Christine (26 page)

"She answered," Arnie went on. "She said "Hello?" and, man, I couldn't say anything. I tried and nothing came out but this little whistle of air. So she said "Hello, who is this?" like it might be some kind of practical joke, you know, and I thought, This is ridiculous. If I can talk to her in the hall, I should be able to talk to her on the goddam phone, all she can say is no, I mean slid can't
shoot
me or anything if I ask her for a date. So I said hi, this is Arnie Cunningham, and she said hi, and blah-blah-blahdy-blah, bullshit-builshit-bullshit, and then I realized I didn't even know where the hell I wanted to ask her to go, and we're running out of things to say, pretty soon she's going to hang up. So I asked her the first thing I could think of, would she want to go to the football game on Saturday. She said she'd love to go, right off like that, like she had just been waiting for me to ask her, you know?"

"Probably she was."

"Yeah, maybe." Arnie considered this, bemused.

The bell rang, signifying five minutes to period five. Arnie and I got up. The cheerleaders trotted off the field, their little skirts flipping saucily.

We climbed down the bleachers, tossed our lunchbags in one of the trash barrels painted with the school colors orange and black, talk about Halloween—and walked toward the school.

Arnie was still smiling, recalling the way it had-worked itself out, that first time with Leigh. "Asking her to the game was sheer desperation."

"Thank a lot," I said. "That" s what I get for playing my heart out every Saturday afternoon, huh?"

"You know what I mean. Then, after she said she'd go with me, I had this really horrible thought and called you remember?"

Suddenly I did. He had called to ask me if that game was at home or away and had seemed absurdly crushed when I told him it was at Hidden Hills.

"So there I was, I've got a date with the prettiest girl in school, I'm crazy about her, and it turns out to be an away game and my car's in Will's garage."

"You could have taken the bus."

"I know that now, but I didn't then. The bus always used to be full up a week before the game. I didn't know so many people would stop coming to the games if the team started losing."

"Don't remind me," I said.

"So I went to Will. I knew Christine could do it, but no way she was street-legal. I mean, I was desperate."

How desperate?
I wondered coldly and suddenly.

"And he came through for me. Said he understood how important it was, and if…" Arnie paused; seemed to consider. "And that's the story of the big date," he finished gracelessly.

And if…

But that wasn't my business,

Be his eyes, my father had said.

But I pushed that away too.

We were walking past the smoking area now, deserted except for three guys and two girls, hurriedly finishing a joint. They had it in a makeshift matchbook roachclip, and the evocative odor of pot, so similar to the aroma of slowly burning autumn leaves, slipped into my nostrils.

"Seen Buddy Repperton around?" I asked.

"No," he said. "And don't want to. You?"

I had seen him once, hanging out at Vandenberg's Happy Gas, an extra-barrel service station out on Route 22 in Monroeville. Don Vandenberg's dad owned it, and the place had been on the ragged edge of going bust ever since the Arab oil embargo in '73. Buddy hadn't seen me; I was just cruising by.

"Not to talk to."

"You mean he can talk?" Arnie said with a scorn that wasn't like him. "What a shitter."

I started. That word again. I thought about it, told myself what the fuck, and asked him where he had gotten that particular term.

He looked at me thoughtfully. The second bell rang suddenly, braying out from the side of the building. We were going to be late to class, but right then I didn't care at all.

"You remember that day I bought the car?" he said. "Not the day I put the deposit on it, but the day I actually bought it?"

"Sure."

"I went in with LeBay while you stayed outside. He had this tiny kitchen with a red-checked tablecloth on the table. We sat down and he offered me a beer. I figured I better take it. I really wanted the car, and I didn't want to, you know, offend him somehow. So we each had a beer and he got off, on this long, rambling what would you call it? Rant, I guess. This rant about how all the shitters were against him. It was his word, Dennis. The shitters. He said it was the shitters that were making him sell his car."

"What did he mean.

"I guess he meant that he was too old to drive, but he wouldn't put it that way. It was all their fault. The shitters. The shitters wanted him to take a driver's road-test every two years and an eye exam every year. It was the eye exam that bothered him. And he said they didn't like him on the street—no one did. So someone threw a stone at the car.

"I understand all that. But I don't understand why…" Arnie paused in the doorway, oblivious of the fact that we were late for class. His hands were shoved into the back pockets of his jeans and he was frowning. "I don't understand why he let Christine go to rack and ruin like that, Dennis. Like she was when I bought her. Mostly he talked about her like he really loved her—I know you thought it was just part of his sales-pitch but it wasn't—and then near the end, when he was counting the money, he sort of growled, "That shitting car, I'll be fucked if I know why you want it, boy. It's the ace of spades." And I said something like I thought I could fix it up really nice. And he said, "All that and more. If the shitters will let you.""

We went inside. Mr Leheureux, the French teacher, was going someplace fast, his bald head gleaming under the fluorescent lights. "You boys are late," he said in a harried voice that reminded me of the white rabbit in
Alice in Wonderland
. We hurried up until he was out of sight and then we slowed down again.

Arnie said, "When Buddy Repperton got after me like that, I was really scared." He lowered his voice, smiling but serious "I almost pissed my pants, if you want to know the truth. Anyway, I guess I used L6Bay's word without even thinking about it. In Repperton's case it fits, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes."

"I gotta go," Arnie said. "Calculus, then Auto Shop III. I think I've learned the whole course on Christine the last two months anyway."

He hurried off and I just stood there in the hall for a minute, watching him go. I had a study-hall with Miss Rat-Pack period six on Mondays, and I thought I could slip in the back unnoticed I had done it before. Besides, seniors get away with murder, as I was rapidly learning.

I stood there, trying to shake a feeling of fright that would never be so amorphous or un-concrete again. Something was wrong, something was out of place, out of joint. There was a chill, and not all the bright October sunshine spilling through all the high school windows in the world would dispel it. Things were as they always had been, but they were getting ready to change—I felt it.

I stood there trying to get myself in gear, trying to tell myself that the chill was no more than my fears about my own future, and that it was the change coming that I was uneasy about. Maybe that was part of it. But it wasn't all.
That shitting car, I'll be fucked if I know why you want it, boy. It's the ace of spades.
I saw Mr Leheureux coming back from the office, and I started moving.

I think that everybody has a backhoe in his or her head, and at moments of stress or trouble you can fire it up and simply push everything into a great big slit-trench in the floor of your conscious mind. Get rid of it. Bury it. Except that that slit-trench goes down into the subconscious, and sometimes, in dreams, the bodies stir and walk. I dreamed of Christine again that night, Arnie behind the wheel this time, the decomposing corpse of Roland D. LeBay lolling obscenely in the shotgun seat as the car roared out of the garage at me, pinning me with the savage circles of its headlights.

I woke up with my pillow crammed against my mouth to stifle the screams.

19 THE ACCIDENT

Tach it up, tach it up,

Buddy, gonna shut you down.

— The Beach Boys

That was the last time I talked to Arnie—really talked to him—until Thanksgiving, because the following Saturday was the day I got hurt. That was the day we played the Ridge Rock Bears again, and this time we lost by the truly spectacular score of 46-3. I wasn't around at the end of the game, however. About seven minutes into the third quarter I got into the open, took a pass, and was setting myself to run when I was hit simultaneously by three Bears defensive linemen. There was an instant of terrible pain—a bright flare, as if I had been caught on ground zero of a nuclear blast. Then there was a lot of darkness.

Things stayed dark for a fairly long time, although it didn't seem long to me. I was unconscious for about fifty hours, and when I woke up late on the afternoon of Monday the twenty-third of October, I was in Libertyville Community Hospital. My dad and mom were there. So was Ellie, looking pale and strained. There were dark brown circles under her eyes, and I was absurdly touched; she had found it in her heart to cry for me in spite of all the Twinkies and Yodels I had hooked out of the breadbox after she went to bed, in spite of the time, when she was twelve, that I had given her a little bag of Vigoro after she had spent about a week looking at herself sideways in the mirror with her tightest T-shirt on so she could see if her boobs were getting any bigger (she had burst into tears and my mother had been super-pissed at me for almost two weeks), in spite of all the teasing and the shitty little I'm-one-up-on-you sibling games.

Arnie wasn't there when I woke up, but he joined my family shortly; he and Leigh had been down in the waiting room. That evening my aunt and uncle from Albany showed up, and the rest of that week was a steady parade of family and friends—the entire football team showed up, including Coach Puffer, who looked as if he had aged about twenty years. I guess he had found out there were worse things than a losing season. Coach was the one who broke the news to me that I was never going to play football again, and I don't know what he expected—for me to bust out crying or maybe have hysterics, from the drawn, tense look on his face. But I didn't have much of a reaction at all, inwardly or outwardly. I was just glad to be alive and to know I would walk again, eventually.

If I had been hit just once, I probably could have bounced right up and gone back for more. But the human body was never meant to get creamed from three different angles at the same time. Both of my legs were broken, the left in two places. My right arm had whipped around behind me when I went down, and I had sustained a nasty greenstick fracture of the forearm. But all of that was really only the icing on the cake. I had also gotten a fractured skull and sustained what the doctor in charge of my case kept calling "a lower spinal accident", which seemed to mean that I had come within about a centimetre of being paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of my life.

I got a lot of visitors, a lot of flowers, a lot of cards. All of it was, in some ways, very enjoyable—like being alive to help celebrate your own wake.

But I also got a lot of pain and a lot of nights when I couldn't sleep; I got an arm suspended over my body by weights and pulleys, likewise a leg (they both seemed to itch all the time under the casts), and a temporary cast what is called a "presser cast"—around my lower back. Also, of course, I got the prospect of a long hospital stay and endless trips in a wheelchair to that chamber of horrors so innocently labeled the Therapy Wing.

Oh and one other thing—I got a lot of time.

I read the paper; I asked questions of my visitors; and on more than a few occasions, as things went on and my suspicions began to get out of hand, I asked myself if I might not be losing my mind.

I was in the hospital until Christmas, and by the time I got home, my suspicions had almost taken their final shape. I was finding it more and more difficult to deny that monstrous shape, and I knew damned well I wasn't losing my mind. In some ways it would have been better—more comforting—if I could have believed that. By then I was badly frightened, and more than half in love with my best friend's girl, as well.

Time to think too much time.

Time to call myself a hundred names for what I was thinking about Leigh. Time to took up at the ceiling of my room and wish I had never heard of Arnie Cunningham… or Leigh Cabot… or of Christine.

ARNIE—TEENAGE LOVE-SONGS

20 THE SECOND ARGUMENT

The Dealer came up to me and said,

"Trade in your Fo'd,

And I'll put you in a car that'll

Eat up the road!

Just tell me what you want and

Sign that line,

I'll have it brought down to you

In an hour's time."

I'm gonna get me a car

And I'll be headed on down the road;

Then I won't have to worry about

That broken-down, ragged Ford.