Christine (23 page)

“Just liability?”

They were passing under a reflecting sign which read
LEFT LANE FOR AIRPORT
. Arnie put on his blinker and changed lanes. Michael seemed to relax a little.

“You can't get collision insurance until you're twenty-one. I mean that; those shitting insurance companies are all as rich as Croesus, but they won't cover you unless the odds are stacked
outrageously
in their favor.” There was a bitter, somehow weakly peevish note in Arnie's voice that Michael had never heard before, and although he said nothing, he was startled and a little dismayed by his son's choice of words—he had assumed Arnie used that sort of language with his peers (or so he later told Dennis Guilder, apparently totally unaware of the fact that, up until his senior year, Arnie had really had no peers except for Guilder), but he had never used it in front of Regina and himself.

“Your driving record and whether or not you had driver ed don't have anything to do with it,” Arnie went on. “The reason you can't get collision is because their fucking actuarial tables
say
you can't get collision. You can get it at twenty-one only if you're willing to spend a fortune—usually the premiums end up being more than the car books for until you're twenty-three or so, unless you're married. Oh, the shitters have got it all figured out. They know how to walk it right to you, all right.”

Up ahead the airport lights glowed, runways outlined in mystic parallels of blue light. “If anyone ever asks me what the lowest form of human life is, I'll tell them it's an insurance agent.”

“You've made quite a study of it,” Michael commented. He didn't quite dare to say anything else; Arnie seemed only waiting to fly into a fresh rage.

“I went around to five different companies. In spite of what Mom said, I'm not anxious to throw my money away.”

“And straight liability was the best you could do?”

“Yeah, that's right. Six hundred and fifty dollars a year.”

Michael whistled.

“That's right,” Arnie agreed.

Another twinkling sign, advising that the two left-hand lanes were for parking, the right lanes for departures. At the entrance to the parking lot, the way split again. To the right was an automated gate where you took a ticket for short-term parking. To the left was the glass booth where the parking-lot attendant sat, watching a small black-and-white TV and smoking a cigarette.

Arnie sighed. “Maybe you're right. Maybe this is the best solution all the way around.”

“Of course it is,” Michael said, relieved. Arnie sounded more like his old self now, and that hard light had died out of his eyes at last. “Ten months, that's all.”

“Sure.”

He drove up to the booth, and the attendant, a young guy in a black-and-orange high school sweater with the Libertyville logo on the pockets, pushed back the glass partition and leaned out. “Help ya?”

“I'd like a thirty-day ticket,” Arnie said, digging for his wallet.

Michael put his hand over Arnie's. “This one's my treat,” he said.

Arnie pushed his hand away gently but firmly and took his wallet out. “It's my car,” he said. “I'll pay my own way.”

“I only wanted—” Michael began.

“I know,” Arnie said. “But I mean it.”

Michael sighed. “I know you do. You and your mother. Everything will be fine if you do it my way.”

Arnie's lips tightened momentarily, and then he smiled. “Well. . . yeah,” he said.

They looked at each other and both burst out laughing.

At the instant that they did, Christine stalled. Up until then the engine had been ticking over with unobtrusive perfection. Now it just quit; the oil and amp idiot lights came on.

Michael raised his eyebrows. “Say what?”

“I don't know,” Arnie answered, frowning. “It never did that before.”

He turned the key, and the engine started at once.

“Nothing, I guess,” Michael said.

“I'll want to check the timing later in the week,” Arnie muttered. He gunned the engine and listened carefully. And in that instant, Michael thought that Arnie didn't look like his son at all. He looked like someone else, someone much older and harder. He felt a brief but extremely nasty lance of fear in his chest.

“Hey, do you want this ticket or are you just gonna sit there all night talkin about your timing?” the parking-lot attendant asked. He looked vaguely familiar to Arnie, the way people do when you've seen them moving around in the corridors at school but don't have anything else to do with them.

“Oh yeah. Sorry.” Arnie passed him a five-dollar bill, and the attendant gave him a time-ticket.

“Back of the lot,” the attendant said. “Be sure to revalidate it five days before the end of the month if you want the same space again.”

“Right.”

Arnie drove to the back of the lot, Christine's shadow growing and shrinking as they passed under the hooded sodium-arc lights. He found a vacant space and backed Christine in. As he turned off the key, he grimaced and put a hand to his lower back.

“That still bothering you?” Michael asked.

“Only a little,” Arnie said. “I was almost over it, and it came back on me yesterday. I must have lifted something wrong. Don't forget to lock your door.”

They got out and locked up. Once out of the car, Michael felt better—he felt closer to his son, and, maybe just as important, he felt less that he had played the impotent fool with his jingling cap of bells in the argument that had taken place earlier. Once out of the car, he felt as if he might have salvaged something—maybe a lot—out of the night.

“Let's see how fast that bus really is,” Arnie said, and they began to walk across the parking lot toward the terminal, companionably close together.

Michael had formed an opinion of Christine on the ride out to the airport. He was impressed with the job of restoration Arnie had done, but he disliked the car itself—disliked it intensely. He supposed it was ridiculous to hold such feelings about an inanimate object, but the dislike was there all the same, big and unmistakable, like a lump in the throat.

The source of the dislike was impossible to isolate. It had caused bitter trouble in the family, and he supposed that was the real reason . . . but it wasn't all. He hadn't liked the way Arnie
seemed
when he was behind the wheel: somehow arrogant and petulant at the same time, like a weak king. The impotent way he had railed about the insurance . . . his use of that ugly and striking word “shitters” . . . even the way the car had stalled when they laughed together.

And it had a smell. You didn't notice it right away, but it was there. Not the smell of new seat covers, that was quite pleasant; this was an undersmell, bitter, almost (but not quite) secret. It was an old smell.
Well,
Michael told himself,
the car is old, why in God's name do you expect it to smell new?
And that made undeniable sense. In spite of the really fantastic job Arnie had done of restoring it, the Fury was twenty years old. That bitter, mouldy smell might be coming from old carpeting in the trunk, or old matting under the new floormats; perhaps it was coming from the original padding under the bright new seat covers. Just a smell of age.

And yet that undersmell, low and vaguely sickening, bothered him. It seemed to come and go in waves, sometimes very noticeable, at other times completely undetectable. It seemed to have no specific source. At its worst, it smelled like the rotting corpse of some small animal—a cat, a woodchuck, maybe a squirrel—that had gotten into the trunk or maybe crawled up into the frame and then died there.

Michael was proud of what his son had accomplished . . . and very glad to get out of his son's car.

22

Sandy

The parking-lot attendant that night—every night from six until ten, as a matter of fact—was a young man named Sandy Galton, the only one of Buddy Repperton
's close circle of hoodlum friends who had not been in the smoking area on the day Repperton had been expelled from school. Arnie didn't recognize him, but Galton recognized Arnie.

• • •

Buddy Repperton, out of school and with no interest in initiating the procedures that might have gotten him readmitted at the beginning of the spring semester in January, had gone to work at the gas station run by Don Vandenberg's father. In the few weeks he had been there, he had already begun a number of fairly typical scams—shortchanging gas customers who looked as if they might be in too big a hurry to count the bills he gave back to them, running the retread game (which consists of charging the customer for a new tire and then actually putting on a retread and pocketing the fifteen- to sixty-dollar difference), running the similar used-parts game, plus selling inspection stickers to kids from the high school and nearby Horlicks—kids desperate to keep their death-traps on the road.

The station was open twenty-four hours a day, and Buddy worked the late shift, from 9
P.M.
to 5
A.M.
Around eleven o'clock, Moochie Welch and Sandy Galton were apt to drop by in Sandy's old dented Mustang; Richie Trelawney might come by in his Firebird; and Don, of course, was in and out all the time—when he wasn't goofing off at school. By midnight on any given week night there might be six or eight guys sitting around in the office, drinking beer out of dirty teacups, passing around a bottle of Buddy's Texas Driver, doing a joint or maybe a little hash, farting, telling dirty jokes, swapping lies about how much pussy they were getting, and maybe helping Buddy fiddle around with whatever was up on the lift.

During one of these late-night gatherings in early November, Sandy happened to mention that Arnie Cunningham was parking his machine in the long-term lot out at the airport. He had, in fact, bought a thirty-day ticket.

Buddy, whose usual demeanor during these late-night bull-sessions was one of sullen withdrawal, tipped his cheap contour-plastic chair abruptly back down on all four legs and put his bottle of Driver down on the windshield-wiper cabinet with a bang.

“What did you say?” he asked. “Cunningham? Ole Cuntface?”

“Yeah,” Sandy said, surprised and a little uneasy. “That's him.”

“You sure? The guy that got me kicked out of school?”

Sandy looked at him with mounting alarm. “Yeah. Why?”

“And he's got a thirty-day ticket, which means he's parked in the long-term lot?”

“Yeah. Maybe his folks didn't want him to have it at . . .”

Sandy trailed off. Buddy Repperton had begun to smile. It was not a pleasant sight, that smile, and not only because the teeth it revealed were already going rotten. It was as if, somewhere, some terrible machinery had just whined into life and was beginning to cycle up and up to full running speed.

Buddy looked around from Sandy to Don to Moochie Welch to Richie Trelawney. They looked back at him, interested and a little scared.

“Cuntface,” he said in a soft, marvelling voice. “Ole Cuntface got his machine street-legal and his funky folks have got him parking it out at the airport.”

He laughed.

Moochie and Don exchanged a glance that was somehow both uneasy and eager.

Buddy leaned toward them, elbows on the knees of his jeans.

“Listen,” he said.

23

Arnie and Leigh

WDIL was on the car radio and Dion was singing “Runaround Sue” in his tough, streetwise voice, but neither of them was listening.

His hand had slipped up under the T-shirt she was wearing and had found the soft glory of her breasts, capped with nipples that were tight and hard with excitement. Her breath came in short, steep gasps. And for the first time her hand had gone where he wanted it, where he
needed
it, into his lap, where it pressed and turned and moved, without experience but with enough desire to make up for the lack.

He kissed her and her mouth opened wide, her tongue was there, and the kiss was like inhaling the clean aroma/taste of a rain forest. He could feel excitement and arousal coming off her like a glow.

He leaned toward her,
strained
toward her, all of him, and for a moment he could feel her respond with a pure, clean passion.

Then she was gone.

Arnie sat there, dazed and stupefied, a little to the right of the steering wheel, as Christine's dome-light came on. It was brief; the passenger door clunked solidly shut and the light clicked off again.

He sat a moment longer, not sure what had happened, momentarily not even sure of where he was. His body was in a complete stew—a helter-skelter array of emotions and erratic physical reactions that were half wonderful and half terrible. His glands hurt; his penis was hard iron; his balls throbbed dully. He could feel adrenaline whipping rapidly through his bloodstream, up and down and all around.

He made a fist and brought it down on his leg, hard. Then he slid across the seat, opened the door, and went after her.

Leigh was standing on the very edge of the Embankment, looking down into the darkness. Within a bright rectangle in the middle of that darkness, Sylvester Stallone strode across the night in the costume of a young labor leader from the 1930s. Again Arnie had that feeling of living in some marvellous dream that might at any moment skew off into nightmare . . . perhaps it had already begun to happen.

She was too close to the edge—he took her arm and pulled her gently backward. The ground up here was dry and crumbly. There was no fence or guardrail. If the earth at the edge let go, Leigh would be gone; she would land somewhere in the suburban development loosely scattered around the Liberty Hill Drive-In.

The Embankment had been the local lovers' lane since time out of mind. It was at the end of Stanson Road, a long, meandering stretch of two-lane blacktop that first curved out of town and then hooked back toward it, dead-ending on Libertyville Heights, where there had once been a farm.

It was November 4, and the rain that had begun earlier that Saturday night had turned to a light sleet. They had the Embankment and the free (if silent) view of the drive-in to themselves. He got her back into the car—she came willingly enough—thinking it was sleet on her cheeks. It was only inside, by the ghostly green glow of the dashboard lights, that he saw for sure she was crying.

“What's the matter?” he asked. “What's wrong?”

She shook her head and cried harder.

“Did I . . . was it something you didn't want to do?” He swallowed and made himself say it. “Touch me like that?”

She shook her head again, but he wasn't sure what that meant. Arnie held her, clumsy and worried. And in the back of his mind he was thinking about the sleet, the trip back down, and the fact that he had no snow tires on Christine as yet.

“I never did that for any boy,” she said against his shoulder. “That's the first time I ever touched . . . you know. I did it because I wanted to. Because I wanted to, that's all.”

“Then what is it?”

“I can't . . . here.” The words came out slowly and painfully, one at a time, with an almost awful reluctance.

“The Embankment?” Arnie said, gazing around, thinking stupidly that maybe she thought he had really brought them up here so they could watch
F•I•S•T
free.

“In this car!” she shouted at him suddenly. “I can't make love to you in this car!”

“Huh?” He stared at her, thunderstruck. “What are you talking about? Why not?”

“Because . . . because . . . I don't know!” She struggled to say something else and then burst into fresh tears. Arnie held her again until she quieted.

“It's just that I don't know which you love more,” Leigh said when she was able.

“That's . . .” Arnie paused, shook his head, smiled. “Leigh, that's crazy.”

“Is it?” she asked, searching his face. “Which of us do you spend more time with? Me . . . or her?”

“You mean Christine?” He looked around him, smiling that puzzled smile that she could find either lovely and lovable or horridly hateful—sometimes both at once.

“Yes,” she said tonelessly. “I do.” She looked down at her hands, lying lifelessly on her blue woollen slacks. “I suppose it's stupid.”

“I spend a lot more time with you,” Arnie said. He shook his head. “This is crazy. Or maybe it's normal—maybe it just seems crazy to me because I never had a girl before.” He reached out and touched the fall of her hair where it spilled over one shoulder of her open coat. The T-shirt beneath read
GIVE ME LIBERTYVILLE OR GIVE ME DEATH
, and her nipples poked at the thin cotton cloth in a sexy way that made Arnie feel a little delirious.

“I thought girls were supposed to be jealous of other girls. Not cars.”

Leigh laughed shortly. “You're right. It must be because you've never had a girl before. Cars
are
girls. Didn't you know that?”

“Oh, come on—”

“Then why don't you call this Christopher?” And she suddenly slammed her open palm down on the seat, hard. Arnie winced.

“Come on, Leigh. Don't.”

“Don't like me slapping your girl?” she asked with sudden and unexpected venom. Then she saw the hurt look in his eyes. “Arnie, I'm sorry.”

“Are you?” he asked, looking at her expressionlessly. “Seems like nobody likes my car these days—you, my dad and mom, even Dennis. I worked my ass off on it, and it means zero to everybody.”

“It means something to me,” she said softly. “The
effort
it took.”

“Yeah,” he said morosely. The passion, the heat, had fled. He felt cold and a little sick to his stomach. “Look, we better get going. I don't have any snow tires. Your folks'd think it was cute, us going bowling and then getting racked up on Stanson Road.”

She giggled. “They don't know where Stanson Road ends up.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her, some of his good humor returning. “That's what
you
think,” he said.

• • •

He drove back down toward town slowly, and Christine managed the twisting, steeply descending road with easy sure-footedness. The sprinkle of earth-stars that was Libertyville and Monroeville grew larger and drew closer together and then ceased to have any pattern at all. Leigh watched this a little sadly, feeling that the best part of a potentially wonderful evening had somehow slipped away. She felt irritated, chafed, out of sorts with herself—unfulfilled, she supposed. There was a dull ache in her breasts. She didn't know if she had meant to let him go what was euphemistically known as “all the way” or not, but after things had reached a certain point, nothing had gone as she had hoped . . .
all because she had to open her big fat mouth.

Her body was in a mess, and her thoughts were the same way. Again and again on the mostly silent drive back down she opened her mouth to try to clarify how she felt . . . and then closed it again, afraid of being misunderstood, because she didn't understand how she felt herself.

She didn't feel jealous of Christine . . . and yet she did. About that Arnie hadn't told the truth. She had a good idea of how much time he spent tinkering on the car, but was that so wrong? He was good with his hands, he liked to work on it, and it ran like a watch . . . except for that funny little glitch with the odometer numbers running backward.

Cars
are
girls,
she had said. She hadn't been thinking of what she was saying; it had just popped out of her mouth. And it certainly wasn't always true; she didn't think of their family sedan as having any particular gender; it was just a Ford.

But—

Forget it, get rid of all the hocus-pocus and phony stuff. The truth was much more brutal and even crazier, wasn't it? She couldn't make love to him, couldn't touch him in that intimate way, much less think about bringing him to a climax that way (or the other, the real way—she had turned that over and over in her mind as she lay in her narrow bed, feeling a new and nearly amazing excitement steal over her), in the car.

Not in the car.

Because the really crazy part was that she felt Christine was
watching
them. That she was jealous, disapproving, maybe hating. Because there were times (like tonight, as Arnie skated the Plymouth so smoothly and delicately across the building scales of sleet) when she felt that the two of them—Arnie and Christine—were welded together in a disturbing parody of the act of love. Because Leigh did not feel that she
rode
in Christine; when she got in to go somewhere with Arnie she felt
swallowed
in Christine. And the act of kissing him, making love to him, seemed a perversion worse than voyeurism or exhibitionism—it was like making love inside the body of her rival.

The really crazy part of it was that she hated Christine.

Hated her and feared her. She had developed a vague dislike of walking in front of the new grille, or closely behind the trunk; she had vague thoughts of the emergency brake letting go or the gearshift popping out of park and into neutral for some reason. Thoughts she had never had about the family sedan.

But mostly it was not wanting to do anything in the car . . . or even go anywhere in the car, if she could help it. Arnie seemed somehow different in the car, a person she didn't really know. She loved the feel of his hands on her body—her breasts, her thighs (she had not yet allowed him to touch the center of her, but she wanted his hands there; she thought if he touched her there she would probably just melt). His touch always brought a coppery taste of excitement to her mouth, a feeling that every sense was alive and deliciously attuned. But in the car that feeling seemed blunted . . . maybe because in the car Arnie always seemed less honestly passionate and somehow more lecherous.

She opened her mouth again as they turned onto her street, wanting to explain some of this, and again nothing would come. Why should it? There was really nothing to explain—it was all vapors. Nothing but vague humors. Well . . . there was one thing. But she couldn't tell him that; it would hurt him too badly. She didn't want to hurt him because she thought she was beginning to love him.

But it was there.

The smell—a rotten, thick smell under the aromas of new seat covers and the cleaning fluid he had used on the floormats. It was there, faint but terribly unpleasant. Almost stomach-turning.

As if, at some time, something had crawled into the car and died there.

• • •

He kissed her good night on her doorstep, the sleet shining silver in the cone of yellow light thrown by the carriage lamp at the foot of the porch steps. It shone in her dark blond hair like jewels. He would have liked to have really kissed her, but the fact that her parents might be watching from the living room—probably were, in fact—forced him to kiss her almost formally, as you might kiss a dear cousin.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I was silly.”

“No,” Arnie said, obviously meaning yes.

“It's just that”—and her mind supplied her with something that was a curious hybrid of the truth and a lie—“that it doesn't seem right in the car.
Any
car. I want us to be together, but not parked in the dark at the end of a dead-end road. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he said. Up at the Embankment, in the car, he had felt a little angry with her . . . well, to be honest, he had been pretty goddam pissed off. But now, standing here on her stoop, he thought he could understand—and marvel that he could want to deny her anything or cross her will in any way. “I know exactly what you mean.”

She hugged him, her arms locked around his neck. Her coat was still open, and he could feel the soft, maddening weight of her breasts.

“I love you,” she said for the first time, and then slipped inside to leave him standing there on the porch momentarily, agreeably stunned, and much warmer than he should have been in the ticking, pattering sleet of late autumn.

The idea that the Cabots might find it peculiar if he stood on their front stoop much longer in the sleet at last percolated down into his bemused brain. Arnie went back down the walk through the tick and patter, snapping his fingers and grinning. He was riding the roller-coaster now, the one that's the best ride, the one they really only let you take once.

Near the place where the concrete path joined the sidewalk, he stopped, the smile fading off his face. Christine stood at the curb, drops of melted sleet pearling her glass, smearing the red idiot lights from the dash inside, and he wondered passingly what the source of that particular bit of slang was—
idiot lights;
it was an unpleasant term. Then that was wiped out by the more important consideration. He had left Christine running, and she had stalled. This was the second time.

“Wet wires,” he muttered under his breath. “That's all.” It couldn't be plugs; he had put in a whole new set just the day before yesterday, at Will's. Eight new Champion and—

Which of us do you spend more time with? Me . . . or
her?

The smile returned, but this time it was uneasy. Well, he spent more time around cars in
general
—of course. That came of working for Will. But it was ridiculous to think that. . .