Christine (37 page)

His door was shut, but there was an intercom, always on, between the office and the long, barnlike garage area. It was the same intercom on which he had heard the beginnings of the Cunningham-Repperton title fight back in August. From the intercom's speaker he now heard the steady tick of metal as the engine cooled. He heard nothing else.

No one got out of Christine, because there was no one in her to get out.

He put stuff like that in an open file because nothing really inexplicable had ever happened to him . . . except maybe something like that was happening now.

He had seen her cross the cement to stall twenty, the automatic door rattling shut against the cold December night behind her. And experts, examining the case later, could say:
The witness had dozed and then fallen asleep, he admits that much, and that he was dreaming . . . what he claims to have seen was obviously nothing more or less than an extension
of that dream, an outward stimulus causing a subjective range of spontaneous, dream-oriented imagery. . . .

Yes, they could say that, just as Will could dream of dancing with fifteen-year-old Wanda Haskins . . . but the reality was a hard-headed man of sixty-one, a man who had long since jettisoned any last romantic notions.

And he had
seen
Cunningham's '58 glide across the garage empty, the steering wheel moving all by itself as the car slipped into her accustomed stall. He had
seen
the headlights go off, and he had heard the eight-cylinder engine as it died.

Now, feeling oddly boneless, Will Darnell got up, hesitated, went to the door of his office, hesitated again, and then opened it. He walked out and moved down the ranks of slant-parked cars to stall twenty. His footfalls echoed behind him and then died out in a mystery.

He stood beside the car with her rich two-tone body, red and white. The paintjob was deep and clear and perfect, unmarred by the smallest chip or the slightest touch of rust. The glass was clear and unbroken, not marked by so much as a nick caused by a random-flying pebble.

The only sound now was the slow drip of melting snow from the front and rear bumpers.

Will touched the hood. It was warm.

He tried the driver's side door, and it opened freely. The smell that issued forth was the warm smell of new leather, new plastic, new chrome—except that there seemed to be another, more unpleasant smell beneath it. An earthy smell. Will breathed deep but could not place it. He thought briefly of old turnips in his father's basement vegetable bin, and his nose wrinkled.

He leaned in. There were no keys in the ignition. The odometer read 52,107.8.

Suddenly, the empty ignition slot set into the dashboard revolved, the black slit heeling over of its own accord past
ACC
to
START
. The hot engine caught at once and rumbled steadily, full of contented high-octane power.

Will's heart staggered in his chest. His breath caught. Gasping and whooping noisily for breath, he hurried back to his office to find the spare aspirator in one of his desk drawers. His breath, thin and impotent, sounded like winter wind under an entryway door. His face was the color of old candlewax. His fingers caught in the loose flesh of his throat and pulled restlessly.

Christine's engine turned off again.

No sound now but the tick and click of cooling metal.

Will found his aspirator, plunged it deep into his throat, depressed the trigger, and inhaled. Little by little, the feeling that a wheelbarrowful of cinderblocks was sitting on his chest dissipated. He sat down in the swivel chair and listened gratefully to the sane and expected creak of protest from its springs. He covered his face momentarily with his fat hands.

Nothing really inexplicable. . . until now.

He had
seen
it.

Nothing had been driving that car. It had come in empty, smelling of something like rotting turnips.

And even then, in spite of his dread, Will's mind began to turn and he began wondering how he could put what he knew to his own advantage.

38

Breaking Connections

The burned-out wreck of Buddy Repperton's Camaro was found late on Wednesday afternoon by a park ranger. An old lady who lived with her husband in the tiny town of Upper Squantic had called the ranger station on the lake side of the park. She was badly afflicted with arthritis, and sometimes she couldn't sleep. Last night she thought she had seen flames coming from near the park's south gate. At what time? She reckoned it to be around quarter past ten, because she had been watching the Tuesday Night Movie on CBS and it hadn't been but half over.

On Thursday, a news photo of the burned car appeared on the front page of the Libertyville
Keystone,
under a headline which read:
THREE KILLED IN CAR CRASH AT SQUANTIC HILLS STATE PARK
. A State Police source was quoted as saying “liquor was probably a factor”—an officially opaque way of saying that the shattered remains of over half a dozen bottles of a juice-and-wine combination sold under the trade name Texas Driver had been found in the wreckage.

The news struck particularly hard at Libertyville High School; the young always have the greatest difficulty accepting unpleasant intelligence of their own mortality. Perhaps the holiday season made it that much harder.

Arnie Cunningham found himself terribly depressed by the news. Depressed and frightened. First Moochie; now Buddy, Richie Trelawney, and Bobby Stanton. Bobby Stanton, a dipshit little freshman Arnie had never even heard of—what had a dipshit little kid like that been doing with the likes of Buddy Repperton and Richie Trelawney anyway? Didn't he know that was like going into a den of tigers with nothing for protection but a squirt gun? He found it unaccountably hard to accept the grapevine version, which was simply that Buddy and his friends had gotten pretty well squiffed at the basketball game, had gone out cruising and drinking, and had come to a bad end.

He couldn't quite lose the feeling that he was somehow involved.

Leigh had stopped talking to him since the argument. Arnie didn't call her—partly out of pride, partly out of shame, partly out of a wish that she would call him first and things could go back to what they had been . . . before.

Before what?
his mind whispered.
Well, before she almost choked to death in your car, for one thing.
Before you tried to punch out the guy who saved her life.

But she wanted him to sell Christine. And that was simply impossible . . . wasn't it? How could he do that after he had put so much time and effort and blood and—yes, it was true—even tears into it?

It was an old rap, and he didn't want to think about it. The final bell rang on that seemingly endless Thursday, and he went out to the student parking lot—almost ran out—and nearly dived into Christine.

He sat there behind the wheel and drew a long, shuddering breath, watching the first snowflakes of an afternoon flurry twist and skirl across the bright hood. He dug for his keys, pulled them out of his pocket, and started Christine up. The motor hummed confidently and he pulled out, tires rolling and crunching over the packed snow. He would have to put snow tires on eventually, he supposed, but the truth was, Christine didn't seem to need them. She had the best traction of any car he had ever driven.

He felt for the radio knob and turned on WDIL. Sheb Wooley was singing “The Purple People Eater.” That raised a smile on his face at last.

Just being behind Christine's wheel, in control, made everything seem better. It made everything seem manageable.

Hearing about Repperton and Trelawney and the little shitter stepping out that way had been a terrible shock, naturally, and after the hard feelings of the late summer and this fall, it was probably natural enough for him to feel a little guilty. But the simple truth was, he had been in Philly. He hadn't had anything to do with it; it was impossible.

He had just been feeling low about things in general. Dennis was in the hospital. Leigh was behaving stupidly—as if his car had grown hands and jammed that piece of hamburger down her throat, for Christ's sake. And he had quit the chess club today.

Maybe the worst part of that had been the way Mr. Slawson, the faculty advisor, had accepted his decision without even trying to change his mind. Arnie had given him a lot of guff about how little time he had these days, and how he was simply going to have to cut back on some of his activities, and Mr. Slawson had simply nodded and said,
Okay, Arnie, we
'll be right here in Room 30 if you change your mind.
Mr. Slawson had looked at him with his faded blue eyes that his thick glasses magnified to the size of repulsive boiled eggs, and there had been something in them—was it reproach?

Maybe it had been. But the guy hadn't even
tried
to persuade him to stay, that was the thing. He should have at least
tried,
because Arnie was the best the LHS chess club had to offer, and Slawson knew it. If he had tried, maybe Arnie would have changed his mind. The truth was, he did have a little more time now that Christine was . . . was . . .

What?

. . . well, fixed up again. If Mr. Slawson had said something like
Hey Arnie, don't be so rash, let's think this over, we could really use you
. . . if Mr. Slawson had said something like that, why, he might have reconsidered. But not Slawson. Just we'll be right here in Room 30 if you change your mind, and blah-blah and yak-yak, what a fucking shitter, just like the rest of them. It wasn't his fault that LHS had been knocked out in the semi-final round; he had won four games before that and would have won in the finals if he had gotten a chance. It was those two shitters Barry Qualson and Mike Hicks that had lost it for them; both of them played chess as if maybe they thought Ruy Lopez was some new kind of soft drink or something. . . .

He stripped the wrapper and the foil from a stick of gum, folded the gum into his mouth, balled the wrapper, and flicked it into the litterbag hanging from Christine's ashtray with neat accuracy. “Right up the little tramp's ass,” he muttered, and then grinned. It was a hard, spitless grin. Above it, his eyes moved restlessly from side to side, looking mistrustfully out at a world full of crazy drivers and stupid pedestrians and general idiocy.

Arnie cruised aimlessly around Libertyville, his thoughts continuing to run on in this softly paranoid and bitterly comforting fashion. The radio spilled out a steady flood of golden oldies, and today all of them seemed to be instrumentals—“Rebel Rouser,” “Wild Weekend,” “Telstar,” Sandy Nelson's jungle-driven “Teen Beat,” and “Rumble” by Line Wray, the greatest of them all. His back nagged, but in a low key. The flurry intensified briefly to a dark gray cloud of snow. He popped on his headlights, and just as quickly the snow tapered off and the clouds broke, spilling through bars of remote and coldly beautiful late-afternoon winter sun.

He cruised.

He came out of his thoughts—which now were that Repperton had maybe come to a perfectly fitting end after all—and was shocked to realize that it was nearly quarter of six, and dark. Gino's Pizza was coming up on the left, the little green neon shamrocks shimmering in the dark. Arnie pulled over to the curb and got out. He started to cross the street, then realized he had left his keys in Christine's ignition.

He leaned in to get them . . . and suddenly the smell assaulted him, the smell Leigh had told him about, the smell he had denied.

It was here now, as if it had come out when he left the car—a high, rotten, meaty smell that made his eyes water and his throat close. He snatched the keys and stood back, trembling, looking at Christine with something like horror.

Arnie, there was a smell. A horrible, rotten smell . . . you know what I'm talking about.

No, I don't have the slightest idea . . . you're imagining things.

But if she was, so was he.

Arnie turned suddenly and ran across the street to Gino's as if the devil was on his tail.

• • •

Inside, he ordered a pizza he didn't really want, changed some quarters for dimes, and slipped into the telephone booth beside the juke. It was thumping some current tune Arnie had never heard before.

He called home first. His father answered, his voice oddly toneless—Arnie had never heard Michael's voice quite that way before, and his unease deepened. His father sounded like Mr. Slawson. This Thursday afternoon and evening were taking on the maroon tones of nightmare. Beyond the glass walls of the booth, strange faces drifted dreamily past, like untethered balloons on which someone had crudely drawn human faces. God at work with a Magic Marker.

Shitters,
he thought disjointedly.
All a bunch of
shitters.

“Hello, Dad,” he said uncertainly. “Look, I—uh, I kind of lost track of the time here. I'm sorry.”

“That's all right,” Michael said. His voice was almost a drone, and Arnie felt his unease deepen into something like fright. “Where are you, the garage?”

“No—uh, Gino's. Gino's Pizza. Dad, are you okay? You sound funny.”

“I'm fine,” Michael said. “Just scraped your dinner down the garbage disposal, your mother's upstairs crying again, and you're having a pizza. I'm fine. Enjoying your car, Arnie?”

Arnie's throat worked, but no sound came out.

“Dad,” he managed finally, “I don't think that's very fair.”

“I don't think I'm very interested anymore in what you think is fair and what you don't think is fair,” Michael said. “You had some justification for your behavior at first, perhaps. But in the last month or so you've turned into someone I don't understand at all, and something is going on that I understand even less. Your mother doesn't understand it either, but she senses it, and it's hurting her very badly. I know she brought part of the hurt on herself, but I doubt if that changes the quality of the pain.”

“Dad, I just lost track of the time!” Arnie cried. “Stop making such a big thing out of it!”

“Were you driving around?”

“Yes, but—”

“I notice that's when it usually happens,” Michael said. “Will you be home tonight?”

“Yes, early,” Arnie said. He wet his lips. “I just want to go by the garage, I have some information Will asked me to get while I was in Philly—”

“I'm not interested in that either, pardon me,” Michael said. His voice was still polite, chillingly disconnected.

“Oh,” Arnie said in a very small voice. He was very scared now, almost trembling.

“Arnie?”

“What?” Arnie nearly whispered.

“What
is
going on?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Please. That detective came by to see me at my office. He was after Regina, as well. He upset her very badly. I don't think he meant to, but—”

“What was it this time?” Arnie asked fiercely. “That fucker, what was it this time? I'll—”

“You'll what?”

“Nothing.” He swallowed something that tasted like a lump of dust. “What was it this time?”

“Repperton,” his father said. “Repperton and those other two boys. What did you think it was? The geopolitical situation in Brazil?”

“What happened to Repperton was an
accident,”
Arnie said. “Why did he want to talk to you and Mom about something that was an
accident,
for Christ's sake?”

“I don't know.” Michael Cunningham paused. “Do you?”

“How would I?” Arnie yelled. “I was in Philadelphia, how would I know anything about it? I was playing chess, not . . . not. . . not anything else,” he finished lamely.

“One more time,” Michael Cunningham said. “Is something going on, Arnie?”

He thought of the smell, the high, rotting stink. Leigh choking, digging at her throat, turning blue. He had tried to thump her on the back because that's what you did when someone was choking, there was no such thing as a Heimlich Maneuver because it hadn't been invented yet, and besides, this was how it was supposed to end, only not in the car . . . beside the road . . . in his arms. . ..

He closed his eyes and the whole world seemed to tilt and swirl sickly.

“Arnie?”

“There is nothing going on,”
he said through clenched teeth and without opening his eyes. “Nothing but a lot of people who are on my case because I finally got something of my own and did it all by myself.”

“All right,” his father said, his lackluster voice once more terribly reminiscent of Mr. Slawson's. “If you want to talk about it, I'm here. I always have been, although I didn't always make that as clear as I should have. Be sure to kiss your mother when you come in, Arnie.”

“Yeah, I will. Listen, Mi—”

Click.

He stood in the booth, listening stupidly to the sound of nothing at all. His father was gone. There wasn't even a dial tone because it was a dumb . . . fucking . . . phone booth.

He dug into his pocket and spread his change out on the little metal shelf where he could look at it. He picked up a dime, almost dropped it, and at last got it into the slot. He felt sick and overheated. He felt as if he had been very efficiently disowned.

He dialled Leigh's number from memory.

Mrs. Cabot picked the phone up and recognized his voice immediately. Her pleasant and rather sexy come-hither-thou-fascinating-stranger phone voice became instantly hard. Arnie had had his last chance with
her,
that voice said, and he had blown it.

“She doesn't want to talk to you and she doesn't want to see you,” she said.

“Mrs. Cabot, please, if I could just—”

“I think you've done enough,” Mrs. Cabot said coolly. “She came in crying the other night and she's been crying off and on ever since. She had some sort of a . . . an experience with you the last time you and she went out, and I only pray it wasn't what I thought it was. I—”