Christine (66 page)

"There was a boy—I have forgotten his name—a bigger boy who thrashed Rollie three or four times. A bully. He would start on Rollie's clothes and ask him if he'd worn his underpants one month or two this time. And Rollie would fight him and curse him and threaten him and the bully would laugh at him and hold him off with his longer arms and punch him until he was tired or until Rollie's nose was bleeding. And then Rollie would sit there on the corner, smoking a cigarette and crying with blood and snot drying on his face. And if Drew or I came near him, he would beat us to within an inch of our lives.

"That bully's house burned down one night, Dennis. The bully and the bully's father and the bully's little brother were killed. The bully's sister was horribly burned. It was supposed to have been the stove in the kitchen, and maybe it was. But the fire sirens woke me up, and I was still awake when Rollie came up the ivy trellis and into the room I shared with him. There was soot on his forehead, and he smelled of gasoline. He saw me lying there with my eyes open and he said, 'If you tell, Georgie, I'll kill you.' And ever since that night, Dennis, I've tried to tell myself that he meant if I told he had been out, watching the fire. And maybe that was all it was."

My mouth was dry. There seemed to be a lead ball in my stomach. The hairs along the nape of my neck felt like dry quills. "How old was your brother then?" I asked hoarsely.

"Not quite thirteen," LeBay said with terrible false calm. "One winter day about a year later, there was a fight during a hockey game, and a fellow named Randy Throgmorton laid open Rollie's head with his stick. Knocked him senseless. We got him to old Dr Farner—Rollie had come around by then, but he was still groggy—and Farner put a dozen stitches in his scalp. A week later, Randy Throgmorton fell through the ice on Palmer Pond and was drowned. He had been skating in an area clearly marked with THIN ICE signs, apparently."

"Are you saying your brother killed these people? Are you leading up to telling me that LeBay killed his own daughter?"

"Not that he killed her, Dennis—never think that. She choked to death. What I am suggesting is that he may have let her die."

"You said he turned her over—punched her—tried to make her vomit

"That's what Rollie told me at the funeral," George said.

"Then what—"

"Marcia and I talked it over later. Only that once, you understand. Over dinner that night. Rollie told me, "I picked her up by her Buster Browns and tried to whack that sonofabitch out of there, Georgie. But it was stuck down fast." And what Veronica told Marcia was, "Rollie picked her up by her shoes and tried to whack whatever was choking her out of there, but it was stuck down fast." They told exactly the same story, in exactly the same words. And do you know what that made me think of?"

"No."

"It made me think of Rollie climbing in the bedroom window and whispering to me, '
If you tell, Georgie, I'll kill you'
."

"But… why? Why would he—?"

"Later, Veronica wrote Marcia a letter and hinted that Rollie had made no real effort to save their daughter. And that, at the very end, he put her back in the car. So she would be out of the sun, he said. But in her letter, Veronica said she thought Rollie wanted her to die in the car." I didn't want to say it, but I had to.

"Are you suggesting that your brother offered his daughter up as some kind of a human sacrifice?"

There was a long, thinking, dreadful pause.

"Not in any conscious way, no," LeBay said. "Not any more than I am suggesting that he consciously murdered her. If you had known my brother, you would know how ridiculous it is to suspect him of witchcraft or sorcery or trafficking with demons. He believed in nothing beyond his own senses… except, I suppose, for his own will. I am suggesting that he might have had some… some intuition… or that he might have been directed to do what he did.

"My mother said he was a changeling."

"And Veronica?"

"I don't know," he said. "The police verdict was suicide, even though there was no note. It may well have been. But the poor woman had made some friends in town, and I have often wondered if perhaps she had hinted to some of them, as she had to Marcia, that Rita's death was not quite as she and Rollie had reported it. I have wondered if Rollie found out.
If you tell, Georgie, I'll kill you
. There's no proof one way or the other, of course. But I've wondered why she would do it the way she did—and I've wondered how a woman who didn't know the slightest thing about cars would know enough to get the hose and attach it to the exhaust pipe and put it in through the window. I try not to wonder about those things. They keep me awake at night."

I thought about what he had said, and about the things he hadn't said—the things he had left between the lines.
Intuitive
, he had said.
So single-minded in his few simple purposes
, he had said. Suppose Roland LeBay had understood in some way he wouldn't even admit to himself that he was investing his Plymouth with some supernatural power? And suppose he had only been waiting for the right inheritor to come along and now

"Does that answer your questions, Dennis?"

"I think it does," I said slowly.

"What are you going to do?"

"I think you know that."

"Destroy the car?"

"I'm going to try," I said, and then looked over at my crutches, leaning against the wall. My goddam crutches.

"You may destroy your friend, as well."

"I may save him," I said.

Quietly, George LeBay said, " I wonder if that is still possible."

47 THE BETRAYAL

There was blood and glass all over,

And there was nobody there but me.

As the rain tumbled down, hard and cold,

I seen a young man lyin by the side

of the road,

He cried, "Mister, won't you

help me, please?"

— Bruce Springsteen

I kissed her.

Her arms slipped around my neck. One of her cool hands pressed lightly against the back of my head. There was no more question for me about what was going on; and when she pulled slightly away from me, her eyes half-closed, I could see there was no question for her, either.

"Dennis," she murmured, and I kissed her again. Our tongues touched gently. For a moment her kiss intensified; I could feel the passion those high cheekbones hinted at. Then she gasped a little and drew back. "That's enough," she said. "We'll be arrested for indecent exposure, or something."

It was January 18th. We were parked in the lot behind the local Kentucky Fried, the remains of a pretty decent chicken dinner spread around us. We were in my Duster, and that alone was something of an occasion for me—it was my first time behind the wheel since the accident. Just that morning, the doctor had removed the huge cast on my left leg and replaced it with a brace. His warning to stay off it was stern, but I could tell he was feeling good about the way things were going for me. My recovery was about a month ahead of schedule. He put it down to superior techniques; my mother to positive thinking and chicken soup; Coach Puffer to rosehips.

Me, I thought Leigh Cabot had a lot to do with it.

"We have to talk," she said.

"No, let's make out some more," I said.

"Talk now. Make out later."

"Has he started again?"

She nodded.

In the almost two weeks since my telephone conversation with LeBay, the first two weeks of winter term, Arnie had been working at making a
rapprochement
with Leigh working at it with an intensity that scared both of us. I had told her about my talk with George LeBay (but not, as I've said, about my terrible ride home on New Year's morning) and made it as clear as I could that on no account should she simply cut him off. That would drive him into a fury, and these days, when Arnie was furious with someone, unpleasant things happened to them.

"That makes it like cheating on him," she said.

"I know," I said, more sharply than I had intended. "I don't like it, but I don't want that car rolling again."

"So?"

And I shook my head,

In truth, I was starting to feel like Prince Hamlet, delaying and delaying. I knew what had to be done, of course; Christine had to be destroyed. Leigh and I had looked into ways of doing it.

The first idea had been Leigh's—Molotov cocktails. We would, she said, fill some wine-bottles with gasoline, take them to the Cunningham house in the early-morning hours, light the wicks ("Wicks? What wicks?" I asked. "Kotex ought to do just fine," she answered promptly, causing me to wonder again about her high-cheekboned forebears), and toss them in through Christine's windows.

"What if the windows are rolled up and the doors are locked?" I asked her. "That's the way it's apt to be, you know."

She looked at me as if I was a total drip. "Are you saying, she asked, "that the idea of firebombing Arnie's car is okay, but you've got moral scruples about breaking some glass?"

"No," I said. "But who's going to get close enough to her to break the glass with a hammer, Leigh? You?"

She looked at me, biting at her soft lower lip. She said nothing.

The next idea had been mine. Dynamite.

Leigh thought about it and shook her head.

"I could get it without too much sweat, I think," I said. I still saw Brad Jeffries from time to time, and Brad still worked for Penn-DOT, and Penn-DOT had enough dynamite to put Three Rivers Stadium on the moon. I thought that maybe I could borrow the right key without Brad knowing I had borrowed it—he had a way of getting tanked up when the Penguins were on the tube. Borrow the key to the explosives shed during the third period of one game, I thought, and return it to his ring in the third period of another. The chance that he would be wanting explosives in January, and thus realize his key was missing, was small indeed. It was a deception, another betrayal—but it was a way to end things.

"No," she said.

"Why not?" To me, dynamite seemed to offer the kind of utter finality the situation demanded.

"Because Arnie keeps it parked in his driveway now. Do you really want to send shrapnel flying all over a suburban neighborhood? Risking a piece of flying glass cutting off some little kid's head?"

I winced. I hadn't thought of that, but now that she mentioned it, the image seemed sharp and clear and hideous. And that got me thinking about other things. Lighting a bundle of dynamite with your cigarillo and then tossing it overhand at the object you wanted to destroy… that might look okay on the Saturday afternoon Westerns they showed on channel 22, but in real life there were blasting caps and contact points to deal with. Still, I held onto the idea as long as I could.

"If we did it at night?"

"Still pretty dangerous," she said. "And you know it, too.

It's all over your face."

A long, long pause.

"What about the crusher at Darnell's? " she asked finally.

"Same basic objection as before," I said. "Who gets to drive her down there? You, me, or Arnie?"

And that was where matters stood.

"What was it today?" I asked her.

"He wanted me to go out with him tonight," she said. "Bowling this time." In previous days it had been the movies, out for dinner, over to watch TV at his house, proposed study-dates. Christine figured in all of them as the mode of transport. "He's getting ugly about it, and I'm running out of excuses. If we're going to do something, we ought to do it soon."

I nodded. Failure to find a satisfactory method was one thing. The other thing holding us back had been my leg. Now the cast was off, and although I was on stern doctor's orders to use my crutches, I had tested the left leg without them. There was some pain, but not as much as I had feared.

Those things, yeah—but mostly there had been us. Discovering each other. And although it's going to sound stinking, r guess I ought to add something else, if this thing is going to stay straight (and I promised myself when I began to tell the tale that I'd stop if I found I couldn't get it straight or keep it straight). The spice of danger had added something to what I felt for her—and, I think, to what she felt for me. He was my best friend, but there was still a dirty, senseless attraction in the idea that we were seeing each other behind his back. I felt that each time I drew her into my arms, each time my hand slipped over the firm swelling of her breasts. The sneaking around. Can you tell me why that should have an attraction? But it did. For the first time in my life, I had fallen for a girl. I had slipped before, but this time I had taken the grand head-over-heels tumble. And I loved it. I loved
her
. That constant sense of betrayal, though that was a snakelike thing, both a shame and a crazy sort of goad. We could tell each other (and we did) that we were keeping our mouths shut to protect our families and ourselves.

That was true.

But it wasn't all, Leigh, was it? No. It wasn't all.

In one way, nothing worse could have happened. Love slows down reaction time; it mutes the sense of danger. My conversation with George LeBay was twelve long days in the past, and thinking about the things he had said—and worse, the things he had suggested—no longer raised the hair on the back of my neck.

The same was true—or not true—of the few times I talked with Arnie or glimpsed him in the halls. In a strange way, we seemed to be back in September and October again, when we had grown apart simply because Arnie was so busy. When we did talk he seemed pleasant enough, although the gray eyes behind his specs were cool. I waited for a wailing Regina or a distraught Michael to call me on the phone with the news that Arnie had finally stopped toying with them and had given up the idea of college in the fall for certain.

That didn't happen, and it was from Motormouth himself—our guidance counsellor—that I heard Arnie had taken home a lot of literature on the University of Pennsylvania, Drew University, and Penn State. Those were the schools Leigh was most interested in. I knew it, and Arnie knew it—too.