Christine

43 LEIGH COMES TO VISIT

About fifteen minutes before Leigh was due, I got my crutches under me and worked my way to the chair closest the door, so she’d be sure to hear me when I hollered for her to come in. Then I picked up my copy of Esquire again and turned back to an article reading “The Next Vietnam,” which was part of a school assignment. I still had no success reading it. I was nervous and scared, and part of it—a lot of it, I guess—was simple eagerness. I wanted to see her again.

The house was empty. Not too long after Leigh called that stormy Christmas Eve afternoon, I got my dad aside and asked him if he could maybe take Mom and Elaine someplace the afternoon of the twenty-sixth.

“Why not?” he agreed amiably enough.

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Sure. But you owe me one, Dennis.”

“Dad!”

He winked solemnly. “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine.”

“Nice guy,” I said.

“A real prince,” he agreed.

My dad, who is no slouch, asked me if it had to do with Arnie. “She’s his girl, isn’t she?”

“Well,” I said, not sure just what the situation was, and uncomfortable for reasons of my own, “she has been. I don’t know about now.”

“Problems?”

“I didn’t do such a hot job being his eyes, did I?”

“It’s hard to see from a hospital bed, Dennis. I’ll see you mother and Ellie are out Tuesday afternoon. Just be careful, okay?”

Since then, I’ve pondered exactly what he might have meant by that; he surely couldn’t have been worried about me trying to jump Leigh’s bones, with one upper leg still in plaster and a half-cast on my back. I think maybe he was just afraid that something had gotten terribly out of whack, with my old childhood friend suddenly a stranger, and a stranger who was out on bail at that.

I sure thought something was out of whack, and it scared the piss out of me. The Keystone doesn’t publish on Christmas, but all three Pittsburgh network-TV affiliates and both the independent channels had the story of what had happened to Will Darnell, along with bizarre and frightening pictures of his house. The side facing the road had been demolished. It was the only word which fit. That side of the house looked as if some mad Nazi had driven a Panzer tank through it. The story had been headlined this morning—FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED IN BIZARRE DEATH OF SUSPECTED CRIME FIGURE. That was bad enough, even without another picture of Will Darnell’s house with that big hole punched in the side. But you had to check page three to get the rest of it. The other item was smaller because Will Darnell had been a “suspected crime figure”, and Don Vandenberg had only been a dipshit dropout gas-jockey.

SERVICE STATION ATTENDANT KILLED IN CHRISTMAS EVE HIT-AND-RUN, this headline read. A single column followed. The story ended with the Libertyville Chief of Police theorizing that the driver had probably been drunk or stoned. Neither he nor the Keystone made any attempt to connect the deaths, which had been separated by almost ten miles on the night of a screaming blizzard which had stopped all traffic in Ohio and western Pennsylvania. But I could make connections. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it. And hadn’t my father been looking at me strangely several times during the morning? Yes. Once or twice it had seemed he would say something—I had no idea what I would say if he did; Will Darnell’s death, bizarre as it had been, was nowhere nearly as bizarre as my suspicions. Then he had closed his mouth without speaking. That, to be up front about it, was something of a relief.

The doorbell chimed at two past two.

“Come on in!” I yelled, getting up on my crutches again anyway.

The door opened and Leigh poked her head in. “Dennis?”

“Yeah. Come on in.”

She did, looking very pretty in a bright red ski parka and dark blue pants. She pushed the parka’s fur-edged hood back.

“Sit down”, she said, unzipping her parka. “Go on, right now, that’s an order. You look like a big dumb stork on those things.”

“Keep it up,” I said, sitting down again with an ungainly plop. When you’re cast in plaster, it’s never like in the movies; you never sit down like Cary Grant getting ready to have cocktails at the Ritz with Ingrid Bergman. It all happens at once, and if the cushion you land on doesn’t give out a big loud raspberry, as if your sudden descent had scared you into cutting the cheese, you count yourself ahead of the game. This time I got lucky. “I’m such a sucker for flattery that I make myself sick.”

“How are you, Dennis?”

“Mending,” I said.” How about you?”

“I’ve been better,” she said in a low voice, and bit at her lower lip. This can sometimes be a seductive gesture on a girl’s part, but it wasn’t this time.

“Hang up your coat and sit down yourself.”

“Okay.” Her eyes touched mine, and looking at them was a little much. I looked someplace else, thinking about Arnie.

She hung her coat up and came back into the living room slowly. “Your folks—”

“I got my father to take everyone out,” I said. “I thought maybe,” I shrugged—“we ought to talk just between ourselves.”

She stood by the sofa, looking at me across the room. I was struck again by the simplicity of her good looks her lovely girl’s figure outlined in dark blue pants and a sweater of light, powdery blue, an outfit that made me think about skiing. Her hair was tied in a loose pigtail and lay over her left shoulder. Her eyes were the colour of her sweater, maybe a little darker. A cornfed American beauty, you would have said, except for the high cheekbones, which seemed a little arrogant, bespeaking some older, more exotic heritage—maybe some fifteen or twenty generations back there was a Viking in the woodpile.

Or maybe that isn’t what I was thinking at all.

She saw me looking at her too long and blushed. I looked away.

“Dennis, are you worried about him?”

“Worried? Scared might be a better word.”

“What do you know about that car? What has he told you?”

“Not much,” I said. “Look, would you like something to drink? There’s some stuff in the fridge I felt for my crutches.

“Sit still,” she said. “I would like something, but I’ll get it. What about you?”

“I’ll take a ginger ale, if there’s one left.”

She went into the kitchen and I watched her shadow on the wall, moving lightly, like a dancer. There was a momentary added weight in my stomach, almost like a sickness. There’s a name for that sort of sickness. I think it’s called failing in love with your best friend’s girl.

“You’ve got an automatic ice-maker.” Her voice floated back. “We’ve got one too. I love it.”

“Sometimes it goes crazy and sprays ice-cubes all over the floor,” I said. “It’s like Jimmy Cagney in White Heat. “Take that, you dirty rats.” It drives my mother crazy.” I was babbling.

She laughed. Ice-cubes clinked in glasses. Shortly she came back with two glasses of ice and two cans of Canada Dry.

“Thanks,” I said, taking mine.

“No, thank you,” she said, and now her blue eyes were dark and sober. “Thanks for being around. If I had to deal with this alone, I think I’d… I don’t know.”

“Come on,” I said. “It’s not that bad.”

“Isn’t it? Do you know about Darnell?” I nodded.

“And that other one? Don Vandenberg.”

So she had made the connection too.

I nodded again. “I saw it. Leigh, what is it about Christine that bothers you?”

For a long time I didn’t know if she was going to answer. If she would be able to answer. I could see her struggling with it, looking down at her glass, held in both hands.

At last in a very low voice, she said, “I think she tried to kill me.”

I don’t know what I had expected, but it wasn’t that. “What do you mean?”

She talked, first hesitantly, then more rapidly, until it was pouring out of her. It is a story you have already heard, so I won’t repeat it here; suffice to say that I tried to tell it pretty much as she told it to me. She hadn’t been kidding about being scared. It was in the pallor of her face, the little hitches and gulps of her voice, the way her hands constantly caressed her upper arms, as if she was too cold in spite of the sweater. And the more she talked, the more scared I got.

She finished by telling me how, as consciousness dwindled, the dashboard lights had seemed to turn into watching eyes. She laughed nervously at this last, as if trying to take the curse off an obvious absurdity, but I didn’t laugh back. I was remembering George LeBay’s dry voice as we sat in cheap patio chairs in front of the Rainbow Motel, his voice telling me the story of Roland, Veronica, and Rita. I was remembering those things and my mind was making unspeakable connections. Lights were going on. I didn’t like what they were revealing. My heart started to thud heavily in my chest, and I couldn’t have joined in her laughter if my life had depended on it.

She told me about the ultimatum she had given him—her or the car. She told me about Arnie’s furious reaction. That had been the last time she went out with him.

“Then he got arrested,” she said, “and I started to think… think about what had happened to Buddy Repperton and those other boys… and Moochie Welch…”

“And now Vandenberg and Darnell.”

“Yes. But that’s not all.” She drank from her glass of ginger ale and then poured in more. The edge of the can chattered briefly against the rim of the glass. “Christmas Eve, when I called you, my mom and dad went out for drinks at my dad’s boss’s house. And I started to get nervous. I was thinking about… oh, I don’t know what I was thinking about.”

“I think you do.”

She put a hand to her forehead and rubbed it, as if she was getting a headache. “I suppose I do, I was thinking about that car being out. Her. Being out and getting them, But if she was out on Christmas Eve, I guess she had plenty to keep her busy without bothering my par—” She slammed the glass down, making me jump. “And why do I keep talking about that car as if it was a person?” she cried out, Tears had begun to spill down her checks. “Why do I keep doing that?”

On that night, I saw all too clearly what comforting her could lead to. Arnie was between us—and part of myself was, too. I had known him for a long time. A long good time.

But that was then; this was now.

I got my crutches under me, thumped my way across to the couch, and plopped down beside her. The cushions sighed. It wasn’t a raspberry, but it was close.

My mother keeps a box of Kleenex in the drawer of the little endtable. I pulled one out, looked at her, and pulled out a whole handful. I gave them to her and she thanked me. Then, not liking myself much, I put an arm around her and held her.

She stiffened for a moment… and then let me draw her against my shoulder. She was trembling. We just sat that way, both of us afraid of even the slightest movement, I think. Afraid we might explode. Or something. Across the room, the clock ticked importantly on the mantelpiece. Bright winterlight fell through the bow windows that give a three-way view of the street. The storm had blown itself out by noon on Christmas Day, and now the hard and cloudless blue sky seemed to deny that there even was such a thing as snow—but the dunelike drifts rolling across lawns all up and down the street like the backs of great buried beasts confirmed it.

“The smell,” I said at last. “How sure are you about that?”

“It was there!” she said, drawing away from me and sitting up straight. I collected my arm again, with a mixed sensation of disappointment and relief. “It really was there… a rotten, horrible smell,” She looked at me. “Why? Have you smelled it too?”

I shook my head. I never had. Not really.

“What do you know about that car, the she asked. “You know something. I can see it on your face.”

It was my turn to think long and hard, and oddly what came into my mind was an image of nuclear fission from, some science textbook. A cartoon. You don’t expect to see cartoons in science books, but as someone once said to me, there are many devious twists and turns along the path of public education… in point of fact, that someone had been Arnie himself. The cartoon showed two hotrod atoms speeding toward each other and then slamming together. Presto! Instead of a lot of wreckage (and atom ambulances to take away the dead and wounded neutrons), critical mass, chain reaction, and one hell of a big bang.

Then I decided the memory of that cartoon really wasn’t odd at all. Leigh had certain information I hadn’t had before. The reverse was also true. In both cases a lot of it was guesswork, a lot of it was subjective feeling and circumstance… but enough of it was hard information to be really scary. I wondered briefly what the police would do if they knew what we did. I could guess: nothing. Could you bring a ghost to trial? Or a car?

“Dennis?”

“I’m thinking,” I said, “Can’t you smell the wood burning?”

“What do you know?” she asked again

Collision. Critical mass. Chain reaction. Kaboom.

The thing was, I was thinking, if we put our information together, we would have to do something or tell someone. Take some action. We—

I remembered my dream: the car sitting there in LeBay’s garage, the motor revving up and then falling off, revving up again, the headlights coming on, the shriek of tyres.

I took her hands in both of mine. “Okay,” I said. “Listen. Arnie: he bought Christine from a guy who is dead now. A guy named Roland D. LeBay. We saw her on his lawn one day when we were coming home from work, and “You’re doing it too,” she said softly.

“What?”

“Calling it she.”

I nodded, not letting go of her hands. “Yeah. I know. It’s hard to stop. The thing is, Arnie wanted her—or it, or whatever that car is—from the first time he laid eyes on her. And I think now… I didn’t then, but I do now… that LeBay wanted Arnie to have her just as badly, that he would have given her to him if it had come to that. It’s like Arnie saw Christine and knew, and then LeBay saw Arnie and knew the same thing.”

Leigh pulled her hands free of mine and began to rub her elbows restlessly again. “Arnie said he paid—”

“He paid, all right. And he’s still paying. That is, if Arnie’s left at all.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I’ll show you,” I said, “in a few minutes. First, let me give you the background.”

“All right.”

“LeBay had a wife and daughter. This was back in the fifties. His daughter died beside the road. She choked to death. On a hamburger.”

Leigh’s face grew white, then whiter; for a moment she seemed as milky and translucent as clouded glass.

“Leigh!” I said sharply. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said with a chilling placidity. Her colour didn’t improve. Her mouth moved in a horrid grimace that was perhaps intended to be a reassuring smile. “I’m fine.” She stood up. “Where is the bathroom, please?”

“There’s one at the end of the hall,” I said. “Leigh, you look awful.”

“I’m going to vomit,” she said in that same placid voice, and walked away. She moved jerkily now, like a puppet, all the dancer’s grace I had seen in her shadow now gone. She walked out of the room slowly, but when she was out of sight the rhythm of her stride picked up; I heard the bathroom door thrown open, and then the sounds. I leaned back against the sofa and put my hands over my eyes.

When she came back she was still pale but had regained a touch of her colour. She had washed her face and there were still a few drops of water on her cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s all right. It just… startled me.” She smiled wanly. “I guess that’s an understatement.” She caught my eyes with hers. “Just tell me one thing, Dennis. What you said. Is it true? Really true?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s true. And there’s more. But do you really want to hear any more?”

“No,” she said. “But tell me anyway.”

“We could drop it,” I said, not really believing it.

Her grave, distressed eyes held mine. “It might be… safer… if we didn’t,” she said.

“His wife committed suicide shortly after their daughter died.”

“The car…”

“… was involved.”

“How?”

“Leigh—”

“How?

So I told her—not just about the little girl and her mother, but about LeBay himself, as his brother George had told me, His bottomless reservoir of anger. The kids who had made fun of his clothes and his bowl haircut. His escape into the Army, where everyone’s clothes and haircuts were the same. The motor pool. The constant railing at the shitters, particularly those shitters who brought him their big expensive cars to be fixed at government expense. The Second World War. The brother, Drew, killed in France. The old Chevrolet. The old Hudson Hornet. And through it all, a steady and unchanging backbeat, the anger.

“That word,” Leigh murmured.

“What word?”

“Shitters.” She had to force herself to say it, her nose wrinkling in rueful and almost unconscious distaste. “He uses it. Arnie.”

“I know.”

We looked at each o her, and her hands found mine again.

“You’re cold,” I said. Another bright remark from that fount of wisdom, Dennis Guilder. I got a million of em.

“Yes. I feel like I’ll never be warm again.”

I wanted to put my arms around her and didn’t. I was afraid to. Arnie was still too much mixed up in things. The most awful thing—and it was awful—was how it seemed more and more that he was dead… dead, or under some weird enchantment.

“Did his brother say anything else?”

“Nothing that seems to fit.” But a memory rose like a bubble in still water and popped: He was obsessed and he was angry, but he was not a monster, George LeBay had told me. At least… I don’t think he was. It had seemed that, lost in the past as he had been, he had been about to say something more… and then had realized where he was and that he was talking to a stranger. What had he been about to say?”

All at once I had a really monstrous idea. I pushed it away. It went… but it was hard work, pushing that idea.

Like pushing a piano. And I could still see its outlines in the shadows.

I became aware that Leigh was looking at me very closely, and I wondered how much of what I had been thinking showed on my face.

“Did you take Mr LeBay’s address?” she said.

“No.” I thought for a moment, and then remembered the funeral, which now seemed impossibly far back in time. “But I imagine the Libertyville American Legion Post has it. They buried LeBay and contacted the brother. Why?”

Leigh only shook her head and went to the window, where she stood looking out into the blinding day. Shank of the year, I thought randomly.

She turned back to me, and I was struck by her beauty again, calm and undemanding except for those high, arrogant cheekbones—the sort of cheekbones you might expect to see on a lady probably carrying a knife in her belt.

“You said you’d show me something,” she said. “What was it?”

I nodded. There was no way to stop now. The chain reaction had started. There was no way to shut it down.

“Go upstairs,” I said, “My room’s the second door on the left. Look in the third drawer of my dresser. You’ll have to dig under some of my undies, but they won’t bite.”

She smiled—only a little, but even a little was an improvement”. “And what am I going to find? A Baggie of dope?”

“I gave that up last year,” I said, smiling back. “’Ludes this year. I finance my habit selling heroin down at the junior high.”

“What is it? Really?”

“Arnie’s autograph,” I said, “immortalized on plaster.”

“His autograph?”

I nodded. “In duplicate.”

She found them, and five minutes later we were on the couch again, looking at the two squares of plaster cast. They sat side by side on the glass-topped coffee table, slightly ragged on the sides, a little the worse for wear. Other names danced off into limbo on one of them. I had saved the casts, had even directed the nurse on where to cut them, Later I bad cut out the two squares, one from the right leg, one from the left.

We looked at them silently: on the right; on the left.

Leigh looked at me, questioning and puzzled. “Those are pieces of your—”

“My casts, yeah.”

“Is it… a joke, or something?”

“No joke. I watched him sign both of them.” Now that it was out, there was a queer kind of loosening, or relief. It was good to be able to share this. It had been on my mind for a long time, itching and digging away.

“But they don’t look anything alike.”

“You’re telling me,” I said. “But Arnie isn’t much like he used to be either. And it all goes back to that goddam car.” I poked savagely at the square of plaster on the left. “That isn’t his signature. I’ve known Arnie almost all my life. I’ve seen his homework papers, I’ve seen him send away for things, I’ve watched him endorse his paycheques, and that is not his signature. The one on the left, yes. This one, no. You want to do something for me tomorrow, Leigh?”

“What?”

I told her. She nodded slowly. “For us.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll do it for us. Because we have to do something, don’t we?”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess so. You mind a personal question?” She shook her head, her remarkable blue eyes never leaving mine.”

“How have you been sleeping lately?”

“Not so well,” she said. “Bad dreams. How about you?”

“No. Not so good.

And then, because I couldn’t help myself anymore, I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her. There was a momentary hesitation, and I thought she was going to draw away… then her chin came up and she kissed me back, firmly and fully. Maybe it was sort of lucky at that, me being mostly immobilized.

When the kiss was over she looked into my eyes, questioning.

“Against the dreams,” I said, thinking it would come out stupid and phony-smooth, the way it looks on paper, but instead it sounded shaky and almost painfully honest.

“Against the dreams,” she repeated gravely, as if it were a talisman, and this time she inclined her head towards me and we kissed again with those two ragged squares of plaster staring up at us like blind white eyes with Arnie’s name written across them. We kissed for the simply animal comfort that comes with animal contact—sure, that, and something more, starting to be something more—and then we held each other without talking, and I don’t think we were kidding ourselves about what was happening—at least not entirely. It was comfort, but it was also good old sex—full, ripe, and randy with teenage hormones. And maybe it had a chance to be something fuller and kinder than just sex.

But there was something else in those kisses—I knew it, she knew it, and probably you do too. That other thing was a shameful sort of betrayal. I could feel eighteen years of memories cry out—the ant farms, the chess games, the movies, the things he had taught me, the times I had kept him from getting killed. Except maybe in the end, I hadn’t. Maybe I had seen the last of him—and a poor, rag-tag end at that—on Thanksgiving night, when he brought me the turkey sandwiches and beer.

I don’t think it occurred to either of us until then that we had done nothing unforgivable to Arnie—nothing that might anger Christine.

But now, of course, we had.

44 DETECTIVE WORK

What happened in the next three weeks or so was that Leigh and I played detective, and we fell in love.

She went down to the Municipal Offices the next day and paid fifty cents to have two papers xeroxed—those papers got to Harrisburg, but Harrisburg sends a copy back to the town.

This time my family was home when Leigh arrived. Ellie peeked in on us whenever she got the chance. She was fascinated by Leigh. and I was quietly amused when, about a week into the new year, she started wearing her hair tied back as Leigh did. I was tempted to get on her case about it… and withstood the temptation. Maybe I was growing up a little bit (but not enough to keep from sneaking one of her Yodels when I saw one hidden behind the Tupperware bowls of leftovers in the refrigerator).

Except for Ellie’s occasional peeks, we had the living room mostly to ourselves that next afternoon, the 27th of December, after the social amenities had been observed. I introduced Leigh to my mother and father, my mom served coffee, and we talked. Elaine talked the most—chattering about her school and asking Leigh all sorts of questions about ours. At first I was annoyed, and then I was grateful. Both my parents are the soul of middle-class politeness (if my mom was being led to the electric chair and bumped into the chaplain, she would excuse herself), and I felt pretty clearly that they liked Leigh, but it was also obvious—to me, at least—that they were puzzled and a little uncomfortable, wondering where Arnie fitted into all this.

Which was what Leigh and I were wondering ourselves, I guess. Finally they did what parents usually do when they’re puzzled in such situations—they dismissed it as kid business and went about their own business. Dad excused himself first, saying that his workshop in the basement was in its usual post-Christmas shambles and he ought to start doing something about it. Mom said she wanted to do some writing.

Ellie looked at me solemnly and said, “Dennis, did Jesus have a dog?”

I cracked up and so did Ellie, Leigh sat watching us laugh, smiling politely the way outsiders do when it’s a family joke.

“Split, Ellie,” I said.

“What’ll you do if I won’t?” she asked, but it was only routine brattiness; she was already getting up.

“Make you wash my underwear,” I said.

“The hell you will!” Ellie declared grandly, and left the room.

“My little sister,” I said.

Leigh was smiling. “She’s great.”

“If you had to live with her full-time you might change your mind. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Leigh put one of the Xerox copies on the glass coffee table where the pieces of my casts had been yesterday.

It was the re-registration of a used car, 1958 Plymouth sedan (4-door), red and white. It was dated November 1, 1978, and signed Arnold Cunningham. His father had co-signed for him:

“What does that look like to you?” I asked.

“One of the signatures on one of the squares you showed me,” she said. “Which one?”

“It’s the one he signed just after I got crunched in Ridge Rock,” I said. “It’s the way his signature always looked. Now let’s see the other one.”

She put it down beside the first. This was a registration slip for a new car, 1958 Plymouth sedan (4-door), red and white. It was dated November 1, 1957—I felt a nasty jolt at that exact similarity, and one look at Leigh’s face told me she had seen it too.

“Look at the signature,” she said quietly.

I did.

This was the handwriting Arnie had used on Thanksgiving evening, you didn’t have to be a genius or a handwriting expert to see that. The names were different, but the writing was exactly the same.

Leigh reached for my hands, and I took hers.

What my father did in his basement workshop was make toys. I suppose that might sound a little weird to you, but it’s his hobby, Or maybe something more than a hobby—I think there might have been a time in his life when he had to make a difficult choice between going to college and going out on his own to become a toymaker. If that’s true, then I guess he chose the safe way. Sometimes I think I see it in his eyes, like an old ghost not quite laid to rest, but that is probably only my imagination, which used to be a lot less active than it is now.

Ellie and I were the chief ben eficiaries, but Arnie had also found some of my father’s toys under various Christmas trees and beside various birthday cakes, as had Ellie’s closest childhood friend Aimee Carruthers (long since moved to Nevada and now referred to in the doleful tones reserved for those who have died young and senselessly) and many other chums.

Now my dad gave most of what he made to the Salvation Army 400 Fund, and before Christmas the basement always reminded me of Santa’s workshop—until just before Christmas it would be filled with neat white cardboard cartons containing wooden trains, little tool-chests… Erector-set clocks that really kept time, stuffed animals, a small puppet theatre or two. His main interest was in wooden toys (up until the Vietnam war he had made battalions of toy soldiers, but in the last five years or so they had been quietly phased out—even now I’m not sure he was aware he was doing it), but like a good spray hitter, my dad went to all fields. During the week after Christmas there was a hiatus. The workshop would seem terribly empty, with only the sweet smell of sawdust to remind us that the toys had ever been there.

In that week he would sweep, clean, oil his machinery, and get ready for next year. Then, as the winter wore on through January and February, the toys and the seeming junk that would become parts of toys would begin appearing again—trains and joined wooden ballerinas with red spots of colour on their cheeks, a box of stuffing raked out of someone’s old couch that would later end in a bear’s belly (my father called every one of his bears Owen or Olive—I had worn out six Owen Bears between infancy and second grade, and Ellie had worn out a like number of Olive Bears), little snips of wire, buttons, and flat, disembodied eyes scattered across the worktable like something out of a pulp horror story. Last, the liquor-store boxes would appear, and the toys would again be packed into them.

In the last three years he had gotten three awards from the Salvation Army, but he kept them hidden away in a drawer, as if he was ashamed of them. I didn’t understand it then and don’t now—not completely—but I know it wasn’t shame. My father had nothing to be ashamed of.

I worked my way down that evening after supper, clutching the bannister madly with one arm and using my other crutch like a ski-pole.

“Dennis,” he said, pleased but slightly apprehensive. “You need any help?”

“No, I got it.”

He put his broom aside by a small yellow drift of shavings and watched to see if I was really going to make it. “How about a push, then?”

“Ha-ha, very funny.”

I got down, semi-hopped over to the big easy chair my father keeps in the corner beside our old Motorola black-and-white, and sat down. Plonk.

“How you doing?” he asked.

“Pretty good.”

He brushed up a dustpanful of shavings, dumped them into his wastebarrel, sneezed, and brushed up some more. “No pain?”

“No. Well… some.”

“You want to be careful of stairs. If your mother had seen what you just did—”

I grinned. “She’d scream, yeah.”

“Where is your mother?”

“She and Ellie went over to the Rennekes”. Dina Renneke got a complete library of Shaun Cassidy albums for Christmas. Ellie is green.”

“I thought Shaun was out,” my father said.

“I think she’s afraid fashion might be doubling back on her.”

Dad laughed. Then there was a companionable silence for a while, me sitting, him sweeping. I knew he’d get around to it, and presently he did.

“Leigh,” he said, “used to go with Arnie, didn’t she?”

“Yes,” I said.

He glanced at me, then down at his work again. I thought he would ask me if I thought that was wise, or maybe mention that one fellow stealing another fellow’s girl was not the best way to promote friendship and accord. But he said neither of those things.

“We don’t see much of Arnie anymore. Do you suppose he’s ashamed of the mess he’s in?”

I had the feeling that my father didn’t believe that at all; that he was simply testing the wind.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I don’t think he has much to worry about. With Darnell dead”—he tipped his dustpan into the barrel and the shavings slid in with a soft flump—“I doubt if they’ll even bother to prosecute.”

“No?”

“Not Arnie. Not on anything serious. He may be fined, and the judge will probably lecture him, but nobody wants to put an indelible black mark on the record of a nice young suburban white boy who is bound for college and a fruitful place in society.”

He shot me a sharp questioning look, and I shifted in the chair, suddenly uncomfortable.

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“Except he’s not really like that anymore, is he, Dennis?”

“No. He’s changed.”

“When was the last time you actually saw him?”

“Thanksgiving.”

“Was he okay then?”

I shook my head slowly, suddenly feeling like crying and blurting it all out. I had felt that way once before and hadn’t; I didn’t this time, either, but for a different reason. I remembered what Leigh had said, about being nervous for her parents on Christmas Eve. And it seemed to me now that the fewer the people who knew about our suspicions, the safer… for them.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does Leigh?”

“No. Not for sure. We have… some suspicions.”

“Do you want to talk about them?”

“Yes. In a way I do. But I think it would be better if I didn’t.”

“All right,” he said. “For now.”

He swept the floor. The sound of the hard bristles on the concrete was almost hypnotic.

“And maybe you had better talk to Arnie before too much longer.”

“Yeah. I was thinking about that.” But it wasn’t an interview I looked forward to.

There was another period of silence. Dad finished sweeping and then glanced around. “Looks pretty good, huh?”

“Great, Dad.”

He smiled a little sadly and lit a Winston. Since his heart attack he had given the butts up almost completely, but kept a pack around, and every now and then he’d have one—usually when he felt under stress. “Bullshit. It looks empty as hell.”

“Well… yeah.”

“You want a hand upstairs, Dennis?”

I got my crutches under me. “I wouldn’t turn it down.” He looked at me and snickered. “Long John Silver. All you need is the parrot.”

“Are you going to stand there giggling or give me a hand?”

“Give you a hand, I guess.”

I slung an arm over his shoulder, feeling somehow like a little kid again—it brought back almost forgotten memories of him carrying me upstairs to bed on Sunday nights, after I started to doze off halfway through the Ed Sullivan Show. The smell of his aftershave was just the same.

At the top he said, “Step on me if I’m getting too personal, Denny, but Leigh’s not going with Arnie anymore, is she.”

“No, Dad.”

“Is she going with you?”

“I… well, I don’t really know. I guess not.”

“Not yet, you mean.”

“Well—yeah, I guess so.” I was starting to feel uncomfortable, and it must have showed, but he pushed on anyway.

“Would it be fair to say that maybe she broke it off with Arnie because he wasn’t the same person anymore?”

“Yes. I think that would be fair to say.”

“Does he know about you and Leigh?”

“Dad, there’s nothing to know… at least, not yet.” He cleared his throat, seemed to consider, and then said nothing. I let go of him and worked at getting my crutches under me. I worked a little harder at it than I had to, maybe.

“I’ll give you a little gratuitous advice,” my father said finally. “Don’t let him know what’s between you and her—and never mind the protestations that there isn’t anything. You’re trying to help him some way, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know if there’s anything either Leigh or I can do for Arnie, Dad.”

“I’ve seen him two or three times,” my father said.

“You have?” I said, startled. “Where?”

My father shrugged. “On the street. Downtown. You know. Libertyville’s not that big, Dennis. He…”

“He what?”

“Hardly seemed to recognize me. And he looks older. Now that his face has cleared, he looks much older. I used to think he took after his father, but now—” He broke off suddenly. “Dennis, has it occurred to you that Arnie may be having some sort of nervous breakdown.”

“Yes,” I said, and only wished I could have told him that there were other possibilities. Worse ones. Possibilities that would have made my old man wonder if I was the one having a nervous breakdown.

“You be careful,” he said, and although he didn’t mention what had happened to Will Darnell, I suddenly felt strongly that he was thinking of it. “You be careful, Dennis.”

Leigh called me on the telephone the next day and said her father was being called away to Los Angeles on year-end business and had proposed, on the spur of the moment, that they all go along with him and get away from the cold and the snow.

“My mother was crazy about the idea, and I just couldn’t think of any plausible reason to say no,” she said. “It’s only ten days, and school doesn’t start again until January 8th.” “It sounds great,” I said. “Have fun out there.”

“You think I should go?”

“If you don’t, you ought to have your head examined.”

“Dennis?”

“What?”

Her voice dropped a little. “You’ll be careful won’t you? I… well, I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.”

She hung up then, leaving me feeling surprised and warm—but the guilt remained, fading a little now, maybe, but still there. My father had asked me if I was trying to help Arnie. Was I? Or was I maybe only snooping into a part of his life which he had expressly marked off-limits… and stealing his girl in the process? And what exactly would Arnie do or say if he found out?

My head ached with questions, and I thought that maybe it was just as well that Leigh was going away for a while.

As she herself had said about our folks, it seemed safer.

On Friday the 29th, the last business day of the old year, I called the Libertyville American Legion Post and asked for the secretary. I got his name, Richard McCandless, from the building’s janitor, who also found a telephone number to go with it. The number turned out to be that of David Emerson’s, Libertyville’s “good” furniture store. I was told to wait a moment and then McCandless came on, a deep, gravelly voice that sounded a tough sixty—as if maybe Patton and the owner of this voice had fought their way across Germany to Berlin shoulder to shoulder, possibly biting enemy bullets out of the air with their teeth as they went.

“McCandless,” he said.

“Mr McCandless, my name is Dennis Guilder. Last August you put on a military-style funeral for a fellow named Roland LeBay—”

“Was he a friend of yours?”

“No, only a bare acquaintance, but—”

“Then I don’t have to spare your feelings none,” McCandless said, gravel rattling in his throat. He sounded like Andy Devine crossed with Broderick Crawford. “LeBay was nothing but a pure-d sandy-craw sonofabitch, and if I’d had my way, the Legion wouldn’t have had a thing to do with planting him. He quit the organization back in 1970. If he hadn’t quit, we would have fired him. That man was the most contentious bastard that every lived.”

“Was he?”

“You bet he was. He’d pick an argument with you, then up it to a fight if he could. You couldn’t play poker with the sonofabitch, and you sure couldn’t drink with him. You couldn’t keep up with him, for one thing, and he’d get mean for another. Not that he had to go far to get to mean. What a crazy bastard he was, you should pardon my fran-sayse. Who are you, boy?”

For an insane moment I thought of quoting Emily Dickinson at him: I’m nobody! Who are you?

“A friend of mine bought a car from LeBay just before he died—”

“Shit! Not that ’57?”

“Well, actually it was a ’58—”

Yeah, yeah, ’57 or ’58, red and white. That was the only goddam thing he cared about, Treated it like it was a woman. It was over that car he quit the Legion, did you know that?”

“No,” I said. “What happened?”

“Ah, shit. Ancient history, kid. I’m bending your car as it is. But every time I think of that sonofabitch LeBay, I see red. I’ve still got the scars on my hands. Uncle Sam had three years or my life during World War II and I never got so much as a Purple Heart out of it, although I was in combat almost all that time. I fought my way across half the little shitpot islands in the South Pacific. Me and about fifty other guys stood up to a banzai charge on Guadalcanal two fucking million Japs coming at us hopped to the eyeballs and waving those swords they made out of Maxwell House coffee cans—and I never got a scar, I felt a couple of bullets go right by me, and just before we broke that charge the guy next to me got his guts rearranged courtesy of the Emperor of Japan, but the only times I saw the colour of my own blood over there in the Pacific was when I cut myself shaving. Then…”

McCandless laughed.

“Shit on toast, there I go again. My wife says I’ll open my mouth too wide someday and just fall right in. What’d you say your name was?”

“Dennis Guilder.”

“Okay, Dennis, I bent your ear, now you bend mine. What did you want?”

“Well, my friend bought that car and fixed it up… for a sort of a street-rod, I guess you’d say. A showpiece.”

“Yeah, just like LeBay,” McCandless said, and my mouth went dry. “He loved that fucking car, I’ll say that for him. He didn’t give a shit for his wife—you know what happened to her?”

“Yes,” I said.

“He drove her to it,” McCandless said grimly. “After their kid died, she didn’t get any comfort from him at all. None. I don’t think he gave much of a shit about the kid, either. Sorry, Dennis. I never could shut up. Talk all the time. Always have. My mother used to say, “Dickie, your tongue’s hung in the middle and runs on both ends.” What did you say you wanted?”

“My friend and I went to LeBay’s funeral,” I said, “and after it was over, I introduced myself to his brother—”

“He seemed a right enough type,” McCandless broke in. “Schoolteacher. Ohio.”

“That’s right. I had a talk with him, and he did seem like a nice enough guy, I told him I was going to do my senior English paper on Ezra Pound—”

“Ezra who?”

“Pound.”

“Who the fuck’s that? Was he at LeBay’s funeral?”

“No, sir. Pound was a poet.”

“A what?”

“Poet. He’s dead too.”

“Oh.” McCandless sounded doubtful.

“Anyway, LeBay—this is George LeBay he said he’d send me a bunch of magazines about Ezra Pound for my report, if I wanted them. Well, it turns out that I could use them, but I forgot to get his address. I thought you might have it.”

“Sure, it’ll be in the records; all that stuff is. I hate being fucking secretary, but my year’s up this July, and never again. Know what I mean? Never-fucking-again.”

“I hope I’m not being a real pain in the ass.”

“No. Hell, no. I mean, that’s what the American Legion’s for, right? Gimme your address, Dennis, and I’ll send you a card with the info on it.”

I gave him my name and address and apologized again for bothering him at his job.

“Think nothing of it,” he said. “I’m on my fucking coffee break, anyhow.” I had a moment to wonder just what it was he did at David Emerson’s, which really was where Libertyville’s elite bought. Was he a salesman? I could see him showing some smart young lady around, saying, Here’s one fuck of a nice couch, ma’am, and look at this goddam settee, we sure didn’t have nothing like that on Guadalcanal when those fucking stoned-out Japs came at us with their Maxwell House swords.

I grinned a little, but what he said next sobered me quickly.

“I rode in that car of LeBay’s a couple of times. I never liked it. I’ll be damned if I know why, but I never did. And I never would ride in it after his wife…you know. Jesus, that gave me the spooks.”

“I’ll bet,” I said, and my voice seemed to come from far away. “Listen, what did happen when he quit the Legion? You said it had something to do with the car?”

He laughed, sounding a little pleased. “You’re not really interested in all that ancient history, are you?”

“Well, yeah, I am. My friend bought the car, remember.”

“Well then I’ll tell you. It was a pretty funny goddam thing, at that. A few of the guys mention it from time to time, when we’ve all had a few. I ain’t the only one with scars on my hands. Get right down to the bottom of it, it was sort of spooky.”

“What was?”

“Aw, it was a kid’s trick. But nobody really liked the sonofabitch, you know. He was an outsider, a loner—”

Like Arnie, I thought.

“—and we’d all been drinking,” McCandless finished. “It was after the meeting, and LeBay had been making an even worse prick of himself than usual. So a bunch of us are at the bar, you know, and we could tell LeBay was getting ready to go home. He was getting his jacket on and arguing with Poochie Anderson about some baseball question. When LeBay went, he always went the same way, kid. He’d jump into that Plymouth of his, back up, and then floor it. That thing’d go out of the parking lot like a rocket, spraying gravel everywhere. So—this was Sonny Bellerman’s idea—about four of us go out the back door to the parking lot while LeBay’s shouting at Poochie. We all get behind the far corner of the building, because we know that’s where he’ll finish backing the car up before he takes off. He always called it by a girl’s name, I told you it was like he was married to the fucking thing.

“Keep your eyes open and your heads down or he’ll see us,” Sonny says. “And don’t move until I give you a go.” We were all sort of tanked up, you know.

“So about ten minutes later out he comes, drunk as a skunk and feeling around in his chinos for his keys. Sonny says, “Get ready, you guys, and keep low!”

“LeBay gets in his car and backs her up. It was perfect, because he stopped to light a cigarette. While he did that, we grabbed the back bumper of that Fury and we lifted the rear wheels right off the ground so that when he tries to pull out, spraying gravel all over the side of the building like usual, you know, he’s only gonna spin his wheels and not go anywhere. You see what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I said. It was a kid’s trick; we had pulled the same thing from time to time at school dances, and once, for a joke, we had blocked up Coach Puffer’s Dodge so that the driving wheels were off the ground.

“We got some kind of shock, though. He gets his cigarette lit, and then he turns on the radio. That’s another thing that used to drive us all fucking bugshit, the way he always listened to that rock and roll music like he was some kid instead of old enough to qualify for Social-fucking-Security. Then he put the tranny into drive. We didn’t see it, because we were all hunkered down so he wouldn’t see us. I remember Sonny Bellerman was kind of laughing, and just before it happened, he whispers, “They up, men?” and I whispers back, “Your pecker’s up, Bellerman.” He was the only one who really got hurt, you know. Because of his wedding ring. But I swear to God, those wheels were up. We had that Plymouth’s rear end four inches off the ground.”

“What happened?” I asked. From the way the story was going, I thought I could guess.

“What happened? He pulled out just like always, that’s what happened! Just like all four wheels was on the ground, He spun gravel and ripped that rear bumper out of our hands and pulled about a yard of skin off with it. Took most of Sonny Bellerman’s third finger; his wedding ring got caught under the bumper, you know, and that finger popped off like a cork coming out of a bottle. And we heard LeBay laughing as he went out, like he knew all along we was there. He could of, you know; if he’d gone back to use the bathroom after he finished shouting at Poochie, he could have looked right out the window while he whizzed and seen us standing around behind the building waiting for him.

“Well, that was it for him and the Legion. We sent him a letter telling him we wanted him out, and he quit. And, just to show you how funny the world is, it was Sonny Bellerman who stood up at the meeting right after LeBay died and said we ought to do the right thing by him just the same. “Sure,” Sonny says, he says, “the guy was a dirty sonofabitch, but he fought the war with the rest of us. So why don’t we send him off right?” So we did. I dunno. I guess Sonny Bellerman’s a lot more of a Christian than I’ll ever be.”

“You must not have had the back wheels off the ground,” I said, thinking of what had happened to the guys who had screwed around with Christine in November. They had lost a lot more than some skin off their fingers.

“We did, though,” McCandless said. “When we got sprayed with gravel, it was from the front wheels. I’ve never to this day been able to figure out how he pulled that trick off. It’s kind of spooky, like I said. Gerry Barlow—he was one of us who did it—always claimed LeBay threw a four-wheel drive into her somehow, but I don’t think there’s a conversion kit for something like that, do you?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think it could be done.”

“Naw, never do it,” McCandless agreed. “Never do it. Well, hey! I done jawed away most of my coffee break, kid. Want to get back and grab another half a cup before it all gets away from me. I’ll send you that address if we got it. I think we do.”

“Thank you, Mr McCandless.”

“My pleasure, Dennis. Take care of yourself.

“Sure. Use it, don’t abuse it, right?”

He laughed. “That’s what we used to say in the Fighting Fifth, anyway.” He hung up.

I put the phone down slowly and thought about cars that still kept moving even when you lifted their driving wheels off the ground. Sort of spooky. It was spooky, all right, and McCandless still had the scars to prove it. That made me remember something George LeBay had told me. He had a scar to show from his association with Roland D. LeBay, as well. And as he grew older, his scar had spread.

45 NEW YEAR’s EVE

I called Arnie on New Year’s Eve. I’d had a couple of days to think about it, and I didn’t really want to do it, but I had to see him. I had come to believe I wouldn’t be able to decide anything until I actually saw him again for myself, And until I had seen Christine again. I had mentioned the car to my father at breakfast, casually, as if in passing, and he told me that he believed all the cars that had been impounded in Darnell’s Garage had now been photographed and returned.

Regina Cunningham answered the phone, her voice stiff and formal. “Cunningham residence.”

“Hi, Regina, it’s Dennis.”

“Dennis!” She sounded both pleased and surprised. For a moment it was the voice of the old Regina, the one who gave Arnie and me peanut butter sandwiches with bits of bacon crumbled into them (peanut butter and bacon on stone-ground rye, of course). “How are you? We heard that they sprung you from the hospital.”

“I’m doing okay,” I said. “How about you?”

There was a brief silence, and then she said, “Well, you know how things have been around here.”

“Problems,” I said. “Yeah.”

“All the problems we missed “in earlier years,” Regina said. “I guess they just piled up in a corner and waited for us.”

I cleared my throat a little and said nothing.

“Did you want to talk to Arnie?”

“If he’s there.”

After another slight pause, Regina said, “I remember that in the old days you and he used to swap back and forth on New Year’s Eve, seeing the New Year in. Was that what you were calling about, Dennis?” She sounded almost timid, and that was not like the old full-steam-ahead Regina at all.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Kid stuff, I know, but—”

“No!” she said, sharply and quickly. “No, not at all! If Arnie ever needed you, Dennis—needed some friend now is the time. He… he’s upstairs now, sleeping. He sleeps much too much. And he’s… he’s not… he hasn’t.”

“Hasn’t what, Regina?”

“He hasn’t made any of his college applications!” she burst out, and then immediately lowered her voice, as if Arnie might overhear. “Not a single one! Mr Vickers, the guidance counsellor at school, called and told me! He scored 700s on his college boards, he could get into almost any college in the country—at least he could have before this—this trouble…” Her voice wavered toward tears, and then she got hold of herself again. “Talk to him, Dennis. If you could spend the evening with him tonight… drink a few beers with him and just… just talk to him…”

She stopped, but I could tell there was something more. Something she needed to say and couldn’t.

“Regina,” I said. I hadn’t liked the old Regina, the compulsive dominator who seemed to run the lives of her husband and son to fit her own timetable, but I liked this distracted, weepy woman even less. “Come on. Take it easy, okay?”

“I’m afraid to talk to him,” she said finally. “And Michael’s afraid to talk to him. He… he seems to explode if you cross him on some subjects. At first it was only his car; now it’s college too. Talk to him, Dennis, please.” There was another short pause, and then, almost casually, she brought out the heart of her dread: “I think we’re losing him.”

“No, Regina, hey—”

“I’ll get him,” she said abruptly, and the phone clunked down. The wait seemed to stretch out. I crooked the phone between my jaw and my shoulder and rapped my knuckles on the cast that still covered my upper left leg. I wrestled with a craven urge just to hang the telephone up and push this entire business away.

Then the phone was picked up again. “Hello?” a wary voice asked, and the thought that burned across my mind with complete assurance was: That’s not Arnie.

“Arnie?”

“It sounds like Dennis Guilder, the mouth that walks like a man,” the voice said, and that sounded like Arnie, all right—but at the same time, it didn’t. His voice hadn’t really deepened, but it seemed to have roughened, as if through overuse and shouting. It was eerie, as if I were talking to a stranger who was doing a pretty good imitation of my friend Arnie.

“Watch what you’re saying, dork,” I said. I was smiling but my hands were dead cold.

“You know,” he said in a confidential voice, “your face and my ass bear a suspicious resemblance.”

“I’ve noticed the resemblance, but last time I thought it was the other way around,” I said, and then a little silence fell between us—we had gone through what passed for the amenities with us. “So what are you doing tonight?” I asked.

“Not much,” he said. “No date or anything. You?”

“Sure, I’m in great shape,” I said. “I’m going to go pick up Roseanne and take her to Studio 2000. You can come along and hold my crutches while we dance, if you want.”

He laughed a little.

“I thought I’d come over,” I said. “Maybe you and me could see the New Year in like we used to. You know?”

“Yeah!” Arnie said. He sounded pleased by the idea—but still not quite like himself. “Watch Guy Lombardo and all that happy crappy. That’d be all right.”

I paused for a moment, not quite sure what to say. Finally I replied cautiously, “Well, maybe Dick Clark or someone. Guy Lombardo’s dead, Arnie.”

“Is he?” Arnie sounded puzzled, doubtful. “Oh. Oh, yeah, I guess he is. But Dick Clark’s hanging in there, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“I got to give it an eighty-five Dick, it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it,” Arnie said, but it wasn’t Arnie’s voice at all. My mind made a sudden and hideously unexpected cross-connection

(best smell in the world… except maybe for pussy) and my hand tightened down convulsively on the telephone. I think I almost screamed. I wasn’t talking to Arnie; I was talking to Roland LeBay. I was talking to a dead man.

“That’s Dick, all right,” I heard myself say, as if from a distance.

“How you getting over, Dennis? Can you drive?”

“No, not yet. I thought I’d get my dad to drive me over. I paused momentarily, then plunged. “I thought maybe you could drive me back, if you got your car. Would that be okay?”

“Sure!” He sounded honestly excited. “Yeah, that’d be good, Dennis! Real good! We’ll have some laughs. Just like the old times.”

“Yes,” I said. And then—I swear to God it just popped out—I added, “Just like in the motor pool.”

“Yeah, that’s right!” Arnie replied, laughing. “Too much! See you, Dennis.”

“Right.” I said automatically. “See you.” I hung up, and I looked at the telephone, and presently I began to shudder all over. I had never been so frightened in my life as I was right then. Time passes: the mind rebuilds its defences. I think one of the reasons there is so little convincing evidence of psychic phenomena is that the mind goes to work and restructures the evidence. A little stacking is better than a lot of insanity. Later I questioned what I heard, or led myself to believe that Arnie had misunderstood my comment, but in the few moments after I put telephone down, I was sure: LeBay had gotten in him. Somehow, dead or not, LeBay was in him.

And LeBay was taking over.

New Year’s Eve was cold and crystal clear. My dad dropped me off at the Cunninghams’ at quarter past seven and helped me over to the back door—crutches were not made for winter or snow-packed paths.

The Cunninghams’ station wagon was gone, but Christine stood in the driveway, her bright red-and-white finish sheened with a condensation of ice-crystals. She had been released with the rest of the impounded cars only this week. Just looking at her brought on a feeling of dull dread like a headache. I did not want to ride home in that car, not tonight, not ever. I wanted my own ordinary, mass-produced Duster with its vinyl seatcovers and its dumb bumper-sticker reading MAFIA STAFF CAR.

The back porch light flicked on, and we saw Arnie cross toward the door in silhouette. He didn’t even look like Arnie. His shoulders loped; his movements seemed older. I told myself it was only imagination, my suspicions working on me, and of course I was full of bullshit… and I knew it.

He opened the door and leaned out in an old flannel shirt and a pair of jeans. “Dennis!” he said. “My man!”

“Hi, Arnie,” I said.

“Hello, Mr Guilder.”

“Hi, Arnie,” my dad said, raising one gloved hand. “How’s it been going?”

“Well, you know, not that great. But that’s all going to change, New year, new broom, out with the old shit, in with the new shit, right?”

“I guess so,” my father said, sounding a little taken aback. “Dennis, are you sure you don’t want me to come back and get you?”

I wanted that more than anything, but Arnie was looking at me and his mouth was still smiling but his eyes were flat and watchful. “No, Arnie’ll bring me home… if that rustbucket will start, that is?”

“Oh-oh, watch what you call my car,” Arnie said. “She’s very sensitive.”

“Is she?” I asked.

“She is,” Arnie said, smiling.

I turned my head and called, “Sorry, Christine.”

“That’s better.”

For a moment all three of us stood there, my father and I at the bottom of the kitchen steps. Arnie in the doorway above us, none of us apparently knowing what to say next. I felt a kind of panic—someone had to say something, or else the whole, ridiculous fiction that nothing had changed would collapse of its own weight.

“Well, okay,” my dad said at last. “You two kids stay sober. If you have more than a couple of beers, Arnie, call me.”

“Don’t worry, Mr Guilder.”

“We’ll be all right,” I said, grinning a grin that felt plastic and false. “You go on home and get your beauty sleep, Dad. You need it.”

“Oh-ho,” my father said. “Watch what you call my face. It’s very sensitive.”

He went back to the car. I stood and watched him, my crutches propped into my armpits. I watched him while he crossed behind Christine. And when he backed out of the driveway and turned toward home, I felt a little bit better.

I banged the snow off the tip of each crutch carefully while standing in the doorway. The Cunninghams’ kitchen was tile-floored. A couple of near accidents had taught me that on smooth surfaces a pair of crutches with wet snow on them can turn into ice-skates.

“You really operate on those babies,” Arnie said, watching me cross the floor. He took a pack of Tiparillos from the pocket of his flannel shirt, shook one out, bit down on the white plastic mouthpiece, and lit it with his head cocked to one side. The match flame played momentarily across his cheeks like yellow streaks of paint.

“It’s a skill I’ll be glad to lose,” I said. “When did you start with the cigars?”

“Darnell’s,” he said. “I don’t smoke em in front of my mother. The smell drives her bugshit.”

He didn’t smoke like a kid who just learning the habit—he smoked like a man who has been doing it for twenty years.

“I thought I’d make popcorn,” he said. “You up for that?”

“Sure. You got any beer?”

“That’s affirmative. There’s a six-pack in the fridge and two more downstairs.”

“Great.” I sat down carefully at the kitchen table, stretching out my left leg. “Where’re your folks?”

“Went to a New Year’s Eve party at the Fassenbachs’. When’s that cast come off?”

“Maybe at the end of January, if I’m lucky.” I waved my crutches in the air and cried dramatically, “Tiny Tim walks again! God bless us, every one!”

Arnie, on his way to the stove with a deep pan, a bag of popcorn, and a bottle of Wesson Oil, laughed and shook his head. “Same old Dennis. They didn’t knock much of the stuffing out of you, you shitter.”

“You didn’t exactly overwhelm me with visits in the hospital, Arnie.”

“I brought you Thanksgiving supper—what the hell do you want, blood?”

I shrugged.

Arnie sighed. “Sometimes I think you were my good-luck charm, Dennis.”

“Off my case, hose-head.”

“No, seriously. I’ve been in hot water ever since you broke your wishbones, and I’m still in hot water. It’s a wonder I don’t look like a lobster.” He laughed heartily. It was not the sound you’d expect of a kid in trouble; it was the laugh of a man—yes, a man—who was enjoying himself tremendously, He put the pan on the stove and poured Wesson Oil over the bottom of it. His hair, shorter than it used to be and combed back in a style that was new to me, fell over his forehead. He flipped it back with a quick jerk of his head and added popcorn to the oil. He slammed a lid over the pan. Went to the fridge. Got a six-pack. Slammed it down in front of me, pulled off two cans, and opened them. Gave me one. Held up his. I held up mine.

“A toast,” Arnie said. “Death to all the shitters of the world in 1979.”

I lowered my can slowly. “I can’t drink to that, man.”

I saw a spark of anger in those grey eyes. It seemed to twinkle there, like spurious good humour, and then go out. “Well, what can you drink to—man?”

“How about to college?” I asked quietly.

He looked at me sullenly, his earlier good humour gone like magic. “I should have known she’d fill you full of that garbage. My mother is one woman who never stuck at getting low to get what she wants. You know that, Dennis. She’d kiss the devil’s ass if that’s what it took.”

I put my beer-can down, still full. “Well, she didn’t kiss my ass. She just said you weren’t making any applications and she was worried.”

“It’s my life,” Arnie said. His lips twisted, changing his face, making it extraordinarily ugly. “I’ll do what I want.”

“And college isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I’ll go. But in my own time. You tell her that, if she asks. In my own time. Not this year. Definitely not. If she thinks I’m going to go off to Pitt or Horlicks or Rutgers and put on a freshman beanie and go boola-boola at the home football games, she’s out of her mind. Not after the shitstorm I’ve been through this year. No way, man.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m taking off,” he said. “I’m going to get in Christine and we’re going to motorvate right the Christ out of this one-timetable town. You understand?” His voice began to rise, to become shrill, and I felt horror sweep over me again. I was helpless against that unmanning fear and could only hope that it didn’t show on my face. Because it wasn’t just LeBay’s voice now; now it was even LeBay’s face, swimming under Arnie’s like some dead thing preserved in Formalin. “It’s been nothing but a shitstorm, and I think that goddam Junkins is still after me full steam ahead, and he better watch out or somebody just might junk him—”

“Who’s Junkins?” I asked.

“Never mind,” he said. “It’s not important.” Behind him, the Wesson Oil had begun to sizzle. A kernel of corn popped—ponk! — against the underside of the lid. “I’ve got to go shake that, Dennis. Do you want to make a toast or not? Makes no difference to me.”

“All right,” I said. “How about to us?”

He smiled, and the constriction in my chest eased a little. “Us, yeah, that’s a good one, Dennis. To us. Gotta be that, huh?”

“Gotta be,” I said, and my voice hoarsened a little. “Yeah, gotta be.”

We clicked the Bud cans together and drank.

Arnie went over to the stove and began shaking the pan, where the corn was picking up speed. I let a couple of swallows of beer slide down my throat. Beer was still a fairly new thing to me then, and I had never been drunk on it because I liked the taste quite well, and friends—Lenny Barongg was the chief of them—had told me that if you got falling-down, standing-up, ralphing-down-your-shirt shitfaced, you couldn’t even look at the stuff for weeks. Sadly, I have found out since that that isn’t completely true.

But Arnie was drinking like they were going to reinstitute Prohibition on January 1st; he had finished his first can before the popcorn had finished popping. He crimped the empty, winked at me, and said, “Watch me put it up the little tramp’s ass, Dennis.” The allusion escaped me, so I just smiled noncommitally as he tossed the can toward the wastebasket. It banged the wall over it and dropped in.

“Two points,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “Hand me another one, would you?”

I did, figuring what the hell—my folks were planning to see the New Year in at home, and if Arnie got really drunk and passed out, I could give my dad a call. Arnie might say things drunk that he wouldn’t say sober, and I didn’t want to ride home in Christine anyway.

But the beer didn’t seem to affect him. He finished popping the corn, dumped it into a big plastic bowl, melted half a stick of margarine, poured it over the top, salted it, and said, “Let’s go in the living room and watch some tube. What do you say?”

“Fine by me.” I got my crutches, seated them in my armpits—which just lately felt as if they might be growing callouses and then groped for the three beers still on the table.

“I’ll come back for them,” Arnie said. “Come on. Before you break everything all over again. He smiled at me, and for that moment he was nobody but Arnie Cunningham, so much so that it broke my heart a little bit to look at him.

There was some dorky New Year’s Eve special on. Donny and Marie Osmond were singing, both of them showing their giant white teeth in friendly but somehow sharklike grins. We let the TV play and talked. I told Arnie about the physical therapy sessions, and how I was working out with weights, and after two beers I confessed that I was sometimes afraid that I would never walk right again. Not playing football in college didn’t bother me, but that did. He nodded calmly and sympathetically through it all.

I may as well stop right here and tell you that I have never spent such a peculiar evening in my life. Worse things were waiting, but nothing that was so strange, so… so disjointed. It was like sitting through a movie where the picture is almost—but not quite—focused. Sometimes he seemed like Arnie, but at others he didn’t seem like Arnie at all. He had picked up mannerisms I had never noticed before—twirling his car-keys nervously on the rectangle of leather to which they were attached, cracking his knuckles, occasionally biting at the ball of his thumb with his upper front teeth. There was that comment about putting it up the little tramp’s ass when he tossed his beer-can. And although he had gotten through five beers by the time I had finished my second, just downing them one after the other, he still didn’t seem drunk.

And there were mannerisms I had always associated with Arnie which seemed to have disappeared completely: the quick, nervous pull at his earlobe when he was talking, the sudden stretch of his long legs ending with the ankles briefly crossed, his habit of expressing amusement by hissing air through his pursed lips instead of laughing outright. He did do that last once or twice. But more often he would signal his amusement in a string of shrill chuckles that I associated with LeBay.

The special finished up at eleven, and Arnie switched around the dial until he found a dance-party in some New York hotel where they kept switching outside to Times Square, where a big crowd had already gathered. It wasn’t Guy Lombardo, but it was close.

“You’re really not going to college?” I asked.

“Not this year. Christine and I are going to head out for California right after graduation. That golden shore.”

“Your folks know?”

He looked startled at the idea. “Hell, no! And don’t you tell them, either! I need that like I need a rubber dick!”

“What are you going to do out there?”

He shrugged. “Look for a job fixing cars. I’m as good at that as I am at anything.” And then he stunned me by saying casually, “I’m hoping I can persuade Leigh to come with me.”

I swallowed beer the wrong way and began to cough, spraying my pants. Arnie slammed me on the back twice, hard. “You okay?”

“Sure,” I managed. “Just went down the wrong pipe. Arnie… if you think she’s going to come with you, you’re living in a dream world. She’s working on her college applications. She’s got a whole file of them, man. She’s really serious about it.”

His eyes narrowed immediately, and I had a sinking feeling that the beer had betrayed me into saying more than I should have.

“How come you know so much about my girl?”

All of a sudden I felt as if I had been dropped into a long field that was full of loaded mines. “It’s all she talks about Arnie. Once she gets started on the subject, you can’t shut her up.”

“Chummy. You’re not moving in, are you, Dennis?” He was watching me closely, his eyes slitted with suspicion. “You wouldn’t do anything like that, would you?”

“No,” I said, lying completely and fully. “That’s a hell of a thing to say.”

“Then how do you know so much about what she’s doing?”

“I see her around,” I said, “We talk about you.”

“She talks about me?”

“Yeah, a little,” I said casually. “She said that you and she had a fight over Christine.”

It was the right thing. He relaxed. “It was just a little thing. Just a little spat. She’ll come around. And there are good schools out in California, if she wants to go to school. We’re going to be married, Dennis. Have kids and all that shit.”

I struggled to keep my poker face. “Does she know that?”

He laughed. “No way! Not yet. But she will. Soon enough. I love her, and nothing’s going to get in the way of that.” The laughter died away. “What did she say about Christine?”

Another mine.

“She said she didn’t like her. I think… that maybe she was a little jealous.”

It was the right thing again. He relaxed even more. “Yeah, she sure was. But she’ll come around, Dennis. The course of true love never runs smooth, but she’ll come around, don’t worry. If you see her again, tell her I’m going to call. Or talk to her when school starts again.”

I considered telling him that Leigh was in California right now and decided not to. And I wondered what this new suspicious Arnie would do if he knew I had kissed the girl he thought he was going to marry, had held her… was falling in love with her.

“Look, Dennis!” Arnie cried, and pointed at the TV.

They had switched to Times Square again. The crowd was a huge—but still swelling—organism. It was just past eleven-thirty. The old year was guttering.

“Look at those shitters!” He cackled his shrill, excited laugh, finished his beer, and went downstairs for a fresh six-pack. I sat in my chair and thought about Welch and Repperton, Trelawney, Stanton, Vandenberg, Darnell. I thought about how Arnie—or whatever Arnie had become—thought that he and Leigh had just had an unimportant lovers’ spat and how they would end the school year getting married, just like in those greasy love-ballads from the Nifty Fifties.

And oh God I had such a case of the creeps.

We saw the New Year in.

Arnie produced a couple of noisemakers and party favours—the kind that go bang and then release a cloud of tiny crepe streamers. We toasted 1979 and talked a little more on neutral subjects such as the Phillies’ disappointing collapse in the playoffs and the Steelers’ chances of going all the way to the Super Bowl.

The bowl of popcorn was down to the old maids and the burny-bottoms when I took myself in hand and asked one of the questions I had been avoiding. “Arnie? What do you think happened to Darnell?”

He glanced at me sharply, then glanced back at the TV, where couples with New Year’s confetti in their hair were dancing. He drank some more beer. “The people he was doing business with shut him up before he could talk too much. That’s what I think happened.”

“The people he was working for?”

“Will used to say the Southern Mob was bad,” Arnie said, “but that the Colombians were even worse.”

“Who are the “The Colombians?” Arnie laughed cynically. “Cocaine cowboys, that’s who the Colombians are. Will used to claim they’d kill you if you even looked at one of their women the wrong way—and sometimes if you looked at her the right way. Maybe it was the Colombians. It was messy enough to be them.”

“Were you running coke for Darnell?”

He shrugged. “I was running stuff for Will. I only moved coke for him once or twice, and I thank Christ that I didn’t have anything worse than untaxed cigarettes when they picked me up. They caught me dead-bang. Bad shit. But if the situation was the same, I’d probably do it again. Will was a dirty, scuzzy old sonofabitch, but in some ways he was okay.” His eyes grew veiled, strange. “Yeah, in some ways he was okay. But he knew too much. That’s why he got wasted. He knew too much… and sooner or later he would have said something, Probably it was the Colombians. Crazy fuckers.”

“I don’t get you. And it’s not my business, I suppose.”

He looked at me, grinned, and winked. “It was Vietnam,” he said. “At least, it was supposed to be. There was a guy named Henry Buck. He was supposed to rat on me. I was supposed to rat on Will. And then—the big casino—Will was supposed to rat on the people down South that were selling him the dope and the fireworks and cigarettes and booze. Those were the people Ju—the cops really wanted, Especially the Colombians.”

“And you think they killed him?”

He looked at me flatly. “Them or the Southern Mob, sure. Who else?”

I shook my head.

“Well,” he said, “Let’s have another beer and then I’ll give you a lift home. I enjoyed this, Dennis, I really did.” There was a ring of truth in that, but Arnie would never have made a dorky comment like “I enjoyed this, I really did.” Not the old Arnie.

“Yeah, me too, man.”

I didn’t want another beer, but I took one anyway. I wanted to put off the inevitable moment of getting into Christine. This afternoon it had seemed a necessary step to sample the atmosphere of that car itself… if there was any atmosphere to sample. Now it seemed a frightening and crazy idea. I felt the secret of what Leigh and I were becoming to each other like a large, breakable egg in my head.

Tell me, Christine, can you read minds?

I felt a crazy laugh coming up my throat and dumped beer on it.

“Listen,” I said. “I can call my dad to come and get me, if you want, Arnie. He’ll still be up.”

“No problem,” Arnie said. “I could walk two miles of straight line, don’t worry.”

“I just thought—”

“Bet you’re anxious to be able to drive yourself around again, huh?”

“Yeah, I am.”

“There’s nothing finer than being behind the wheel of your own car,” Arnie said, and then his left eye slipped down in a bleary old roué’s wink. “Except maybe pussy.”

The time came. Arnie snapped off the TV and I crutched my way across the kitchen and worked into my old ski parka, hoping that Michael and Regina would come in from their party and delay things a while longer—maybe Michael would smell beer on Arnie’s breath and offer me a ride. The memory of the afternoon I had slipped behind Christine’s wheel, when Arnie was in LeBay’s house, dickering with the old sonofabitch, was all too clear in my mind.

Arnie had gotten a couple of beers from the fridge—“for the road”, he said. I considered telling him that if he got picked up DWI while he was on bail, he’d probably go to jail before he could turn around. Then I decided I better keep my mouth shut. We went out.

The first early morning of 1979 was deeply, clearly cold, the kind of cold that makes the moisture in your nose freeze in seconds. The snowbanks ringing the driveway glittered with billions of diamond crystals. And there sat Christine, her black windows cauled with frost. I stared at her. The Mob, Arnie had said. The Southern Mob or the Colombians. It sounded melodramatic but possible—no, more; it sounded plausible. But the Mob shot people, pushed them out of windows, strangled them. According to legend, Al Capone had disposed of one poor sucker with a lead-cored baseball bat. But to drive a car over some guy’s snow covered lawn and slam it through the side of his house and into his living room?

The Colombians, maybe. Arnie said the Colombians are crazy. But that crazy? I didn’t think so.

She glittered in the light from the house and the stars, and what if it was her? And what if she found out that Leigh and I had our suspicions? Worse yet, what if she found out that we had been fooling around?

“You need help on the steps, Dennis?” Arnie asked, startling me.

“No, I can handle the steps,” I said. “You might have to give me a hand on the path.”

“No problem, man.”

I got down the kitchen steps sidesaddle, clutching the railing in one hand and my crutches in the other. On the path, I set them under me, got out a couple of steps, and then slipped. A dull thud of pain rumbled up my left leg, the one that still wasn’t worth doodly-squat. Arnie grabbed me.

“Thanks,” I said, glad of a chance to sound shaky.

“No sweat.”

We got over to the car, and Arnie asked if I could get in by myself. He left me and crossed around the front of Christine’s hood. I got hold of the doorhandle with one gloved hand, and a hopeless feeling of dread and revulsion swept over me. It wasn’t until then that I really began to believe it, deep inside, where a person lives. Because that doorhandle felt alive under my hand. It felt like some living beast that was asleep. The doorhandle didn’t feel like chromed steel; dear Christ, it felt like skin. It seemed as if I could squeeze it and wake the beast up, roaring.

Beast?

Okay, what beast?

What was it? Some sort of afreet? An ordinary car that had somehow become the dangerous, stinking dwelling-place of a demon? A weird manifestation of LeBay’s lingering personality, a hellish haunted house that rolled on Goodyear rubber? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I was scared, terrified. I didn’t think I could go through with this.

“Hey, you okay?” Arnie asked. “Can you make it?”

“I can make it,” I said hoarsely, and jammed my thumb down on the button below the handle. I opened the door, turned my back on the seat, and let myself fall backward onto it, left leg extending stiffly. I got hold of my leg and swung it in. It was like moving a piece of furniture. My heart was triphammering in my chest. I pulled the door shut.

Arnie turned the key and the motor rumbled to life—as if the engine were hot instead of dead cold. And the smell assaulted me, seeming to come from everywhere, but most of all seeming to pour up from the upholstery: the sick, rotten smell of death and decay.

I don’t know how to tell you about that ride home, that three-mile ride that lasted no more than ten or twelve minutes, without sounding like an escapee from a lunatic asylum. There is no way to be objective about it; just sitting here and trying is enough to make me feel cold and hot at the same time, feverish and ill. There is no way to separate what was real and what my mind might have manufactured; no dividing line between objective and subjective, between the truth and horrified hallucination. But it wasn’t drunkenness; if I can assure you of nothing else, I can assure you of that. Any mild high I retained from the beer evaporated immediately. What followed was a cold-sober tour of the country of the damned.

We went back in time, for one thing.

For a while Arnie wasn’t driving at all; it was LeBay, rotting and stinking of the grave, half skeleton and half rotting, spongy flesh, greenly corroded buttons. Maggots squirmed their sluggish way up from his collar. I could hear a low buzzing sound and thought at first it was a short circuit in one of the dashboard lights. It was only later that I began to think it might have been the sound of flies hatching in his flesh. Of course it was wintertime, but—

At times, there seemed to be other people in the car with us. Once I glanced up into the rearview mirror and saw a wax dummy of a woman staring at me with the bright and sparkling eyes of a stuffed trophy. Her hair was done in a ’50s pageboy style. Her cheeks appeared to have been wildly rouged, and I remembered that carbon monoxide poisoning was supposed to give the illusion of life and high colour. Later, I glanced into the mirror again and seemed to see a little girl back there, her face blackened with strangulation, her eyes popping like those of some cruelly squeezed stuffed animal. I shut my eyes tight and when I opened them it was Buddy Repperton and Richie Trelawney in the rearview mirror. Crusted blood had dried on Buddy’s mouth, chin, neck, and shirt. Richie was a roasted hulk—but his eyes were alive and aware.

Slowly Buddy extended his arm. He was holding a bottle of Texas Driver in one blackened hand.

I closed my eyes once more. And after that, I didn’t look into the rearview anymore.

I remember rock and roll on the radio: Dion and the Belmonts, Ernie K-Doe, the Royal Teens, Bobby Rydell (“Oh, Bobby, oh… everything’s cool… we’re glad you go to a swingin school…”).

I remember that for a while red Styrofoam dice seemed to be hanging from the rearview mirror, then for a while there were baby shoes, and then there was neither one.

Most of all I remembering seizing the idea that these things, like the smell of rotting flesh and mouldy upholstery, were only in my mind—that they were no more than the mirages that haunt the consciousness of an opium-eater.

I was like someone who is badly stoned and trying to make some kind of rational conversation with a straight person. Because Arnie and I did talk; I remember that, but not what we talked about. I held up my end. I kept my voice normal. I responded. And that ten or twelve minutes seemed to last hours.

I have told you that it is impossible to be objective about that ride; if there was a logical progression of events, it is lost to me now, blocked out. That journey through the cold black night really was like a trip on a boulevard through hell. I can’t remember everything that happened, but I can remember more than I want to. We backed out of the driveway and into a mad funhouse world where all the creeps were real.

We went back in time, I have said, but did we? The present-day streets of Libertyville were still there, but they were like a thin overlay of film—it was as if the Libertyville of the late 1970s had been drawn on Saran Wrap and laid over a time that was somehow more real, and I could feel that time reaching its dead hands out toward us, trying to catch us and draw us in for ever. Arnie stopped at intersections where we should have had the right-of-way; at others, where traffic lights glowed red, he cruised Christine mildly through without even slowing. On Main Street I saw Shipstad’s Jewellery Store and the Strand Theatre, both of them torn down in 1972 to make way for the new Pennsylvania Merchants Bank. The cars parked along the street gathered here and there in clumps where New Year’s Eve parties were going on—all seemed to be pre-60s… or pre-1958. Long portholed Buicks. A DeSoto Firelite station wagon with a body-long blue inset that looked like a check-mark. A ’57 Dodge Lancer four-door hardtop. Ford Fairlanes with their distinctive tail-lights, each like a big colon lying on its side. Pontiacs in which the grille had not yet been split. Ramblers, Packards, a few bullet-nosed Studebakers, and once, fantastical and new, an Edsel.

“Yeah, this year is going to be better,” Arnie said. I glanced over at him. He raised his beercan to his lips, and before it got there, his face had turned to LeBay’s a rotting figure from a horror comic. The fingers that held the beer were only bones. I swear to you, they were only bones, and the pants lay nearly flat against the seat, as if there was nothing inside them except broomsticks.

“Is it?” I said, breathing the car’s foul and choking miasma as shallowly as possible and trying not to choke.

“It is,” LeBay said, only now he was Arnie again, and as we paused at a stop sign, I saw a ’77 Camaro go ripping past. “All I ask is that you stand by me a little, Dennis. Don’t let my mother drag you into this shit. Things are going to turn out.” He was LeBay again, grinning fleshlessly and eternally at the idea of things turning out. I felt my brains beginning to totter. Surely I would scream soon.

I dropped my eyes from that terrible half-face and saw what Leigh had seen: dashboard instruments that weren’t instruments at all, but luminescent green eyes bulging out at me.

At some point the nightmare ended. We pulled up at the kerb in an area of town I didn’t even recognize, an area I would have sworn I had never seen before. Tract houses stood dark everywhere, some of them three-quarters finished, some no more than frames. Halfway down the block, lit by Christine’s hi-beams, was a sign which read:

“Well, here you go,” Arnie said. “Can you make it up the walk yourself, man?”

I looked doubtfully around at this deserted, snow-covered development and then nodded. Better here, on crutches, alone, than in that terrible car. I felt a large plastic smile on my face. “Sure. Thanks.”

“Negative perspiration,” Arnie said. He finished his beer, and LeBay tossed it into the back seat. “Another dead soldier.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Happy New Year, Arnie.” I fumbled for the doorhandle and opened it. I wondered if I could get out, if my trembling arms would support the crutches.

LeBay was looking at me, grinning. “Just stay on my side, Dennis,” he said. “You know what happens to shitters who don’t.”

“Yes,” I whispered. I knew, all right.

I got my crutches out and heaved myself up onto them, careless of any ice that might be underneath. They held me. And once out, the world underwent a swimming, twisting change. Lights came on—but of course, they had been there all along. My family had moved into Mapleway Estates in June of 1959, the year before I was born.

We still lived here, but the area had stopped being known as Mapleway Estates by 1963 or ’64 at the latest.

Out of the car, I was looking at my own house on my own perfectly normal street—just another part of Libertyville, Pa. I looked back at Arnie, half-expecting to see LeBay again, taxi-driver from hell with his benighted cargo of the long-dead.

But it was only Arnie, wearing his high school jacket with his name sewn over the left breast, Arnie looking too pale and too alone, Arnie with a can of beer propped against his crotch.

“Good night, man.”

“Goodnight,” I said. “Be careful going home. You don’t want to get picked up.”

“I won’t,” he said. “You take care, Dennis.”

“I will.”

I shut the door. My horror had changed to a deep and terrible sorrow—it was as if he had been buried. Buried alive. I watched Christine pull away from the kerb and head off down the street. I watched until she turned the corner and disappeared from sight. Then I started up the walk to the house. The walk was clear. My dad had scattered most of a ten-pound bag of Halite over it with me in mind.

I was three-quarters of the way to the door when a greyness seemed to drift over me like smoke and I had to stop and put my head down and try to hold onto myself. I could faint out here, I thought dimly, and then freeze to death on my own front walk where once Arnie and I had played hopscotch and jacks and statue-tag.

At last, little by little, the greyness started to clear. I felt an arm around my waist. It was Dad in his bathrobe and slippers.

“Dennis, are you okay?”

Was I okay? I had been driven home by a corpse.

“Yeah,” I said. “Got a little dizzy. Let’s get in. You’ll freeze your butt off.”

He walked up the steps with me, his arm still circling my waist. I was glad to have it.

“Is Mom still up?” I asked.

“No—she saw the New Year in, and then she and Ellie went to bed. Are you drunk, Dennis?”

“No.”

“You don’t look good,” he said, slamming the door behind us.

I uttered a crazy little shriek of laughter, and things went grey again… but only briefly this time. When I came back, he was looking at me with tight concern.

“What happened over there?”

“Dad—”

“Dennis, you talk to me!”

“Dad, I can’t.”

“What is it with him? What’s wrong with him, Dennis?”

I only shook my head, and it wasn’t just the craziness of it, or fear for myself. Now I was afraid for all of them—my dad, my mom, Elaine, Leigh’s folks. Coldly and sanely afraid.

Just stay on my side, Dennis. You know what happens to shitters who don’t.

Had I really heard that?

Or had it been in my mind only?

My father was still looking at me.

“I can’t.”

“All right,” he said. “For now. I guess. But I need to know one thing, Dennis, and I want you to tell me. Do you have any reason to believe that Arnie was involved some way with Darnell’s death, and the deaths of those boys?”

I thought of LeBay’s rotting, grinning face, the flat pants poked up by something that could only have been bones.

“No,” I said, and that was almost the truth. “Not Arnie.”

“All right,” he said. “You want a hand up the stairs?”

“I can make it okay. You go to bed yourself, Dad.”

“Yeah. I’m going to. Happy New Year, Dennis—and if you want to tell me, I’m still here.”

“Nothing to tell,” I said.

Nothing I could tell.

“Somehow,” he said, “I doubt that.”

I went up and got into bed and left the light on and didn’t sleep at all. It was the longest night of my life, and several times I thought of getting up and going in with my mom and dad, the way I had done when I was small. Once I actually caught myself getting out of bed and groping for my crutches. I lay back down again. I was afraid for all of them, yes, right. But that wasn’t the worst. Not anymore.

I was afraid of losing my mind. That was the worst.

The sun was just poking over the horizon when I finally dropped off and dozed uneasily for three or four hours. And when I woke up, my mind had already begun trying to heal itself with unreality. My problem was that I could simply no longer afford to listen to that lulling song. The line was blurred for good.

46 GEORGE LEBAY AGAIN

On Friday January 5th I got a postcard from Richard McCandless, secretary of the Libertyville American Legion Post. Written on the back in smudgy pencil was George LeBay’s home address in Paradise Falls, Ohio. I carried the card around in my hip pocket most of the day, taking it out occasionally and looking at it. I didn’t want to call him; I didn’t want to talk to him about his crazy brother Roland again; I didn’t want this crazy business to go any further at all.

That evening my father and mother went out to the Monroeville Mall with Ellie, who wanted to spend some of her Christmas money on a new pair of downhill skis. Half an hour after they were gone, I picked up the telephone and propped McCandless’s postcard up in front of me. A call to Ohio directory assistance placed Paradise Falls in area code 513—western Ohio. After a pause for thought I called directory assistance again and got LeBay’s number. I jotted it on the card, paused for thought again—a long pause, this time—and then picked up the phone a third time. I dialled half of LeBay’s number and then hung up. Fuck it, I thought, full of a nervous resentment I could not recall ever feeling before. Enough is enough, so fuck it, I’m not calling him. I’m done with it, I wash my hands of the whole crappy mess. Let him go to hell in his own handcar. Fuck it.

“Fuck it,” I whispered, and got out of there before my conscience could begin to bore into me again. I went upstairs, took a sponge bath, and then turned in. I was soundly asleep before Ellie and my folks came back in, and I slept long and well that night. A good thing, because it was a long time before I slept that well again. A very long time.

While I slept, someone—something—killed Rudolph Junkins of the Pennsylvania State Police. It was in the paper when I got up next morning. DARNELL INVESTIGATOR MURDERED NEAR BLAIRSVILLE, the headline shouted.

My father was upstairs taking a shower; Ellie and two of her friends out on the porch, giggling and cawing over a game of Monopoly; my mother working on one of her stories in the sewing room. I was at the table by myself, stunned and scared. It occurred to me that Leigh and her family were going to be back from California tomorrow, school would start again the day after, and unless Arnie (or LeBay) changed his mind, she would be actively pursued.

I slowly pushed away the eggs I had scrambled for myself. I no longer wanted them. Last night it had seemed possible to push away the whole ominous and inexplicable business of Christine as easily as I’d just pushed away my breakfast. Now I wondered how I could have been so naive.

Junkins was the man Arnie had mentioned New Year’s Eve. I couldn’t even kid myself that it hadn’t been. The paper said he had been the man in charge of Pennsylvania’s part of the Will Darnell investigation, and it hinted that some shadowy crime organization had been behind the murder. The Southern Mob, Arnie would have said. Or the crazy Colombians.

I thought differently.

Junkins’s car had been driven off a lonely country road and battered to so much senseless wreckage

(That goddam Junkins is still after me full steam ahead; he better watch out or somebody might just junk him… Just stay on my side, Dennis. You know what happens to shitters who don’t…) with Junkins still inside it.

When Repperton and his friends were killed, Arnie had been in Philly with the chess club. When Darnell was killed, he was in Ligonier with his parents, visiting relatives. Cast-iron alibis. I thought he would have another for Junkins. Seven—seven deaths now, and they formed a deadly ring around Arnie Cunningham and Christine. The police could surely see that; not even a blind man could miss such an explicit chain of motivation. But the paper didn’t say that anyone was “aiding the police in their enquiries”, as the British so delicately put it.

Of course, the police are not in the habit of just handing everything they know over to the newspapers. I knew that, but every instinct I had told me that the state cops weren’t seriously investigating Arnie in connection with this latest murder by automobile.

He was in the clear.

What had Junkins seen behind him on that country road outside of Blairsville? A red and white car, I thought. Maybe empty, maybe driven by a corpse.

A goose ran squawking over my grave and my arms broke in cold bumps.

Seven people dead.

It had to end. If for no other reason than because maybe killing gets to be a habit. If Michael and Regina wouldn’t go along with Arnie’s crazy California plans, either of them or both of them might be next. Suppose he walked up to Leigh in study hall period three next Tuesday and asked her to marry him and Leigh simply said no? What might she see idling at the kerb when she got home that afternoon?

Jesus Christ, I was scared.

My mother poked her head in. “Dennis, you’re not eating.”

I looked up. “I got reading the paper. Guess I’m not that hungry, Mom.”

“You have to eat right or you’re not going to get well. Want me to make you oatmeal?”

My stomach churned at the thought, but I smiled as I shook my head. “No—but I’ll eat a big lunch.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Denny, do you feel okay? You’ve looked so tired and peaked lately.”

“I’m fine, Mom.” I widened my smile to show her how fine I was, and then I thought of her getting out of her blue Reliant-K at the Monroeville Mall, and two rows back was a white-over-red car, idling. In my mind’s eye I saw her walk in front of it, purse over her arm, saw Christine’s transmission lever suddenly drop into DRIVE—

“Are you sure? It’s not your leg bothering you, is it?”

“No.”

“Have you taken your vitamins?”

“Yes.”

“And your rosehips?”

I burst out laughing. She looked irritated for a moment, then smiled. “Ye’re a sassbox, Dennis Guilder,” she said in her best Irish accent (which is pretty good, since her mom came from the auld sod), “and there’s no kivver to ye.” She went back to the sewing room, and in a moment the irregular bursts of her typewriter began again.

I picked up the newspaper and looked at the photo of Junkins’s twisted auto. DEATH CAR, the caption beneath read.

Try this, I thought: Junkins is interested in a lot more than finding out who sold illegal fireworks and cigarettes to Will Darnell. Junkins is a state detective, and state detectives work on more than one case at a time. He could have been trying to find out who killed Moochie Welch. Or he could have been—

I crutched over to the sewing room and knocked.

“Yes?”

“Sorry to bother you, Mom—”

“Don’t be silly, Dennis.”

“Are you going downtown today?”

“I might be. Why?”

“I’d like to go to the library.”

By three o’clock that Saturday afternoon it had begun to snow again. I had a slight headache from staring into the microfilm reader, but I had what I wanted. My hunch had been on the money— not that it had been any great intuitive leap.

Junkins had been in charge of the hit-and-run that had killed Moochie Welch, all right… and he had also been in charge of investigating what had happened to Repperton, Trelawney, and Bobby Stanton. He’d have to be one dumb cop not to read Arnie’s name between the lines of what was happening.

I leaned back in the chair, snapped off the reader, and closed my eyes. I tried to make myself be Junkins for a minute. He suspects Arnie of being involved with the murders. Not doing them, but involved somehow. Does he suspect Christine? Maybe he does. On the TV detective shows, they’re always great at identifying guns, typewriters used to write ransom notes, and cars involved in hit-and-runs. Flakes and scrapes of paint, maybe…

Then the Darnell bust looms up. For Junkins, that’s nothing but great. The garage will be closed and everything in it impounded. Maybe Junkins suspects…

What?

I worked harder at imagining. I’m a cop. I believe in legitimate answers, sane answers, routine answers. So what do I suspect? After a moment, it came.

An accomplice, of course. I suspect an accomplice. It has to be an accomplice. Nobody in his right mind would suspect that the car was doing it herself. So…?

So after the garage is closed, Junkins brings in the best technicians and lab men he can lay his hands on. They go over Christine from stem to stern, looking for evidence of what has happened. Reasoning as Junkins would reason trying to, anyway—I think that there has to be some evidence. Hitting a human body is not like hitting a feather pillow. Hitting the crash barrier out at Squantic Hills is not like hitting a feather pillow, either.

So what do they find, these experts in vehicular homicide?

Nothing.

They find no dents, no touch-up repainting, no blood stains. They find no embedded brown paint-flakes from the Squantic Hills road barrier that was broken off. In short, Junkins finds absolutely no evidence that Christine was used in either crime. Now jump ahead to Darnell’s murder. Does Junkins hustle over to the garage the next day to check on Christine? I would, if it was me. The side of a house isn’t a feather pillow either, and a car that has just crashed through one must have sustained major damage, damage that simply couldn’t have been repaired overnight. And when he gets there, what does he find?

Only Christine, without so much as a ding in her fender.

That led to another deduction, one that explained why Junkins had never put a stakeout on the car, I hadn’t been able to understand that, because he must have suspected that Christine was involved. But in the end, logic had ruled him—and perhaps it had killed him, as well. Junkins hadn’t put a stakeout on her because Christine’s alibi, while mute, was every bit as iron-clad as those of her owner. If he had inspected Christine immediately following the murder of Will Darnell, Junkins must have concluded that the car could not have been involved, no matter how persuasive the evidence to the contrary seemed.

Not a scratch on her. And why not? It was just that Junkins hadn’t had all the facts. I thought about the milometer that ran backward, and Arnie saying, Just a glitch. I thought of the nest of cracks in the windscreen that had seemed to grow smaller and draw inward—as if they were running backward too. I thought of the haphazard replacement of parts that seemed totally without rhyme or reason. Last of all, I thought of my nightmare ride home on Sunday night—old cars that looked new clumped up at the kerb outside houses where parties were going on, the Strand Theatre intact again in all of its yellow brick solidity, the half-built development that had been completed and occupied by Libertyville suburbanites twenty years ago.

Just a glitch.

I thought that not knowing about that glitch was what had really killed Rudolph Junkins.

Because, look: if you own a car long enough, things wear out no matter how well You take care of it, and they usually go randomly. A car comes off the assembly line like a newborn baby, and just like a newborn, it starts rolling down an Indian gauntlet of years. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune crack a battery here, bust a tie-rod there, freeze a bearing somewhere else. The carburettor float sticks, a tyre blows, there’s an electrical short, the upholstery starts getting ratty.

It’s like a movie. And if you could run the film backward—

“Will there be anything else, sir?” the Records Clerk asked from behind me, and I nearly screamed.

Mom was waiting for me in the main lobby, and she chattered most of the way home about her writing and her new class, which was disco dancing. I nodded and replied in most of the right places. And I thought that if Junkins had brought in his technicians, his high-powered auto specialists from Harrisburg, they had probably overlooked an elephant while looking for a needle. I couldn’t blame them, either. Cars just don’t run backward, like a movie in reverse. And there are no such things as ghosts or revenants or demons preserved in Quaker State motor oil.

Believe in one, believe in all, I thought, and shuddered.

“Want to turn up the heater, Denny?” Mom asked brightly.

“Would you, Mom?”

I thought of Leigh, who was due back tomorrow. Leigh with her lovely face (enhanced by those slanting, almost cruel cheekbones), her young and sweetly luscious figure that had not yet been marred by the forces of time or gravity; like that long-ago Plymouth that had rolled out of Detroit on a carrier in 1957, she was, in a sense, still under warranty. Then I thought of LeBay, who was dead and yet undead, and I thought of his lust (but was it lust? or just a need to spoil things?). I thought of Arnie saying with calm assurance that they were going to be married. And then, with a helpless clarity, I saw their wedding night. I saw her looking up into the darkness of some motel room and seeing a rotting grinning corpse poised over her. I heard her screams as Christine, a Christine still festooned with crepe streamers and soaped-on JUST MARRIED signs, waited faithfully outside the closed and locked door. Christine—or the terrible female force that animated her—would know Leigh wouldn’t last long… and she, Christine, would be around when Leigh was gone.

I closed my eyes to block the images out, but that only intensified them.

It had begun with Leigh wanting Arnie and had progressed logically enough to Arnie wanting her back. But it hadn’t stopped there, had it? Because now LeBay had Arnie… and he wanted Leigh.

But he wasn’t going to have her. Not if I could help it. That night I called George LeBay.

“Yes, Mr Guilder,” he said, He sounded older, tireder. “I remember you very well. I talked your ear off in front of my unit in what I believe may have been the most depressing motel in the universe. What can I do for you?” He sounded as though he hoped I wouldn’t require too much.

I hesitated. Did I tell him that his brother had come back from the dead? That not even the grave had been able to end his hate of the shitters? Did I tell him he had possessed my friend, had picked him out as unerringly as Arnie had picked out Christine? Did we talk about mortality, and time, and rancid love?

“Mr Guilder? Are you there?”

“I’ve got a problem, Mr LeBay. And I don’t know exactly how to tell you about it. It concerns your brother.”

Something new came into his voice then, something tight and controlled. “I don’t know what sort of a problem you could have that would concern him. Rollie’s dead.”

“That’s just it.” Now I was unable to control my own voice. It trembled up to a higher octave and then drifted back down again. “I don’t think he is.”

“What are you talking about?” His voice was taut, accusing… and fearful. “If this is your idea of a joke, I assure you it’s in the poorest possible taste.”

“No joke. Just let me tell you some of the stuff that’s happened since your brother died.”

“Mr Guilder, I have several sets of papers to correct, and a novel I want to finish, and I really don’t have time to indulge in—”

“Please,” I said. “Please, Mr LeBay, please help me, and help my friend.”

There was a long, long pause, and then LeBay sighed. “Tell your tale,” he said, and then, after a brief pause, he added, “Goddam you.”

I passed the story along to him by way of modern long-distance cable; I could imagine my voice going through computerized switching stations full of miniaturized circuits, under snow-blanketed wheatfields, and finally into the ear of this man.

I told him about Arnie’s trouble with Repperton, Buddy’s expulsion and revenge; I told him about the death of Moochie Welch; what had happened at Squantic Hills; what had happened during the Christmas Eve storm. I told him about windscreen cracks that seemed to run backward and a milometer that did for sure. I told him about the radio that seemed to receive only WDIL, the oldies station, no matter where you set it—that brought a soft grunt of surprise from George LeBay. I told him about the handwriting on my casts, and how the one Arnie had done on Thanksgiving night matched his brother’s signature on Christine’s original registration form. I told him about Arnie’s constant use of the word “shitters”. The way he had started combing his hair like Fabian, or one of those other fifties greaseballs. I told him everything, in fact, except what had happened to me on my ride home early on New Year’s morning. I had intended to, but I simply could not do it. I never let that out of myself until I wrote all of this down four years later.

When I finished, there was a silence on the line.

“Mr LeBay? Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” he said finally. “Mr Guilder—Dennis—I don’t intend to offend you, but you must realize that what you are suggesting goes far beyond any possible psychic phenomena and extends into.” He trailed off.

“Madness?”

“That isn’t the word I would have used. From what you say, you were involved in a terrible football accident. You were in the hospital for two months, and in great pain for some of that time. Now isn’t it possible that your imagination—”

“Mr LeBay,” I said “did your brother ever have a saying about the little tramp?”

“What?”

“The little tramp. Like when you throw a ball of paper at the wastebasket and hit it, you say “Two points.” Only instead of that, “Watch me put it up the little tramp’s ass.” Did your brother ever say that?”

“How did you know that?” And then, without giving me time to answer: “He used the phrase on one of the occasions when you met him, didn’t he?”

“No.

“Mr Guilder, you’re a liar.”

I said nothing. I was shaking, weak-kneed. No adult had ever said that to me in my whole life.

“Dennis, I’m sorry. But my brother is dead. He was an unpleasant, possibly even an evil human being, but he is dead and all of these morbid fancies and fantasies “Who was the little tramp?” I managed.

Silence.

“Was it Charlie Chaplin?”

I didn’t think he was going to reply at all. Then, at last, heavily, he said, “Only at second hand. He meant Hitler. There was a passing resemblance between Hitler and Chaplin’s little tramp. Chaplin made a movie called The Great Dictator. You’ve probably never even seen it. It was a common enough name for him during the war years, at any rate. You would be much too young to remember. But it means nothing.”

It was my turn to remain silent.

“It means nothing!” he shouted. “Nothing! It’s vapours and suggestions, nothing more! You must see this!”

“There are seven people dead over here in western Pennsylvania,” I said. “That’s not just vapours. There are the signatures on my casts. They’re not vapours, either. I saved them, Mr LeBay. Let me send them to you. Look at them and tell me if one of them isn’t your brother’s handwriting.”

“It could be a knowing or unknowing forgery.”

“If you believe that, get a handwriting expert. I’ll pay for it.”

“You could do that yourself.”

“Mr LeBay,” I said, “I don’t need any more convincing.”

“But what do you want from me? To share your fantasy? I won’t do that. My brother is dead. His car is just a car.” He was lying. I felt it. Even through the telephone I felt it.

“I want you to explain something you said to me that night we talked.”

“What would that be?” He sounded wary.

I licked my lips. “You said he was obsessed and angry, but he wasn’t a monster. At least, you said, you didn’t, think he was. Then it seemed like you changed the subject completely… but the more I think about it, the more I think you didn’t change the subject at all. The next thing you said was that he never put a mark on either of them.”

“Dennis, really. I—”

“Look, if you were going to say something, for Christ’s sake, say it now!” I cried. My voice cracked. I wiped my forehead, and my hand came away slimy with sweat. “This is no easier for me than it is for you, Arnie’s fixated on this girl, her name is Leigh Cabot, only I don’t think it’s Arnie who’s fixated on her at all, I think it’s your brother, your dead brother, now talk to me, please!”

He sighed.

“Talk to you?” he said. “Talk to you? To talk about these old events… no, these old suspicions… that would be almost the same as to shake a sleeping fiend, Dennis. Please, I know nothing.”

I could have told him that the fiend was already awake, but he knew that.

“Tell me what you suspect.”

“I’ll call you back.”

“Mr LeBay… please…”

“I’ll call you back,” he said. “I’ve got to call my sister Marcia in Colorado.”

“If it will help, I’ll call—”

“No, she would never talk to you. We’ve only talked of it to each other once or twice, if that. I hope your conscience is clear on this matter, Dennis. Because you are asking us to rip open old scars and make them bleed again. So I’ll ask you once more: how sure are you?”

“Sure,” I whispered.

“I’ll call you back,” he said, and hung up.

Fifteen minutes went past, then twenty. I went around the room on my crutches, unable to sit still. I looked out the window at the wintry street, a study in blacks and whites. Twice I went to the telephone and didn’t pick it up, afraid he would be trying to get me at the same time, even more afraid that he wouldn’t call back at all. The third time, just as I put my hand on it, it rang. I jerked back as if stung, and then scooped it up.

“Hi?” Ellie’s breathless voice said from downstairs. “Donna?”

“Is Dennis Guilder—” LeBay’s voice began, sounding older and more broken than ever.

“I’ve got it, Ellie,” I said.

“Well, who cares?” Ellie said pertly, and hung up.

“Hello, Mr LeBay,” I said. My heart was thudding hard.

“I spoke to her,” he said heavily. “She tells me only to use my own judgement. But she is frightened. Together, you and I have conspired to frighten an old lady who has never hurt anyone and has nothing whatever to do with this.”

“In a good cause,” I said.

“Is it?”

“If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t have called you,” I said. “Are you going to talk to me or not, Mr LeBay?”

“Yes,” he said. “To you, but to no one else. If you should tell someone else, I would deny it. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Very well,” he sighed. “In our conversation last summer, Dennis, I told you one lie about what happened and one lie about what I—what Marcy and I—felt about it. We lied to ourselves. If it hadn’t been for you, I think we could have continued to lie to ourselves about that—that incident by the highway—for the rest of our lives.”

“The little girl? LeBay’s daughter?” I was holding the phone tightly, squeezing it.

“Yes,” he said heavily. “Rita.”

“What really happened when she choked?”

“My mother used to call Rollie her changeling,” Le Bay said. “Did I tell you that?”

“No.”

“No, of course not. I told you I thought your friend would be happier if he got rid of the car, but there is only so much a person can say in defence of one’s beliefs, because the irrational… it creeps in.

He paused. I didn’t prompt him. He would tell, or he wouldn’t. It was as simple as that.

“My mother said he was a perfectly good baby until he was six months old. And then… she said that was when Puck came, She said Puck took her good baby for one of his jokes and replaced him with a changeling. She laughed when she said it. But she never said it when Rollie was around to hear, and her eyes never laughed, Dennis. I think… it was her only explanation for what he was, for why he was so untouchable in his rage… so single-minded in his few simple purposes.

“There was a boy—I have forgotten his name—a bigger boy who thrashed Rollie three or four times. A bully. He would start on Rollie’s clothes and ask him if he’d worn his underpants one month or two this time. And Rollie would fight him and curse him and threaten him and the bully would laugh at him and hold him off with his longer arms and punch him until he was tired or until Rollie’s nose was bleeding. And then Rollie would sit there on the corner, smoking a cigarette and crying with blood and snot drying on his face. And if Drew or I came near him, he would beat us to within an inch of our lives.

“That bully’s house burned down one night, Dennis. The bully and the bully’s father and the bully’s little brother were killed. The bully’s sister was horribly burned. It was supposed to have been the stove in the kitchen, and maybe it was. But the fire sirens woke me up, and I was still awake when Rollie came up the ivy trellis and into the room I shared with him. There was soot on his forehead, and he smelled of gasoline. He saw me lying there with my eyes open and he said, “If you tell, Georgie, I’ll kill you.” And ever since that night, Dennis, I’ve tried to tell myself that he meant if I told he had been out, watching the fire. And maybe that was all it was.”

My mouth was dry. There seemed to be a lead ball in my stomach. The hairs along the nape of my neck felt like dry quills. “How old was your brother then?” I asked hoarsely.

“Not quite thirteen,” LeBay said with terrible false calm. “One winter day about a year later, there was a fight during a hockey game, and a fellow named Randy Throgmorton laid open Rollie’s head with his stick. Knocked him senseless. We got him to old Dr Farner—Rollie had come around by then, but he was still groggy—and Farner put a dozen stitches in his scalp. A week later, Randy Throgmorton fell through the ice on Palmer Pond and was drowned. He had been skating in an area clearly marked with THIN ICE signs, apparently.”

“Are you saying your brother killed these people? Are you leading up to telling me that LeBay killed his own daughter?”

“Not that he killed her, Dennis—never think that. She choked to death. What I am suggesting is that he may have let her die.”

“You said he turned her over—punched her—tried to make her vomit.”

“That’s what Rollie told me at the funeral,” George said.

“Then what—”

“Marcia and I talked it over later. Only that once, you understand. Over dinner that night. Rollie told me, “I picked her up by her Buster Browns and tried to whack that sonofabitch out of there, Georgie. But it was stuck down fast.” And what Veronica told Marcia was, “Rollie picked her up by her shoes and tried to whack whatever was choking her out of there, but it was stuck down fast.” They told exactly the same story, in exactly the same words. And do you know what that made me think of?”

“No.”

“It made me think of Rollie climbing in the bedroom window and whispering to me, “If you tell, Georgie, I’ll kill you.”

“But… why? Why would he—?”

“Later, Veronica wrote Marcia a letter and hinted that Rollie had made no real effort to save their daughter. And that, at the very end, he put her back in the car. So she would be out of the sun, he said. But in her letter, Veronica said she thought Rollie wanted her to die in the car.” I didn’t want to say it, but I had to.

“Are you suggesting that your brother offered his daughter up as some kind of a human sacrifice?”

There was a long, thinking, dreadful pause.

“Not in any conscious way, no,” LeBay said. “Not any more than I am suggesting that he consciously murdered her. If you had known my brother, you would know how ridiculous it is to suspect him of witchcraft or sorcery or trafficking with demons. He believed in nothing beyond his own senses… except, I suppose, for his own will. I am suggesting that he might have had some… some intuition… or that he might have been directed to do what he did.

“My mother said he was a changeling.”

“And Veronica?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The police verdict was suicide, even though there was no note. It may well have been. But the poor woman had made some friends in town, and I have often wondered if perhaps she had hinted to some of them, as she had to Marcia, that Rita’s death was not quite as she and Rollie had reported it. I have wondered if Rollie found out. If you tell, Georgie, I’ll kill you. There’s no proof one way or the other, of course. But I’ve wondered why she would do it the way she did—and I’ve wondered how a woman who didn’t know the slightest thing about cars would know enough to get the hose and attach it to the exhaust pipe and put it in through the window. I try not to wonder about those things. They keep me awake at night.”

I thought about what he had said, and about the things he hadn’t said—the things he had left between the lines. Intuitive, he had said. So single-minded in his few simple purposes, he had said. Suppose Roland LeBay had understood in some way he wouldn’t even admit to himself that he was investing his Plymouth with some supernatural power? And suppose he had only been waiting for the right inheritor to come along… and now…

“Does that answer your questions, Dennis?”

“I think it does,” I said slowly.

“What are you going to do?”

“I think you know that.”

“Destroy the car?”

“I’m going to try,” I said, and then looked over at my crutches, leaning against the wall. My goddam crutches.

“You may destroy your friend, as well.”

“I may save him,” I said.

Quietly, George LeBay said, “I wonder if that is still possible.”

47 THE BETRAYAL

I kissed her.

Her arms slipped around my neck. One of her cool hands pressed lightly against the back of my head. There was no more question for me about what was going on; and when she pulled slightly away from me, her eyes half-closed, I could see there was no question for her, either.

“Dennis,” she murmured, and I kissed her again. Our tongues touched gently. For a moment her kiss intensified; I could feel the passion those high cheekbones hinted at. Then she gasped a little and drew back. “That’s enough,” she said. “We’ll be arrested for indecent exposure, or something.”

It was January 18th. We were parked in the lot behind the local Kentucky Fried, the remains of a pretty decent chicken dinner spread around us. We were in my Duster, and that alone was something of an occasion for me—it was my first time behind the wheel since the accident. Just that morning, the doctor had removed the huge cast on my left leg and replaced it with a brace. His warning to stay off it was stern, but I could tell he was feeling good about the way things were going for me. My recovery was about a month ahead of schedule. He put it down to superior techniques; my mother to positive thinking and chicken soup; Coach Puffer to rosehips.

Me, I thought Leigh Cabot had a lot to do with it.

“We have to talk,” she said.

“No, let’s make out some more,” I said.

“Talk now. Make out later.”

“Has he started again?”

She nodded.

In the almost two weeks since my telephone conversation with LeBay, the first two weeks of winter term, Arnie had been working at making a reapprochement with Leigh working at it with an intensity that scared both of us. I had told her about my talk with George LeBay (but not, as I’ve said, about my terrible ride home on New Year’s morning) and made it as clear as I could that on no account should she simply cut him off. That would drive him into a fury, and these days, when Arnie was furious with someone, unpleasant things happened to them.

“That makes it like cheating on him,” she said.

“I know,” I said, more sharply than I had intended. “I don’t like it, but I don’t want that car rolling again.”

“So?”

And I shook my head.

In truth, I was starting to feel like Prince Hamlet, delaying and delaying. I knew what had to be done, of course; Christine had to be destroyed. Leigh and I had looked into ways of doing it.

The first idea had been Leigh’s—Molotov cocktails. We would, she said, fill some wine-bottles with gasoline, take them to the Cunningham house in the early-morning hours, light the wicks (“Wicks? What wicks?” I asked. “Kotex ought to do just fine,” she answered promptly, causing me to wonder again about her high-cheekboned forebears), and toss them in through Christine’s windows.

“What if the windows are rolled up and the doors are locked?” I asked her. “That’s the way it’s apt to be, you know.”

She looked at me as if I was a total drip. “Are you saying,” she asked, “that the idea of firebombing Arnie’s car is okay, but you’ve got moral scruples about breaking some glass?”

“No,” I said. “But who’s going to get close enough to her to break the glass with a hammer, Leigh? You?”

She looked at me, biting at her soft lower lip. She said nothing.

The next idea had been mine. Dynamite.

Leigh thought about it and shook her head.

“I could get it without too much sweat, I think,” I said. I still saw Brad Jeffries from time to time, and Brad still worked for Penn-DOT, and Penn-DOT had enough dynamite to put Three Rivers Stadium on the moon. I thought that maybe I could borrow the right key without Brad knowing I had borrowed it—he had a way of getting tanked up when the Penguins were on the tube. Borrow the key to the explosives shed during the third period of one game, I thought, and return it to his ring in the third period of another. The chance that he would be wanting explosives in January, and thus realize his key was missing, was small indeed. It was a deception, another betrayal—but it was a way to end things.

“No,” she said.

“Why not?” To me, dynamite seemed to offer the kind of utter finality the situation demanded.

“Because Arnie keeps it parked in his driveway now. Do you really want to send shrapnel flying all over a suburban neighbourhood? Risking a piece of flying glass cutting off some little kid’s head?”

I winced. I hadn’t thought of that, but now that she mentioned it, the image seemed sharp and clear and hideous. And that got me thinking about other things. Lighting a bundle of dynamite with your cigarillo and then tossing it overhand at the object you wanted to destroy… that might look okay on the Saturday afternoon Westerns they showed on channel 22, but in real life there were blasting caps and contact points to deal with. Still, I held onto the idea as long as I could.

“If we did it at night?”

“Still pretty dangerous,” she said. “And you know it, too.

It’s all over your face.”

A long, long pause.

“What about the crusher at Darnell’s?” she asked finally.

“Same basic objection as before,” I said. “Who gets to drive her down there? You, me, or Arnie?”

And that was where matters stood.

“What was it today?” I asked her.

“He wanted me to go out with him tonight,” she said. “Bowling this time.” In previous days it had been the movies, out for dinner, over to watch TV at his house, proposed study-dates. Christine figured in all of them as the mode of transport. “He’s getting ugly about it, and I’m running out of excuses. If we’re going to do something, we ought to do it soon.”

I nodded. Failure to find a satisfactory method was one thing. The other thing holding us back had been my leg. Now the cast was off, and although I was on stern doctor’s orders to use my crutches, I had tested the left leg without them. There was some pain, but not as much as I had feared.

Those things, yeah—but mostly there had been us. Discovering each other. And although it’s going to sound stinking, I guess I ought to add something else, if this thing is going to stay straight (and I promised myself when I began to tell the tale that I’d stop if I found I couldn’t get it straight or keep it straight). The spice of danger had added something to what I felt for her—and, I think, to what she felt for me. He was my best friend, but there was still a dirty, senseless attraction in the idea that we were seeing each other behind his back. I felt that each time I drew her into my arms, each time my hand slipped over the firm swelling of her breasts. The sneaking around. Can you tell me why that should have an attraction? But it did. For the first time in my life, I had fallen for a girl. I had slipped before, but this time I had taken the grand head-over-heels tumble. And I loved it. I loved her. That constant sense of betrayal, though… that was a snakelike thing, both a shame and a crazy sort of goad. We could tell each other (and we did) that we were keeping our mouths shut to protect our families and ourselves.

That was true.

But it wasn’t all, Leigh, was it? No. It wasn’t all.

In one way, nothing worse could have happened. Love slows down reaction time; it mutes the sense of danger. My conversation with George LeBay was twelve long days in the past, and thinking about the things he had said—and worse, the things he had suggested—no longer raised the hair on the back of my neck.

The same was true—or not true—of the few times I talked with Arnie or glimpsed him in the halls. In a strange way, we seemed to be back in September and October again, when we had grown apart simply because Arnie was so busy. When we did talk he seemed pleasant enough, although the grey eyes behind his specs were cool. I waited for a wailing Regina or a distraught Michael to call me on the phone with the news that Arnie had finally stopped toying with them and had given up the idea of college in the fall for certain.

That didn’t happen, and it was from Motormouth himself—our guidance counsellor—that I heard Arnie had taken home a lot of literature on the University of Pennsylvania, Drew University, and Penn State. Those were the schools Leigh was most interested in. I knew it, and Arnie knew it—too.

Two nights earlier, I had happened to overhear my mother and my sister Ellie in the kitchen.

“Why doesn’t Arnie ever come over anymore, Mom?” Ellie asked. “Did he and Dennis have a fight?”

“No, honey,” my mother answered. “I don’t think so. But when friends get older… sometimes they grow apart.”

“That’s never going to happen to me,” Ellie said, with all the awesome conviction of the just-turned-fifteen.

I sat in the other room, wondering if maybe that was really all it was—hallucination brought on by my long stay in the hospital, as LeBay had suggested, and a simple growing-apart, a developing space between two childhood friends. I could see a certain logic to it, even down to my fixation on Christine, the wedge that had come between us.

It ignored the hard facts, but it was comfortable. To believe such a thing would allow Leigh and me to pursue our ordinary lives—to get involved in school activities, to do a little extra cramming for the Scholastic Achievement Tests in March, and, of course, to jump into each other’s arms as soon as her parents or mine left the room. To neck like what we were, which was a couple of horny teenagers totally infatuated with each other.

Those things lulled me… lulled us both. We had been careful—as careful, in fact, as adulterers instead of a couple of kids—but today the cast had come off, today I had been able to use the keys to my Duster again instead of just looking at them, and on an impulse I had called Leigh up and asked her if she’d like to go out to the world-famous Colonel’s with me for a little of his world-famous Crunchy Style. She had been delighted.

So maybe you see how our attention waned, how we became the smallest bit indiscreet. We sat in the parking lot, the Duster’s engine running so we could have some heat, and we talked about putting an end to that old and infinitely clever she-monster like a couple of children playing cowboys.

Neither of us saw Christine when she pulled up behind us.

“He’s buckling down for a long siege, if that’s what it takes,” I said.

“What?”

“The colleges he applied to. Hasn’t it hit you yet?”

“I guess not,” she said, mystified.

“They’re the schools you’re most interested in,” I said patiently.

She looked at me. I looked back, trying to smile, not making it.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go over it one more time. Molotov cocktails are out. Dynamite looks risky, but in a pinch—”

Leigh’s harsh gasp stopped me right there—that, and the expression of startled horror on her face. She was staring out through the windscreen, eyes wide, mouth open. I turned in that direction, and what I saw was so stunning that for a moment I was immobilized too.

Arnie was standing in front of my Duster.

He had parked directly behind us and gone in to get his chicken without realizing who it was, and why should he? It was nearly dark, and one splashed and muddy four-year-old Duster looks pretty much like another. He had gone in, had gotten his chow, had come out again… and stared right in through the windscreen at Leigh and me, sitting close together, our arms around each other, looking deep into each other’s eyes, as the poets say. Nothing but a coincidence—a grisly, hideous coincidence. Except that even now a part of my mind is coldly convinced that it was Christine that even at that turn, Christine led him there.

There was a long, frozen moment. A little moan escaped Leigh’s throat. Arnie stood not quite halfway across the small parking lot, dressed in his high school jacket, faded jeans, boots. A plaid scarf was tied around his throat. The collar of his jacket was turned up, and its black wings framed a face that was slowly twisting from an expression of sick incredulity into a pallid grimace of hate, The red-and-white-striped bag with the Colonel’s smiling face on it slipped out of one of his gloved hands and thumped onto the packed snow of the parking lot.

“Dennis,” Leigh whispered. “Dennis, oh my God.”

He began to run. I thought he was coming to the car, probably to haul me out and work me over. I could see myself hopping feebly around on my not-so-good good leg under the parking-lot lights that had just come on while Arnie, whose life I had saved all those years going back to kindergarten, beat the living Jesus out of me. He ran, his mouth twisted down in a snarl I had seen before—but not on his face. It was LeBay’s face now.

He didn’t stop at my car; instead he ran right past. I twisted around, and that was when I saw Christine.

I got my door open and began to struggle out, grabbing onto the roof gutter for support. The cold numbed my fingers almost at once.

“Dennis, no!” Leigh cried.

I got on my feet just as Arnie raked open Christine’s door.

“Arnie!” I shouted. “Hey, man!”

His head jerked up. His eyes were wide and blank and glaring. A line of spittle was working its way down from one corner of his mouth. Christine’s grille seemed to be snarling too.

He raised both fists and shook them at me. “You shitter!” His voice was high and cracked. “Have her! You deserve her! She’s shit! You’re both shit! Have each other! You won’t for long!”

People had come to the plate-glass windows of the Kentucky Fried Chicken and the neighbouring Kowloon Express to see what was going on.

“Arnie! Let’s talk, man—”

He jumped in the car and slammed her door. Christine’s engine screamed and her headlights came on, the glaring white eyes of my dream, pinning me like a bug on a card. And over them, behind the glass, was Arnie’s terrible face, the face of a devil sick of sin. That face, both hateful and haunted, has lived in my dreams ever since. Then the face was gone. It was replaced by a skull, a grinning death’s head.

Leigh uttered a high, piercing scream. She had turned around to look, so I knew that it wasn’t just my imagination. She had seen it too.

Christine roared forward, her rear tyres spinning snow back. She didn’t come for the Duster, but for me. I think his intention was to grind me to jelly between his car and mine. It was only my bad left leg that saved me; it buckled and I fell back inside my Duster, bumping my right hip on the wheel and honking the horn.

A cold wave of wind buffeted my face. Christine’s bright red flank passed within three feet of me. She roared down the take-out joint’s IN drive and shot onto JFK Drive without slowing, rear end fishtailing. Then she was gone, still accelerating.

I looked at the snow and could see the fresh zig-zag treads of her tyres. She had missed my open door by no more than three inches.

Leigh was crying. I pulled my left leg into the car with my hands, slammed the door, and held her. Her arms groped for me blindly and then grasped with panicky tightness. “It… it wasn’t…”

“Shhh, Leigh. Never mind. Don’t think about it.”

“That wasn’t Arnie driving that car! It was a dead person! It was a dead person!”

“It was LeBay,” I said, and now that it had happened, I felt a kind of eerie calm instead of the trembly, close-call reaction I should have had—that and the guilt of finally being discovered with my best friend’s girl. “It was him, Leigh. You just met Roland D. LeBay.”

She wept, crying out her fear and shock and horror, holding onto me. I was glad to have her. My left leg throbbed dully. I looked up into the rearview mirror at the empty slot where Christine had been. Now that it had happened, it seemed to me that any other conclusion would have been impossible. The peace of the last two weeks, the simple joy of having Leigh on my side, all of that now seemed to be the unnatural thing, the false thing—as false as the phoney war between Hitler’s conquest of Poland and the Wehrmacht’s rolling assault on France.

And I began to see the end of things, how it would be.

She looked up at me, her cheeks wet. “What now, Dennis? What do we do now?”

“Now we end it.”

“How? What do you mean?”

Speaking more to myself than to her, I said, “He needs an alibi. We have to be ready when he goes away. The garage. Darnell’s. I’m going to trap it in there. Try to kill it.” “Dennis, what are you talking about?”

“He’ll leave town,” I said. “Don’t you see? All of the people Christine has killed—they make a ring around Arnie. He’ll know that. He’ll get Arnie out of town again.”

LeBay, you mean.

I nodded, and Leigh shuddered.

“We have to kill it. You know that.”

“But how? Please, Dennis… how are we going to do it?”

And at last I had an idea.

48 PREPARATIONS

I dropped Leigh off at her house and told her to call me if she saw Christine cruising around.

“What are you going to do? Come over here with a flame-thrower?”

“A bazooka,” I said, and we both started to laugh hysterically.

“Nuke the ’58! Nuke the ’58!” Leigh yelled, and we got laughing again—but all the time we were laughing we were scared half out of our minds… maybe more than half. And all the time we were laughing I was sick over Arnie, both over what he had seen and what I had done. And I think Leigh felt the same. It’s just that sometimes you have to laugh. Sometimes you just do. And when it comes, nothing can keep that laugh away. It just walks in and does its stuff.

“So what do I tell my folks?” she asked me when we finally started to come down a little. “I’ve got to tell them something, Dennis! I can’t just let them risk being run down in the street!”

“Nothing,” I said. “Tell them nothing at all.”

“But—”

“For one thing, they wouldn’t believe you. For another, nothing’s going to happen as long as Arnie’s in Libertyville. I’d stake my life on that.”

“You are, dummy,” she whispered.

“I know. My life, my mother’s, my father’s, my sister’s.”

“How will we know if he leaves?”

“I’ll take care of that. You’re going to be sick tomorrow. You’re not going to school.”

“I’m sick right now,” she said in a low voice. “Dennis, what’s going to happen? What are you planning?”

“I’ll call you later tonight,” I said, and kissed her. Her lips were cold.

When I got home, Elaine was struggling into her parka and muttering black imprecations at people who sent other people down to Tom’s for milk and bread just when Dance Fever was coming on TV. She was prepared to be grumpy at me as well, but she cheered up when I offered to give her a lift down to the market and back. She also gave me a suspicious look, as if this unexpected kindness to the little sister might be the onset of some disease. Herpes, maybe. She asked me if I felt all right. I only smiled blandly and told her to hop in before I changed my mind, although by now my right leg was aching and my left was throbbing fiercely. I could talk on and on to Leigh about how Christine wouldn’t roll as long as Arnie was in Libertyville, and intellectually I knew that was right… but it didn’t change the instinctive rolling in my guts when I thought of Ellie walking the two blocks to Tom’s and crossing the dark suburban sidestreets in her bright yellow parka. I kept seeing Christine parked down one of those streets, crouched in the dark like an old bitch hunting dog.

When we got to Tom’s, I gave her a buck. “Get us each a Yodel and a Coke,” I said.

“Dennis, are you feeling all right?”

“Yes. And if you put my change in that Asteroids game, I’ll break your arm.”

That seemed to set her mind at rest. She went in, and I sat slumped behind the wheel of my Duster, thinking about what a terrible box we were in. We couldn’t talk to anyone—that was the nightmare. That was where Christine was so strong. Was I going to grab my dad down in his toy-shop and tell him that what Ellie called “Arnie Cunningham’s pukey old red car” was now driving itself? Was I going to call the cops and tell them that a dead guy wanted to kill my girlfriend and myself? No. The only thing on our side, other than the fact that the car couldn’t move until Arnie had an alibi, was the fact that it would want no witnesses—Moochie Welch, Don Vandenberg and Will Darnell had been killed alone, late at night; Buddy Repperton and his two friends had been killed out in the boonies.

Elaine came back with a bag clutched to her budding bosom, got in, gave me my Coke and my Yodel.

“Change,” I said.

“You’re such a boogersnot,” she said, but put some twenty-odd cents in my outstretched hand.

“I know, but I love you anyway,” I said. I pushed her hood back, ruffled her hair, and then kissed her ear. She looked surprised and suspicious—and then she smiled. She wasn’t such a bad sort, my sister Ellie. The thought of her being run down in the street simply because I fell in love with Leigh Cabot after Arnie went mad and left her… I simply wasn’t going to let that happen.

At home, I worked my way upstairs after saying hi to my mom. She wanted to know how the leg was doing, and I told her it was in good shape. But when I got upstairs, I made the bathroom medicine cabinet my first stop. I swallowed a couple of aspirin for the sake of my legs, which were now singing Ave Maria. Then I went down to my folks’ bedroom, where the upstairs phone is, and sat down in Mom’s rocking chair with a sigh.

I picked up the phone and made the first of my calls.

“Dennis Guilder, scourge of the turnpike extension project!” Brad Jeffries said heartily. “Good to hear from you, kiddo. When you gonna come over and watch the Penguins with me again?”

“I dunno,” I said. “I get tired of watching handicapped people play hockey after a while. Now if you got interested in a good team, like the Flyers—”

“Christ, have I got to listen to this from a kid that isn’t even mine?” Brad asked. “The world really is going to hell, I guess.”

We chatted for a while longer, just kicking things back and forth, and then I told him why I had called.

He laughed. “What the fuck, Denny? You goin into business for yourself?”

“You might say so.” I thought of Christine. “For a limited time only.”

“Don’t want to talk about it?”

“Well, not just yet. Do you know someone who might have an item like that for rent?”

“I’ll tell you, Dennis. There’s only one guy I know who might do business with you on anything like that. Johnny Pomberton. Lives out on the Ridge Road. He’s got more rolling stock than Carter’s got liver pills.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Brad.”

“How’s Arnie?”

“All right, I guess. I don’t see as much of him as I used to.”

“Funny guy, Dennis. I never in my wildest dreams thought he’d last out the summer the first time I set eyes on him. But he had one hell of a lot of determination.”

“Yeah,” I said. “All of that and then some.”

“Say hi to him when you see him.”

“I’ll do it, Brad. Stay loose.”

“Can’t live if you do anything else, Denny. Come an over some night and peel a few cans with me.”

“I will. Good night.”

“Night.”

I hung up and then hesitated over the phone for a minute or two, not really wanting to make this next call. But it had to be done; it was central to the whole sorry, stupid business. I picked the telephone up and dialled the Cunninghams’ number from memory. If Arnie answered, I would simply hang up without speaking. But my luck was in; it was Michael who answered.

“Hello?” His voice sounded tired and a bit slurred.

“Michael, this is Dennis.”

“Hey, hi!” He sounded genuinely pleased.

“Is Arnie there?”

“Upstairs. He came home from somewhere and went right to his room. He looked pretty thundery, but that’s far from unusual these days. Want me to call him?”

“No,” I said. “That’s okay. It was really you I wanted to talk to, anyhow. I need a favour.”

“Well, sure. Name it.” I realized what that slur in his voice was—Michael Cunningham was at least halfway snookered. “You did us a helluva favour, talking some sense to him about college.”

“Michael, I don’t think he listened to a thing I said.”

“Well, something sure happened. He’s applied to three schools just this month. Regina thinks you walk on water, Dennis. And just between me and thee, she’s pretty ashamed of the way she treated you when Arnie first told us about his car. But you know Regina. She’s never been able to say “I’m sorry”.”

I knew that, all right. And what Regina would think, I wondered, if she knew that Arnie—or whatever controlled Arnie—didn’t have any more interest in college than a hog has in mutual funds? That he was simply following Leigh’s tracks, hounding her, fixated on her? It was perversion on perversion—LeBay, Leigh, and Christine in some hideous ménage à trois.

“Listen, Michael,” I said. “I’d like you to call me if Arnie decides to go out of town for some reason. Especially in the next day or two, or over the weekend. Day or night. I have to know if Arnie’s going to leave Libertyville. And I have to know before he leaves. It’s very important.”

“Why?”

“I’d just as soon not go into that. It’s complicated, and it would… well, it would sound crazy.”

There was a long, long silence, and when Arnie’s dad spoke again, his voice was a near-whisper. “It’s that goddam car of his, isn’t it?”

How much did he suspect? How much did he know? If he was like most people I knew, he probably suspected a little more drunk than sober. How much? Even now I don’t know for sure. But what I believe is that he suspected more than anyone—except maybe Will Darnell.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s the car.”

“I knew it,” he said dully. “I knew. What’s happening, Dennis? How is he doing it? Do you know?”

“Michael, I can’t say any more. Will you tell me if he plans a trip tomorrow or the next day?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, all right.”

“Thanks.”

“Dennis,” he said. “Do you think I’ll ever have my son back?”

He deserved the truth. That poor, devilled man deserved the truth. “I don’t know,” I said, and bit at my lower lip until it hurt. “I think… that it may have gone too far for that.”

“Dennis,” he almost wailed, “what is it? Drugs? Some kind of drugs?”

“I’ll tell you when I can,” I said. “That’s all I can promise you. I’m sorry. I’ll tell you when I can.”

Johnny Pomberton was easier to talk to.

He was a lively, garrulous man, and any fears I’d had that he wouldn’t do business with a kid soon went by the board. I got the feeling that Johnny Pomberton would have done business with Satan freshly risen from hell with the smell of brimstone still on him, if he had good old legal tender.

“Sure,” he kept saying. “Sure, sure.” You’d no more than started some proposition before Johnny Pomberton was agreeing with you. It was a little unnerving. I had a cover story, but I don’t think he even listened to it. He simply quoted me a price—a very reasonable one, as it turned out.

“That sounds fine,” I said.

“Sure,” he agreed. “What time, you coming by?”

“Well, how would nine-thirty tomorrow m—”

“Sure,” he said. “See you then.”

“One other question, Mr Pomberton…”

“Sure. And make it Johnny.”

“Okay, Johnny, then. What about automatic transmission?”

Johnny Pemberton laughed heartily—so heartily that I held the phone away from my ear a bit, feeling glum. That laugh was answer enough.

“On one of these babies? You got to be kidding. Why? Can’t you run a manual shift?”

“Yes, that’s what I learned on,” I said.

“Sure! So you got no problems, right?”

“I guess not,” I said, thinking of my left leg, which would be running the clutch—or trying to. Simply shifting it around a little tonight had made it ache like hell, I hoped that Arnie would wait a few days before taking his trip out of town, but somehow I didn’t think that was on the cards. It would be tomorrow, over the weekend at the latest, and my left leg would simply have to bear up as best it could. “Well, good night, Mr Pomberton. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Sure. Thanks for calling, kid. I got one all picked out in my mind for you. You’ll like her, see if you don’t. And if you don’t start calling me Johnny, I’m gonna double the price.”

“Sure,” I said, and hung up on his laughter.

You’ll like her. See if you don’t.

Her again—I was becoming morbidly aware of that casual form of referral… and getting damned sick of it.

Then I made my last preparatory call. There were four Sykeses in the phone book. I got the one I wanted on my second try; Jimmy himself answered the phone. I introduced myself as Arnie Cunningham’s friend, and Jimmy’s voice brightened. He liked Arnie, who hardly ever teased him and never “punched on him” as Buddy Repperton had done when Buddy worked for Will. He wanted to know how Arnie was, and, lying again, I told him Arnie was fine.

“Jeez, that’s good,” he said. “He really had his butt in a sling there for a while. I knew them fireworks and cigarettes was no good for him.”

“It’s Arnie I’m calling for,” I said. “You remember when Will got arrested and they shut down the garage, Jimmy?”

“Sure do.” Jimmy sighed. “Now poor old Will’s dead and I’m out of a job. My ma keeps sayin I got to go to the vocational-technical school, but I wouldn’t be no good at that. I guess I’ll go for bein a janitor, or somethin like that. My Uncle Fred’s a janitor up at the college, and he says there’s an op-nin, because this other Janitor, he disappeared, just took off or somethin, and—”

“Arnie says when they closed down the garage, he lost his whole socket-wrench kit,” I broke in. “It was up behind some of those old tyres, you know, on the overhead racks. He put them up there so no one would rip him off.”

“Still there?” Jimmy asked.

“I guess so.”

“What a bummer!”

“You know it. That set of boltfuckers was worth a hundred dollars.”

“Holy crow! I bet they ain’t there anymore anyway, though. I bet one of them cops got it.”

“Arnie thinks they might still be there. But he’s not supposed to go near the garage because of the trouble he’s in.” This was a lie, but I didn’t think Jimmy would catch it and he didn’t. Putting one over on a fellow who was borderline retarded didn’t add a thing to my self-esteem, however.

“Aw, shit! Well, listen—I’ll go down and look for ’em. Yessir! Tomorrow morning, first thing. I still got my keys.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t Arnie’s mythical set of socket wrenches that I wanted; I wanted Jimmy’s keys.

“I’d like to get them, Jimmy, that’s the thing. As a surprise. And I know right where he put them. You might hunt around all day and still not find them.”

“Oh, yeah, for sure. I was never no good at finding things, that’s what Will said. He always said I couldn’t find my own bee-hind with both hands and a flashlight.”

“Aw, man, he was just putting you down. But really—I’d like to do it.”

“Well, sure.”

“I thought I’d come by tomorrow and borrow your keys. I could get that set of wrenches and have your keys back to you before dark.”

“Gee, I dunno. Will said to never loan out my keys—”

“Sure, before, but the place is empty now except for Arnie’s tools and a bunch of junk out back. The estate will be putting it up for sale pretty soon, contents complete, and if I take them after that, it would like stealing.”

“Oh! Well, I guess it’d be okay. If you bring my keys back.” And then he said an absurdly touching thing: “See, they’re all I got to remember Will by.”

“It’s a promise.”

“Okay,” he said. “If it’s for Arnie, I guess it’s okay.”

Just before bed, now downstairs, I made one final call—to a very sleepy-sounding Leigh.

“One of these next few nights we’re going to end it. You game?”

“Yes,” she said. “I am. I think I am. What have you got planned, Dennis?”

So I told her, going through it step by step, half-expecting her to poke a dozen holes in my idea. But when I was done, she simply said, “What if it doesn’t work?”

“You make the honour roll. I don’t think you need me to draw you a picture.”

“No,” she said. “I guess not.”

“I’d keep you out of it if I could, I said. “But LeBay is going to suspect a trap, so the bait has to be good.”

“I wouldn’t let you leave me out of it,” she said. Her voice was steady. “This is my business too. I loved him. I really did. And once you start loving someone… I don’t think you ever really get over it completely. Do you, Dennis?”

I thought of the years. The summers of reading and swimming and playing games: Monopoly, Scrabble, Chinese checkers. The ant farms. The times I had kept him from getting killed in all the ways kids like to kill the outsider, the one who’s a little bit strange, a little bit off the beat. There had been times when I had gotten pretty fucking sick of keeping him from getting killed, times when I had wondered if my life wouldn’t be easier, better, if I simply let Arnie go, let him drown. But it wouldn’t have been better. I had needed Arnie to make me better, and he had. We had traded fair all the way down the line, and oh shit, this was very bitter, very fucking bitter indeed.

“No,” I said, and I suddenly had to put my hand over my eyes. “I don’t think you ever do. I loved him too. And maybe it isn’t too late for him, even now. That’s what I would have prayed: Dear God, let me keep Arnie from getting killed just one more time. Just this one last time.

“It’s not him I hate,” she said, her voice low. “It’s that man LeBay… did we really see that thing this afternoon, Dennis? In the car?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think we did.”

“Him and that bitch Christine,” she said. “Will it be soon?”

“Soon, yeah. I think so.

“All right. I love you, Dennis.”

“I love you too.”

As it turned out, it ended the next day— Friday the 19th of January.

49 ARNIE

I began that long, terrible day by driving over to Jimmy Sykes’s house in my Duster. I had expected there might be some trouble from Jimmy’s mother, but that turned out to be okay. She was, if anything, mentally slower than her son. She invited me in for bacon and eggs (I declined—my stomach was tied in miserable knots) and clucked over my crutches while Jimmy hunted around in his room for his keyring. I made small-talk with Mrs Sykes, who was roughly the size of Mount Etna, while time passed and a dismal certainty rose inside me: Jimmy had lost his keys somewhere and the whole thing was off the rails before it could really begin.

He came back shaking his head. “Can’t find em,” he said, “Jeez, I guess I must have lost em somewhere. What a bummer.”

And Mrs Sykes, nearly three hundred pounds on the hoof in a faded housedress and her hair up in puffy pink rollers, said with blessed practicality, “Did you look in your pockets, Jim?”

A startled expression crossed Jimmy’s face. He rammed a hand into the pocket of his green chino workpants. Then, with a shamefaced grin, he pulled out a bunch of keys. They were on one of the keyrings they sell at the novelty shop in the Monroeville Mall—a large rubber fried egg. The egg was dark with grease.

“There you are, you little suckers,” he said.

“You watch your language, young man,” Mrs Sykes said. “Just show Dennis which key it is that opens the door and keep your dirty language in your head.”

Jimmy ended up handing three Schlage keys over to me, because they weren’t labelled and he couldn’t tell which was which. One of them opened the main overhead door, one opened the back overhead door, the one which gave on the long lot of junked cars, and one opened the door to Will’s office.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll have these back to you just as soon as I can, Jimmy.”

“Great,” Jimmy said. “Say hello to Arnie when you see him.”

“You bet,” I said.

“You sure you don’t want some bacon and eggs, Dennis?” Mrs Sykes asked. “There’s plenty.”

“Thanks,” I said, “but I really ought to get going.” It was a quarter past eight; school started at nine. Arnie usually pulled in around eight-forty-five, Leigh had told me. I just had time. I got my crutches under me and got to my feet.

“Help him out, Jim,” Mrs Sykes commanded. “Don’t just stand there.”

I started to protest and she waved me away. “Wouldn’t want you to fall on your can getting back to your car, Dennis. Might break your leg all over again.” She laughed uproariously at this, and Jimmy, the soul of obedience, practically carried me back to my Duster.

The sky that day was a scummy, frowsy grey, and the radio was predicting more snow by late afternoon. I drove across town to Libertyville High, took the driveway which led to the student parking lot, and parked in the front row. I didn’t need Leigh to tell me that Arnie usually parked in the back row. I had to see him, had to strew the bait in front of his nose, but I wanted him as far from Christine as possible when I did it. Away from the car, LeBay’s hold seemed weaker.

I sat with the key turned over to ACCESSORY for the radio and looked at the football field. It seemed impossible that I had ever traded sandwiches with Arnie on those snowcovered bleachers. Impossible to believe that I had run and cavorted on that field myself, dressed up in padding, helmet, and tight pants, stupidly convinced of my own physical invulnerability… perhaps even of my own immortality.

I didn’t feel that way anymore, if I ever had.

Students were coming in, parking their cars, and heading for the building, chattering and laughing and horsing around. I slouched lower in my seat, not wanting to be recognized. A bus pulled up at the doors in the main turnaround and disgorged a load of kids. A small cluster of shivering boys and girls gathered out in the smoking area where Buddy had taken Arnie on that day last fall. That day also seemed impossibly distant now.

My heart was thumping in my chest and I was miserably tense. A craven part of me hoped that Arnie simply wouldn’t show up. And then I saw the familiar white-over-red shape of Christine turn in from School Street and cruise up the student drive, moving at a steady twenty, blowing a little plume of white exhaust from her pipe. Arnie was behind the wheel, wearing his school jacket. He didn’t look at me; he simply drove to his accustomed place at the back of the lot and parked.

Just stay slouched down and he won’t even see you, that craven, traitorous part of my mind whispered. He’ll walk right by you, like all the rest of them.

Instead, I opened my door and fumbled my crutches outside. Leaning my weight on them, I yanked myself out and stood there on the packed snow of the parking lot, feeling a little bit like Fred MacMurray in that old picture Double Indemnity. From the school came the burring of the first bell, made faint and unimportant by distance—Arnie was later than he had been in the old days. My mother had said that Arnie was almost disgustingly punctual. Maybe LeBay hadn’t been.

He came toward me, books under his arm, head down twisting in and out between the cars. He walked behind a van, passing out of my sight temporarily, and then came back into view. He looked up then, directly into my eyes.

Ms own eyes widened, and he made an automatic half-turn back toward Christine.

“Feel kind of naked when you’re not behind the wheel?” I asked.

He looked back at me. His lips drew slightly downward, as if he had tasted something of unpleasant flavour.

“How’s your cunt, Dennis?” he asked.

George LeBay hadn’t said, but he had at least hinted that his brother was extraordinarily good at getting through to people, finding their soft spots.

I took two shuffling steps forward on my crutches while he stood there, smiling with the corners of his mouth down.

“How did you like it when Repperton called you Cuntface?” I asked him. “Did you like it so well you want to turn it around and use it on somebody else?”

Part of him seemed to flinch at that—something that was maybe only in his eyes—but the contemptuous, watchful smile remained on his lips. It was cold out. I hadn’t put on my gloves, and my hands, on the crossbars of the crutches, were getting numb. Our breath made little plumes… “Or what about in the fifth grade, when Tommy Deckinger used to call you Fart-Breath?” I asked, my voice rising. Getting angry at him hadn’t been part of the game-plan, but now it was here, shaking inside me. “Did you like that? And do you remember when Ladd Smythe was a patrol-boy and he pushed you down in the street and I pulled his hat off and stuffed it down his pants? Where you been, Arnie? This guy LeBay is a Johnny-come-lately. Me, I was here all along.”

That flinch again. This time he half-turned away, the smile faltering, his eyes searching for Christine the way your eyes might search for a loved one in a crowded terminal or bus-station. Or the way a junkie might took for his pusher.

“You need her that bad?” I asked. “Man, you’re hooked right through the fucking bag, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said hoarsely. “You stole my girl. Nothing is going to change that. You went behind my back… you cheated… you’re just a shitter, like all the rest of them.” He was looking at me now, his eyes wide and hurt and blazing with anger. “I thought I could trust you, and you turned out to be worse than Repperton or any of them!” He took a step toward me and cried out in a perfect fury of loss, “You stole her, you shitter!”

I lurched forward another step on my crutches; one of them slid a little bit in the packed snow underfoot. We were like two reluctant gunslingers approaching each other.

“You can’t steal what’s been given away,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the night she choked in your car. The night Christine tried to kill her. You told her you didn’t need her. You told her to fuck off.”

“I never did! That’s a lie! That’s a goddam lie!”

“Who am I talking to?” I asked.

“Never mind!” His grey eyes were huge behind his spectacles. “Never mind who the fuck you’re talking to! That’s nothing but a dirty lie! No more than I’d expect from that stinking bitch!”

Another step closer. His pale face was marked with flaring red patches of colour.

“When you write your name, it doesn’t look like your signature anymore, Arnie.”

“You shut up, Dennis.”

“Your father says it’s like having a stranger in the house.”

“I’m warning you, man.”

“Why bother?” I asked brutally. “I know what’s going to happen. So does Leigh. The same thing that happened to Buddy Repperton and Will Darnell and all the others. Because you’re not Arnie at all anymore. Are you in there, LeBay? Come on out and let me see you. I’ve seen you before. I saw you on New Year’s Eve, I saw you yesterday at the chicken place. I know you’re in there; why don’t you stop fucking around and come out?”

And he did… but in Arnie’s face this time, and that was more terrible than all the skulls and skeletons and comic-book horrors ever thought of. Arnie’s face changed. A sneer bloomed on his lips like a rancid rose. And I saw him as he must have been back when the world was young and a car was all a young man needed to have; everything else would just automatically follow. I saw George LeBay’s big brother.

I only remember one thing about him, but I remember that one thing very well. His anger. He was always angry.

He came toward me, closing the distance between where he had been and where I stood propped on my crutches. His eyes were filmy and beyond all reach. That sneer was stamped on his face like the mark of a branding-iron.

I had time to think of the scar on George LeBay’s forearm, skidding from his elbow to his wrist. He pushed me and then he came back and threw me. I could hear that fourteen-year-old LeBay shouting, You stay out of my way from now on, you goddam snotnose, stay out of my way, you hear?

It was LeBay I was facing now, and he was not a man who took losing easily. Check that: he didn’t take losing at all.

“Fight him, Arnie,” I said. “He’s had his own way too long. Fight him, kill him, make him stay d—”

He swung his foot and kicked my right crutch out from under me. I struggled to stay up, tottered, almost made it… and then he kicked the left crutch away. I fell down on the cold packed snow. He took another step and stood above me, his face hard and alien.

“You got it coming, and you’re going to get it,” he said remotely.

“Yeah, right,” I gasped. “You remember the ant farms, Arnie? Are you in there someplace? This dirty sucker never had a fucking ant farm in his life. He never had a friend in his life.”

And suddenly the calm hardness broke. His face—his face roiled. I don’t know how else to describe it. LeBay was there, furious at having to put down a kind of internal mutiny. Then Arnie was there—drawn, tired, ashamed, but, most of all, desperately unhappy. Then LeBay again, and his foot drew back to kick me as I lay on the snow groping for my crutches and feeling helpless and useless and dumb. Then it was Arnie again, my friend Arnie, brushing his hair back off his forehead in that familiar, distracted gesture; it was Arnie saying, “Oh, Dennis… Dennis… I’m sorry… I’m so sorry.”

“It’s too late for sorry, man,” I said.

I got one crutch and then the other. I pulled myself up little by little, slipping twice before I could get the crutches under me again. Now my hands felt like pieces of furniture. Arnie made no move to help me; he stood with his back against the van, his eyes wide and shocked.

“Dennis, I can’t help it,” he whispered. “Sometimes I feel like I’m not even here anymore. Help me, Dennis. Help me.”

“Is LeBay there?” I asked him.

“He’s always here,” Arnie groaned. “Oh God, always! Except—”

“The car?”

“When Christine… when she goes, then he’s with her. That’s the only time he’s… he’s…”

Arnie fell silent. His head slipped over to one side. His chin rolled on his chest in a boneless pivot. His hair dangled toward the snow. Spit ran out of his mouth and splattered on his boots. And then he began to scream thinly and beat his gloved fists on the van behind him:

“Go away! Go away! Go awaaaaay!”

Then nothing for maybe five seconds nothing except the shuddering of his body, as if a basket of snakes had been dumped inside his clothes; nothing except that slow, horrible roll of his chin on his chest.

I thought maybe he was winning, that he was beating the dirty old sonofabitch. But when he looked up, Arnie was gone. LeBay was there.

“It’s all going to happen just like he said,” LeBay told me. “Let it go, boy. Maybe I won’t drive over you.”

Come on over to Darnell’s tonight, I said. My voice was harsh, my throat as dry as sand. “We’ll play. I’ll bring Leigh. You bring Christine.”

“I’ll pick my own time and place,” LeBay said, and grinned with Arnie’s mouth, showing Arnie’s teeth, which were young and strong—a mouth still years from the indignity of dentures. “You won’t know when or where. But you’ll know… when the time comes.”

“Think again,” I said, almost casually. “Come to Darnell’s tonight, or she and I start talking tomorrow.”

He laughed, an ugly contemptuous sound. “And where will that get you? The asylum over at Reed City?”

“Oh, we won’t be taken seriously at first,” I said. “I give you that. But that stuff about how they put you in the loonybin as soon as you start talking about ghosts and demons… uh-uh, LeBay. Maybe in your day, before flying saucers and The Exorcist and that house in Amityville. These days a hell of a lot of people believe in that stuff.”

He was still grinning, but his eyes looked at me with narrow suspicion. That, and something else. I thought that something else was the first sparkle of fear.

“And what you don’t seem to realize is how many people know something is wrong.”

His grin faltered. Of course he must have realized that, and been worried about it. But maybe killing gets to be a fever; maybe after a while you are simply unable to stop and count the cost.

“Whatever weird, filthy kind of life you still have is all wrapped up in that car,” I said. “You knew it, and you planned to use Arnie from the very beginning—except that “planned” is the wrong word, because you never really planned anything, did you? You just followed your intuitions.”

He made a snarling sound and turned to go.

“You really want to think about it,” I called after him. “Arnie’s father knows something is rotten. So does mine. I think there must be some police somewhere who’d be willing to listen to anything about how their friend Junkins died. And it all comes back to Christine, Christine, Christine. Sooner or later someone’s going to run her through the crusher in the back of Darnell’s just on general principles.”

He had turned back and was looking at me with a bright mixture of hate and fear in his eyes.

“We’ll keep talking, and a lot of people will laugh at us, I don’t doubt it. But I’ve got two pieces of cast with Arnie’s signature on them. Only one of them isn’t his. It’s yours. I’ll take them to the state cops and keep pestering them until they have a handwriting specialist confirm that. People are going to start watching Arnie. People are going to start watching Christine too. You get the picture?”

“Sonny, you don’t worry me one fucking bit.” But his eyes said something different. I was getting to him, all right.

“It’s going to happen,” I said. “People are only rational on the surface. They still toss salt over their left shoulder if they spill the shaker, they don’t walk under ladders, they believe in survival after death. And sooner or later — probably sooner, with Leigh and me shooting off our mouths—someone is going to turn that car of yours into a sardine can. And I’m willing to bet that when it goes, you’ll go with it.”

“Don’t you just wish!” he sneered.

“We’ll be at Darnell’s tonight,” I said. “If you’re good, you can get rid of both of us. That won’t end it either, but it might give you some breathing space… time enough to get out of town. But I don’t think you’re good enough, chum. It’s gone on too long. We’re getting rid of you.”

I crutched back to my Duster and got in. I used the crutches more clumsily than I had to, tried to make myself look more incapacitated than I really was. I had rocked him by mentioning the signatures; it was time to leave before I overplayed my hand. But there was one more thing. One thing guaranteed to drive LeBay into a frenzy.

I pulled my left leg in with my hands, slammed the door, and leaned out.

I looked into his eyes and smiled.

“She’s great in bed,” I said. “Too bad you’ll never know.”

With a furious roar, he charged at me. I rolled up the window and slapped down the door-lock. Then, leisurely, I started the engine while he slammed his gloved fists on the glass. His face was snarling, terrible. There was no Arnie in it now. No Arnie at all. My friend was gone. I felt a dark sorrow that was deeper than tears or fear, but I kept that slow, insulting, dirty grin on my face. Then, slowly, I raised my middle finger to the glass.

“Fuck you, LeBay,” I said, and then pulled out, leaving him to stand there in the lot, shaking with that simple, unswerving fury his brother had told me of. It was that more than anything else that I was counting on to bring him tonight.

We’d see.

50 PETUNIA

I drove about four blocks before the reaction set in, and then I had to pull over. I had the shakes, bad. Not even the heater, turned up to full, could kill them. My breath came in harsh little gasps. I clutched myself to keep warm, but it seemed that I would never be warm again, never. That face, that horrible face, and Arnie buried somewhere inside, he’s always here, Arnie had said, always except when—what? When Christine rolled by herself, of course. LeBay couldn’t be both places at the same time. That was beyond even his powers.

At last I was able to drive on again, and I wasn’t even aware that I had been crying until I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the wet circles under my eyes.

It was quarter to ten by the time I made it out to Johnny Pomberton’s place. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing green gum-rubber boots and a heavy red-and-black-checked hunting jacket. An old hat with a grease-darkened bill was tilted up on his balding head as he studied the grey sky.

“More snow comin, the radio says. Didn’t know as you’d really be out, boy, but I brung her around forya just in case. What do you think of her?”

I got my crutches under me again and got out of my car.

Road salt gritted under the crutches’ rubber tips, but the going felt safe. Standing in front of Johnny Pomberton’s woodpile was one of the strangest-looking vehicles I’ve ever seen in my life. A faint, pungent odour, not exactly pleasant, drifted over from it to where we stood.

At one time, far back in its career, it had been a GM product—or so the logo on its gigantic snout advertised. Now it was a little bit of everything. One thing it surely was, and that was big. The top of its grille would have been head-high on a tall man. Behind and over it, the cab loomed like a big square helmet. Behind that, supported by two sets of double wheels on each side, was a long, tubular body, like the body of a gasoline tanker truck.

Except that I never saw a tanker truck before this one that was painted bright pink. The word PETUNIA was written across the side in Roman gothic letters two feet high.

“I don’t know what to think of her,” I said. “What is she?”

Pomberton poked a Camel cigarette into his mouth and lit it with a quick flick of his horny thumbnail on the tip of a wooden match. “Kaka sucker,” he said.

“What?”

He grinned. “Twenty-thousand-gallon capacity,” he said. “She’s a corker, is Petunia.”

“I don’t get you.” But I was starting to. There was an absurd, grisly irony to it that Arnie—the old Arnie would have appreciated.

I had asked Pomberton over the phone if he had a big, heavy truck to rent, and this was the biggest one currently in his yard. All four of his dump trucks were working, two in Libertyville and two others in Philly Hill. He’d had a grader, he explained to me, but it had had a nervous bustdown just after Christmas. He said he was having a devilish job keeping his trucks rolling since Darnell’s Garage shut down.

Petunia was essentially a tanker, no more and no less. Her job was pumping out septic systems.

“How much does she weigh?” I asked Pomberton.

He flicked away his cigarette. “Dry, or loaded with shit?”

I gulped. “Which is it now?”

He threw his head back and laughed. “Do you think I’d rentcher a loaded truck?” He pronounced it ludded truck. “Naw, naw—she’s dry, dry as a bone and all hosed out. Sure she is. Still a little fragrant, though, ain’t she?”

I sniffed. She was fragrant, all right.

“It could be a lot worse,” I said. “I guess.”

“Sure,” Pomberton said. “You bet, Old Petunia’s original pedigree was lost long ago, but what’s on her current registration is eighteen thousand pounds, GVW.”

“What’s that?”

“Gross vehicle weight,” he said. “If they pull you over on the Interstate and you weigh more than eighteen thousand the ICC gets upset. Dry, she prob’ly goes around, I dunno, eight-nine thousand Pounds. She’s got a five-speed tranny with a two-speed differential, giving you ten forward speeds all told… if you can run a clutch.”

He cast a dubious eye up and down my crutches and lit another cigarette.

“Can you run a clutch?”

“Sure,” I said with a straight face. “If it isn’t really stiff.” But for how long? That was the question.

“Well, that’s your business and I won’t mess into it.” He looked at me brightly. “I’ll give you a ten per cent discount for cash, on account of I don’t usually report cash transactions to my favourite uncle.”

I checked my wallet and found three twenties and three tens. “How much did you say for one day?”

“How does ninety bucks sound?”

I gave it to him. I had been prepared to pay a hundred and twenty.

“What are you going to do with your Duster there?”

It hadn’t even crossed my mind until just now. “Could I leave it here? Just for today?”

“Sure,” Pomberton said, “you can leave it here all week, I don’t give a shit. Just put it around the back and leave the keys in it in case I have to move it.”

I drove around back where there was a wilderness of cannibalized truck parts poking out of the deep snow like bones from white sand. It took me nearly ten minutes to work my way back around on my crutches. I could have done it faster if I’d used my left leg a bit, but I wouldn’t do that. I was saving it for Petunia’s clutch.

I approached Petunia, feeling dread gather in my stomach like a small black cloud. I had no doubt it would stop Christine… if she really showed up at Darnell’s Garage tonight and if I could drive the damned truck. I had never driven anything that big in my life, although the summer before I’d gotten some hours in on a bulldozer and Brad Jeffries had let me try the payloader a couple of times after knocking off for the day.

Pomberton stood there in his checked jacket, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his workpants, watching me with wise eyes. I got over to the driver’s side, grabbed the doorhandle, and slipped a little. He took a step or two toward me.

“I can make it.”

“Sure,” he said.

I jammed the crutch into my armpit again, my breath frosting out in quick little gasps, and pulled the door open. Holding onto the door’s inside handle with my left hand and balancing on my right leg like a stork, I threw my crutches into the cab and then followed them. The keys were in the ignition, the shift pattern printed on the stick. I slammed the door, pushed the clutch down with my left leg—not much pain, so far so good—and started Petunia up. Her engine sounded like a full field of stockers at Philly Plains.

Pomberton strolled over. “Little noisy, ain’t she?” he yelled.

“Sure!” I screamed back.

“You know,” he bellowed, “I doubt like hell if you got an I on your licence, boy.” An I on your licence meant that the state had tested you on the big trucks. I had an A for motorcycles (much to my mother’s horror) but no I.

I grinned down at him. “You never checked because I looked trustworthy.”

He smiled back. “Sure.”

I revved the engine a little. Petunia blew off two brisk backfires that were almost as loud as mortar blasts.

“You mind if I ask what-you-want that truck for? None of my business, I know.”

“Just what it was meant for,” I said.

“Beggin your pardon?”

“I want to get rid of some shit,” I said.

I had something of a scare going downhill from Pomberton’s place; even dry and empty, that baby really got rolling. I seemed incredibly high up—able to look down on the roofs of the cars I passed. Driving through downtown Libertyville, I felt as conspicuous as a baby whale in a goldfish pond. It didn’t help any that Pomberton’s septic pumper was painted that bright pink colour. I got some amused glances.

My left leg had begun to ache a little, but running through Petunia’s unfamiliar gear pattern in the stop-and-go downtown traffic kept my mind off it. A more surprising ache was developing in my shoulders and across my chest; it came from simply piloting Petunia through traffic. The truck was not equipped with power steering, and that wheel really turned hard.

I turned off Main, onto Walnut, and then into the parking lot behind the Western Auto. I got carefully down from Petunia’s cab, slammed her door (my nose had already become used to the faint odour she gave off), set my crutches under me, and went in the back entrance.

I got the three garage keys off Jimmy’s ring and took them over to the key-making department. For one-eighty, I got two copies of each. I put the new keys in one pocket, Jimmy’s ring, with his original keys reattached, in the other. I went out the front door, onto Main Street, and down to the Libertyville Lunch, where there was a pay telephone. Overhead, the sky was greyer and more lowering than ever. Pomberton was right. There would be snow.

Inside, I ordered a coffee and Danish and got change for the telephone booth. I went inside, closed the door clumsily behind me, and called Leigh. She answered on the first ring.

“Dennis! Where are you?”

“The Libertyville Lunch. Are you alone?”

“Yes. Dad’s at work and Mom went grocery shopping. Dennis, I… I almost told her everything. I started thinking about her parking at the A&P and crossing the parking lot, and… I don’t know, what you said about Arnie leaving town didn’t seem to matter. It still made sense, but it didn’t seem to matter. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking about giving Ellie a lift down to Tom’s the night before, even though my leg was aching like hell by then. “I know exactly what you mean.”

“Dennis, it can’t go on like this. I’ll go crazy. Are we still going to try your idea?”

“Yes,” I said. “Leave your mom a note, Leigh. Tell her you have to be gone for a little while. Don’t say any more than that. When you’re not home for supper, your folks will probably call mine. Maybe they’ll decide we ran off and eloped.”

“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” she said, and laughed in a way that gave me prickles. “I’ll see you.”

“Hey, one other thing. Is there any pain-killer in your house? Darvon? Anything like that?”

“There’s some Darvon from the time Dad threw his back out,” she said. “Is it your leg, Dennis?”

“It hurts a little.”

“How much is a little?”

“It’s really okay.”

“No B.S.?”

“No B.S. And after tonight I’ll give it a nice long rest, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Get here as quick as you can.”

She came in as I was ordering a second cup of coffee, wearing a fur-fringed parka and a pair of faded jeans. The jeans were tucked into battered Frye boots. She managed to look both sexy and practical. Heads turned.

“Looking good,” I said, and kissed her temple.

She passed me a bottle of grey and pink gel capsules.

“You don’t look so hot, though, Dennis. Here.”

The waitress, a woman of about fifty with iron-grey hair, came over with my coffee. The cup sat placidly, an island in a small brown pond in the saucer. “Why aren’t you kids in school?” she asked.

“Special dispensation,” I said gravely. She stared at me.

“Coffee, please,” Leigh said, pulling off her gloves. As the waitress went back behind the counter with an audible sniff, she leaned toward me and said, “It would be pretty funny if we got picked up by the truant officer, wouldn’t it?”

“Hilarious,” I said, thinking that, in spite of the radiance the cold had given her, Leigh really wasn’t looking all that good. I didn’t think either of us really would be until this thing was over. There were small strain-lines around her eyes, as if she had slept poorly the night before.

“So what do we do?”

“We get rid of it,” I said. “Wait until you see your chariot, madam.”

“My God!” Leigh said, staring at Petunia’s hot-pink magnificence. It bulked silently in the Western Auto parking lot, dwarfing a Chevy van on one side and a Volkswagen on the other. “What is it?”

“Kaka sucker,” I said with a straight face.

She looked at me, puzzled… and then she burst into hysterical gales of laughter. I wasn’t sorry to see it happen. When I had told her about my confrontation with Arnie in the student parking lot that morning, those strain-lines on her face had grown deeper and deeper, her lips whitening as they pressed together.

“I know that it looks sort of ridiculous—” I said now.

“That’s putting it mildly,” she replied, still giggling and hiccupping.

“—but it’ll do the job, if anything will.”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose it should. And… it’s not exactly unfitting, is it?”

I nodded. “I had that thought.”

“Well, let’s get in,” she said. “I’m cold.”

She climbed up into the cab ahead of me, her nose wrinkling. “Ag,” she said.

I smiled. “You get used to it.” I handed her my crutches and climbed laboriously up behind the wheel. The pain in my left leg had subsided from a series of sharp clawings to a dull throb again; I had taken two Darvon back in the restaurant.

“Dennis, is your leg going to be all right?”

“It’ll have to be,” I said, and slammed the door.

51 CHRISTINE

It was eleven-thirty or so when we pulled out of the Western Auto parking lot. The first spats of snow were coming down. I drove across town to the Sykes’s house, changing gear more easily now as the Darvon took hold.

The house was dark and locked, Mrs Sykes maybe at work, Jimmy maybe off collecting his unemployment or something. Leigh found a crumpled-up envelope in her handbag, scratched off her address and wrote Jimmy Sykes across the front in her slanting, pretty hand. She put Jimmy’s keyring into the envelope, folded in the flap, and slipped it through the letter-slot in the front door. While she did that, I let Petunia idle in neutral, resting my leg.

“What now?” she asked, climbing back into the cab.

“Another phone call,” I said.

Out near the intersection of JFK Drive and Crescent Avenue, I found a telephone booth. I got carefully out of the truck, holding on until Leigh handed down my crutches. Then I made my way carefully through the thickening snow to the booth. Seen through the dirty phone-booth glass and the swirling snow, Petunia looked like some strange pink dinosaur.

I called Horlicks University and went through the switchboard to get Michael’s office. Arnie had told me once that his dad was a real office drone, always brown-bagging it at lunch and staying in. Now, as the phone was picked up on the second ring, I blessed him for it.

“Dennis! I tried to reach you at home! Your mom said—”

“Where’s he going?” My stomach was cold. It wasn’t until then—at that exact moment—that all of it began to seem completely real to me, and I began to think that this crazy confrontation was going to come off.

“How did you know he was going? You’ve got to tell me—”

“I don’t have time for questions, and I couldn’t answer them anyway. Where is he going?”

Slowly, he said, “He and Regina are going to Penn State this afternoon right after school. Arnie called her this morning and asked her if she’d go with him. He said…” He paused, thinking. “He said he felt as if he’d suddenly come to his senses. He said it just sort of hit him as he was going to school this morning that if he didn’t do something definite about college, it might slip away from him. He told her he’d decided Penn State was the best bet and asked her if she’d like to go up with him and help talk to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and to some of the people in the history and philosophy departments.”

The booth was cold. My hands were starting to go numb. Leigh was high up in Petunia’s wheelhouse, watching me anxiously. How well you arranged things, Arnie, I thought. Still the chess-player. He was manipulating his mother, putting her on strings and making her dance. I felt some pity for her, but not as much as I might have felt. How many times had Regina herself been the manipulator, dancing others across her stage like so many Punch and Judys? Now, white she was half-distracted with fear and shame, LeBay had dangled in front of her eyes the one thing absolutely guaranteed to make her come running: the possibility that things might just be returning to normal.

“And did all that ring true to you?” I asked Michael.

“Of course not!” he burst out. “It wouldn’t have rung true to her, if she was thinking straight! With college admissions what they are today, Penn State would enrol him in July, if he had the money for tuition and the College Board scores—and Arnie has both. He talked as if this were the fifties instead of the seventies!”

“When are they leaving?”

“She’s going to meet him at the high school after period six; that’s what she said when she called me. He’s getting a dismissal slip.”

That meant they would be leaving Libertyville in less than an hour and a half. So I asked the last question, even though I already knew the answer. “They’re not taking Christine, are they?”

“No, they’re going in the station wagon. She was delirious with joy, Dennis. Delirious. That business of getting her to go with him to Penn State… that was inspired. Wild horses wouldn’t have kept Regina from a chance like that. Dennis, what’s going on? Please.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “That’s a promise. Firm. Meantime, you’ve got to do something for me. It could be a matter of life and death for my family and for Leigh Cabot’s family. You—”

“Oh my God,” he said hoarsely. He spoke in the voice of a man for whom a great light has just dawned. “He’s been gone every time—except when the Welch boy was killed, and that time he was… Regina saw him asleep, and I’m sure she wasn’t lying about that… Dennis, who’s driving that car? Who’s using Christine to kill people when Arnie isn’t here?”

I almost told him, but it was cold in the telephone booth and my leg was starting to ache again, and that answer would have led to other questions, dozens of them. And even then the only final result might be a flat refusal to believe.

“Michael, listen,” I said, speaking with all the deliberateness I could summon. For one weird moment I felt like Mister Rogers on TV. A big car from the 1950s is coming to eat you up, boys and girls… Can you say Christine? I knew you could! “You’ve got to call my father and Leigh’s father. Have both families get together at Leigh’s house.” I was thinking of brick, good solid brick. “I think maybe you ought to go too, Michael. All of you stay together until Leigh and I get there or until I call. But you tell them for Leigh and me: They’re not to go outside after”—I calculated: If Arnie and Regina left the high school at two, how long before his alibi would be cast-iron-watertight?—“after four o’clock this afternoon. After four, none of you goes out on the street. Any street. Under no circumstances.”

“Dennis, I can’t just—”

“You have to,” I said. “You’ll be able to convince my old man, and between the two of you, you should be able to convince Mr and Mrs Cabot. And stay away from Christine yourself, Michael.”

“They’re leaving right from school,” Michael said. “He said the car would be all right in the school parking lot.”

I could hear it in his voice again—his knowledge of the lie. After what had happened last fall, Arnie would no more leave Christine in a public parking lot than he would show up in Calc class naked.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “But if you should happen to look out the window and see her in the driveway anyhow, stay clear. Do you understand?”

“Yes, but—”

“Call my father first. Promise me.”

“All right, I promise… but Dennis—”

“Thank you, Michael.”

I hung up. My hands and feet were numb with the cold, but my forehead was slick with sweat. I pushed the door of the phone booth open with the tip of one crutch and worked my way back to Petunia.

“What did he say?” Leigh asked. “Did he promise?”

“Yes,” I said. “He promised and my dad will see that they get together. I’m pretty sure of that. If Christine goes for anyone tonight, it will have to be us.”

“All right,” she said. “Good.”

I threw Petunia into gear, and we rumbled away. The stage was set—as well as I could set it, anyway—and now there was really nothing to do but wait and see what would come.

We drove a-cross town to Darnell’s Garage through steady light snow, and I pulled into the parking lot at just past one that afternoon. The long, rambling building with its corrugated-steel sides was totally deserted, and Petunia’s bellyhigh wheels cut through deep, unploughed snow to stop in front of the main door. The signs bolted to that door were the same as they had been on that long-ago August evening when Arnie first drove Christine there—SAVE MONEY! YOUR KNOW-HOW, OUR TOOLS! Garage Space Rented by the Week, Month, or Year, and HONK FOR ENTRY—but the only one that really meant anything was the new one leaning in the darkened office window: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Sitting in one corner of the snowy front lot was an old crumpled Mustang, one of the real door-suckers from the ’60s. Now it sat silent and broody under a shroud of snow.

“It’s creepy,” Leigh said in a low voice.

“Yeah. It sure is.” I gave her the keys I’d made at the Western Auto that morning. “One of these will do it.”

She took the keys, got out, and walked over to the door. I kept an eye in both rearview mirrors while she fumbled at the lock, but we didn’t seem to be attracting any undue attention. I suppose there is a certain psychology involved in seeing such a big, conspicuous vehicle—it makes the idea of something clandestine or illegal harder to swallow.

Leigh suddenly tugged hard on the door, stood up, tugged again, and then came back to the truck. “I got the key to turn, but I can’t get the door up,” she said. “I think it’s frozen to the ground or something.”

Great, I thought. Wonderful. None of this was going to come easily.

“Dennis, I’m sorry,” she said, seeing it on my face.

“No, it’s all right,” I said. I opened the driver’s door and performed another of my comical sliding exits.

“Be careful,” she said anxiously, walking beside me with her arm around my waist as I crutched carefully through the snow to the door. “Remember your leg.”

“Yes, Mother,” I said, grinning a little. I stood in profile to the door when I got there so I could bend down to the right and keep my weight off my bad leg. Bent over in the snow, left leg in the air, left hand holding onto my crutches, right hand grasping the roll-up door’s handle, I must have looked like a circus contortionist. I pulled and felt the door give a little… but not quite enough. She was right; it had iced up pretty good along the bottom. You could hear it crackling.

“Grab on and help me,” I said.

Leigh placed both of her hands over my right hand and we pulled together. That crackling sound became a little louder, but still the ice wouldn’t quite give up its grip on the foot of the door.

“We’ve almost got it,” I said. My right leg was throbbing unpleasantly, and sweat was running down my cheeks. “I’ll count. On three, give it all you’ve got. Okay?”

“Yes,” she said.

“One… two… three!”

What happened was the door came free of the ice all at once, with absurd, deadly ease. It flew upwards on its tracks, and I stumbled backward, my crutches flying. My left leg folded underneath me and I landed on it. The deep snow cushioned the fall somewhat, but I still felt the pain as a kind of silver bolt that seemed to ram upward from my thigh all the way to my temples and back down again. I clenched my teeth over a scream, barely keeping it in, and then Leigh was on her knees in the snow beside me, her arm around my shoulders.

“Dennis! Are you all right?”

“Help me up.”

She had to do most of the pulling, and both of us were gasping like winded runners by the time I was on my feet again with my crutches propped under me. Now I really needed them. My left leg was in agony.

“Dennis, you won’t be able to work the clutch in that truck now—”

“Yeah, I will. Help me back, Leigh.”

“You’re as white as a ghost. I think we ought to get you to a doctor.”

“No. Help me back.”

“Dennis—”

“Leigh, help me back!”

We inched our way back to Petunia through the snow leaving shuffling, troubled tracks in the snow behind us. I reached up, laid hold of the steering wheel, and did a chin-up to get in, scraping feebly at the running board with my right leg… and still, in the end, Leigh had to get behind me and put both hands on my kiester and shove. At last I was behind Petunia’s wheel, hot and shivering with pain. My shirt was wet with snowmelt and sweat. Until that day in January of 1979, I don’t think I knew how much pain can make you sweat.

I tried to jam down the clutch with my left foot and that silver bolt of pain came again, making me throw my head back and grind my teeth until it subsided a little.

“Dennis, I’m going down the street and find a phone and call a doctor.” Her face was white and scared. “You broke it again, didn’t you? When you fell?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But you can’t do that, Leigh. It’ll be your folks or mine if we don’t end it now. You know that. LeBay won’t stop. He has a well-developed sense of vengeance. We can’t stop.”

“But you can’t drive it!” she wailed. She looked up into the cab at me, crying now. The hood of her parka had fallen back in our mutual struggle to get me up into the driver’s seat, where I now sat in magnificent uselessness. I could see a scatter of snowflakes in her dark blond hair.

“Go inside there,” I said. “See if you can find a broom, or a long stick of wood.”

“What good will that do?” she asked, crying harder.

“Just get it, and then we’ll see.”

She went into the dark maw of the open door and disappeared from view. I held onto my leg and sparred with terror. If I really had broken my leg again, there was a good chance I’d be wearing a built-up heel on my left foot for the rest of my life. But there might not even be that much of my life left if we couldn’t put a stop to Christine. Now there was a cheery thought.

Leigh came back with a push broom. “Will this do?” she asked.

“To get us inside, yes. Then we’ll have to see if we can find something better.”

The handle was the type that unscrews. I got hold of it, unthreaded it, and tossed the bristle end aside. Holding it in my left hand along my side—just another goddam crutch I pushed down the clutch with it. It held for a moment, then slipped off. The clutch sprang back up. The top of the handle almost bashed me in the mouth. Lookin good, Guilder. But it would have to do.

“Come on, get in,” I said.

“Dennis, are you sure?”

“As sure as I can be,” I said.

She looked at me for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay.”

She went around to the passenger side and got in. I slammed my own door, depressed Petunia’s clutch with the broom-handle, and geared into first. I had the clutch halfway out and Petunia was just starting to roll forward when the broom-handle slipped off the clutch again. The septic tanker ran inside Darnell’s Garage with a series of neck-snapping jerks, and when I slammed my right foot down on the brake, the truck stalled. We were mostly inside.

“Leigh, I’ve got to have something with a wider foot,” I said. “This broom-handle don’t cut it.”

“I’ll see what there is.”

She got out and began to walk around the edge of the garage floor, hunting. I stared around. Creepy, Leigh had said, and she was right. The only cars left were four or five old soldiers so gravely wounded that no one had cared enough to claim them. All the rest of the slant spaces with their numbers stencilled in white paint were empty. I glanced at stall twenty and then glanced away.

The overhead tyre racks were likewise nearly empty. A few baldies remained, heeled over against one another like giant doughnuts blackened in a fire, but that was all. One of the two lifts was partially up, with a wheel-rim caught beneath it. The front-end alignment chart on the right-hand wall glimmered faintly red and white, the two headlight targets like bloodshot eyes. And shadows, everywhere. Overhead, big box-shaped heaters pointed their louvers this way and that, roosting up there like weird bats.

It seemed very much like a death-place.

Leigh had used another of Jimmy’s keys to open Will’s office. I could see her moving back and forth in there through the window Will had used to look out at his customers… those working joes who had to keep their cars running so they could blah-blah-blah. She flipped some switches, and the overhead fluorescents came on in snowcold ranks. So the electric company hadn’t cut off the juice. I’d have to have her turn the lights off again—we couldn’t afford to risk attracting attention—but at least we could have some heat.

She opened another door and disappeared temporarily from view. I glanced at my watch. One-thirty now.

She came back, and I saw that she was holding an O-Cedar mop, the kind with the wide yellow sponge along the foot.

“Would this be any good?”

“Only perfect,” I said. “Get in, kiddo. We’re in business.”

She climbed up once more, and I pushed the clutch down with the mop. “Lots better,” I said. “Where did you find it?”

“In the bathroom,” she said, and wrinkled her nose.

“Bad in there?”

“Dirty, reeking of cigars, and there’s a whole pile of mouldy books in the corner. The kind they sell at those little hole-in-the-wall stores.”

So that was what Darnell left behind him, I thought: an empty garage, a pile of Beeline Books, and a phantom reek of Roi-Tan cigars. I felt cold again, and thought that if I had my way, I’d see this place bulldozed flat and pasted over with hottop. I could not shake the feeling that it was an unmarked grave of a sort—the place where LeBay and Christine had killed my friend’s mind and taken over his life.

“I can’t wait to get out of here,” Leigh said, looking around nervously.

“Really? I kind of like it. I was thinking of moving in.” I caressed her shoulder and looked deeply into her eyes. “We could start a family,” I breathed.

She held up a fist. “Want me to start a nosebleed?”

“No, that’s all right. For what it’s worth, I can’t wait to get out of here, either.” I drove Petunia the rest of the way inside. I found that I could run the clutch pretty well using the O-Cedar mop… in first gear, at least. The handle had a tendency to bend, and I would have preferred something thicker, but it would have to do unless we could find something better in the meantime.

“We’ve got to turn off the lights again,” I said, killing the engine. “The wrong people might see them.”

She got out and turned them off while I swung Petunia in a wide circle and then carefully backed it up until the rear end almost touched the window between the garage and Darnell’s office. Now the big truck’s snout was pointing directly back at the open overhead door through which we had entered.

With the lights off, the shadows descended again. The light coming in through the open door was weak, muted by the snow, white and without strength. It spread on the oil-stained, cracked concrete like a pie-wedge and simply died halfway across the floor.

“I’m cold, Dennis,” Leigh called from Darnell’s office. “He’s got the switches for the heat marked. Can I turn them on?”

“Go ahead,” I called back.

A moment later the garage whispered with the sound of the blowers. I leaned back against the seat, gently running my hands over my left leg. The material of my jeans was stretched smoothly over the thigh, tight and without a wrinkle. The sonofabitch was swelling. And it hurt. Christ, did it hurt.

Leigh came back and climbed up beside me. She told me again how terrible I looked, and for some reason my mind cross-patched and I thought of the afternoon Arnie had brought Christine down here, of the be-bop queen’s husband yelling for Arnie to get that hunk of junk out from in front of his house, and of Arnie telling me the guy was a regular Robert Deadford. How we had gotten the giggles. I closed my eyes against the sting of tears.

With nothing to do but wait, time slowed down. It was quarter of two, then two o’clock. Outside, the snow had thickened a little, but not much. Leigh got out of the truck and pushed the button that trundled the door back down. That made it even darker inside.

She came back, climbed up, and said, “There’s a funny gadget on the side of the door—see it? It looks just like the electronic garage door-opener we used to have when we lived in Weston.”

I sat up suddenly. Stared at it. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, Jesus.”

“What’s the matter?”

“That’s just what it is. A garage door-opener. And there’s one of the transmitter gadgets on Christine. Arnie mentioned that to me Thanksgiving night. You’ve got to break it, Leigh. Use the handle of that push broom.”

So she got down again, picked up the broom-handle, and stood below the electric eye gadget, looking up and bashing at it with the handle. She looked like a woman trying to kill a bug near the ceiling. At last she was rewarded with a crunch of plastic and a tinkle of glass.

She came back slowly, tossing the broom-handle aside and got up beside me. “Dennis, don’t you think it’s time you told me exactly what you’ve got in mind?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” she said, and pointed at the closed overhead door. Five square windows in a line three-quarters of the way up its height let in minimal light through dirty glass. “When it gets dark you plan to open that door again, don’t you?”

I nodded. The door itself was wood, but it was braced with hinged steel strips, like the inner gate of an old-time elevator. I’d let her in, but once the door was shut, Christine wouldn’t be able to bash her way out again. I hoped. It made me cold to think how close we’d come to overlooking the electronic door-opener.

Open the door at dusk, yes. Let Christine in, yes. Close the door again. Then I would use Petunia to batter her to death.

“Okay,” she said, “that’s the trap. But once she—it—comes in, how are you going to get that door shut again to keep her in? Maybe there’s a button in Darnell’s office that does it, but I didn’t see it.”

“So far as I know, there isn’t one,” I said. “So you’re going to be standing over there by the button that shuts the door.” I pointed. The manual button was located on the right side of the door, about two feet below the ruin of the electric door-opener box. “You’ll be against the wall, out of sight. When Christine comes in—always assuming she does—you’re going to push the button that starts the door coming down and then step outside in a hurry. The door comes down. And, bam! The trap’s shut.”

Her face set. “On you as well as her. In the words of the immortal Wordsworth, that sucks.”

“That’s Coleridge, not Wordsworth. There’s no other way to do it, Leigh. If you’re still inside when that door comes down, Christine is going to run you down. Even if there was a button in Darnell’s office—well, you saw in the paper what happened to the side of his house.”

Her face was stubborn. “Park over by the switch. And when she comes in, I’ll reach out the window and hit the button and lower the door.”

“If I park there, I’ll be in sight. And if this tank is in sight, she won’t come in.”

“I don’t like it!” she burst out. “I don’t like leaving you alone! It’s like you tricked me!”

In a way, that’s just what I had done, and for whatever it’s worth, I would not do it the same way now—but I was going on eighteen then, and there’s no male chauvinist pig like an eighteen-year-old male chauvinist pig. I put an arm around her shoulders. She resisted stiffly for a moment and then came to me, “There’s just no other way,” I said. “If it wasn’t for my leg, or if you could drive a manual shift—” I shrugged.

“I’m scared for you, Dennis. I want to help.”

“You’ll be helping plenty. You’re the one that’s really in danger, Leigh—you’ll be outside, on the floor, when she comes in. I’m just going to sit up here in the cab and beat that bitch back into component parts.”

“I only hope it works that way,” she said, and put her head on my chest. I touched her hair.

So we waited.

In my mind’s eye I could see Arnie coming out of the main building at LHS, books under his arm. I could see Regina waiting for him there in the Cunninghams’ compact wagon, radiant with happiness, Arnie smiling remotely and submitting to her embrace. Arnie, you’ve made the right decision… you don’t know how relieved, how happy, your father and I are. Yes, Mom. Do you want to drive, honey? No, you drive, Mom. That’s okay.

The two of them setting off for Penn State through the light snow, Regina driving, Arnie sitting in the shotgun seat with his hands folded stiffly in his lap, his face pale and unsmiling and clear of acne.

And back in the student parking lot at LHS, Christine sitting silently in the driveway. Waiting for the snow to thicken. Waiting for dark.

At three-thirty or so, Leigh went back through Darnell’s office to use the bathroom, and while she was gone I dry-swallowed two more Darvon. My leg was a steady, leaden agony.

Shortly after that, I lost coherent track of time. The dope had me fuddled, I guess. The whole thing began to seem Dreamlike the deepening shadows, the white light coming in through the windows slowly changing to an ashy grey, the drone of the overhead heaters.

I think that Leigh and I made love… not in the ordinary way, not with my leg the way it was, but some kind of sweet substitute. I seem to remember her breath steepening in my ear until she was nearly panting; I seem to remember her whispering for me to be careful, to please be careful, that she had lost Arnie and could not bear to lose me too. I seem to remember an explosion of pleasure that made the pain disappear in a brief but total way that not all the Darvon in the world could manage… but brief was the right word. It was all too brief. And then I think I dozed.

The next thing I remember for sure was Leigh shaking me fully awake and whispering my name over and over in my ear.

“Huh? What?” I was spaced out and my leg was full of a glassy pain, simply waiting to explode. There was an ache in my temples, and my eyes felt too big for their sockets. I blinked around at Leigh like a large stupid owl.

“It’s dark,” she said. “I thought I heard something.”

I blinked again and saw that she looked drawn and frightened. Then I glanced toward the door and saw that it was standing wide open.

“How the hell did that—”

“Me,” she said. “I opened it.”

“Cripes!” I said, straightening up a little and wincing at the pain in my leg. “That wasn’t too smart, Leigh. If she had come—”

“She didn’t,” Leigh said. “It started to get dark, that’s all, and to snow harder. So I got out and opened the door and then I came back here. I kept thinking you’d wake up in a minute… you were mumbling… and I kept thinking, “I’ll wait until it’s really dark, I’ll just wait until it’s really dark,” and then I saw I was fooling myself, because it’s been dark for almost half an hour now and I was only thinking I could still see some light. Because I wanted to see it, I guess. And… just now… I thought I heard something.”

Her lips began to tremble and she pressed them tightly together.

I looked at my watch and saw that it was quarter of six. If everything had gone right, my parents and sister would be together with Michael and Leigh’s folks now. I looked through Petunia’s windscreen at the square of snow-shot darkness where the garage entrance was. I could hear the wind shrieking. A thin creeper of snow had already blown in onto the cement.

“You just heard the wind,” I said uneasily. “It’s walking and talking out there.”

“Maybe. But—”

I nodded reluctantly. I didn’t want her to leave the safety of Petunia’s high cab, but if she didn’t go now, maybe she never would. I wouldn’t let her, and she would let me not let her. And then, when and if Christine came, all she would have to do would be to reverse back out of Darnell’s.

And wait for a more opportune time.

“Okay,” I said. “But remember… stand back in that little niche to the right of the door. If she comes, she may just stand outside for a while.” Scenting the air like an animal, I thought. “Don’t get scared, don’t move. Don’t let her freak you into giving yourself away. Just be cool and wait until she comes in. Then push that button and get the hell out. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Dennis, will this work?”

“It should, if she comes at all.”

“I won’t see you until it’s over.”

“I guess that’s so.”

She leaned over, placed her left hand tightly on the side of my neck, and kissed my mouth. “Be careful, Dennis,” she said, “But kill it. It’s really not a she at all—just an it. Kill it.”

“I will,” I said.

She looked in my eyes and nodded. “Do it for Arnie,” she said. “Set him free.”

I hugged her hard and she hugged me back. Then she slid across the seat. She hit her little handbag with her knee and it fell to the floor of the cab. She paused, head cocked, a startled, thoughtful look in her eyes. Then she smiled, bent over, picked it up, and began to rummage quickly through it.

“Dennis,” she said, “do you remember the Morte d’arthur?”

“A little.” One of the classes Leigh and Arnie and I had all shared before my football injury was Fudgy Bowen’s Classics of English Literature, and one of the first things we had been faced with in there was Malory’s Morte d’arthur. Why Leigh asked me this now was a mystery to me.

She had found what she wanted. It was a filmy pink scarf, nylon, the sort of thing a girl wears over her head on a day when a misty sort of rain is falling. She tied it around the left forearm of my parka.

“What the hell?” I asked, smiling a little.

“Be my knight,” she said, and smiled back—but her eyes were serious. “Be my knight, Dennis.”

I picked up the squeegee mop she had found in Will’s bathroom and made a clumsy salute with it. “Sure,” I said. “Just call me Sir O-Cedar.”

“Joke about it if you want,” she said, “but don’t really joke about it. Okay?”

“All right,” I said. “If it’s what you want, I’ll be your parfit goddam gentil knight.”

She laughed a little, and that was better.

“Remember about that button kiddo. Push it hard. We don’t want that door to just burp once and stop on its track. No escapes, right?”

“Right.”

She got out of Petunia, and I can close my eyes now and see her as she was then, in that clean and silent moment just before everything went terribly wrong—a tall, pretty girl with long blond hair the colour of raw honey, slim hips, long legs, and those striking, Nordic cheekbones, now wearing a ski-parka and faded Lee Riders, moving with a dancer’s grace. I can still see it and I still dream about it, because of course while we were busy setting up Christine, she was busy setting us up—that old and infinitely wise monster. Did we really think we could outsmart her so easily? I guess we did.

My dreams are in terrible slow motion. I can see the softly lovely motion of her hips as she walks; I can hear the hollow click of her Frye boots on the oil-stained cement floor; I can ever hear the soft, dry whish-whish of her parka’s quilted inner lining brushing against her blouse. She’s walking slowly and her head is up—now she is the animal, but no predator; she walks with the cautious grace of a zebra approaching a waterhole at dusk. It is the walk of an animal that scents danger. I try to scream to her through Petunia’s windscreen. Come back, Leigh, come back quick, you were right, you heard something, she’s out there now, out there in the snow with her headlights off, crouched down, Leigh, come back!

She stopped suddenly, her hands tensing into fists, and that was when sudden savage circles of light sprang to life in the snowy dark outside. They were like white eyes opening.

Leigh froze, hideously exposed on the open floor. She was thirty feet inside the door and slightly to the right of centre. She turned toward the headlights, and I could see the dazed, uncertain expression on her face.

I was just as stunned, and that first vital moment passed unused. Then the headlights sprang forward and I could see the dark, low-slung shape of Christine behind them; I could hear the mounting, furious howl of her engine as she leaped toward us from across the street where she had been waiting all along—maybe even since before dark. Snow tunnelled back from her roof and skirted across her windscreen in filmy nets that were almost instantly melted by the defroster. She hit the tarmac leading up to the entrance, still gaining speed. Her engine was a V-8 scream of rage.

“Leigh!” I screamed, and clawed for Petunia’s ignition switch.

Leigh broke to the right and ran for the wall-button. Christine roared inside as she reached it and pushed it. I heard the rattle-rumble of the overhead door descending on its track.

Christine came in angling to the right, going for Leigh. She dug a great clout of dry wood and splinters from the wall. There was a metallic screech as part of her right bumper pulled loose—a sound like a drunk’s scream of laughter. Sparks cascaded across the floor as she went into a long, slewing turn. She missed Leigh, but she wouldn’t when she went back; Leigh was stuck in that right-hand corner with nowhere to hide. She might be able to make it outside, but I was terribly afraid that the door wasn’t coming down fast enough to cut off Christine. The descending door might peel off her roof, but that wouldn’t stop her and I knew it.

Petunia’s engine bellowed and I dragged out the headlight button. Her brights came on, splashing over the closing door, and over Leigh. She was backed up against the wall, her eyes wide. Her parka took on a weird, almost electric blue colour in the headlights, and my mind informed me with sickening and clinical accuracy that her blood would look purple.

I saw her glance upward for a moment and then back down at Christine.

The Fury’s tyres screamed violently as she leaped at Leigh. Smoke rose from the new black marks on the concrete, and I just had time to register the fact that there were people inside of Christine: a whole carload of them.

At the same instant that Christine roared toward her, Leigh leaped upward with a big ungainly Jack-in-the-box spring. My mind, seeming to run at a speed approaching light, wondered for a moment if she was intending to leap right over the Plymouth, as if, instead of Fryes, she wore boots of the seven-league variety.

Instead, she caught and gripped the rusted metal struts which supported an overhead shelf about nine feet above the floor, over three feet above her head. This shelf skirted all four walls. On the night Arnie and I had first brought Christine in, that entire shelf had been crammed with recapped tyres and old baldies waiting to be recapped—in some funny way it had reminded me of a well-stocked library shelf. Now it was mostly empty. Holding those angled struts, Leigh swung her jeaned legs up like a kid who means to throw his legs right over his own shoulders—what we used to call skinning the cat in grammar school. Christine’s snout smashed into the wall directly below her. If she had been any slower getting her legs up, they would have been mashed off at the knees. A piece of chrome flew. Two of the remaining tyres tumbled from the shelf and bounced crazily on the cement like giant rubber doughnuts.

Leigh’s head smashed back against the wall with battering, dazing force as Christine reversed, all four of her tyres laying rubber and squirting blue smoke.

And what was I doing “all this time,” you wonder? It wasn’t all that time, that is my answer. Even as I used the O-Cedar mop to depress Petunia’s clutch and gear into first, the overhead door was just thumping down. All of it had happened in the space of seconds.

Leigh was still holding onto the struts supporting the tyre shelf, but now she only hung there, head down, dazed.

I let the clutch out, and a cold part of my mind took over: Easy, man—if you pop the clutch and stall this fucker, she’s dead.

Petunia rolled. I revved the engine up to a bellow and let the clutch out all the way. Christine roared at Leigh again, her hood crimped almost double from her first hit, bright metal showing through the broken paint at the sharpest points of bend. It looked as if her hood and grille had grown shark’s teeth.

I hit Christine three-quarters of the way toward the front and she slid around, one of her tyres pulling off the rim. The ’58 slammed into a litter of old bumper jacks and junk parts in one corner; there was a booming crash as she struck the wall, and then the hot sound of her engine, revving and falling off, revving and falling off. The entire left front end was bashed in—but she was still running.

I slammed on Petunia’s brake with my right foot and barely managed to avoid crushing Leigh myself. Petunia’s engine stalled. Now the only sound in the garage was Christine’s screaming engine.

“Leigh!” I screamed over it. “Leigh, run!”

She looked over at me groggily, and now I could see sticky braids of blood in her hair—it was as purple as I had expected. She let go of the struts, landed on her feet, staggered, and went to one knee.

Christine came for her. Leigh got up, took two wobbling steps, and got on her blind side, behind Petunia. Christine swerved and struck the truck’s front end. I was thrown roughly to the right. Pain roared through my left leg.

“Get up!” I screamed at Leigh, trying to lean even farther over and open the door. “Get up!”

Christine backed off, and when she came again she cut hard to the right and went out of my line of vision around the back of Petunia. I caught just a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror bolted outside the driver’s side window. Then I could only hear the scream of her tyres.

Barely conscious, Leigh simply wandered off, holding both hands laced to the back of her head. Blood trickled through her fingers. She walked in front of Petunia’s grille toward me and then just stopped.

I didn’t have to see in order to know-what was going to happen next. Christine would reverse again, back to my side, and then crush her against the wall.

Desperately, I shoved the clutch in with the mop and keyed the engine again. It turned over, coughed, stalled. I could smell gasoline in the air, heavy and rich. I had flooded the engine.

Christine reappeared in the rearview mirror. She came at Leigh, who managed to stumble backward just out of reach. Christine slammed nose-on into the wall with crunching force. The passenger door popped open and the horror was complete; the hand not clutching the mop-handle went to my mouth and I screamed through it.

Sitting on the passenger side like a grotesque life-sized doll was Michael Cunningham. His head, lolling limply on the stalk of his neck, snapped over to one side as Christine reversed to make another try at Leigh, and I saw his face had the high, rosy colour of carbon monoxide poisoning. He hadn’t taken my advice. Christine had gone to the Cunninghams’ house first, as I had vaguely suspected she might. Michael came home from school and there she was, standing in the driveway, his son’s restored 1958 Plymouth. He had gone to it, and somehow Christine had… had gotten him. Had he maybe gotten in just to sit behind the wheel for a moment, as I had that day in LeBay’s garage? He might have. Just to see what vibrations he could pick up. If so, he must have picked up some terrible vibes indeed during his last few minutes on earth. Had Christine started herself up? Driven herself into the garage? Maybe. Maybe. And had Michael discovered that he could neither turn off the madly revving engine or get out of the car? Had he maybe turned his head and perhaps seen the true guiding spirit of Arnie’s ’58 Fury, lounging in the shotgun seat, and fainted in terror?

It didn’t matter now. Leigh was all that mattered.

She had seen, too. Her screams, high, despairing, and shrill, floated in the exhaust-stinking air like hysterically bright balloons. But it had, at least, cut through her daze.

She turned and ran for Will Darnell’s office, blood splattering behind her in dime-sized drops as she went. Blood was soaking into the collar of her parka—too much blood.

Christine backed up, laying rubber and leaving a scatter of glass behind. As she pulled around in a tight circle to go after Leigh, centrifugal force pulled the passenger door shut again—but not before I saw Michael’s head loll back the other way.

Christine held still for a moment, her nose pointed toward Leigh, her engine revving. Perhaps LeBay was savouring the instant before the kill. If so, I’m glad, because if Christine had gone for her right away, she would have been killed then. But as it was, I had an instant of time, I turned the key again, babbling something aloud—a prayer, I guess—and this time Petunia’s engine coughed into life. I let the clutch out and stepped down on the accelerator as Christine leaped forward again. This time I struck her right side. There was a shrill scream of tearing metal as Petunia’s bumper punched through her mudguard. Christine heeled over and smashed against the wall. Glass broke. Her engine raced and raved. Behind the wheel, LeBay turned toward me, grinning with hate.

Petunia stalled again.

I rattled off a string of every curse I knew as I grabbed for the key again. If not for my goddam leg, if not for the fall I’d taken in the snow, this would be over now; it would just be a matter of cornering her and smashing her to pieces against the cinderblock.

But even as I cranked Petunia’s engine, keeping my foot off the gas to keep from stalling her again, Christine began to reverse with an ear-splitting squeal of metal. She backed out from between Petunia’s grille and the wall, leaving a twisted chunk of her red body behind, baring her right front tyre.

I got Petunia going and found reverse. Christine had backed all the way down to the far end of the garage. All her headlights were out. Her windscreen was smashed into a galaxy of cracks. The bent hood seemed to sneer.

Her radio was blasting. I could hear Ricky Nelson singing “Waitin in School”.

I stared around for Leigh and saw her in Will’s office, looking out into the garage. Her blond hair was matted with blood. More blood ran down the left side of her face and soaked into her jacket. Bleeding too damn much, I thought incoherently. Bleeding too damn much, even for a head wound.

Her eyes widened and she pointed past me, her lips moving soundlessly behind the glass.

Christine came roaring straight up the empty floor, gaining speed.

And the hood was uncrimping, straightening out and down to cover the motor cavity again. Two of the headlights flickered, then came back strong. The mudguard and the right-hand side of her body—I only caught a glimpse, but I swear it’s true—they were… reknitting themselves, red metal appearing from nowhere and slipping down in smooth automotive curves to cover the right front tyre and the right side of the engine compartment again. The cracks in the windscreen were running inward and disappearing. And the tyre that had been pulled off its rim looked as good as new.

It all looks as good as new, I thought. God help us.

She was going directly for the wall between the garage and the office. I let the mop-handle off the clutch fast, hoping to interpose the tanker’s body, but Christine got past me. Petunia backed into nothing but thin air. Oh, I was doing great. I backed all the way across the floor and crashed into the dented tool-lockers ranged there. They crashed to the floor with dull metallic janglings. Through the windscreen I saw Christine hit the wall between the garage and Will’s office. She never slowed; she went full speed ahead.

I’ll never forget those next few moments—they remain hypnotically clear in my memory, as if seen through a magnifying crystal. Leigh saw Christine coming and stumbled backward. Her bloody hair was matted to her head. She fell over Will’s swivel chair. She hit the floor, out of sight behind his desk. An instant later—and I mean the barest instant—Christine slammed into the wall. The big window Will had used to keep track of the comings and goings out in his garage exploded inward. Glass flew like a cluster of deadly spears. Christine’s front end bulged with the impact. The hood popped up and then tore off, flying back over the roof to land on the concrete with a metallic sound that was much like the sound the falling tool-lockers had made.

Her windscreen shattered. Michael Cunningham’s body flew through the jagged opening, legs trailing, his head a grotesque flattened football. He was catapulted through Will’s window; he struck Will’s desk with a heavy grainsack thud and skidded over onto the floor. His shoes stuck up.

Leigh began to scream.

Her fall had probably saved her from being badly lacerated or killed by the flying glass, but when she rose from behind the desk her face was contorted with horror, and utter hysteria had its hold on her. Michael had skidded from the desk and his arms had looped themselves over her shoulders and as Leigh struggled to her feet she appeared to be waltzing with the corpse. Her screams were like fireballs. Her blood, still flowing, sparkled deadly bright. She dumped Michael and ran for the door.

“Leigh, no!” I screamed, and slammed down the clutch with the mop again. The handle snapped cleanly in two, leaving me with a stump five inches long. “Ohhhh—SHIT!” Christine reversed away from the broken window, leaving water, antifreeze, and oil puddled on the floor.

I stamped down on the clutch with my left foot, barely feeling the pain now, bracing my left knee with my left hand as I worked the gearstick.

Leigh tore the office door open and ran out.

Christine turned toward her, its smashed, snarling snout sighting down on her.

I revved Petunia’s engine and roared at her, and as that damned car from hell grew in the windscreen, I saw the purple, swollen face of a child pressed to the rear window, watching me, seeming to beg me to stop.

I struck her hard. The boot lid popped up and gaped like a mouth. The rear end heeled around and Christine went skidding sideways past Leigh, who fled with her eyes seeming to swallow her face. I remember the spray of blood along the fur fringe of her parka’s hood, tiny droplets like an evil fall of dew.

I was in it now. I was in the peak seat. Even if they had to take my leg off at the groin when this was done, I was going to drive.

Christine hit the wall and bounced back. I stamped the clutch, rammed the gearstick into reverse, backed up ten feet, stamped the clutch again, rammed it back into first. Engine revving, Christine tried to pull away along the wall. I cut to the left and hit her again, crushing her almost wasp-waisted in the middle. The doors popped out of their frames at the top and the bottom. LeBay was behind the wheel, now a skull, now a decayed and stinking cameo of humanity, now a hale and hearty man in his fifties with a crew-cut turning white. He stared out at me with his devil’s grin, one hand on the wheel, one balled into a fist that he shook at me.

And still her engine would not die.

I got into reverse again, and now my leg was white iron and the pain was all the way up to my left armpit. The hell it was. The pain was everywhere. I could feel it

(Michael, Jesus why didn’t you stay in the house) in my neck, in my jaw in my

(Arnie? Man, I am so sorry I wish I wish) temples. The Plymouth—what remained of her—lunged drunkenly down the side of the garage, spraying tools and junk metal, pulling out struts and dumping the overhead shelves. The shelves hit the concrete with flat, clapping sounds that echoed like demon applause.

I stamped the clutch again and floored the gas. Petunia’s engine bellowed, and I hung onto the wheel like a man trying to stay aboard a bucking mustang. I hit her on the right side and smashed the body clear off the rear axle, driving it into the door, which shivered and rattled. I went up over the wheel, which slammed into my belly and drove the breath out of me and dumped me back into my seat, gasping.

Now I saw Leigh, cowering in the far corner, her hands clapped to her face, dragging it down into a witch’s mask.

Christine’s engine was still running.

She dragged herself slowly down toward Leigh, like an animal whose rear legs have been broken in a trap. And even as she went I could see her regenerating, coming back: a tyre that suddenly popped up full and plump, the radio aerial that unjointed itself with a silvery twinggg! sound, the accretion of metal around the ruined rear end.

“Stay dead!” I screamed at it. I was crying, my chest heaving. My leg wouldn’t work anymore. I braced it with both hands and jammed it onto the clutch. My vision went hazy and grey with the white-metal agony. I could almost feel the bones grating.

I raced the engine, got first gear again, and charged it; and as I did I heard LeBay’s voice for the first and only time, high and cheated and full of a terrible, unquenchable fury:

“You SHITTER! Fuck off, you miserable SHITTER! LEAVEMEALONE!”

“You should have left my friend alone,” I tried to yell—but all that would come out was a tearing, wounded gasp.

I hit it squarely in the rear end, and the gas tank ruptured as the back of the car accordioned inward and upward in a kind of metal mushroom. There was a yellow lick of fire. I shielded my face with my hands—but then it was gone. Christine sat there, a refugee from a demolition derby. Her engine ran choppily, missed, fired again, and then died.

The place was silent except for the bass rumble of Petunia’s engine.

Then Leigh was running across the floor, screaming my name over and over, crying. I was suddenly, stupidly aware that I was wearing her pink nylon scarf around the arm of my jacket.

I looked down at it, and then the world greyed out again.

I could feel her hands on me, and then there was nothing but darkness as I fainted.

I came to about fifteen minutes later, my face wet and blessedly cool. Leigh was standing on Petunia’s driver’s side running board, mopping my face with a wet rag. I caught it in one hand, tried to suck it, and then spat. The rag tasted strongly of oil.

“Dennis, don’t worry,” she said. “I ran out into the street… stopped a snowplough… scared the poor man out of ten years of his life, I think… all this blood… he said… an ambulance… he said he’d, you know… Dennis, are you all right?”

“Do I look all right?” I whispered.

“No,” she said, and burst into tears.

“Then don’t”—I swallowed past a pain dry lump in my throat—“don’t ask stupid questions. I love you.”

She hugged me clumsily.

“He said he’d call the police, too,” she said.

I barely heard her. My eyes had found the twisted, silent hulk that was Christine’s remains. And hulk was the right word; she hardly looked like a car at all anymore. But why hadn’t she burned? A hubcap lay off to one side like a dented silver tiddlywink.

“How long since you stopped the plough?” I asked hoarsely.

“Maybe five minutes. Then I got the rag and dipped it in that bucket over there. Dennis… thank God it’s over.”

Punk! Punk! Punk!

I was still looking at the hubcap.

The dents were popping out of it.

Abruptly it flicked up on its rim and rolled towards the car like a huge coin.

Leigh saw it too. Her face froze. Her eyes widened and began to bulge. Her lips mouthed the word No but no sound came out.

“Get in here with me,” I said in a low voice, as if it could hear us. How do I know? — perhaps it could. “Get in on the passenger side. You’re going to run the gas while I run the clutch with my right foot.”

“No…” This time it was a hissing whisper. Her breath came in whining little gasps. “No… no…”

The wreckage was quivering all over. It was the most eerie, most terrible thing I have ever seen in my life. It was quivering all over, quivering like an animal that is not… quite… dead. Metal tapped nervously against metal. Tie rods clicked jittery jazz rhythms against their connectors. As I watched, a bent cotter-pin lying on the floor straightened itself and did half a dozen cartwheels to land in the wreckage.

“Get in,” I said.

“Dennis, I can’t.” Her lips quivered helplessly. “I can’t… no more… that body… that was Arnie’s father. I can’t, no more, please—”

“You have to,” I said.

She looked at me, glanced affrightedly back at the obscenely quivering remains of that old whore LeBay and Arnie had shared, and then came around Petunia’s front end. A piece of chrome tumbled and scratched her leg deeply. She screamed and ran. She clambered up into the cab and pushed over beside me. “Wh-what do I do?”

I hung halfway out of the cab, holding onto the roof, and pushed the clutch down with my right foot. Petunia’s engine was still running. “Just gun the gas and keep it gunned,” I said. “No matter what.”

Steering with my right hand, holding on with my left, I let the clutch out and we rolled forward and smashed into the wreckage, smashing it, scattering it. And in my head I seemed to hear another scream of fury.

Leigh clapped her hands to her head. “I can’t, Dennis! I can’t do it! It—it’s screaming!”

“You’ve got to do it,” I said. Her foot had come off the gas and now I could hear the sirens in the night, rising and falling. I grabbed her shoulder and a sickening blast of pain ripped up my leg. “Leigh, nothing has changed. You’ve got to.”

“It screamed at me!”

“We’re running out of time and it still isn’t done. Just a little more.”

“I’ll try,” she whispered, and stepped on the gas again.

I changed into reverse. Petunia rolled back twenty feet. I clutched again, got first… and Leigh suddenly cried out. “Dennis, no! Don’t! Look!”

The mother and the little girl, Veronica and Rita, were standing in front of the smashed and dented hulk of Christine, hand in hand, their faces solemn and sorrowing.

“They’re not there,” I said. “And if they are, it’s time they went back”—more pain in my leg and the world went grey—“back to where they belong. Keep your foot on it.”

I let out the clutch and Petunia rolled forward again, gaining speed. The two figures did not disappear as TV and movie ghosts do; they seemed to stream out in every direction, bright colours fading to wash pinks and blues… and then they were totally gone.

We slammed into Christine again, spinning what was left of her around. Metal shrieked and tore.

“Not there,” Leigh whispered. “Not really there. Okay. Okay, Dennis.”

Her voice was coming from far down a dark hallway. I fetched up reverse and back we went. Then forward. We hit it; we hit it again. How many times? I don’t know. We just kept slamming into it, and every time we did, another jolt of pain would go up from my leg and things would get a little bit darker.

At last I looked up blearily, and saw that the air outside the door seemed full of blood. But it wasn’t blood; it was a pulsing red light reflecting off the falling snow. People were rattling at the door out there.

“Is it good enough?” Leigh asked me.

I looked at Christine—only it wasn’t Christine anymore. It was a spread-out pile of twisted, gored metal, puffs of upholstery, and glittering broken glass.

“Have to be,” I said. “Let them in, Leigh.”

And while she went, I fainted again.

Then there were a series of confused images; things that came into focus for a while and then faded or disappeared completely. I can remember a stretcher being rolled out of the back of an ambulance; I can remember its sides being folded up, and how the overhead fluorescents put cold highlights on its chrome; I can remember someone saying, “Cut it, you have to cut it off so we can at least look at it”; I can remember someone else—Leigh, I think—saying “Don’t hurt him, please, don’t hurt him if you can help it”; I can remember the roof of an ambulance… it had to be an ambulance because at the periphery of my vision were two suspended IV bottles; I can remember a cool swab of antiseptic and then the sting of a needle.

After that, things became exceedingly weird. I knew, somewhere deep inside, that I was not dreaming—the pain proved that, if it proved nothing else—but all of it seemed like a dream. I was pretty well doped, and that was part of it… but shock was part of it too. No fake, Jake. My mother was there, crying, in a room that looked sickeningly like the hospital room in which I had spent the entire autumn. Then my father was there, and Leigh’s dad was with him, and their faces were both so tight and grim they looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee as Franz Kafka might have written them. My father bent over me and said in a voice like thunder reverberating through cotton batting: “How did Michael get there, Dennis?” That’s what they really wanted to know: how Michael got there. Oh, I thought, oh my friends, I could tell you stories…

Then Mr Cabot was saying, “What did you get my daughter into, boy?” I seem to remember replying, “It’s not what I got her into, it’s what she got you out of,” which I still think was pretty witty under the circumstances, doped up the way I was and all.

Elaine was there briefly, and she seemed to be holding a Yodel or a Twinkie or something mockingly out of my reach. Leigh was there, holding her filmy nylon scarf out and asking me to raise my arm so she could tie it on. But I couldn’t; my arm was like a lead bar.

Then Arnie was there, and of course that had to be a dream.

Thanks, man, he said, and I noticed with something like terror that the left lens of his glasses was shattered. His face was okay, but that broken lens… it scared me. Thanks. You did okay. I feel better now. I think things are going to be okay now.

No sweat, Arnie, I said—or tried to say—but he was gone.

It was the next day not the 20th, but Sunday, January 21st—that I started to come back a little. My left leg was in a cast up in its old familiar position again amid all the pulleys and weights. There was a man I had never seen before sitting to the left of my bed, reading a paperback John D. MacDonald story. He saw me looking at him and lowered his book.

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Dennis,” he said mildly, and deliberately marked his place in the book with a matchbook cover. He put the book in his lap and folded his hands over it.

“Are you a doctor?” I asked. He sure wasn’t Dr Arroway, who had taken care of me last time; this guy was twenty years younger and at least fifty pounds leaner. He looked tough.

“State Police Inspector,” he said. “Richard Mercer is my name. Rick, if you like.” He held out his hand, and stretching awkwardly and carefully I touched it. I couldn’t really shake it. My head ached and I was thirsty.

“Look,” I said. “I don’t really mind talking to you, and I’ll answer all of your questions, but I’d like to see a doctor.” I swallowed. He looked at me, concerned, and I blurted out, “I need to know if I’m ever going to walk again.”

“If what that fellow Arroway says is the truth,” Mercer said, “You’ll be able to get around in four to six weeks. You didn’t break it again, Dennis. You severely strained it; that was what he said. It swelled up like a sausage. He also said you were lucky to get off so cheap.”

“What about Arnie?” I asked. “Arnie Cunningham? Do you know—”

His eyes flickered.

“What is it?” I asked. “What is it about Arnie?”

“Dennis,” he said, and then hesitated. “I don’t know if this is the time.”

“Please. Is Arnie… is he dead?”

Mercer sighed. “Yes, he’s dead. He and his mother had an accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in the snow. If it was an accident.”

I tried to talk and couldn’t. I motioned for the pitcher of water on the bedtable, thinking how dismal it was to be in a hospital room and know exactly where everything was. Mercer poured me a glass and put the straw with the elbow-bend in it. I drank, and it got a little bit better. My throat, that is. Nothing else seemed better at all.

“What do you mean, if it was an accident?”

Mercer said, “It was Friday evening, and the snow just wasn’t that heavy. The turnpike classification was two bare and wet, reduced visibility, use appropriate caution. We guess, from the force of impact, that they weren’t doing much more than forty-five. The car veered across the median and struck a semi. It was Mrs Cunningham’s Volvo wagon. It exploded.”

I closed my eyes. “Regina?”

“Also DOA. For whatever it’s worth, they probably didn’t—”

“—suffer,” I finished. “Bullshit. They suffered plenty.” I felt tears and choked them back. Mercer said nothing. “All three of them,” I muttered. “Oh Jesus Christ, all three.”

“The driver of the truck broke his arm. That was the worst of it for him. He said that there were three people in the car, Dennis.”

“Three!”

“Yes. And he said they appeared to be struggling.” Mercer looked at me frankly. “We’re going on the theory that they picked up a bad-news hitchhiker who escaped after the accident and before the troopers arrived.”

But that was ridiculous, if you knew Regina Cunningham, I thought. She would no more pick up a hitchhiker than she would wear slacks to a faculty tea. The things you did and those you never did were firmly set in Regina Cunningham’s mind. As if in cement, you could say.

It had been LeBay. He couldn’t be both places at once, that was the thing. And at the end, when he saw how things were going in Darnell’s Garage, he had abandoned Christine and had tried to go back to Arnie. What had happened then was anyone’s guess. But I thought then—and do now—that Arnie fought him… and earned at least a draw.

“Dead,” I said, and now the tears did come. I was too weak and low to stop them. I hadn’t been able to keep him from getting killed, after all. Not the last time, not when it really mattered. Others, maybe, but not Arnie.

“Tell me what happened,” Mercer said. He put his book on the bedtable and leaned forward. “Tell me everything you know, Dennis, from first to last.”

“What has Leigh said?” I asked. “And how is she?”

“She spent Friday night here under observation, Mercer told me. “She had a concussion and a scalp laceration that took a dozen stitches to close. No marks on her face. Lucky. She’s a very pretty girl.”

“She’s more than that,” I said. “She’s beautiful.”

“She won’t say anything,” Mercer said, and a reluctant grin—of admiration, I think—slanted his face to the left. “Not to me, not to her father. He is, shall we say, in a state of high pissoff about the whole thing. She says it’s your business what to tell and when to tell.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “Because, she says, you’re the one who ended it.”

I didn’t do such a great job,” I muttered. I was still trying to cope with the idea that Arnie could possibly be dead. It was impossible, wasn’t it? We had gone to Camp Winnesko in Vermont together when we were twelve, and I got homesick and told him I was going to call and tell my parents they had to come get me. Arnie said if I did, he’d tell everybody at school that the reason I came home early was that they caught me eating boogers in my bunk after lights out and expelled me. We climbed the tree in my back yard to the very top fork and carved our initials there. He used to sleep over at my house and we’d stay up late watching Shock Theatre, crouched together on the sofa under an old quilt. We ate all those clandestine Wonder Bread sandwiches. When he was fourteen Arnie came to me, scared and ashamed because he was having these sexy dreams and he thought they were making him wet the bed. But it was the ant farms my mind kept coming back to. How could he be dead when we had made those ant farms together? Dear Christ, it seemed like only a week or two ago, those ant farms. So how could he be dead? I opened my mouth to tell Mercer that Arnie couldn’t be dead those ant farms made the very idea absurd. Then I closed my mouth again. I couldn’t tell him that. He was just a guy.

Arnie, I thought. Hey, man—it’s not true, is it? Jesus Christ, we still got too much to do. We never even double-dated at the drive-in yet.

“What happened?” Mercer asked again. “Tell me, Dennis.”

“You’d never believe it,” I said thickly.

“You might be surprised what I’d believe,” he said. “And you might be surprised what we know. A fellow named Junkins was the chief investigator on this case. He was killed not so very far from here. He was a friend of mine. A good friend. A week before he died he told me that he thought something was going on in Libertyville that nobody would believe. Then he was killed. With me that makes it personal.”

I shifted positions cautiously. “He didn’t tell you any more?”

“He told me that he believed he had uncovered an old murder,” Mercer said, still not taking his eyes from mine. “But it didn’t much matter, he said, because the perpetrator was dead.”

“LeBay,” I muttered, and thought that if Junkins had known about that, it was no wonder Christine had killed him. Because if Junkins had known that, he had been much too close to the whole truth.

Mercer said, “LeBay was the name he mentioned. He leaned closer. “And I’ll tell you something else, Dennis—Junkins was one hell of a driver. When he was younger, before he got married, he used to run stockers at Philly Plains, and he won his share of checkered flags. He went off the road doing better than a hundred and twenty in a Dodge cruiser with a hemi engine. Whoever was chasing him and we know someone was—had to be one hell of a driver.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He was.”

“I came by myself. I’ve been here for two hours waiting for you to wake up. I was here until they kicked me out last night. I don’t have a stenographer with me, I don’t have a tape recorder, and I assure you that I’m not wearing a wire. When you make a statement—if you ever have to—that’ll be a different ballgame. But for now, it’s you and me. I have to know. Because I see Rudy Junkins’s wife and Rudy Junkins’s kids from time to time. You dig?”

I thought it over. For a long time I thought it over nearly five minutes. He sat there and let me do it. At last I nodded. “Okay. But you’re still not going to believe it.”

“We’ll see, — ” he said.

I opened my mouth with no idea of what was going to come out. “He was a loser, you know,” I said. “Every high school has to have at least two, it’s like a national law. Everyone’s dumping ground. Only sometimes… sometimes they find something to hold onto and they survive. Arnie had me. And then he had Christine.”

I looked at him, and if I had seen the slightest wrong flicker in those grey eyes that were so unsettlingly like Arnie’s… well, if I had seen that, I think I would have clammed up right there and told him to put it on his books in whatever way seemed the most plausible and to tell Rudy Junkins’s kids whatever the hell he pleased.

But he only nodded, watching me closely.

“I just wanted you to understand that,” I said, and then a lump rose in my throat and I couldn’t say what I maybe should have said next: Leigh Cabot came later.

I drank some more water and swallowed hard. I talked for the next two hours.

At last I finished. There was no big climax; I simply dried up, my throat sore from so much talking. I didn’t ask if he believed me; I didn’t ask him if he was going to have me locked up in a loonybin or give me a liars’ medal. I knew that he believed a great deal of it, because what I knew dovetailed too well with what he knew. What he thought about the rest of it—Christine and LeBay and the past reaching out its hands toward the present—that I didn’t know. And don’t to this day. Not really.

A little silence fell between us. At last he slapped his hands down on his thighs with a brisk sound and got to his feet. “Well!” he said. “Your folks will be waiting to visit you, no doubt.”

“Probably, yeah.”

He took out his wallet and produced small white business card with his name and number on it. “I can usually be reached here, or someone will throw me a relay. When you speak to Leigh Cabot again, would you tell her what you’ve told me and ask her to get in touch?”

“Yes, if you want. I’ll do that.”

“Will she corroborate your story.”

“Yes.”

He looked at me fixedly. “I’ll tell you this much, Dennis,” he said. “If you’re lying, you don’t know you are.”

He left. I only saw him once more, and that was at the triple funeral for Arnie and his parents. The papers reported a tragic and bizarre fairy tale—father killed in driveway car accident while mother and son are killed on Pennsylvania Turnpike. Paul Harvey used it on his programme.

No mention was made of Christine being at Darnell’s Garage.

My family came to visit that night, and by then I was feeling much easier in my mind—part of it was baring my bosom to Mercer, I think (he was what one of my psych profs in college called “an interested outsider”, the sort it’s often easiest to talk to), but a great lot of the way I felt was due to a flying late-afternoon visit by Dr Arroway. He was out of temper and irascible with me, suggesting that next time I just take a chainsaw to the goddam leg and save us all a lot of time and trouble… but he also informed me (grudgingly, I think) that no lasting damage had been done. He thought. He warned me that I had not improved my chances of ever running in the Boston Marathon and left.

So the family visit was a gay one—due mostly to Ellie, who prattled on and on about that upcoming cataclysm, her First Date. A pimply, bullet-headed nerd named Brandon Hurling had invited her to go roller skating with him. My dad was going to drive them. Pretty cool.

My mother and father joined in, but my mother kept throwing anxious don’t-forget glances at Dad, and he lingered after Mom had taken Elaine out.

“What happened?” he asked me. “Leigh told her father some crazy story about cars driving themselves and little girls who were dead and I don’t know whatall. He’s damn near wild.”

I nodded. I was tired, but I didn’t want Leigh catching hell from her folks—or have them thinking she was either lying or nuts. If she was going to cover me with Mercer, I would have to cover her with her mother and father.

“All right,” I said. “It’s a bit of a story. You want to send Mom and Ellie around for a malt, or something? Or maybe you better tell them to go to a movie.”

“That long?”

“Yeah. That long.”

He looked at me, his gaze troubled. “Okay,” he said.

Shortly after, I told my story a second time. Now I’ve told it a third; and third time, so they say, pays for all.

Rest in peace, Arnie.

I love you, man.