t. In fact, there were times when he didn’t want the car at all. There were times when he felt he would be better off just… well, junking it. Not that he ever would, or could. It was just that, sometimes (in the sweaty, shaking aftermath of that dream last night, for instance), he felt that if he got rid of it, he would be… happier.

The radio suddenly spat an almost feline burst of static.

“Don’t worry,” Arnie whispered. He ran his hand slowly over the dashboard, loving the feel of it. Yes, the car frightened him sometimes. And he supposed his father was right; it had changed his life to some degree. But he could no more junk it than he could commit suicide.

The static cleared. The Marvelettes were singing “Please Mr Postman”.

And then a voice said in his car, “Arnold Cunningham?” He jumped and snapped off the radio. He turned around. A small, dapper little man was leaning in Christine’s window. His eyes were a dark brown, and his colour was high—from the cold outside, Arnie guessed.

“Yes?”

“Rudolph Junkins. State Police, Detective Division.” Junkins stuck his hand in through the open window.

Arnie looked at it for a moment. So his father had been right.

He grinned his most charming grin, took the hand, shook it firmly, and said, “Don’t shoot, copper, I’ll throw out my guns.”

Junkins returned Arnie’s grin, but Arnie noticed that the grin did no more than touch his eyes, which were exploring the car in a quick, thorough fashion that Arnie didn’t like. Not at all.

“Whoo! I got the feeling from the local police that the guys who worked over your rolling iron had really tattooed it. It sure doesn’t look like it.”

Arnie shrugged and got out of the car. Friday nights were slow at the garage; Will himself rarely came in, and he wasn’t in tonight. Across the way, in stall ten, a fellow named Gabbs was putting a new silencer on his old Valiant, and down at the far end of the garage there was the periodic burr on an air wrench as some fellow put on his snow tyres. Otherwise, he and Junkins had the place to themselves.

“It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it looked,” Arnie said. He thought that this smiling, dapper little man might be extremely clever. As if it was a natural outgrowth of the thought, he rested his hand easily on Christine’s roof and immediately felt better. He could cope with this man, clever or not. After all, what was there to worry about? “There was no structural damage.”

“Oh? I understood they punched holes in the body with some sharp instrument,” Junkins said, looking closely at Christine’s flank. “I’ll be damned if I can see the fill. You must be a bodywork genius, Arnie. The way my wife drives, maybe I ought to put you on retainer,” He smiled disarmingly, but his eyes went on running back and forth over the car. They would dart momentarily to Arnie’s face and then go back to the car again. Arnie liked it less and less.

“I’m good but not God,” Arnie said. “You can see the bodywork if you really look for it.” He pointed at a minute ripple in Christine’s back deck. “And there.” He pointed at another. “I was lucky enough to find some original Plymouth body parts up in Ruggles, I replaced the entire back door on this side. You see the way the paint doesn’t quite match?” He knocked his knuckles on the door.

“Nope,” Junkins said. “I might be able to tell with a microscope, Arnie, but it looks like a perfect match to me.”

He also knocked his knuckles on the door. Arnie frowned.

“Hell of a job,” Junkins said. He walked slowly around to the front of the car. “Hell of a job, Arnie. You’re to be congratulated.”

“Thanks.” He watched as Junkins, in the guise of the sincere admirer, used his sharp brown eyes to look for suspicious dents, flaked paint, maybe a spot of blood or a snarl of matted hair. Looking for signs of Moochie Welch, Arnie was suddenly sure that was just what the shitter was doing. “What exactly can I do for you, Detective Junkins?”

Junkins laughed. “Man, that’s formal! I can’t take that! Make it Rudy, okay?”

“Sure,” Arnie said, smiling. “What can I do for you, Rudy?”

“You know, it’s funny,” Junkins said, squatting to look at the driver’s side headlights. He tapped one of them reflectively with his knuckles and then, with seeming absent-mindedness, he ran his forefinger along the headlight’s semicircular metal hood. His overcoat pooled on the oilstained cement floor for a moment; then he stood up. “We get reports on anything of this nature—the trashin of your car, I mean—”

“Oh, hey, they didn’t really trash it,” Arnie said. He was beginning to feel as if he was on a tightrope, and he touched Christine again. Her solidity, her reality, once more seemed to comfort him. “They tried, you know, but they didn’t do a very good job.”

“Okay. I guess I’m not up on the current terminology.” Junkins laughed. “Anyway, when it came to my attention, what do you think I said? “Where’s the photographs?” That’s what I said. I thought it was an oversight, you know. So I called the Libertyville PD and they said there were no photographs.”

“No,” Arnie said. “A kid my age can’t get anything but liability insurance, you know that. Even the liability comes with a seven-hundred-dollar deductible. If I had damage insurance, I would have taken plenty of pictures. But since I didn’t, why would I? I sure wouldn’t want them for my scrapbook.”

“No, I guess not,” Junkins said, and walked idly around to the rear of the car, eyes searching for broken glass, for scrapes, for guilt. “But you know what else I thought was funny? You didn’t even report the crime!” He raised his dark questioning eyes to Arnie’s, looked at him closely and then smiled a phony, bewildered little smile. “Didn’t even report it!” “Huh,” I said. “Sonofabitch! Who reported it?” “Guy’s father, they tell me.” Junkins shook his head. “I don’t get that, Arnie, I don’t mind telling you. A guy works his ass off restoring an old car until it’s worth two, maybe five thousand dollars, then some guys come along and beat the hell out of it—”

“I told you—”

Rudy Junkins raised his hand and smiled disarmingly. For one weird second Arnie thought he was going to say “Peace”, as Dennis sometimes did when things got heavy.

“Damaged it. Sorry.”

“Sure,” Arnie said.

“Anyhow, according to whiat your girlfriend said, one of the perpetrators… well, defecated on the dashboard. I would have thought you would have been mad as hell. I would have thought you would have reported it.”

Now the smile faded altogether and Junkins looked at Arnie soberly, even sternly.

Arnie’s cool grey eyes met Junkins’s brown ones.

“Shit wipes off,” he said finally. “You want to know something, Mr—Rudy? You want me to tell you something?”

“Sure, son.”

“When I was one and a half, I got hold of a fork and marked up an antique bureau that my mother had saved up for over a period of maybe five years. Saved up her pin money, that’s what she said. I guess I racked the hell out of it in a very short time. Of course I don’t remember it, but she says she just sat right down and bawled.” Arnie smiled a little, “Up until this year, I couldn’t feature my mother doing that. Now I think I can. Maybe I’m growing up a little, what do you think?”

Junkins lit a cigarette. “Am I missing the point, Arnie? Because I don’t see it yet.”

“She said that she would rather have had me in diapers until I was three than have had me do that. Because, she said, shit wipes off.” Arnie smiled. “You flush it away and it’s gone.”

“The way Moochie Welch is gone?” Junkins asked.

“I know nothing about that.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Scout’s honour?” Junkins asked. The question was humorous but the eyes were not; they probed at Arnie, looking for the smallest break, a crucial flicker.

Down the aisle, the fellow who had been putting on his winter snows dropped a tool on the concrete. It clanged musically and the fellow chanted, almost chorally, “Oh shit on you, you whore.”

Junkins and Arnie both glanced that way briefly, and the moment was broken.

“Sure, Scout’s honour,” Arnie said. “Look, I suppose you have to do this, it’s your job—”

“Sure its my job,” Junkins agreed softly. “The boy was run over three times each way. He was meat. They scraped him up with a shovel.”

“Come on,” Arnie said sickly. His stomach did a lazy barrel roll.

“Why? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with shit? Scrape it up with a shovel?”

“I had nothing to do with it!” Arnie cried, and the man across the way, who had been tinkering with his silencer looked up, startled.

Arnie lowered his voice.

“I’m sorry. I just wish you’d leave me alone. You know damn well I didn’t have anything to do with it. You just went over the whole car. If Christine had hit that Welch kid that many times and that hard, it would be all busted up. I know that much just from watching TV. And when I was taking Auto Shop II two years ago, Mr Smolnack said that the two best ways he knew to totally destroy a car’s front end was to either hit a deer or a person. He was joking a little, but he wasn’t kidding… if you know what I mean.” Arnie swallowed and heard a click in his throat, which was very dry.

“Sure,” Junkins said. “Your car looks all right. But you don’t, kid. You look like a sleepwalker. You look absolutely fucked over. Pardon my French.” He flicked his cigarette away. “You know something, Arnie?”

“What?”

“I think you’re lying faster than a horse can trot.” He slapped Christine’s hood. “Or maybe I should say faster than a Plymouth can run.”

Arnie looked at him, his hand on the outside mirror on the passenger side. He said nothing.

“I don’t think you’re lying about killing the Welch boy. But I think you’re lying about what they did to your car; your girl said they mashed the crap out of it, and she’s a hell of a lot more convincing than you are. She cried while she told me. She said there was broken glass everywhere… Where did you buy replacement glass, by the way?”

“McConnell’s,” Arnie said promptly. “In the Burg.”

“Still got the receipt?”

“Tossed it out.”

“But they’ll remember you. Big order like that.”

“They might,” Arnie said, “but I wouldn’t count on it, Rudy. They’re the biggest auto-glass specialists west of New York and east of Chicago. That covers a lot of ground. They do yea business, and a lot of it’s old cars.”

“Still, they’ll have the paperwork.”

“I paid cash.”

“But your name will be on the invoice.”

“No,” Arnie said, and smiled a wintry smile. “Darnell’s Do-It-Yourself Garage. That way I got a ten per cent discount.”

“You got it all covered, don’t you?”

“Lieutenant Junkins—”

“You’re lying about the glass too, although I’ll be goddamned if I know why.”

“You’d think Christ was lying on Calvary, that’s what I think,” Arnie said angrily. “Since when is it a crime to buy replacement glass if someone busts up your windows? Or pay cash? Or get a discount?”

“Since never,” Junkins said.

“Then leave me be.”

“More important, I think you’re lying about not knowing anything about what happened to the Welch boy. You know something. I want to know what.”

“I don’t know anything,” Arnie said.

“What about—”

“I don’t have anything more to say to you,” Arnie said. “I’m sorry.”

“All right,” Junkins said, giving up so quickly that Arnie was immediately suspicious. He rummaged around in the sportcoat he was wearing under his topcoat and took out his wallet. Arnie saw that Junkins was carrying a gun in a shoulder holster and suspected Junkins had wanted him to see it. He produced a card and gave it to Arnie. “I can be reached at either of those numbers, If you want to talk about anything. Anything at all.”

Arnie put the card in his breast pocket.

Junkins took one more leisurely stroll around Christine. “Hell of a restoration job,” he repeated. He looked squarely at Arnie. “Why didn’t you report it?”

Arnie let out a low shuddering sigh. “Because I thought that would be the end,” he said. “I thought they’d let off.”

“Yeah,” Junkins said. “I thought that might be it. Good night, son.”

“Good night.”

Junkins started away, turned, came back. “Think it over,” he said. “You really do look like hell, you know what I mean? You have a nice girl there. She’s worried about you, and she feels bad about what happened to your car. Your dad’s worried about you, too. I could get that even over the phone. Think it over and then give me a call, son. You’ll sleep better.”

Arnie felt something trembling behind his lips, something small and tearful, something that hurt. Junkins’s brown eyes were kind. He opened his mouth—God alone knew what might have spilled out—and then a monstrous jab of pain walloped him in the back, making him straighten suddenly. It also had the effect of a slap on a hysteric. He felt calmer, clear-headed again.

“Good night,” he repeated. “Good night, Rudy.”

Junkins looked at him a moment longer, troubled, and then left.

Arnie began to shake all over. The trembling started in his hands and spread up his forearms to his elbows, and then it was suddenly everywhere. He grabbed blindly for the doorhandle, found it at last, and slipped into Christine, into the comforting smells of car and fresh upholstery. He turned the key to ACC, the dash lights glowed, and he felt for the radio dial.

As he did so his eyes fell on the swinging leather tab with R.D.L. branded into it and his dream recurred with sudden terrible force: the rotting corpse sitting where he was sitting now; the empty eyesockets staring out through the windshield; the fingerbones gripping the wheel; the empty grin of the skull’s teeth as Christine bore down on Moochie Welch while the radio, tuned to WDIL, played “Last Kiss” by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers.

He suddenly felt sick—puking-sick. Nausea fluttered sickeningly in his stomach and in the back of his throat. Arnie scrambled out of the car and ran for the head, his footfalls hammering crazily in his cars. He just made it. Everything came up; he vomited again and again until there was nothing left but sour spit. Lights danced in front of his eyes. His ears rang and the muscles in his gut throbbed tiredly.

He looked at his pale, harried face in the spotty mirror, at the dark circles under his eyes and the lank spill of hair across his forehead, Junkins was right. He looked like hell.

But his pimples were all gone.

He laughed crazily. He wouldn’t give Christine up, no matter what. That was the one thing he wouldn’t do. He—

And suddenly he had to do it, again, only there was nothing left to come up: only ripping, clenching dry-heaves and that electric taste of spit in his mouth again.

He had to talk to Leigh. Quite suddenly he had to talk to Leigh.

He let himself into Will’s office, where the only sound was the thump of the time clock bolted on the wall turning up fresh minutes. He dialled the Cabots’ number from memory but miscued twice because his fingers were trembling so badly.

Leigh herself answered, her voice sounding sleepy.

“Arnie?”

“I have to talk to you, Leigh. I have to see you.”

“Arnie, it’s almost ten o’clock. I just got out of the shower and into bed… I was almost asleep.”

“Please,” he said, and shut his eyes.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “It can’t be tonight, my folks wouldn’t let me out so late—”

“It’s only ten. And it’s Friday.”

“They really don’t want me to see so much of you Arnie. They liked you at first, and my dad still does… but they both think you’ve gotten a little spooky.” There was a long, long pause at Leigh’s end. “I think you have, too,” she said finally.

“Does that mean you don’t want to see me anymore?” he asked dully. His stomach hurt, his back hurt, everything hurt.

“No.” Now the faintest reproach crept into her voice. “I was kind of getting the idea that you didn’t want to see me… not at school, and nights you’re always down there at the garage. Working on your car.”

“That’s all done,” he said. And then, with a monstrous effort: “It’s the car I want to—oww, goddammit!” He grabbed at his back, where there had been another huge bolt of pain, and got only a handful of back brace.

“Arnie?” She was alarmed. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. I had a twinge in my back.”

“What were you going to say?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll drive over to Baskin-Robbins and have an ice cream and maybe do some Christmas shopping and have some supper and I’ll have you home by seven. And I won’t be weird, I promise.”

She laughed a little, and Arnie felt a great, sweeping relief. It was like balm. “You dummy.”

“Does that mean okay?”

“Yes, it means okay.” Leigh paused and then said softly, “I said my parents didn’t want me to see so much of you. I didn’t say I wanted that.”

“Thanks,” he said, struggling to keep his voice steady. “Thanks for that.”

“What do you want to talk to me about?”

“Christine. I want to talk to you about her—and about my dreams. And about why I look like hell. And why I always want to listen to WDIL now, and about what I did that night after everyone was gone… the night I hurt my back. Oh Leigh I want—”

Another slash of pain up his back like cat’s claws.

“I think we just talked about it,” he said.

“Oh.” A slight, warm pause. “Good.”

“Leigh?”

“Umm.”

“There’ll be more time now. I promise. All the time you want.” And thought: Because now, with Dennis in the hospital, you’re all that’s left, all that’s left between me… me and…

“That’s good,” Leigh said.

“I love you.”

“Goodbye, Arnie.”

Say it back! he wanted to shout suddenly. Say it back, I need you to say it back!

But there was only the click of the phone in his ear.

He sat behind Will’s desk for a long time, head lowered, getting hold of himself. She didn’t need to say it back every time he said it to her, did she? He didn’t need reassurance that badly, did he? Did he?

Arnie got up and went to the door. She was coming out with him tomorrow, that was the important thing. They would do the Christmas shopping they had been planning on the day those shitters trashed Christine; they would walk and talk; they would have a good time. She would say she loved him.

“She’ll say it,” he whispered, standing in the doorway, but halfway down the left-hand side of the garage Christine sat like a mute and stupid denial, her grille poking forward as if hunting something.

And the voice whispered out of his lower consciousness, the dark questioning voice: How did you hurt your back? How did you hurt your back? How did you hurt your back, Arnie?

It was a question he shrank from. He was afraid of the answer.

34 LEIGH AND CHRISTINE

It was a grey day, threatening snow, but Arnie was right on both counts—they had a good time and he wasn’t weird. Mrs Cabot had been at home when Arnie got there, and her initial reception was cool. But it was a long time—perhaps twenty minutes—before Leigh came downstairs, wearing a caramel-coloured sweater that clung lovingly to her breasts and a new pair of cranberry-coloured slacks that clung lovingly to her hips. This inexplicable lateness in a girl who was almost always perfectly on time might have been on purpose. Arnie asked her later and Leigh denied it with an innocence that was perhaps just a little too wide-eyed, but in any case it served its purpose.

Arnie could be charming when he had to be, and he went to work on Mrs Cabot with a will. Before Leigh finally came bouncing downstairs, twisting her hair into a ponytail, Mrs Cabot had thawed. She had gotten Arnie a Pepsi-Cola and was listening raptly as he regaled her with tales of the chess club.

“It’s the only civilized extra-curricular activity I’ve ever heard of,” she told Leigh, and smiled approvingly at Arnie.

“BORRRRR-ing,” Leigh trumpeted. She put an arm around Arnie’s waist and smacked him loudly on the cheek.

“Leigh Cabot!”

“Sorry, Mums, but he looks cute in lipstick, doesn’t he? Wait a minute, Arnie, I’ve got a Kleenex. Don’t claw at it.” She dug in her purse for a tissue. Arnie looked at Mrs Cabot and rolled his eyes. Natalie Cabot put a hand to her mouth and giggled. The rapprochement between her and Arnie was complete.

Arnie and Leigh went to Baskin-Robbins, where an initial awkwardness, left over from the phone conversation of the night before, finally melted away. Arnie had had a vague fear that Christine would not run well, or that Leigh would find something nasty to say about her; she had never liked riding in his car. Both were needless worries. Christine ran like a fine Swiss watch, and the only things Leigh had to say about her rang of pleasure and amazement.

“I never would have believed it,” she said as they drove out of the ice-cream parlour’s small parking lot and joined the flow of traffic beaded toward the Monroeville Mall. “You must have worked like a dog.”

“It wasn’t as bad as it probably looked to you,” Arnie said. “Mind some music?”

“No, of course not.”

Arnie turned on the radio—The Silhouettes were kip-kipping and boom-booming through “Get a Job.” Leigh made a face. “DIL, yuck. Can I change it?”

“Be my guest.”

Leigh switched it to a Pittsburgh rock station and got Billy Joel. “You may be right,” Billy admitted cheerfully, “I may be crazy.” This was followed by Billy telling his girl Virginia that Catholic girls started much too late—it was the Block Party Weekend. Now, Arnie thought. Now she’ll start to hitch… back off… something. But Christine only went rolling along.

The mall was thronged with hectic but mostly good-natured shoppers; the last frantic and sometimes ugly Christmas rush was better than two weeks off. The Yuletide spirit was still new enough to be novel, and it was possible to look at the tinsel strung through the wide mall hallways without feeling sour and Ebenezer Scroogey. The steady ringing of the Salvation Army Santas’ bells had not yet become a guilty annoyance; they still chanted good tidings and good will rather than the monotonous, metallic chant of The poor have no Christmas the poor have no Christmas the poor have no Christmas that Arnie always seemed to hear as the day grew closer and both the shopgirls and the Salvation Army Santas grew more harried and hollow-eyed.

They held hands until the parcels grew too many for that, and then Arnie complained goodnaturedly about how she was turning him into her beast of burden. As they were going down to the lower level and B. Dalton, where Arnie wanted to look for a book on toy-making for Dennis Guilder’s old man, Leigh noticed that it had begun to snow. They stood for a moment at the window of the glassed-in stairwell, looking out like children. Arnie took her hand and Leigh looked at him, smiling. He could smell her skin, clean and a bit soapy; he could smell the fragrance of her hair. He moved his head forward a bit; she moved hers a bit toward him. They kissed lightly and she squeezed his hand. Later, after the bookstore, they stood above the rink in the centre of the mall, watching the skaters as they dipped and pirouetted and swooped to the sound of Christmas carols.

It was a very good day right up until the moment that Leigh Cabot almost died.

She almost surely would have died, if not for the hitchhiker.

They had been on their way back then, and an early December twilight had long since turned to snowy dark. Christine, surefooted as usual, purred easily through the four inches of fresh light powder.

Arnie had made a reservation for an early dinner at the British Lion Steak House, Libertyville’s only really good restaurant, but the time had gotten away from them and they had agreed on a quick to-go meal from the McDonald’s on JFK Drive. Leigh had promised her mother she would be in by eight-thirty because the Cabots were having friends in” and it had been quarter of eight when they left the mall.

“Just as well,” Arnie said. “I’m damn near broke anyway.”

The headlights picked out the hitchhiker standing at the intersection of Route 17 and JFK Drive, still five miles outside of Libertyville. His black hair was shoulder-length, speckled with snow, and there was a duffel-bag between his feet.

As they approached him, the hitchhiker held up a sign painted with Day-Glo letters It read: LIBERTYVILLE, PA. As they drew closer, he flipped it over. The other side read: NON-PSYCHO COLLEGE STUDENT.

Leigh burst out laughing. “Let’s give him a ride, Arnie.” Arnie said, “When they go out of their way to advertise their non-psychotic status, that’s when you got to look out. But okay.” He pulled over. That evening he would have tried to catch the moon in a bushel basket if Leigh had asked him to give it a shot.

Christine rolled smoothly to the verge of the road, tyres barely slipping. But as they stopped, static blared across the radio, which had been playing some hard rock tune, and when the static cleared, there was the Big Bopper, singing “Chantilly Lace”.

“What happened to the Block Party Weekend?” Leigh asked as the hitchhiker ran toward them.

“I don’t know,” Arnie said, but he knew. It had happened before. Sometimes all that Christine’s radio would pick up was WDIL. It didn’t matter what buttons you pushed or how much you fooled with the FM converter tinder the dashboard; it was WDIL or nothing.

He suddenly felt that stopping for the hitchhiker had been a mistake.

But it was too late for second thoughts now; the fellow had opened one of Christine’s rear doors, tossed his duffel-bag onto the floor, and slipped in after it. A blast of cold air and a swirl of snow came in with him.

“Ah, man, thanks.” He sighed. “My fingers and toes all took off for Miami Beach about twenty minutes ago. They must have gone somewhere, anyway cause I sure can’t feel em anymore.”

“Thank my lady,” Arnie said shortly.

“Thank you, ma’am,” the hitchhiker said, tipping an invisible hat gallantly.

“Don’t mention it,” Leigh said, and smiled. “Merry Christmas.”

“Same to you,” the hitchhiker said, “although you’d never know there was such a thing if you’d been standing out there trying to hook a ride tonight. People just breeze by and then they’re gone. Voom.” He looked around appreciatively. “Nice car, man. Hell of a nice car.”

“Thanks,” Arnie said.

“You restore it yourself?”

“Yeah.”

Leigh was looking at Arnie, puzzled. His earlier expansive mood had been replaced by a curtness that was not like his usual self at all. On the radio, the Big Bopper finished and Richie Valens came on, doing “La Bamba”.

The hitchhiker shook his head and laughed. “First the Big Bopper, then Richie Valens. Must be death night on the radio. Good old WDIL.”

“What do you mean?” Leigh asked.

Arnie snapped the radio off. “They died in a plane crash. With Buddy Holly.”

“Oh,” Leigh said in a small voice.

Perhaps the hitchhiker also sensed the change in Arnie’s mood; he fell silent and meditative in the back seat. Outside, the snow began to fall faster and harder. The first good storm of the season had come in.

At length, the golden arches twinkled up out of the snow.

“Do you want me to go in, Arnie?” Leigh asked. Arnie had gone nearly as quiet as stone, turning aside her bright attempts at conversation with mere grunts.

“I will,” he said, and pulled in. “What do you want?” “Just a hamburger and french fries, please.” She had intended to go the whole hog—Big Mac, shake, even the cookies—but her appetite seemed to have shrunk away to nothing.

Arnie parked. In the yellow light flaring from the squat brick building’s undersides, his face looked jaundiced and somehow diseased. He turned around, arm trailing over the seat. “Can I grab you something?”

“No thanks,” the hitchhiker said. “Folks’ll be waiting supper. Can’t disappoint my mom. She kills the fatted calf every time I come h—”

The chunk of door cut off his final word. Arnie had gotten out and was headed briskly across to the IN door, his boots kicking up little puffs of new snow.

“Is he always that cheery?” the hitchhiker asked “Or does he get sorta taciturn sometimes?”

“He’s very sweet,” Leigh said firmly. She was suddenly nervous. Arnie had turned off the engine and taken the keys, and she was left alone with this stranger in the back seat. She could see him in the rearview mirror, and suddenly his long black hair, tangled by the wind, his scruff of beard, and his dark eyes made him seem Manson-like and wild.

“Where do you go to school?” she asked. Her fingers were plucking at her slacks, and she made them stop.

“Pitt,” the hitchhiker said, and no more. His eyes met hers in the mirror, and Leigh dropped hers hastily to her lap. Cranberry red slacks. She had worn them because Arnie had once told her he liked them—probably because they were the tightest pair she owned, even tighter than her Levi’s. She suddenly wished she had worn something else, something that could be considered provocative by no stretch of the imagination: a grain-sack, maybe. She tried to smile—it was a funny thought, all right, a grain-sack, get it, ha-ha-ho-ho, wotta knee-slapper—but no smile came. There was no way she could keep from admitting it to herself: Arnie had left her alone with this stranger (as punishment? it had been her idea to pick him up), and now she was scared.

“Bad vibes,” the hitchhiker said suddenly, making her actually catch her breath. His words were flat and final. She could see Arnie through the plate-glass window, standing fifth or sixth in line. He wouldn’t get up to the counter for a while. She found herself imagining the hitchhiker suddenly clamping his gloved hands around her throat. Of course she could reach the horn-ring… but would the horn sound? She found herself doubting it for no sane reason at all. She found herself thinking that she could hit the horn ninety-nine times and it would honk satisfyingly. But if, on the hundredth, she was being strangled by this hitchhiker on whose behalf she had interceded, the horn wouldn’t blow. Because… because Christine didn’t like her. In fact, she believed that Christine hated her guts. It was as simple as that. Crazy but simple.

“P-Pardon me?” She glanced back in the rearview mirror and was immeasurably relieved to see that the hitchhiker wasn’t looking at her at all; he was glancing around the car. He touched the seat cover with his palm, then lightly brushed the roof upholstery with the tips of his fingers.

“Bad vibes,” he said, and shook his head. “This car, I don’t know why, but I get bad vibes.”

“Do you?” she asked, hoping her voice sounded neutral.

“Yeah. I got stuck in an elevator once when I was a little kid. Ever since then I get attacks of claustrophobia. I never had one in a car before, but boy, I got one now. In the worst way. I think you could light a kitchen match on my tongue, that’s how dry my mouth is.”

He laughed a short, embarrassed laugh.

“If I wasn’t already so late, I’d just get out and walk. No offence to you or your guy’s car,” he added hastily, and when Leigh looked back into the mirror his eyes did not seem wild at all, only nervous. Apparently he wasn’t kidding about the claustrophobia, and he no longer looked like Charlie Manson to her at all. Leigh wondered how she could have been so stupid… except she knew how, and why. She knew perfectly well.

It was the car. All day long she had felt perfectly okay riding in Christine, but now her former nervousness and dislike were back. She had merely projected her feelings onto a hitchhiker because… well, because you could be scared and nervous about some guy you just picked up off the road, but it was insane to be scared by a car, an inanimate construct of steel and glass and plastic and chrome. That wasn’t just a little eccentric, it was insane.

“You don’t smell anything, do you?” he asked abruptly.

“Smell anything?”

“A bad smell.”

“No, not at all.” Her fingers were plucking at the bottom of her sweater now, pulling off wisps of angora. Her heart was knocking unpleasantly in her chest. “It must be part of your claustrophobia whatzis.”

“I guess so.”

But she could smell it. Under the good new smells of leather and upholstery there was a faint odour: something like gone-over eggs. Just a whiff… a lingering whiff.

“Mind if I crank the window down a little?”

“If you want,” Leigh said, and found it took some effort to keep her voice steady and casual. Suddenly her mind’s eye showed her the picture that had been in the paper yesterday morning, a picture of Moochie Welch probably culled from the yearbook. The caption beneath read: Peter Welch, victim of fatal hit-and-run incident that police feel may have been murder.

The hitchhiker unrolled his window three inches and crisp cold air came in, driving that smell away. Inside McD’s, Arnie had reached the counter and was giving his order. Looking at him, Leigh experienced such an odd swirl of love and fear that she felt nauseated by the mixture—for the second or third time lately she found herself wishing that she had fixed on Dennis first. Dennis who seemed so safe and sensible…

She turned her thoughts away from that.

“Just tell me if it gets cold on you,” the hitchhiker said apologetically. “I’m weird, I know it.” He sighed. “Sometimes I think I never should have given up drugs, you know?”

Leigh smiled.

Arnie came out with a white bag, skidded a little in the snow, and then got behind the wheel.

“Cold like an icebox in here,” he grunted.

“Sorry, man,” the hitchhiker said from the back, and rolled the window up again. Leigh waited to see if that smell would come back, but now she could smell nothing but leather, upholstery, and the faint aroma of Arnie’s aftershave.

“Here you go, Leigh.” He gave her a burger, fries, and a small Coke. He had gotten himself a Big Mac.

“Want to thank you again for the ride, man,” the hitchhiker said. “You can just drop me off at the corner of JFK and Center, if that’s cool.”

“Fine,” Arnie said shortly, and pulled out. The snow was coming down even more heavily now, and the wind had begun to whoop. For the first time Leigh felt Christine skid a bit as she felt for a grip on the wide street, which was now almost deserted. They were less than fifteen minutes from home.

With the smell gone, Leigh discovered that her appetite had come back. She wolfed half of her hamburger, drank some Coke, and stifled a burp with the back of her hand. The corner of Center and JFK, marked with a war memorial, came up on the left, and Arnie pulled over, pumping the brakes lightly so Christine wouldn’t slide.

“Have a nice weekend,” Arnie said. He sounded more like his usual self now. Maybe all he needed was some food, Leigh thought, amused.

“Same goes to both of you,” the hitchhiker said. “And have a merry Christmas.”

“You too,” Leigh said. She took another bite of her hamburger, chewed, swallowed… and felt it lodge halfway down her throat. Suddenly she couldn’t breathe.

The hitchhiker was getting out. The noise of the door opening was very loud. The sound of the latch clicking sounded like the thud of tumblers falling in a bank-vault. The sound of the wind was like a factory whistle.

(this is stupid I know but I can’t Arnie I can’t breathe)

I’m choking! she tried to say, and what came out was a faint, fuzzy sound that she was sure the whine of the wind must have covered. She clawed at her throat and it felt swollen and throbbing in her hand. She tried to scream. No breath to scream, no breath

(Arnie I can’t) at all, and she could feel it in there… a warm lump of burger and bun. She tried to cough it up and it wouldn’t come. The dashboard lights, bright green, circular,

(cat like the eyes of a cat dear God I can’t BREATHE) watching her—

(God I can’t BREATHE can’t BREATHE can’t)

Her chest began to pound for air. Again she tried to cough up the lump of half-chewed burger and bun in her throat, but it wouldn’t come. Now the sound of the wind was bigger than the world, bigger than any sound she had ever heard before, and Arnie was finally turning away from the hitchhiker to look at her; he was turning in slow motion, his eyes widening almost comically, and even his voice seemed too loud, like thunder, the voice of Zeus speaking to some poor mortal from behind a massy skystack of thunderclouds:

“LEIGH… ARE YOU… WHAT THE HELL?… SHE’s CHOKING! OH MY GOD SHE’s—”

He reached for her in slow motion, and then he drew his hands back, immobilized by panic

(Oh help me help me for God’s sake do something I’m dying oh my dear God I’m choking to death on a McDonald’s hamburger Arnie why don’t you HELP ME?) and of course she knew why, he drew back because Christine didn’t want her to have any help, this was Christine’s way of getting rid of her, Christine’s way of getting rid of the other woman, the competition, and now the dashboard instruments really were eyes, great round unemotional eyes watching her choke to death, eyes she could only see through a glowing jitter of black dots, dots that burst and spread as

(mamma oh my dear this I’m dying and SHE SEES ME SHE IS ALIVE ALIVE ALIVE OH MAMMA MY GOD CHRISTINE IS ALIVE) Arnie reached for her again. Now she had begun to thrash on her seat, her chest heaving spasmodically as she clawed at her throat. Her eyes were bulging. Her lips had begun to turn blue. Arnie was pounding her ineffectually on the back and yelling something. He grabbed her shoulder, apparently meaning to pull her out of the car, and then he suddenly winced and straightened, his hands going involuntarily to the small of his back.

Leigh twitched and thrashed. The blockage in her throat felt huge and hot and throbbing. She tried again to cough it up, more weakly this time. The lump didn’t budge. Now the whistle of the wind was beginning to fade, everything was beginning to fade, but her need for air didn’t seem so awful. Maybe she was dying, but suddenly it didn’t seem so bad. Nothing was so bad, except for those green eyes staring at her from the instrument panel. They weren’t unemotional anymore. Now they were blazing with hate and triumph.

(o my God I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee

I am

for offending

this is my act

my act of

of)

Arnie had reached across from the driver’s side. Now Leigh’s door was suddenly jerked open and she spilled sideways into a brutal, cutting cold. The air partially revived her, made her struggle for breath seem important again, but the obstruction wouldn’t move… it just wouldn’t move.

From far away, Arnie’s voice thundering sternly, the voice of Zeus: “WHATARE YOU DOING? GET YOUR HANDS OFF HER!”

Arms around her. Strong arms. The wind on her face. Snow swirling in her eyes

(o my God hear me a sinner this is my act of contrition I am heartily sorry for having offended

OH!

OWW!

what are you DOING my ribs

hurts

what

what are you) and suddenly there were arms around her, crushing, and a pair of hard hands were clasped together in a knot just below her breasts, in the hollow of her solar plexus. And suddenly one thumb popped up, the thumb of a hitchhiker signalling for a ride, only the thumb drove painfully into her breastbone. At the same time the grip of the arms tightened brutally. She felt caught

(Ohhhhhhh you’re breaking my RIBS) in a gigantic bearhug. Her whole diaphragm seemed to heave, and something flew out of her mouth with the force of a projectile. It landed in the snow: a wet chunk of bun and meat.

“Let her go!” Arnie was shouting as he slipped and slid around Christine’s rear deck to where the hitchhiker held Leigh’s limp body like a life-sized marionette. “Let her go, you’re killing her!”

Leigh began to breathe in great, tearing gasps. Her throat and lungs seemed to burn in rivers of fire with each gulp of the cold, wonderful air. She was dimly aware that she was sobbing.

The brutal bearhug relaxed and the hands let her go. “Are you okay, girl? Are you all—”

Then Arnie was reaching past her, grabbing for the hitchhiker. He turned toward Arnie, his long black hair flying in the wind, and Arnie hit him in the mouth. The hitchhiker flailed backward, boots slipping in the snow, and landed on his back. Fresh snow as fine and dry as confectioners’ sugar puffed up around him.

Arnie advanced, fists held up, eyes slitted.

She took another convulsive breath—oh, it hurt, it was like being stabbed with knives—and screamed: “What are you doing, Arnie? Stop it!”

He turned toward her, dazed. “Huh? Leigh?”

“He saved my life, what are you hitting him for?”

The effort was too much and the black dots began to spiral up before her eyes again. She could have leaned against the car, but she didn’t want to go near it, didn’t want to touch it. The dashboard instruments. Something had happened to the dashboard instruments. Something

(eyes they turned into eyes) she didn’t want to think about.

She staggered to a lamppost instead and hung onto it like a drunk, head down, panting. A soft, tentative arm went around her waist. “Leigh… honey, are you all right?” She turned her head slightly and saw his miserable, scared face. She burst into tears.

The hitchhiker approached them carefully, wiping his bloody mouth on the sleeve of his jacket.

“Thank you,” Leigh said between harsh, swift breaths.

The pain was ebbing a trifle now, and the hard, cold wind was soothing on her hot face. “I was choking. I think… think I would have died if you hadn’t…”

Too much. The black dots again, all sounds fading into an eerie wind-tunnel again. She put her head down and waited for it to pass.

“It’s the Heimlich Manoeuvre,” the hitchhiker said. “They make you learn it when you go to work in the cafeteria. At school. Make you practise on a rubber dummy. Daisy Mae, they call her. And you do it, but you don’t have any idea if it’ll—you know—work on a real person or not.” His voice was shaky, jumping in pitch from low to high and back to low again like the voice of a kid entering puberty. His voice seemed to want to laugh or cry—something—and even in the uncertain light and heavily falling snow, Leigh could see how pallid his face was. “I never thought I’d actually have to use it. Works pretty good. Did you see that fucking piece of meat fly?” The hitchhiker wiped his mouth and looking blankly at the thin froth of blood on the palm of his hand.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” Arnie said. He sounded close to tears. “I was just… I was…”

“Sure, man, I know.” He clapped Arnie on the shoulder. “No harm, no foul. Girl, are you all right?”

“Yes,” Leigh said. Her breath was coming evenly now. Her heart was slowing down. Only her legs were bad; they were so much helpless rubber. My God, she thought. I could be dead now. If we hadn’t picked that guy up, and we almost didn’t—

It occurred to her that she was lucky to be alive. This cliché struck her forcibly with a stupid, undeniable power that made her feel faint. She began to cry harder. When Arnie led her back toward the car, she came with him, her head on his shoulder.

“Well,” the hitchhiker said uncertainly, “I’ll be off.”

“Wait,” Leigh said. “What’s your name? You saved my life, I’d like to know your name.”

“Barry Gottfried,” the hitchhiker said. “At your service.” Again he swept off an imaginary hat.

“Leigh Cabot,” she said. “This is Arnie Cunningham. Thank you again.”

“For sure,” Arnie added, but Leigh heard no real thanks in his voice—only that shakiness. He handed her into the car and suddenly the smell assaulted her, attacked her: nothing mild this time, much more than just a whiff underneath. It was the smell of rot and decomposition, high and noxious. She felt a mad fright invade her brain and she thought: It is the smell of her fury—

The world slipped sideways in front of her. She leaned out of the car and threw up.

Then everything there was went grey for a little while.

Are you sure you’re all right?” Arnie asked her for what seemed to be the hundredth time. It would also have to be for one of the last, Leigh realized with some relief. She felt very, very tired. There was a dull, throbbing pain in her chest and another one at her temples.

“I’m fine now.”

“Good. Good.”

He moved irresolutely, as if wanting to go but not sure it would be right yet; perhaps not until he had asked his seemingly eternal question at least once more. They were standing in front of the Cabot house. Oblongs of yellow light spilled from the windows and lay smoothly on the fresh and unmarked snow. Christine stood at the curb, idling, showing parking lights.

“You scared me when you fainted like that,” Arnie said.

“I didn’t faint… I only got fogged in for a few minutes.”

“Well, you scared me. I love you, you know.”

She looked at him gravel. “Do you?”

“Of course I do! Leigh, you know I do!”

She drew in a deep breath. She was tired, but it had to be said, and said right now. Because if she didn’t say it now, what had happened would seem completely ridiculous by morninglight—or maybe more than ridiculous; by morninglight the idea would likely seen mad. A smell that came and went like the “mouldering stench” in a Gothic horror story? Dashboard instruments that turned into eyes? And most of all the insane feeling that the car had actually tried to kill her?

By tomorrow, even the fact that she had almost choked to death would be nothing but a vague ache in her chest and the conviction that it had been nothing, really, not a close call at all.

Except it was all true, and Arnie knew it was—yes, some part of him did—and it had to be said now.

“Yes, I think you do love me,” she said slowly. She looked at him steadily. “But I won’t go anywhere with you again in that car. And if you really love me, you’ll get rid of it.” The expression of shock on his face was so large and so sudden that she might have struck him in the face.

“What—what are you talking about, Leigh?”

Was it shock that had caused that slapped expression? Or was some of it guilt?

“You heard what I said. I don’t think you’ll get rid of it—I don’t know if you even can anymore—but if you want to go someplace with me, Arnie, we go on the bus. Or thumb a ride. Or fly. But I’m never going to ride in your car again. It’s a death-trap.”

There. She had said it; it was out.

Now the shock on his face was turning to anger—the blind, obdurate sort of anger she had seen on his face so frequently lately. Not just over the big things, but over the little ones as well—a woman going through a traffic light on the yellow, a cop who held up traffic just before it was their turn to go—but it came to her now with all the force of a revelation that his anger, corrosive and so unlike the rest of Arnie’s personality, was always associated with the car. With Christine.

“If you love me you’ll get rid of it,” he repeated. “You know who you sound like?”

“No, Arnie.”

“My mother, that’s who you sound like.”

“I’m sorry.” She would not allow herself to be drawn, neither would she defend herself with words or end it by just going into the house. She might have been able to if she didn’t feel anything for him, but she did. Her original impressions—that behind the quiet shyness Arnie Cunningham was good and decent and kind (and maybe sexy as well)—had not changed much. It was the car, that was all. That was the change. It was like watching a strong mind slowly give way under the influence of some evil, corroding, addictive drug.

Arnie ran his hands through his snow-dusted hair, a characteristic gesture of bewilderment and anger. “You had a bad choking spell in the car, okay, I can understand that you don’t feel great about it. But it was the hamburger, Leigh, that’s all. Or maybe not even that. Maybe you were trying to talk while you were chewing or inhaled at just the wrong second or something. You might as well blame Ronald McDonald. People choke on their food every now and then that’s all. Sometimes they die. You didn’t. Thank God for that. But to blame my car—!”

Yes, it all sounded perfectly plausible. And was. Except that something was going on behind Arnie’s grey eyes. A frantic something that was not precisely a lie, but… rationalization? A wilful turning away from the truth?

“Arnie,” she said, “I’m tired and my chest hurts and I’ve got a headache and I think I’ve only got the strength to say this once. Will you listen?”

“If it’s about Christine, you’re wasting your breath,” he said, and that stubborn, mulish look was on his face again. “It’s crazy to blame her and you know it is.”

“Yes, I know it’s crazy, and I know I’m wasting my breath,” Leigh said. “But I’m asking you to listen.”

“I’ll listen.”

She took a deep breath, ignoring the pull in her chest. She looked at Christine, idling a plume of white vapour into the thickly falling snow, then looked hastily away. Now it was the parking lights that looked like eyes: the yellow eyes of a lynx.

“When I choked… when I was choking… the instrument panel… the lights on it changed. They changed. They were… no, I won’t go that far, but they looked like eyes.”

He laughed, a short bark in the cold air. In the house a curtain was pulled aside, someone looked out, and then the curtain dropped back again.

“If that hitchhiker… that Gottfried fellow… if he hadn’t been there, I would have died, Arnie. I would have died.” She searched his eyes with her own and pushed ahead. Once, she told herself. I only have to say this once. “You told me that you worked in the cafeteria at LHS your first three years. I’ve seen the Heimlich Manoeuvre poster on the door to the kitchen. You must have seen it too. But you didn’t try that on me, Arnie. You were getting ready to clap me on the back. That doesn’t work. I had a job in a restaurant back in Massachusetts, and the first thing they teach you, even before they teach you the Heimlich Manoeuvre, is that clapping a choking victim on the back doesn’t work.”

“What are you saying?” he asked in a thin, out-of-breath voice.

She didn’t answer; only looked at him. He met her gaze for only a moment, and then his eyes—angry, confused, almost haunted—shifted away.

“Leigh, people forget things. You’re right, I should have used it. But if you had the course, you know you can use it on yourself.” Arnie laced his hands together into a fist with one thumb sticking up and pressed against his diaphragm to demonstrate. “It’s just that in the heat of the moment, people forget—”

“Yes, they do. And you seem to forget a lot of things in that car. Like how to be Arnie Cunningham.”

Arnie was shaking his head. “You need time to think this over, Leigh. You need—”

“That is just what I don’t need!” she said with a fierceness she wouldn’t have believed she still had left in her. “I never had a supernatural experience in my life—I never even believed in stuff like that—but now I wonder just what’s going on and what’s happening to you. They looked like eyes, Arnie. And later… afterward… there was a smell, A horrible, rotten smell.”

He recoiled.

“You know what I’m talking about.”

No. I don’t have the slightest idea.”

“You just jumped as if the devil had twisted your ear.”

“You’re imagining things,” Arnie said hotly. “A lot of things.”

“That smell was there. And there are other things as well. Sometimes your radio won’t get anything but that oldies station—”

Another flicker in his eyes, and a slight twitch at the left corner of his mouth.

“And sometimes when we’re making out it just stalls, as if it didn’t like it. As if the car didn’t like it, Arnie.”

“You’re upset,” he said with ominous flatness.

“Yes, I am upset,” she said, beginning to cry. “Aren’t you?” The tears trickled slowly down her cheeks. I think this is the end of it for us, Arnie—I loved you, but I think it’s over. I really think it is, and that makes me feel so sad, and so sorry. “Your relationship with your parents has turned into a… an armed camp, you’re running God knows what into New York and Vermont for that fat pig Will Darnell, and that car… that car…”

She could not say anything more. Her voice dissolved. She dropped her packages and bent blindly to pick them up. Exhausted and weeping, she succeeded in doing little more than stirring them around. He bent to help her and she pushed at him roughly. “Leave them alone! I’ll get them!”

He stood up, his face pale and set. His expression was one of wooden fury, but his eyes… oh, to Leigh his eyes seemed lost.

“All right,” he said, and now his voice roughened with his own tears. “Good. Join up with the rest of them if you want. You just saddle up and ride right along with all those other shitters. Who gives a tin shit?” He drew in a shivering breath, and a single hurt sob escaped him before he could clap a gloved hand brutally over his mouth.

He began to walk backward toward the car; he reached out blindly behind himself for the Plymouth and Christine was there. “Just as long as you know you’re crazy. Right out of your mind! So go on and play you! I don’t need any of you!”

His voice rose to a thin scream, in devilish harmony with the wind:

“I don’t need you so fuck off!”

He rushed around to the driver’s side, his feet slid and he grabbed for Christine. She was there and he didn’t fall. He got in, the engine revved, the headlights came on in a huge white glare, and the Fury pulled out, rear tyres spinning up a fog of snow.

Now the tears came fast and hard as she stood watching, the tail-lights fade to round red periods and wink out as the car went around the corner. Her packages lay scattered at her feet.

And then, suddenly, her mother was there, absurdly clothed in an open raincoat, green rubber boots, and her blue flannel nightgown.

“Honey, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Leigh sobbed.

“I almost choked to death, I smelled something that might have come from a freshly opened tomb, and I think… yes, I think that somehow that car is alive… more alive every day. I think it’s like some kind of horrible vampire, only it’s taking Arnie’s mind to feed itself. His mind and his spirit.”

“Nothing, nothing’s wrong, I had a fight with Arnie, that’s all. Help me pick up my things, would you?”

They picked up Leigh’s parcels and went in. The door shut behind them and the night belonged to the wind and to the swiftly falling snow. By morning there would be better than eight inches.

Arnie cruised until sometime after midnight, and later had no memory of it. The snow had filled the streets; they were deserted and ghostly. It was not a night for the great American motor-car. Nevertheless, Christine moved through the deepening storm with surefooted ease, even without snow tyres. Now and then the prehistoric shape of a snowplough loomed and was gone.

The radio played. It was WDIL all the way across the dial. The news came on. Eisenhower had predicted, at the AFL–CIO convention, a future of labour and management marching harmoniously into the future together. Dave Beck had denied that the Teamsters Union was a front for the rackets. Rock ’n roller Eddie Cochran had been killed in a car crash while en route to London’s Heathrow Airport: three hours of emergency surgery had failed to save his life. The Russians were rattling their ICBMS. WDIL played the oldies all week long, but on the weekends they really got dedicated. Fifties newscasts, wow. That was

(never heard anything like that before) a really neat idea. That was

(totally insane) pretty neat.

The weather promised more snow.

Then music again: Bobby Darin singing “Splish-Splash”, Ernie K-Doe singing “Mother-in-Law”, the Kalin twins singing “When”. The wipers beat time.

He looked to his right, and Roland D. LeBay was riding shotgun.

Roland D. LeBay sat there in his green pants and a faded shirt of Army twill, looking out of dark eyesockets. A beetle sat, preening, within one.

You have to make them pay, Roland D. LeBay said. You have to make the shitters pay, Cunningham. Every last fucking one of them.

“Yes,” Arnie whispered. Christine hummed through the night, cutting the snow with fresh, sure tracks. “Yes, that’s a fact.” And the wipers nodded back and forth.

35 NOW THIS BRIEF INTERLUDE

At Libertyville High, Coach Puffer had given way to Coach Jones, and football had given way to basketball. But nothing really changed: the LHS cagers didn’t do much better than the LHS gridiron warriors—the only bright spot was Lenny Barongg, a three-sport man whose major one was basketball. Lenny stubbornly went about having the great year he needed to get the athletic scholarship to Marquette that he lusted after.

Sandy Galton suddenly blew town. One day he was there, the next he was gone. His mother, a forty-five-year old wino who didn’t look a day over sixty, did not seem terribly concerned. Neither did his younger brother, who pushed more dope than any other kid in Gornick Junior High. A romantic rumour that he had cut out for Mexico made the rounds at Libertyville High. Another, less romantic, rumour also made the rounds: that Buddy Repperton had been on Sandy about something and he felt it would be safer to make himself scarce.

The Christmas break approached and the school’s atmosphere grew restless and rather thundery, as it always did before a long vacation. The student body’s overall grade average took its customary pre-Christmas dip. Book reports were turned in late and often bore a suspicious resemblance to jacket copy (after all, how many sophomore English students are apt to call The Catcher in the Rye “this burning classic of postwar adolescence”?). Class projects were left half done or undone, the percentage of detention periods given for kissing and petting in the halls skyrocketed, and busts for marijuana went way up as the Libertyville High School students indulged in a little pre-Christmas cheer. So a good many of the students were up; teacher absenteeism was up; in the hallways and homerooms, Christmas decorations were up.

Leigh Cabot was not up. She flunked an exam for the first time in her high school career and got a D on an executive typing drill. She could not seem to study, she found her mind wandering back, again and again, to Christine—to the green dashboard instruments that had become hateful, gloating cat’s-eyes, watching her choke to death.

But for most, the last week of school before the Christmas break was a mellow period when offences which would have earned detention slips at other times of the year were excused, when hard-hearted teachers would sometimes actually throw a scale on an exam where everyone had done badly, when girls who had been bitter enemies made it up, and when boys who had scuffled repeatedly over real or imagined insults did the same. Perhaps more indicative of the mellow season than anything else was the fact that Miss Rat-Pack, the gorgon of Room 23 study hall, was seen to smile… not just once, but several times.

In the hospital, Dennis Guilder was moderately up—he had swapped his bedfast traction casts for walking casts. Physical therapy was no longer the torture it had been. He swung through corridors that had been strung with tinsel and decorated with first-, second-, and third-grade Christmas pictures, his crutches thump-thumping along, sometimes in time to the carols spilling merrily from the overhead speakers.

It was a caesura, a lull, an interlude, a period of quiet. During his seemingly endless walks up and down the hospital corridors, Dennis reflected that things could be worse—much, much worse.

Before too long, they were.

36 BUDDY AND CHRISTINE

On Tuesday, December 12, the Terriers lost to the Buccaneers 54–48 in the Libertyville High gym. Most of the fans went out into the still black cold of the night not too disappointed: every sportswriter in the Pittsburgh area had predicted another loss for the Terriers. The result could hardly be called an upset. And there was Lenny Barongg for the Terriers fans to be proud of: he scored a mind-boggling 34 points all by himself, setting a new school record.

Buddy Repperton, however, was disappointed.

Because he was, Richie Trelawney was also at great pains to be disappointed. So was Bobby Stanton in the back seat.

In the few months since he had been ushered out of LHS, Buddy seemed to have aged. Part of it was the beard. He looked less like Clint Eastwood and more like some hard-drinking young actor’s version of Captain Ahab. Buddy had been doing a lot of drinking these last few weeks. He had been having dreams so terrible he could barely remember them. He awoke sweaty and trembling, feeling he had barely escaped some awful doom that ran dark and quiet.

The booze cut them off, though. Cut them right off at the fucking knees. Goddam right. Working nights and sleeping days, that’s all it was.

He unrolled the window of his scuffed and dented Camaro, scooping in frigid air, and tossed out an empty bottle. He reached back over his shoulder and said, “Another Molotov cocktail, mess-sewer.”

“Right on, Buddy,” Bobby Stanton said respectfully, and slapped another bottle of Texas Driver into Buddy’s hand. Buddy had treated them to a case of the stuff—enough to paralyse the entire Egyptian Navy, he said—after the game.

He spun off the cap, steering momentarily with his elbows, and then gulped down half the bottle. He handed it to Richie and uttered a long, froggy belch. The Camaro’s headlights cut Route 46, running northeast as straight as a string through rural Pennsylvania. Snow-covered fields lay dreaming on either side of the road, twinkling in a billion points of light that mimed the stars in the black winter sky. He was headed—in a sort of casual, half-drunk way—for Squantic Hills. Another destination might take his fancy in the meantime, but if not, the Hills were a fine and private place to get high in peace.

Richie passed the bottle back to Bobby again, who drank big even though he hated the taste of Texas Driver. He supposed that when he got a little drunker, he wouldn’t mind the taste at all. He might be hung over and puking tomorrow, but tomorrow was a thousand years away. Bobby was still excited just to be with them; he was only a freshman, and Buddy Repperton, with his near-mythic reputation for bigness and badness, was a figure he viewed with mixed fear and awe.

“Fucking clowns,” Buddy said morosely. “What a bunch of fucking clowns. You call that a basketball game?”

“All a bunch of retards,” Richie agreed. “Except for Barongg. Thirty-four points, not too tacky.”

“I hate that fucking spade,” Buddy said, giving Richie a long, measuring, drunken look. “You taking up for that jungle bunny?”

“No way, Buddy,” Richie said promptly.

“Better not. I’ll Barongg him.”

“Which do you want first?” Bobby asked abruptly from the back seat. “The good news or the bad news?”

“Bad news first,” Buddy said. He was into his third bottle of Driver now and feeling no pain—only an aggrieved anger. He had forgotten—at least for the moment—that he had been expelled; he was concentrating only on the fact that the old school team, that bunch of fucking retard assholes, had let him down. “Always bad news first.” The Camaro rolled northeast at sixty-five over two-lane tar that was like a swipe of black paint across a hilly white floor. The land had begun to rise slightly as they approached Squantic Hills.

“Well, the bad news is that a million Martians just landed in New York,” Bobby said. “Now you wanna hear the good news?”

“There is no good news,” Buddy said in a low, morose, grieving voice. Richie would have liked to tell the kid you didn’t try to cheer Buddy up when he was in a mood like this; that only made it worse. The thing to do was to let it run its course.

Buddy had been this way ever since Moochie Welch, that little four-eyes panhandling dork, got run down by some psycho on JFK Drive.

“The good news is that they eat niggers and piss gasoline,” Bobby said, and roared with laughter. He laughed for quite a while before he realized he was laughing alone. Then he shut up quickly. He glanced up and saw Buddy’s bloodshot eyes looking at him over the uppermost tendrils of his beard, and that red, ferrety gaze in the rearview mirror gave him an unpleasant thrill of fear. It occurred to Bobby Stanton that he might have shut up a minute or two too late.

Behind them, distant, perhaps as much as three miles back, headlights twinkled like insignificant yellow sparks in the night.

“You think that’s funny?” Buddy asked. “You tell a fucking racist joke like that and you think it’s funny? You’re a fucking bigot, you know that?”

Bobby’s mouth dropped open. “But you said—”

“I said I didn’t like Barongg. In general I think spades are as good as white people.”

Buddy considered.

“Well, almost as good.”

“But—”

“You want to watch out or you’ll be walking home,” Buddy snarled. “With a rupture. Then you can write I HATE NIGGERS all over your fuckin truss.”

“Oh,” Bobby said in a small, scared voice. He felt as if he had reached up to turn on a light and had got a whopper of an electric shock. “Sorry.”

“Give me that bottle and shut your head.”

Bobby handed the Driver up front with alacrity. His hand was shaking.

Buddy killed the bottle. They passed a sign which read SQUANTIC HILLS STATE PARK 3 mi. The lake at the centre of the state park was a popular beach area in the summertime, but the park was closed from November to April. The road which wound through the park to Squantic Lake was kept ploughed for periodic National Guard manoeuvres and winter Explorer Scouts camping trips, however, and Buddy had discovered a side entrance which went around the main gate and then joined the park road. Buddy liked to go into the silent, wintry state park and cruise and drink.

Behind them, the distant twin sparks had grown to circles—dual headlights about a mile back.

“Hand me another Molotov cocktail, you fucking racist pig.”

Bobby handed up a fresh bottle of Driver, remaining prudently silent.

Buddy drank deeply, belched, and then handed the bottle across to Richie.

“No thanks, man.”

“You drink it, or you may find yourself getting an enema with it.”

“Sure, okay,” Richie said, wishing mightily that he had stayed home tonight. He drank.

The Camaro sped along, its headlights cutting the night. Buddy glanced into the rearview and saw the other car. It was now coming up fast. He glanced at his speedometer and saw he was doing sixty-five. The car behind them had to be doing close to seventy. Buddy felt something—a curious kind of doubling back to the dreams he could not quite remember. A cold finger seemed to press lightly against his heart.

Ahead, the road branched in two, Route 46 continuing east toward New Stanton, the other road bearing north toward Squantic Hills State Park. A large orange sign advised: CLOSED WINTER MONTHS.

Barely slowing, Buddy dragged left and shot up the hill. The approach road to the park was not so well-ploughed, and overarching trees had kept the warm afternoon sun from melting off the snowpack. The Camaro slid a little before grabbing the road again. In the back seat, Bobby Stanton made a low, uneasy sound.

Buddy looked up in the rearview, expecting to see the other car shoot by along 46—after all, there was nothing up this road but a dead end as far as most drivers were concerned—but instead it took the turn eyen faster than Buddy had and pounded along after them, now less than a quarter of a mile behind. Its headlights were four glowing white circles that washed the Camaro’s interior.

Bobby and Richie turned around to look.

“What the fuck?” Richie muttered.

But Buddy knew. Suddenly he knew. It was the car that had run down Moochie. Oh yes it was. The psycho who had greased Moochie was behind the wheel of that car, and now he was after Buddy.

He stepped down on the go, and the Camaro started to fly. The speedometer needle crept up to seventy and then gradually heeled over toward eighty. Trees blurred past, dark sketches in the night. The lights behind them did not fall back; the truth was that they were still gaining. The duals had merged into two great white eyes.

“Man, you want to slow down,” Richie said. He grabbed for his seatbelt, actively scared now. “If we roll at this speed—”

Buddy didn’t answer. He hunched over the wheel, alternating glances at the road ahead with glances shot into the rearview mirror, where those lights grew and grew.

“The road curves up ahead,” Bobby said hoarsely. And as the curve approached, guardrail reflectors flickering chrome in the Camaro’s headlights, he screamed it: “Buddy! It curves! It curves!”

Buddy changed down to second gear and the Camaro’s engine bellowed its protest. The tachometer needle hit 6,000 rpm, danced briefly at redline—7,000, and then dropped back to a more normal range. Backfires blatted through the Camaro’s exhaust pipes like machine-gun fire. Buddy pulled the wheel over, and the car floated into the sharp bend. The rear wheels skimmed over hard-packed snow. At the last possible instant he shifted back up, tramped on the accelerator pedal, and let his body sway freely as the Camaro’s left rear end slammed into the snowbanks digging a coffin-sized divot and then bouncing off. The Camaro slewed the other way. He went with it, then goosed the accelerator again. For one moment he thought it would not respond, that the skid would continue and they would simply barrel sideways up the road at seventy-five until they hit a bare patch and flipped over.

But the Camaro straightened out.

“Holy Jesus Buddy slow down!” Richie wailed.

Buddy hung over the wheel, grinning through his beard, bloodshot eyes bulging. The bottle of Driver was clamped between his legs. There! There, you crazy murdering sonofabitch. Let’s see you do that without rolling it over! A moment later the headlights reappeared, closer than ever, Buddy’s grin faltered and faded. For the first time he felt a sickish, unmanning tingle running up his legs toward his crotch, Fear—real fear—stole into him.

Bobby had been looking behind as the car chased them round the bedd, and now he turned around, his face slack and cheesy. “It dint even skid,” he said. “But that’s impossible! That’s—”

“Buddy, who is it?” Richie asked.

He reached out to touch Buddy’s elbow, and his hand was flung away with such force that his knuckles cracked on the glass of his window.

“You don’t want to touch me,” Buddy whispered. The road rolled straight in front of him, not black tar now but white snow, packed and treacherous. The Camaro was rolling over this greasy surface at better than ninety miles an hour, only its roof and the orange Ping-Pong ball jammed on the top of its radio aerial visible between chest-high embankments. “You don’t want to touch me, Richie. Not going this fast.”

“Is it—” Richie’s voice cracked and he couldn’t go on.

Buddy spared him a glance, and at the sight of the fear in Buddy’s small red eyes, Richie’s own terror came up in his throat like hot, smooth oil.

“Yeah,” Buddy said. “I think it is.”

No houses up here; they were already on state land. Nothing up here but the high snow embankments and the dark interlacing of trees.

“It’s gonna bump us!” Bobby screeched from the back seat. His voice was as high as an old woman’s. Between his feet the remaining bottles of Texas Driver chattered wildly in their carton. “Buddy! It’s gonna bump us!”

The car behind them had come to within five feet of the Camaro’s back bumper; its high beams flooded the car with light bright enough to read fine print. It slipped forward even closer. A moment later there was a thud.

The Camaro shifted its stance on the road as the car behind them fell back a trifle; to Buddy it was as if they were suddenly floating, and he knew they were a hair’s breadth from going into a wild, looping skid, the front end and the rear briskly swapping places until they hit something and rolled.

A droplet of sweat, as warm and stinging as a tear, ran into his eye.

Gradually, the Camaro straightened out again.

When he felt that he had control, Buddy let his right foot smoothly depress the accelerator all the way. If it was Cunningham in that old rustbucket ’58—ah, and hadn’t that been part of the dreams he could barely remember—the Camaro would shut him down.

The engine was now screaming. The tach needle was again on the edge of the redline at 7,000 rpm. The speedometer had passed the one hundred post, and the snowbanks streamed past them on either side in ghastly silence. The road ahead looked like a point-of-view shot in a film that had been insanely speeded up.

“Oh dear God,” Bobby babbled, “oh dear God please don’t let me get killed oh dear God oh holy shit—”

He wasn’t there the night we trashed Cuntface’s car, Buddy thought. He doesn’t know what’s going on. Poor busted-luck sonofawhore. He did not really feel sorry for Bobby, but if he could have been sorry for anyone, it would have been for the little shit-for-brains freshman. On his right, Richie Trelawney sat bolt-upright and as pallid as a gravestone, his eyes eating up his face. Richie knew the score, all right.

The car whispered toward them, headlights swelling in the rearview mirror.

He can’t be gaining! Buddy’s mind screamed. He can’t be! But the car behind them was indeed gaining, and Buddy sensed it was boring in for the kill. His mind ran like a rat in a cage, looking for a way out, and there was none. The slot in the left snowbank that marked the little side-road he usually used to bypass the gate and get into the state park had already flashed by. He was running out of time, room, and options.

There was another soft bump, and again the Camaro slewed—this, time at something over a hundred and ten miles an hour. No hope, man, Buddy thought fatalistically. He took his hands off the wheel altogether and grabbed his seatbelt. For the first time in his life, he snapped it shut across his waist.

At the same time, Bobby Stanton in the back seat screamed in a shrill ecstasy of fear: “The gate, man! Oh Jesus Buddy it’s the gaaaaayyyyy—”

The Camaro had breasted a final steep hill. The far side sloped down to a place where the road branched in two, becoming the entrance and exit from the state park. Between the two ways stood a small gatehouse on a concrete island—in the summertime, a lady sat in there on a camp chair and took a buck from each car that entered the park.

Now the gatehouse was flooded with ghastly light as the two cars raced down toward it, the Camaro heeling steadily to port as the skid worsened.

“Fuck you, Cuntface!” Buddy screamed. “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!” He yanked the wheel all the way around, twirling it with the death-knob that held one bobbing red die in alcohol.

Bobby screamed again. Richie Trelawney clapped his hands over his face, his last thought on earth a constant repetition of Watch out for broken glass watch out for broken glass watch out for broken glass—

The Camaro swapped ends, and now the headlights of the car following blared directly into them, and Buddy began to scream because it was Cuntface’s car, all right, that grille was impossible to mistake, it seemed at least a mile wide, only there was no one behind the wheel. The car was totally empty.

In the last two seconds before impact, Christine’s headlights shifted away to what was now Buddy’s left. The Fury shot into the entrance roadway as neatly and exactly as a bullet shoots down a rifle barrel. It snapped off the wooden barrier and sent it flying end over end into the black night, round yellow reflectors flashing.

Buddy Repperton’s Camaro rammed ass-backwards into the concrete island where the gatehouse stood. The eight-inch concrete lip peeled off everything bolted to the lower deck, leaving the twisted wreckage of the exhaust pipes and the silencer sitting on the snow like some weird sculpture. The Camaro’s rear end was first accordioned and then demolished. Bobby Stanton was demolished along with it. Buddy was dimly aware of something hitting his back like a bucket of warm water. It was Bobby Stanton’s blood.

The Camaro flipped into the air end for end, a mangled projectile in a squall of flying splinters and shattered boards, one headlight still glaring maniacally. It did a complete three-sixty and came down with a glass-jangling thud and rolled over. The firewall ruptured and the engine slid backward, at an angle crushing Richie Trelawney from the waist down. There was a coughing explosion of fire from the ruptured gas tank as the Camaro came to rest.

Buddy Repperton was alive. He had been cut in several places by flying glass—one ear had been clipped off with surgical neatness, leaving a red hole on the left side of his head—and his leg had been broken, but he was alive. His seatbelt had saved him. He thumbed the catch and it let go. The crackle of fire was like someone crumpling paper. He could feel the baking heat.

He tried to open the door, but the door was crimped shut.

Panting hoarsely, he threw himself through the empty space where the windscreen had been—

— and there was Christine.

She stood forty yards away, facing him at the end of a long, slewing skidmark. The rumble of her engine was like the slow panting of some gigantic animal.

Buddy licked his lips. Something in his left side pulled and jabbed with every breath. Something busted in there, too. Ribs.

Christine’s engine gunned and fell off; gunned and fell off. Faintly, like something from a lunatic’s nightmare, he could hear Elvis Presley singing “Jailhouse Rock”.

Orange-pink points of light on the snow. The rumbling whoosh of fire. It was going to blow. It was—

It did blow. The Camaro’s gas tank went with a hard thudding noise. Buddy felt a rude hand shove him in the back, and he flew through the air and landed in the snow on his hurt slide. His jacket was flaming. He grunted and rolled in the snow, putting himself out. Then he tried to get to his knees. Behind him, the Camaro was a blazing pyre in the night.

Christine’s engine, revving and falling off, revving and falling off, now more quickly, more urgently.

Buddy finally managed to get to his hands and knees. He peered at Cunningham’s Plymouth through the sweaty tangles of hair hanging in his eyes. The hood had been crimped up when the Plymouth blasted through the barrier arm, and the radiator was dripping a mixture of water and antifreeze that steamed on the snow like fresh animal spoor.

Buddy licked his lips again. They felt as dry as lizard skin. His back felt warm, as if he had gotten a moderately bad sunburn; he could smell smoking cloth, but in the extremity of his shock he was unaware that both his parka and the two shirts beneath had been burned away.

“Listen,” he said, hardly aware he was speaking. “Listen hey—”

Christine’s engine screamed and she came at him, rear end flirting back and forth as her tyres spun through the sugary snow. The crimped hood was like a mouth in a frozen snarl.

Buddy waited on his hands and knees, resisting the overpowering urge to leap and scramble away at once, resisting as much as he could—the wild panic that was ripping away his self-control. No one in the car. A more imaginative person would already have gone mad, perhaps.

At the last possible second he rolled to the left, screaming as the splintered ends of the broken bone in his leg ground together. He felt something bullet past him inches away, there was warm, foul-smelling exhaust in his face for a moment, and then the snow was red as Christine’s tail-lights flashed.

She wheeled, skidding, and came back at him

“No!” Buddy screamed. Pain lanced at his chest. “No! No! N—”

He leaped, blind reflexes taking over, and this time the bullet was closer, clipping leather off one shoe and turning his left foot instantly numb. He turned crazily on his hands and knees, like a small child playing I Witness at a birthday party. Blood from his mouth now mixed with the snot running freely from his nose; one of his broken ribs had nicked a lung. Blood ran down his cheek from the hole in his head where his ear had been. Frosty air jetted from his nose. His breath came in whistling sobs.

Christine paused.

White vapour drifted from her exhaust; her engine throbbed and purred. The windscreen was a black blank.

Behind Buddy, the remains of the Camaro shot greasy flames at the sky. A razor-sharp wind fluttered and fanned them. Bobby Stanton sat in the inferno of the back seat, his head cocked, a grin locked onto his blackening features.

Playing with me, Buddy thought. Playing with me, that’s what it’s doing. Like a cat with a mouse.

“Please,” he croaked. The headlights were blinding, turning the blood dripping down his cheek and from the sides of his mouth to an insectile black. “Please… I… I’ll tell him I’m sorry… I’ll crawl to him on my fucking hands and knees if that’s what you want… only please… pl—

The engine screamed. Christine leaped at him like old doom from a dark age. Buddy howled and lunged aside again, and this time the bumper struck his shin and broke his other leg and threw him toward the embankment at the side of the park road. He hit and sprawled like a loose bag of grain.

Christine wheeled back toward him, but Buddy bad seen a chance, one thin chance. He began to scramble wildly up the embankment, digging into the snow with bare hands from which the feeling had already departed, digging with his feet, ignoring the tremendous clouts of pain from his shattered legs. Now his breath came in little screams as the headlights grew brighter and the engine louder; every clod of snow threw its own jagged black shadow and he could feel it, he could feel it behind him like some horrible man-eating tiger—

There was a crunch and jangle of metal, and Buddy cried out as one of his feet was driven into the snow by Christine’s bumper. He yanked it out of the snow, leaving his shoe wedged deep.

Lying, gibbering, crying, Buddy gained the top of the bank thrown up by some National Guard Motor Pool plough days ago, tottered on the edge of balance there, pinwheeled his arms, and barely kept from rolling back down.

He turned to face Christine, The Plymouth had reversed across the road and now came forward again, rear tyres spinning, digging at the snow. It crashed into the bank a foot below where Buddy was perched, making him sway and sending down a further avalanche of snow. The hit crimped her hood in further, but Buddy was not touched. She reversed again through a mist of churned-up snow, engine now seeming to howl with frustrated anger.

Buddy screamed in triumph and shook his middle finger at her. “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” A spray of mixed blood and spittle flew from his lips. With each gasping breath, the pain seemed to sink deeper into his left side, numbing and paralyzing.

Christine roared forward and slammed into the embankment again.

This time a large section of the bank, loosened in the car’s first charge, came sliding down, burying Christine’s wrinkled, snarling snout, and Buddy almost came down with it. He saved himself only by skittering backward rapidly, sliding on his butt and pulling himself with hands that were clawed into the snow like bloody grappling hooks. His legs were in agony now, and he flopped over on his side, gasping like a beached fish.

Christine came again.

“Get outta here!” Buddy cried. “Get outta here, you crazy WHORE!”

She slammed into the embankment again, and this time enough snow fell to douse her hood to the windscreen. The wipers came on and began to arc back and forth, flicking melting snow away.

She reversed again, and Buddy saw that one more hit would sent him cascading down onto Christine’s hood with the snow. He let himself fall over backward and went rolling down the far side of the embankment, screaming each time his broken ribs bumped the ground. He came to rest in loose powder, staring up at black sky, the cold stars. His teeth began to click helplessly together. Shudders raced through his body.

Christine didn’t come again, but he could hear the soft mutter of her engine. Not coming, but waiting.

He glanced at the snowbank bulking against the sky. Beyond it, the glow of the burning Camaro had begun to wane a bit. How long had it been since the crash? He didn’t know. Would anyone see the fire and come to rescue him? He didn’t know that either.

Buddy became aware of two things simultaneously: that blood was flowing from his mouth—flowing at a frightening rate—and that he was very cold. He would freeze to death if someone didn’t come.

Frightened all over again, he struggled and thrashed his way into a sitting position. He was trying to decide if he could worm his way back up and watch the car—it was worse, not being able to see it—when he glanced up at the embankment again. His breath snagged and stopped.

A man was standing there.

Only it wasn’t a man at all; it was a corpse. A rotting corpse in green pants. It was shirtless, but a back brace splotched with grey mould was cinched around its blackening torso. White bone gleamed through the skin stretched across its face.

“That’s it for you, you shitter,” this starlit apparition whispered.

The last of Buddy’s control broke and he began to scream hysterically, his eyes bulging, his long hair seeming to puff into a grotesque helmet around his bloody, soot-smudged face as the root of each strand stiffened and stood on end. Blood poured from his mouth in freshets and drenched the collar of his parka; he tried to skid backward, hooking into the snow with his hands again and sliding his buttocks as the thing came toward him. It had no eyes. Its eyes were gone, eaten out of its face by God knew what squirming things. And he could smell it, oh God he could smell it and the smell was like rotting tomatoes, the smell was death.

The corpse of Roland D. LeBay held out its decayed hands to Buddy Repperton and grinned.

Buddy screamed. Buddy howled. And suddenly he stiffened, his lips forming an O of perfect finality, puckered as if he wished to kiss the horror shambling toward him. His hands scratched and scrabbled at the left side of his shredded parka above his heart, which had finally been punctured by the jagged stub of a splintered rib. He fell backward feet kicking groove in the snow, his final breath slipping out in a long white jet from his slack mouth… like auto exhaust.

On the embankment, the thing he had seen flickered and was gone. There were no tracks.

From the far side, Christine’s engine cranked up into an exhaust-crackling bellow of triumph that struck the frowning, snow-covered uplands of Squantic Hills and then echoed back.

On the far verge of Squantic Lake, some ten miles away as the crow flies, a young man who had gone out for a cross-country ski by starlight heard the sound and suddenly stopped, his hands on his poles and his head cocked.

Abruptly the skin on his back prickled into bumps, as if a goose had just walked over his grave, and although he knew it was only a car somewhere on the other side—sound carried a long way up here on still winter nights—his first thought was that something prehistoric had awakened and had tracked its prey to earth: a great wolf, or perhaps a sabre-toothed tiger.

The sound was not repeated and he went on his way.

37 DARNELL COGITATES

Will Darnell was at the garage until after midnight on the night Buddy Repperton and his friends met Christine in Squantic Hills. His emphysema had been particularly bad that day. When it got bad, he was afraid to lie down, although he was ordinarily a perfect bear for sleep.

The doctor told him it was not at all likely he would choke to death in his sleep, but as he got older and the emphysema slowly tightened its grip on his lungs, he feared it more and more. The fact that his fear was irrational didn’t change it in the least. Although he hadn’t been inside a church of any faith since he had been twelve years old—forty-nine years ago now! — he had been morbidly interested in the circumstances surrounding the death of Pope John Paul I ten weeks before. John Paul had died in bed and had been found there in the morning. Already stiffening probably. That was the part that haunted Will: Already stiffening, probably.

He pulled into the garage at half-past nine, driving his 1966 Chrysler Imperial—the last car he intended ever to own. At about the same time Buddy Repperton was noticing the twin sparks of distant headlights in his rearview mirror.

Will was worth better than two million dollars, but money didn’t give him much pleasure anymore, if indeed it ever had. The money didn’t even seem completely real anymore. Nothing did, except the emphysema. That was hideously real, and Will welcomed anything that took his mind off it.

The problem of Arnie Cunningham, now—that had taken his mind off his emphysema. He supposed that was why he had let Cunningham hang around the place when all of his strongest- instincts told him to get the kid out of the garage, he was in some way dangerous. Something was going on with Cunningham and his rebuilt ’58. Something very peculiar.

The kid wasn’t in tonight; he and the entire LHS chess club were in Philadelphia for three days at the Northern States Fall Tourney. Cunningham had laughed about that; he was much changed from the pimply, big-eyed kid that Buddy Repperton had jumped on, the kid Will had immediately (and erroneously) dismissed as a crybaby jellyfish and maybe a goddam queer in the bargain.

For one thing, he had grown cynical.

He had told Will in the office yesterday afternoon over cigars (the boy had developed a taste for those as well; Will doubted if his parents knew) that he had missed so many chess club meetings that according to the by-laws, he was no longer a member. Slawson, the faculty advisor, knew it but was conveniently overlooking it until after the Northern States Tourney.

“I’ve missed more meetings than anyone, but I also happen to play better than anyone else, and the shitter knows—” Arnie winced and shoved both hands into the small of his back for a moment.

“You ought to get a doctor to look at that,” Will remarked.

Arnie winked, suddenly looking much older than nearly eighteen. “I don’t need anything but a good Christian fuck to stretch the vertebrae.”

“So you’re going to Philly?” Will had been disappointed, even though Cunningham had the off-time coming; it meant he would have to put Jimmy Sykes in charge for the next couple of nights, and Jimmy didn’t know his ass from ice cream.

“Sure. I’m not about to turn down three days of bright lights,” Arnie said. He saw Will’s sour face and had grinned. “Don’t worry, man. This close to Christmas, all your regulars are buying toys for the kiddies instead of spark plugs and carburettor kits. This place will be dead until next year, and you know it.”

That was certainly true enough, but he hadn’t needed a snotnose kid to point it out for him.

“You want to go to Albany for me after you get back?” Will had asked.

Arnie looked at him carefully. “When?”

“This weekend.”

“Saturday?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the deal?”

“You take my Chrysler to Albany that’s the fucking deal. Henry Buck was fourteen clean used cars he wants to get rid of. He says they’re clean. You go look at them. I’ll give you a blank cheque. If they look good, you make the deal. If they look hot, tell him to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”

“And what do I fake with me?”

Will had looked at him for a long time. “Getting scared, Cunningham?”

“No.” Arnie crushed his cigar out half-smoked. He looked at Will defensively. “Maybe I just feel the odds getting a little longer each time I do it. Is it coke?”

“I’ll get Jimmy to do it,” Will said brusquely.

“Just tell me what it is.”

“Two hundred cartons of Winstons.”

“All right.”

“You sure? Just like that?”

Arnie had laughed. “It’ll be a break from chess.”

Will parked the Chrysler in the stall closest to his office, the one with MR DARNELL DO NOT BLOCK! painted inside the lines. He got out and slammed the door, puffing, labouring for breath. The emphysema was sitting on his chest, and tonight it seemed to have brought its brother. No, he just wasn’t going to lie down; no matter what that asshole doctor said.

Jimmy Sykes was apathetically wielding the big push broom. Jimmy was tall and gangling, twenty-five years old. His light mental retardation made him look perhaps eight years younger. He had started combing his hair back in a fifties-style ducktail, in imitation of Cunningham, whom Jimmy almost worshipped. Except for the low whssht, whssht of the broom’s bristles on the oil-stained concrete, the place was silent. And empty.

“Place is really jumpin tonight, Jimmy, huh?” Will wheezed.

Jimmy looked around. “No, sir, Mr Darnell, nobody been in since Mr Hatch came and got his Fairlane, and that was half an hour ago.”

“Just joking,” Will said, wishing again that Cunningham were here. You couldn’t talk to Jimmy except on a perfectly literal Dick-and-Jane level. Still, maybe he would invite him in for a cup of coffee with a slug of Courvoisier tipped in for good measure. Make it a threesome. Him, Jimmy, and the emphysema. Or maybe, since the emphysema had brought its brother tonight, you’d have to call it a foursome. “What do you say about—”

He broke off suddenly, noticing that stall twenty was empty. Christine was gone.

“Arnie come in?” he said.

“Arnie?” Jimmy repeated, blinkin stupidly.

“Arnie, Arnie Cunningham,” Will said impatiently. “How many Arnies do you know? His car’s gone.”

Jimmy looked around at stall twenty and frowned. “Oh. Yeah.”

Will smiled. “Hotshot got knocked out of his hotshot chess tournament, huh?”

“Oh, did he?” Jimmy asked. “Jeez, that’s too bad, huh?”

Will restrained an urge to grab Jimmy and give him a shake and a wallop. He would not get angry; that only made it harder to breathe, and he would end up having to shoot his lungs full of the horrible-tasting stuff from his aspirator. “Well, what did he say, Jimmy? What did he say when you saw him?” But Will knew suddenly and surely that Jimmy hadn’t seen Arnie.

Jimmy finally understood what Will was driving at. “Oh, I didn’t see him. Just saw Christine go out the door, you know. Boy, that’s some pretty car, ain’t it? He fixed it up like magic.”

“Yes,” Will said. “Like magic.” It was a word that had occurred to him in connection with Christine before. He suddenly changed his mind about inviting Jimmy in for coffee and brandy. Still looking at stall twenty, he said, “You can go home now, Jimmy.”

“Aw, jeez, Mr Darnell, you said I could have six hours tonight. That ain’t over until ten.”

“I’ll punch you out at ten.

Jimmy’s muddy eyes brightened at this unexpected, almost unheard-of largesse. “Really?”

“Yeah, really, really. Make like a tree and leave, Jimmy, okay?”

“Sure,” Jimmy said, thinking that for the first time in the five or six years he had worked for Will (he had trouble remembering which it was, although his mother kept track of it, the same as she kept track of all his tax papers), the old grouch had gotten the Christmas spirit. Just like in that movie about the three ghosts. Summoning up his own Christmas spirit, Jimmy cried: “That’s a big ten-four, good buddy!”

Will winced and lumbered into his office. He turned on the Mr Coffee and sat down behind his desk, watching as Jimmy put away his broom, turned out most of the overhead fluorescents, and got his heavy coat.

Will leaned back and thought.

It was, after all, his brains that had kept him alive all these years, alive and one step ahead; he had never been handsome, he had been fat all of his adult life, and his health had always been terrible. A childhood bout of scarlet fever one spring had been followed by a mild case of polio; he had been left with a right arm that operated at only about seventy per cent capacity. As a young man he had endured a plague of boils. When Will was forty-three his doctor had discovered a large, spongy growth under one arm. It had turned out to be non-malignant, but the removal surgery had kept him on his back most of one summer, and as a result he had developed bedsores. A year later he had almost died of double pneumonia. Now it was incipient diabetes and emphysema. But his brains had always been fine and dandy, and his brains had kept him one step ahead.

So he leaned back and thought about Arnie. He supposed one of the things that had favourably impressed him about Cunningham after he had stood up to Repperton that day was a certain similarity to the long-ago teenaged Will Darnell. Of course, Cunningham wasn’t sickly, but he had been pimply, disliked, a loner. Those things had all been true of the young Will Darnell.

Cunningham had brains, too.

Brains and that car. That strange car.

“Good night, Mr Darnell,” Jimmy called. He stood by the door for a moment, and then added uncertainly, “Merry Christmas.”

Will raised his hand in a wave. Jimmy left. Will heaved his bulk out of his chair, got the bottle of Courvoisier out of the filing cabinet, and set it down next to the Mr Coffee. Then he sat down again. A rough chronology was ticking through his mind.

August: Cunningham brings in an old wreck of a ’58 Plymouth and parks it in stall twenty. It looks familiar, and it should. It’s Rollie LeBay’s Plymouth. And Arnie doesn’t know it—he has no need to know—but once upon a time Rollie LeBay also made an occasional run to Albany or Burlington or Portsmouth for Will Darnell… only in those dim dead days, Will had a ’54 Cadillac. Different transport cars, same false-bottom boot with the hidden compartment for fireworks, cigarettes, booze, and pot. In those days Will had never heard of cocaine. He supposed no one but jazz musicians in New York had.

Late August: Repperton and Cunningham get into it, and Darnell kicks Repperton out. He’s tired of Repperton, the constant braggadocio, the cock-of-the-walk manner. He’s hurting custom, and while he’ll make all the runs into New York and New England that Will wants, he’s careless, and carelessness is dangerous. He has a tendency to exceed the double-nickel speed limit, he’s gotten speeding tickets. All it would take is one nosy cop to put them all in court. Darnell isn’t afraid of going to jail—not in Libertyville but it would look bad. There was a time when he didn’t care much how things looked, but he’s older now.

Will got up, poured coffee, and tipped in a capful of brandy. He paused, thought it over, and tipped in a second capful. He sat down, took a cigar out of his breast pocket, looked at it, and lit it. Fuck you, emphysema. Take this.

Fragrant smoke rising around him, good hot coffee laced with brandy before him, Darnell stared out into his shadowy, silent garage and thought some more.

September: The kid asks him to jump an inspection sticker and loan him a dealer plate so he can take his girl to a football game. Darnell does it—hell, there was a day when he used to sell inspection stickers for seven dollars and never even look at the car it was going on. Besides, the kid’s car is looking good. A little rough, maybe, and it’s still more than a little noisy, but all in all, pretty damn good. He’s going a real job of restoration.

And that’s pretty damn strange, isn’t it, when you consider that no one has ever seen him really work on it.

Oh, little things, sure. Replacing bulbs in the parking lights. Changing tyres. The kid is no dummy about cars: Will sat right in this chair one day and watched him replace the upholstery in the back seat. But no one has seen him working on the car’s exhaust system, which was totally shot when he wheeled the ’58 in here for the first time late last summer. And no one has seen him doing any bodywork, either, although the Fury’s bod, which had an advanced case of cancer when the kid brought it in, now looks cherry.

Darnell knew what Jimmy Sykes thought, because he had asked him once. Jimmy thought Arnie did the serious work at night, after everyone was gone.

“That’s one hell of a lot of night work,” Darnell said aloud, and felt a sudden chill that not even the brandy-laced coffee could dispel, A lot of night work, yeah. It must have been. Because what the kid seemed to be doing days was listening to the greaser music on WDIL. That, and a lot of aimless fooling around.

“I guess he does the big stuff at night,” Jimmy had said, with all the guileless faith of a child explaining how Santa Claus gets down the chimney or how the tooth fairy put the quarter under his pillow. Will didn’t believe in either Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, and he didn’t believe that Arnie had restored Christine at night, either.

Two other facts rolled around uneasily in his mind like poolballs looking for a pocket in which to come to rest.

He knew that Cunningham had been driving the car around out back a lot before it was street-legal, that was one thing. Just cruising slowly up and down the narrow lanes between the thousands of junked cars in the block-long back lot. Driving at five miles an hour, around and around after dark, after everyone had gone home, circling the big crane with the round electromagnet and the great box of the car-crusher. Cruising. The one time Darnell asked him about it, Arnie had told him he was checking out a shimmy in the front end. But the kid couldn’t lie for shit. No one ever checked out a shimmy at five miles an hour.

That was what Cunningham did after everyone else went home. That had been his night work. Cruising out back, threading his way in and out of the junkets, headlights flickering unsteadily in their rust-eaten sockets.

Then there was the Plymouth’s milometer. It ran backward. Cunningham had pointed that out to him with a sly little smile. It ran backward at an extremely fast rate. He told Will that he figured the milometer turned back five miles or so for every actual mile travelled. Will had been frankly amazed. He had heard of setting milometers back in the used-car business, and he had done a good bit of it himself (along with stuffing transmissions full of sawdust to stifle their death whines and pouring boxes of oatmeal into terminally ill radiators to temporarily plug their leaks), but he had never seen one that ran backward spontaneously. He would have thought it impossible. Arnie had just smiled a funny little smile and called it a glitch.

It was a glitch, all right, Will thought. One hell of a glitch.

The two thoughts clicked lazily off each other and rolled in different directions.

Boy, that’s some pretty car, isn’t it? He fixed it up like magic.

Will didn’t believe in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, but he was perfectly willing to acknowledge that there were strange things in the world. A practical man recognized that and put it to use if he could. A friend of Will’s who lived in Los Angeles claimed he had seen the ghost of his wife before the big quake of ’67, and Will had no particular reason to doubt the claim (although he would have doubted it completely if the friend had had anything to gain). Quent Youngerman, another friend, had claimed to have seen his father, long dead, standing at the foot of his hospital bed after Quent, a steel-worker, had taken a terrible fall from the fourth floor of a building under construction down on Wood Street.

Will had heard such stories off and on all his life, as most people undoubtedly did. And as most thinking people probably did, he put them in a kind of open file, neither believing nor disbelieving, unless the teller was an obvious crank. He put them in that open file because no one knew where people came from when they were born and no one knew where people went when they died, and not all the Unitarian ministers and born-again Jesus-shouters and Popes and Scientologists in the world could convince Will otherwise. Just because some people went crazy on the subject didn’t mean they knew anything. He put stuff like that in that open file because nothing really inexplicable had ever happened to him.

Except maybe something like that was happening now.

November: Repperton and his good buddies beat the living shit out of Cunningham’s car at the airport. When it comes in on the tow-truck, it looks like the Green Giant shat all over it. Darnell looks at it and thinks, It’s never gonna run again. That’s all; it’s never gonna run another foot.

At the end of the month the Welch kid gets killed on JFK Drive.

December: A State Police detective comes sucking around. Junkins. He comes sucking around one day and talks to Cunningham; then he comes sucking around on a day when Cunningham isn’t here and wants to know how come the kid is lying about how much damage Repperton and his dogturd friends (of whom the late and unlamented Peter “Moochie” Welch was one) did to Cunningham’s Plymouth. Why you talking to me? Darnell asks him, wheezing and coughing through a cloud of cigar smoke, Talk to him, it’s his fucking Plymouth, not mine. I just run this place so working joes can keep their cars running and keep putting food on the tables for their families.

Junkins listens patiently to this rap. He knows Will Darnell is doing a hell of a lot more than just running a do-it-yourself garage and a junkyard, but Darnell knows he knows, so that’s okay.

Junkins lights a cigarette and says, I’m talking to you because I already talked to the kid and he won’t tell me. For a little while there I thought he wanted to tell me; I got the feeling he’s scared green about something. Then he tightened up and wouldn’t tell me squat.

Darnell says, If you think Arnie ran down that Welch kid, say so.

Junkins says, I don’t. His parents say he was home asleep, and it doesn’t feel like they’re lying to cover up for him. But Welch was one of the guys that trashed his car, we’re pretty sure of that, and I’m positive he’s lying about how bad they trashed it and I don’t know why and it’s driving me crazy.

Too bad, Darnell says with no sympathy at all.

Junkins asks, How bad was it, Mr Darnell? You tell me.

And Darnell tells his first and only lie during the interview with Junkins: I really didn’t notice.

He noticed, all right, and he knows why Arnie is lying about it, trying to minimize it, and this cop would know why too, if it wasn’t so obvious he was walking all over it instead of seeing it. Cunningham is lying because the damage was horrible, the damage was much worse than this state gumshoe can imagine, those hoods didn’t just beat up on Cunningham’s ’58, they killed it. Cunningham is lying because, although nobody saw him do much of anything during the week after the tow-truck brought Christine back to stall twenty, the car was basically as good as new—even better than it had been before.

Cunningham lied to the cop because the truth was incredible.

“Incredible,” Darnell said out loud, and drank the rest of his coffee. He looked down at the telephone, reached for it, and then drew his hand back. He had a call to make, but it might be better to finish thinking this through first—have all his ducks in a row.

He himself was the only one (other than Cunningham himself) who could appreciate the incredibility of what had happened: the car’s complete and total exoneration. Jimmy was too soft in the attic, and the other guys were in and out, not regular custom at all. Still, there had been comments about what a fantastic job Cunningham had done; a lot of the guys who had been doing repairs on their rolling iron during that week in November had used the word incredible, and several of them had looked uneasy. Johnny Pomberton, who bought and sold used trucks, had been trying to get an old dumpster he’d picked up in running shape that week. Johnny knew cars and trucks better than anyone else in Libertyville, maybe anyone else in all of Pennsylvania. He told Will frankly and flat-out that he couldn’t believe it. It’s like voodoo, Johnny Pomberton had said, and then uttered a laugh without much humour. Will only sat there looking politely interested, and after a second or two the old man shook his head and went away.

Sitting in his office and looking out at the garage, eerily silent in the slack time that came every year in the weeks before Christmas, Will thought (not for the first time) that most people would accept anything they saw it happen right before their very eyes. In a very real sense there was no supernatural, no abnormal; what happened, happened, and that was the end.

Jimmy Sykes: Like magic.

Junkins: He’s lying about it, but I’ll be goddamned if I know why.

Will pulled open his desk drawer, denting his paunch, and found his note-minder book for 1978. He paged through it and found his own scrawled entry: Cunningham. Chess Tourney. Philly Sheraton Dec. 11–13.

He called Directory Assistance, got the number of the hotel, and made the call. He was not too surprised to feel his heartbeat shifting into a higher gear as the phone rang and the desk clerk picked it up.

Like magic.

“Hello, Philadelphia-Sheraton.

“Hello,” Will said, “You have a chess tournament put up there, I th—”

“Northern States, yessir,” the desk clerk broke in. He sounded quick and almost insufferably young.

“I’m calling from Libertyville, Pee-Ay,” Will said. “I believe you have an LHS student named Arnold Cunningham registered. He’s one of the chess tourney kids. I’d like to speak to him, if he’s in.”

“Just a moment, sir, I’ll see.”

Clunk. Will was put on hold. He cocked himself back on his swivel chair and sat that way for what seemed to be a very long time, although the red second-hand on the office clock only revolved once. He won’t be there, and if he is, I’ll eat my—

“Hello?”

The voice was young, warily cautious and unmistakably Cunningham’s. Will Darnell felt a peculiar lift-drop in his belly, but none of it showed in his voice; he was much too old for that.

“Hi, Cunningham,” he said. “Darnell.”

“Yeah.”

“What are you up to, Will?”

“How you doing, kid?”

“Won yesterday and drew today. Bullshit game. Couldn’t seem to keep my mind on it. What’s up?”

Yes, it was Cunningham—him without a doubt.

Will, who would no more call someone without a cover story than he would go out without his skivvies on, said smoothly, “You got a pencil, kiddo?”

“Sure.”

“There’s an outfit on North Broad Street, United Auto Parts. You think you could go by there and see what they’ve got for tyres?”

“Remoulds?” Arnie asked.

“First-lines.”

“Sure, I can go by. I’m free tomorrow afternoon from noon until three.”

“That’ll be fine. You ask for Roy Mustungerra, and mention my name.”

“Spell that.”

Will spelled it.

“That’s all?”

“Yeah… except I hope you get your ass whuped.”

“Fat chance,” Cunningham said, and laughed. Will told him goodbye and hung up.

It was Cunningham, no doubt about that. Cunningham was in Philadelphia tonight, and Philadelphia was almost three hundred miles away.

Who could he have given an extra set of keys to?

The Guilder kid.

Sure! Except the Guilder kid was in the hospital.

His girl.

But she didn’t have a driver’s licence or even a permit. Arnie had said so.

Someone else.

There was no one else. Cunningham wasn’t close to anyone else except for Will himself, and Will knew damned well Cunningham had never given him a dupe set of keys.

Like magic.

Shit.

Will leaned back in his chair again and lit another cigar. When it was going and the neatly clipped-off end was in his ashtray, he looked up at the raftering smoke and thought it over. Nothing came. Cunningham was in Philly and he had gone on the high school bus, but his car was gone. Jimmy Sykes had seen it pulling out, but Jimmy hadn’t seen who was driving it. Now just what did all of that mean? What did it add up to?

Gradually, his mind turned into other channels. He thought of his own high school days, when he had had the lead part in the senior play. His part had been that of the minister who is driven to suicide by his lust for Sadie Thompson, the girl he has set out to save. He had brought down the house. His one moment of glory in a high school career that had been devoid of sporting or academic triumphs, and maybe the high point of his youth—his father had been a drunk, his mother a drudge, his one brother a deadbeat with his own moment of glory coming somewhere in Germany, his only applause the steady pounding of German 88s.

He thought of his one girlfriend, a pallid blonde named Wanda Haskins, whose white cheeks had been splattered with freckles which grew painfully profuse in the August sun. They almost surely would have married—Wanda was one of four girls that Will Darnell had actually fucked (he excluded whores from his count). She was surely the only one he had ever loved (always assuming there was such a thing—and, like the supernatural events he had sometimes heard about but never witnessed, he could doubt its existence but not disprove it), but her father had been in the Army, and Wanda had been an Army brat. At the age of fifteen—perhaps only a year before the mystic shift in the balance of power from the hands of the old into those of the young—she and her family had moved to Wichita, and that had been the end of that.

There was a certain lipstick she had worn, and in that long-ago summer of 1934 it had tasted like fresh raspberries to a Will Darnell who was still quite slim and clear-eyed and ambitious and young. It had been a taste to make the left hand stray to the erect and enthusiastic root of the penis in the middle of the night… and even before Wanda Haskins consented, they had danced that sweet and special dance in Will Darnell’s dreams. In his narrow child’s bed that was too short for his growing legs, they had danced.

And, now thinking of this dance, Will ceased to think and began to dream and, ceasing to dream, began to dance again.

He awakened from a sleep that had never really deepened solidly some three hours later; he awoke to the sound of the big garage door rattling up and the inside light over the door—no fluorescent but a blaring 200-watt bulb—coming on.

Will tilted his chair down in a hurry. His shoes hit the mat under his desk (BARDAHL written across it in raised rubber letters), and it was the shock of pins and needles in his feet more than anything else that brought him awake.

Christine moved slowly across the garage towards stall twenty and slipped in.

Will, hardly convinced even now that he was awake, watched her with a curious lack of excitement which perhaps only belongs to those summoned directly from their dreams. He sat upright behind his desk, hamlike arms planted on his dirty, doodled-upon blotter, and watched her.

The engine raced once, twice. The bright new exhaust pipe shot blue smoke.

Then the motor shut down.

Will sat there, not moving.

His door was shut, but there was an intercom, always on, between the office and the long, barnlike garage area. It was the same intercom on which he had heard the beginnings of the Cunningham-Repperton title fight back in August. From the intercom’s speaker he now heard the steady tick of metal as the engine cooled. He heard nothing else.

No one got out of Christine, because there was no one in her to get out.

He put stuff like that in an open file because nothing really inexplicable had ever happened to him… except maybe something like that was happening now.

He had seen her cross the cement to stall twenty, the automatic door rattling shut against the cold December night behind her. And experts, examining the case later, could say: The witness had dozed and then fallen asleep, he admits that much, and that he was dreaming… what he claims to have seen was obviously nothing more or less than an extension of that dream, an outward stimulus causing a subjective range of spontaneous, dream-oriented imagery…

Yes, they could say that, just as Will could dream of dancing with fifteen-year-old Wanda Haskins… but the reality was a hard-headed man of sixty-one, a man who had long since jettisoned any last romantic notions.

And he had seen Cunningham’s ’58 glide across the garage empty, the steering wheel moving all by itself as the car slipped into her accustomed stall. He had seen the headlights go off, and he had heard the eight-cylinder engine as it died.

Now, feeling oddly boneless, Will Darnell got up, hesitated, went to the door of his office, hesitated again, and then opened it. He walked out and moved down the ranks of slant-parked cars to stall twenty. His footfalls echoed behind him and then died out in a mystery.

He stood beside the car with her rich two-tone body, red and white. The paint job was deep and clear and perfect, umarred by the smallest chip or the slightest touch of rust. The glass was clear and unbroken, not marked by so much as a nick caused by a random-flying pebble.

The only sound now was the slow drip of melting snow from the front and rear bumpers.

Will touched the hood. It was warm.

He tried the driver’s side door, and it opened freely. The smell that issued forth was the warm smell of new leather, new plastic, new chrome—except that there seemed to be another, more unpleasant smell beneath it. An earthy smell. Will breathed deep but could not place it. He thought briefly of old turnips in his father’s basement vegetable bin, and his nose wrinkled.

He leaned in. There were no keys in the ignition. The milometer read 52,107.8.

Suddenly the empty ignition slot set into the dashboard revolved, the black slit heeling over of its own accord past ACC to START. The hot engine caught at once and rumbled steadily, full of contented high-octane power.

Will’s heart staggered in his chest. His breath caught. Gasping and whooping noisily for breath, he hurried back to his office to find the spare aspirator in one of his desk drawers. His breath, thin and impotent, sounded like winter wind under an entryway door. His face was the colour of old candlewax. His fingers caught in the loose flesh of his throat and pulled restlessly.

Christine’s engine turned off again.

No sound now but the tick and click of cooling metal.

Will found his aspirator, plunged it deep into his throat, depressed the trigger, and inhaled. Little by little, the feeling that a wheelbarrowful of cinderblocks was sitting on his chest dissipated. He sat down in the swivel chair and listened gratefully to the sane and expected creak of protest from its springs. He covered his face momentarily with his fat hands.

Nothing really inexplicable… until now.

He had seen it.

Nothing had been driving that car. It had come in empty, smelling of something like rotting turnips.

And even then, in spite of his dread, Will’s mind began to turn and he began wondering how he could put what he knew to his own advantage.

38 BREAKING CONNECTIONS

The burned out wreck of Buddy Repperton’s Camaro was found late on Wednesday afternoon by a park ranger. An old lady who lived with her husband in the tiny town of Upper Squantic had called the ranger station on the lake side of the park. She was badly afflicted with arthritis, and sometimes she couldn’t sleep. Last night she thought she had seen flames coming from near the park’s south gate. At what time? She reckoned it to be around quarter past ten, because she had been watching the Tuesday Night Movie on CBS and it hadn’t been but half over.

On Thursday, a newsphoto of the burned car appeared on the front page of the Libertyville Keystone under a headline which read: THREE KILLED IN CAR CRASH AT SQUANTIC HILLS STATE PARK. A State Police source was quoted as saying “liquor had probably been a factor”—an officially opaque way of saying that the shattered remains of over half a dozen bottles of a juice-and-wine combination sold under the trade name Texas Driver had been found in the wreckage.

The news struck particularly hard at Libertyville High School; the young always have the greatest difficulty accepting unpleasant intelligence of their own mortality. Perhaps the holiday season made it that much harder.

Arnie Cunningham found himself terribly depressed by the news, Depressed and frightened. First Moochie; now Buddy, Richie Trelawney, and Bobby Stanton. Bobby Stanton, a dipshit little freshman Arnie had never even heard of—what had a dipshit little kid like that been doing with the likes of Buddy Repperton and Richie Trelawney anyway? Didn’t he know that was like going into a den of tigers with nothing for protection but a squirt gun. He found it unaccountably hard to accept the grapevine version, which was simply that Buddy and his friends had gotten pretty well squiffed at the basketball game, and gone out cruising and drinking, and had come to a bad end.

He couldn’t quite lose the feeling he was somehow involved.

Leigh had stopped talking to him since the argument. Arnie didn’t call her—partly out of pride, partly out of shame, partly out of a wish that she would call him first and things could go back to what they had been… before.

Before what? his mind whispered. Well, before she almost choked to death in your car, for one thing. Before you tried to punch out the guy who saved her life.

But she wanted him to sell Christine. And that was simply impossible… wasn’t it? How could he do that after he had put so much time and effort and blood and—yes, it was true—even tears into it?

It was an old rap, and he didn’t want to think about it. The final bell rang on that seemingly endless Thursday, and he went out to the student parking lot—almost ran out and nearly dived into Christine.

He sat there behind the wheel and drew a long, shuddering breath, watching the first snowflakes of an afternoon flurry twist and skirl across the bright bonnet. He dug for his keys, pulled them out of his pocket, and started Christine up. The motor hummed confidently and he pulled out, tyres rolling and cruching over the packed snow. He would have to put snow tyres on eventually, he supposed, but the truth was, Christine didn’t seem to need them. She had the best traction of any car he had ever driven.

He felt for the radio knob and turned on WDIL. Sheb Wooley was singing “The Purple People Eater.” That raised a smile on his face at last.

Just being behind Christine’s wheel, in control, made everything seem better. It made everything seem manageable. Hearing about Repperton and Trelawney and the little shitter stepping out that way had been a terrible shock, naturally, and after the hard feelings of the late summer and this fall, it was probably natural enough for him to feel a little guilty. But the simple truth was, he had been in Philly. He hadn’t had anything to do with it; it was impossible.

He had just been feeling low about things in general. Dennis was in the hospital. Leigh was behaving stupidly as if his car had grown hands and jammed that piece of hamburger down her throat, for Christ’s sake. And he had quit the chess club today.

Maybe the worst part of that had been the way Mr Slawson, the faculty advisor, had accepted his decision without even trying to change his mind, Arnie had given him a lot of guff about how little time he had these days, and how he was simply going to have to cut back on some of his activities, and Mr Slawson had simply nodded and said, Okay, Arnie, we’ll be right here in Room 30 if you change your mind. Mr Slawson had looked at him with his faded blue eyes that his thick glasses magnified to the size of repulsive boiled eggs, and there had been something in them—was it reproach?

Maybe it had been. But the guy hadn’t even tried to persuade him to stay, that was the thing. He should have at least tried, because Arnie was the best the LHS chess club had to offer, and Slawson knew it. If he had tried, maybe Arnie would have changed his mind. The truth was, he did have a little more time now that Christine was… was… What?

… well, fixed up again. If Mr Slawson had said something like Hey Arnie, don’t be so rash, let’s think this over, we could really use you… if Mr Slawson had said something like that, why, he might have reconsidered. But not Slawson. Just we’ll be right here in Room 30 if you change your mind, and blah-blah and yak-yak, what a fucking shitter, just like the rest of them. It wasn’t his fault that LHS had been knocked out in the semi-final round; he had won four games before that and would have won in the finals if he had gotten a chance. It was those two shitters Barry Qualson and Mike Hicks that had lost it for them; both of them played chess as if maybe they thought Ruy Lopex was some new kind of soft drink or something…

He stripped the wrapper and the foil from a stick of gum, folded the gum into his mouth, balled the wrapper, and flicked it into the litterbag hanging from Christine’s ashtray with neat accuracy, “Right up the little tramp’s ass,” he muttered, and then grinned. It was a hard, spitless grin. Above it, his eyes moved restlessly from side to side, looking mistrustfully out at a world full of crazy drivers and stupid pedestrians and general idiocy.

Arnie cruised aimlessly around Libertyville, his thoughts continuing to run on in this softly paranoid and bitterly comforting fashion. The radio spilled out a steady flood of golden oldies, and today all of them seemed to be instrumentals—“Rebel Rouser”, “Wild Weekend”, “Telstar”, Sandy Nelson’s jungle-driven “Teen Beat”, and “Rumble” by Line Wray, the greatest of them all. His back nagged, but in a low key. The flurry intensified briefly to a dark grey cloud of snow. He popped on his headlights, and just as quickly the snow tapered off and the clouds broke, spilling through bars of remote and coldly beautiful late-afternoon winter sun.

He cruised.

He came out of his thoughts which now were that Repperton had maybe come to a perfectly fitting end after all—and was shocked to realize that it was nearly quarter of six, and dark. Gino’s Pizza was coming up on the left, the little green neon shamrocks shimmering in the dark. Arnie pulled over to the kerb and got out. He started to cross the street, then realized he had left his keys in Christine’s ignition.

He leaned in to get them… and suddenly the smell assaulted him, the smell Leigh had told him about, the smell he had denied.

It was here now, as if it had come out when he left the car—a high, rotten, meaty smell that made his eyes water and his throat close. He snatched the keys and stood back, trembling, looking at Christine with something like horror.

Arnie, there was a smell. A horrible, rotten smell… you know what I’m talking about.

No, I don’t have the slightest idea… you’re imagining things.

But if she was, so was he.

Arnie turned suddenly and ran across the street to Gino’s as if the devil was on his tail.

Inside, he ordered a pizza he didn’t really want, changed some quarters for dimes, and slipped into the telephone booth beside the juke. It was thumping some current tune Arnie had not heard before.

He called home first. His father answered, his voice oddly toneless—Arnie had never heard Michael’s voice quite that way before, and his unease deepened. His father sounded like Mr Slawson. This Thursday afternoon and evening were taking on the maroon tones of nightmare. Beyond the glass walls of the booth, strange faces drifted dreamily past, like untethered balloons on which someone had crudely drawn human faces, God at work with a Magic Marker.

Shitters,he thought disjointedly. All a bunch of shitters.

“Hello, Dad,” he said uncertainly. “Look, I—uh, I kind of lost track of the time here, I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right,” Michael said. His voice was almost a drone, and Arnie felt his unease deepen into something like fright. “Where are you, the garage?”

“No—uh, Gino’s. Gino’s Pizza. Dad, are you okay? You sound funny.”

“I’m fine,” Michael said. “Just scraped your dinner down the garbage disposal, your mother’s upstairs crying again, and you’re having a pizza. I’m fine. Enjoying your car, Arnie?”

Arnie’s throat worked, but no sound came out.

“Dad,” he managed finally, “I don’t think that’s very fair.”

“I don’t think I’m very interested anymore in what you think is fair and what you don’t think is fair,” Michael said. “You had some justification for your behaviour at first, perhaps. But in the last month or so you’ve turned into someone I don’t understand at all, and something is going on that I understand even less. Your mother doesn’t understand it either, but she senses it, and it’s hurting her very badly. I know she brought part of the hurt on herself, but I doubt if that changes the quality of the pain.”

“Dad, I just lost track of the time!” Arnie cried. “Stop making such a big thing out of it!”

“Were you driving around?”

“Yes, but—”

“I notice that’s when it usually happens, Michael said. “Will you be home tonight?”

“Yes, early,” Arnie said. He wet his lips. “I just want to go by the garage, I have some information Will asked me to get while I was in Philly

“I’m not very interested in that either, pardon me,” Michael said. His voice was still polite, chillingly disconnected.

“Oh,” Arnie said in a very small voice. He was very scared now, almost trembling.

“Arnie?”

“What?” Arnie nearly whispered.

“What is going on?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Please. That detective came by to see me at my office. He was after Regina, as well. He upset her very badly. I don’t think he meant to, but—”

“What was it this time?” Arnie asked” fiercely. “That fucker, what was it this time? I’ll—”

“You’ll what?”

“Nothing.” He swallowed something that tasted like a lump of dust. “What was it this time?”

“Repperton,” his father said. “Repperton and those other two boys. What did you think it was? The geopolitical situation in Brazil?”

“What happened to Repperton was an accident,” Arnie said. “Why did he want to talk to you and Mom about something that was an accident, for Christ’s sake?”

“I don’t know.” Michael Cunningham paused. “Do you?”

“How would I?” Arnie yelled. “I was in Philadelphia, how would I know anything about it? I was playing chess, not… not… not anything else,” he finished lamely.

“One more time,” Michael Cunningham said. “Is something going on, Arnie?”

He thought of the smell, the high, rotting stink. Leigh choking, digging at her throat, turning blue. He had tried to thump her on the back because that’s what you did when someone was choking, there was no such thing as a Heimlich Manoeuvre because it hadn’t been invented yet, and besides, that was how it was supposed to end, only not in the car… beside the road… in his arms…

He closed his eyes and the whole world seemed to tilt and swirl sickly.

“Arnie?”

“There is nothing going on,” he said through clenched teeth and without opening his eyes. “Nothing but a lot of people who are on my case because I finally got something of my own and did it all by myself.”

“All right,” his father said, his lacklustre voice once more terribly reminiscent of Mr Slawson’s. “If you want to talk about it, I’m here. I always have been, although I didn’t always make that as clear as I should have. Be sure to kiss your mother when you come in, Arnie.”

“Yeah, I will. Listen, Mi—”

Click.

He stood in the booth, listening stupidly to the sound of nothing at all. His father was gone. There wasn’t even a dial tone because it was a dumb fucking… phone booth.

He dug into his pocket and spread his change out on the little metal shelf where he could look at it. He picked up a dime, almost dropped it, and at last got it into the slot. He felt sick and overheated. He felt as if he had been very efficiently disowned.

He dialled Leigh’s number from memory.

Mrs Cabot picked the phone up and recognized his voice immediately. Her pleasant and rather sexy come-hither-thou-fascinating-stranger phone voice became instantly hard. Arnie had had his last chance with her, that voice said, and he had blown it.

“She doesn’t want to talk to you and she doesn’t want to see you,” she said.

“Mrs Cabot, please, if I could just—”

“I think you’ve done enough,” Mrs Cabot said coolly. “She came in crying the other night and she’s been crying off and on ever since. She had some sort of a… an experience with you the last time you and she went out, and I only pray it wasn’t what I thought it was. I—”

Arnie felt hysterical laughter bubbling up inside him. Leigh had almost choked to death on a hamburger, and her mother was afraid Arnie had tried to rape her.

“Mrs Cabot, I have to talk to her.”

“I’m afraid not.”

He tried to think of something else to say, some way to get past the dragon at the gate. He felt a little like a Fuller Brush salesman trying to get in to see the lady of the house. His tongue wouldn’t move. He would have made a lousy salesman. There was going to be that hard click and then smooth silence again.

Then he heard the telephone change hands, Mrs Cabot said something in sharp protest, and Leigh said something back; it was too muffled for him to catch. Then Leigh’s voice said, “Arnie?”

“Hi,” he said. “Leigh, I just wanted to call and tell you how sorry I was about—”

“Yes,” Leigh said “I know you were, and I accept your apology, Arnie. But I won’t—I can’t go out with you anymore. Unless things change.”

“Ask me something easy,” he whispered.

“That’s all I—” Her voice sharpened, moved slightly away from the telephone. “Mom, please stop hanging over me!” Her mother said something that sounded disgruntled, there was a pause, and then Leigh’s voice again, low. “That’s all I can say, Arnie. I know how crazy it sounds, but I still think your car tried to kill me the other night. I don’t know how something like that could be, but no matter how I work it over in my mind, it comes out seeing that that was how it was. I know that’s how it was. It’s got you, doesn’t it?”

“Leigh, if you’ll pardon my French, that’s pretty fucking stupid. It’s a car! Can you spell that C-A-R, car! There’s nothing—”

“Yes,” she said, and now her voice was wavering toward tears. “It’s got you, she’s got you, and I guess nobody can get you free except you.”

His back suddenly awoke and began to throb, sending pain out in a sickish radiation that seemed to echo and amplify in his head.

“Isn’t that the truth of it, Arnie?”

He didn’t, couldn’t, answer.

“Get rid of it,” Leigh said. “Please. I read about that Repperton boy in the paper this morning, and—”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Arnie croaked. And for the second time: “That was an accident.”

“I don’t know what it was. Maybe I don’t want to know. But it isn’t us I’m worried about anymore. It’s you, Arnie. I’m scared for you. You ought to—no, you have to get rid of it.”

Arnie whispered, “Just say you won’t dump me, Leigh. Okay?”

Now she was even closer to crying—or perhaps she was already doing it. “Promise me, Arnie. You have to promise me and then you have to do it. Then we… we can see. Promise me you’ll get rid of that car. It’s all I want from you, nothing else.”

He closed his eyes and saw Leigh walking home from school. And a block down, idling at the kerb, was Christine. Waiting for her.

He opened his eyes quickly, as if he had seen a friend in a dark room.

“I can’t do that,” he said.

“Then we don’t have much to talk about, do we?”

“Yes! Yes, we do. We—”

“No. Goodbye, Arnie. I’ll see you in school.”

“Leigh, wait!”

Click. And dead smooth silence.

A moment of nearly total rage came over him. He had a sudden deadly impulse to swing the black phone receiver around and around his head like an Argentinian bolas, shattering the glass in this goddam torture-chamber of a telephone booth. They had run out on him, all of them. Rats deserting a sinking ship.

You have to be ready to help yourself before anyone else can help you.

Fuck that bullshit! They were rats deserting a sinking ship. Not one of them, from that shitter Slawson with his thick horn — rimmed glasses and his weird poached-egg eyes to his rotten shitting old man who was so fucking pussywhipped that he ought to just give that cunt he was married to a razor and invite her to cut it off to that cheap bitch in her fancy house with her legs crossed probably she’d been having her period and that’s why she choked on the goddam hamburger and those shitters with their fancy goddam cars and the boots full of golf-clubs those goddam officers I’d like to bend them over this here lathe I’d play some golf with them I could find the right hole to put those little white balls in you bet your ass but when I get out of here no one’s going to tell me what to do it’s gonna be my way my way mine mine mine mine mine MINE—

Arnie came back to himself suddenly, scared and wide-eyed, breathing hard. What had been happening to him? He had seemed like someone else there for a moment, someone on a crazed rant against humanity in general Not just someone. It was LeBay.

No! That’s not true at all!

Leigh’s voice: Isn’t that the truth of it, Arnie?

Suddenly something very like a vision rose in his tired, confused mind. He was hearing a minister’s voice: Arnold, do you take this woman to be your loving—

But it wasn’t a church; it was a used-car lot with bright multicoloured plastic pennants fluttering in a stiff breeze. Camp chairs had been set up. It was Will Darnell’s lot, and Will was standing beside him in the best man’s position. There was no girl beside him. Christine was parked beside him, shining in a spring sun, even her whitewalls seeming to glow.

His father’s voice: Is there something going on?

The preacher’s voice: Who giveth this woman to this man?

Roland D. LeBay rose from one of the camp chairs like the prow of a skeletal ghost-ship from Hades. He was grinning—and for the first time Arnie saw who had been sitting around him: Buddy Repperton, Richie Trelawney, Moochie Welch. Richie Trelawney was black and charred, most of his hair burned off. Blood had poured down Buddy Repperton’s chin and had caked his shirt like hideous vomit. But Moochie Welch was the worst; Moochie Welch had been ripped open like a laundry bag. They were smiling. All of them were smiling.

I do, Roland D. LeBay croaked. He grinned, and a tongue slimed with graveyard mould lolled from the stinking hole of his mouth. I give her, and he’s got the receipt to prove it. She’s all his. The bitch is the ace of spades… and she’s all his.

Arnie became aware that he was moaning in the telephone booth, clutching the receiver against his chest. With a tremendous effort he pulled himself all the way out of the daze—vision, whatever it had been—and got hold of himself.

This time when he reached for the change on the ledge, he spilled half of it onto the floor. He plugged a dime into the slot and scrabbled through the telephone book until he found the hospital number. Dennis. Dennis would be there, Dennis always had been. Dennis wouldn’t let him down. Dennis would help.

The switchboard girl answered, and Arnie said, “Room Two-forty, please.”

The connection was made. The phone began to ring It rang… and rang… and rang. Just as he was about to give up, a brisk female voice said, “Second floor, C-Wing, who were you trying to reach?”

“Guilder,” Arnie said. “Dennis Guilder.”

“Mr Guilder’s in Physical Therapy right now, the female voice said. “You could reach him at eight o’clock.”

Arnie thought of telling her it was important—very important—but suddenly he was overwhelmed with a need to get out of the phone booth. Claustrophobia was like a giant’s hand pushing down on his chest. He could smell his own sweat. The smell was sour, bitter.

“Sir?”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll call back,” Arnie said. He broke the connection and nearly burst out of the booth, leaving his change scattered on the ledge and the floor. A few people turned around to look at him, mildly interested, and then turned back to their food again.

“Pizza’s ready,” the counterman said.

Arnie glanced up at the clock and saw he had been in the booth for almost twenty minutes. There was sweat all over his face. His armpits felt like a jungle. His legs were trembling—the muscles in his thighs felt as if they might simply give out and spill him onto the floor.

He paid for the pizza, nearly dropping his wallet as he tucked his three dollars in change back in.

“You okay?” the counterman asked. “You look a little white around the gills.”

“I’m fine,” Arnie said. Now he felt as if he might vomit. He snatched the pizza in its white box with the word GINO’s emblazoned across the top and fled into the cold sharp clarity of the night. The last of the clouds had blown away, and the stars twinkled like chipped diamonds. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking first at the stars and then at Christine, parked across the street, waiting faithfully.

She would never argue or complain, Arnie thought. She would never demand. You could enter her anytime and rest on her plush upholstery, rest in her warmth. She would never deny. She—she—

She loved him.

Yes; he sensed that was true. Just as he sometimes sensed that LeBay would not have sold her to anyone else, not for two hundred and fifty, not for two thousand. She had been sitting there waiting for the right buyer. One who would…

One who would love her for herself alone, that voice inside whispered.

“Yes. That was it; that was exactly it.

Arnie stood there with his pizza forgotten in his hands, white steam rising lazily from the grease-spotted box. He looked at Christine, and such a confusing whirl of emotions ran through him that there might have been a cyclone in his body, rearranging everything it did not simply destroy. Oh, he loved and loathed her, he hated her and cherished her, he needed her and needed to run from her, she was his and he was hers and

(I now pronounce you man and wife joined and sealed from this day forth for ever and ever, until death do you part)

But worst of all was the horror, the terrible numbing horror, the realization that… that…

(how did you hurt your back that night, Arnie? after Repperton—the late Clarence “Buddy” Repperton—and his buddies trashed her? How did you hurt your back so that now you have to wear this stinking brace all the time? How did you hurt your back?)

The answer rose and Arnie began to run, trying to beat the realization, to get to Christine before he saw the whole thing plain and went mad.

He ran for Christine, running his tangled emotions and some terrible drawing realization a foot race; he ran to her the way a hype runs for his works when the shakes and the jitters get so bad he can no longer think of anything but relief; he ran the way that the damned run to their appointed doom; he ran as a bridegroom runs to the place where his bride stands waiting.

He ran because inside Christine none of these things mattered—not his mother, father, Leigh, Dennis, or what he had done to his back that night when everyone was gone, that night after he had taken his almost totally destroyed Plymouth from the airport and back to Darnell’s, and after the place was empty he had put Christine’s transmission in neutral and pushed her, pushed her until she began to roll on her flat tyres, pushed her until she was out the door and he could hear the wind of November keening sharply around the wrecks and the abandonded hulks with their stellated glass and their ruptured gas tanks; he had pushed her until the sweat ran off him in rivers and his heart thudded like a runaway horse in his chest and his back cried out for mercy; he had pushed her, his body pumping as if in some hellish consummation; he had pushed her, and inside the milometer ran slowly backward, and some fifty feet beyond the door his back began to really throb, and he kept pushing, and then his back began to scream in protest, and he kept pushing, muscling it along on the flat, slashed tyres, his hands going numb, his back screaming, screaming, screaming. And then—

He reached Christine and flung himself inside, shuddering and panting. His pizza fell on the floor. He picked it up and set it on the seat, feeling calm slowly wash through him like a soothing balm. He touched the steering wheel, let his hands slip down it, tracing its delicious curve. He took one glove off and felt in his pocket for his keys. For LeBay’s keys.

He could still remember what had happened that night, but it did not seem horrible now; now, sitting behind Christine’s steering wheel, it seemed rather wonderful.

It had been a miracle.

He remembered how it had suddenly become easier to push the car because the tyres were healing themselves magically, kneading themselves together without a scar and then inflating. The broken glass had begun to re-assemble from nowhere, knitting itself upward with small, scratchy, crystalline sounds, The dents began to pop back out.

He simply pushed her until she was right enough to run, and then he had driven her, cruising between the rows until the milometer ran back past what Repperton and his friends had done. And then Christine was okay.

What could be so horrible about that?

“Nothing,” a voice said.

He looked around. Roland D. LeBay was sitting on the passenger side of the car, wearing a black double-breasted suit, a white shirt, a blue tie. A row of medals hung askew on one lapel of his suit-coat—it was the outfit he had been buried in, Arnie knew that even though he had never actually seen it. Only LeBay looked younger and tougher. A man you’d not want to fool with.

“Start her up,” LeBay said. “Get the heater going and let’s motorvate.”

“Sure,” Arnie said, and turned the key. Christine pulled out, tyres crunching on the packed snow. He had pushed her that night until almost all the damage had been repaired. No, not repaired—negated. Negated was the right word for what had happened. And then he had put her back in stall twenty, leaving the rest to do himself.

“Let’s have us some music,” the voice beside him said.

Arnie turned on the radio. Dion was singing” Donna the Prima Donna”.

“You going to eat that pizza, or what?” The voice seemed to be changing somehow.

“Sure,” Arnie said. “You want apiece?”

Leering: “I never say no to a piece of anything.” Arnie opened the pizza box with one hand and pulled a piece free. “Here you g—”

His eyes widened. The slice of pizza began to tremble, the long threads of cheese dangling down beginning to sway like the strands of a spiderweb broken by the wind.

It wasn’t LeBay sitting there anymore.

It was him.

It was Arnie Cunningham at roughly age fifty, not as old as LeBay had been when he and Dennis first met him on that August day, not that old, but getting there, friends and neighbours, getting there. His older self was wearing a slightly yellowed T-shirt and dirty, oil-smeared bluejeans. The glasses were hornrims, taped at one bow. The hair was cut short and receding. The grey eyes were muddy and bloodshot. The mouth had taken all the tucks of sour loneliness. Because this—this thing, apparition, whatever it was—it was alone. He felt that.

Alone except for Christine.

This version of himself and Roland D. LeBay could have been son and father: the resemblance was that great.

“You going to drive? Or are you going to stare at me?” this thing asked, and it suddenly began to age before Arnie’s stunned eyes. The iron-coloured hair went white, the T-shirt rippled and thinned, the body beneath twisted with age. The wrinkles raced across the face and then sank in like lines of acid. The eyes sank into their sockets and the corneas yellowed. Now only the nose thrust forward, and it was the face of some ancient carrion-eater, but still his face, oh, yes, still his.

“See anything green?” this sept—no, this octogenarian “Arnie Cunningham croaked, as its body twisted and writhed and withered on Christine’s red seat. “See anything green? See anything green? See anything—” The voice cracked and rose and whined into a shrill, senile treble, and now the skin broke open in sores and surface tumours and behind the glasses milky cataracts covered both eyes like shades being pulled down. It was rotting before his very eyes and the smell of it was what he had smelled in Christine before, what Leigh had smelled, only it was worse now, it was the high, gassy, gagging smell of high-speed decay, the smell of his own death, and Arnie began to whine as Little Richard came on the radio singing “Tutti Frutti,” and now the thing’s hair was failing out in gossamer white drifts and its collarbones poked through the shiny, stretched skin above the T-shirt’s sagging round collar, they poked through like grotesque white pencils. Its lips were shrivelling away from the final surviving teeth that leaned this way and that like tombstones, it was him, it was dead, and yet it lived—like Christine, it lived,

“See anything green?” it gibbered. “See anything green?”

Arnie began to scream.

39 JUNKINS AGAIN

Arnie pulled into Darnell’s Garage about an hour later. His rider—if there really had been a rider—was long gone. The smell was gone too; it had undoubtedly been just an illusion. If you hung around the shitters for long enough, Arnie reasoned, everything started to smell like shit. And that made them happy, of course.

Will was sitting behind his desk in his glassed-in office, eating a hoagie. He raised one drippy hand but didn’t come out. Arnie blipped his horn and parked.

It had all been some kind of dream. Simple as that. Some crazy kind of dream. Calling home, calling Leigh, trying to call Dennis and having that nurse tell him Dennis was in Physical Therapy—it was like being denied three times before the cock crew, or something. He had freaked a little bit. Anyone would have freaked, after the shitstorm he’d been through since August. It was all a question of perspective, after all, wasn’t it? All his life he had been one thing to people, and now he was coming out of his shell, turning into a normal everyday person with normal everyday concerns. It was not at all surprising that people should resent this, because when someone changed

(for better or worse, for richer or poorer) it was natural for people to get a little weird about it. It fucked up their perspective.

Leigh has spoken as if she thought he was crazy, and that was nothing but bullshit of the purest ray serene. He had been under strain, of course he had, but strain was a natural part of life. If Miss High-Box-Oh-So-Preppy Leigh Cabot thought otherwise, she was in for an abysmal fucking at the hands of that all-time champion rapist, Life. She’d probably end up taking Big Reds to get out of first gear in the morning and Nembies or ’Ludes to come down at night.

Ah, but he wanted her—even now, thinking about her, he felt a great, unaccountable, unnameable desire sweep through him like cold wind, making him squeeze Christine’s wheel fiercely in his hands. It was a hot wanting too great, too elemental, for naming. It was its own force.

But he was all right now. He felt he had… crossed the last bridge, or something.

He had come back to himself sitting in the middle of a narrow access road beyond the farthest parking-lot reaches of the Monroeville Mail—which meant he was roughly halfway to California. Getting out, looking behind the car, he had seen a hole smashed through a snowbanks and there was melting snow sprayed across Christine’s hood. Apparently he had lost control, gone skating across the lot (which, even with the Christmas shopping season in full swing, was mercifully empty this far out), and had crashed through the bank. Damn lucky he hadn’t been in an accident. Damn lucky.

He had sat there for a while, listening to the radio and looking through the windscreen at the half-moon floating overhead. Bobby Helms had come on singing “Jingle Bell Rock”, a Sound of the Season, as the deejays said, and he had smiled a little, feeling better. He couldn’t remember what exactly it was that he had seen (or thought he had seen), and he didn’t really want to. Whatever it had been, it was the first and last time. He was quite sure of that. People had gotten him imagining things. They’d probably be delighted if they knew… but he wasn’t going to give them that satisfaction.

Things were going to be better all the way around. He would mend his fences at home—in fact, could start tonight by watching some TV with his folks, just like in the old days. And he would win Leigh back. If she didn’t like the car, no matter how weird her reasons were, fine. Maybe he would, even buy another car sometime soon and tell her he had traded Christine in. He could keep Christine here, rent space. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. And Will. This was going to be his last run for Will, this coming weekend. That bullshit had gone just about far enough; he could feel it. Let Will think he was a chicken if that’s what he wanted to think. A felony rap for interstate transport of unlicensed cigarettes and alcohol wouldn’t look all that hot on his college application, would it? A Federal felony rap. No. Not too cool.

He laughed a little. He did feel better. Purged. On his way over to the garage he ate his pizza even though it was cold. He was ravenous. It had struck him a bit peculiar that one piece was gone—in fact, it made him a bit uneasy—but he dismissed it. He had probably eaten it during that strange blank period, or maybe even thrown it out the window. Whoo, that had been spooky. No more of that shit. And he had laughed again, this time a little less shakily.

Now he got out of the car, slammed the door, and started toward Will’s office to find out what he had for him to do this evening. It suddenly occurred to him that tomorrow was the last day of school before the Christmas vacation, and that put an extra spring in his step.

That was when the side door, the one beside the big carport door, opened and a man let himself in. It was Junkins. Again.

He saw Arnie looking at him and raised a hand. “Hi, Arnie.”

Arnie glanced at Will. Through the glass, Will shrugged and went on eating his hoagie.

“Hello,” Arnie said. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Junkins said. He smiled, and then his eyes slid past Arnie to Christine, appraising, looking for damage. “Do you want to do something for me?”

“Not fucking likely,” Arnie said. He could feel his head starting to throb with rage again.

Rudy Junkins smiled, apparently unoffended.

“I just dropped by. How you been?”

He stuck out his hand. Arnie only looked at it. Not embarrassed in the slightest, Junkins dropped his hand, walked around to Christine, and began examining her again. Arnie watched him, his lips pressed together so tightly they were white. He felt a fresh pulse of anger each time Junkins dropped one of his hands onto Christine.

“Look, maybe you ought to buy a season ticket or something,” Arnie said. “Like to the Steelers games.”

Junkins turned and looked at him questioningly.

“Never mind,” Arnie said sullenly.

Junkins went on looking. “You know,” he said, it’s a hell of a strange thing, what happened to Buddy Repperton and those other two boys, isn’t it?”

Fuck it, Arnie thought. I’m not going to fool around with this shitter.

“I was in Philadelphia. Chess tourney.”

“I know,” Junkins said.

“Jesus! You’re really checking me out!”

Junkins walked back to Arnie. There was no smile on his face now. “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “I’m checking you out. Three of the boys I believe were involved in vandalizing your car are now dead, along with a fourth boy who was apparently just along for the ride on Tuesday night. That’s a pretty big coincidence. It’s nine miles too big for me. You bet I’m checking you out.”

Arnie stared at him, surprised out of his anger, uncertain. “I thought it was an accident… that they were liquored up and speeding and—”

“There was another car involved,” Junkins said.

“How do you know that?”

“There were tracks in the snow, for one thing. Unfortunately, the wind had blurred them too much for us to be able to get a decent photo. But one of the barriers at the Squantic Hills State Park gate was broken, and we found traces of red paint on it. Buddy’s Camaro wasn’t red. It was blue.”

He measured Arnie with his eyes.

“We also found traces of red paint embedded in Moochie Welch’s skin, Arnie. Can you dig that? Embedded. Do you know how hard a car has to hit a guy to embed paint in his skin?”

“You ought to go out there and start counting red cars,” Arnie said coldly. “You’ll be up to twenty before you get to Basin Drive, I guarantee it.”

“You bet,” Junkins said. “But we sent our samples to the FBI lab in Washington, where they have samples of every shade of paint they ever used in Detroit. We got the results back today. Any idea what they were? Want to guess?”

Arnie’s heart was thudding dully in his chest; there was a corresponding beat at his temples. “Since you’re here, I’d guess it was Autumn Red. Christine’s colour.”

“Give that man a Kewpie doll,” Junkins said. He lit a cigarette and looked at Arnie through the smoke. He had abandoned any pretence of good humour; his gaze was stony.

Arnie clapped his hands to his head in an exaggerated gesture of exasperation. “Autumn Red, great. Christine’s a custom job but there were Fords from 1959 to 1963 painted Autumn Red, and Thunderbirds, and Chevrolet offered that shade from 1962 to 1964, and for a while in the mid-fifties you could get a Rambler painted Autumn Red. I’ve been working on my ’58 for half a year now, I get the car books; you can’t do work on an old car without the books, or you’re screwed before you start. Autumn Red was a popular choice. I know it”—he looked at Junkins fixedly—“and you know it, too. Don’t you?”

Junkins said nothing; he only went on looking at Arnie in that fixed, stony, unsettling way. Arnie had never seen looked at in that way by anyone in his life, but he recognized the gaze, He supposed anyone would. It was a look of strong, frank suspicion. It scared him. A few months ago—even a few weeks ago—that was probably all it would have done. But now it made him furious as well.

“You’re really reaching. Just what the hell have you got against me anyway, Mr Junkins? Why are you on my ass?” Junkins laughed and walked around in a large half-circle. The place was entirely empty except for the two of them out here and Will in his office, finishing his hoagie and licking olive oil off his hands and still watching them closely.

“What have I got against you?” He said. “How does first-degree murder sound to you, Arnie? Does that grab you with any force?”

Arnie grew very still.

“Don’t worry,” Junkins said, still walking. “No big tough cop scene. No menacing threats about going downtown—except in this case downtown would be Harrisburg. No Miranda card. Everything is still fine for our hero, Arnold Cunningham.”

“I don’t understand any of what you’re—”

“You… understand. PLENTY!” Junkins roared at him. He had stopped next to a giant yellow hulk of a truck—another of Johnny Pomberton’s dumpsters-in-the-making. He stared at Arnie. “Three of the kids who beat on your car are dead. Autumn Red paint samples were taken at both crime scenes, leading us to believe that the vehicle the perpetrator used in both cases was at least in part Autumn Red. And gee whiz! It just turns out that the car those kids trashed is mostly Autumn Red. And you stand there and push your glasses up on your nose and tell me you don’t understand what I’m talking about.”

“I was in Philadelphia when it happened,” Arnie said quietly. “Don’t you get that? Don’t you get that at all?”

“Kiddo,” Junkins said flipping his cigarette away, “that’s the worst part of it. That’s the part that really stinks.”

“I wish you’d get out of here or put me under arrest or something. Because I’m supposed to punch in and do some work.”

“For now,” Junkins said, “talk is all I’ve got. The first time—when Welch got killed—you were supposed to be home in bed.”

“Pretty thin, I know,” Arnie said. “Believe me, if I’d known this shit was going to come down on my head, I would have hired a sick friend to sit up with me.”

“Oh, no—that was good,” Junkins said. “Your mother and father had no cause to doubt your tale. I could tell that from speaking to them. And alibis—the true ones—usually have more holes than a Salvation Army suit. It’s when they start to look like suits of armour that I get nervous.”

“Holy Jumping Jesus!” Arnie almost screamed. “It was a fucking chess meet! I’ve been in the chess club for four years now!”

“Until today,” Junkins said, and Arnie grew still again. Junkins nodded. “Oh yeah, I talked to the club advisor. Herbert Slawson. He says that the first three years you never missed a meeting, even came to a couple with a low-grade case of the flu. You were his star player. Then, this year, you were spotty right from the start—”

“I had my car to work on… and I got a girl—”

“He said you missed the first three tourneys, and he was pretty surprised when your name turned up on the trip sheet for the Northern States meet. He thought you’d lost all your interest in the club.”

“I told you—”

“Yes, you did. Too busy. Cars and girls, just what makes most kids too busy. But you regained your interest long enough to go to Philly—and then you dropped out. That strikes me as very odd.”

“I can’t see anything funny about it,” Arnie said, but his voice seemed distant, almost lost in the surf-roar of blood in his ears.

“Bullshit. It looks as if you knew it was coming down and set yourself up with an airtight alibi.”

The roar in his head had even assumed the steady, wavelike beats of surf, each beat accompanied by a dull thrust of pain. He was getting a headache—why wouldn’t this monstrous man with his prying brown eyes just go away? None of it was true, none of it, He hadn’t set anything up, not an alibi, not anything. He had been as surprised as anyone else when he read in the paper what had happened. Of course he had been. There was nothing strange going on, unless it was this lunatic’s paranoia, and

(how did you hurt your back anyway, Arnie? and by the way, do you see anything green? do you see) he closed his eyes and for a moment the world seemed to lurch out of its orbit and he saw that green, grinning, rotting face floating before him, saying: Start her up. Get the heater going and let’s motorvate. And while we’re at it, let’s get the shitters that wrecked our car. Let’s grease the little cockknockers, kid, what do you say? Let’s hit them so fucking hard the corpse-cutter down at city, hospital will have to pull the paint-chips out of their carcasses with pliers. What do you say? Find some doowop music on the radio and let’s cruise. Let’s—

He groped back behind him, touched Christine—her hard, cool, reassuring surface—and things dropped back into place again. He opened his eyes.

“There’s only one other thing, really,” Junkins said, “and it’s very subjective. Nothing you could put on a report. You’re different this time, Arnie. Harder, somehow. It’s almost as if you’ve put on twenty years.”

Arnie laughed, and was relieved to hear it sounded quite natural. “Mr Junkins, you’ve got a screw loose.”

Junkins didn’t join him in his laughter. “Uh-huh. I know it. The whole thing is screwy—screwier than anything I’ve investigated in the ten years I’ve been a detective. Last time, I felt like I could reach you, Arnie. I felt you were… I don’t know. Lost, unhappy, groping around, trying to get out. Now I don’t feel that at all. I almost feel like I’m talking to a different person. Not a very nice one.”

“I’m done-talking to you,” Arnie said abruptly, and began walking toward the office.

“I want to know what happened,” Junkins called after him. “And I’m going to find out. Believe me.”

“Do me a favour and stay away from here,” Arnie said. “You’re crazy.”

He let himself into the office, closed the door behind him, and noticed his hands weren’t shaking at all. The room was stuffy with the smells of cigar and olive oil and garlic. He crossed in front of Will without speaking, took his time-card out of the rack, and punched in: ka-thud. Then he looked through the glass window and saw Junkins standing there, looking at Christine. Will said nothing. Arnie could hear the noisy engine of the big man’s respiration. A couple of minutes later Junkins left.

“Cop,” Will said, and ripped out a long belch. It sounded like a chainsaw.

“Yeah.”

“Repperton?”

“Yeah. He thinks I had something to do with it.”

“Even though you were in Philly?”

Arnie shook his head. “He doesn’t even seem to care about that.”

He’s a smart cop then, Will thought. He knows the facts are wrong, and his intuition tells him there’s something even wronger than that, so he’s gotten further with it than most cops ever would, but he could spend a million years and not get all the way to the truth. He thought of the empty car driving itself into stall twenty like some weird wind-up toy. The empty ignition slot turning over to START, The engine revving once, like a warning snarl, and then failing off.

And thinking of these things, Will did not trust himself to look Arnie in the face, even though his own experience in routine deceit was nearly lifelong.

“I don’t want to send you to Albany if the cops are watching you.”

“I don’t care if you send me to Albany or not, but you don’t have to worry about the heat. He’s the only cop I’ve seen, and he’s crazy. He’s not interested in anything but two cases of hit-and-run.”

Now Will’s eyes did meet Arnie’s: Arnie’s grey and distant, Will’s a faded no-colour, the corneas a dim yellow; they were the eyes of an ancient tomcat who has seen a thousand mice turned inside out.

“He’s interested in you,” he said. “I’d better send Jimmy.”

“You like the way Jimmy drives, do you?”

Will looked at Arnie for a moment and then sighed. Okay,” he said. “But if you see that cop, you back off. And if you get caught holding a bag, Cunningham, it’s your bag. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” Arnie said. “Do you want me to do some work tonight, or what?”

“There’s a ’77 Buick in forty-nine. Pull the starter motor. Check the solenoid. If it seems okay, pull that too.”

Arnie nodded and left. Will’s thoughtful eyes drifted from his retreating back to Christine. He had no business sending him to Albany this weekend and he knew it. The kid knew it too, but he was going to push ahead anyway. He had said he’d go, and he was now going to by-God do it. And if anything happened, the kid would stand up. Will was sure of it. There was a time when he surely wouldn’t have done, but that time was past now.

He had heard it all on the intercom.

Junkins had been right.

The kid was harder now.

Will began to look at the kid’s ’58 again. Arnie would be taking Will’s Chrysler to New York. While he was gone, Will would watch Christine. He would watch Christine and see what happened.

40 ARNIE IN TROUBLE

Rudolph Junkins and Rick Mercer of the Pennsylvania State Police detective division sat drinking coffee the following afternoon in a glum little office with paint peeling from the walls. Outside, a depressing mixture of snow and sleet was falling.

“I’m pretty sure this is going to be the weekend,” Junkins said. “That Chrysler has rolled every four or five weeks for the last eight months.”

“Just understand that busting Darnell and whatever bee you’ve got in your bonnet about that kid are two different things.”

“They’re both the same thing to me,” Junkins replied. “The kid knows something. If I get him rattled, I may find out what it is.”

“You think he had an accomplice? Someone who used his car and killed those kids while he was at the chess tourney?”

Junkins shook his head. “No, goddammit. The kid has got exactly one good friend, and he’s in the hospital. I don’t know what I think, except that the car was involved… and he was involved too.”

Junkins put his Styrofoam coffee cup down and pointed at the man on the other side of the desk.

“Once we get that place closed down, I want a six-pack of lab technicians to go over it from stem to stern, inside and out. I want it up on a lift, I want it checked for dents bumps, repaint… and for blood. That’s what I really want, Rick. Just one drop of blood.”

“You don’t like that kid much, do you?” Rick asked.

Junkins uttered a bewildered little laugh. “You know, the first time I kind of did. I liked him and I felt sorry for him. I felt like maybe he was covering for somebody else who had something on him. But this time I didn’t like him at all.” He considered.

“And I didn’t like that car, either. The way he kept touching it every time I thought I had him on the ropes. It was spooky.”

Rick said, “As long as you remember that Darnell is the guy I’ve got to bust. No one in Harrisburg has the slightest interest in your kid.”

“I’ll remember,” Junkins said. He picked up his coffee again and looked at Rick grimly. “Because he’s a means to the end. I’m going to nail the person who killed those kids if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

“It may not even go down this weekend,” Rick said.

But it did.

Two plainclothes cops from Pennsylvania’s State Felony Squad sat in the cab of a four-year-old Datsun pickup on the morning of Saturday, December 16, watching as Will Darnell’s black Chrysler rolled out of the big door and into the street. A light drizzle was failing; it was not quite cold enough to be sleet. It was one of those misty days when it is impossible to tell where the lowering clouds end and the actual mist begins. The Chrysler was quite properly showing its parking lights. Arnie Cunningham was a safe driver.

One of the plainclothesmen lifted a walkie-talkie to his mouth and spoke into it. He just came out in Darnell’s car. You guys stay on your toes.”

They followed the Chrysler to I-76. When they saw Arnie get on the eastbound ramp with its Harrisburg sign, they turned up the westbound ramp, toward Ohio, and reported. They would get off I-76 one exit down the line and return to their original position near Darnell’s Garage.

“Okay Junkins voice came back let’s make an omelette.”

Twenty minutes later, as Arnie was cruising east at a sedate and legal 50, three cops with all the right paperwork in hand knocked on the door of William Upshaw, who lived in the very much upscale suburb of Sewickley. Upshaw answered the door in his bathrobe. From behind came the cartoon squawks of Saturday-morning TV.

“Who is it, honey?” his wife called from the kitchen.

Upshaw looked at the papers, which were court orders and felt that he might faint. One ordered that all of Upshaw’s tax records relating to Will Darnell (an individual) and Will Darnell (a corporation) be impounded. These papers bore the signature of the Pennsylvania Attorney General and a Superior Court judge.

“Who is it, hon?” his wife asked again, and one of his kids came to look, all big eyes.

Upshaw tried to speak and could raise only a dusty croak. It had come. He had dreamed about it, and it had finally come, The house in Sewickley had not protected him from it; the woman he kept at a safe distance in King of Prussia had not protected him from it; it was here: he read it in the smooth faces of these cops in their off-the-rack Anderson Little suits. Worst of all, one of them was Federal—Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. He produced a second ID, proclaiming him an agent of something called the Federal Drug Control Task Force.

“Our information is that you keep an office in your home,” the Federal cop said. He looked—what? Twenty-six? Thirty? Had he ever had to worry about what you were going to do when you had three kids and a wife who liked nice things maybe a little too much? Bill Upshaw didn’t think so. When you had those things to think about, your face didn’t stay that smooth. Your face only stayed that smooth when you could indulge in the luxury of grand thoughts—law and order, right and wrong, good guys and bad guys.

He opened his mouth to answer the Federal cop’s question and produced only another dusty croak.

“Is this information correct?” the Federal cop asked patiently.

“Yes,” Bill Upshaw croaked.

“And another office at 100 Frankstown Road in Monroeville?”

“Yes.”

“Hon, who is it?” Amber asked, and came into the hallway. She saw the three men standing on the stoop and pulled the neck of her housecoat closed. The cartoons blared.

Upshaw thought suddenly, almost with relief, It’s the end of everything.

The kid who had come out to see who had come to visit so early on a Saturday morning suddenly burst into tears and fled for the safety of the SuperFriends on channel 4.

When Rudy Junkins received the news that Upshaw had been served and that all the papers pertaining to Darnell, both at Upshaw’s Sewickley home and his Monroeville office, had been impounded, he led half a dozen state cops in what he supposed would have been called a raid in the old days. Even during the holiday season the garage was moderately busy on Saturday (although it was by no means the bustling place it became on summer weekends), and when Junkins raised a battery-powered loudhailer to his lips and began to use it, perhaps two dozen heads whipped around. They would have conversation enough out of this to last them into the new year.

“This is the Pennsylvania State Police!” Junkins cried into the loudhailer. The words echoed and bounced. He found, even at this instant, that his eyes were drawn to the white-over-red Plymouth sitting empty in stall twenty. He had handled half a dozen murder weapons in his time, sometimes at the scene, more frequently in the witness box, but just looking at that car made him feel cold.

Gitney, the IRS man who had come along for this particular sleigh-ride, was frowning at him to go on. None of you know what this is about. None of you. But he raised the loudhailer to his lips again.

“This place of business is closed! I repeat, this place of business is closed! You may take your vehicles if they are in running order—if not, please leave quickly and quietly! This place is closed!”

The loudhailer made an amplified click as he turned it off.

He looked toward the office and saw that Will Darnell was talking on the telephone, an unlit cigar jammed in his face. Jimmy Sykes was standing by the Coke machine, his simple face a picture of confused dismay—he didn’t look much different from Bill Upshaw’s kid at the moment before he burst into tears.

“Do you understand your rights as I have read them to you?” The cop in charge was Rick Mercer. Behind them, the garage was empty except for four uniformed cops, who were doing paperwork on the cars which had been impounded when the garage was closed.

“Yeah,” Will said. His face was composed; the only sign of his upset was his deepening wheeze, the fast rise and fall of his big chest under his open-throated white shirt, the way he held his aspirator constantly in one hand.

“Do you have anything to say to us at this time?” Mercer asked.

“Not until my lawyer gets here.”

“Your lawyer can meet us in Harrisburg,” Junkins said.

Will glanced at Junkins contemptuously and said nothing. Outside, more uniformed police had finished affixing seals to every door and window of the garage except for the small side door. Until the state of impound ceased, all traffic would use that door.

“This is the craziest thing I ever heard of,” Will Darnell said at last.

“It’ll get crazier,” Mercer said, smiling sincerely. “You’re going away for a very long time, Will. Maybe someday they’ll put you in charge of the prison motor pool.”

“I know you,” Will said, looking at him. “Your name is Mercer. I knew your father well. He was the crookedest cop that ever came out of King’s County.”

The blood fell out of Rick Mercer’s face and he raised his hand.

“Stop it, Rick,” Junkins said.

“Sure,” Will said. “You guys have your fun. Make your jokes about the prison motor pool. I’ll be back here doing business in two weeks. And if you don’t know it, you’re even stupider than you look.”

He glanced around at them, his eyes intelligent, sardonic… and trapped. Abruptly he raised his aspirator to his mouth and breathed in deeply.

“Get this bag of shit out of here,” Mercer said. He was still white.

“Are you all right?” Junkins asked. They were sitting in an unmarked state Ford half an hour later. The sun had decided to come out and shone blindingly on melting snow and wet streets. Darnell’s Garage sat silent. Darnell’s records—and Cunningham’s street-rod Plymouth—were safely penned up inside.

“That crack he made about my father,” Mercer said heavily. “My father shot himself, Rudy. Blew his head off. And I always thought… in college I read…” He shrugged. “Lots of cops eat the gun. Melvin Purvis did it, you know. He was the man who got Dillinger. But you wonder.” Mercer lit a cigarette and drew smoke downstairs in a long, shuddery breath.

“He didn’t know anything,” Junkins said.

“The fuck he didn’t,” Mercer said. He unrolled his window and threw the cigarette out. He unclipped the mike under the dash. “Home, this is Mobile Two.”

“Ten-four, Mobile Two.”

“What’s happening with our carrier pigeon?”

“He’s on Interstate Eighty-four coming up on Port Jervis.” Port Jervis was the crossover point between Pennsylvania and New York.

“New York is all ready?”

“Affirmative.”

“You tell them again that I want him northeast of Middletown before they grab him, and his toll-ticket taken in evidence.”

“Ten-four.”

Mercer put the mike back and smiled thinly. “Once he crosses into New York, there’s not a question in the world about it being Federal—but we’ve still got first dibs. Isn’t that beautiful?”

Junkins didn’t answer. There was nothing beautiful about it—from Darnell with his aspirator to Mercer’s father eating his gun, there was nothing beautiful about it. Junkins was filled with a spooky feeling of inevitability, a feeling that the ugly things were not ending but only just beginning to happen. He felt halfway through a dark story that might prove too terrible to finish. Except he had to finish it now, didn’t he? Yes.

The terrible feeling, the terrible image persisted: that the first time he had talked to Arnie Cunningham, he had been talking to a drowning man, and the second time he had talked to him, the drowning had happened—and he was talking to a corpse.

The cloud cover over western New York was breaking, and Arnie’s spirits began to rise. It always felt good to get away from Libertyville, away from… from everything. Not even the knowledge that he had contraband in the boot could quench that feeling of lift. And at least it wasn’t dope this time. Far in the back of his mind—hardly even acknowledged, but there—was the idle speculation about how things would be different and how his life would change if he just dumped the cigarettes and kept on going. If he just left the entire depressing mess behind.

But of course he wouldn’t. Leaving Christine after he had put so much into her was of course impossible.

He turned up the radio and hummed along with something current. The sun, weakened by December but still trying to be bold, broke cover entirely and Arnie grinned.

He was still grinning when the New York State Police car pulled up beside him in the passing lane and paced him. The loudspeaker on top began to chant, “This is for the Chrysler! Pull over, Chrysler! Pull over!”

Arnie looked over, the grin fading from his lips. He stared into a pair of black sunglasses. Copglasses. The terror that seized him was deeper than he would have believed any emotion could be—and it wasn’t for himself. His mouth went totally dry. His mind went into a blurring overdrive. He saw himself tramping the gas pedal and running for it, and perhaps he would have done it if he had been driving Christine… but he wasn’t. He saw Will Darnell telling him that if he got caught holding a bag, it was his bag. Most of all he saw Junkins, Junkins with his sharp brown eyes, and knew this was Junkins’s doing.

He wished Rudolph Junkins was dead.

“Pull over, Chrysler! I’m not talking to hear my own voice! Pull over right now!”

Can’t say anything, Arnie thought incoherently as he veered over into the breakdown lane. His balls were crawling, his stomach churning madly. He could see his own eyes in the rearview, wall-eyed with fear behind his glasses—not for him, though. Not for him. Christine. He was afraid for Christine. What they might do to Christine.

His panic-stricken mind spun up a kaleidoscope of jumbled images. College application forms with the words REJECTED—CONVICTED FELON stamped across them. Prison bars, blued steel. A judge bending down from a high bench, his face white and accusing. Big bull queers in a prison yard looking for fresh meat. Christine riding the conveyor into the car-crusher in the junkyard behind the garage.

And then, as he stopped the Chrysler and put it in park, the State Police car pulling in behind him (and another, appearing like magic, pulling in ahead of him), a thought came from nowhere, full of cold comfort: Christine can take care of herself.

Another thought came as the cops got out and came toward him, one holding a search warrant in his hand. It also seemed to come from nowhere, but it reverberated in Roland D. LeBay’s raspy, old man’s tones:

And she’ll take care of you, boy. All you got to do is go on believing in her and she’ll take care of you.

Arnie opened the car door and got out a moment before one of the cops could open it.

“Arnold Richard Cunningham?” one of the cops asked. “Yes, indeed,” Arnie said calmly. “Was I speeding?”

“No, son,” one of the others said. “But you are in a world of hurt, all the same.”

The first cop stepped forward as formally as a career Army officer. “I have a duly executed document here permitting the search of this 1966 Chrysler Imperial in the name of the People of New York State and of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and of the United States of America. Further—”

“Well, that just about covers the motherfucking waterfront, doesn’t it?” Arnie said. His back flared dully, and he jammed his hands against it.

The cop’s eyes widened slightly at the old voice coming out of this kid, but then he went on.

“Further, to seize any contraband found in the course of this search in the name of the People of New York State and of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and of the United States of America.”

“Fine,” Arnie said. None of it seemed real. Blue lights flashed a confusion. People passing in their cars turned to look, but he found he had no desire to turn from them, to hide his face, and that was something of a relief.

“Give me the keys, kid,” one of the cops said.

“Why don’t you just get them yourself, you shitter?” Arnie said.

“You’re not helping yourself, kiddo,” the cop said, but he looked startled and a little fearful all the same; for a moment the kid’s voice had deepened and roughened and he had sounded forty years older and a pretty tough customer—nothing like the skinny runt he saw before him at all.

He leaned in, got the keys, and three of the cops immediately headed for the boot. They know, Arnie thought, resigned. At least this had nothing to do with Junkins’s obsession with Buddy Repperton and Moochie Welch and the others (at least not directly, he amended cautiously); this smelled like a well-planned and well-coordinated operation against Will’s smuggling operations from Libertyville into New York and New England.

“Kid,” one of the cops said, “would you like to answer some questions or make a statement? If you think you would, I’ll read you the Miranda right now.”

“No,” Arnie said calmly. “I don’t have anything to say.”

“Things could go a lot easier with you.”

“That’s coercion,” Arnie said, smiling a little. “Watch out or you’ll put a big fat hole in your own case.”

The cop flushed. “If you want to be an asshole, that’s your lookout.”

The Chrysler boot was open. They had pulled out the spare tyre, the jack, and several boxes of small parts springs, nuts, bolts, and the like. One of the cops was almost entirely in the boot; only his blue-grey-clad legs stuck out. For a moment Arnie hoped vaguely that they wouldn’t find the under-compartment; then he dismissed the thought—it was just the childish part of him, the part he now wished burned away, because all that part of him did lately was hurt. They would find it. The quicker they found it, the quicker this nasty roadside scene would end.

As if some god had heard his wish and decided to grant it posthaste, the cop in the boot called triumphantly, “Cigarettes!”

“All right,” the cop who had read the warrant said. “Close it up.” He turned to Arnie and read him the Miranda warning. “Do you understand your rights as I have read them to you?”

“Yes,” Arnie said.

“Do you want to make a statement?”

“No.”

“Get in the car, son. You’re under arrest.”

I’m under arrest, Arnie thought, and almost brayed laughter, the thought was so foolish. This was all a dream and he would wake up soon. Under arrest. Being hustled to a State Police cruiser. People looking at him—

Desperate, childish tears, hot salt, welled up in his throat and closed it.

His chest hitched—once, twice.

The cop who had read him his rights touched his shoulder and Arnie shrugged it off with a kind of desperation. He felt that if he could get deep down inside himself quickly enough, he would be okay—but sympathy might drive him mad.

“Don’t touch me!”

“You do it the way you want to do it, son,” the cop said, removing his hand. He opened the cruiser’s rear door for Arnie and handed him in.

Do you cry in dreams? Of course you could—hadn’t he read about people waking up from sad dreams with tears on their cheeks? But, dream or no dream, he wasn’t going to cry.

Instead he would think of Christine. Not of his mother or father, not of Leigh or Will Darnell, not of Slawson—all the miserable shitters who had betrayed him.

He would think of Christine.

Arnie closed his eyes and leaned his pale, gaunt face, forward into his hands and did just that. And as always, thinking about Christine made things better. After a while he was able to straighten up and look out at the passing scenery and think about his position.

Michael Cunningham put the telephone back into its cradle slowly—with infinite care—as if to do less might cause it to explode and spray his upstairs study with jagged black hooks of shrapnel.

He sat back in the swivel chair behind his desk, on which there sat his IBM Correcting Selectric II typewriter, an ashtray with the blue-and-gold legend HORLICKS UNIVERSITY barely legible across the dirty bottom, and the manuscript of his third book, a study of the ironclads Monitor and Merrimac. He had been halfway through a page when the telephone rang. Now he flipped the paper release on the right side of the typewriter and pulled the page bonelessly out from under the roller, observing its slight curve clinically. He put it down on top of the manuscript, which was now little more than a jungle of pencilled-in corrections.

Outside, a cold wind whined around the house. The morning’s cloudy warmth had given way to a frigid, clear December evening. The earlier melt had frozen tight, and his son was being held in Albany on charges of what amounted to smuggling: no Mr Cunningham it is not marijuana it is cigarettes, two hundred cartons of Winston cigarettes with no tax stamps.

From downstairs he could hear the whir of Regina’s sewing machine. He would have to get up now, go to the door and open it, go down the hall to the stairs, walk down the stairs, walk into the dining room, then into the plant-lined little room that had once been a laundry but which was now a sewing room, and stand there while Regina looked up at him (she would be wearing her half-glasses for the close work), and say “Regina, Arnie has been arrested by the New York State Police.”

Michael attempted to begin this process by getting up from his desk chair, but the chair seemed to sense he was temporarily off-guard. It swivelled and rolled backward on its casters at the same moment, and Michael had to clutch the edge of his desk to keep from failing. He slipped heavily back into the chair, heart thudding with painful rapidity in his chest.

He was struck suddenly by such a complex wave of despair and sorrow that he groaned aloud and grabbed his forehead, squeezing his temples. The old thoughts swarmed back in, as predictable as summer mosquitoes and just as maddening. Six months ago, things had been okay. Now his son was sitting in a jail cell somewhere. What were the watershed moments? How could he, Michael, have changed things? What was the history of it, exactly? Where had the sickness started to creep in?

“Jesus—”

He squeezed harder, listening to the winter-whine outside the windows. He and Arnie had put the storms on just last month. That had been a good day, hadn’t it? First Arnie holding the ladder and looking up, then him down and Arnie up there, him shouting for Arnie to be careful, the wind in his hair and dead brown leaves blowing over his shoes, their colours gone. Sure, it had been a good day. Even after that beastly car had come, seeming to overshadow everything in their son’s life like a fatal disease, there had been some good days. Hadn’t there?

“Jesus,” he said again in a weak, teary voice that he despised.

Unbidden images rose behind his eyes. Colleagues looking at him sideways, maybe whispering in the faculty club. Discussions at cocktail parties in which his name bobbed uneasily up and down like a waterlogged body. Arnie wouldn’t be eighteen for almost two months and he supposed that meant his name couldn’t be printed in the paper, but everyone would still know. Word got around.

Suddenly, crazily, he saw Arnie at four, astride a red trike he and Regina had gotten at a rummage sale (Arnie at four had called them “Momma’s rubbage sales”). The trike’s red paint was flaked with scales of rust, the tyres were bald, but Arnie had loved it; he would have taken that trike to bed with him, if he could. Michael closed his eyes and saw Arnie riding up and down the sidewalk, wearing his blue corduroy jumper, his hair flopping in his eyes, and then his mind’s eye blinked or wavered or did something and the rusty rubbage-sale trike was Christine, her red paint scummed with rust, her windows milky-white with age.

He gritted his teeth together. Someone looking in might have thought he was smiling crazily. He waited until he had some kind of control, and then got up and went downstairs to tell Regina what had happened. He would tell her and she would think of what they were going to do, just as she always had; she would steal the forward motion from him, taking whatever sorry balm that actually doing things had to give, and leave him with only sick sorrow and the knowledge that now his son was someone else.

41 THE COMING OF THE STORM

The first of that winter’s great northeast storms came to Libertyville on Christmas Eve, beating its way across the upper third of the US, on a wide and easily predictable storm track. The day began in bright thirty-degree sunshine, but morning deejays were already cheerfully predicting doom and gloom, urging those who had not finished their last-minute shopping to do so by mid-afternoon. Those planning trips to the old homestead for an old-fashioned Christmas were urged to rethink their plans if the trip could not be made in four to six hours.

“If you don’t want to be spending Christmas Day in the breakdown lane of I-76 somewhere between Bedford and Carlisle, I’d leave early or not at all,” the FM-104 jock advised his listening audience (a large part of which was too stoned to even consider going anyplace), and then resumed the Christmas Block Party with Springsteen’s version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”.

By 11:00 A.M… when Dennis Guilder finally left Libertyville Community Hospital (as per hospital regulations, he was not allowed on his crutches until he was actually out of the building; until then he was pushed along in a wheelchair by Elaine), the sky had begun to scum over with clouds and there was an eerie fairy ring around the sun. Dennis crossed the parking lot carefully on his crutches, his mother and father bookending him nervously in spite of the fact that the lot had been scrupulously salted free of even the slightest trace or snow and ice. He paused by the family car, turning his face up slightly into the freshening breeze. Being outside was like a resurrection. He felt he could stand here for hours and not have enough of it.

By one o’clock that afternoon, the Cunningham family station wagon had reached the outskirts of Ligonier, ninety miles east of Libertyville. The sky had gone a smooth and pregnant slate-grey by this time, and the temperature had dropped six degrees.

It had been Arnie’s idea that they not cancel the traditional Christmas Eve visit with Aunt Vicky and Uncle Steve, Regina’s sister and her husband. The two families had created a casual, loosely rotating ritual over the years, with Vicky and Steve coming to their house some years, the Cunninghams going over to Ligonier on others. This year’s trip had been arranged in early December. It had been cancelled after what Regina stubbornly called “Arnie’s trouble”, but at the beginning of last week, Arnie had begun restlessly agitating for the trip.

At last, after a long telephone conversation with her sister on Wednesday, Regina gave in to Arnie’s wish mostly because Vicky had seemed calm and understanding and most of all not very curious about what had happened. That was important to Regina—more important than she would perhaps ever be able to say. It seemed to her that in the eight days since Arnie had been arrested in New York, she had had to cope with a seemingly endless flood of rancid curiosity masquerading as sympathy. Talking to Vicky on the telephone, she had finally broken down and cried. It was the first and only time since Arnie had been arrested in New York that she had allowed herself that bitter luxury. Arnie had been in bed asleep. Michael, who was drinking much too much and passing it off as “the spirit of the season”, had gone down to O’Malley’s for a beer or two with Paul Strickland, another factory reject in the game of faculty politics. It would probably end up being six beers, or eight, or ten. And if she went upstairs to his study later on, she would find him sitting bolt upright behind his desk, looking out into the dark, his eyes dry but bloodshot. if she tried to speak with him, his conversation would be horribly confused and centred too much in the past. She supposed her husband might be having a very quiet mental breakdown. She would not allow herself the same luxury (for so, in her own hurt and angry state, she thought it), and every night her mind ticked and whirred with plans and schemes until three or four o’clock, All these thoughts and schemes were aimed at one end: “Getting us over this.” The only two ways she would allow her mind to approach what had happened were deliberately vague. She thought about “Arnie’s trouble” and “Getting us over this”.

But, talking to Vicky on the phone a few days after her son’s arrest, Regina’s iron control had wavered briefly. She cried on Vicky’s shoulder long-distance, and Vicky had been calmly comforting, making Regina hate herself for all the cheap shots she had taken at Vicky over the years. Vicky, whose only daughter had dropped out of junior college to get married and become a housewife, whose only son had been content with a vocational-technical school (none of that for her son! Regina had thought with a private exultation); Vicky whose husband sold, of all hilarious things, life insurance. And Vicky (hilariouser and hilariouser) sold Tupperware. But it was Vicky she had been able to cry to, it had been Vicky to whom she had been able to express at least part of her tortured sense of disappointment and terror and hurt; yes, and the terrible embarrassment of it, of knowing that people were talking and that people who had for years wanted to see her take a fall were now satisfied. It was Vicky, maybe it had always been Vicky, and Regina decided that if there was to be a Christmas at all for them this miserable year, it would be at Vicky and Steve’s ordinary suburban ranchhouse in the amusingly middle-class suburb of Ligonier, where most people still owned American cars and called a trip to McDonald’s “eating out”.

Mike, of course, simply went along with her decision; she would have expected no more and brooked no less.

For Regina Cunningham the three days following the news that Arnie was “in trouble” had been an exercise in pure cold control, a hard lunge for survival. Her survival, the family’s survival, Arnie’s survival—he might not believe that, but Regina found she hadn’t the time to care. Mike’s pain had never entered her equations; the thought that they could comfort each other had never even crossed her mind as a speculation. She had calmly put the cover on her sewing machine after Mike came downstairs and gave her the news. She did that, and then she had gone to the phone and had gotten to work. The tears she would later shed while talking to her sister had then been a thousand years away. She had brushed past Michael as if he were a piece of furniture, and he had trailed uncertainly after her as he had done all of their married life.

She called Tom Sprague, their lawyer, who, hearing that their problem was criminal, hastily referred her to a colleague, Jim Warberg. She called Warberg and got an answering service that would not reveal Warberg’s home number. She sat by the phone for a moment, drumming her fingers lightly against her lips, and then called Sprague again. He hadn’t wanted to give her Warberg’s home telephone number, but in the end he gave in. When Regina finally let him go, Sprague sounded dazed, almost shell-shocked. Regina in full spate often caused such a reaction.

She called Warberg, who said he absolutely couldn’t take! the case. Regina had lowered her bulldozer blade again. Warberg ended up not only taking the case but agreeing to go immediately to Albany, where Arnie was being held, to see what could be done. Warberg, speaking in the weak, amazed voice of a man who has been filled full of Novocain and then run over by a tractor, protested that he knew a perfectly good man in Albany who could get the lay of the land. Regina was adamant. Warberg went by private plane and reported back four hours later.

Arnie, he said, was being held on an open charge. He would be extradited to Pennsylvania the following day. Pennsylvania and New York had coordinated the bust along with three Federal agencies: the Federal Drug Control Task Force, the IRS, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The main target was not Arnie, who was small beans, but Will Darnell—Darnell, and whomever Darnell was doing business with. Those guys, Warberg said, with their suspected ties to organized crime and disorganized drug smuggling in the new South, were the big beans.

“Holding someone on an open charge is illegal,” Regina had snapped immediately, drawing on a deep backlog of TV crime-show fare.

Warberg, not exactly overjoyed to be where he was when he had planned on spending a quiet evening at home reading a book, rejoined crisply, “I’d be down on my knees thanking God that’s what they’re doing, They caught him with a trunkload of unstamped cigarettes, and if I push them on it, they’ll be more than happy to charge him, Mrs Cunningham. I advise you and your husband to get over here to Albany. Quickly.”

“I thought you said he was going to be extradited tomorrow—”

“Oh, yes, that’s all been arranged. If we’ve got to play hardball with these guys, we ought to be glad the game’s going to be played on our home court. Extradition isn’t the problem here.”

“What is?”

“These people want to play knock-over-the-dominoes. They want to knock your son over onto Will Darnell. Arnold is not talking. I want you two to get over here and persuade him that it’s in his best interest to talk.”

“Is it?” she had asked hesitantly.

“Hell, yes!” Warberg’s voice crackled back. “These guys don’t want to put your son in jail. He’s a minor from a good family with no previous criminal record, not even a school record of disciplinary problems. He can get out of this without even facing a judge. But he’s got to talk.”

So they had gone to Albany, and Regina had been taken down a short, narrow hallway faced in white tile, lit with high-intensity bulbs sunken into small wells in the ceiling and covered with wire mesh. The place had smelled vaguely of Lysol and urine, and she kept trying to convince herself that her son was being held here, her son, but achieving that conviction was a hard go. It didn’t seem possible that it could be true. The possibility that it was all a hallucination seemed much more likely.

Seeing Arnie had stripped away that possibility in a hurry. The protective jacket of shock was likewise stripped away, and she felt a cold, consuming fear. It was at this moment that she had first seized on the idea of “Getting us over this”, the way a drowning person will seize a life preserver. It was Arnie, it was her son, not in a jail cell (that was the only thing she had been spared, but she was grateful for even small favours) but in a small square room whose only furnishings were two chairs and a table scarred with cigarette burns.

Arnie had looked at her steadily, and his face seemed horribly gaunt, skull-like. He had been to the barber only a week before, and had gotten a surprisingly short haircut (after years of wearing it long, in emulation of Dennis), and now the overhead light shone down cruelly through what was left, making him appear momentarily bald, as if they had shaved his head to loosen his lips.

“Arnie,” she said, and went to him—halfway to him. He turned his head away from her, his lips pressing together, and she stopped. A lesser woman might have burst into tears then, but Regina was not a lesser woman. She let the coldness come back and have its way with her. The coldness was all that would help now.

Instead of embracing him—something he obviously didn’t want—she sat down and told him what had to be done. He refused. She ordered him to talk to the police. He refused again. She reasoned with him. He refused. She harangued him. He refused. She pleaded with him. He refused. Finally she just sat there dully, a headache thudding at her temples, and asked him why. He refused to tell her.

“I thought you were smart!” she shouted finally. She was nearly mad with frustration—the thing she hated above all others was not getting her way when she absolutely wanted to have it, needed to have it; this had in fact ever happened to her since she left home. Until now. It was infuriating to be so smoothly and seamlessly baulked by this boy who had once drawn milk from her breasts. “I thought you were smart but you’re stupid! You’re… you’re an asshole! They’ll put you in jail! Do you want to go to jail for that man Darnell? Is that what you want? He’ll laugh at you! He’ll laugh at you!” Regina could imagine nothing worse, and her son’s apparent lack of interest in whether or not he was laughed at infuriated her all the more.

She rose from her chair and pushed her hair away from her brow and eyes, the unconscious gesture of a person who is ready to fight. She was breathing rapidly, and her face was flushed. To Arnie, she looked both younger and much, much older than he had ever seen her.

“I’m not doing it for Darnell,” he said quietly, “and I’m not going to jail.”

“What are you, Oliver Wendell Holmes?” she rejoined fiercely, but her anger was in some measure overmastered by relief. At least he could say something. “They caught you in his car with the boot loaded with cigarettes! Illegal cigarettes!”

Mildly, Arnie said, “They weren’t in the boot. They were in a compartment under the boot. A secret compartment. And it was Will’s car. Will told me to take his car.” She looked at him.

“Are you saying you didn’t know they were there?”

Arnie looked at her with an expression she simply couldn’t accept, it was so foreign to his face—it was contempt. Good as gold, my boy’s as good as gold, she thought crazily.

“I knew, and Will knew. But they have to prove it, don’t they?”

She could only look at him, amazed.

“If they do drop it on me somehow,” he said, “I’ll get a suspended sentence.”

“Arnie,” she said at last, “you’re not thinking straight. Maybe your father—”

“Yes,” he interrupted. “I’m thinking straight. I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m thinking very straight.”

And he looked at her, his grey eyes so horribly blank that she could no longer stand it and had to leave.

In the small green reception room she walked blindly past her husband, who had been sitting on a bench with Warberg. “You go in,” she said. “You make him see reason.” She went on without waiting for his reply, not stopping until she was outside and the cold December air was painting her hot cheeks.

Michael went in and had no better luck; he came out with nothing more than a dry throat and a face that looked ten years older than it had going in.

At the motel, Regina told Warberg what Arnie had said and asked him if there was any chance he might be right.

Warberg looked thoughtful. “Yes, that’s a possible defence,” he said. “But it would be a helluva lot more possible if Arnie was the first domino in line. He’s not. There’s a used-car dealer here in Albany named Henry Buck. He was the catcher. He’s been arrested too.”

“What has he said?” Michael asked.

“I have no way of knowing. But when I tried to I speak to his lawyer, he declined to speak with me. I find that ominous. If Buck talks, he puts the onus on Arnie. I’ll bet you my house and lot that Buck can testify your son knew that secret compartment was there, and that’s bad.” Warberg looked at them closely.

“You see, what your boy said to you is really only half-smart, Mrs Cunningham. I’ll be talking to him tomorrow, before they move him back to Pennsylvania. What I hope to make him see is that there’s a possibility this whole thing could come down on his head.”

The first flakes of snow began to swirl out of the heavy sky as they turned onto Steve and Vicky’s street. Is it snowing in Libertyville yet? Arnie wondered, and touched the keys on their leather tab in his pocket. Probably it was.

Christine was still in Darnell’s Garage, impounded. That was all right. At least she was out of the weather. He would pick her up again. In time.

The previous weekend was like a blurred bad dream. His parents, haranguing him in the little white room, had seemed to bear the disconnected faces of strangers; they were heads talking in a foreign language. The lawyer they had hired, Warley or Warmly or whatever, kept talking about something he called the domino theory, and about the need to get out of “the condemned building before the whole thing falls down on your head, boy—there are two states and three Federal agencies bringing up the wrecking balls.”

But Arnie was more worried about Christine.

It seemed clearer and clearer to him that Roland D. LeBay was either with him or hovering someplace near he was, perhaps, coalescing inside him. This idea did not frighten Arnie; it comforted him. But he had to be careful. Not of Junkins; he felt that Junkins had only suspicions, and that they all lay in wrong directions, radiating out from Christine rather than in toward her.

But Darnell… there could be problems with Will. Yes, real problems.

That first night in Albany, after his mother and father had gone back to their motel, Arnie had been conducted to a holdin cell, where he had fallen asleep with surprising ease and speed. And he had had a dream—not quite a nightmare, but something that seemed terribly disquieting. He had awakened watchfully in the middle of the night, his body running with sweat.

He had dreamed that Christine had been reduced in scale to a tiny ’58 Plymouth no longer than a man’s hand. It was on a slotcar track surrounded by HO-scale scenery that was amazingly apt—here was a plastic street that could be Basin Drive, here was another that could be JFK Drive, where Moochie Welch had been killed. A Lego building that looked exactly like Libertyville High. Plastic houses, paper trees…

… and a gigantic, hulking Will Darnell was at the controls that dictated how fast or how slowly the tiny Fury ran through all of this. His breath wheezed in and out of his damaged lungs with a windstorm sound.

You don’t want to open your mouth, kiddo, Will said “He loomed over this scale-model world like the Amazing Colossal Man. You don’t want to frig with me because I’m in control; I can do this—

And slowly, Will began to turn the control knob over toward FAST.

No! Arnie tried to scream. No, don’t do that, please! I love her! Please, you’ll kill her!

On the track, the tiny Christine raced through the tiny Libertyville faster and faster, her rear end switching on the curves as she shimmied on the far edge of centrifugal force, that dish-shaped mystery, Now she was simply a blur of white-over-red, her engine a high, angry wasp-whine.

Please! Arnie screamed. Pleeeeeaaaaase!

At last, Will had begun to turn the control back, looking grimly pleased. The little car began to slow down.

If you start to get ideas, you just want to remember where your car is, kiddo. Keep your mouth shut and we’ll both live to fight another day. I’ve been in tighter jams than this—

Arnie had reached out to grasp the little car, to rescue it from the track. The dream—Will had slapped his hand away.

Whose bag is it, kiddo?

Will, please—

Let me hear you say it.

It’s my bag.

Just remember it, kiddo.

And Arnie had awakened with that in his ears. There had been no more sleep for him that night.

Was it so unlikely that Will would know… well, would know something about Christine? No. He saw a great deal from behind that window, but he knew how to keep his mouth shut—at least until the time was right to open it. He might know what Junkins did not, that Christine’s regeneration in November was not just strange but totally impossible. He would know that a lot of the repairs had never been made, at least not by Arnie.

What else would he know?

With a creeping coldness that moved up his legs to the root of his guts, Arnie realized at last that. Will could have been at the garage the night Repperton and the others had died. In fact, it was more than possible. It was probable. Jimmy Sykes was simple, and Will didn’t like to trust him alone.

You don’t want to open your mouth. You don’t want to frig with me because I can do this…

But even supposing Will knew, who would believe him? It was too late for self-delusion now, and Arnie could no longer put the unthinkable thought away from himself… he no longer even wanted to. Who would believe Will if Will decided to tell someone that Christine sometimes ran by herself? That she had been out on her own the night Moochie Welch was killed, and the night those other hoods were killed? Would the police believe that? They would laugh themselves into a haemorrhage. Junkins? Getting warmer, but Arnie didn’t believe Junkins would be able to accept such a thing, even if he wanted to. Arnie had seen his eyes. So even if Will did know, what good would his knowledge do?

Then, with mounting horror, Arnie realized that it didn’t matter. Will would be out on bail tomorrow or the next day, and then Christine would be his hostage. He could torch it—he had torched plenty of cars in his time, as Arnie knew from sitting in the office and listening to him yarn—and after she was torched, a burned hulk, helpless, there was the crusher out back. In goes the cindered hulk of Christine on the conveyor belt, out comes a smashed cube of metal.

The cops have sealed the place.

But that didn’t cut any ice, either. Will Darnell was a very old fox, and he stayed prepared for any contingency. If Will wanted to get in and torch Christine, he would do it… although it was much more likely, Arnie thought, that he would hire an insurance specialist to do the job—a guy who would throw double handfuls of charcoal-lighter cubes into the car and then toss a match.

In his mind’s eye Arnie could see the blossoming flames. He could smell charring upholstery.

He lay on the cell bunk, his mouth dry, his heart beating rapidly in his chest.

You don’t want to open your mouth. You don’t want to frig with me…

Of course, if Will tried something and got careless—if his concentration lapsed for even a moment—Christine would get him. But somehow Arnie didn’t think Will would get careless.

The next day he had been taken back to Pennsylvania, charged, then bailed for a nominal sum. There would be a preliminary hearing in January, and there was already talk of a grand jury. The bust was front-page material across the state, although Arnie was only identified as “a youth” whose name was “being withheld by state and Federal authorities due to his minor status.”

Arnie’s name was common enough knowledge in Libertyville, however. In spite of its new exurban sprawl of drive-ins, fast-food emporiums, and Bowl-a-Ramas, it was still a faculty town where a lot of people were living in other people’s back pockets. These people, mostly associated with Horlicks University, knew who had been driving for Will Darnell and who had been arrested over the New York State line with a bootful of contraband cigarettes. It was Regina’s nightmare.

Arnie went home in the custody of his parents—bailed for a thousand dollars—after a brief detour to jail. It was all nothing but a big shitting game of Monopoly, really. His parents had come up with the Get Out of Jail Free card. As expected.

“What are you smiling about, Arnie?” Regina asked him. Michael was driving the wagon along at fast walking speed, looking through the swirls of snow for Steve and Vicky’s ranchhouse.

“Was I smiling?”

“Yes,” she said, and touched her hair.

“I don’t really remember,” he said remotely, and she took her hand away.

They had come home on Sunday and his parents had left him pretty much alone, either because they didn’t know how to talk to him or because they were utterly disgusted with him… or perhaps it was a combination of the two. He didn’t give a crap which, and that was the truth. He felt washed out, exhausted, a ghost of himself. His mother had gone to bed and slept all that afternoon, after taking the telephone off the hook. His father puttered aimlessly in his workroom, running his electric planer periodically and then shutting it off.

Arnie sat in the living room watching a football playoff doubleheader, not knowing who was playing, not caring, content to watch the players run around, first in bright warm California sunshine, later in a mixture of rain and sleet that turned the playing field to churned-up mud and erased the lines.

Around six o’clock he dozed off.

And dreamed.

He dreamed again that night and the next, in the bed where he had slept since earliest childhood, the elm outside casting its old familiar shadow (a skeleton each winter that gained miraculous new flesh each May). These dreams were not like the dream of the giant Will looming over the slotcar track. He could not remember these dreams at all more than a few moments after waking. Perhaps that was just as well. A figure by the roadside; a fleshless finger tapping a decayed palm in a lunatic parody of instruction; an uneasy sense of freedom and… escape? Yes, escape. Nothing else except…

Yes, he escaped from these dreams and back into reality with one repeating image: he was behind the wheel of Christine, driving slowly through a howling blizzard, snow so thick that he could literally see no farther than the end of her hood. The wind was not a scream; it was a lower, more sinister sound a basso roar. Then the image had changed. The snow wasn’t snow any longer; it was tickertape. The roar of the wind was the roar of a great crowd lining both sides of Fifth Avenue. They were cheering him. They were cheering Christine. They were cheering because he and Christine had… had…

Escaped.

Each time this confused dream retreated, he thought, When this is over I’m getting out. Getting out for sure. Going to drive to Mexico. And Mexico, as he imagined its steady sun and its rural quiet, seemed more real than the dreams.

Shortly after awakening from the last of these dreams, the idea of spending Christmas with Aunt Vicky and Uncle Steve, just like in the old days, had come to him. He awoke with it, and it clanged in his head with a peculiar persistence. The idea seemed to be an awfully good one, an all-important one. To get out of Libertyville before…

Well, before Christmas. What else?

So he began talking to his mother and father about it, coming down particularly hard on Regina. On Wednesday, she abruptly gave in and agreed. He knew she had talked to Vicky, and Vicky hadn’t been inclined to lord it over her, so it was all right.

Now, on Christmas Eve, he felt that everything would soon be all right.

“There it is, Mike,” Regina said, “and you’re going to drive right by it, just like you do every time we come here.”

Michael grunted and turned into the driveway. “I saw it,” he said in the perpetually defensive tone he always seemed to use around his wife. He’s a donkey, Arnie thought. She talks to him like a donkey, she rides him like a donkey, and he brays like a donkey.

“You’re smiling again,” Regina said.

“I was just thinking about how much I love you both,” Arnie said. His father looked at him, surprised and touched; there was a soft gleam in his mother’s eyes that might have been tears.

They really believed it.

The shitters.

By three o’clock that Christmas Eve the snow was still only isolated flurries, although the flurries were beginning to blend into each other. The delay in the storm’s arrival was not good news, the weather forecasters said. It had compacted itself and turned even more vicious. Predictions of possible accumulations had gone from a foot to a possible eighteen inches, with serious drifting in high winds.

Leigh Cabot sat in the living room of her house, across from a small natural Christmas tree that was already beginning to shed its needles (in her house she was the voice of traditionalism and for four years had successfully staved off her father’s wish for a synthetic tree and her mother’s wish to kick off the holiday season with a goose or a capon instead of the traditional Thanksgiving turkey). She was alone in the house. Her mother and father had gone over to the Stewarts for Christmas Eve drinks; Mr Stewart was her father’s new boss, and they liked each other. This was a friendship Mrs Cabot was eager to promote. In the last ten years they had moved six times, hopping all over the eastern seaboard, and of all the places they had been, her mom liked Libertyville the best. She wanted to stay here, and her husband’s friendship with Mr Stewart could go a long way toward ensuring that.

All alone and still a virgin, she thought. That was an utterly stupid thing to think, but all the same she got up suddenly, as if stung. She went into the kitchen, over-conscious of that Formica wonderland’s little servo-sounds: electric clock, the oven where a ham was baking (turn that off at five if they’re not back, she reminded herself), a cool clunk from the freezer as the Frigidaire’s icemaker made another cube.

She opened the fridge, saw a six-pack of Coke sitting in there next to Daddy’s beer, and thought: Get thee behind me, Satan. Then she grabbed a can anyway. Never mind what it did to her complexion. She wasn’t going with anyone now. If she broke out, so what?

The empty house made her uneasy. It never had before; she had always felt pleased and absurdly competent when they left her alone—a holdover from childhood days, no doubt. The house had always seemed comforting to her. But now the sounds of the kitchen, of the rising wind outside, even the scuff of her slippers on the linoleum those sounds seemed sinister, even frightening. If things had worked out differently, Arnie could have been here with her. Her folks, especially her mother, had liked him. At first. Now, of course, after what had happened, her mother would probably wash her mouth out with soap if she knew Leigh was even thinking of him. But she did think of him. Too much of the time. Wondering why he had changed. Wondering how he was taking the breakup. Wondering if he was okay.

The wind rose to a shriek and then fell off a little, reminding her—for no reason, of course—of a car’s engine reving and then failing off.

Won’t come back from Dead Man’s” Curve, her mind whispered strangely, and for no reason at all (of course) she went to the sink and poured her Coke down the drain and wondered if she was going to cry, or throw up, or what.

She realized with dawning surprise that she was in a state of low terror.

For no reason at all.

Of course.

At least her parents had left the car in the garage (cars, she had cars on the brain). She didn’t like to think of her dad trying to drive home from the Stewarts’ in this, half-soused from three or four martinis (except that he always called them martoonis, with typical adult kittenishness). It was only three blocks, and the two of them had left the house bundled up and giggling, looking like a couple of large children on their way to make a snowman. The walk home would sober them up. It would be good for them. It would be good for them if…

The wind rose again—gunning around the eaves and then falling off—and she suddenly saw her mother an father walking up the street through clouds of blowing snow, holding onto each other to keep from falling on their drunken, lovable asses, laughing. Daddy maybe goosing Mom through her snowpants. The way he sometimes goosed her when he got a buzz on was also something that had always irritated Leigh precisely because it seemed such a juvenile thing for a grown man to do. But of course she loved them both. Her love was a part of the irritation, and her occasional exasperation with them was very much a part of her love.

They were walking together through a snow as thick as heavy smoke and then two huge green eyes opened in the white behind them, seeming to float… eyes that looked terribly like the circles of the dashboard instruments she had seen as she was choking to death… and they were growing… stalking her helpless, laughing, squiffy parents.

She drew a harsh breath and went back into the living room. She approached the telephone, almost touched it, then veered away and went back to the window, looking out into the white and cupping her elbows in the palms of her hands.

What had she been about to do? Call them? Tell them she was alone in the house and had gotten thinking about Arnie’s old and somehow slinking car, his steel girlfriend Christine, and that she wanted them to come home because she was scared for them and herself? Was that what she was going to do?

Cute, Leigh. Cute.

The ploughed blacktop of the street was disappearing under new snow, but slowly; it had only just begun to snow really hard, and the wind periodically tried to clear the street with strong gusts that sent membranes of powder twisting and rising to merge with the whitish-grey sky of the stormy afternoon like slowly twisting smoke-ghosts…

Oh, but the terror was there, it was real, and something was going to happen. She knew it. She had been shocked to hear that Arnie had been arrested for smuggling, but that reaction had been nowhere as strong as the sick fear she had felt when she opened the paper on an earlier day and saw what had happened to Buddy Repperton and those other two boys, that day when her first crazy, terrible, and somehow certain thought had been. Christine.

And now the premonition of some new piece of black work hung heavily on her, and she couldn’t get rid of it, it was crazy, Arnie had been in Philadelphia at a chess tourney, she had asked around that day, that was all there was to it and she would not think about this anymore she would turn on all the radios the TV fill the house up with sound not think about that car that smelled like the grave that car that had tried to kill her murder her.

“Oh damn,” she whispered. “Can’t you quit?”

Her arms, sculpted rigidly in gooseflesh.

Abruptly she went to the telephone again, found the phone book, and as Arnie had done on an evening some two weeks before, she called Libertyville Community Hospital. A pleasant-voiced receptionist told her that Mr Guilder had been checked out that morning. Leigh thanked her and hung up.

She stood thoughtful in the empty living room, looking at the small tree, the presents, the manger in the corner. Then she looked up the Guilders’ number in the phone book and dialled it.

“Leigh,” Dennis said, happily pleased.

The phone in her hand felt cold. “Dennis, can I come over and talk to you?”

“Today?” he asked, surprised.

Confused thoughts tumbled through her mind. The ham in the oven. She had to turn the oven off at five. Her parents would be home. It was Christmas Eve. The snow. And… and she didn’t think it would be safe to be out tonight. Out walking on the sidewalks, when anything might come looming out of the snow. Anything at all. Not tonight, that was the worst. She didn’t think it would be safe to be out tonight.

“Leigh?”

“Not tonight,” she said. “I’m house-sitting for my folks.

They’re at a cocktail party.”

“Yeah, mine too,” Dennis said, amused. “My sister and I are playing Parcheesi. She cheats.”

Faintly: “I do not!”

At another time it might have been funny. It wasn’t now.

“After Christmas. Maybe on Tuesday. The twenty-sixth. Would that be all right?”

“Sure,” he said. “Leigh, is it about Arnie?”

“No,” she said, clutching the telephone so tightly that her hand felt numb. She had to struggle with her voice. “No—not Arnie. I want to talk to you about Christine.”

42 THE STORM BREAKS

By five o’clock that evening the storm had blanketed Pennsylvania; it screamed across the state from border to border its howling throat full of snow. There was no final Christmas Eve rush, and most of the weary and shell-shocked clerks and salespeople were grateful to mother nature in spite of the missed overtime. There would, they told each other over Christmas Eve drinks in front of freshly kindled fires, be plenty of that when returns started on Tuesday.

Mother nature didn’t seem all that motherly that evening as early dusk gave way to full dark and then to blizzardy night. She was a pagan, fearsome old witch that night, a harridan on the wind, and Christmas meant nothing to her; she ripped down Chamber of Commerce tinsel and sent it gusting high into the black sky, she blew the large nativity scene in front of the police station into a snowbank where the sheep, the goats, the Holy Mother and Child were not found until a late January thaw uncovered them. And as a final spit in the eye of the holiday season, she tipped over the forty-foot tree that had stood in front of the Libertyville Municipal Building And sent it through a big window and into the town Tax Assessor’s office. A good place for it, many said later.

By seven o’clock the ploughs had begun to fall behind. A Trailways bus bulled its way up Main Street at quarter past seven, a short line of cars dogging its silvery rump like puppies behind their mother, and then the street was empty except for a few slant-parked cars that had already been buried to the bumpers by the passing ploughs. By morning, most of them would be buried entirely. At the intersection of Main Street and Basin Drive, a stop-and-go light that directed no one at all twisted and danced from its power cable in the wind. There was a sudden electrical fizzing noise and the light went dark. Two or three passengers from the last city bus of the day were crossing the street at the time; they glanced up and then hurried on.

By eight o’clock, when Mr and Mrs Cabot finally arrived home (to Leigh’s great but unspoken relief), the local radio stations were broadcasting a plea from the Pennsylvania State Police for everyone to stay off the roads.

By nine o’clock, as Michael, Regina, and Arnie Cunningham, equipped with hot rum punches (Uncle Steve’s avowed Speciality of the Season), were gathering around the television with Uncle Steve and Aunt Vicky to watch Alastair Sim in A Christmas Carol, a forty-mile stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike had been closed by drifting snow. By midnight almost all of it would be closed.

By nine-thirty, when Christine’s headlights suddenly came on in Will Darnell’s deserted garage, cutting a bright arc through the interior blackness, Libertyville had totally shut down, except for the occasional cruising ploughs.

In the silent garage, Christine’s engine gunned and fell off.

Gunned and fell off.

In the empty front seat, the gearstick lever dropped down into DRIVE.

Christine began to move.

The electric eye gadget clipped to the driver’s sun-visor hummed briefly. Its low sound was lost in the howl of the wind. But the door heard; it rattled upward obediently on its tracks. Snow blew in and swirled gustily.

Christine passed outside, wraithlike in the snow. She turned right and moved down the street, her tyres cutting through the deep snow cleanly and firmly, with no spin, skid, or hesitation.

A turnblinker came on—one amber, winking eye in the snow. She turned left, toward JFK Drive.

Don Vandenberg sat behind the desk inside the office of his father’s gas station. Both his feet and his pecker were up. He was reading one of his father’s fuckbooks, a deeply incisive and thought-provoking tome titled Swap-Around Pammie. Pammie had gotten it from just about everyone but the milkman and the dog, and the milkman was coming up the drive and the dog was lying at her feet when the bell dinged, signalling a customer.

Don looked up impatiently. He had called his father at six, four hours ago, and asked him if he shouldn’t close the station down—there wouldn’t be enough business tonight to pay for the electricity it took to light up the sign. His father, sitting home warm and toasty and safely shitfaced, had told him to keep it open until midnight. If there ever was a Scrooge, Don had thought resentfully as he slammed the phone back down, his old man was it.

The simple fact was, he didn’t like being alone at night anymore. Once, and not so long ago at that, he would have had plenty of company. Buddy would have been here, and Buddy was a magnet, drawing the others with his booze, his occasional gram of coke, but most of all with the simple force of his personality. But now they were gone. All gone.

Except sometimes it seemed to Don that they weren’t. Sometimes it seemed to him (when he was alone, as he was tonight) that he might look up and see them sitting there—Richie Trelawney on one side, Moochie Welch on the other, and Buddy between them with a bottle of Texas Driver in his hand and a joint cocked behind his ear. Horribly white, all three of them, like vampires, their eyes as glazed as the eyes of dead fish. And Buddy would hold out the bottle and whisper, Catch yourself a drink, asshole—pretty soon you’ll be dead, like us.

These fantasies were sometimes real enough to leave him with his mouth dry and his hands shaking.

And the reason why wasn’t lost on Don. They never should have trashed old Cuntface’s car that night. Every single one of the guys in on that little prank had died horrible deaths. All of them, that was, except for him and Sandy Galton, and Sandy had gotten in that old, broken-down Mustang of his and taken off somewhere. On these long night shifts, Don often thought he would like to do the same.

Outside, the customer beeped his horn.

Don slammed the book down on the desk next to the greasy credit-card machine and struggled into his parka, peering out at the car and wondering who would be crazy enough to be out in a shitstorm like this one. In the blowing snow, it was impossible to tell anything about either the car or the customer; he could make out nothing for sure but the headlights and the shape of the body, which was too long for a new ear.

Someday, he thought, drawing on his gloves and bidding a reluctant farewell to his hard-on, his father would put in self-service pumps and all this shit would end. If people were crazy enough to be out on a night like this, they should have to pump their own gas.

The door almost ripped itself out of his hand. He held onto it so it wouldn’t slam back into the cinderblock side of the building and maybe shatter the glass; he almost went down on his ass for his pains. In spite of the steady hooting of the wind (which he had been trying not to hear), he had totally misjudged the force of the storm. The very depth of the snow—better than eight inches—helped to keep him on his feet. That fucking car must be on snowshoes, he thought resentfully. Guy gives me a credit-card I’m gonna fuse his spine.

He waded through the snow, approaching the first set of islands. The fuckstick had parked at the far set. Naturally. Don tried to glance up once, but the wind threw snow into his face in a stinging sheet and he lowered his head quickly, letting the top of the parka’s hood take the brunt of it.

He crossed in front of the car, bathed for a moment in the bright but heatless glow of its dual headlights. He struggled and floundered around to the driver’s side. The pump island’s fluorescents made the car into a garish white-over-purple burgundy shade. His cheeks were already numb. If this guy wants a dollar’s worth and asks me to check the oil, I’m telling him to cram it, he thought, and raised his head into the sting of the snow as the window went down.

“Can I h—” he began, and the h-sound of help you became a high, hissing, strengthless scream: hhhhhhhhhaaaaaaahhhh—

Leaning out of the window, less than six inches from his own face, was a rotting corpse. Its eyes were wide, empty sockets, its mummified lips were drawn back from a few yellowed, leaning teeth. One hand lay whitely on the steering wheel. The other, clicking horridly, reached out to touch him.

Don floundered backward, his heart a runaway engine in his chest, his terror a monstrous hot rock in his throat. The dead thing beckoned him, grinning, and the car’s engine suddenly screamed, piling up revs.

“Fill it up,” the corpse whispered, and in spite of his shock and horror, Don saw it was wearing the tattered and moss-slimed remains of an Army uniform. “Fill it up, you shitter.” Skull-teeth grinned in the fluorescent light. Far back in that mouth a bit of gold twinkled.

“Catch yourself a drink, asshole,” another voice whispered hoarsely, and Buddy Repperton leaned forward in the back seat, extending a bottle of Texas Driver toward Don. Worms spilled and squirmed through his grin. Beetles crawled in what remained of his hair. “I think you must need one.”

Don shrieked, the sound bulletins up and out of him. He whirled away, running through the snow in great leaping cartoon steps; he shrieked again as the car’s engine screamed V-8 power; he looked back over his shoulder and saw that it was Christine standing by the pumps, Arnie’s Christine, now moving, churning snow up behind her rear tyres, and the things he had seen were gone—that was even worse, somehow. The things were gone. The car was moving on its own.

He had turned toward the street, and now he climbed up over the snowbank thrown up by the passing ploughs and down the other side. Here the wind had swept the pavement clear of everything except an occasional blister of ice. Don skidded on one of these. His feet went out from under him. He landed on his back with a thump.

A moment later the street was flooded with white light. Don rolled over and looked up, eyes straining wildly in their sockets, in time to see the huge white circles of Christine’s headlights as she slammed through the snowbank and bore down on him like a locomotive.

Like Gaul, all of Libertyville Heights was divided into three parts. The semicircle closest to town on the low shoal of hills that had been known as Liberty Lookout until the mid-nineteenth century (a Bicentennial Plaque on the corner of Rogers and Tacklin streets so reminded) was the town’s only real poor section. It was an unhappy warren of apartments and wooden-frame buildings. Rope clotheslines spanned scruffy back yards which were, in more temperate seasons, littered with kids and Fisher-Price toys—in too many cases, both kids and toys had been badly battered. This neighbourhood, once middle-class, had been growing tackier ever since the war jobs had dried up in 1945. The decline moved slowly at first, then began to gain speed in the ’60s and early ’70s. Now the worst yet had come, although nobody would come right out and say it, at least not in public, where he or she could be quoted. Now the blacks were moving in. It was said in private, in the better parts of town, over barbecues and drinks: the blacks, God help us, the blacks are discovering Libertyville. The area had even gained its own name—not Liberty Lookout but the Low Heights. It was a name many found chillingly ghetto-ish. The editor of the Keystone had been quietly informed by several of his biggest advertisers that to use that phrase in print, thus legitimizing it, would make them very unhappy. The editor, whose mother had raised no fools, never did so.

Heights Avenue split off from Basin Drive in Libertyville proper and then began to rise. It cut cleanly through the middle of the Low Heights and then left them behind. The road then climbed through a greenbelt and into a residential area. This section of town was known simply as the Heights. All this might seem confusing to you—Heights this and Heights-that—but Libertyville residents knew what they were talking about. When you said the Low Heights, you meant poverty, genteel or otherwise. When you left off the adjective “Low”, you meant poverty’s direct opposite. Here were fine old homes, most of them set tastefully back from the road, some of the finest behind thick yew hedges. Libertyville’s movers and shakers lived here—the newspaper publisher, four doctors, the rich and dotty granddaughter of the man who had invented the rapid-fire ejection system for automatic pistols. Most of the rest were lawyers.

Beyond this area of respectable small-town wealth, Heights Avenue passed through a wooded area that was really too thick to be called a greenbelt; the woods lined both sides of the road for more than three miles. At the highest point of the Heights, Stanson Road branched off to the left, dead-ending at the Embankment, overlooking the town and the Libertyville Drive-In.

On the other side of this low mountain (but also known as the Heights), was a fairly old middle-class neighbourhood where houses forty and fifty years old were slowly mellowing. As this area began to thin out into countryside, Heights Avenue became County Road No.2.

At ten-thirty on that Christmas Eve, a 1958 two-tone Plymouth moved up Heights Avenue, its lights cutting through the snow-choked, raving dark. Long-time natives of the Heights would have said that nothing—except maybe a four-wheel-drive—could have gotten up Heights Avenue that night, but Christine moved along at a steady thirty miles an hour, headlights probing, wipers moving rhythmically back and forth, totally empty within. Its fresh tracks where alone, and in places they were almost a foot deep. The steady wind filled them in quickly. Now and again her front bumper and hood would explode through the ridged back of a snowdrift, nosing the powder aside easily.

Christine passed the Stanson Road turnoff and the Embankment, where Arnie and Leigh had once trysted. She reached the top of Liberty Heights and headed down the far side, at first through black woods cut only by the white ribbon that marked the road, then past the suburban houses with their cosy living-room lights and, in some cases, their cheery trim of Christmas lights. In one of these houses, a young man who had just finished playing Santa and who was having a drink with his wife to celebrate, happened to glance out and see headlights passing by. He pointed it out to her.

“If that guy came over the Heights tonight,” this young man said with a grin, “he must have had the devil riding shotgun.”

“Never mind that,” she said. “Now that the kids are taken care of, what do I get from Santa?

He grinned. “We’ll think of something.”

Farther down the road, almost at the point where the Heights ceased being the Heights, Will Darnell sat in the living room of the simple two-storey frame house he had owned for thirty years. He was wearing a bald and fading blue terrycloth robe over his pyjama bottoms, his huge sack of stomach pushing out like a swollen moon. He was watching the final conversion of Ebenezer Scrooge to the side of Goodness and Generosity, but not really seeing it. His mind was once more sifting through the pieces of a puzzle that grew steadily more fascinating: Arnie, Welch, Repperton, Christine. Will had aged a decade in the week or so since the bust. He had told that cop Mercer that he would be back doing business at the same old stand in two weeks, but in his heart he wondered. It seemed that lately his throat was always slimy from the taste of that goddam aspirator.

Arnie, Welch Repperton… Christine.

“Boy!” Scrooge hailed down from his window, a caricature of the Christmas Spirit in his nightgown and cap. “Is the prize turkey still in the butcher’s window?”

“Wot?” the boy asked. “The one as big as I am?”

“Yes, yes,” Scrooge answered, giggling wildly. It was as if the three spirits had, instead of saving him, driven him mad. “The one as big as you are!”

Arnie, Welch, Repperton… LeBay?

Sometimes he thought it was not the bust that had tired him out and made him feel so constantly beaten and afraid. That it was not even the fact that they had busted his pet accountant or that the Federal tax people were in on it and were obviously loaded for bear this time. The tax people weren’t the reason that he had begun scanning the street before going out mornings; the State Attorney General’s Office didn’t have anything to do with the sudden glances he had begun throwing back over his shoulder when he was driving home nights from the garage.

He had gone over what he had seen that night—or what he thought he had seen—again and again, trying to convince himself that it was absolutely not real… or that it absolutely was. For the first time in years he found himself doubting his own senses. And as the event receded into the past, it became easier to believe he had fallen asleep and dreamed the whole thing.

He hadn’t seen Arnie since the bust, or tried to call him on the telephone. At first he had thought to use his knowledge about Christine as a lever to keep Arnie’s mouth shut if the kid weakened and took a notion to talk—God knew the kid could go a long way toward sending him to jail if he cooperated with the cops. It wasn’t until after the police had landed everywhere that Will realized how much the kid knew, and he had had a few panicky moments of self-appraisal (something else that was upsetting because it was so foreign to his nature): had all of them known that much? Repperton, and all the hoody Repperton clones stretching back over the years? Could he actually have been so stupid?

No, he decided. It was only Cunningham. Because Cunningham was different. He seemed to understand things almost intuitively. He wasn’t all brag and booze and bullshit. In a queer way, Will felt almost fatherly toward the boy—not that he would have hesitated to cut the kid loose if it started to look as if he was going to rock the boat. And not that I’d hesitate now, he assured himself.

On the TV, a scratchy black-and-white Scrooge was with the Cratchets. The film was almost over. The whole bunch of them looked like loonies, and that was the truth, but Scrooge was definitely the worst. The look of mad joy in his eye was not so different from the last look in the eye of a man Will had known twenty years before, a fellow named Everett Dingle who had gone home from the garage one afternoon and murdered his entire family.

Will lit a cigar. Anything to take the taste of the aspirator out of his mouth, that rotten taste. Lately it seemed harder than ever to catch his breath. Damned cigars didn’t help, but he was too old to change now.

The kid hadn’t talked—at least not yet he hadn’t. They had turned Henry Buck, Will’s lawyer had told him; Henry, who was sixty-three and a grandfather, would have denied Christ three times if they had promised him a dismissal Or even a suspended sentence in return. Old Henry Buck was sicking up everything he knew, which fortunately wasn’t a great deal. He knew about the fireworks and cigarettes, but that had only been two rings of what had been, at one time, a six- or seven-ring circus encompassing booze, hot cars, discount firearms (including a few machine-guns sold to gun nuts and homicidal hunters who wanted to see if one “would really tear up a deer like I heard”), and stolen antiques from New England. And in the last couple of years, cocaine. That had been a mistake; he knew it now. Those Colombians down in Miami were as crazy as shithouse rats. Come to think of it, they were shithouse rats. Thank Christ they hadn’t caught the kid holding a pound of coke.

Well, they were going to hurt him this time—how much or how little depended a great deal on that weird seventeen-year-old kid, and maybe on his weird car. Things were as delicately balanced as a house of cards, and Will hesitated to do or say anything, for fear he would change things for the worse. And there was always the possibility that Cunningham would laugh in his face and call him crazy.

Will got up, cigar clamped in his jaws, and shut off his television set. He should go to bed, but maybe he would have a brandy first. He was always tired now, but sleep came hard.

He turned toward the kitchen… and that was when the horn began to honk outside. The sound came over the howl of the wind in short, imperative blasts.

Will stopped cold in the kitchen doorway and belted his robe closed across his big stomach. His face was sharp and rapt and alive, suddenly the face of a much younger man. He stood there a moment longer.

Three more short, sharp honks.

He turned back, taking the cigar from his mouth, and walked slowly across the living room. An almost dreamlike sense of déjà vu washed over him like warm water. Mixed with it was a feeling of fatalism. He knew it was Christine out there even before he brushed the curtain back and looked out, She had come for him, as he supposed he knew she might.

The car stood at the head of his turnaround driveway, little more than a ghost in the membranes of blowing snow. Its lights shone out in widening cones that at last disappeared into the storm. For a moment it seemed to Will that someone was behind the wheel, but he blinked again and saw that the car was empty. As empty as it had been when it returned to the garage that night.

Whonk. Whonk. Whonk-whonk.

Almost as if it were talking.

Will’s heart thudded heavily in his chest. He turned abruptly to the phone. The time had come to call Cunningham after all. Call him and tell him to bring his pet demon to heel.

He was halfway there when he heard the car’s engine scream. The sound was like the shriek of a woman who scents treachery. A moment later there was a heavy crunch.

Will went back to the window and was in time to see the car backing away from the high snowbank that fronted the end of his driveway. Its bonnet, sprayed with clods of snow, had crimped slightly. The engine revved again. The rear wheels spun in the powdery snow and then caught hold. The car leaped across the snowy road and struck the snowbank again. More snow exploded up and raftered away on the wind like cigar smoke blown in front of a fan.

Never do it, Will thought. And even if you get into the driveway, what then? You think I’m going to come out and play?

Wheezing more sharply than ever, he went back to the phone, looked up Cunningham’s home number, and started to dial it. His fingers jittered, he misdialled, swore, hit the cutoff buttons, started again.

Outside, Christine’s engine revved. A moment later there was a crunch as she hit the embankment for the third time. The wind wailed and snow struck — the big picture window like dry sand. Will licked his lips and tried to breathe slowly. But his throat was closing up; he could feel it.

The phone began to ring on the other end. Three times, Four.

Christine’s engine screamed. Then the heavy thud as she hit the snowbank the passing ploughs had piled up at both ends of Will’s semicircular driveway.

Six rings. Seven. Nobody home.

“Shit on it,” Will whispered, and slammed the phone back down. His face was pale, his nostrils flared wide, like the nostrils of an animal scenting fire upwind. His cigar had gone out. He threw it on the carpet and groped in his bathrobe pocket as he hurried back to the window. His hand found the comforting shape of his aspirator, and his fingers curled around its pistol grip.

Headlights shone momentarily in his face, nearly blinding him, and Will raised his free hand to shield his eyes. Christine hit the snowbank again. Little by little she was bludgeoning her way through to the driveway. He watched her back up across the road and wished savagely for a plough to come along now and hit the damned thing broadside.

No plough came. Christine came again instead, engine howling, lights glaring across his snow-covered lawn. She struck the snowbanks pushing mounds of snow violently to either side. The front end canted up and for a moment Will thought she was going to come right over what was left of the frozen, hard-packed embankment. Then the rear wheels lost traction and spun frantically.

She backed up.

Will’s throat felt as if its bore was down to a pinhole. His lungs strained for air. He took the aspirator out and used it. The police. He ought to call the police. They could come. Cunningham’s ’58 couldn’t get him. He was safe in his house. He was—

Christine came again, accelerating across the road, and this time she hit the bank and came over it easily, front end at first tilting up, splashing the front of his house with light, then crashing back down. She was in the driveway. Yes, all right, but she could come no further, she… it…

Christine never slowed. Still accelerating, she crossed the semicircular driveway on a tangent, ploughed through the shallower, looser snow of the side yard, and roared directly at the picture window where Will Darnell stood looking out.

He staggered backward, gasping hard, and tripped over his own easy chair.

Christine hit the house. The picture window exploded, letting in the shrieking wind. Glass flew in deadly arrows, each of them reflecting Christine’s headlamps. Snow blew in and — danced over the rug in erratic corkscrews. The headlights momentarily illuminated the room with the unnatural glare of a television studio, and then she withdrew, her front bumper dragging, her hood popped up, her grille smashed into a chrome-dripping grin full of fangs.

Will was on his hands and knees, gagging harshly for breath, his chest heaving. He was vaguely aware that, had he not tripped over his chair and fallen down, he probably would have been cut to ribbons by flying glass. His robe had come undone and flapped behind him as he got to his feet. The wind streaming in the window picked up the TV Guide from the little table by his chair, and the magazine flew across the room to the foot of the stairs, pages riffling. Will got the telephone in both hands and dialled 0.

Christine reversed along her own tracks through the snow. She went all the way back to the flattened snowback at the entrance to the driveway. Then she came forward, accelerating rapidly, and as she came the bonnet immediately began to uncrimp, the grille to regenerate itself. She slammed into the side of the house below the picture window again. More glass flew; wood splintered and groaned and creaked. The big window’s low ledge cracked in two, and for a moment Christine’s windscreen, now cracked and milky, seemed to peer in like a giant alien eye.

“Police,” Will said to the operator. His voice was hardly there; it was all wheeze and whistle. His bathrobe flapped in the cold blizzard wind coming in through the shattered window. He saw that the wall below the window was nearly shattered. Broken chunks of lathing protruded like fractured bones. It couldn’t get in, could it? Could it?

“I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to speak up,” the operator said. “We seem to have a very bad connection.”

Police, Will said, but this time it wasn’t even a whisper; only a hiss of air. Dear God, he was strangling, he was choking; his chest was a locked bank vault. Where was his aspirator?

“Sir?” the operator asked doubtfully.

There it was, on the floor. Will dropped the telephone and scrabbled for it.

Christine came again, roaring across the lawn and striking the side of the house. This time the entire wall gave way in a shrapnel-burst of glass and lathing, and incredibly, nightmarishly, Christine’s smashed and dented bonnet was in his living room, she was in, he could smell exhaust and hot engine.

Christine’s underworks caught on something, and she reversed back out of the ragged hole with a screech of pulling boards, her front end a gored ruin dusted with snow and plaster. But she would come again in a few seconds, and this time she might—just might—

Will grabbed his aspirator and ran blindly for the stairs.

He was only halfway up when the revving whine of her engine came again and he turned to watch, leaning on the railing more than grasping it.

The stairwell’s height lent a certain nightmare perspective. He watched Christine come across the snow-covered lawn, saw her bonnet fly up so that now her front end resembled the mouth of a huge red and white alligator. Then it snapped off altogether as she struck the house again, this time doing better than forty. She ripped away the last of the window frame and sprayed more splintered boards across his living room. Her headlights bounced upward, glaring, and then she was in, she was in his house, leaving a huge torn hole in the wall behind her with an electrical cable hanging out onto the rug like a black severed artery. Little clouds of blown-in fibreglass insulation danced on the cold wind like milkweed puffs.

Will screamed and couldn’t hear himself over the blatting roar of her engine. The Sears Muzzler silencer Arnie had put on her—one of the few things he really put on her, Will thought crazily—had hung up on the sill of the house, along with most of the exhaust pipe.

“The Fury roared across the living room, knocking Will’s La-Z-Boy armchair onto its side, where it lay like a dead pony. The floor under Christine creaked uneasily and a part of Will’s mind screamed: Yes! Break! Break! Spill the goddam thing into the cellar! Let’s see it climb out of there! And this image was replaced with the image of a tiger in a pit that had been dug and them camouflaged by wily natives.

But the floor held—at least for the time being, it held.

Christine roared across the living room at him. Behind, she left a zig-zag pattern of snowy tyre prints on the rug. She slammed into the stairs. Will was thrown back against the wall. His aspirator fell out of his hand and tumbled end over end all the way to the bottom.

Christine reversed across the room, floorboards groaning underneath. Her rear end struck the Sony TV, and the picture tube imploded. She roared forward again and struck the side of the stairs again, shattering lath and gouging out plaster. Will could feel the entire structure grow wobbly under him. There was an awful sensation of lean. For a moment Christine was directly beneath him; he could look down into the oily gut of her engine compartment, could feel the heat of her V-8 mill. She reversed again, and Will scrambled up the stairs, heaving for air, clawing at the fat sausage of his throat, eyes bulging.

He reached the top an instant before Christine hit the wall again, turning the centre of the stairs into a jumbled wreck. A long splinter of wood fell into her engine. The fan chewed it up and spat out coarse-grained sawdust and smaller splinters. The entire house smelled of gas and exhaust. Will’s ears rang with the heavy thunder of that merciless engine.

She backed up again. Now her tyres had chewed ragged trenches in the carpet. Down the hall, Will thought. Attic. Attic’ll be safe. Yes, the at… oh God… oh God… oh my GOD—

The final pain came with sharp, spiking suddenness. It was as if his heart had been punctured with an icicle. His left arm locked with pain. Still there was no breath; his chest heaved uselessly. He staggered backward. One foot danced out over nothingness, and then he fell back down the stairs in two great bone-snapping barrel rolls, legs flying over his head, arms waving, blue bathrobe sailing and flapping.

He landed in a heap at the bottom and Christine pounced upon him: struck him, reversed, struck him again, snapped off the heavy newel post at the foot of the stairs like a twig, reversed, struck him again.

From beneath the floor came the increasing mutter of supports splintering and bowing. Christine paused in the middle of the room for a moment, as if listening. Two of her tyres were flat; a third had come half off the wheel. The left side of the car was punched inward, scraped clean of paint in great bald patches.

Suddenly her gearstick dropped into reverse. Her engine screamed, and she rocketed back across the room and out of the ragged hole in the side of Will Darnell’s house, her rear end dropping down several inches and into the snow. The tyres spun, found some purchase, and pulled her out. She backed limpingly toward the road, her engine chopping and missing now, blue smoke hazing the air around her, oil dripping and spraying.

At the road, she turned back toward Libertyville. The gearsticklever dropped into DRIVE, but at first the damaged transmission wouldn’t catch; when it did she rolled slowly away from the house. Behind her, from Will’s house, a broad bar of light shone out onto the churned up snow in a shape that was not at all like the neat rectangle of light thrown up by a window. The shape of the light on the snow was senseless and strange.

She moved slowly, lurching from side to side on her flats like a very old drunk making her way up an alley. Snow fell thickly, driven into slanting lines by the wind.

One of her headlights, shattered in her last destructive, trampling charge, flickered and came on.

One of the tyres began to reinflate, then the other.

The clouds of stinking oil-smoke began to diminish.

The engine’s chopping, uncertain note smoothed out.

The missing bonnet began to reappear, from the windscreen end down, looking weirdly like a scarf or cardigan being knitted by invisible needles; the raw metal drew itself out of nothing, gleamed steel-grey, and then darkened to red as if filling with blood.

The cracks in the windscreen began to run in reverse, leaving unflawed smoothness behind themselves.

The other headlights came on, one after the other; now she moved with swift surety through the stormy night, behind the cutting edge of her confident brights.

Her milometer spun smoothly backward.

Forty-five minutes later she sat in the darkness of the late Will Darnell’s Do-It-Yourself Garage, in stall twenty. The wind howled and moaned in the ranks of the wrecks out back, rusting hulks that perhaps held their own ghosts and their own baleful memories as powdery snow swirled across the ripped and tattered seats, their balding floor carpets.

Her engine ticked slowly, cooling.