Christine (35 page)

His mother, father, and sister had come over to visit for an hour in the morning, and for the first time he had sensed in Ellie an anxiousness to be gone. They had been invited over to the Callisons' for a light Thanksgiving brunch, and Lou Callison, one of the three Callison boys, was fourteen and "cute". Her racked-up brother had become boring. They hadn't discovered a rare and tragic form of cancer breeding in his bones. He wasn't going to be paralysed for the rest of his life. There was no movie-of-the-week in him.

They had called him from the Callisons' around twelve-thirty and his father sounded a bit drunk—Dennis guessed he was maybe on his second bloody Mary and was maybe getting some disapproving looks from Mom. Dennis himself had just been finishing up his dietician-approved bluecarded Thanksgiving dinner—the only such dinner he had ever been able to finish in fifteen minutes—and he did a good job of sounding cheerful, not wanting to spoil their good time. Ellie came on the wire briefly, sounding giggly and rather screamy. Maybe it was talking to Ellie that had tired him out enough to need a nap.

He had fallen asleep (and had his unsettling dream) around two o'clock. The hospital was unusually quiet today, running on a skeleton staff. The usual babble of TVs and transistor radios from the other rooms was muted. The candy-striper who took his tray smiled brightly and said I she hoped he had enjoyed his "special dinner." Dennis assured her that he had. After all, it was Thanksgiving for her, too.

And so he dreamed, and the dream broke up and became a darker sleep, and when he woke up it was nearly five o'clock and Arnie Cunningham was sitting in the hard plastic contour chair where his girl had sat only the day before.

Dennis was not at all surprised to see him there; he simply assumed that it was a new dream.

"Hi, Arnie," he said. "How's it hanging?"

"Hanging good," Arnie said, "but you look like you're still asleep, Dennis. Want some head-noogies? That'll wake you up."

There was a brown bag on his lap, and Dennis's sleepy mind thought:
Got his lunch after all. Maybe Repperton didn't squash it as bad as we thought.
He tried to sit up in the bed, hurt his back, and used the control panel to get into what was almost a sitting position. The motor whined. "Jesus, it's really you!"

"Were you expecting Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster?" Arnie asked amiably.

"I was sleeping. I guess I thought I still was." Dennis rubbed his forehead hard, as if to get rid of the steep behind it. "Happy Thanksgiving, Arnie."

"You bet," Arnie said. "Same to you. Did they feed you turkey with all the trimmings?"

Dennis laughed. "I got something that looked like those play-dinners that came with Ellie's Happy-Time Cafeteria when she was about seven. Remember?"

Arnie put his cupped hands to his mouth and made ralphing noises. "I remember. What a gross-out."

"I'm really glad you came," Dennis said, and for a moment he was perilously close to tears. Maybe he hadn't realized just how depressed he had been, He redoubled his determination to be home by Christmas. If he was here on Christmas Day, he'd probably commit suicide.

"Your folks didn't come?"

"Sure they did," Dennis said, "and they'll be back again tonight—Mom and Dad will be, anyway—but it's not the same. You know."

"Yeah. Well, I brought some stuff. Told the lady downstairs I had your bathrobe." Arnie giggled a little.

"What
is
that?" Dennis asked, nodding at the bag. It wasn't just a lunchbag, he saw; it was a shopping bag.

"Aw, I raided the fridge after we et the bird," Arnie said. "My mom and dad went around visiting their friends from the University—they do that every year on Thanksgiving afternoon. They won't even be back until around eight."

As he talked, he took things out of the bag. Dennis watched, amazed. Two pewter candle-holders. Two candles. Arnie slammed the candles into the holders, lit them with a matchbook advertising Darnell's Garage, and turned off the overhead light. Then four sandwiches, clumsily wrapped in waxed paper.

"The way I recall it," Arnie said, "you always said that scarfing up a couple of turkey sandwiches around eleven-thirty Thursday night was better than Thanksgiving dinner, anyway. Because the pressure was off."

"Yeah," Dennis said. "Sandwiches in front of the TV, Carson or some old movie. But, honest to God, Arnie, you didn't have to—"

"Ali, shit, I haven't even been around to see you in almost three weeks. Good thing for me you were sleeping when I came in or you probably would have shot me." He tapped Dennis's two sandwiches. "Your favorite, I think. White meat and mayo on Wonder Bread."

Dennis got giggling at that, then laughing, then roaring. Arnie could see it hurt his back, but he couldn't stop. Wonder Bread had been one of Arnie and Dennis's great common secrets as children. Both of their mothers had been very serious about the subject of bread; Regina bought Diet-Thin loaves, with an occasional side-trip into the Land of Stone-Ground Rye. Dennis's mother favored Roman Meal and pumpernickel loaves. Arnie and Dennis ate what was given them—but both were secret Wonder Bread freaks, and more than one occasion they had pooled their money and instead of buying sweets they had gotten a loaf of Wonder and a jar of French's Mustard. They would then slink out into Arnie's garage (or Dennis's tree-house, sadly demolished in a windstorm almost nine years before) and gobble mustard sandwiches and read Richie Rich comic books until the whole loaf was gone.

Arnie joined him in his laughter, and for Dennis that was the best part of Thanksgiving.

Dennis had been between room-mates for almost ten days, and so had the semi-private room to himself. Arnie closed the door and produced a six-pack of Busch beer from the brown bag.

"Wonders will never cease," Dennis said, and had to laugh again at the unintentional pun,

"No," Arnie said, "I don't think they ever will." He toasted

Dennis over the candles with a bottle of beer. "
Prosit
."

"Live for ever," Dennis responded. They drank.

After they had finished the thick turkey sandwiches, Arnie produced two plastic Tupperware pie-wedges from his apparently bottomless bag and prised off the lids. Two pieces of home-made apple pie rested within.

"No, man, I can't," Dennis said. "I'll bust."

"Eat," Arnie commanded.

"I really can't," Dennis said, taking the Tupperware container and a fresh plastic fork. He finished the slice of pie in four huge bites and then belched. He upended the remainder of his second beer and belched again. "In Portugal, that's a compliment to the cook," he said. His head was buzzing pleasantly from the beer.

"Whatever you say," Arnie responded with a grin. He got up, turned on the overhead fluorescent, and snuffed the candles. Outside a steady rain had begun to beat against the windows; it looked and sounded cold. And for Dennis, some of the warm spirit of friendship and real Thanksgiving seemed to go out with the candles.

"I'm gonna hate you tomorrow," Dennis said. "I'll probably have to sit on that john in there for an hour. And it hurts my back."

"You remember the time Elaine got the farts?" Arnie asked, and they both laughed. "We teased her until your mother gave us holy old hell."

"They didn't smell, but they sure were loud," Dennis said, smiling.

"Like gunshots," Arnie agreed, and they both laughed a little—but it was a sad sort of laughter, if there is such a thing. A lot of water under the bridge. The thought that Ellie's attack of the farts had happened seven years ago was somehow more unsettling than it was amusing. There was a breath of mortality in the realization that seven years could steal past with such smooth and unobtrusive ease.

Conversation lapsed a little, both of them lost in their own thoughts.

At last Dennis said, "Leigh came by yesterday. Told me, about Christine. I'm sorry, man. Bummer."

Arnie looked up, and his expression of thoughtful melancholy was lost in a cheerful smile that Dennis didn't really believe.

"Yeah," he said. "It was crude. But I went way overboard about it."

"Anyone would," Dennis said, aware that he had become suddenly watchful, hating it but unable to help it. The friendship part was over; it had been here, warming the room and filling it, and now it had simply slipped away like the ephemeral, delicate thing it was. Now they were just dancing. Arnie's cheerful eyes were also opaque and—he would have sworn to it—watchful.

"Sure. I gave my mother a hard time. Leigh too, I guess. It was just the shock of seeing all that work all that… work down the tubes." He shook his head. "Bad news."

"Are you going to be able to do anything with it?" Arnie brightened immediately—really brightened this time, Dennis felt. "Sure! I already have. You wouldn't believe it, Dennis, if you'd seen the way it looked in that parking lot. They made them tough in those days, not like now when all the stuff that looks like metal is really just shiny plastic. That car is nothing but a damn tank. The glass was the worst part. And the tires, of course. They slashed the tires."

"What about the engine?"

"Never got at it," Arnie said promptly, and that was the first lie. They had been at it, all right. When Arnie and Leigh had gotten to Christine that afternoon, the distributor cap had been lying on the pavement. Leigh had recognized it and had told Dennis about it. What else had they done under the hood, Dennis wondered. The radiator? If someone was going to use a tire iron to punch holes in the bodywork, might they not be apt to use the same tool to spring the radiator in a few places? What about the plugs? The voltage regulator? The carburetor?

Arnie, why are you lying to me?

"So what are you doing with it now?" Dennis asked.

"Spending money on it, what else?" Arnie said, and laughed his almost-genuine laugh. Dennis might even have accepted it as genuine if he hadn't heard the real article once or twice over the Thanksgiving supper Arnie had brought. "New tires, new glass. Got some bodywork to do, and then it will be as good as new."

As good as new
. But Leigh had said that they had found something that was little more than a smashed hulk, a carny three-swings-for-a-quarter derelict.

Why are you lying?

For a cold moment he found himself wondering if maybe Arnie hadn't gone a little crazy—but no, that wasn't the impression he gave. The feeling Dennis got from him was one of… furtiveness. Craftiness. Then, for the first time, the crazy thought came to him, the thought that maybe Arnie was only half-lying, trying to lay a groundwork of plausibility for… for what? A case of spontaneous regeneration? That was pretty crazy, wasn't it?

Wasn't it?

It was indeed, Dennis thought, unless you had happened to see a mass of cracks in a windscreen seem to
shrink
between one viewing and the next.

Just a trick of the light. That's what you thought then, and you were right.

But a trick of the light didn't explain the haphazard way Arnie had gone about rebuilding Christine, the hopscotch of old and new parts. It didn't explain that weird feeling Dennis had gotten sitting behind the wheel of Christine in LeBay's garage, or the sense, after the new tire had been put on en route to Darnell's, that he was looking at an old-car picture with a new-car picture directly underlying it, and that a hole had been cut out of the old-car picture at the spot where one of the old-car tires had been.

And nothing explained Arnie's lie now… or the narrow, thoughtful way he was watching Dennis to see if his lie was going to be accepted. So he smiled… a big, easy, relieved grin. "Well, that's great," he said.

Arnie's narrow, evaluating expression held for a moment longer; then he smiled an aw-shucks grin and shrugged. "Luck," he said. "When I think of the things they could have done sugar in the gas tank, molasses in the carb—they were stupid. Lucky for me."

"Repperton and his merry crew?" Dennis asked quietly.

The suspicious look, so dark and unlike Arnie, appeared again and then sank from sight. Arnie looked grim now. Grim and morose. He seemed to speak, then sighed instead. "Yeah," he said. "Who else?"

"But you didn't report it."

"My dad did."

"That's what Leigh said."

"What else did she tell you?" Arnie asked sharply.

"Nothing, and I didn't ask," Dennis said, holding his hand out. "Your business, Arnie. Peace."

"Sure." He laughed a little and then passed a hand over his face. "I'm still not over it. Fuck. I don't think I'm ever going to be over it, Dennis. Coming into that parking lot with Leigh, feeling like I was on top of the world, and seeing—"

"Won't they just do it again if you fix her up again?" Arnie's face went dead-cold, set. "They won't do it again," he said. His gray eyes were like March ice, and Dennis found himself suddenly very glad he wasn't Buddy Repperton.

"What do you mean?"

"I'll be parking it at home, that's what I mean," he said, and once more his face broke into that large, cheerful, unnatural grin. "What did you think I meant?"

"Nothing," Dennis said. The image of ice remained. Now it was a feeling of thin ice, creaking uneasily under his feet. Beneath that, black, cold water. "But I don't know, Arnie. You seem awful sure that Buddy wants to let this go."

"I'm hoping he'll see it as a standoff," Arnie said quietly. "We got him expelled from school

"He got
himself
expelled!" Dennis said hotly. "He pulled a knife—hell, it wasn't even a knife, it was a goddam pigsticker!"

I'm just telling it the way he'll see it," Arnie said, then held out his hand and laughed. "Peace."

"Yeah, okay."

"We got him expelled—or more accurately, I did—and he and his buddies beat hell out of Christine. Evens. The end."

"Yeah, if he sees it that way."

"I think he will," Arnie said. "The cops questioned him and Moochie Welch and Richie Trelawney. Scared them. And almost got Sandy Galton to confess, I guess." Arnie's lip curled. "Fucking crybaby."

This was so unlike Arnie—the old Arnie—that Dennis sat up in bed without thinking and then winced at the pain in his back and lay down again quickly. "Jesus, man, you sound like you want him to stonewall it!"