When she heard the door open and close… when she heard his step on the stairs… then she would be able to sleep.
Maybe.
JUNKINS
I think you better slow down and drive with me, baby…
You say what? Hush up and mind my own bidness?
But Baby, you are my bidness! You gooood bidness, baby,
And I love good bidness! What kind of car am I drivin?
I’m drive a ’48 Cadillac
With Thunderbird wings
I tell you, baby, she’s a movin thing,
Ride on, Josephine, ride on…
— Ellas McDaniel
Junkins turned up at Darnell’s around eight-forty-five that evening. Arnie had just finished with Christine for the night. He had replaced the radio aerial that Repperton’s gang had snapped off with a new one, and for the last fifteen minutes or so he had been sitting behind the wheel, listening to WDIL’s Friday Night Cavalcade of Gold.
He had meant to do no more than turn the radio on and dial across once, making sure that he had hooked up the aerial plug properly and that there was no static. But he had run onto WDIL’s strong signal and had sat there, looking straight through the windscreen, his grey eyes musing and far away, as Bobby Fuller sang “I Fought the Law”, as Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers sang “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”, as Eddie Cochran sang “C’mon, Everybody”, and Buddy Holly sang “Rave On”. There were no commercials on WDIL Friday nights, and no deejays. Just the sounds. Gone from the charts but not from our hearts. Every now and then a soothing female voice would break in and tell him what he already knew—that he was listening to WDIL Pittsburgh, the sound of Blue Suede Radio.
Arnie sat dreaming behind the wheel, the red dash lights glowing, tapping his fingers lightly. The aerial was fine. Yes. He had done a good job. It was like Will said; he had a light touch, Look at Christine; Christine proved it. She had been a hunk of junk sitting on LeBay’s lawn and he had brought her back; then she had been a hunk of junk sitting in the long-term lot out at the airport and he had brought her back again. He had…
Rave on… rave on and tell me… Tell me… not to be lonely…
He had what?
Replaced the aerial, yes. And he had popped so — me of the dents, he could remember that. But he hadn’t ordered any glass (although it was all replaced), he hadn’t ordered any new seat covers (but they were all replaced, too), and he had only looked closely under the hood once before slamming it back down in horror at the damage they had done to Christine’s mill.
But now the radiator was whole, the engine block clean and glowing, the pistons moving free and clear. And it purred like a cat.
But there had been dreams.
He had dreamed of LeBay behind the wheel of Christine, LeBay dressed in an Army uniform that was spotted and splotched with blue-grey patches of graveyard mould, LeBay’s flesh had sloughed and run. White, gleaming bone poked through in places. The sockets where LeBay’s eyes had once been were empty and dark (but something was squirming in there, ah, yes, something). And then Christine’s headlights had come on and someone had been pinned there, pinned like a bug on a white square of cardboard. Someone familiar.
Moochie Welch?
Maybe. But as Christine suddenly rocketed forward, tyres screaming, it had seemed to Arnie that the terrified face out there on the street ran like tallow, changing even as the Plymouth bore down on it: now it was Repperton’s face, now Sandy Galton’s, now it was Will Darnell’s heavy moon face.
Whoever was out there had jumped aside, but LeBay had thrown Christine into reverse, working the gear lever with black rotting fingers—a wedding ring hung on one, as loose as a hoop thrown over the branch of a dead tree—and then he threw it back into drive as the figure raced for the far side of the street. And as Christine bore down again, the head had turned, throwing a terrified glance backward, and Arnie had seen the face of his mother… the face of Dennis Guilder… Leigh’s face, all eyes under a floating cloud of dark-blond hair… and finally his own face, the twisted mouth forming the words No! No! No!
Overriding everything, even the heavy thunder of the exhaust (something underneath had been damaged for sure), was LeBay’s rotting, triumphant voice, coming from a decayed larynx, passing lips that were already shrivelled away from the teeth and tattooed with a delicate spidering of dark green mould, LeBay’s triumphant, shrieking voice:
Here you go, you shitter! See how you like it!
There had been the heavy, mortal thud of Christine’s bumper striking flesh, the gleam of a pair of spectacles rising in the night air, turning over and over, and then Arnie had awakened in his room, curled into a trembling ball and clutching his pillow. It had been quarter of two in the morning, and his first feeling had been a great and terrible relief, relief that he was still alive. He was alive, LeBay was dead, and Christine was safe. The only three things in the world that mattered.
Oh but Arnie, how did you hurt your back?
Some voice inside, sly and insinuating—asking a question he was afraid to answer.
I hurt it at Philly Plains, he had told everyone. One of the junkers started to slip back down the ramp of Will’s flatbed and I pushed it back up—didn’t think about it; I just did it. Strained something really bad. So he had said. And one of the junkers had started to slip, and he had pushed it back up, but that hadn’t been how he hurt his back, had it? No.
That night after he and Leigh had found Christine smashed to hell in the parking lot, sitting on four slashed tyres… that night at Darnell’s, after everyone was gone… he had tuned the radio in Will’s office to the oldies on WDIL. Will trusted him now, why not? He was running cigarettes across the state line into New York, he was running fireworks all the way over to Burlington, and twice he had run something wrapped in flat brown-paper packages into Wheeling, where a young guy in an old Dodge Challenger traded him another, slightly larger, brown-paper package, for it. Arnie thought maybe he was trading cocaine for money, but he didn’t want to know for sure.
He drove a boat on these trips, Will’s private car, a 1966 Imperial as black as midnight in Persia. It was whisper-quiet, and the boot had a false bottom. If you kept to the speed limit, it was no problem. Why should it be? The important thing was that he now had the keys to the garage. He could come in after everyone else was gone. Like he had that night. And he had turned on WDIL and he had… he had…
Hurt his back somehow.
What had he been doing to hurt his back?
A strange phrase came to him in answer, floating up from his subconscious: It’s just a funny little glitch.
Did he really want to know? He didn’t. In fact, there were times when he didn’t want the car at all. There were times when he felt he would be better off just… well, junking it. Not that he ever would, or could. It was just that, sometimes (in the sweaty, shaking aftermath of that dream last night, for instance), he felt that if he got rid of it, he would be… happier.
The radio suddenly spat an almost feline burst of static.
“Don’t worry,” Arnie whispered. He ran his hand slowly over the dashboard, loving the feel of it. Yes, the car frightened him sometimes. And he supposed his father was right; it had changed his life to some degree. But he could no more junk it than he could commit suicide.
The static cleared. The Marvelettes were singing “Please Mr Postman”.
And then a voice said in his car, “Arnold Cunningham?” He jumped and snapped off the radio. He turned around. A small, dapper little man was leaning in Christine’s window. His eyes were a dark brown, and his colour was high—from the cold outside, Arnie guessed.
“Yes?”
“Rudolph Junkins. State Police, Detective Division.” Junkins stuck his hand in through the open window.
Arnie looked at it for a moment. So his father had been right.
He grinned his most charming grin, took the hand, shook it firmly, and said, “Don’t shoot, copper, I’ll throw out my guns.”
Junkins returned Arnie’s grin, but Arnie noticed that the grin did no more than touch his eyes, which were exploring the car in a quick, thorough fashion that Arnie didn’t like. Not at all.
“Whoo! I got the feeling from the local police that the guys who worked over your rolling iron had really tattooed it. It sure doesn’t look like it.”
Arnie shrugged and got out of the car. Friday nights were slow at the garage; Will himself rarely came in, and he wasn’t in tonight. Across the way, in stall ten, a fellow named Gabbs was putting a new silencer on his old Valiant, and down at the far end of the garage there was the periodic burr on an air wrench as some fellow put on his snow tyres. Otherwise, he and Junkins had the place to themselves.
“It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it looked,” Arnie said. He thought that this smiling, dapper little man might be extremely clever. As if it was a natural outgrowth of the thought, he rested his hand easily on Christine’s roof and immediately felt better. He could cope with this man, clever or not. After all, what was there to worry about? “There was no structural damage.”
“Oh? I understood they punched holes in the body with some sharp instrument,” Junkins said, looking closely at Christine’s flank. “I’ll be damned if I can see the fill. You must be a bodywork genius, Arnie. The way my wife drives, maybe I ought to put you on retainer,” He smiled disarmingly, but his eyes went on running back and forth over the car. They would dart momentarily to Arnie’s face and then go back to the car again. Arnie liked it less and less.
“I’m good but not God,” Arnie said. “You can see the bodywork if you really look for it.” He pointed at a minute ripple in Christine’s back deck. “And there.” He pointed at another. “I was lucky enough to find some original Plymouth body parts up in Ruggles, I replaced the entire back door on this side. You see the way the paint doesn’t quite match?” He knocked his knuckles on the door.
“Nope,” Junkins said. “I might be able to tell with a microscope, Arnie, but it looks like a perfect match to me.”
He also knocked his knuckles on the door. Arnie frowned.
“Hell of a job,” Junkins said. He walked slowly around to the front of the car. “Hell of a job, Arnie. You’re to be congratulated.”
“Thanks.” He watched as Junkins, in the guise of the sincere admirer, used his sharp brown eyes to look for suspicious dents, flaked paint, maybe a spot of blood or a snarl of matted hair. Looking for signs of Moochie Welch, Arnie was suddenly sure that was just what the shitter was doing. “What exactly can I do for you, Detective Junkins?”
Junkins laughed. “Man, that’s formal! I can’t take that! Make it Rudy, okay?”
“Sure,” Arnie said, smiling. “What can I do for you, Rudy?”
“You know, it’s funny,” Junkins said, squatting to look at the driver’s side headlights. He tapped one of them reflectively with his knuckles and then, with seeming absent-mindedness, he ran his forefinger along the headlight’s semicircular metal hood. His overcoat pooled on the oilstained cement floor for a moment; then he stood up. “We get reports on anything of this nature—the trashin of your car, I mean—”
“Oh, hey, they didn’t really trash it,” Arnie said. He was beginning to feel as if he was on a tightrope, and he touched Christine again. Her solidity, her reality, once more seemed to comfort him. “They tried, you know, but they didn’t do a very good job.”
“Okay. I guess I’m not up on the current terminology.” Junkins laughed. “Anyway, when it came to my attention, what do you think I said? “Where’s the photographs?” That’s what I said. I thought it was an oversight, you know. So I called the Libertyville PD and they said there were no photographs.”
“No,” Arnie said. “A kid my age can’t get anything but liability insurance, you know that. Even the liability comes with a seven-hundred-dollar deductible. If I had damage insurance, I would have taken plenty of pictures. But since I didn’t, why would I? I sure wouldn’t want them for my scrapbook.”
“No, I guess not,” Junkins said, and walked idly around to the rear of the car, eyes searching for broken glass, for scrapes, for guilt. “But you know what else I thought was funny? You didn’t even report the crime!” He raised his dark questioning eyes to Arnie’s, looked at him closely and then smiled a phony, bewildered little smile. “Didn’t even report it!” “Huh,” I said. “Sonofabitch! Who reported it?” “Guy’s father, they tell me.” Junkins shook his head. “I don’t get that, Arnie, I don’t mind telling you. A guy works his ass off restoring an old car until it’s worth two, maybe five thousand dollars, then some guys come along and beat the hell out of it—”
“I told you—”
Rudy Junkins raised his hand and smiled disarmingly. For one weird second Arnie thought he was going to say “Peace”, as Dennis sometimes did when things got heavy.
“Damaged it. Sorry.”
“Sure,” Arnie said.
“Anyhow, according to whiat your girlfriend said, one of the perpetrators… well, defecated on the dashboard. I would have thought you would have been mad as hell. I would have thought you would have reported it.”
Now the smile faded altogether and Junkins looked at Arnie soberly, even sternly.
Arnie’s cool grey eyes met Junkins’s brown ones.
“Shit wipes off,” he said finally. “You want to know something, Mr—Rudy? You want me to tell you something?”
“Sure, son.”
“When I was one and a half, I got hold of a fork and marked up an antique bureau that my mother had saved up for over a period of maybe five years. Saved up her pin money, that’s what she said. I guess I racked the hell out of it in a very short time. Of course I don’t remember it, but she says she just sat right down and bawled.” Arnie smiled a little, “Up until this year, I couldn’t feature my mother doing that. Now I think I can. Maybe I’m growing up a little, what do you think?”
Junkins lit a cigarette. “Am I missing the point, Arnie? Because I don’t see it yet.”
“She said that she would rather have had me in diapers until I was three than have had me do that. Because, she said, shit wipes off.” Arnie smiled. “You flush it away and it’s gone.”
“The way Moochie Welch is gone?” Junkins asked.
“I know nothing about that.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Scout’s honour?” Junkins asked. The question was humorous but the eyes were not; they probed at Arnie, looking for the smallest break, a crucial flicker.
Down the aisle, the fellow who had been putting on his winter snows dropped a tool on the concrete. It clanged musically and the fellow chanted, almost chorally, “Oh shit on you, you whore.”
Junkins and Arnie both glanced that way briefly, and the moment was broken.
“Sure, Scout’s honour,” Arnie said. “Look, I suppose you have to do this, it’s your job—”
“Sure its my job,” Junkins agreed softly. “The boy was run over three times each way. He was meat. They scraped him up with a shovel.”
“Come on,” Arnie said sickly. His stomach did a lazy barrel roll.
“Why? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with shit? Scrape it up with a shovel?”
“I had nothing to do with it!” Arnie cried, and the man across the way, who had been tinkering with his silencer looked up, startled.
Arnie lowered his voice.
“I’m sorry. I just wish you’d leave me alone. You know damn well I didn’t have anything to do with it. You just went over the whole car. If Christine had hit that Welch kid that many times and that hard, it would be all busted up. I know that much just from watching TV. And when I was taking Auto Shop II two years ago, Mr Smolnack said that the two best ways he knew to totally destroy a car’s front end was to either hit a deer or a person. He was joking a little, but he wasn’t kidding… if you know what I mean.” Arnie swallowed and heard a click in his throat, which was very dry.
“Sure,” Junkins said. “Your car looks all right. But you don’t, kid. You look like a sleepwalker. You look absolutely fucked over. Pardon my French.” He flicked his cigarette away. “You know something, Arnie?”
“What?”
“I think you’re lying faster than a horse can trot.” He slapped Christine’s hood. “Or maybe I should say faster than a Plymouth can run.”
Arnie looked at him, his hand on the outside mirror on the passenger side. He said nothing.
“I don’t think you’re lying about killing the Welch boy. But I think you’re lying about what they did to your car; your girl said they mashed the crap out of it, and she’s a hell of a lot more convincing than you are. She cried while she told me. She said there was broken glass everywhere… Where did you buy replacement glass, by the way?”
“McConnell’s,” Arnie said promptly. “In the Burg.”
“Still got the receipt?”
“Tossed it out.”
“But they’ll remember you. Big order like that.”
“They might,” Arnie said, “but I wouldn’t count on it, Rudy. They’re the biggest auto-glass specialists west of New York and east of Chicago. That covers a lot of ground. They do yea business, and a lot of it’s old cars.”
“Still, they’ll have the paperwork.”
“I paid cash.”
“But your name will be on the invoice.”
“No,” Arnie said, and smiled a wintry smile. “Darnell’s Do-It-Yourself Garage. That way I got a ten per cent discount.”
“You got it all covered, don’t you?”
“Lieutenant Junkins—”
“You’re lying about the glass too, although I’ll be goddamned if I know why.”
“You’d think Christ was lying on Calvary, that’s what I think,” Arnie said angrily. “Since when is it a crime to buy replacement glass if someone busts up your windows? Or pay cash? Or get a discount?”
“Since never,” Junkins said.
“Then leave me be.”
“More important, I think you’re lying about not knowing anything about what happened to the Welch boy. You know something. I want to know what.”
“I don’t know anything,” Arnie said.
“What about—”
“I don’t have anything more to say to you,” Arnie said. “I’m sorry.”
“All right,” Junkins said, giving up so quickly that Arnie was immediately suspicious. He rummaged around in the sportcoat he was wearing under his topcoat and took out his wallet. Arnie saw that Junkins was carrying a gun in a shoulder holster and suspected Junkins had wanted him to see it. He produced a card and gave it to Arnie. “I can be reached at either of those numbers, If you want to talk about anything. Anything at all.”
Arnie put the card in his breast pocket.
Junkins took one more leisurely stroll around Christine. “Hell of a restoration job,” he repeated. He looked squarely at Arnie. “Why didn’t you report it?”
Arnie let out a low shuddering sigh. “Because I thought that would be the end,” he said. “I thought they’d let off.”
“Yeah,” Junkins said. “I thought that might be it. Good night, son.”
“Good night.”
Junkins started away, turned, came back. “Think it over,” he said. “You really do look like hell, you know what I mean? You have a nice girl there. She’s worried about you, and she feels bad about what happened to your car. Your dad’s worried about you, too. I could get that even over the phone. Think it over and then give me a call, son. You’ll sleep better.”
Arnie felt something trembling behind his lips, something small and tearful, something that hurt. Junkins’s brown eyes were kind. He opened his mouth—God alone knew what might have spilled out—and then a monstrous jab of pain walloped him in the back, making him straighten suddenly. It also had the effect of a slap on a hysteric. He felt calmer, clear-headed again.
“Good night,” he repeated. “Good night, Rudy.”
Junkins looked at him a moment longer, troubled, and then left.
Arnie began to shake all over. The trembling started in his hands and spread up his forearms to his elbows, and then it was suddenly everywhere. He grabbed blindly for the doorhandle, found it at last, and slipped into Christine, into the comforting smells of car and fresh upholstery. He turned the key to ACC, the dash lights glowed, and he felt for the radio dial.
As he did so his eyes fell on the swinging leather tab with R.D.L. branded into it and his dream recurred with sudden terrible force: the rotting corpse sitting where he was sitting now; the empty eyesockets staring out through the windshield; the fingerbones gripping the wheel; the empty grin of the skull’s teeth as Christine bore down on Moochie Welch while the radio, tuned to WDIL, played “Last Kiss” by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers.
He suddenly felt sick—puking-sick. Nausea fluttered sickeningly in his stomach and in the back of his throat. Arnie scrambled out of the car and ran for the head, his footfalls hammering crazily in his cars. He just made it. Everything came up; he vomited again and again until there was nothing left but sour spit. Lights danced in front of his eyes. His ears rang and the muscles in his gut throbbed tiredly.
He looked at his pale, harried face in the spotty mirror, at the dark circles under his eyes and the lank spill of hair across his forehead, Junkins was right. He looked like hell.
But his pimples were all gone.
He laughed crazily. He wouldn’t give Christine up, no matter what. That was the one thing he wouldn’t do. He—
And suddenly he had to do it, again, only there was nothing left to come up: only ripping, clenching dry-heaves and that electric taste of spit in his mouth again.
He had to talk to Leigh. Quite suddenly he had to talk to Leigh.
He let himself into Will’s office, where the only sound was the thump of the time clock bolted on the wall turning up fresh minutes. He dialled the Cabots’ number from memory but miscued twice because his fingers were trembling so badly.
Leigh herself answered, her voice sounding sleepy.
“Arnie?”
“I have to talk to you, Leigh. I have to see you.”
“Arnie, it’s almost ten o’clock. I just got out of the shower and into bed… I was almost asleep.”
“Please,” he said, and shut his eyes.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “It can’t be tonight, my folks wouldn’t let me out so late—”
“It’s only ten. And it’s Friday.”
“They really don’t want me to see so much of you Arnie. They liked you at first, and my dad still does… but they both think you’ve gotten a little spooky.” There was a long, long pause at Leigh’s end. “I think you have, too,” she said finally.
“Does that mean you don’t want to see me anymore?” he asked dully. His stomach hurt, his back hurt, everything hurt.
“No.” Now the faintest reproach crept into her voice. “I was kind of getting the idea that you didn’t want to see me… not at school, and nights you’re always down there at the garage. Working on your car.”
“That’s all done,” he said. And then, with a monstrous effort: “It’s the car I want to—oww, goddammit!” He grabbed at his back, where there had been another huge bolt of pain, and got only a handful of back brace.
“Arnie?” She was alarmed. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah. I had a twinge in my back.”
“What were you going to say?”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll drive over to Baskin-Robbins and have an ice cream and maybe do some Christmas shopping and have some supper and I’ll have you home by seven. And I won’t be weird, I promise.”
She laughed a little, and Arnie felt a great, sweeping relief. It was like balm. “You dummy.”
“Does that mean okay?”
“Yes, it means okay.” Leigh paused and then said softly, “I said my parents didn’t want me to see so much of you. I didn’t say I wanted that.”
“Thanks,” he said, struggling to keep his voice steady. “Thanks for that.”
“What do you want to talk to me about?”
“Christine. I want to talk to you about her—and about my dreams. And about why I look like hell. And why I always want to listen to WDIL now, and about what I did that night after everyone was gone… the night I hurt my back. Oh Leigh I want—”
Another slash of pain up his back like cat’s claws.
“I think we just talked about it,” he said.
“Oh.” A slight, warm pause. “Good.”
“Leigh?”
“Umm.”
“There’ll be more time now. I promise. All the time you want.” And thought: Because now, with Dennis in the hospital, you’re all that’s left, all that’s left between me… me and…
“That’s good,” Leigh said.
“I love you.”
“Goodbye, Arnie.”
Say it back! he wanted to shout suddenly. Say it back, I need you to say it back!
But there was only the click of the phone in his ear.
He sat behind Will’s desk for a long time, head lowered, getting hold of himself. She didn’t need to say it back every time he said it to her, did she? He didn’t need reassurance that badly, did he? Did he?
Arnie got up and went to the door. She was coming out with him tomorrow, that was the important thing. They would do the Christmas shopping they had been planning on the day those shitters trashed Christine; they would walk and talk; they would have a good time. She would say she loved him.
“She’ll say it,” he whispered, standing in the doorway, but halfway down the left-hand side of the garage Christine sat like a mute and stupid denial, her grille poking forward as if hunting something.
And the voice whispered out of his lower consciousness, the dark questioning voice: How did you hurt your back? How did you hurt your back? How did you hurt your back, Arnie?
It was a question he shrank from. He was afraid of the answer.
LEIGH AND CHRISTINE
My baby drove up in a brand-new Cadillac,
She said, “Hey, come here, Daddy, I ain’t never comin back!”
Baby, baby, won’t you hear my plea?
Come on, sugar, come on back to me!
She said, “Balls to you, big daddy, I ain’t never comin back!”
— The Clash
It was a grey day, threatening snow, but Arnie was right on both counts—they had a good time and he wasn’t weird. Mrs Cabot had been at home when Arnie got there, and her initial reception was cool. But it was a long time—perhaps twenty minutes—before Leigh came downstairs, wearing a caramel-coloured sweater that clung lovingly to her breasts and a new pair of cranberry-coloured slacks that clung lovingly to her hips. This inexplicable lateness in a girl who was almost always perfectly on time might have been on purpose. Arnie asked her later and Leigh denied it with an innocence that was perhaps just a little too wide-eyed, but in any case it served its purpose.
Arnie could be charming when he had to be, and he went to work on Mrs Cabot with a will. Before Leigh finally came bouncing downstairs, twisting her hair into a ponytail, Mrs Cabot had thawed. She had gotten Arnie a Pepsi-Cola and was listening raptly as he regaled her with tales of the chess club.
“It’s the only civilized extra-curricular activity I’ve ever heard of,” she told Leigh, and smiled approvingly at Arnie.
“BORRRRR-ing,” Leigh trumpeted. She put an arm around Arnie’s waist and smacked him loudly on the cheek.
“Leigh Cabot!”
“Sorry, Mums, but he looks cute in lipstick, doesn’t he? Wait a minute, Arnie, I’ve got a Kleenex. Don’t claw at it.” She dug in her purse for a tissue. Arnie looked at Mrs Cabot and rolled his eyes. Natalie Cabot put a hand to her mouth and giggled. The rapprochement between her and Arnie was complete.
Arnie and Leigh went to Baskin-Robbins, where an initial awkwardness, left over from the phone conversation of the night before, finally melted away. Arnie had had a vague fear that Christine would not run well, or that Leigh would find something nasty to say about her; she had never liked riding in his car. Both were needless worries. Christine ran like a fine Swiss watch, and the only things Leigh had to say about her rang of pleasure and amazement.
“I never would have believed it,” she said as they drove out of the ice-cream parlour’s small parking lot and joined the flow of traffic beaded toward the Monroeville Mall. “You must have worked like a dog.”
“It wasn’t as bad as it probably looked to you,” Arnie said. “Mind some music?”
“No, of course not.”
Arnie turned on the radio—The Silhouettes were kip-kipping and boom-booming through “Get a Job.” Leigh made a face. “DIL, yuck. Can I change it?”
“Be my guest.”
Leigh switched it to a Pittsburgh rock station and got Billy Joel. “You may be right,” Billy admitted cheerfully, “I may be crazy.” This was followed by Billy telling his girl Virginia that Catholic girls started much too late—it was the Block Party Weekend. Now, Arnie thought. Now she’ll start to hitch… back off… something. But Christine only went rolling along.
The mall was thronged with hectic but mostly good-natured shoppers; the last frantic and sometimes ugly Christmas rush was better than two weeks off. The Yuletide spirit was still new enough to be novel, and it was possible to look at the tinsel strung through the wide mall hallways without feeling sour and Ebenezer Scroogey. The steady ringing of the Salvation Army Santas’ bells had not yet become a guilty annoyance; they still chanted good tidings and good will rather than the monotonous, metallic chant of The poor have no Christmas the poor have no Christmas the poor have no Christmas that Arnie always seemed to hear as the day grew closer and both the shopgirls and the Salvation Army Santas grew more harried and hollow-eyed.
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