Will screamed and couldn’t hear himself over the blatting roar of her engine. The Sears Muzzler silencer 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 exhaust pipe.
“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 them 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 tyre 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 struck 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 centre 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 tyres 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 tyres 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 gearstick 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 tyres 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 gearsticklever 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 up 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 tyres 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 bonnet began to reappear, from the windscreen end down, looking weirdly like a scarf or cardigan being knitted by invisible needles; the raw metal drew itself out of nothing, gleamed steel-grey, and then darkened to red as if filling with blood.
The cracks in the windscreen 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 milometer spun smoothly backward.
Forty-five minutes later she sat in the darkness of 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 swirled across the ripped and tattered seats, their balding floor carpets.
Her engine ticked slowly, cooling.
Part III
CHRISTINE—TEENAGE DEATH-SONGS
LEIGH COMES TO VISIT
James Dean in that Mercury ’49,
Junior Johnson Bonner through the woods o’ Caroline
Even Burt Reynolds in that black Trans-Am,
All gonna meet down at the Cadillac Ranch.
— Bruce Springsteen
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 reading “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 see you 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 light, 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 colour 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 failing 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 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 in 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 the 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 checks. “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 winterlight 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, the 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 tyres.
I took her hands 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 “You’re doing it too,” she said softly.
“What?”
“Calling it she.”
I nodded, not letting go of her hands. “Yeah. I know. It’s hard to stop. The thing is, Arnie wanted her—or it, or whatever that car is—from the first time he laid eyes on her. And I think now… I didn’t then, but I do now… that LeBay wanted Arnie to have her just as badly, that he would have given her to him if it had come to that. It’s like Arnie saw Christine and knew, and then LeBay saw Arnie and knew the same thing.”
Leigh pulled her hands free of mine and began to rub her elbows restlessly again. “Arnie said he paid—”
“He paid, all right. And he’s still paying. That is, if Arnie’s left at all.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I’ll show you,” I said, “in a few minutes. First, let me give you the background.”
“All right.”
“LeBay had a wife and daughter. This was back in the fifties. His daughter died beside the road. She choked to death. On a hamburger.”
Leigh’s face grew white, then whiter; for a moment she seemed as milky and translucent as clouded glass.
“Leigh!” I said sharply. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said with a chilling placidity. Her colour didn’t improve. Her mouth moved in a horrid grimace that was perhaps intended to be a reassuring smile. “I’m fine.” She stood up. “Where is the bathroom, please?”
“There’s one at the end of the hall,” I said. “Leigh, you look awful.”
“I’m going to vomit,” she said in that same placid voice, and walked away. She moved jerkily now, like a puppet, all the dancer’s grace I had seen in her shadow now gone. She walked out of the room slowly, but when she was out of sight the rhythm of her stride picked up; I heard the bathroom door thrown open, and then the sounds. I leaned back against the sofa and put my hands over my eyes.
When she came back she was still pale but had regained a touch of her colour. She had washed her face and there were still a few drops of water on her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s all right. It just… startled me.” She smiled wanly. “I guess that’s an understatement.” She caught my eyes with hers. “Just tell me one thing, Dennis. What you said. Is it true? Really true?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s true. And there’s more. But do you really want to hear any more?”
“No,” she said. “But tell me anyway.”
“We could drop it,” I said, not really believing it.
Her grave, distressed eyes held mine. “It might be… safer… if we didn’t,” she said.
“His wife committed suicide shortly after their daughter died.”
“The car…”
“… was involved.”
“How?”
“Leigh—”
“How?
So I told her—not just about the little girl and her mother, but about LeBay himself, as his brother George had told me, His bottomless reservoir of anger. The kids who had made fun of his clothes and his bowl haircut. His escape into the Army, where everyone’s clothes and haircuts were the same. The motor pool. The constant railing at the shitters, particularly those shitters who brought him their big expensive cars to be fixed at government expense. The Second World War. The brother, Drew, killed in France. The old Chevrolet. The old Hudson Hornet. And through it all, a steady and unchanging backbeat, the anger.
“That word,” Leigh murmured.
“What word?”
“Shitters.” She had to force herself to say it, her nose wrinkling in rueful and almost unconscious distaste. “He uses it. Arnie.”
“I know.”
We looked at each o her, and her hands found mine again.
“You’re cold,” I said. Another bright remark from that fount of wisdom, Dennis Guilder. I got a million of em.
“Yes. I feel like I’ll never be warm again.”
I wanted to put my arms around her and didn’t. I was afraid to. Arnie was still too much mixed up in things. The most awful thing—and it was awful—was how it seemed more and more that he was dead… dead, or under some weird enchantment.
“Did his brother say anything else?”
“Nothing that seems to fit.” But a memory rose like a bubble in still water and popped: He was obsessed and he was angry, but he was not a monster, George LeBay had told me. At least… I don’t think he was. It had seemed that, lost in the past as he had been, he had been about to say something more… and then had realized where he was and that he was talking to a stranger. What had he been about to say?”
All at once I had a really monstrous idea. I pushed it away. It went… but it was hard work, pushing that idea.
Like pushing a piano. And I could still see its outlines in the shadows.
I became aware that Leigh was looking at me very closely, and I wondered how much of what I had been thinking showed on my face.
“Did you take Mr LeBay’s address?” she said.
“No.” I thought for a moment, and then remembered the funeral, which now seemed impossibly far back in time. “But I imagine the Libertyville American Legion Post has it. They buried LeBay and contacted the brother. Why?”
Leigh only shook her head and went to the window, where she stood looking out into the blinding day. Shank of the year, I thought randomly.
She turned back to me, and I was struck by her beauty again, calm and undemanding except for those high, arrogant cheekbones—the sort of cheekbones you might expect to see on a lady probably carrying a knife in her belt.
“You said you’d show me something,” she said. “What was it?”
I nodded. There was no way to stop now. The chain reaction had started. There was no way to shut it down.
“Go upstairs,” I said, “My room’s the second door on the left. Look in the third drawer of my dresser. You’ll have to dig under some of my undies, but they won’t bite.”
She smiled—only a little, but even a little was an improvement”. “And what am I going to find? A Baggie of dope?”
“I gave that up last year,” I said, smiling back. “’Ludes this year. I finance my habit selling heroin down at the junior high.”
“What is it? Really?”
“Arnie’s autograph,” I said, “immortalized on plaster.”
“His autograph?”
I nodded. “In duplicate.”
She found them, and five minutes later we were on the couch again, looking at the two squares of plaster cast. They sat side by side on the glass-topped coffee table, slightly ragged on the sides, a little the worse for wear. Other names danced off into limbo on one of them. I had saved the casts, had even directed the nurse on where to cut them, Later I bad cut out the two squares, one from the right leg, one from the left.
We looked at them silently: on the right; on the left.
Leigh looked at me, questioning and puzzled. “Those are pieces of your—”
“My casts, yeah.”
“Is it… a joke, or something?”
“No joke. I watched him sign both of them.” Now that it was out, there was a queer kind of loosening, or relief. It was good to be able to share this. It had been on my mind for a long time, itching and digging away.
“But they don’t look anything alike.”
“You’re telling me,” I said. “But Arnie isn’t much like he used to be either. And it all goes back to that goddam car.” I poked savagely at the square of plaster on the left. “That isn’t his signature. I’ve known Arnie almost all my life. I’ve seen his homework papers, I’ve seen him send away for things, I’ve watched him endorse his paycheques, and that is not his signature. The one on the left, yes. This one, no. You want to do something for me tomorrow, Leigh?”
“What?”
I told her. She nodded slowly. “For us.”
“Huh?”
“I’ll do it for us. Because we have to do something, don’t we?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess so. You mind a personal question?” She shook her head, her remarkable blue eyes never leaving mine.”
“How have you been sleeping lately?”
“Not so well,” she said. “Bad dreams. How about you?”
“No. Not so good.
And then, because I couldn’t help myself anymore, I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her. There was a momentary hesitation, and I thought she was going to draw away… then her chin came up and she kissed me back, firmly and fully. Maybe it was sort of lucky at that, me being mostly immobilized.
When the kiss was over she looked into my eyes, questioning.
“Against the dreams,” I said, thinking it would come out stupid and phony-smooth, the way it looks on paper, but instead it sounded shaky and almost painfully honest.
“Against the dreams,” she repeated gravely, as if it were a talisman, and this time she inclined her head towards me and we kissed again with those two ragged squares of plaster staring up at us like blind white eyes with Arnie’s name written across them. We kissed for the simply animal comfort that comes with animal contact—sure, that, and something more, starting to be something more—and then we held each other without talking, and I don’t think we were kidding ourselves about what was happening—at least not entirely. It was comfort, but it was also good old sex—full, ripe, and randy with teenage hormones. And maybe it had a chance to be something fuller and kinder than just sex.
But there was something else in those kisses—I knew it, she knew it, and probably you do too. That other thing was a shameful sort of betrayal. I could feel eighteen years of memories cry out—the ant farms, the chess games, the movies, the things he had taught me, the times I had kept him from getting killed. Except maybe in the end, I hadn’t. Maybe I had seen the last of him—and a poor, rag-tag end at that—on Thanksgiving night, when he brought me the turkey sandwiches and beer.
I don’t think it occurred to either of us until then that we had done nothing unforgivable to Arnie—nothing that might anger Christine.
But now, of course, we had.
DETECTIVE WORK
Well, when the pipeline gets broken
And I’m lost on the river-bridge,
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