Christine (33 page)

The expression of shock on his face was so large and so sudden that she might have struck him in the face.

“What—what are you talking about, Leigh?”

Was it shock that had caused that slapped expression? Or was some of it guilt?

“You heard what I said. I don't think you'll get rid of it—I don't know if you even can anymore—but if you want to go someplace with me, Arnie, we go on the bus. Or thumb a ride. Or fly. But I'm never going to ride in your car again. It's a death-trap.”

There. She had said it; it was out.

Now the shock on his face was turning to anger—the blind, obdurate sort of anger she had seen on his face so frequently lately. Not just over the big things, but over the little ones as well—a woman going through a traffic light on the yellow, a cop who held up traffic just before it was their turn to go—but it came to her now with all the force of a revelation that his anger, corrosive and so unlike the rest of Arnie's personality, was always associated with the car. With Christine.

“ ‘If you love me you'll get rid of it,' ” he repeated. “You know who you sound like?”

“No, Arnie.”

“My mother, that's who you sound like.”

“I'm sorry.” She would not allow herself to be drawn; neither would she defend herself with words or end it by just going into the house. She might have been able to if she didn't feel anything for him, but she did. Her original impressions—that behind the quiet shyness Arnie Cunningham was good and decent and kind (and maybe sexy as well)—had not changed much. It was the car, that was all. That was the change. It was like watching a strong mind slowly give way under the influence of some evil, corroding, addictive drug.

Arnie ran his hands through his snow-dusted hair, a characteristic gesture of bewilderment and anger. “You had a bad choking spell in the car, okay, I can understand that you don't feel great about it. But it was the
hamburger,
Leigh, that's all. Or maybe not even that. Maybe you were trying to talk while you were chewing or inhaled at just the wrong second or something. You might as well blame Ronald McDonald. People choke on their food every now and then, that's all. Sometimes they die. You didn't. Thank God for that. But to blame my car—!”

Yes, it all sounded perfectly plausible. And
was.
Except that something was going on behind Arnie's gray eyes. A frantic something that was not precisely a lie, but . . . rationalization! A willful turning away from the truth?

“Arnie,” she said, “I'm tired and my chest hurts and I've got a headache and I think I've only got the strength to say this once. Will you listen?”

“If it's about Christine, you're wasting your breath,” he said, and that stubborn, mulish look was on his face again. “It's crazy to blame her and you know it is.”

“Yes, I know it's crazy, and I know I'm wasting my breath,” Leigh said. “But I'm asking you to listen.”

“I'll listen.”

She took a deep breath, ignoring the pull in her chest. She looked at Christine, idling a plume of white vapor into the thickly falling snow, then looked hastily away. Now it was the parking lights that looked like eyes: the yellow eyes of a lynx.

“When I choked . . . when I was choking . . . the instrument panel. . . the lights on it changed. They
changed.
They were . . . no, I won't go that far, but they
looked
like eyes.”

He laughed, a short bark in the cold air. In the house a curtain was pulled aside, someone looked out, and then the curtain dropped back again.

“If that hitchhiker . . . that Gottfried fellow . . . if he hadn't been there, I would have died, Arnie. I would have
died.”
She searched his eyes with her own and pushed ahead.
Once,
she told herself.
I
only have to say this once.
“You told me that you worked in the cafeteria at LHS your first three years. I've seen the Heimlich Maneuver poster on the door to the kitchen. You must have seen it too. But you didn't try that on me, Arnie. You were getting ready to clap me on the back. That doesn't work. I had a job in a restaurant back in Massachusetts, and the first thing they teach you, even before they teach you the Heimlich Maneuver, is that
clapping a choking victim on the back doesn't work.”

“What are you saying?” he asked in a thin, out-of-breath voice.

She didn't answer; only looked at him. He met her gaze for only a moment, and then his eyes—angry, confused, almost haunted—shifted away.

“Leigh, people forget things. You're right, I should have used it. But if you had the course, you know you can use it on yourself.” Arnie laced his hands together into a fist with one thumb sticking up and pressed against his diaphragm to demonstrate. “It's just that in the heat of the moment, people forget—”

“Yes, they do. And you seem to forget a lot of things in that car. Like how to be Arnie Cunningham.”

Arnie was shaking his head. “You need time to think this over, Leigh. You need—”

“That is just what I don't need!” she said with a fierceness she wouldn't have believed she still had left in her. “I never had a supernatural experience in my life—I never even
believed
in stuff like that—but now I wonder just what's going on and what's happening to you. They looked like
eyes,
Arnie. And later . . . afterward . . . there was a smell. A horrible, rotten smell.”

He recoiled.

“You know what I'm talking about.”

“No. I don't have the slightest idea.”

“You just jumped as if the devil had twisted your ear.”

“You're imagining things,” Arnie said hotly. “A lot of things.”

“That smell was
there.
And there are other things as well. Sometimes your radio won't get anything but that oldies station—”

Another flicker in his eyes, and a slight twitch at the left corner of his mouth.

“And sometimes when we're making out it just stalls, as if it didn't like it.
As if the car didn't like it, Arnie.”

“You're upset,” he said with ominous flatness.

“Yes, I
am
upset,” she said, beginning to cry. “Aren't
you?”
The tears trickled slowly down her cheeks.
I think this is the end of it for us, Arnie
—
I loved you, but I think it's over. I really think it is, and that makes me feel so sad, and so sorry.
“Your relationship with your parents has turned into a . . . an armed camp, you're running God knows what into New York and Vermont for that fat pig Will Darnell, and that car. . . that car. . .”

She could not say anything more. Her voice dissolved. She dropped her packages and bent blindly to pick them up. Exhausted and weeping, she succeeded in doing little more than stirring them around. He bent to help her and she pushed at him roughly. “Leave them alone! I'll get them!”

He stood up, his face pale and set. His expression was one of wooden fury, but his eyes . . . oh, to Leigh his eyes seemed lost.

“All right,” he said, and now his voice roughened with his own tears. “Good. Join up with the rest of them if you want. You just saddle up and ride right along with all those other shitters. Who gives a tin shit?” He drew in a shivering breath, and a single hurt sob escaped him before he could clap a gloved hand brutally over his mouth.

He began to walk backward toward the car; he reached out blindly behind himself for the Plymouth and Christine was there. “Just as long as you know you're crazy. Right out of your mind! So go on and play your games! I don't need you! I don't need
any
of you!”

His voice rose to a thin scream, in devilish harmony with the wind:

“I don't need you so fuck off!”

He rushed around to the driver's side, his feet slid, and he grabbed for Christine. She was there and he didn't fall. He got in, the engine revved, the headlights came on in a huge white glare, and the Fury pulled out, rear tires spinning up a fog of snow.

Now the tears came fast and hard as she stood watching the taillights fade to round red periods and wink out as the car went around the corner. Her packages lay scattered at her feet.

And then, suddenly, her mother was there, absurdly clothed in an open raincoat, green rubber boots, and her blue flannel nightgown.

“Honey, what's wrong?”

“Nothing,” Leigh sobbed.

I almost choked to death, I smelled something that might have come from a freshly opened tomb, and I think . . . yes, I think that somehow that car is alive . . . more alive every day. I think it's like some kind of horrible vampire, only it's
taking Arnie's mind to feed itself. His mind and his spirit.

“Nothing, nothing's wrong, I had a fight with Arnie, that's all. Help me pick up my things, would you?”

They picked up Leigh's parcels and went in. The door shut behind them and the night belonged to the wind and to the swiftly falling snow. By morning there would be better than eight inches.

• • •

Arnie cruised until sometime after midnight, and later had no memory of it. The snow had filled the streets; they were deserted and ghostly. It was not a night for the great American motor-car. Nevertheless, Christine moved through the deepening storm with surefooted ease, even without snow tires. Now and then the prehistoric shape of a snowplow loomed and was gone.

The radio played. It was WDIL all the way across the dial. The news came on. Eisenhower had predicted, at the AFL/CIO convention, a future of labor and management marching harmoniously into the future together. Dave Beck had denied that the Teamsters Union was a front for the rackets. Rock 'n roller Eddie Cochran had been killed in a car crash while en route to London's Heathrow Airport; three hours of emergency surgery had failed to save his life. The Russians were rattling their ICBMs. WDIL played the oldies all week long, but on the weekends they got really dedicated. Fifties newscasts wow. That was

(never heard anything like that before)

a really neat idea. That was

(totally insane)

pretty neat.

The weather promised more snow.

Then music again: Bobby Darin singing “Splish-Splash,” Ernie K-Doe singing “Mother-in-Law,” the Kalin twins singing “When.” The wipers beat time.

He looked to his right, and Roland D. LeBay was riding shotgun.

Roland D. LeBay sat there in his green pants and a faded shirt of Army twill, looking out of dark eyesockets. A beetle sat, preening, within one.

You have to make them pay,
Roland D. LeBay said.
You have to make the shitters pay, Cunningham. Every last fucking one of them.

“Yes,” Arnie whispered. Christine hummed through the night, cutting the snow with fresh, sure tracks. “Yes, that's a fact.” And the wipers nodded back and forth.

35

Now This Brief Interlude

At Libertyville High, Coach Puffer had given way to Coach Jones, and football had given way to basketball. But nothing really changed: the LHS cagers didn't do much better than the LHS gridiron warriors—the only bright spot was Lenny Barongg, a three-sport man whose major one was basketball. Lenny stubbornly went about having the great year he needed to have if he was going to get the athletic scholarship to Marquette that he lusted after.

Sandy Galton suddenly blew town. One day he was there, the next he was gone. His mother, a forty-five-year-old wino who didn't look a day over sixty, did not seem terribly concerned. Neither did his younger brother, who pushed more dope than any other kid in Gornick Junior High. A romantic rumor that he had cut out for Mexico made the rounds at Libertyville High. Another, less romantic, rumor also made the rounds: that Buddy Repperton had been on Sandy about something and he felt it would be safer to make himself scarce.

The Christmas break approached and the school's atmosphere grew restless and rather thundery, as it always did before a long vacation. The student body's overall grade average took its customary pre-Christmas dip. Book reports were turned in late and often bore a suspicious resemblance to jacket copy (after all, how many sophomore English students are apt to call
The Catcher in the Rye
“this burning classic of postwar adolescence”?). Class projects were left half done or undone, the percentage of detention periods given for kissing and petting in the halls skyrocketed, and busts for marijuana went way up as the Libertyville High School students indulged in a little pre-Christmas cheer. So a good many of the students were up; teacher absenteeism was up; in the hallways and home-rooms, Christmas decorations were up.

Leigh Cabot was not up. She flunked an exam for the first time in her high school career and got a D on an executive typing drill. She could not seem to study; she found her mind wandering back, again and again, to Christine—to the green dashboard instruments that had become hateful, gloating cat's-eyes, watching her choke to death.

But for most, the last week of school before the Christmas break was a mellow period when offenses which would have earned detention slips at other times of the year were excused, when hard-hearted teachers would sometimes actually throw a scale on an exam where everyone had done badly, when girls who had been bitter enemies made it up, and when boys who had scuffled repeatedly over real or imagined insults did the same. Perhaps more indicative of the mellow season than anything else was the fact that Miss Rat-Pack, the gorgon of Room 23 study hall, was seen to smile . . . not just once, but several times.

In the hospital, Dennis Guilder was moderately up—he had swapped his bedfast traction casts for walking casts. Physical therapy was no longer the torture it had been. He swung through corridors that had been strung with tinsel and decorated with first-, second-, and third-grade Christmas pictures, his crutches thump-thumping along, sometimes in time to the carols spilling merrily from the overhead speakers.

It was a
caesura,
a lull, an interlude, a period of quiet. During his seemingly endless walks up and down the hospital corridors, Dennis reflected that things could be worse—much, much worse.

Before too long, they were.