Christine (45 page)

Will screamed and couldn't hear himself over the blatting roar of her engine. The Sears Muzzler Arnie had put on her—one of the few things he
really
put on her, Will thought crazily—had hung up on the sill of the house, along with most of the tailpipe.

The Fury roared across the living room, knocking Will's La-Z-Boy armchair onto its side, where it lay like a dead pony. The floor under Christine creaked uneasily and a part of Will's mind screamed:
Yes! Break! Break! Spill the goddam thing into the cellar! Let's see it climb out of there!
And this image was replaced with the image of a tiger in a pit that had been dug and then camouflaged by wily natives.

But the floor held—at least for the time being, it held.

Christine roared across the living room at him. Behind, she left a zig-zag pattern of snowy tire prints on the rug. She slammed into the stairs. Will was thrown back against the wall. His aspirator fell out of his hand and tumbled end over end all the way to the bottom.

Christine reversed across the room, floorboards groaning underneath. Her rear end stuck the Sony TV, and the picture tube imploded. She roared forward again and struck the side of the stairs again, shattering lath and gouging out plaster. Will could feel the entire structure grow wobbly under him. There was an awful sensation of
lean.
For a moment Christine was directly beneath him; he could look down into the oily gut of her engine compartment, could feel the heat of her V-8 mill. She reversed again, and Will scrambled up the stairs, heaving for air, clawing at the fat sausage of his throat, eyes bulging.

He reached the top an instant before Christine hit the wall again, turning the center of the stairs into a jumbled wreck. A long splinter of wood fell into her engine. The fan chewed it up and spat out coarse-grained sawdust and smaller splinters. The entire house smelled of gas and exhaust. Will's ears rang with the heavy thunder of that merciless engine.

She backed up again. Now her tires had chewed ragged trenches in the carpet.
Down the hall,
Will thought.
Attic, Attic'll be safe. Yes, the at . . . oh God . . . oh God . . . oh my GOD—

The final pain came with sharp, spiking suddenness. It was as if his heart had been punctured with an icicle. His left arm locked with pain. Still there was no breath; his chest heaved uselessly. He staggered backward. One foot danced out over nothingness, and then he fell back down the stairs in two great bone-snapping barrel rolls, legs flying over his head, arms waving, blue bathrobe sailing and flapping.

He landed in a heap at the bottom and Christine pounced upon him: struck him, reversed, struck him again, snapped off the heavy newel post at the foot of the stairs like a twig, reversed, struck him again.

From beneath the floor came the increasing mutter of supports splintering and bowing. Christine paused in the middle of the room for a moment, as if listening. Two of her tires were flat; a third had come half off the wheel. The left side of the car was punched inward, scraped clean of paint in great bald patches.

Suddenly her gearshift dropped into reverse. Her engine screamed, and she rocketed back across the room and out of the ragged hole in the side of Will Darnell's house, her rear end dropping down several inches and into the snow. The tires spun, found some purchase, and pulled her out. She backed limpingly toward the road, her engine chopping and missing now, blue smoke hazing the air around her, oil dripping and spraying.

At the road, she turned back toward Libertyville. The gearshift lever dropped into
DRIVE
, but at first the damaged transmission wouldn't catch; when it did she rolled slowly away from the house. Behind her, from Will's house, a broad bar of light shone out onto the churned-up snow in a shape that was not at all like the neat rectangle of light thrown by a window. The shape of the light on the snow was senseless and strange.

She moved slowly, lurching from side to side on her flats like a very old drunk making her way up an alley. Snow fell thickly, driven into slanting lines by the wind.

One of her headlights, shattered in her last destructive, trampling charge, flickered and came on.

One of the tires began to reinflate, then the other.

The clouds of stinking oil-smoke began to diminish.

The engine's chopping, uncertain note smoothed out.

The missing hood began to reappear, from the windshield end down, looking weirdly like a scarf or cardigan being knitted by invisible needles; the raw metal drew itself out of nothing, gleamed steel-gray, and then darkened to red as if filling with blood.

The cracks in the windshield began to run in reverse, leaving unflawed smoothness behind themselves.

The other headlights came on, one after the other; now she moved with swift surety through the stormy night, behind the cutting edge of her confident brights.

Her odometer spun smoothly backward.7

• • •

Forty-five minutes later she sat in the darkness at the late Will Darnell's Do-It-Yourself Garage, in stall twenty. The wind howled and moaned in the ranks of the wrecks out back, rusting hulks that perhaps held their own ghosts and their own baleful memories as powdery snow skirled across the ripped and tattered seats, their balding floor carpets.

Her engine ticked slowly, cooling.

3

Christine—
Teenage Death-Songs

43

Leigh Comes to Visit

About fifteen minutes before Leigh was due, I got my crutches under me and worked my way to the chair closest the door, so she
'd be sure to hear me when I hollered for her to come in. Then I picked up my copy of
Esquire
again and turned back to an article titled “The Next Vietnam,” which was part of a school assignment. I still had no success reading it. I was nervous and scared, and part of it—a lot of it, I guess—was simple eagerness. I wanted to see her again.

The house was empty. Not too long after Leigh called that stormy Christmas Eve afternoon, I got my dad aside and asked him if he could maybe take Mom and Elaine someplace the afternoon of the twenty-sixth.

“Why not?” he agreed amiably enough.

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Sure. But you owe me one, Dennis.”

“Dad!”

He winked solemnly. “I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine.”

“Nice guy,” I said.

“A real prince,” he agreed.

My dad, who is no slouch, asked me if it had to do with Arnie. “She's his girl, isn't she?”

“Well,” I said, not sure just what the situation was, and uncomfortable for reasons of my own, “she has been. I don't know about now.”

“Problems?”

“I didn't do such a hot job being his eyes, did I?”

“It's hard to see from a hospital bed, Dennis. I'll make sure your mother and Ellie are out Tuesday afternoon. Just be careful, okay?”

Since then, I've pondered exactly what he might have meant by that; he surely couldn't have been worried about me trying to jump Leigh's bones, with one upper leg still in plaster and a half-cast on my back. I think maybe he was just afraid that something had gotten terribly out of whack, with my old childhood friend suddenly a stranger, and a stranger who was out on bail at that.

I
sure thought something was out of whack, and it scared the piss out of me. The
Keystone
doesn't publish on Christmas, but all three Pittsburgh network-TV affiliates and both the independent channels had the story of what had happened to Will Darnell, along with bizarre and frightening pictures of his house. The side facing the road had been demolished. It was the only word which fit. That side of the house looked as if some mad Nazi had driven a Panzer tank through it. The story had been headlined this morning—
FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED IN BIZARRE DEATH OF SUSPECTED CRIME FIGURE
. That was bad enough, even without another picture of Will Darnell's house with that big hole punched in the side. But you had to check page three to get the rest of it. The other item was smaller because Will Darnell had been a “suspected crime figure,” and Don Vandenberg had only been a dipshit dropout gas-jockey.

service
STATION ATTENDANT KILLED IN CHRISTMAS EVE HIT-AND-RUN
, this headline read. A single column followed. The story ended with the Libertyville Chief of Police theorizing that the driver had probably been drunk or stoned. Neither he nor the
Keystone
made any attempt to connect the deaths, which had been separated by almost ten miles on the night of a screaming blizzard which had stopped all traffic in Ohio and western Pennsylvania. But I could make connections. I didn't want to, but I couldn't help it. And hadn't my father been looking at me strangely several times during the morning? Yes. Once or twice it had seemed he would say something—I had no idea what I would say if he did; Will Darnell's death, bizarre as it had been, was nowhere nearly as bizarre as my suspicions. Then he had closed his mouth without speaking. That, to be up front about it, was something of a relief.

The doorbell chimed at two past two.

“Come on in!” I yelled, getting up on my crutches again anyway.

The door opened and Leigh poked her head in. “Dennis?”

“Yeah. Come on in.”

She did, looking very pretty in a bright red ski parka and dark blue pants. She pushed the parka's fur-edged hood back.

“Sit down,” she said, unzipping her parka. “Go on, right now, that's an order. You look like a big dumb stork on those things.”

“Keep it up,” I said, sitting down again with an ungainly plop. When you're cast in plaster, it's never like in the movies; you never sit down like Cary Grant getting ready to have cocktails at the Ritz with Ingrid Bergman. It all happens at once, and if the cushion you land on doesn't give out a big loud raspberry, as if your sudden descent had scared you into cutting the cheese, you count yourself ahead of the game. This time I got lucky. “I'm such a sucker for flattery that I make myself sick.”

“How are you, Dennis?”

“Mending,” I said. “How about you?”

“I've been better,” she said in a low voice, and bit at her lower lip. This can sometimes be a seductive gesture on a girl's part, but it wasn't this time.

“Hang up your coat and sit down yourself.”

“Okay.” Her eyes touched mine, and looking at them was a little much. I looked someplace else, thinking about Arnie.

She hung her coat up and came back into the living room slowly. “Your folks—?”

“I got my father to take everyone out,” I said. “I thought maybe”—I shrugged—“we ought to talk just between ourselves.”

She stood by the sofa, looking at me across the room. I was struck again by the simplicity of her good looks—her lovely girl's figure outlined in dark blue pants and a sweater of a lighter, powdery blue, an outfit that made me think about skiing. Her hair was tied in a loose pigtail and lay over her left shoulder. Her eyes were the color of her sweater, maybe a little darker. A cornfed American beauty, you would have said, except for the high cheekbones, which seemed a little arrogant, bespeaking some older, more exotic heritage. Maybe some fifteen or twenty generations back there was a Viking in the woodpile.

Or maybe that isn't what I was thinking at all.

She saw me looking at her too long and blushed. I looked away.

“Dennis, are you worried about him?”

“Worried? Scared might be a better word.”

“What do you know about that car? What has he told you?”

“Not much,” I said. “Look, would you like something to drink? There's some stuff in the fridge—” I felt for my crutches.

“Sit still,” she said. “I would like something, but I'll get it. What about you?”

“I'll take a ginger ale, if there's one left.”

She went into the kitchen and I watched her shadow on the wall, moving lightly, like a dancer. There was a momentary added weight in my stomach, almost like a sickness. There's a name for that sort of sickness. I think it's called falling in love with your best friend's girl.

“You've got an automatic ice-maker.” Her voice floated back. “We've got one too. I love it.”

“Sometimes it goes crazy and sprays ice-cubes all over the floor,” I said. “It's like Jimmy Cagney in
White Heat. ‘
Take that, you dirty rats.' It drives my mother crazy.” I was babbling.

She laughed. Ice-cubes clinked in glasses. Shortly she came back with two glasses of ice and two cans of Canada Dry.

“Thanks,” I said, taking mine.

“No, thank
you,”
she said, and now her blue eyes were dark and sober. “Thanks for being around. If I had to deal with this alone, I think I'd . . . I don't know.”

“Come on,” I said. “It's not that bad.”

“Isn't it? Do you know about Darnell?”

I nodded.

“And that other one? Don Vandenberg?”

So she had made the connection too.

I nodded again. “I saw it. Leigh, what is it about Christine that bothers you?”

For a long time I didn't know if she was going to answer. If she would be
able
to answer. I could see her struggling with it, looking down at her glass, held in both hands.

At last in a very low voice, she said, “I think she tried to kill me.”

I don't know what I had expected, but it wasn't that. “What do you mean?”

She talked, first hesitantly, then more rapidly, until it was pouring out of her. It is a story you have already heard, so I won't repeat it here; suffice it to say that I tried to tell it pretty much as she told it to me. She hadn't been kidding about being scared. It was in the pallor of her face, the little hitches and gulps of her voice, the way her hands constantly caressed her upper arms, as if she was too cold in spite of the sweater, and the more she talked, the more scared I got.

She finished by telling me how, as consciousness dwindled, the dashboard lights had seemed to turn into watching eyes. She laughed nervously at this last, as if trying to take the curse off an obvious absurdity, but I didn't laugh back. I was remembering George LeBay's dry voice as we sat in cheap patio chairs in front of the Rainbow Motel, his voice telling me the story of Roland, Veronica, and Rita. I was remembering those things and my mind was making unspeakable connections. Lights were going on. I didn't like what they were revealing. My heart started to thud heavily in my chest, and I couldn't have joined her laughter if my life had depended on it.

She told me about the ultimatum she had given him—her or the car. She told me about Arnie's furious reaction. That had been the last time she went out with him.

“Then he got arrested,” she said, “and I started to think . . . think about what had happened to Buddy Repperton and those other boys . . . and Moochie Welch. . . .”

“And now Vandenberg and Darnell.”

“Yes. But that's not all.” She drank from her glass of ginger ale and then poured in more. The edge of the can chattered briefly against the rim of the glass. “Christmas Eve, when I called you, my mom and dad went out for drinks at my dad's boss's house. And I started to get nervous. I was thinking about . . . oh, I don't know what I was thinking about.”

“I think you do.”

She put a hand to her forehead and rubbed it, as if she was getting a headache. “I suppose I do. I was thinking about that car being out.
Her.
Being out and getting them. But if she was out on Christmas Eve, I guess she had plenty to keep her busy without bothering my par—” She slammed her glass down, making me jump. “And why do I keep talking about that car as if it was a person?” she cried out. Tears had begun to spill down her cheeks. “Why do I keep doing that?”

On that night, I saw all too clearly what comforting her could lead to. Arnie was between us—and part of myself was, too. I had known him for a long time. A long good time.

But that was then; this was now.

I got my crutches under me, thumped my way across to the couch, and plopped down beside her. The cushions sighed. It wasn't a raspberry, but it was close.

My mother keeps a box of Kleenex in the drawer of the little endtable. I pulled one out, looked at her, and pulled out a whole handful. I gave them to her and she thanked me. Then, not liking myself much, I put an arm around her and held her.

She stiffened for a moment . . . and then let me draw her against my shoulder. She was trembling. We just sat that way, both of us afraid of even the slightest movement, I think. Afraid we might explode. Or something. Across the room, the clock ticked importantly on the mantelpiece. Bright winter-light fell through the bow windows that give a three-way view of the street. The storm had blown itself out by noon on Christmas Day, and now the hard and cloudless blue sky seemed to deny that there even was such a thing as snow—but the dunelike drifts rolling across lawns all up and down the street like the backs of great buried beasts confirmed it.

“The smell,” I said at last. “How sure are you about that?”

“It was
there
!”
she said, drawing away from me and sitting up straight. I collected my arm again, with a mixed sensation of disappointment and relief. “It really was there . . . a rotten, horrible smell.” She looked at me. “Why? Have you smelled it too?”

I shook my head. I never had. Not really.

“What do you know about that car, then?” she asked. “You know something. I can see it on your face.”

It was my turn to think long and hard, and oddly what came into my mind was an image of nuclear fission from some science textbook. A cartoon. You don't expect to see cartoons in science books, but as someone once said to me, there are many devious twists and turns along the path of public education . . . in point of fact, that someone had been Arnie himself. The cartoon showed two hotrod atoms speeding toward each other and then slamming together. Presto! Instead of a lot of wreckage (and atom ambulances to take away the dead and wounded neutrons), critical mass, chain reaction, and one hell of a big bang.

Then I decided the memory of that cartoon really wasn't odd at all. Leigh had certain information I hadn't had before. The reverse was also true. In both cases a lot of it was guesswork, a lot of it was subjective feeling and circumstance . . . but enough of it was hard information to be really scary. I wondered briefly what the police would do if they knew what we did. I could guess: nothing. Could you bring a ghost to trial? Or a car?

“Dennis?”

“I'm thinking,” I said. “Can't you smell the wood burning?”

“What do you know?” she asked again.

Collision. Critical mass. Chain reaction. Kaboom.

The thing was, I was thinking, if we put our information together, we would have to do something or tell someone. Take some action. We—

I remembered my dream: the car sitting there in LeBay's garage, the motor revving up and then falling off, revving up again, the headlights coming on, the shriek of tires.

I took her hand in both of mine. “Okay,” I said. “Listen, Arnie: he bought Christine from a guy who is dead now. A guy named Roland D. LeBay. We saw her on his lawn one day when we were coming home from work, and—”