Christine (25 page)

25

Buddy Visits the Airport

One night some ten days later, as cardboard turkeys and construction-paper cornucopias were beginning to appear in grammar school windows, a blue Camaro, so radically jacked in the back that its nose seemed almost to scrape the road, slid into the long-term parking lane at the airport.

Sandy Galton looked out from his glass booth nervously. From the driver's side of the Chevrolet the happy smiling face of Buddy Repperton tilted up toward him. Buddy's face was scrubbed with a week-old beard and his eyes held a maniacal glitter that was more cocaine than Thanksgiving cheer—he and the boys had scored a pretty good gram that evening. All in all, Buddy looked quite a bit like a depraved Clint Eastwood.

“How are they hanging, Sandy?” Buddy asked.

Dutiful laughter from the Camaro greeted this sally. Don Vandenberg, Moochie Welch, and Richie Trelawney were with Buddy, and between the gram of coke and the six bottles of Texas Driver Buddy had procured for the occasion, they were feeling pretty much reet and compleet. They had come to do a little dirty boogie on Arnie Cunningham's Plymouth.

“Listen, if you guys get caught, I'm gonna lose my job,” Sandy said nervously. He was the only one cold sober, and he was regretting ever having mentioned that Cunningham was parking his heap here. The thought that he might go to jail as well had fortunately not occurred to him.

“If you or any of your Mission Imfuckingpossible force are caught, the Secretary will disavow you ever fuckin lived,” Moochie said from the back seat, and there was more laughter.

Sandy looked around for other cars—witnesses—but there were no planes due for more than an hour and the parking lot was as deserted as the mountains of the moon. The weather had turned very cold, and a wind as keen as a fresh razor-blade whined across the runways and taxi-ways and hooted miserably between the ranks of empty cars. Above and to his left, the Apco sign banged restlessly back and forth.

“You can laugh, you retard,” Sandy said. “I never saw you, that's all. If you get caught, I'll say I was takin a crap.”

“Jesus, what a baby,” Buddy said. He looked sorrowful. “I never thought you were such a baby, Sandy. Honest.”

“Arf! Arf!” Richie barked, and there was more laughter. “Roll over and play dead for Daddy Warbucks, Sandy!”

Sandy flushed. “I don't care,” he said. “Just be careful.”

“We will, man,” Buddy said sincerely. He had saved back a seventh bottle of Texas Driver and a pretty decent toot of nose-candy. Now he handed both up to Sandy. “Here. Enjoy yourself.”

Sandy grinned in spite of himself. “Okay,” he said, and added, just so they'd know he was no sad sack: “Do a good job.”

Buddy's smile hardened, became metallic. The light went out of his eyes; they became dull and dead and frightening. “Oh, we will,” he said. “We will.”

The Camaro drifted into the parking lot. For a while Sandy could follow its progress toward the back by the moving taillights, and then Buddy doused them. The sound of the motor, burbling through twin glasspack mufflers, came back for a few moments on the wind, and then that sound was gone, too.

Sandy dumped the coke out on the counter by his portable TV and tooted it with a rolled-up dollar bill. Then he got into the Texas Driver. He knew that being discovered drunk on the job would also get him canned, but he didn't much care. Being drunk was better than being cat-jumpy and always staring around for one of the two gray Airport Security cars.

The wind was blowing toward him, and he could hear—too much, he could hear.

A tinkle of breaking glass, muffled laughter, a loud metallic
thonk.

More breaking glass.

A pause.

Low voices drifting to him on the cold wind. He was unable to pick up the individual words; they were distorted.

Suddenly there was a perfect fusillade of blows; Sandy winced at the sound. More breaking glass in the dark, and a tinkle of metal falling on the pavement—chrome or something, he supposed. He found himself wishing Buddy had brought more coke. Coke was sort of cheery stuff, and he sure could use some cheering up right about now. It sounded as if some pretty bad stuff was going on down at the far end of that parking lot.

And then a louder voice, urgent and commanding, Buddy's for sure:

“Do it there!”

A mutter of protest.

Buddy again: “Never mind that! On the dashboard, I said!”

Another mutter.

Buddy: “I don't
give
a shit!”

And for some reason this produced a stifle of laughter.

Sweaty now in spite of the knifing cold, Sandy suddenly slid his glass window shut and snapped on the TV. He drank deeply, grimacing at the heavy taste of the mixed fruit juice and cheap wine. He didn't care for it, but Texas Driver was what
they
all drank when they weren't drinking Iron City beer, and what was he supposed to do? Make out he was better than them, or something? That would get him fried, sooner or later. Buddy didn't like wimps.

He drank, and began to feel a little better—or at least a little drunker. When one of the Airport Security cars
did
pass, he hardly even flinched. The cop raised a hand to Sandy. Sandy raised a hand right back, just as cool as you could want.

About fifteen minutes after it had cruised toward the back of the lot, the blue Camaro reappeared, this time in the exit lane. Buddy sat cool and relaxed behind the wheel, a three-quarters-empty bottle of Driver propped in his crotch. He was smiling, and Sandy noted uneasily how bloodshot and weird his eyes looked. That wasn't just wine, and it wasn't just coke, either. Buddy Repperton was no one to fuck with; Cunningham would find that out, if nothing else.

“All taken care of, my good man,” Buddy said.

“Good,” Sandy said and tried a smile. It felt a little sick. He had no feelings about Cunningham one way or another, and he was not a particularly imaginative person, but he could make a good guess about how Cunningham was going to feel when he saw what had come of all his careful work restoring that red and white Plymouth. Still, it was Buddy's business, not his.

“Good,” he said again.

“Keep your jock on, man,” Richie said, and giggled.

“Sure,” Sandy said. He was glad they were going. Maybe he wouldn't hang around Vandenberg's Happy Gas so much after this. Maybe after this he didn't want to. This was heavy shit. Too heavy, maybe. And maybe he would pick up a couple of night courses, too. He'd have to give this job up, but maybe that wouldn't be so bad, either—it was a pretty dull fucking job.

Buddy was still looking at him, smiling that hard, gonzo smile, and Sandy took a big drink of Texas Driver. He nearly gagged. For an instant he had an image of puking down into Buddy's upturned face, and his unease became terror.

“If the cops get in on it,” Buddy said, “you don't know nothing, you didn't see nothing. Like you said, you had to go in and take a crap around nine-thirty.”

“Sure, Buddy.”

“We all wore our wittle mittens. We didn't leave any prints.”

“Sure.”

“Stay cool, Sandy,” Buddy said softly.

“Yeah, okay.”

The Camaro began to roll again. Sandy raised the gate with the manual button. The car headed toward the airport exit road at a sedate pace.

Someone called “Arf! Arf!” The sound drifted back to Sandy against the wind.

Troubled, he sat down to watch TV.

Shortly before the rush of customers who had come in on the ten-forty from Cleveland began to arrive, he poured the rest of the Driver out of the window and onto the ground. He didn't want it anymore.

26

Christine Laid Low

The next day Arnie and Leigh rode out to the airport together after school to pick up Christine. They were planning on a trip to Pittsburgh to do some early Christmas shopping, and they were looking forward to doing it together—it seemed somehow terribly adult.

Arnie was in a fine mood on the bus, making up fanciful little vignettes about their fellow passengers and making her laugh in spite of her period, which was usually depressing and almost always painful. The fat lady in the man's workshoes was a lapsed nun, he said. The kid in the cowboy hat was a hustler. And on and on. She got into the spirit of the thing but was not as good at it as he. It was amazing, the way he had come out of his shell . . . the way he had
bloomed.
That was really the only word for it. She felt the smug, pleased satisfaction of a prospector who has suspected the presence of gold by certain signs and has been proved correct. She loved him, and she had been right to love him.

They got off the bus at the terminal stop together and walked across the access road to the parking lot hand in hand.

“This isn't bad,” Leigh said. It was the first time she had come out with him to pick up Christine. “Twenty-five minutes from school.”

“Yeah, it's okay,” Arnie said. “It keeps peace in the family, that's the important thing. I'm telling you, when my mom got home that night and saw Christine in the driveway, she went totally bullshit.”

Leigh laughed, and the wind flipped her hair out behind her. The temperature had moderated from last night's bitter mid-teens, but it was still chilly. She was glad. Without a certain chill in the air, it didn't feel like Christmas shopping. Bad enough the decorations in Pittsburgh wouldn't be up yet. But it wasn't bad; it was good. And suddenly she was glad about everything, most of all glad to be alive. And in love.

She had thought about it, the way she loved him. She had had crushes before, and once, in Massachusetts, she had thought she
might
be in love, but about this boy there was simply no question. He troubled her sometimes—his interest in the car seemed almost obsessive—but even her occasional unease played a part in her feelings, which were richer than anything she had ever known. And part of it, she admitted to herself, was of course selfish—she had, in weeks only, begun to make him over . . . to
complete
him.

They cut between the cars, headed for the thirty-day section of the parking lot. Overhead, a USAir jet was coming in on its final approach, the thunder of its engines rolling away in great flat waves of sound. Arnie was saying something, but the plane obliterated his voice altogether after the first few words—something about Thanksgiving dinner—and she turned to look at his face, secretly amused by his silently moving mouth.

Then, quite suddenly, his mouth stopped moving. He stopped walking. His eyes opened wider . . . and then seemed to bulge. His mouth began to
twist,
and the hand holding Leigh's suddenly clamped down ruthlessly, grinding her fingerbones painfully together.

“Arnie—”

The jet-roar was fading, but he seemed not to have heard. His hand clamped tighter. His mouth had slammed shut now, and it was knotted into an awful grimace of surprise and terror. She thought,
He's having a heart attack . . . stroke . . . something.

“Arnie, what's wrong?” she cried. “Arnie . . .
oooww-whoww, that hurts!”

For one unbearable moment the pressure on the hand he had been holding so lightly and lovingly just before increased until it seemed that the bones would actually splinter and break. The high color in his cheeks was gone, and his skin was as leaden as a slate headstone.

He said one word—“Christine!”—and suddenly let go of her. He ran, thumping his leg against the bumper of a Cadillac, spinning away, almost falling, catching himself, and running forward again.

She realized at last it was something about the car—the car, the car, always it was the goddam car—and a bitter anger rose in her that was both total and despairing. For the first time she wondered if it would be possible to love him; if Arnie would allow it.

Her anger was quenched the instant she really looked . . . and saw.

• • •

Arnie ran to what remained of his car, hands out, and stopped so abruptly in front of it that the gesture seemed almost to be a horrified warding-off; the classic movie pose of the hit-and-run victim an instant before the lethal collision.

He stood that way for a moment, as if to stop the car, or the whole world. Then he lowered his arms. His adam's apple lurched up and down twice as he struggled to swallow something back—a moan, a cry—and then his throat seemed to lock solid, every muscle standing out, each cord standing out, even the blood-vessels standing out in perfect relief. It was the throat of a man trying to lift a piano.

Leigh walked slowly toward him. Her hand still throbbed, and tomorrow it would be swollen and virtually useless, but for now she had forgotten it. Her heart went out to him and seemed to find him; she felt his sorrow and shared it—or it seemed to her that she did. It was only later that she realized how much Arnie shut her out that day—how much of his suffering he elected to do alone, and how much of his hate he hid away.

“Arnie, who did it?” she asked, her voice breaking with grief for him. No, she had not liked the car, but to see it reduced to this made her understand fully what Arnie's commitment had been, and she could hate it no longer—or so she thought.

Arnie made no answer. He stood looking at Christine, his eyes burning, his head slightly down.

The windshield had been smashed through in two places; handfuls of safety glass fragments were strewn across the slashed seat covers like trumpery diamonds. Half of the front bumper had been pried off and now dragged on the pavement, near a snarl of black wires like octopus tentacles. Three of the four side windows had also been broken. Holes had been punched through the sides of the body at waist-level in ragged, wavering lines. It looked as if some sharp, heavy instrument—maybe the pry-end of a tire iron—had been used. The passenger door hung open, and she saw that all the dashboard glass had been broken. Tufts and wads of stuffing were everywhere. The speedometer needle lay on the driver's side floormat.

Arnie walked slowly around his car, noting all of this. Leigh spoke to him twice. He didn't answer either time. Now the leaden color of his face was broken by two hectic, burning spots of flush riding high up on his cheekbones. He picked up the octopus-thing that had been lying on the pavement and she saw it was a distributor cap—her father had pointed that out to her once when he had been tinkering with their car.

He looked at it for a moment, as if examining an exotic zoological specimen, and then threw it down. Broken glass gritted under their heels. She spoke to him again. He didn't answer, and now, as well as a terrible pity for him, she began to feel afraid, too. She told Dennis Guilder later that it seemed—at least at the time—perfectly possible that he might have lost his mind.

He booted a piece of chrome trim out of his way. It struck the cyclone fence at the back of the lot with a little tinkling sound. The taillights had been smashed, more trumpery gems, this time rubies, this time on the pavement instead of the seat.

“Arnie—” she tried again.

He stopped. He was looking in through the hole in the driver's side window. A terrible low sound began to come from his chest, a jungle sound. She looked over his shoulder, saw, and suddenly felt a crazy need to laugh and scream and faint all at the same time. On the dashboard . . . she hadn't noticed at first; in the midst of the general destruction she hadn't noticed what was on the dashboard. And she wondered, with vomit suddenly rising in her throat, who could be so low, so completely low, as to do such a thing, to . . .

“Shitters!” Arnie cried, and his voice was not his own. It was high and shrill and cracked with fury.

Leigh turned around and threw up, holding blindly onto the car next to Christine, seeing small white dots in front of her eyes that expanded like puffed rice. Dimly she thought of the county fair—every year they'd haul an old junk car up onto a plank platform and lean a sledgehammer against it and you got three swings for a quarter. The idea was to demolish the car. But not.. . not to . . .

“You goddam
shitters!”
Arnie screamed. “I'll get you! I'll get you if it's the last thing I do! If it's the last motherfucking thing
I ever
do!”

Leigh threw up again and for one terrible moment found herself wishing that she had never ever met Arnie Cunningham.