Christine (34 page)

36

Buddy and Christine

On Tuesday, December 12, the Terriers lost to the Buccaneers 54-48 in the Libertyville High gym. Most of the fans went out into the still black cold of the night not too disappointed: every sportswriter in the Pittsburgh area had predicted another loss for the Terriers. The result could hardly be called an upset. And there was Lenny Barongg for the Terriers fans to be proud of: he scored a mind-boggling 34 points all by himself, setting a new school record.

Buddy Repperton, however,
was
disappointed.

Because he was, Richie Trelawney was also at great pains to be disappointed. So was Bobby Stanton in the back seat.

In the few months since he had been ushered out of LHS, Buddy seemed to have aged. Part of it was the beard. He looked less like Clint Eastwood and more like some hard-drinking young actor's version of Captain Ahab. Buddy had been doing a lot of drinking these last few weeks. He had been having dreams so terrible he could barely remember them. He awoke sweaty and trembling, feeling he had barely escaped some awful doom that ran dark and quiet.

The booze cut them off, though. Cut them right off at the fucking knees. Goddam right. Working nights and sleeping days, that's all it was.

He unrolled the window of his scuffed and dented Camaro, scooping in frigid air, and tossed out an empty bottle. He reached back over his shoulder and said, “Another Molotov cocktail, mess-sewer.”

“Right on, Buddy,” Bobby Stanton said respectfully, and slapped another bottle of Texas Driver into Buddy's hand. Buddy had treated them to a case of the stuff—enough to paralyze the entire Egyptian Navy, he said—after the game.

He spun off the cap, steering momentarily with his elbows, and then gulped down half the bottle. He handed it to Richie and uttered a long, froggy belch. The Camaro's headlights cut Route 46. running northeast as straight as a string through rural Pennsylvania. Snow-covered fields lay dreaming on either side of the road, twinkling in a billion points of light that mimed the stars in the black winter sky. He was headed—in a sort of casual, half-drunk way—for Squantic Hills. Another destination might take his fancy in the meantime, but if not, the Hills were a fine and private place to get high in peace.

Richie passed the bottle back to Bobby again, who drank big even though he hated the taste of Texas Driver. He supposed that when he got a little drunker, he wouldn't mind the taste at all. He might be hung over and puking tomorrow, but tomorrow was a thousand years away. Bobby was still excited just to be with them; he was only a freshman, and Buddy Repperton, with his near-mythic reputation for bigness and badness, was a figure he viewed with mixed fear and awe.

“Fucking clowns,” Buddy said morosely. “What a bunch of fucking clowns. You call that a basketball game?”

“All a bunch of retards,” Richie agreed. “Except for Barongg. Thirty-four points, not too tacky.”

“I hate that fucking spade,” Buddy said, giving Richie a long, measuring, drunken look. “You taking up for that jungle bunny?”

“No way, Buddy,” Richie said promptly.

“Better not. I'll Barongg him.”

“Which do you want first?” Bobby asked abruptly from the back seat. “The good news or the bad news?”

“Bad news first,” Buddy said. He was into his third bottle of Driver now and feeling no pain—only an aggrieved anger. He had forgotten—at least for the moment—that he had been expelled: he was concentrating only on the fact that the old school team that bunch of fucking retard assholes, had let him down. “Always bad news first.” The Camaro rolled northeast at sixty-five over two-lane tar that was like a swipe of black paint across a hilly white floor. The land had begun to rise slightly as they approached Squantic Hills.

“Well, the bad news is that a million Martians just landed in New York,” Bobby said. “Now you wanna hear the good news?”

“There is no good news.” Buddy said in a low, morose, grieving voice. Richie would have liked to tell the kid you didn't try to cheer Buddy up when he was in a mood like this: that only made it worse. The thing to do was to let it run its course.

Buddy had been this way ever since Moochie Welch, that little four-eyed panhandling dork, got run down by some psycho on JFK Drive.

“The good news is that they eat niggers and piss gasoline,” Bobby said and roared with laughter. He laughed for quite a while before he realized he was laughing alone. Then he shut up quickly. He glanced up and saw Buddy's bloodshot eyes looking at him over the uppermost tendrils of his beard, and that red, ferrety gaze floating in the rearview mirror gave him an unpleasant thrill of fear. It occurred to Bobby Stanton that he might have shut up a minute or two too late.

Behind them, distant, perhaps as much as three miles back, headlights twinkled like insignificant yellow sparks in the night.

“You think that's funny?” Buddy asked. “You tell a fucking racist joke like that and you think it's
funny?
You're a fucking bigot, you know that?”

Bobby's mouth dropped open. “But you said—”

“I said I didn't like
Barongg.
In general I think spades are as good as white people.”

Buddy considered.

“Well, almost as good.”

“But—”

“You want to watch out or you'll be walking home,” Buddy snarled. “With a rupture. Then you can write
I HATE NIGGERS
all over your fuckin truss.”

“Oh,” Bobby said in a small, scared voice. He felt as if he had reached up to turn on a light and had got a whopper of an electric shock. “Sorry.”

“Give me that bottle and shut your head.”

Bobby handed the Driver up front with alacrity. His hand was shaking.

Buddy killed the bottle. They passed a sign which read
SQUANTIC HILLS STATE PARK 3 MI
. The lake at the center of the state park was a popular beach area in the summertime, but the park was closed from November to April. The road which wound through the park to Squantic Lake was kept plowed for periodic National Guard maneuvers and winter Explorer Scouts camping trips, however, and Buddy had discovered a side entrance which went around the main gate and then joined the park road. Buddy liked to go into the silent, wintry state park and cruise and drink.

Behind them, the distant twin sparks had grown to circles—dual headlights about a mile back.

“Hand me up another Molotov cocktail, you fucking racist pig.”

Bobby handed up a fresh bottle of Driver, remaining prudently silent.

Buddy drank deeply, belched, and then handed the bottle across to Richie.

“No thanks, man.”

“You drink it, or you may find yourself getting an enema with it.”

“Sure, okay,” Richie said, wishing mightily that he had stayed home tonight. He drank.

The Camaro sped along, its headlights cutting the night.

Buddy glanced into the rearview and saw the other car. It was now coming up fast. He glanced at his speedometer and saw he was doing sixty-five. The car behind them had to be doing close to seventy. Buddy felt something—a curious kind of doubling back to the dreams he could not quite remember. A cold finger seemed to press lightly against his heart.

Ahead, the road branched in two, Route 46 continuing east toward New Stanton, the other road bearing north toward Squantic Hills State Park. A large orange sign advised:
CLOSED WINTER MONTHS
.

Barely slowing, Buddy dragged left and shot up the hill. The approach road to the park was not so well-plowed, and overarching trees had kept the warm afternoon sun from melting off the snowpack. The Camaro slid a little before grabbing the road again. In the back seat, Bobby Stanton made a low, uneasy sound.

Buddy looked up in the rearview, expecting to see the other car shoot by along 46—after all, there was nothing up this road but a dead end as far as most drivers were concerned—but instead it took the turn even faster than Buddy had and pounded along after them, now less than a quarter of a mile behind. Its headlights were four glowing white circles that washed the Camaro's interior.

Bobby and Richie turned around to look.

“What the fuck?” Richie muttered.

But Buddy knew. Suddenly he knew. It was the car that had run down Moochie. Oh yes it was. The psycho who had greased Moochie was behind the wheel of that car, and now he was after Buddy.

He stepped down on the go, and the Camaro started to fly. The speedometer needle crept up to seventy and then gradually heeled over toward eighty. Trees blurred past, dark sketches in the night. The lights behind them did not fall back; the truth was that they were still gaining. The duals had merged into two great white eyes.

“Man, you want to slow down,” Richie said. He grabbed for his seatbelt, actively scared now. “If we roll at this speed—”

Buddy didn't answer. He hunched over the wheel, alternating glances at the road ahead with glances shot into the rearview mirror, where those lights grew and grew.

“The road curves up ahead,” Bobby said hoarsely. And as the curve approached, guardrail reflectors flickering chrome in the Camaro's headlights, he screamed it:
“Buddy! It curves! It curves!”

Buddy changed down to second gear and the Camaro's engine bellowed in protest. The tachometer needle hit 6,000 rpm, danced briefly at redline-7,000, and then dropped back into a more normal range. Backfires blatted through the Camaro's straight-pipes like machine-gun fire. Buddy pulled the wheel over, and the car floated into the sharp bend. The rear wheels skimmed over hard-packed snow. At the last possible instant he shifted back up, tramped on the accelerator pedal, and let his body sway freely as the Camaro's left rear end slammed into the snowbank, digging a coffin-sized divot and then bouncing off. The Camaro slewed the other way. He went with it, then goosed the accelerator again. For one moment he thought it would not respond, that the skid would continue and they would simply barrel sideways up the road at seventy-five until they hit a bare patch and flipped over.

But the Camaro straightened out.

“Holy Jesus Buddy slow down!” Richie wailed.

Buddy hung over the wheel, grinning through his beard, bloodshot eyes bulging. The bottle of Driver was clamped between his legs.
There! There, you crazy murdering sonofabitch. Lets see you do
that
without rolling it over!

A moment later the headlights reappeared, closer than ever. Buddy's grin faltered and faded. For the first time he felt a sickish, unmanning tingle running up his legs toward his crotch. Fear—real fear—stole into him.

Bobby had been looking behind as the car chasing them rounded the bend, and now he turned around, his face slack and cheesy. “It dint even skid,” he said. “But that's impossible! That's—”

“Buddy, who is it?” Richie asked.

He reached out to touch Buddy's elbow, and his hand was flung away with such force that his knuckles cracked on the glass of his window.

“You don't want to touch me,” Buddy whispered. The road unrolled straight in front of him, not black tar now but white snow, packed and treacherous. The Camaro was rolling over this greasy surface at better than ninety miles an hour, only its roof and the orange Ping-Pong ball jammed on the top of its radio aerial visible between chest-high embankments. “You don't want to touch me, Richie. Not going this fast.”

“Is it—” Richie's voice cracked and he couldn't go on.

Buddy spared him a glance, and at the sight of the fear in Buddy's small red eyes, Richie's own terror came up in his throat like hot, smooth oil.

“Yeah,” Buddy said. “I think it is.”

No houses up here; they were already on state land. Nothing up here but the high snow embankments and the dark interlacing of trees.

“It's gonna bump us!” Bobby screeched from the back seat. His voice was as high as an old woman's. Between his feet the remaining bottles of Texas Driver chattered wildly in their carton. “Buddy! It's gonna bump us!”

The car behind them had come to within five feet of the Camaro's back bumper; its high beams flooded the car with light bright enough to read fine print. It slipped forward even closer. A moment later there was a thud.

The Camaro shifted its stance on the road as the car behind them fell back a trifle; to Buddy it was as if they were suddenly floating, and he knew they were a hair's breadth from going into a wild, looping skid, the front end and the rear briskly swapping places until they hit something and rolled.

A droplet of sweat, warm and stinging as a tear, ran into his eye.

Gradually, the Camaro straightened out again.

When he felt that he had control, Buddy let his right foot smoothly depress the accelerator all the way. If it was Cunningham in that old rustbucket '58—ah, and hadn't that been part of the dreams he could barely remember?—the Camaro would shut him down.

The engine was now screaming. The tach needle was again on the edge of the red line at 7,000 rpm. The speedometer had passed the one hundred post, and the snowbanks streamed past them on either side in ghastly silence. The road ahead looked like a point-of-view shot in a film that had been insanely speeded up.

“Oh dear God,” Bobby babbled, “oh dear God please don't let me get killed oh dear God oh holy shit—”

He wasn't there the night we trashed Cuntface's car,
Buddy thought.
He doesn't know what's going on. Poor busted-luck sonofawhore.
He did not really feel sorry for Bobby, but if he could have been sorry for anyone, it would have been for the little shit-for-brains freshman. On his right, Richie Trelawney sat bolt upright and as pallid as a gravestone, his eyes eating up his face. Richie knew the score, all right.

The car whispered toward them, headlights swelling in the rearview mirror.

He can't be gaining!
Buddy's mind screamed.
He can't be!
But the car behind them was indeed gaining, and Buddy sensed it was boring in for the kill. His mind ran like a rat in a cage, looking for a way out, and there was none. The slot in the left snowbank that marked the little side road he usually used to bypass the gate and get into the state park had already flashed by. He was running out of time, room, and options.