“I’ll pick my own time and place,” LeBay said, and grinned with Arnie’s mouth, showing Arnie’s teeth, which were young and strong—a mouth still years from the indignity of dentures. “You won’t know when or where. But you’ll know… when the time comes.”
“Think again,” I said, almost casually. “Come to Darnell’s tonight, or she and I start talking tomorrow.”
He laughed, an ugly contemptuous sound. “And where will that get you? The asylum over at Reed City?”
“Oh, we won’t be taken seriously at first,” I said. “I give you that. But that stuff about how they put you in the loonybin as soon as you start talking about ghosts and demons… uh-uh, LeBay. Maybe in your day, before flying saucers and The Exorcist and that house in Amityville. These days a hell of a lot of people believe in that stuff.”
He was still grinning, but his eyes looked at me with narrow suspicion. That, and something else. I thought that something else was the first sparkle of fear.
“And what you don’t seem to realize is how many people know something is wrong.”
His grin faltered. Of course he must have realized that, and been worried about it. But maybe killing gets to be a fever; maybe after a while you are simply unable to stop and count the cost.
“Whatever weird, filthy kind of life you still have is all wrapped up in that car,” I said. “You knew it, and you planned to use Arnie from the very beginning—except that “planned” is the wrong word, because you never really planned anything, did you? You just followed your intuitions.”
He made a snarling sound and turned to go.
“You really want to think about it,” I called after him. “Arnie’s father knows something is rotten. So does mine. I think there must be some police somewhere who’d be willing to listen to anything about how their friend Junkins died. And it all comes back to Christine, Christine, Christine. Sooner or later someone’s going to run her through the crusher in the back of Darnell’s just on general principles.”
He had turned back and was looking at me with a bright mixture of hate and fear in his eyes.
“We’ll keep talking, and a lot of people will laugh at us, I don’t doubt it. But I’ve got two pieces of cast with Arnie’s signature on them. Only one of them isn’t his. It’s yours. I’ll take them to the state cops and keep pestering them until they have a handwriting specialist confirm that. People are going to start watching Arnie. People are going to start watching Christine too. You get the picture?”
“Sonny, you don’t worry me one fucking bit.” But his eyes said something different. I was getting to him, all right.
“It’s going to happen,” I said. “People are only rational on the surface. They still toss salt over their left shoulder if they spill the shaker, they don’t walk under ladders, they believe in survival after death. And sooner or later — probably sooner, with Leigh and me shooting off our mouths—someone is going to turn that car of yours into a sardine can. And I’m willing to bet that when it goes, you’ll go with it.”
“Don’t you just wish!” he sneered.
“We’ll be at Darnell’s tonight,” I said. “If you’re good, you can get rid of both of us. That won’t end it either, but it might give you some breathing space… time enough to get out of town. But I don’t think you’re good enough, chum. It’s gone on too long. We’re getting rid of you.”
I crutched back to my Duster and got in. I used the crutches more clumsily than I had to, tried to make myself look more incapacitated than I really was. I had rocked him by mentioning the signatures; it was time to leave before I overplayed my hand. But there was one more thing. One thing guaranteed to drive LeBay into a frenzy.
I pulled my left leg in with my hands, slammed the door, and leaned out.
I looked into his eyes and smiled.
“She’s great in bed,” I said. “Too bad you’ll never know.”
With a furious roar, he charged at me. I rolled up the window and slapped down the door-lock. Then, leisurely, I started the engine while he slammed his gloved fists on the glass. His face was snarling, terrible. There was no Arnie in it now. No Arnie at all. My friend was gone. I felt a dark sorrow that was deeper than tears or fear, but I kept that slow, insulting, dirty grin on my face. Then, slowly, I raised my middle finger to the glass.
“Fuck you, LeBay,” I said, and then pulled out, leaving him to stand there in the lot, shaking with that simple, unswerving fury his brother had told me of. It was that more than anything else that I was counting on to bring him tonight.
We’d see.
PETUNIA
Something warm was running in my eyes
But I found my baby somehow that night,
I held her tight, I kissed her our last kiss…
— J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers
I drove about four blocks before the reaction set in, and then I had to pull over. I had the shakes, bad. Not even the heater, turned up to full, could kill them. My breath came in harsh little gasps. I clutched myself to keep warm, but it seemed that I would never be warm again, never. That face, that horrible face, and Arnie buried somewhere inside, he’s always here, Arnie had said, always except when—what? When Christine rolled by herself, of course. LeBay couldn’t be both places at the same time. That was beyond even his powers.
At last I was able to drive on again, and I wasn’t even aware that I had been crying until I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the wet circles under my eyes.
It was quarter to ten by the time I made it out to Johnny Pomberton’s place. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing green gum-rubber boots and a heavy red-and-black-checked hunting jacket. An old hat with a grease-darkened bill was tilted up on his balding head as he studied the grey sky.
“More snow comin, the radio says. Didn’t know as you’d really be out, boy, but I brung her around forya just in case. What do you think of her?”
I got my crutches under me again and got out of my car.
Road salt gritted under the crutches’ rubber tips, but the going felt safe. Standing in front of Johnny Pomberton’s woodpile was one of the strangest-looking vehicles I’ve ever seen in my life. A faint, pungent odour, not exactly pleasant, drifted over from it to where we stood.
At one time, far back in its career, it had been a GM product—or so the logo on its gigantic snout advertised. Now it was a little bit of everything. One thing it surely was, and that was big. The top of its grille would have been head-high on a tall man. Behind and over it, the cab loomed like a big square helmet. Behind that, supported by two sets of double wheels on each side, was a long, tubular body, like the body of a gasoline tanker truck.
Except that I never saw a tanker truck before this one that was painted bright pink. The word PETUNIA was written across the side in Roman gothic letters two feet high.
“I don’t know what to think of her,” I said. “What is she?”
Pomberton poked a Camel cigarette into his mouth and lit it with a quick flick of his horny thumbnail on the tip of a wooden match. “Kaka sucker,” he said.
“What?”
He grinned. “Twenty-thousand-gallon capacity,” he said. “She’s a corker, is Petunia.”
“I don’t get you.” But I was starting to. There was an absurd, grisly irony to it that Arnie—the old Arnie would have appreciated.
I had asked Pomberton over the phone if he had a big, heavy truck to rent, and this was the biggest one currently in his yard. All four of his dump trucks were working, two in Libertyville and two others in Philly Hill. He’d had a grader, he explained to me, but it had had a nervous bustdown just after Christmas. He said he was having a devilish job keeping his trucks rolling since Darnell’s Garage shut down.
Petunia was essentially a tanker, no more and no less. Her job was pumping out septic systems.
“How much does she weigh?” I asked Pomberton.
He flicked away his cigarette. “Dry, or loaded with shit?”
I gulped. “Which is it now?”
He threw his head back and laughed. “Do you think I’d rentcher a loaded truck?” He pronounced it ludded truck. “Naw, naw—she’s dry, dry as a bone and all hosed out. Sure she is. Still a little fragrant, though, ain’t she?”
I sniffed. She was fragrant, all right.
“It could be a lot worse,” I said. “I guess.”
“Sure,” Pomberton said. “You bet, Old Petunia’s original pedigree was lost long ago, but what’s on her current registration is eighteen thousand pounds, GVW.”
“What’s that?”
“Gross vehicle weight,” he said. “If they pull you over on the Interstate and you weigh more than eighteen thousand the ICC gets upset. Dry, she prob’ly goes around, I dunno, eight-nine thousand Pounds. She’s got a five-speed tranny with a two-speed differential, giving you ten forward speeds all told… if you can run a clutch.”
He cast a dubious eye up and down my crutches and lit another cigarette.
“Can you run a clutch?”
“Sure,” I said with a straight face. “If it isn’t really stiff.” But for how long? That was the question.
“Well, that’s your business and I won’t mess into it.” He looked at me brightly. “I’ll give you a ten per cent discount for cash, on account of I don’t usually report cash transactions to my favourite uncle.”
I checked my wallet and found three twenties and three tens. “How much did you say for one day?”
“How does ninety bucks sound?”
I gave it to him. I had been prepared to pay a hundred and twenty.
“What are you going to do with your Duster there?”
It hadn’t even crossed my mind until just now. “Could I leave it here? Just for today?”
“Sure,” Pomberton said, “you can leave it here all week, I don’t give a shit. Just put it around the back and leave the keys in it in case I have to move it.”
I drove around back where there was a wilderness of cannibalized truck parts poking out of the deep snow like bones from white sand. It took me nearly ten minutes to work my way back around on my crutches. I could have done it faster if I’d used my left leg a bit, but I wouldn’t do that. I was saving it for Petunia’s clutch.
I approached Petunia, feeling dread gather in my stomach like a small black cloud. I had no doubt it would stop Christine… if she really showed up at Darnell’s Garage tonight and if I could drive the damned truck. I had never driven anything that big in my life, although the summer before I’d gotten some hours in on a bulldozer and Brad Jeffries had let me try the payloader a couple of times after knocking off for the day.
Pomberton stood there in his checked jacket, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his workpants, watching me with wise eyes. I got over to the driver’s side, grabbed the doorhandle, and slipped a little. He took a step or two toward me.
“I can make it.”
“Sure,” he said.
I jammed the crutch into my armpit again, my breath frosting out in quick little gasps, and pulled the door open. Holding onto the door’s inside handle with my left hand and balancing on my right leg like a stork, I threw my crutches into the cab and then followed them. The keys were in the ignition, the shift pattern printed on the stick. I slammed the door, pushed the clutch down with my left leg—not much pain, so far so good—and started Petunia up. Her engine sounded like a full field of stockers at Philly Plains.
Pomberton strolled over. “Little noisy, ain’t she?” he yelled.
“Sure!” I screamed back.
“You know,” he bellowed, “I doubt like hell if you got an I on your licence, boy.” An I on your licence meant that the state had tested you on the big trucks. I had an A for motorcycles (much to my mother’s horror) but no I.
I grinned down at him. “You never checked because I looked trustworthy.”
He smiled back. “Sure.”
I revved the engine a little. Petunia blew off two brisk backfires that were almost as loud as mortar blasts.
“You mind if I ask what-you-want that truck for? None of my business, I know.”
“Just what it was meant for,” I said.
“Beggin your pardon?”
“I want to get rid of some shit,” I said.
I had something of a scare going downhill from Pomberton’s place; even dry and empty, that baby really got rolling. I seemed incredibly high up—able to look down on the roofs of the cars I passed. Driving through downtown Libertyville, I felt as conspicuous as a baby whale in a goldfish pond. It didn’t help any that Pomberton’s septic pumper was painted that bright pink colour. I got some amused glances.
My left leg had begun to ache a little, but running through Petunia’s unfamiliar gear pattern in the stop-and-go downtown traffic kept my mind off it. A more surprising ache was developing in my shoulders and across my chest; it came from simply piloting Petunia through traffic. The truck was not equipped with power steering, and that wheel really turned hard.
I turned off Main, onto Walnut, and then into the parking lot behind the Western Auto. I got carefully down from Petunia’s cab, slammed her door (my nose had already become used to the faint odour she gave off), set my crutches under me, and went in the back entrance.
I got the three garage keys off Jimmy’s ring and took them over to the key-making department. For one-eighty, I got two copies of each. I put the new keys in one pocket, Jimmy’s ring, with his original keys reattached, in the other. I went out the front door, onto Main Street, and down to the Libertyville Lunch, where there was a pay telephone. Overhead, the sky was greyer and more lowering than ever. Pomberton was right. There would be snow.
Inside, I ordered a coffee and Danish and got change for the telephone booth. I went inside, closed the door clumsily behind me, and called Leigh. She answered on the first ring.
“Dennis! Where are you?”
“The Libertyville Lunch. Are you alone?”
“Yes. Dad’s at work and Mom went grocery shopping. Dennis, I… I almost told her everything. I started thinking about her parking at the A&P and crossing the parking lot, and… I don’t know, what you said about Arnie leaving town didn’t seem to matter. It still made sense, but it didn’t seem to matter. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking about giving Ellie a lift down to Tom’s the night before, even though my leg was aching like hell by then. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“Dennis, it can’t go on like this. I’ll go crazy. Are we still going to try your idea?”
“Yes,” I said. “Leave your mom a note, Leigh. Tell her you have to be gone for a little while. Don’t say any more than that. When you’re not home for supper, your folks will probably call mine. Maybe they’ll decide we ran off and eloped.”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” she said, and laughed in a way that gave me prickles. “I’ll see you.”
“Hey, one other thing. Is there any pain-killer in your house? Darvon? Anything like that?”
“There’s some Darvon from the time Dad threw his back out,” she said. “Is it your leg, Dennis?”
“It hurts a little.”
“How much is a little?”
“It’s really okay.”
“No B.S.?”
“No B.S. And after tonight I’ll give it a nice long rest, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Get here as quick as you can.”
She came in as I was ordering a second cup of coffee, wearing a fur-fringed parka and a pair of faded jeans. The jeans were tucked into battered Frye boots. She managed to look both sexy and practical. Heads turned.
“Looking good,” I said, and kissed her temple.
She passed me a bottle of grey and pink gel capsules.
“You don’t look so hot, though, Dennis. Here.”
The waitress, a woman of about fifty with iron-grey hair, came over with my coffee. The cup sat placidly, an island in a small brown pond in the saucer. “Why aren’t you kids in school?” she asked.
“Special dispensation,” I said gravely. She stared at me.
“Coffee, please,” Leigh said, pulling off her gloves. As the waitress went back behind the counter with an audible sniff, she leaned toward me and said, “It would be pretty funny if we got picked up by the truant officer, wouldn’t it?”
“Hilarious,” I said, thinking that, in spite of the radiance the cold had given her, Leigh really wasn’t looking all that good. I didn’t think either of us really would be until this thing was over. There were small strain-lines around her eyes, as if she had slept poorly the night before.
“So what do we do?”
“We get rid of it,” I said. “Wait until you see your chariot, madam.”
“My God!” Leigh said, staring at Petunia’s hot-pink magnificence. It bulked silently in the Western Auto parking lot, dwarfing a Chevy van on one side and a Volkswagen on the other. “What is it?”
“Kaka sucker,” I said with a straight face.
She looked at me, puzzled… and then she burst into hysterical gales of laughter. I wasn’t sorry to see it happen. When I had told her about my confrontation with Arnie in the student parking lot that morning, those strain-lines on her face had grown deeper and deeper, her lips whitening as they pressed together.
“I know that it looks sort of ridiculous—” I said now.
“That’s putting it mildly,” she replied, still giggling and hiccupping.
“—but it’ll do the job, if anything will.”
“Yes. Yes, I suppose it should. And… it’s not exactly unfitting, is it?”
I nodded. “I had that thought.”
“Well, let’s get in,” she said. “I’m cold.”
She climbed up into the cab ahead of me, her nose wrinkling. “Ag,” she said.
I smiled. “You get used to it.” I handed her my crutches and climbed laboriously up behind the wheel. The pain in my left leg had subsided from a series of sharp clawings to a dull throb again; I had taken two Darvon back in the restaurant.
“Dennis, is your leg going to be all right?”
“It’ll have to be,” I said, and slammed the door.
CHRISTINE
As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking,—
John I sd, which was not his name,
the darkness surrounds us, what can we do against it,
or else, shall we & why not,
buy a goddam big car,
drive, he sd, for christ’s sake,
look out where yr going.
— Robert Creeley
It was eleven-thirty or so when we pulled out of the Western Auto parking lot. The first spats of snow were coming down. I drove across town to the Sykes’s house, changing gear more easily now as the Darvon took hold.
The house was dark and locked, Mrs Sykes maybe at work, Jimmy maybe off collecting his unemployment or something. Leigh found a crumpled-up envelope in her handbag, scratched off her address and wrote Jimmy Sykes across the front in her slanting, pretty hand. She put Jimmy’s keyring into the envelope, folded in the flap, and slipped it through the letter-slot in the front door. While she did that, I let Petunia idle in neutral, resting my leg.
“What now?” she asked, climbing back into the cab.
“Another phone call,” I said.
Out near the intersection of JFK Drive and Crescent Avenue, I found a telephone booth. I got carefully out of the truck, holding on until Leigh handed down my crutches. Then I made my way carefully through the thickening snow to the booth. Seen through the dirty phone-booth glass and the swirling snow, Petunia looked like some strange pink dinosaur.
I called Horlicks University and went through the switchboard to get Michael’s office. Arnie had told me once that his dad was a real office drone, always brown-bagging it at lunch and staying in. Now, as the phone was picked up on the second ring, I blessed him for it.
“Dennis! I tried to reach you at home! Your mom said—”
“Where’s he going?” My stomach was cold. It wasn’t until then—at that exact moment—that all of it began to seem completely real to me, and I began to think that this crazy confrontation was going to come off.
“How did you know he was going? You’ve got to tell me—”
“I don’t have time for questions, and I couldn’t answer them anyway. Where is he going?”
Slowly, he said, “He and Regina are going to Penn State this afternoon right after school. Arnie called her this morning and asked her if she’d go with him. He said…” He paused, thinking. “He said he felt as if he’d suddenly come to his senses. He said it just sort of hit him as he was going to school this morning that if he didn’t do something definite about college, it might slip away from him. He told her he’d decided Penn State was the best bet and asked her if she’d like to go up with him and help talk to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and to some of the people in the history and philosophy departments.”
The booth was cold. My hands were starting to go numb. Leigh was high up in Petunia’s wheelhouse, watching me anxiously. How well you arranged things, Arnie, I thought. Still the chess-player. He was manipulating his mother, putting her on strings and making her dance. I felt some pity for her, but not as much as I might have felt. How many times had Regina herself been the manipulator, dancing others across her stage like so many Punch and Judys? Now, white she was half-distracted with fear and shame, LeBay had dangled in front of her eyes the one thing absolutely guaranteed to make her come running: the possibility that things might just be returning to normal.
“And did all that ring true to you?” I asked Michael.
“Of course not!” he burst out. “It wouldn’t have rung true to her, if she was thinking straight! With college admissions what they are today, Penn State would enrol him in July, if he had the money for tuition and the College Board scores—and Arnie has both. He talked as if this were the fifties instead of the seventies!”
“When are they leaving?”
“She’s going to meet him at the high school after period six; that’s what she said when she called me. He’s getting a dismissal slip.”
That meant they would be leaving Libertyville in less than an hour and a half. So I asked the last question, even though I already knew the answer. “They’re not taking Christine, are they?”
“No, they’re going in the station wagon. She was delirious with joy, Dennis. Delirious. That business of getting her to go with him to Penn State… that was inspired. Wild horses wouldn’t have kept Regina from a chance like that. Dennis, what’s going on? Please.”
“Tomorrow,” I said. “That’s a promise. Firm. Meantime, you’ve got to do something for me. It could be a matter of life and death for my family and for Leigh Cabot’s family. You—”
“Oh my God,” he said hoarsely. He spoke in the voice of a man for whom a great light has just dawned. “He’s been gone every time—except when the Welch boy was killed, and that time he was… Regina saw him asleep, and I’m sure she wasn’t lying about that… Dennis, who’s driving that car? Who’s using Christine to kill people when Arnie isn’t here?”
I almost told him, but it was cold in the telephone booth and my leg was starting to ache again, and that answer would have led to other questions, dozens of them. And even then the only final result might be a flat refusal to believe.
“Michael, listen,” I said, speaking with all the deliberateness I could summon. For one weird moment I felt like Mister Rogers on TV. A big car from the 1950s is coming to eat you up, boys and girls… Can you say Christine? I knew you could! “You’ve got to call my father and Leigh’s father. Have both families get together at Leigh’s house.” I was thinking of brick, good solid brick. “I think maybe you ought to go too, Michael. All of you stay together until Leigh and I get there or until I call. But you tell them for Leigh and me: They’re not to go outside after”—I calculated: If Arnie and Regina left the high school at two, how long before his alibi would be cast-iron-watertight?—“after four o’clock this afternoon. After four, none of you goes out on the street. Any street. Under no circumstances.”
“Dennis, I can’t just—”
“You have to,” I said. “You’ll be able to convince my old man, and between the two of you, you should be able to convince Mr and Mrs Cabot. And stay away from Christine yourself, Michael.”
“They’re leaving right from school,” Michael said. “He said the car would be all right in the school parking lot.”
I could hear it in his voice again—his knowledge of the lie. After what had happened last fall, Arnie would no more leave Christine in a public parking lot than he would show up in Calc class naked.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “But if you should happen to look out the window and see her in the driveway anyhow, stay clear. Do you understand?”
“Yes, but—”
“Call my father first. Promise me.”
“All right, I promise… but Dennis—”
“Thank you, Michael.”
I hung up. My hands and feet were numb with the cold, but my forehead was slick with sweat. I pushed the door of the phone booth open with the tip of one crutch and worked my way back to Petunia.
“What did he say?” Leigh asked. “Did he promise?”
“Yes,” I said. “He promised and my dad will see that they get together. I’m pretty sure of that. If Christine goes for anyone tonight, it will have to be us.”
“All right,” she said. “Good.”
I threw Petunia into gear, and we rumbled away. The stage was set—as well as I could set it, anyway—and now there was really nothing to do but wait and see what would come.
We drove a-cross town to Darnell’s Garage through steady light snow, and I pulled into the parking lot at just past one that afternoon. The long, rambling building with its corrugated-steel sides was totally deserted, and Petunia’s bellyhigh wheels cut through deep, unploughed snow to stop in front of the main door. The signs bolted to that door were the same as they had been on that long-ago August evening when Arnie first drove Christine there—SAVE MONEY! YOUR KNOW-HOW, OUR TOOLS! Garage Space Rented by the Week, Month, or Year, and HONK FOR ENTRY—but the only one that really meant anything was the new one leaning in the darkened office window: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Sitting in one corner of the snowy front lot was an old crumpled Mustang, one of the real door-suckers from the ’60s. Now it sat silent and broody under a shroud of snow.
“It’s creepy,” Leigh said in a low voice.
“Yeah. It sure is.” I gave her the keys I’d made at the Western Auto that morning. “One of these will do it.”
She took the keys, got out, and walked over to the door. I kept an eye in both rearview mirrors while she fumbled at the lock, but we didn’t seem to be attracting any undue attention. I suppose there is a certain psychology involved in seeing such a big, conspicuous vehicle—it makes the idea of something clandestine or illegal harder to swallow.
Leigh suddenly tugged hard on the door, stood up, tugged again, and then came back to the truck. “I got the key to turn, but I can’t get the door up,” she said. “I think it’s frozen to the ground or something.”
Great, I thought. Wonderful. None of this was going to come easily.
“Dennis, I’m sorry,” she said, seeing it on my face.
“No, it’s all right,” I said. I opened the driver’s door and performed another of my comical sliding exits.
“Be careful,” she said anxiously, walking beside me with her arm around my waist as I crutched carefully through the snow to the door. “Remember your leg.”
“Yes, Mother,” I said, grinning a little. I stood in profile to the door when I got there so I could bend down to the right and keep my weight off my bad leg. Bent over in the snow, left leg in the air, left hand holding onto my crutches, right hand grasping the roll-up door’s handle, I must have looked like a circus contortionist. I pulled and felt the door give a little… but not quite enough. She was right; it had iced up pretty good along the bottom. You could hear it crackling.
“Grab on and help me,” I said.
Leigh placed both of her hands over my right hand and we pulled together. That crackling sound became a little louder, but still the ice wouldn’t quite give up its grip on the foot of the door.
“We’ve almost got it,” I said. My right leg was throbbing unpleasantly, and sweat was running down my cheeks. “I’ll count. On three, give it all you’ve got. Okay?”
“Yes,” she said.
“One… two… three!”
What happened was the door came free of the ice all at once, with absurd, deadly ease. It flew upwards on its tracks, and I stumbled backward, my crutches flying. My left leg folded underneath me and I landed on it. The deep snow cushioned the fall somewhat, but I still felt the pain as a kind of silver bolt that seemed to ram upward from my thigh all the way to my temples and back down again. I clenched my teeth over a scream, barely keeping it in, and then Leigh was on her knees in the snow beside me, her arm around my shoulders.
“Dennis! Are you all right?”
“Help me up.”
She had to do most of the pulling, and both of us were gasping like winded runners by the time I was on my feet again with my crutches propped under me. Now I really needed them. My left leg was in agony.
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