Christine (2 page)

"Arnie, you're having me on, aren't you?" I said. "It's sunstroke, right? Tell me it's sunstroke. I'll take you home and put you under the frigging air conditioner and we'll forget all about this, okay?" But I said it without much hope. He knew how to joke, but there was no joke on his face then. Instead, there was a kind of goofy madness I didn't like much.

He didn't even bother to reply. A hot, stuffy billow of air, redolent of age, oil, and advanced decomposition, puffed out of the open door. Arnie didn't seem to notice that, either. He got in and sat down on the ripped and faded back seat. Once, twenty years before, it had been red. Now it was a faded wash pink.

I reached in and pulled up a little puff of stuffing, looked at it, and blew it away. "Looks like the Russian army marched over it on their way to Berlin," I said.

He finally noticed I was still there. "Yeah… yeah. But she could be fixed up. She could… she could be tough. A moving unit, Dennis. A beauty. A real—"

"Here! Here! What you two kids up to?"

It was an old guy who looked as if he was enjoying—more or less—his seventieth summer. Probably less. This particular dude struck me as the sort of man who enjoyed very little. His hair was long and scraggy, what little there was left of it. He had a good case of psoriasis going on the bald part of his skull.

He was wearing green old man's pants and low-topped Keds. No shirt; instead there was something cinched around his waist that looked like a lady's corset. When he got closer I saw it was a back brace. From the look of it I would say, just offhand, that he had changed it last somewhere around the time Lyndon Johnson died.

"What you kids up to?" His voice was shrill and strident.

"Sir, is this your car?" Arnie asked him. Not much question that it was. The Plymouth was parked on the lawn of the postwar tract house from which the old man had issued. The lawn was horrible, but it looked positively great with that Plymouth in the foreground for perspective.

"What if it is?" the old guy demanded.

"I"—Arnie had to swallow—"I want to buy it."

The old dude's eyes gleamed. The angry took on his face was replaced by a furtive gleam in the eye and a certain hungry sneer around the lips. Then a large resplendent shit-eating grin appeared. That was the moment, I think then, just at that moment—when I felt something cold and blue inside me. There was a moment—just then—when I felt like slugging Arnie and dragging him away. Something came into the old man's eyes. Not just the gleam; it was something
behind
the gleam.

"Well, you should have said so," the old guy told Arnie. He stuck out his hand and Arnie took it. "LeBay's the name. Roland D. LeBay. US Army, retired."

"Arnie Cunningham."

The old sport pumped his hand and sort of waved at me. I was out of the play; he had his sucker. Arnie might as well have handed LeBay his wallet.

"How much?" Arnie asked. And then he plunged ahead. "Whatever you want for her, it's not enough."

I groaned inside instead of sighing. His checkbook had just joined his wallet.

For a moment LeBay's grin faltered a little, and his eyes narrowed down suspiciously. I think he was evaluating the possibility that he was being put on. He studied Arnie's longing face for signs of guile, and then asked the murderously perfect question:

"Son, have you ever owned a car before?"

"He owns a Mustang Mach II," I said quickly. "His folks bought it for him. It's got a Hurst shifter, a supercharger, and it can boil the road in first gear. It—"

"No," Arnie said quietly. "I just got my driver's license this spring."

LeBay tipped me a brief but crafty gaze and then swung his full attention back to his prime target. He put both hands in the small of his back and stretched. I caught a sour whiff of sweat.

"Got a back problem in the Army," he said. "Full disability. Doctors could never put it right. Anyone ever asks you what's wrong with the world, boys, you tell 'em it's three things: doctors, commies, and nigger radicals. Of the three commies is the worst, closely followed by doctors. And if they want to know who told you, tell 'em Roland D. LeBay. Yessir."

He touched the old, scuffed hood of the Plymouth with a kind of bemused love.

"This here is the best car I ever owned. Bought her in September 1957. Back then, that's when you got your new model year, in September. All summer long they'd show you pictures of cars under hoods and cars under tarps until you were fair dyin t'know what they looked like underneath. Not like now." His voice dripped contempt for the debased times he had lived to see. "Brand-new, she was. Had the smell of a brand-new car, and that's about the finest smell in the world."

He considered.

"Except maybe for pussy."

I looked at Arnie, nibbling the insides of my cheeks madly to keep from braying laughter all over everything. Arnie looked back at me, astounded. The old man appeared to notice neither of us; he was off on his own planet.

"I was in khaki for thirty-four years," LeBay told us, still touching the hood of the car. "Went in at sixteen in 1923. I et dust in Texas and seen crabs as big as lobsters in some of them Nogales whoredens. I saw men with their guts comin out of their ears during Big Two. In France I saw that. Their guts was comin out their
ears.
You believe that, son?"

"Yessir," Arnie said. I don't think he'd heard a word LeBay said. He was shifting from foot to foot as if he had to go to the bathroom bad. "About the car, though—"

"You go to the University?" LeBay barked suddenly. "Up there at Horlicks?"

"Nosir, I go to Libertyville High."

"Good," LeBay said grimly. "Steer clear of colleges. They're full of niggerlovers that want to give away the Panama Canal. 'Think-tanks', they call 'em. 'Assholetanks', say I."

He gazed fondly at the car sitting on its flat tire, its paintwork mellowing rustily in the late afternoon sunlight.

"Hurt my back in the spring of '57," he said. "Army was going to rack and ruin even then. I got out just in time. I came on back to Libertyville. Looked over the rolling iron. I took my time. Then I walked into Norman Cobb's Plymouth dealership—where the bowling alley is now on outer Main Street—and I ordered this here car. I said you get it in red and white, next year's model. Red as a fire-engine on the inside. And they did. When I got her, she had a total of six miles on the odometer. Yessir."

He spat.

I glanced over Arnie's shoulder at the odometer. The glass was cloudy, but I could read the damage all the same: 97,432. And six-tenths. Jesus wept.

"If you love the car so much, why are you selling it?" I asked.

He turned a milky, rather frightening gaze on me. "Are you cracking wise on me, son?"

I didn't answer, but I didn't drop my gaze either.

After a few moments of eye-to-eye dueling (which Arnie totally ignored; he was running a slow and loving hand over one of the back fins), he said, "Can't drive anymore. Back's gotten too bad. Eyes are going the same way."

Suddenly I got it—or thought I did. If he had given us the correct dates, he was seventy-one. And at seventy, this state makes you start taking compulsory eye exams every year before they'll renew your driver's license. LeBay had either failed his eye exam or was afraid of failing. Either way, it came to the same thing. Rather than submit to that indignity, he had put the Plymouth up. And after that, the, car had gotten old fast.

"How much do you want for it?" Arnie asked again. Oh he just couldn't wait to be slaughtered.

LeBay turned his face up to the sky, appearing to consider it for rain. Then he looked down at Arnie again and gave him a large, kindly smile that was far too much like the previous shit-eating grin for me.

"I've been asking three hundred," he said. "But you seem a likely enough lad. I'll make it two-fifty for you."

"Oh my
Christ
," I said.

But he knew who his sucker was, and he knew exactly how to drive the wedge in between us. In the words of my grandfather, he hadn't fallen off a haytruck yesterday.

"Okay," he said brusquely. "If that's how you want it. I got my four-thirty story to watch.
Edge of Night.
Never miss it if I can help it. Nice chinning with you boys. So long."

Arnie threw me such a smoking look of pain and anger that I backed off a step. He went after the old man and took his elbow. They talked. I couldn't hear it all, but I could see more than enough. The old man's pride was wounded. Arnie was earnest and apologetic. The old man just hoped Arnie understood that he couldn't stand to see the car that had brought him through safe to his golden years insulted. Arnie agreed. Little by little, the old man allowed himself to be led back. And again I felt something consciously dreadful about him it was as if a cold November wind could think. I can't, put it any better than that.

"If he says one more word, I wash my hands of the whole thing," LeBay said, and cocked a horny, calloused thumb at me.

"He won't, he won't," Arnie said hastily. "Three hundred, did you say?"

"Yes, I believe that was—"

"Two-fifty was the quoted price," I said loudly.

Arnie looked stricken, afraid the old man would walk away again, but LeBay was taking no chances. The fish was almost out of the pond now

"Two-fifty would do it, I guess," LeBay allowed. He glanced my way again, and I saw that we had an understanding—he didn't like me and I didn't like him.

To my ever-increasing horror, Arnie pulled his wallet out and began thumbing through it. There was silence among the three of us. LeBay looked on. I looked away at a little kid who was trying to kill himself on a puke-green skateboard. Somewhere a dog barked. Two girls who looked like eighth- or ninth-graders went past, giggling and holding clutches of library books to their blooming chests. I had only one hope left for getting Arnie out of this; it was the day before payday. Given time, even twenty-four hours, this wild fever might pass. Arnie was beginning to remind me of Toad, of Toad Hall.

When I looked back, Arnie and LeBay were looking at two fives and six ones—all that had been in his wallet, apparently.

"How about a check?" Arnie asked.

LeBay offered Arnie a dry smile and said nothing

"It's a good check," Arnie protested. It would be, too. We had been working all summer for Carson Brothers on the I-376 extension, the one which natives of the Pittsburgh area firmly believe will never be really finished. Arnie sometimes declared that Penn-DOT had begun taking bids on the I-376 work shortly after the Civil War ended. Not that either of us had any right to complain; a lot of kids were either working for slave wages that summer or not working at all. We were making good money, even clocking some overtime. Brad Jeffries, the job foreman, had been frankly dubious about taking a runt like Arnie on, but had finally allowed that he could use a flagman; the girl he had been planning to hire had gotten herself pregnant and had run off to get married. So Arnie had started off flagging in June but had gotten into the harder work little by little, running mostly on guts and determination. It was the first real job he'd ever had, and he didn't want to screw it up. Brad was reasonably impressed, and the summer sun had even helped Arnie's erupting complexion a little. Maybe it was the ultraviolet.

"I'm sure it's a good check, son," LeBay said, "but I gotta make a cash deal. You understand."

I didn't know if Arnie understood, but I did. It would be too easy to stop payment on a local check if this rustbucket Plymouth threw a rod or blew a piston on the way home.

"You can call the bank," Arnie said, starting to sound desperate.

"Nope," LeBay said, scratching his armpit above the scabrous brace. "It's going on five-thirty. Bank's long since closed."

"A deposit, then," Arnie said, and held out the sixteen dollars. He looked positively wild. It may be that you're having-trouble believing a kid who was almost old enough to vote could have gotten himself so worked up over an anonymous old clunk in the space of fifteen minutes. I was having some trouble believing it myself. Only Roland D. LeBay seemed not to be having trouble with it, and I supposed it was because at his age he had seen everything. It was only later that I came to believe that his odd sureness might come from other sources. Either way, if any milk of human kindness had ever run in his veins, it had curdled to sour cream long ago.

"I'd have to have at least ten per cent down," LeBay said. The fish was out of the water; in a moment it would be netted. "If I had ten per cent, I'd hold her for twenty-four hours."

"Dennis," Arnie said. "Can you loan me nine bucks until tomorrow?"

I had twelve in my own wallet, and no particular place to go. Day after day of spreading sand and digging trenches for culverts had done wonders when it came to getting ready for football practice, but I had no social life at all. Lately I hadn't even been assaulting the ramparts of my cheerleader girlfriend's body in the style to which she had become accustomed. I was rich but lonely.

"Come on over here and let's see," I said.

LeBay's brow darkened, but he could see he was stuck with my input, like it or not. His frizzy white hair blew back and forth in the mild breeze. He kept one hand possessively on the Plymouth's hood.

Arnie and I walked back toward where my car, a '75 Duster, was parked at the curb. I put an arm around Arnie's shoulders. For some reason I remembered the two of us up in his room on a rainy autumn day when we were both no more than six years old—cartoons flickering on an ancient black-and-white TV as we colored with old Crayolas from a dented coffee can. The image made me feel sad and a little scared. I have days, you know, when it seems to me that six is an optimum age, and that's why it only lasts about 7.2 seconds in real time.

"Have you got it, Dennis? I'll get it back to you tomorrow afternoon."

"Yeah, I've got it, " I said. "But what in God's name are you doing, Arnie? That old fart has got total disability, for Christ's sake. He doesn't need the money and you're not a charitable institution."

"I don't get it. What are you talking about?"