Christine (38 page)

Arnie felt hysterical laughter bubbling up inside him. Leigh had almost choked to death on a hamburger, and her mother was afraid Arnie had tried to rape her.

“Mrs. Cabot, I have to talk to her.”

“I'm afraid not.”

He tried to think of something else to say, some way to get past the dragon at the gate. He felt a little like a Fuller Brush salesman trying to get in to see the lady of the house. His tongue wouldn't move. He would have made a lousy salesman. There was going to be that hard
click
and then smooth silence again.

Then he heard the telephone change hands. Mrs. Cabot said something in sharp protest, and Leigh said something back; it was too muffled for him to catch. Then Leigh's voice said, “Arnie?”

“Hi,” he said. “Leigh, I just wanted to call and tell you how sorry I was about—”

“Yes,” Leigh said. “I know you were, and I accept your apology, Arnie. But I won't—I can't go out with you anymore. Unless things change.”

“Ask me something easy,” he whispered.

“That's all I—” Her voice sharpened, moved slightly away from the telephone. “Mom, please stop hanging over me!” Her mother said something that sounded disgruntled, there was a pause, and then Leigh's voice again, low. “That's all I can say, Arnie. I know how crazy it sounds, but I still think your car tried to kill me the other night. I don't know how something like that could be, but no matter how I work it over in my mind, it comes out seeming that that was how it was. I
know
that's how it was. It's got you, doesn't it?”

“Leigh, if you'll pardon my French, that's pretty fucking stupid. It's a
car!
Can you spell that? C-A-R,
car!
There's nothing—”

“Yes,” she said, and now her voice was wavering toward tears. “It's got you,
she's
got you, and I guess nobody can get you free except you.”

His back suddenly awoke and began to throb, sending pain out in a sickish radiation that seemed to echo and amplify in his head.

“Isn't that the truth of it, Arnie?”

He didn't, couldn't, answer.

“Get rid of it,” Leigh said. “Please. I read about that Repperton boy in the paper this morning, and—”

“What's that got to do with anything?” Arnie croaked. And for the second time: “That was an
accident.”

“I don't know what it was. Maybe I don't
want
to know. But it isn't us I'm worried about anymore. It's
you,
Arnie. I'm scared for
you.
You ought to—no, you
have
to get rid of it.”

Arnie whispered, “Just say you won't dump me, Leigh. Okay?”

Now she was even closer to crying—or perhaps she was already doing it. “Promise me, Arnie. You have to promise me and then you have to do it. Then we . . . we can see. Promise me you'll get rid of that car. It's all I want from you, nothing else.”

He closed his eyes and saw Leigh walking home from school. And a block down, idling at the curb, was Christine. Waiting for her.

He opened his eyes quickly, as if he had seen a fiend in a dark room.

“I can't do that,” he said.

“Then we don't have much to talk about, do we?”

“Yes! Yes, we do. We—”

“No. Goodbye, Arnie. I'll see you in school.”

“Leigh, wait!”

Click.
And dead smooth silence.

A moment of nearly total rage came over him. He had a sudden deadly impulse to swing the black phone receiver around and around his head like an Argentinian
bolas,
shattering the glass in this goddam torture-chamber of a telephone booth. They had run out on him, all of them. Rats deserting a sinking ship.

You have to be ready to help yourself before anyone else can help you.

Fuck that bullshit! They were rats deserting a sinking ship. Not one of them, from that shitter Slawson with his thick horn-rimmed glasses and his weird poached-egg eyes to his rotten shitting old man who was so fucking pussywhipped that he ought to just give that cunt he was married to a razor and invite her to cut it off to that cheap bitch in her fancy house with her legs crossed probably she
'd been having her period and that's why she choked on the goddam hamburger and those shitters with their fancy goddam cars and the trunks full of golf-clubs those goddam officers I'd like to bend them over this here lathe I'd play some golf with
them
I could find the right hole to put those little white balls in you bet your ass but when I get out of here no one
's going to tell me what to do it's gonna be my way my way mine mine mine mine mine MINE—

Arnie came back to himself suddenly, scared and wide-eyed, breathing hard. What had been happening to him? He had seemed like someone else there for a moment, someone on a crazed rant against humanity in general—

Not just someone. It was LeBay.

No! That's not true at all!

Leigh's voice:
Isn't that the truth of it, Arnie?

Suddenly something very like a vision rose in his tired, confused mind. He was hearing a minister's voice:
Arnold, do you take this woman to be your loving—

But it wasn't a church; it was a used-car lot with bright multicolored plastic pennants fluttering in a stiff breeze. Camp chairs had been set up. It was Will Darnell's lot, and Will was standing beside him in the best man's position. There was no girl beside him. Christine was parked beside him, shining in a spring sun, even her whitewalls seeming to glow.

His father's voice:
Is there something going on?

The preacher's voice:
Who giveth this woman to this man?

Roland D. LeBay rose from one of the camp chairs like the prow of a skeletal ghost-ship from Hades. He was grinning—and for the first time Arnie saw who had been sitting around him: Buddy Repperton, Richie Trelawney, Moochie Welch. Richie Trelawney was black and charred, most of his hair burned off. Blood had poured down Buddy Repperton's chin and had caked his shirt like hideous vomit. But Moochie Welch was the worst; Moochie Welch had been ripped open like a laundry bag. They were smiling. All of them were smiling.

I do,
Roland D. LeBay croaked. He grinned, and a tongue slimed with graveyard mould lolled from the stinking hole of his mouth.
I give her, and he's got the receipt to prove it. She's all his. The bitch is the ace of spades . . . and she's all his.

• • •

Arnie became aware that he was moaning in the telephone booth, clutching the receiver against his chest. With a tremendous effort he pulled himself all the way out of the daze—vision, whatever it had been—and got hold of himself.

This time when he reached for the change on the ledge, he spilled half of it onto the floor. He plugged a dime into the slot and scrabbled through the telephone book until he found the hospital number. Dennis. Dennis would be there, Dennis always had been. Dennis wouldn't let him down. Dennis would help.

The switchboard girl answered, and Arnie said, “Room Two-forty, please.”

The connection was made. The phone began to ring. It rang . . . and rang . . . and rang. Just as he was about to give up, a brisk female voice said, “Second floor, C Wing, who were you trying to reach?”

“Guilder,” Arnie said. “Dennis Guilder.”

“Mr. Guilder's in Physical Therapy right now,” the female voice said. “You could reach him at eight o'clock.”

Arnie thought of telling her it was important—very important—but suddenly he was overwhelmed with a need to get out of the phone booth. Claustrophobia was like a giant's hand pushing down on his chest. He could smell his own sweat. The smell was sour, bitter.

“Sir?”

“Yeah, okay, I'll call back,” Arnie said. He broke the connection and nearly burst out of the booth, leaving his change scattered on the ledge and the floor. A few people turned around to look at him, mildly interested, and then turned back to their food again.

“Pizza's ready,” the counterman said.

Arnie glanced up at the clock and saw he had been in the booth for almost twenty minutes. There was sweat all over his face. His armpits felt like a jungle. His legs were trembling—the muscles in his thighs felt as if they might simply give out and spill him onto the floor.

He paid for the pizza, nearly dropping his wallet as he tucked his three dollars in change back in.

“You okay?” the counterman asked. “You look a little white around the gills.”

“I'm fine,” Arnie said. Now he felt as if he might vomit. He snatched the pizza in its white box with the word
GINO'S
emblazoned across the top and fled into the cold sharp clarity of the night. The last of the clouds had blown away, and the stars twinkled like chipped diamonds. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking first at the stars and then at Christine, parked across the street, waiting faithfully.

She would never argue or complain, Arnie thought. She would never demand. You could enter her anytime and rest on her plush upholstery, rest in her warmth. She would never deny. She—she—

She loved him.

Yes; he sensed that was true. Just as he sometimes sensed that LeBay would not have sold her to anyone else, not for two hundred and fifty, not for two thousand. She had been sitting there waiting for the right buyer. One who would . . .

One who would love her for herself alone,
that voice inside whispered.

Yes. That was it; that was exactly it.

Arnie stood there with his pizza forgotten in his hands, white steam rising lazily from the grease-spotted box. He looked at Christine, and such a confusing whirl of emotions ran through him that there might have been a cyclone in his body, rearranging everything it did not simply destroy. Oh, he loved and loathed her, he hated her and cherished her, he needed her and needed to run from her, she was his and he was hers and

(I now pronounce you man and wife joined and sealed from this day forth for ever and ever, until death do you part)

But worst of all was the horror, the terrible numbing horror, the realization that . . . that . . .

(how did you hurt your back that night, Arnie? after Repperton—the late Clarence “Buddy” Repperton—and his buddies trashed her? how did you hurt your back so that now you have to wear this stinking brace all the time? how did you hurt your back?)

The answer rose—and Arnie began to run, trying to beat the realization, to get to Christine before he saw the whole thing plain and went mad.

He ran for Christine, running his tangled emotions and some terrible dawning realization a foot race; he ran to her the way a hype runs for his works when the shakes and the jitters get so bad he can no longer think of anything but relief; he ran the way that the damned run to their appointed doom; he ran as a bridegroom runs to the place where his bride stands waiting.

He ran because inside Christine none of these things mattered—not his mother, father, Leigh, Dennis, or what he had done to his back that night when everyone was gone, that night after he had taken his almost totally destroyed Plymouth from the airport and back to Darnell's, and after the place was empty he had put Christine's transmission in neutral and pushed her, pushed her until she began to roll on her flat tires, pushed her until she was out the door and he could hear the wind of November keening sharply around the wrecks and the abandoned hulks with their stellated glass and their ruptured gas tanks; he had pushed her until the sweat ran off him in rivers and his heart thudded like a runaway horse in his chest and his back cried out for mercy; he had pushed her, his body pumping as if in some hellish consummation; he had pushed her, and inside the odometer ran slowly backward, and some fifty feet beyond the door his back began to really throb, and he kept pushing, and then his back began to scream in protest, and he kept pushing, muscling it along on the flat, slashed tires, his hands going numb, his back screaming, screaming, screaming. And then—

He reached Christine and flung himself inside, shuddering and panting. His pizza fell on the floor. He picked it up and set it on the seat, feeling calm slowly wash through him like a soothing balm. He touched the steering wheel, let his hands slip down it, tracing its delicious curve. He took one glove off and felt in his pocket for his keys. For LeBay's keys.

He could still remember what had happened that night, but it did not seem horrible now; now, sitting behind Christine's steering wheel, it seemed rather wonderful.

It had been a miracle.

He remembered how it had suddenly become easier to push the car because the tires were healing themselves magically, kneading themselves together without a scar and then inflating. The broken glass had begun to reassemble from nowhere, knitting itself upward with small, scratchy, crystalline sounds. The dents began to pop back out.

He simply pushed her until she was right enough to run, and then he had driven her, cruising between the rows until the odometer ran back past what Repperton and his friends had done. And then Christine was okay.

What could be so horrible about that?

“Nothing,” a voice said.

He looked around. Roland D. LeBay was sitting on the passenger side of the car, wearing a black double-breasted suit, a white shirt, a blue tie. A row of medals hung askew on one lapel of his suit-coat—it was the outfit he had been buried in, Arnie knew that even though he had never actually seen it. Only LeBay looked younger and tougher. A man you'd not want to fool with.

“Start her up,” LeBay said. “Get the heater going and let's motorvate.”

“Sure,” Arnie said, and turned the key. Christine pulled out, tires crunching on the packed snow. He had pushed her that night until almost all the damage had been repaired. No, not repaired—
negated.
Negated was the right word for what had happened. And then he had put her back in stall twenty, leaving the rest to do himself.