Christine (62 page)

My mother and father joined in, but my mother kept throwing anxious don't-forget glances at Dad, and he lingered after Mom had taken Elaine out.

“What happened?” he asked me. “Leigh told her father some crazy story about cars driving themselves and little girls who were dead and I don't know what all. He's damn near wild.”

I nodded. I was tired, but I didn't want Leigh catching hell from her folks—or have them thinking she was either lying or nuts. If she was going to cover me with Mercer, I would have to cover her with her mother and father.

“All right,” I said. “It's a bit of a story. You want to send Mom and Ellie around for a malt, or something? Or maybe you better tell them to go to a movie.”

“That long?”

“Yeah. That long.”

He looked at me, his gaze troubled. “Okay,” he said.

Shortly after, I told my story a second time. Now I've told it a third; and third time, so they say, pays for all.

Rest in peace, Arnie.

I love you, man.

Epilogue

I guess if this was a made-up story I would end it by telling you how the broken-legged knight of Darnell's Garage wooed and won the lady fair . . . she of the pink nylon scarf and the arrogant Nordic cheekbones. But that never happened. Leigh Cabot is Leigh Ackerman now; she's in Taos, New Mexico, married to an IBM customer service rep. She sells Amway in her spare time. She has two little girls, identical twins, so I guess she probably doesn'
t have all that much spare time. I keep up on her doings after a fashion; my affection for the lady never really faded. We trade cards at Christmas, and I also send her a card on her birthday because she never forgets mine. That sort of thing. There are times when it seems a lot longer than four years.

What happened to us? I don't really know. We went together for two years, slept together (very satisfactorily), went to school together (Drew), and were friends with each other. Her father shut up about our crazy story after my father talked with him, although he always regarded me after that as something of a dubious person. I think that both he and Mrs. Cabot were relieved when Leigh and I went our separate ways.

I could feel it when we started to drift apart, and it hurt me—it hurt a lot. I craved her in a way you continue to crave some substance on which you have no more physical dependency . . . candy, tobacco, Coca-Cola. I carried a torch for her, but I'm afraid I carried it self-consciously and dropped it with an almost unseemly haste.

And maybe I do know what happened. What happened that night in Darnell's Garage was a secret between us, and of course lovers need their secrets . . . but this wasn't a good one to have. It was something cold and unnatural, something that smacked of madness and worse than madness; it smacked of the grave. There were nights after love when we would lie together in bed, naked, belly to belly, and that thing would be between us: Roland D. LeBay's face. I would be kissing her mouth or her breasts or her belly, warm with rising passion, and I would suddenly hear his voice:
That
's about the finest smell in the world . . . except for pussy.
And I would freeze, my passion all steam and ashes.

There were times, God knows, when I could see it in her face as well. The lovers don't always live happily ever after, even when they've done what seemed right as well as they could do it. That's something else it took four years to learn.

So we drifted apart. A secret needs two faces to bounce between; a secret needs to see itself in another pair of eyes. And although I did love her, all the kisses, all the endearments, all the walks arm-in-arm through blowing October leaves . . . none of those things could quite measure up to that magnificently simple act of tying her scarf around my arm.

Leigh left college to be married, and then it was goodbye Drew and hello Taos. I went to her wedding with hardly a qualm. Nice fellow. Drove a Honda Civic. No problems there.

• • •

I never had to worry about making the football squad. Drew doesn
't even
have
a football squad. Instead, I took an extra class each semester and went to summer school for two years, in the time when I would have been sweating under the August sun, hitting the tackling dummies, if things had happened differently. As a result, I graduated early—three semesters early, in fact.

If you met me on the street, you wouldn't notice a limp, but if you walked with me four or five miles (I do at least three miles every day as a matter of course; that physical therapy stuff sticks), you'd notice me starting to pull to the right a little bit.

My left leg aches on rainy days. And on snowy nights.

And sometimes, when I have my nightmares—they are not so frequent now—I wake up, sweating and clutching at that leg, where there is still a hard bulge of flesh above the knee. But all my worries about wheelchairs, braces, and built-up heels proved thankfully hollow. And I never liked football that well anyway.

Michael, Regina, and Arnie Cunningham were buried in a family plot in the Libertyville Heights cemetery—no one went out to the gravesite but members of the family, Regina's people from Ligonier, some of Michael's people from New Hampshire and New York, a few others.

The funeral was five days after that final hellish scene in the garage. The coffins were closed. The very fact of those three wooden boxes, lined up on a triple bier like soldiers, struck my heart like a shovelful of cold earth. The memory of the ant farms couldn't stand against the mute testimony of those boxes. I cried a little.

Afterward, I rolled myself down the aisle toward them and put my hand tentatively on the one in the center, not knowing if it was Arnie's or not, not caring. I stayed that way for quite a while, head down, and then a voice said behind me, “Want a push back out to the vestry, Dennis?”

I craned my neck around. It was Mercer, looking neat and lawyerly in a dark wool suit.

“Sure,” I said. “Just gimme a couple of seconds, okay?”

“Fine.”

I hesitated and then said, “The papers say Michael was killed at home. That the car rolled over him after he slipped on the ice, or something.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Your doing?”

Mercer hesitated. “It makes things simpler.” His gaze shifted to where Leigh was standing with my folks. She was talking with my mother but looking anxiously toward me. “Pretty girl,” he said. He had said it before, in the hospital.

“I'm going to marry her someday,” I said.

“I wouldn't be surprised if you did,” Mercer replied. “Did anyone ever tell you that you've got the balls of a tiger?”

“I think Coach Puffer did,” I said. “Once.”

He laughed. “You ready for that push, Dennis? You've been down here long enough. Let it go.”

“Easier said than done.”

He nodded. “Yeah. I guess so.”

“Will you tell me one thing?” I asked. “I have to know.”

“I will if I can.”

“What did—” I had to stop and clear my throat. “What did you do with the . . . the pieces?”

“Why, I saw to that myself,” Mercer said. His voice was light, almost joking, but his face was very, very serious. “I had two fellows from the local police run all those pieces through the crusher out back of Darnell's Garage. Made a little cube about so big.” He held his hands about two feet apart. “One of those guys got a hell of a bad cut. Took stitches.”

Mercer suddenly smiled—it was the bitterest, coldest smile I've ever seen.

“He said it bit him.”

Then he pushed me up the aisle to where my family and my girl stood waiting for me.

• • •

So that'
s my story. Except for the dreams.

I'm four years older, and Arnie's face has grown hazy to me, a browning photograph from an old yearbook. I never would have believed that could happen, but it has. I made it through, made the transition from adolescence to manhood—whatever that is—somehow; I've got a college degree on which the ink is almost dry, and I've been teaching junior high history. I started last year, and two of my original students—Buddy Repperton types, both of them—were older than I was. I'm single, but there are a few interesting ladies in my life, and I hardly think of Arnie at all.

Except in the dreams.

The dreams aren't the only reason I've set all this down—there's another, which I'll tell you in a moment—but I would be lying if I said the dreams weren't a big part of the reason. Maybe it's an effort to lance the wound and clean it out. Or maybe it's just that I'm not rich enough to afford a shrink.

In one of the dreams I am back where the funeral service was held. The three coffins are on their triple bier, but the church is empty except for me. In the dream I am on crutches again, standing at the foot of the central aisle, back by the door. I don't want to go down there, but my crutches are pulling me along, moving by themselves. I touch the middle coffin. It springs open at my touch, and lying inside in the satin interior is not Arnie but Roland D. LeBay, a putrescent corpse in an Army uniform. As the bloated smell of gassy decay rushes out at me, the corpse opens its eyes; its rotting hands, black and slimy with some fungoid growth, grope upward and find my shirt before I can back away, and it pulls itself up until its glaring, reeking face is only inches from mine. And it begins to croak over and over again,
Can
't beat that smell, can you? Nothing smells this good . . . except for pussy . . . except for pussy . . . except for pussy.
. . . I try to scream but I can't scream, because LeBay's hands have settled in a noxious, tightening ring around my throat.

In the other dream—and this one is somehow worse—I've finished with a class or proctoring a study hall at Norton Junior High, where I teach. I pack my books back into my briefcase, stuff in my papers, and leave the room for my next class. And there in the hall, packed in between the industrial-gray lockers lining it, is Christine—brand new and sparkling, sitting on four new whitewall tires, a chrome Winged Victory hood ornament tilting toward me. She is empty, but her engine guns and falls off . . . guns and falls off . . . guns and falls off. In some of the dreams the voice from the radio is the voice of Richie Valens, killed long ago in a plane crash with Buddy Holly and J. P. Richardson, The Big Bopper. Richie is screaming “La Bamba” to a Latin beat, and as Christine suddenly lunges toward me, laying rubber on the hall floor and tearing open locker doors on either side with her doorhandles, I see that there is a vanity plate on the front—a grinning white skull on a dead black field. Imprinted over the skull are the words
ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE
.

Then I wake up—sometimes screaming, always clutching my leg.

• • •

But the dreams are fewer now. Something I read in one of my psych classes—I took a lot of them, maybe hoping to understand things that can't be understood—is that people dream less as they grow older. I think I am going to be all right now. Last Christmas season, when I sent Leigh her annual card, I added a line to my usual note on the back. Below my signature, on impulse, I scribbled:
How are you dealing with it?
Then I sealed the card up and mailed it before I could change my mind. I got a postcard back a month later. It showed the new Taos Center for the Performing Arts on the front. On the back was my address and a single flat line:
Dealing with what? L.

One way or another I guess we find out things we have to know.

Around the same time—it seems as though it's around Christmas that my thoughts turn to it the most often—I dropped Rick Mercer a note, because the question had been on my mind more and more, gnawing at me. I wrote and asked him what had become of the block of scrap metal that had once been Christine.

I got no answer.

But time is teaching me how to deal with that too. I think about it less. I really do.

• • •

So here I am, at the tag end of everything, old memories and old nightmares all bundled into a neat sheaf of pages.
Soon I will put them in a folder and put the folder in my file cabinet and lock that drawer and that will be the end.

But I told you there was something else, didn't I? Some other reason for writing it all down.

His single-minded purpose. His unending fury.

I read it in the paper a few weeks ago—just an item that got put on the AP wire because it was bizarre, I suppose.
Be honest, Guilder,
I can hear Arnie saying, so I will. It was that item that got me going, more than all the dreams and old memories.

The news item was about a guy named Sander Galton, whose nickname, one would logically assume, must have been Sandy.

This Sander Galton was killed out in California, where he was working at a drive-in movie theater in L.A. He was apparently alone, closing up shop for the night after the movie had ended. He was in the snack-bar. A car ripped right through one of the walls, plowed through the counter, smashed the popcorn machine, and got him as he was trying to unlock the door to the projection booth. The cops knew that was what he was doing when the car ran him down because they found the key in his hand. I read that item, headed
BIZARRE MURDER BY CAR IN LOS ANGELES
—and I thought of what Mercer had told me, that last thing:
He said it bit him.

Of course it's impossible, but it was all impossible to start with.

I keep thinking of George LeBay in Ohio.

His sister in Colorado.

Leigh in New Mexico.

What if it's started again?

What if it's working its way east, finishing the job?

Saving me for last?

• • •

His single-minded purpose.

His unending fury.