Christine (20 page)

The engine would gun. The car would lurch forward, drop back, lurch forward, drop back. And then the tires would scream as it roared right at me—

I shook the thought off. It was time to stop pandering to myself with all of this crazy shit. It was time—and overtime—to get my imagination under control. This was a car, not a she but an it, not really Christine at all but only a 1958 Plymouth Fury that had rolled off an assembly line in Detroit along with about four hundred thousand others.

It worked . . . at least temporarily. Just to demonstrate how little afraid of it I was, I got down on my knees and looked under it. What I saw there was even crazier than the haphazard way the car was being rebuilt on top. There were three new Pleasurizer shocks, but the fourth was a dark, oil-caked ruin that looked as if it had been on there forever. The tailpipe was so new it was still silvery, but the muffler looked at least middle-aged and the header pipe was in very bad shape. Looking at the header, thinking about exhaust fumes that could leak into the car from it, made me flash on Veronica LeBay again. Because exhaust fumes can kill. They—

“Dennis, what are you doing?”

I guess I was still more uneasy than I thought, because I was up from my knees like a shot with my heart beating in my throat. It was Arnie. He looked cold and angry.

Because I was looking at his car? Why should that make him mad?
Good question. But it had, that was obvious.

“I was looking over your mean machine,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Where's Leigh?”

“She had to go to the Ladies',” he said, dismissing her. His gray eyes never left my face. “Dennis, you're the best friend I've got, the best friend I've ever had. You might have saved me a trip to the hospital the other day when Repperton pulled that knife, and I know it. But don't you go behind my back, Dennis. Don't you ever do that.”

From the playing field there was a tremendous cheer—the Hillmen had just made the final score of the game, with less than thirty seconds to play.

“Arnie, I don't know what the hell you're talking about,” I said, but I felt guilty. I felt guilty the way I had felt being introduced to Leigh, sizing her up, wanting her a little—wanting the girl he so obviously wanted himself. But . . . going behind his back? Was that what I had been doing?

I suppose he could have seen it that way. I had known that his irrational—interest, obsession, put it however you like—his irrational
thing
about the car was the locked room in the house of our friendship, the place I could not go without inviting all sorts of trouble. And if he hadn't caught me trying to jimmy the door, he had at least come upon me trying to peek through a keyhole.

“I think you know
exactly
what I'm talking about,” he said, and I saw with a tired sort of dismay that he was not just a little mad; he was furious. “You and my father and mother are all spying on me ‘for my own good,' that's the way it is, isn't it? They sent you down to Darnell's Garage to snoop around, didn't they?”

“Hey, Arnie, wait just a—”

“Boy, did you think I wouldn't find out? I didn't say anything then—because we're friends. But I don't know, Dennis. There has to be a line, and I think I'm drawing it. Why don't you just leave my car alone and stop butting in where you don't belong?”

“First of all,” I said, “it wasn't your father
and
your mother. Your father got me alone and asked me if I'd take a look at what you were doing with the car. I said sure I would, I was curious myself. Your dad has always been okay to me. What was I supposed to say?”

“You were supposed to say no.”

“You don't get it. He's on your side. Your mother still hopes it doesn't come to anything—that was the idea I got—but Michael really hopes you get it running. He said so.”

“Sure, that's the way he'd come on to you.” He was almost sneering. “Really all he's interested in is making sure I'm still hobbled. That's what they're both interested in. They don't want me to grow up because then they'd have to face getting old.”

“That's too hard, man.”

“Maybe you think so. Maybe coming from a halfway-normal family makes you soft in the head, Dennis. They offered me a new car for high school graduation, did you know that? All I had to do was give up Christine, make all A's, and agree to go to Horlicks . . . where they could keep me in direct view for another four years.”

I didn't know what to say. That was pretty crass, all right.

“So just butt out of it, Dennis. That's all I'm saying. We'll both be better off.”

“I didn't tell him anything, anyhow,” I said. “Just that you were doing a few things here and there. He seemed sort of relieved.”

“Yeah, I'll bet.”

“I didn't have any idea it was as close to street-legal as it is. But it isn't all the way yet. I looked underneath, and that header pipe's a mess. I hope you're driving with your windows open.”

“Don't tell me how to drive it! I know more about what makes cars run than you ever will!”

That was when I started to get pissed off at him. I didn't like it—I didn't want to have an argument with Arnie, especially not now, when Leigh would be joining him in another moment—but I could feel somebody upstairs in the brain-room starting to pull those red switches, one by one.

“That's probably true,” I said, controlling my voice. “But I'm not sure how much you know about people. Will Darnell gave you an improper sticker—if you got picked up he could lose his state inspection certificate. He gave you a dealer plate. Why did he do those things, Arnie?”

For the first time Arnie seemed defensive. “I told you. He knows I'm doing the work.”

“Don't be a numbskull. That guy wouldn't give a crippled crab a crutch unless there was something in it for him, and you know it.”

“Dennis, will you leave it alone, for God's sake?”

“Man,” I said, stepping toward him. “I don't give a fuck if you have a car. I just don't want you in a bind over it. Sincerely.”

He looked at me uncertainly.

“I mean, what are we yelling at each other about? Because I looked underneath your car to see how the exhaust pipe was hanging?”

But that hadn't been all I was doing. Some . . . but not quite all. And I think we both knew it.

On the playing field, the final gun went off with a flat bang. A slight drizzle had started to come down, and it was getting cold. We turned toward the sound of the gun and saw Leigh coming toward us, carrying her pennant and Arnie's. She waved. We waved back.

“Dennis, I can take care of myself,” he said.

“Okay,” I said simply. “I hope you can.” Suddenly I wanted to ask him how deep he was in with Darnell. And that was a question I couldn't ask; that would bring on an even more bitter argument. Things would be said that could maybe never be repaired.

“I can,” he repeated. He touched his car, and the hard look in his eyes softened.

I felt a mixture of relief and dismay—the relief because we weren't going to have a fight after all; we had both managed to avoid saying anything completely irreparable. But it also seemed to me that it wasn't just one room of our friendship that had been closed off; it was a whole damn wing. He had rejected what I'd had to say with complete totality and had made the conditions for continuing the friendship pretty clear: everything will be okay as long as you do it my way.

Which was also his parents' attitude, if only he could have seen it. But then, I suppose he had to learn it somewhere.

Leigh came up, drops of rain gleaming in her hair. Her color was high, her eyes sparkling with good health and good excitement. She exuded a naive and untested sexuality that made me feel a little light-headed. Not that I was the main object of her attention; Arnie was.

“How did it end?” Arnie asked.

“Twenty-seven to eighteen,” she said, and then added gleefully, “We
destroyed
them. Where were you two?”

“Just talking cars,” I said, and Arnie shot me an amused glance—at least his sense of humor hadn't disappeared with his common sense. And I thought there was some cause for hope in the way he looked at her. He was falling for her, head over heels. The tumble was slow right now, but it would almost surely speed up if things went right. I was really curious about how it had happened, the two of them getting together. Arnie's complexion had cleared up and he looked pretty good, but in a rather bookish, bespectacled sort of way. He wasn't the sort of guy you'd have expected Leigh Cabot to want to be with; you'd expect her to be hanging from the arm of the American high school version of Apollo.

People were streaming back across the field now, our players and theirs, our fans and theirs.

“Just talking cars,” Leigh repeated, mocking softly. She turned her face up to Arnie's and smiled. He smiled back, a sappy, dopey smile that did my heart a world of good. I could tell, just looking at him, that whenever Leigh smiled at him that way, Christine was the farthest thing from his mind; she was demoted back to her proper place as an it, a means of transportation.

I liked that just fine.

18

On the Bleachers

I saw Arnie and Leigh in the halls a lot over the first two weeks in October, first leaning against his locker or hers, talking before the home-room bell; then holding hands; then going out after school with their arms around each other. It had happened. In high school parlance, they were “going together.” I thought it was more than that. I thought they were in love.

I hadn't seen Christine since the day we beat Hidden Hills. She had apparently gone back to Darnell's for more work—maybe that was part of the agreement Arnie had struck with Darnell when Darnell issued the dealer plate and the illegal sticker that day. I didn't see the Fury, but I saw a lot of Leigh and Arnie . . . and heard a lot about them. They were a hot item of school gossip. Girls wanted to know what she
saw
in him, for heaven's sake; boys, always more practical and prosaic, only wanted to know if my runt friend had managed to get into her pants. I didn't care about either of those things, but I did wonder from time to time what Regina and Michael thought of their son's extreme case of first love.

One Monday in mid-October, Arnie and I ate our lunch together on the bleachers by the football field, as we had been planning to do on the day Buddy Repperton had pulled the knife—Repperton had indeed been expelled for that. Moochie and Don had gotten three-day vacations. They were currently being pretty good boys. And, in the not-so-sweet meanwhile, the football team had been run over twice more. Our record was now 1-5, and Coach Puffer had lapsed back into morose silence.

My lunchbag wasn't as full as it had been on the day of Repperton and the knife; the only virtue I could see of being 1-5 was that we were now so far behind the Bears of Ridge Rock (they were 5-0-1) that it would be impossible for us to do anything in the Conference unless their team bus went over a cliff.

We sat in the mellow October sunshine—the time for the little spooks in their bedsheets and rubber masks and Woolworth's Darth Vader costumes wasn't far off—munching and not saying too much. Arnie had a devilled egg and swapped it for one of my cold meatloaf sandwiches. Parents know very little about the secret lives of their children, I guess. Every Monday since first grade, Regina Cunningham had put a devilled egg in Arnie's lunchbag, and every day after we had a meatloaf dinner (which was usually Sunday suppers), I had a cold meatloaf sandwich in mine. Now I have always hated cold meatloaf and Arnie has always hated devilled eggs, although I never saw him turn one down done any other way. And I've often wondered what our mothers would think if they knew how few of the hundreds of devilled eggs and dozens of cold meatloaf sandwiches that went into our respective lunch-sacks had actually been eaten by him for whom each was intended.

I got down to my cookies and Arnie got down to his fig-bars. He glanced over at me to make sure I was watching and then crammed all six fig-bars into his mouth at once and crunched down on them. His cheeks puffled out grotesquely.

“Oh, Jesus, what a gross-out!” I cried.

“Ung-ung-gooth-ung,” Arnie replied.

I started to poke my fingers at his sides, where he's always been extremely ticklish, screaming, “Side-noogies! Look out, Arnie, I got side-noogies onya!”

Arnie started to laugh, spraying out little wads of munched-up fig-bars. I know how obnoxious that must sound, but it was really funny.

“Quit it, Dennith!” Arnie said, his mouth still full of fig-bars.

“What was that? I can't understand you, you fucking barbarian.” I kept poking my fingers at him, giving him what we used to call “side-noogies” when we were little kids (for some reason now lost in the sands of time), and he kept wiggling and twisting and laughing.

He swallowed mightily, then belched.

“You're so fucking gross, Cunningham,” I said.

“I know.” He seemed really pleased by it. Probably was; so far as I know, he'd never pulled the six-fig-bars-at-once trick in front of anyone else. If he had done it in front of his parents, I figure Regina would have had a kitty and Michael possibly a brain-hemorrhage.

“What's the most you ever did?” I asked him.

“I did twelve once,” he said. “But I thought I was going to choke.”

I snorted laughter. “Have you done it for Leigh yet?”

“I'm holding it back for the prom,” he said. “I'll give her a few side-noogies too.” We got laughing over that, and I realized how much I missed Arnie sometimes—I had football, student council, a new girlfriend who would (I hoped) consent to give me a hand-job before the drive-in season ended. I had little hope of getting her to do more than that; she was a little too enchanted with herself. Still, it was fun trying.

Even with all of that going on, I had missed Arnie. First there had been Christine, now there was Leigh and Christine. In that order, I hoped.

“Where is she today?” I asked.

“Sick,” he said. “She got her period, and I guess it really hurts.”

I raised a set of mental eyebrows. If she was discussing her female problems with him, they were getting chummy indeed.

“How did you happen to ask her to the football game that day?” I asked. “The day we played Hidden Hills?”

He laughed. “The only football game I've been to since my sophomore year. We brought you luck, Dennis.”

“You just called her up and asked her to go?”

“I almost didn't. That was the first date I ever had.” He glanced over at me shyly. “I don't think I slept more than two hours the night before. After I called her up and she said she'd go with me, I was scared to death I'd make an asshole of myself, or that Buddy Repperton would show up and want to fight, or something else would happen.”

“You seemed to have everything under control.”

“Did I?” He looked pleased. “Well, that's good. But I was scared. She'd talk to me in the halls, you know—ask me about assignments and stuff like that. She joined the chess club even though she wasn't very good . . . but she's getting better. I'm teaching her.”

I'll bet you are, you dog,
I thought, but didn't quite dare say it—I still remembered the way he had blown up at me the same day at Hidden Hills. Besides, I wanted to hear this. I was pretty curious; captivating a girl as stunning as Leigh Cabot had been a real coup.

“So after a while I started to think maybe she was interested in me,” Arnie went on. “It probably took a lot longer for the penny to drop for me than it would for some other guys—guys like you, Dennis.”

“Sure, I'm a smoothie,” I said. “What James Brown used to call ‘a sex machine.' ”

“No, you're no sex machine, but you know about girls,” he said seriously. “You understand them. I was always just scared of them. Never knew what to say. Still don't, I guess. Leigh's different.

“I was afraid to ask her out.” He seemed to consider this. “I mean, she's a beautiful girl, really beautiful. Don't you think so, Dennis?”

“Yes. As far as I can tell, she's the prettiest girl in school.”

He smiled, pleased. “I think so, too . . . but I thought, maybe it's only because I love her that I think that way.”

I looked at my friend, hoping he wasn't going to get into more trouble than he could handle. At that point, of course, I had no idea what trouble meant.

“Anyway, I heard these guys talking one day in chem lab—Lenny Barongg and Ned Stroughman—and Ned was telling Lenny that he'd asked her out and she'd said no, but in a nice way . . . like maybe if he asked her again she might try it out. And I had this picture of her going steady with Ned by spring, and I started to feel really jealous. It's ridiculous. I mean, she told him no and I'm feeling jealous, you dig what I'm saying?”

I smiled and nodded. Out on the field the cheerleaders were trying out some new routines. I didn't think they would help our team very much, but it was pleasant to watch them. Their shadows puddled at their heels on the green grass in the bright noontime.

“The other thing that got me was that Ned didn't sound pissed off or . . . or ashamed . . . or rejected, or anything like that. He tried for a date and got turned down, that was all. I decided I could do that, too. Still, when I called her up on the phone I was sweating all over. Man, that was bad. I kept imagining her laughing at me and saying something like,
‘Me go out with you, you little creep? You must he dreaming! I'm not that hard up yet!'
”

“Yeah,” I said. “I can't figure out why she didn't.”

He poked me in the stomach. “Gut-noogies, Dennis! Make you puke!”

“Never mind,” I said. “Tell me the rest.”

He shrugged. “Not much else to tell. Her mother answered the phone when I called and said she'd get her. I heard the phone go clunking down on the table, and I almost hung up.” Arnie held up two fingers a quarter of an inch apart. “I came this close to hanging up. No shit.”

“I know the feeling,” I said, and I did—you worry about the laughter, you imagine the contempt to some degree or other, no matter if you're a football player or some pimply little four-eyed runt—but I don't think I could understand the
degree
to which Arnie must have felt it. What he had done had taken monumental courage. It's a small thing, a date, but in our society there are all sorts of charged forces swirling behind that simple concept—I mean, there are kids who go all the way through high school and
never
get up enough courage to ask a girl for a date. Never
once,
in all four years. And that isn't just one or two kids, it's lots of them. And there are lots of sad girls who never get asked. It's a shitty way to run things, when you stop to think about it. A lot of people get hurt. I could dimly imagine the naked terror Arnie must have felt, waiting for Leigh to come to the phone; the sense of dread amazement at the idea that he was not planning to ask just any girl out but
the prettiest girl in school.

“She answered,” Arnie went on. “She said ‘Hello?' and, man, I couldn't say anything. I tried and nothing came out but this little whistle of air. So she said ‘Hello, who is this?' like it might be some kind of practical joke, you know, and I thought, This is ridiculous. If I can talk to her in the hall, I should be able to talk to her on the goddam phone, all she can say is no, I mean she can't
shoot
me or anything if I ask her for a date. So I said hi, this is Arnie Cunningham, and she said hi, and blah-blah-blahdy-blah, bullshit-bullshit-bullshit, and then I realized I didn't even know where the hell I wanted to ask her to go, and we're running out of things to say, pretty soon she's going to hang up. So I asked her the first thing I could think of, would she want to go to the football game on Saturday. She said she'd love to go, right off like that, like she had just been waiting for me to ask her, you know?”

“Probably she was.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Arnie considered this, bemused.

The bell rang, signifying five minutes to period five. Arnie and I got up. The cheerleaders trotted off the field, their little skirts flipping saucily.

We climbed down the bleachers, tossed our lunchbags in one of the trash barrels painted with the school colors—orange and black, talk about Halloween—and walked toward the school.

Arnie was still smiling, recalling the way it had worked itself out, that first time with Leigh. “Asking her to the game was sheer desperation.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said. “That's what I get for playing my heart out every Saturday afternoon, huh?”

“You know what I mean. Then, after she said she'd go with me, I had this really horrible thought and called you—remember?”

Suddenly I did. He had called to ask me if that game was at home or away and had seemed absurdly crushed when I told him it was at Hidden Hills.

“So there I was, I've got a date with the prettiest girl in school, I'm crazy about her, and it turns out to be an away game and my car's in Will's garage.”

“You could have taken the bus.”

“I know that now, but I didn't then. The bus always used to be full up a week before the game. I didn't know so many people would stop coming to the games if the team started losing.”

“Don't remind me,” I said.

“So I went to Will. I knew Christine could do it, but no way she was street-legal. I mean, I was desperate.”

How desperate?
I wondered coldly and suddenly.

“And he came through for me. Said he understood how important it was, and if . . .” Arnie paused; seemed to consider. “And that's the story of the big date,” he finished gracelessly.

And if . . .

But that wasn't my business.

Be his eyes,
my father had said.

But I pushed that away too.

We were walking past the smoking area now, deserted except for three guys and two girls, hurriedly finishing a joint. They had it in a makeshift matchbook roachclip, and the evocative odor of pot, so similar to the aroma of slowly burning autumn leaves, slipped into my nostrils.

“Seen Buddy Repperton around?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “And don't want to. You?”

I had seen him once, hanging out at Vandenberg's Happy Gas, an extra-barrel service station out on Route 22 in Monroeville. Don Vandenberg's dad owned it, and the place had been on the ragged edge of going bust ever since the Arab oil embargo in '73. Buddy hadn't seen me; I was just cruising by.

“Not to talk to.”

“You mean he can talk?” Arnie said with a scorn that wasn't like him. “What a shitter.”

I started. That word again. I thought about it, told myself what the fuck, and asked him where he had gotten that particular term.

He looked at me thoughtfully. The second bell rang suddenly, braying out from the side of the building. We were going to be late to class, but right then I didn't care at all.