Christine (7 page)

“Then shut your pie-hole.”

He turned back to Arnie and put his meaty hands on his wide, well-padded hips.

“I know a creep when I see one,” he said, “and I think I'm lookin at one right now. You're on probation, kid. You screw around with me just one time and it don't matter how much you paid up in front, I'll put you out on your ass.”

Dull fury went up from my stomach to my head and made it throb. Inside I begged Arnie to tell this fat fuck to bore it and stroke it and then drive it straight up his old tan track just as fast and far as it would go. Of course then Darnell's poker buddies would get into it and we'd both probably end this enchanting evening at the emergency room of Libertyville Community Hospital getting our heads stitched up . . . but it would almost be worth it.

Arnie,
I begged inside,
tell him to shove it and let's get out of here. Stand up to him, Arnie. Don't let him pull this shit on you. Don't be a loser, Arnie—if you can stand up to your mother, you can stand up to this happy asshole. Just this once, don't be a loser.

Arnie stood silent for a long time, his head down, and then he said, “Yessir.” The word was so low it was nearly inaudible. It sounded as if he was choking on it.

“What did you say?”

Arnie looked up. His face was deadly pale. His eyes were swimming with tears. I couldn't look at that. It hurt me too bad to look at that. I turned away. The poker players had suspended their game to watch developments over at stall twenty.

“I said, ‘Yessir,' ” Arnie said in a trembling voice. It was as if he had just signed his name to some terrible confession. I looked at the car again, the '58 Plymouth, sitting in here when it should have been out back in the junkyard with the rest of Darnell's rotten plugs, and I hated it all over again for what it was doing to Arnie.

“Arright, get out of here,” Darnell said. “We're closed.”

Arnie stumbled away blindly. He would have walked right into a stack of old bald tires if I hadn't grabbed his arm and steered him away. Darnell went back the other way to the poker table. When he got there he said something to the others in his wheezy voice. They all roared laughter.

“I'm all right, Dennis,” Arnie said, as if I had asked him. His teeth were locked together and his chest was heaving in quick, shallow breaths. “I'm all right, let go of me, I'm all right, I'm okay.”

I let go of his arm. We walked across to the door and Darnell hollered at us, “And you ain't going to bring your hoodlum friends in here, or you're out!”

One of the others chimed, “And leave your dope at home!”

Arnie cringed. He was my friend, but I hated him when he cringed that way.

We escaped into the cool darkness. The door rattled down behind us. And that's how we got Christine to Darnell's Garage. Some great time, huh?

6

Outside

We got into my car and I drove out of the yard. Somehow it had gotten around to past nine o'clock. How the time flies when you're having fun. A half-moon stood out in the sky. That and the orange lights in the acres of parking lot at the Monroeville Mall took care of any wishing stars there might have been.

We drove the first two or three blocks in utter silence, and then Arnie suddenly burst into a fury of weeping. I had thought he might cry, but the force of this frightened me. I pulled over immediately.

“Arnie—”

I gave up right there. He was going to do it until it was done. The tears and the sobs came in a shrill, bitter flood, and they came without restraint—Arnie had used up his quota of restraint for the day. At first it seemed to be nothing but reaction; I felt the same sort of thing myself, only mine had gone to my head, making it ache like a rotted tooth, and to my stomach, which was sickly clenched up.

So, yeah, at first I thought it was nothing but a reaction sort of thing, a spontaneous release, and maybe at first it was. But after a minute or two, I realized it was a lot more than that; it went a lot deeper than that. And I began to get words out of the sounds he was making: just a few at first, then strings of them.

“I'll get them!”
he shouted thickly through the sobs.
“I'll get those fucking sons of bitches I'
ll get them Dennis I'll make them sorry I'll make those fuckers eat it . . . EAT IT . . . EAT IT!”

“Stop it,” I said, scared. “Arnie, quit it.”

But he wouldn't quit it. He began to slam his fists down on the padded dashboard of my Duster, hard enough to make marks.

“
I'll get them, you see if I don't!”

In the dim glow of the moon and a nearby streetlight, his face looked ravaged and haglike. He was like a stranger to me then. He was off walking in whatever cold places of the universe a fun-loving God reserves for people like him. I didn't know him. I didn't want to know him. I could only sit there helplessly and hope that the Arnie I did know would come back. After a while, he did.

The hysterical words disappeared into sobs again. The hate was gone and he was only crying. It was a deep, bawling, bewildered sound.

I sat there behind the wheel of my car, not sure what I should do, wishing I was someplace else, anyplace else, trying on shoes at Thom McAn's, filling out a credit application in a discount store, standing in front of a pay toilet stall with diarrhea and no dime. Anyplace, man. It didn't have to be Monte Carlo. Mostly I sat there wishing I was older. Wishing we were both older.

But that was a copout job. I knew what to do. Reluctantly, not wanting to, I slid across the seat and put my arms around him and held him. I could feel his face, hot and fevered, mashed against my chest. We sat that way for maybe five minutes, and then I drove him to his house and dropped him off. After that I went home myself. Neither of us talked about it later, me holding him like that. No one came along the sidewalk and saw us parked at the curb. I suppose if someone had, we would have looked like a couple of queers. I sat there and held him and loved him the best I could and wondered how come it had to be that I was Arnie Cunningham's only friend, because right then, believe me, I didn't want to be his friend.

Yet somehow—I realized it then, if only dimly—maybe Christine was going to be his friend now, too. I wasn't sure if I liked that either, although we had been through the same shit-factory on her behalf that long crazy day.

When we rolled up to the curb in front of his house I said, “You going to be all right, man?”

He managed a smile. “Yeah, I'll be okay.” He looked at me sadly. “You know, you ought to find some other favorite charity. Heart Fund. Cancer Society. Something.”

“Ahh, get out of here.”

“You know what I mean.”

“If you mean you're a wet end, you're not telling me anything I didn't know.”

The front porch light came on, and both Michael and Regina came flying out, probably to see if it was us or the State Police come to inform them that their only chick and child had been run over on the highway.

“Arnold?” Regina called shrilly.

“Bug out, Dennis,” Arnie said, grinning a little more honestly now. “This shit you don't need.” He got out of the car and said dutifully, “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”

“Where have you been?” Michael asked. “You had your mother badly frightened, young man!”

Arnie was right. I could do without the reunion scene. I glanced back in the rearview mirror just briefly and saw him standing there, looking solitary and vulnerable—and then the two of them enfolded him and began shepherding him back to the $60,000 nest, no doubt turning the full force of all their latest parenting trips on him—Parent Effectiveness Training, est, who knows what else. They were so perfectly rational about it, that was the thing. They had played such a large part in what he was, and they were just too motherfucking (and fatherfucking) rational to see it.

I turned the radio on to FM-104, where the Block Party Weekend was continuing, and got Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band singing “Still the Same.” The serendipity was just a little too hideously perfect, and I dialled away to the Phillies game.

The Phillies were losing. That was all right. That was par for the course.

7

Bad Dreams

When I got home, my dad and my sister were sitting in the kitchen eating brown-sugar sandwiches. I started feeling hungry right away and realized I'd never gotten any supper.

“Where you been, Boss?” Elaine asked, hardly looking up from her
16
or
Creem
or
Tiger Beat
or whatever it was. She had been calling me Boss ever since I discovered Bruce Springsteen the year before and became a fanatic. It was supposed to get under my skin.

At fourteen Elaine was beginning to leave her childhood behind and to turn into the full-fledged American beauty that she eventually became—tall, dark-haired, and blue-eyed. But in that late summer of 1978 she was the total teenaged crowd animal. She had begun with Donny and Marie at nine, then had gotten all moony for John Travolta at eleven (I made the mistake of calling him John Revolta one day and she scratched me so badly that I almost needed a stitch in my cheek—I supposed I deserved it, sort of). At twelve she was gone for Shaun. Then it was Andy Gibb. Just lately she had developed more ominous tastes: heavy-metal rockers like Deep Purple and a new group, Styx.

“I was helping Arnie get his car squared away,” I said, as much to my father as to Ellie. More, really.

“That creep.” Ellie sighed and turned the page of her magazine.

I felt a sudden and amazingly strong urge to rip the magazine out of her hands, tear it in two, and throw the pieces in her face. That went further toward showing me exactly how stressful the day had been than anything else could have done. Elaine doesn't really think Arnie's a creep; she just takes every possible opportunity to get under my skin. But maybe I had heard Arnie called a creep too often over the last few hours. His tears were still drying on the front of my shirt, for Christ's sake, and maybe I felt a little bit creepy myself.

“What's Kiss doing these days, dear?” I asked her sweetly. “Written any love-letters to Erik Estrada lately? ‘Oh, Erik, I'd die for you, I go into a total cardiac arrest every time I think of your thick, greasy lips squelching down on mine . . .' ”

“You're an animal,” she said coldly. “Just an animal, that's all you are.”

“And I don't know any better.”

“That's right.” She picked up her magazine and her brown-sugar sandwich and flounced away into the living room.

“Don't you get that stuff on the floor, Ellie,” Dad warned her, spoiling her exit a bit.

I went to the fridge and rummaged out some bologna and a tomato that didn't look as if it was working. There was also half a package of processed cheese, but wild overindulgence in that shit as a grade-schooler had apparently destroyed my craving for it. I settled for a quart of milk to go with my sandwich and opened a can of Campbell's Chunky Beef.

“Did he get it?” Dad asked me. My dad is a tax-consultant for H&R Block. He also does freelance tax work. In the old days he used to be a full-time accountant for the biggest architectural firm in Pittsburgh, but then he had a heart attack and got out. He's a good man.

“Yeah, he got it.”

“Still look as bad to you as it did?”

“Worse. Where's Mom?”

“Her class,” he said.

His eyes met mine, and we both almost got the giggles. We immediately looked away in separate directions, ashamed of ourselves—but even being honestly ashamed didn't seem to help much. My mom is forty-three and works as a dental hygienist. For a long time she didn't work at her trade, but after Dad had his heart attack, she went back.

Four years ago she decided she was an unsung writer. She began to produce poems about flowers and stories about sweet old men in the October of their years. Every now and then she would get grittily realistic and do a story about a young girl who was tempted “to take a chance” and then decided it would be immeasurably better if she Saved It for the Marriage Bed. This summer she had signed up for a directed writing course at Horlicks—where Michael and Regina Cunningham taught, you will remember—and was putting all her themes and stories in a book she called Sketches of Love and Beauty.

Now you could be saying to yourself (and more power to you if you are) that there is nothing funny about a woman who has managed to hold a job and also to raise her family deciding to try something new, to expand her horizons a little. And of course you'd be right. Also you could be saying to yourself that my father and I had every reason to be ashamed of ourselves, that we were nothing more than a couple of male sexist pigs oinking it up in our kitchen, and again you'd be perfectly right. I won't argue either point, although I will say that if you had been subjected to frequent oral readings from Sketches of Love and Beauty, as Dad and I—and also Elaine—had been, you might understand the source of the giggles a little better.

Well, she was and is a great mom, and I guess she is also a great wife for my father—at least I never heard him complain, and he's never stayed out all night drinking—and all I can say in our defense is that we never laughed to her face, either of us. That's pretty poor, I know, but at least it's better than nothing. Neither of us would have hurt her like that for the world.

I put a hand over my mouth and tried to squeeze the giggles off. Dad appeared to be momentarily choking on his bread and brown sugar. I don't know what he was thinking of, but what had lodged in my mind was a fairly recent essay titled “Did Jesus Have a Dog?”

On top of the rest of the day, it was nearly too much.

I went to the cabinets over the sink and got a glass for my milk, and when I looked back, my father had himself under control again. That helped me do likewise.

“You looked sort of glum when you came in,” he said. “Is everything all right with Arnie, Dennis?”

“Arnie's cool,” I said, dumping the soup into a saucepan and throwing it on the stove. “He just bought a car, and that's a mess, but Arnie's all right.” Of course Arnie wasn't all right, but there are some things you can't bring yourself to tell your dad, no matter how well he's succeeding at the great American job of dadhood.

“Sometimes people can't see things until they see them for themselves,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I hope he sees it soon. He's got the car at Darnell's for twenty a week because his folks didn't want him to park it at home.”

“Twenty a week? For just a stall? Or a stall and tools?”

“Just a stall.”

“That's highway robbery.”

“Yeah,” I said, noticing that my father didn't follow up that judgement with an offer that Arnie could park it at our place.

“You want to play a game of cribbage?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Cheer up, Dennis. You can't make other people's mistakes for them.”

“Yeah, really.”

We played three or four games of cribbage, and he beat me every time—he almost always does, unless he's very tired or has had a couple of drinks. That's okay with me, though. The times that I do beat him mean more. We played cribbage, and after a while my mother came in, her color high and her eyes glowing, looking too young to be my mom, her book of stories and sketches clasped to her breasts. She kissed my father—not her usual brush, but a real kiss that made me feel all of a sudden like I should be someplace else.

She asked me the same stuff about Arnie and his car, which was fast becoming the biggest topic of conversation around the house since my mother's brother, Sid, went into bankruptcy and asked my dad for a loan. I went through the same song-and-dance. Then I went upstairs to bed. My ass was dragging, and it looked to me as if my mom and dad had business of their own to attend to . . . although that was a topic I never went into all that deeply in my mind, as I'm sure you'll understand.

Elaine was in on her bed, listening to the latest K-Tel conglomeration of hits. I asked her to turn it down because I was going to bed. She stuck out her tongue at me. No way I allow that kind of thing. I went in and tickled her until she said she was going to puke. I said go ahead and puke, it's your bed, and tickled her some more. Then she put on her “please don't kid me Dennis because this is something
terribly
important” expression and got all solemn and asked me if it was really true you could light farts. One of her girlfriends, Carolyn Shambliss, said it was, but Carolyn lied about almost
everything.

I told her to ask Milton Dodd, her dorky-looking boyfriend. Then Elaine really did get mad and tried to hit me and asked me why do you always have to be so
awful,
Dennis? So I told her yes, it was true you could light farts, and advised her not to try it, and then I gave her a hug (which I rarely did anymore—it made me uncomfortable since she started to get boobs, and so did the tickling, to tell the truth) and then I went to bed.

And undressing, I thought, The day didn't end so bad, after all. There are people around here who think I'm a human being, and they think Arnie is, as well. I'll get him to come over tomorrow or Sunday and we'll just hang out, watch the Phillies on TV, maybe, or play some dumb board-game, Careers or Life or maybe that old standby, Clue, and get rid of the weirdness. Get feeling decent again.

So I went to bed with everything straight in my mind, and I should have gone right to sleep, but I didn't. Because it
wasn't
straight, and I knew it. Things get started, and sometimes you don't know what the hell they are.

Engines. That's something else about being a teenager. There are all these engines, and somehow you end up with the ignition keys to some of them and you start them up but you don't know what the fuck they are or what they're supposed to do. There are clues, but that's all. The drug thing is like that, and the booze thing, and the sex thing, and sometimes other stuff too—a summer job that generates a new interest, a trip, a course in school. Engines. They give you the keys and some clues and they say, Start it up, see what it will do, and sometimes what it does is pull you along into a life that's really good and fulfilling, and sometimes what it does is pull you right down the highway to hell and leave you all mangled and bleeding by the roadside.

Engines.

Big ones. Like the 382s they used to put in those old cars. Like Christine.

I lay there in the dark, twisting and turning until the sheet was pulled out and all balled up and messy, and I thought about LeBay saying,
Her name is Christine.
And somehow, Arnie had picked up on that. When we were little kids we had had scooters and then bikes, and I named mine but Arnie never named his—he said names were for dogs and cats and guppies. But that was then and this was now. Now he was calling that Plymouth Christine, and, what was somehow worse, it was always “her” and “she” instead of “it.”

I didn't like it, and I didn't know why.

And even my own father had spoken of it as if, instead of buying an old junker, Arnie had gotten married. But it wasn't like that. Not at all. Was it?

Stop the car, Dennis. Go back. . . . I want to look at her again.

Simple as that.

No consideration at all, and that wasn't like Arnie, who usually thought things out so carefully—his life had made him all too painfully aware of what happened to guys like him when they went off half-cocked and did something (gasp!) on impulse. But this time he had been like a man who meets a showgirl, indulges in a whirlwind courtship, and ends up with a hangover and a new wife on Monday morning.

It had been . . . well.. . like love at first sight.

Never mind, I thought. We'll start over again. Tomorrow we'll start over. Well get some perspective on this.

And so finally I went to sleep. And dreamed.

• • •

The whining spin of a starter in darkness.

Silence.

The starter, whining again.

The engine fired, missed, then caught.

An engine running in darkness.

Then headlights came on, high beams, old-fashioned twin beams, spearing me like a bug on glass.

I was standing in the open doorway of Roland D. LeBay's garage, and Christine sat inside—a new Christine with not a dent or a speck of rust on her. The clean, unblemished windshield darkened to a polarized blue strip at the top. From the radio came the hard rhythmic sounds of Dale Hawkins doing “Susie-Q”—a voice from a dead age, full of somehow frightening vitality.

The motor muttering words of power through dual glass-pack mufflers. And somehow I knew there was a Hurst shifter inside, and Feully headers; the Quaker State oil had just been changed—it was a clean amber color, automotive lifeblood.

The wipers suddenly start up, and that's strange because there's no one behind the wheel, the car is empty.

—Come on, big guy. Let's go for a ride. Let's cruise.

I shake my head. I don't want to get in there. I'm scared to get in there. I don'
t want to cruise. And suddenly the engine begins to rev and fall off, rev and fall off; it's a hungry sound, frightening, and each time the engine revs Christine seems to lunge forward a bit, like a mean dog on a weak leash . . . and I want to move . . . but my feet seem nailed to the cracked pavement of the driveway.

—Last chance, big guy.

And before I can answer—or even think of an answer—there is the terrible scream of rubber kissing off concrete and Christine lunges out at me, her grille snarling like an open mouth full of chrome teeth, her headlights glaring—

• • •

I screamed myself awake in the dead darkness of two in the morning, the sound of my own voice scaring me, the hurried, running thud of bare feet coming down the hall scaring me even worse. I had double handfuls of sheet in both hands. I'd pulled the sheet right out; it was all wadded up in the middle of the bed. My body was sweat-slippery.