Christine (41 page)

His panic-stricken mind spun up a kaleidoscope of jumbled images. College application forms with the words
REJECTED—CONVICTED FELON
stamped across them. Prison bars, blued steel. A judge bending down from a high bench, his face white and accusing. Big bull queers in a prison yard looking for fresh meat. Christine riding the conveyor into the car-crusher in the junkyard behind the garage.

And then, as he stopped the Chrysler and put it in park, the State Police car pulling in behind him (and another, appearing like magic, pulling in ahead of him), a thought came from nowhere, full of cold comfort:
Christine can take care of herself.

Another thought came as the cops got out and came toward him, one holding a search warrant in his hand. It also seemed to come from nowhere, but it reverberated in Roland D. LeBay's raspy, old man's tones:

And she'll take care of you, boy. All you got to do is go on believing in her and she'
ll take care of you.

Arnie opened the car door and got out a moment before one of the cops could open it.

“Arnold Richard Cunningham?” one of the cops asked.

“Yes, indeed,” Arnie said calmly. “Was I speeding?”

“No, son,” one of the others said. “But you are in a world of hurt, all the same.”

The first cop stepped forward as formally as a career Army officer. “I have a duly executed document here permitting the search of this 1966 Chrysler Imperial in the name of the People of New York State and of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and of the United States of America. Further—”

“Well, that just about covers the motherfucking waterfront, doesn't it?” Arnie said. His back flared dully, and he jammed his hands against it

The cop's eyes widened slightly at the old voice coming out of this kid, but then he went on.

“Further, to seize any contraband found in the course of this search in the name of the People of New York State and of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and of the United States of America.”

“Fine,” Arnie said. None of it seemed real. Blue lights flashed a confusion. People passing in their cars turned to look, but he found he had no desire to turn from them, to hide his face, and that was something of a relief.

“Give me the keys, kid,” one of the cops said.

“Why don't you just get them yourself, you shitter?” Arnie said.

“You're not helping yourself, kiddo,” the cop said, but he looked startled and a little fearful all the same; for a moment the kid's voice had deepened and roughened and he had sounded forty years older and a pretty tough customer—nothing like the skinny kid he saw before him at all.

He leaned in, got the keys, and three of the cops immediately headed for the trunk.
They know,
Arnie thought, resigned. At least this had nothing to do with Junkins's obsession with Buddy Repperton and Moochie Welch and the others (at least not directly, he amended cautiously); this smelled like a well-planned and well-coordinated operation against Will's smuggling operations from Libertyville into New York and New England.

“Kid,” one of the cops said, “would you like to answer some questions or make a statement? If you think you would, I'll read you the Miranda right now.”

“No,” Arnie said calmly. “I don't have anything to say.”

“Things could go a lot easier with you.”

“That's coercion,” Arnie said, smiling a little. “Watch out or you'll put a big fat hole in your own case.”

The cop flushed. “If you want to be an asshole, that's your lookout.”

The Chrysler trunk was open. They had pulled out the spare tire, the jack, and several boxes of small parts—springs, nuts, bolts, and the like. One of the cops was almost entirely in the trunk; only his blue-gray-clad legs stuck out. For a moment Arnie hoped vaguely that they wouldn't find the under-compartment; then he dismissed the thought—it was just the childish part of him, the part he now wished burned away, because all that part of him did lately was hurt. They would find it The quicker they found it, the quicker this nasty roadside scene would end.

As if some god had heard his wish and decided to grant it posthaste, the cop in the trunk called triumphantly. “Cigarettes!”

“All right,” the cop who had read the warrant said. “Close it up.” He turned to Arnie and read him the Miranda warning. “Do you understand your rights as I have read them to you?”

“Yes,” Arnie said.

“Do you want to make a statement?”

“No.”

“Get in the car, son. You're under arrest.”

I'm under arrest,
Arnie thought, and almost brayed laughter, the thought was so foolish. This was all a dream and he would wake up soon.
Under arrest.
Being hustled to a State Police cruiser. People looking at him—

Desperate, childish tears, hot salt, welled up in his throat and closed it.

His chest hitched—once, twice.

The cop who had read him his rights touched his shoulder and Arnie shrugged it off with a kind of desperation. He felt that if he could get deep down inside himself quickly enough, he would be okay—but sympathy might drive him mad.

“Don't touch me!”

“You do it the way you want to do it, son,” the cop said, removing his hand. He opened the cruiser's rear door for Arnie and handed him in.

Do you cry in dreams?
Of course you could—hadn't he read about people waking up from sad dreams with tears on their cheeks? But, dream or no dream, he wasn't going to cry.

Instead he would think of Christine. Not of his mother or father, not of Leigh or Will Darnell, not of Slawson—all the miserable shitters who had betrayed him.

He would think of Christine.

Arnie closed his eyes and leaned his pale, gaunt face forward into his hands and did just that. And as always, thinking about Christine made things better. After a while he was able to straighten up and look out at the passing scenery and think about his position.

Michael Cunningham put the telephone back into its cradle slowly—with infinite care—as if to do less might cause it to explode and spray his upstairs study with jagged black hooks of shrapnel.

He sat back in the swivel chair behind his desk, on which there sat his IBM Correcting Selectric II typewriter, an ashtray with the blue-and-gold legend
HORLICKS UNIVERSITY
barely legible across the dirty bottom, and the manuscript of his third book, a study of the ironclads
Monitor
and
Merrimac.
He had been halfway through a page when the telephone rang. Now he flipped the paper release on the right side of the typewriter and pulled the page bonelessly out from under the roller, observing its slight curve clinically. He put it down on top of the manuscript, which was now little more than a jungle of pencilled-in corrections.

Outside, a cold wind whined around the house. The morning's cloudy warmth had given way to a frigid, clear December evening. The earlier melt had frozen tight and his son was being held in Albany on charges of what amounted to smuggling:
no Mr. Cunningham it is not marijuana it is cigarettes, two hundred cartons of Winston cigarettes with no tax stamps.

From downstairs he could hear the whir of Regina's sewing machine. He would have to get up now, go to the door and open it, go down the hall to the stairs, walk down the stairs, walk into the dining room, then into the plant-lined little room that had once been a laundry but which was now a sewing room, and stand there while Regina looked up at him (she would be wearing her half-glasses for the close work), and say “Regina, Arnie has been arrested by the New York State Police.”

Michael attempted to begin this process by getting up from his desk chair, but the chair seemed to sense he was temporarily off-guard. It swivelled and rolled backward on its casters at the same moment, and Michael had to clutch the edge of his desk to keep from falling. He slipped heavily back into the chair, heart thudding with painful rapidity in his chest.

He was struck suddenly by such a complex wave of despair and sorrow that he groaned aloud and grabbed his forehead, squeezing his temples. The old thoughts swarmed back in, as predictable as summer mosquitoes and just as maddening. Six months ago, things had been okay. Now his son was sitting in a jail cell somewhere. What were the watershed moments? How could he, Michael, have changed things? What was the history of it, exactly? Where had the sickness started to creep in?

“Jesus—”

He squeezed harder, listening to the winter-whine outside the windows. He and Arnie had put the storms on just last month. That had been a good day, hadn't it? First Arnie holding the ladder and looking up, then him down and Arnie up there, him shouting for Arnie to be careful, the wind in his hair and dead brown leaves blowing over his shoes, their colors gone. Sure, it had been a good day. Even after that beastly car had come, seeming to overshadow everything in their son's life like a fatal disease, there had been some good days. Hadn't there?

“Jesus,” he said again in a weak, teary voice that he despised.

Unbidden images rose behind his eyes. Colleagues looking at him sideways, maybe whispering in the faculty club. Discussions at cocktail parties in which his name bobbed uneasily up and down like a waterlogged body. Arnie wouldn't be eighteen for almost two months and he supposed that meant his name couldn't be printed in the paper, but everyone would still know. Word got around.

Suddenly, crazily, he saw Arnie at four, astride a red trike he and Regina had gotten at a rummage sale (Arnie at four had called them “Momma's rubbage sales”). The trike's red paint was flaked with scales of rust, the tires were bald, but Arnie had loved it; he would have taken that trike to bed with him, if he could. Michael closed his eyes and saw Arnie riding up and down the sidewalk, wearing his blue corduroy jumper, his hair flopping in his eyes, and then his mind's eye blinked or wavered or did something and the rusty rubbage-sale trike was Christine, her red paint scummed with rust, her windows milky-white with age.

He gritted his teeth together. Someone looking in might have thought he was smiling crazily. He waited until he had some kind of control, and then he got up and went downstairs to tell Regina what had happened. He would tell her and she would think of what they were going to do, just as she always had; she would steal the forward motion from him, taking whatever sorry balm that actually
doing
things had to give, and leave him with only sick sorrow and the knowledge that now his son was someone else.

41

The Coming of the Storm

The first of that winter's great northeast storms came to Libertyville on Christmas Eve, beating its way across the upper third of the U.S. on a wide and easily predictable storm track. The day began in bright thirty-degree sunshine, but morning deejays were already cheerfully predicting doom and gloom, urging those who had not finished their last-minute shopping to do so by mid-afternoon. Those planning trips to the old homestead for an old-fashioned Christmas were urged to rethink their plans if the trip could not be made in four to six hours.

“If you don't want to be spending Christmas Day in the breakdown lane of I-76 somewhere between Bedford and Carlisle, I'd leave early or not at all,” the FM-104 jock advised his listening audience (a large part of which was too stoned to even consider going anyplace), and then resumed the Christmas Block Party with Springsteen's version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”

By 11:00
A.M.
, when Dennis Guilder finally left Libertyville Community Hospital (as per hospital regulations, he was not allowed on his crutches until he was actually out of the building; until then he was pushed along in a wheelchair by Elaine), the sky had begun to scum over with clouds and there was an eerie fairy ring around the sun. Dennis crossed the parking lot carefully on his crutches, his mother and father bookending him nervously in spite of the fact that the lot had been scrupulously salted free of even the slightest trace of snow and ice. He paused by the family car, turning his face up slightly into the freshening breeze. Being outside was like a resurrection. He felt he could stand here for hours and not have enough of it.

By one o'clock that afternoon, the Cunningham family station wagon had reached the outskirts of Ligonier, ninety miles east of Libertyville. The sky had gone a smooth and pregnant slate-gray by this time, and the temperature had dropped six degrees.

It had been Arnie's idea that they not cancel the traditional Christmas Eve visit with Aunt Vicky and Uncle Steve, Regina's sister and her husband. The two families had created a casual, loosely rotating ritual over the years, with Vicky and Steve coming to their house some years, the Cunninghams going over to Ligonier on others. This year's trip had been arranged in early December. It had been cancelled after what Regina stubbornly called “Arnie's trouble,” but at the beginning of last week, Arnie had begun restlessly agitating for the trip.

At last, after a long telephone conversation with her sister on Wednesday, Regina gave in to Arnie's wish—mostly because Vicky had seemed calm and understanding and most of all not very curious about what had happened. That was important to Regina—more important than she would perhaps ever be able to say. It seemed to her that in the eight days since Arnie had been arrested in New York, she had had to cope with a seemingly endless flood of rancid curiosity masquerading as sympathy. Talking to Vicky on the telephone, she had finally broken down and cried. It was the first and only time since Arnie had been arrested in New York that she had allowed herself that bitter luxury. Arnie had been in bed asleep. Michael, who was drinking much too much and passing it off as “the spirit of the season,” had gone down to O'Malley's for a beer or two with Paul Strickland, another factory reject in the game of faculty politics. It would probably end up being six beers, or eight, or ten. And if she went upstairs to his study later on, she would find him sitting bolt upright behind his desk, looking out into the dark, his eyes dry but bloodshot. If she tried to speak with him, his conversation would be horribly confused and centered too much in the past. She supposed her husband might be having a very quiet mental breakdown. She would not allow herself the same luxury (for so, in her own hurt and angry state, she thought it), and every night her mind ticked and whirred with plans and schemes until three or four o'clock. All these thoughts and schemes were aimed at one end: “Getting us over this.” The only two ways she would allow her mind to approach what had happened were deliberately vague. She thought about “Arnie's trouble” and “Getting us over this.”

But, talking to Vicky on the phone a few days after her son's arrest, Regina's iron control had wavered briefly. She cried on Vicky's shoulder long-distance, and Vicky had been calmly comforting, making Regina hate herself for all the cheap shots she had taken at Vicky over the years. Vicky, whose only daughter had dropped out of junior college to get married and become a housewife, whose only son had been content with a vocational-technical school (none of that for
her
son! Regina had thought with a private exultation); Vicky whose husband sold, of all hilarious things, life insurance. And Vicky (hilariouser and hilariouser) sold Tupperware. But it was Vicky she had been able to cry to, it had been Vicky to whom she had been able to express at least part of her tortured sense of disappointment and terror and hurt; yes, and the terrible
embarrassment
of it, of knowing that people were talking and that people who had for years wanted to see her take a fall were now satisfied. It was Vicky, maybe it had always been Vicky, and Regina decided that if there was to be a Christmas at all for them this miserable year, it would be at Vicky and Steve's ordinary suburban ranchhouse in the amusingly middle-class suburb of Ligonier, where most people still owned American cars and called a trip to McDonald's “eating out.”

Mike, of course, simply went along with her decision; she would have expected no more and brooked no less.

For Regina Cunningham the three days following the news that Arnie was “in trouble” had been an exercise in pure cold control, a hard lunge for survival. Her survival, the family's survival, Arnie's survival—he might not believe that, but Regina found she hadn't the time to care. Mike's pain had never entered her equations; the thought that they could comfort each other had never even crossed her mind as a speculation. She had calmly put the cover on her sewing machine after Mike came downstairs and gave her the news. She did that, and then she had gone to the phone and had gotten to work. The tears she would later shed while talking to her sister had then been a thousand years away. She had brushed past Michael as if he were a piece of furniture, and he had trailed uncertainly after her as he had done all of their married life.

She called Tom Sprague, their lawyer, who, hearing that their problem was criminal, hastily referred her to a colleague, Jim Warberg. She called Warberg and got an answering service that would not reveal Warberg's home number. She sat by the phone for a moment, drumming her fingers lightly against her lips, and then called their family lawyer back. Sprague hadn't wanted to give her Warberg's home telephone number, but in the end he gave in. When Regina finally let him go, Sprague sounded dazed, almost shell-shocked. Regina in full spate often caused such a reaction.

She called Warberg, who said he absolutely couldn't take the case. Regina had lowered her bulldozer blade again. Warberg ended up not only taking the case but agreeing to go immediately to Albany, where Arnie was being held, to see what could be done. Warberg, speaking in the weak, amazed voice of a man who has been filled full of Novocain and then run over by a tractor, protested that he knew a perfectly good man in Albany who could get the lay of the land. Regina was adamant. Warberg went by private plane and reported back four hours later.

Arnie, he said, was being held on an open charge. He would be extradited to Pennsylvania the following day. Pennsylvania and New York had coordinated the bust along with three Federal agencies: the Federal Drug Control Task Force, the IRS, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The main target was not Arnie, who was small beans, but Will Darnell—Darnell, and whomever Darnell was doing business with. Those guys, Warberg said, with their suspected ties to organized crime and disorganized drug smuggling in the new South, were the big beans.

“Holding someone on an open charge is illegal,” Regina had snapped immediately, drawing on a deep backlog of TV crime-show fare.

Warberg, not exactly overjoyed to be where he was when he had planned on spending a quiet evening at home reading a book, rejoined crisply, “I'd be down on my knees thanking God that's what they're doing. They caught him with a trunkload of unstamped cigarettes, and if I push them on it, they'll be more than happy to charge him, Mrs. Cunningham. I advise you and your husband to get over here to Albany. Quickly.”

“I thought you said he was going to be extradited tomorrow—”

“Oh, yes, that's all been arranged. If we've got to play hardball with these guys, we ought to be glad the game's going to be played on our home court. Extradition isn't the problem here.”

“What is?”

“These people want to play knock-over-the-dominoes. They want to knock your son over onto Will Darnell. Arnold is not talking. I want you two to get over here and persuade him that it's in his best interest to talk.”

“Is it?” she had asked hesitantly.

“Hell, yes!” Warberg's voice crackled back. “These guys don't want to put your son in jail. He's a minor from a good family with no previous criminal record, not even a school record of disciplinary problems. He can get out of this without even facing a judge. But he's got to talk.”

So they had gone to Albany, and Regina had been taken down a short, narrow hallway faced in white tile, lit with high-intensity bulbs sunken into small wells in the ceiling and covered with wire mesh. The place had smelled vaguely of Lysol and urine, and she kept trying to convince herself that her
son
was being held here, her
son,
but achieving that conviction was a hard go. It didn't seem possible that it could be true. The possibility that it was all a hallucination seemed much more likely.

Seeing Arnie had stripped away that possibility in a hurry. The protective jacket of shock was likewise stripped away, and she felt a cold, consuming fear. It was at this moment that she had first seized on the idea of “Getting us over this,” the way a drowning person will seize a life preserver. It was Arnie, it was her son, not in a jail cell (that was the only thing she had been spared, but she was grateful for even small favors) but in a small square room whose only furnishings were two chairs and a table scarred with cigarette burns.

Arnie had looked at her steadily, and his face seemed horribly gaunt, skull-like. He had been to the barber only a week before, and had gotten a surprisingly short haircut (after years of wearing it long, in emulation of Dennis), and now the overhead light shone down cruelly through what was left, making him appear momentarily bald, as if they had shaved his head to loosen his lips.

“Arnie,” she said, and went to him—halfway to him. He turned his head away from her, his lips pressing together, and she stopped. A lesser woman might have burst into tears then, but Regina was not a lesser woman. She let the coldness come back and have its way with her. The coldness was all that would help now.

Instead of embracing him—something he obviously didn't want—she sat down and told him what had to be done. He refused. She ordered him to talk to the police. He refused again. She reasoned with him. He refused. She harangued him. He refused. She pleaded with him. He refused. Finally she just sat there dully, a headache thudding at her temples, and asked him why. He refused to tell her.

“I thought you were smart!” she shouted finally. She was nearly mad with frustration—the thing she hated above all others was not getting her way when she absolutely wanted to have it,
needed
to have it; this had in fact never happened to her since she left home. Until now. It was infuriating to be so smoothly and seamlessly balked by this boy who had once drawn milk from her breasts. “I thought you were smart but you're stupid! You're . . . you're an asshole! They'll put you in jail! Do you want to go to jail for that man Darnell? Is that what you want? He'll laugh at you! He'll
laugh
at you!” Regina could imagine nothing worse, and her son's apparent lack of interest in whether or not he was laughed at infuriated her all the more.

She rose from her chair and pushed her hair away from her brow and eyes, the unconscious gesture of a person who is ready to fight. She was breathing rapidly, and her face was flushed. To Arnie, she looked both younger and much, much older than he had ever seen her.

“I'm not doing it for Darnell,” he said quietly, “and I'm not going to jail.”

“What are you, Oliver Wendell Holmes?” she rejoined fiercely, but her anger was in some measure overmastered by relief. At least he could say
something.
“They caught you in his car with the trunk loaded with cigarettes! Illegal cigarettes.”

Mildly, Arnie said, “They weren't in the trunk. They were in a compartment under the trunk. A secret compartment And it was Will's car. Will told me to take his car.”

She looked at him.

“Are you saying you didn't know they were there?”

Arnie looked at her with an expression she simply couldn't accept, it was so foreign to his face—it was contempt.
Good as gold, my boy
's as good as gold,
she thought crazily.

“I knew, and Will knew. But they have to prove it, don't they?”

She could only look at him, amazed.

“If they do drop it on me somehow,” he said, “I'll get a suspended sentence.”

“Arnie,” she said at last, “you're not thinking straight. Maybe your father—”

“Yes,” he interrupted. “I'm thinking straight. I don't know what you're doing, but I'm thinking very straight.” And he looked at her, his gray eyes so horribly blank that she could no longer stand it and had to leave.

In the small green reception room she walked blindly past her husband, who had been sitting on a bench with Warberg. “You go in,” she said. “You make him see reason.” She went on without waiting for his reply, not stopping until she was outside and the cold December air was painting her hot cheeks.