Christine (67 page)

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 neighboring 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 tires 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 tires. 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 Hitier'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 checks 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

There's a killer on the road,

His brain is squirming like a toad…

— The Doors

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?"