I had had enough of Christine, but I still cared for Arnie. Which meant that door had to be closed for good. No more creeping around and asking questions. No more lectures.
“Nothing,” I said. “I was just going to say that I guess you found a home for your rustbucket. Congratulations.”
“Dennis, are you eating something?”
“Yeah, a chicken sandwich. Why?”
“You’re chewing in my ear. It really sounds gross.”
I began to smack as loudly as I could. Arnie made puking sounds. We both got laughing, and it was good—it was like the old days before he married that numb fucking car.
“You’re an asshole, Dennis.”
“That’s right. I learned it from you.
“Get bent,” he said, and hung up.
I finished my sandwich and my Hawaiian Punch, rinsed the plate and the glass and went back into the living room, ready to shower and go to bed. I was beat.
Sometime during our phone conversation I had heard the TV go off and had assumed that my father had gone upstairs. But he hadn’t. He was sitting in his recliner chair with his shirt open. I noticed with some unease how grey the hair on his chest was getting, and the way the reading lamp beside him shone through the hair on his head and showed his pink scalp. Getting thinner up there. My father was no kid. I realized with greater unease that in five years, by the time I would theoretically finish college, he would be fifty and balding—a stereotype accountant. Fifty in five years if he didn’t just drop dead of another heart attack. The first one had not been bad—no myocardial scarring, he had told me on the one occasion I had asked. But he did not try to tell me that a second heart attack wasn’t likely. I knew it was, my mom knew it was, and he did too. Only Ellie still thought he was invulnerable—but hadn’t I seen a question in her eyes once or twice? I thought maybe I had.
Died suddenly.
I felt the hairs on my scalp stir. Suddenly. Straightening up at his desk, clutching his chest. Suddenly. Dropping his racket on the tennis court. You didn’t want to think those thoughts about your father, but sometimes they come. God knows they do.
“I couldn’t help overhearing some of that,” he said.
“Yeah?” Warily.
“Has Arnie Cunningham got his foot in a bucket of something warm and brown, Dennis?”
“I… I don’t know for sure,” I said slowly. Because, after all, what did I have? Vapours, that was all.
“You want to talk about it?”
“Not right now, Dad, if it’s okay.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “But if it… as you said on the phone, if it gets heavy, will you for God’s sake tell me what’s happening?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” I started for the Stairs and was almost there when he stopped me by saying, “I ran Will Darnell’s accounts and did his income-tax returns for almost fifteen years, you know.”
I turned back to him, really surprised.
“No. I didn’t know that.”
My father smiled. It was a smile I had never seen before, one I would guess my mother had seen only a few times, my sis maybe not at all. You might have thought it was a sleepy sort of smile at first, if you looked more closely you would have seen that it was not sleepy at all—it was cynical and hard and totally aware.
“Can you keep your mouth shut about something, Dennis?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”
“Don’t just think so.”
“Yes. I can.”
“Better. I did his figures up until 1975, and then he got Bill Upshaw over in Monroeville.”
My father looked at me closely.
“I won’t say that Bill Upshaw is a crook, but I will say that his scruples are thin enough to read a newspaper through. And last year he bought himself a $300,000 English Tudor in Sewickley, Damn the interest rates, full speed ahead.”
He gestured at our own home with a small sweep of his right arm and then let it drop back into his own lap. He and my mother had bought it the year before I was born for $62,000—it was now worth maybe $150,000—and they had only recently gotten their paper back from the bank. We had a little party in the back yard late last summer; Dad lit the barbecue, put the pink slip on the long fork, and each of us got a chance at holding it over the coals until it was gone.
“No English Tudor here, huh, Denny?” he said.
“It’s fine,” I said. I came back and sat down on the couch.
“Darnell and I parted amicably enough,” my father went on, “not that I ever cared very much for him in a personal way. I thought he was a wretch.”
I nodded a little, because I liked that; it expressed my gut feelings about Will Darnell better than any profanity could.
“But there’s all the difference in the world between a personal relationship and a business relationship. You learn that very quickly in this business, or you give it up and start selling Fuller Brushes door-to-door. Our business relationship was good, as far as it went… but it didn’t go far enough. That was why I finally called it quits.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Cash kept showing up,” he said. “Large amounts of cash with no clear ancestry. At Darnell’s direction I invested in two corporations—Pennsylvania Solar Heating and New York Ticketing—that sounded like two of the dummiest dummy corporations I’ve ever heard of. Finally I went to see him, because I wanted all my cards on the table. I told him that my professional opinion was that, if he got audited either by the IRS or by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania tax boys, he was apt to have a great deal of explaining to do, and that before long I was going to know too much to be an asset to him.”
“What did he say?”
“He began to dance,” my father said, still wearing that sleepy, cynical smile. “In my business, you start to get familiar with the steps of the dance by the time you’re thirty-eight or so… if you’re good at your business, that is. And I’m not all that bad, The dance starts off with the guy asking you if you’re happy with your work, if it’s paying you enough. If you say you like the work but you sure could be doing better, the guy encourages you to talk about whatever you’re carrying on your back: your house, your car, your kids’ college education—maybe you’ve got a wife with a taste for clothes a little fancier than she can by rights afford… see?”
“Sounding you out?”
“It’s more like feeling you up,” he said, and then laughed. “But yeah. The dance is every bit as mannered as a minuet. There are all sorts of phrases and pauses and steps. After the guy finds out what sort of financial burdens you’d like to get rid of, he starts asking you what sort of things you’d like to have. A Cadillac, a summer place in the Catskills or the Poconos, maybe a boat.
I gave a little start at that, because I knew my dad wanted a boat about as badly as he wanted anything these days; a couple of times I had gone with him on sunny summer afternoons to marinas along King George Lake and Lake Passeeonkee. He’d price out the smaller yachts and I’d see the wistful look in his eyes. Now I understood it. They were out of his reach. Maybe if his life had taken a different turn—if he didn’t have kids to think about putting through college, for instance—they wouldn’t have been.
“And you said no?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I made it clear pretty early on that I didn’t want to dance. For one thing, it would have meant getting more involved with him on a personal level, and, as I said, I thought he was a skunk. For another thing, these guys are all fundamentally stupid about numbers—which is why so many of them have gone up on tax convictions. They think you can hide illegal income. They’re sure of it. He laughed. “They’ve all got this mystic idea that you can wash money like you wash clothes, when all you can really do is juggle it until something falls down and smashes all over your head.”
“Those were the reasons?”
“Two out of three.” He looked in my eyes. “I’m no fucking crook, Dennis.”
There was a moment of electric communication between us—even now, four years later, I get goosebumps thinking of it, although I’m by no means sure that I can get it across to you. It wasn’t that he treated me like an equal for the first time that night; it wasn’t even that he was showing me the wistful knight-errant still hiding inside the button-down man scrambling for a living in a dirty, hustling world. I think it was sensing him as a reality, a person who had existed long before I ever came onstage, a person who had eaten his share of mud. In that moment I think I could have imagined him making love to my mother, both of them sweaty and working hard to make it, and not have been embarrassed.
Then he dropped his eyes, grinned a defensive grin, and did his husky Nixon-voice, which he was very good at: “You people deserve to know if your father is a crook. Well, I am not a crook, I could have taken the money, but that… harrum!… that would have been wrong.”
I laughed too loud, a release of tension—I felt the moment passing, and although part of me didn’t want it to pass, part of me did; it was too intense. I think maybe he felt that, too.
“Shhh, you’ll wake your mother and she’ll give us both the devil for being up this late.”
“Yeah, sorry. Dad, do you know what he’s into? Darnell?”
“I didn’t know then; I didn’t want to know, because then I’d be a part of it. I had my ideas, and I’ve heard a few things. Stolen cars, I imagine—not that he’d run them through that garage on Hampton Street; he’s not a completely stupid man, and only an idiot shits where he eats. Maybe hijacking as well.”
“Guns and stuff?” I asked, sounding a little hoarse.
“Nothing so romantic. If I had to guess, I’d guess cigarettes, mostly—cigarettes and booze, the two old standbys. Contraband like fireworks. Maybe a shipment of microwave ovens or colour TVs every once in a while, if the risk looked low. Enough to keep him busy these many years.”
He looked at me soberly.
“He’s played the odds good, but he’s also been lucky for a long time, Dennis. Oh, maybe he hasn’t really needed luck here in town—if it was just Libertyville, I guess he could go on for ever, or at least until he dropped dead of a heart attack—but the state tax boys are sand sharks and the feds are Great Whites. He’s been lucky, but one of these days they’re going to fall on him like the Great Wall of China.”
“Have you… have you heard things?”
“Not a whisper. Nor am I apt to. But I like Arnie Cunningham a great deal, and I know you’ve been worried about this car thing.”
“Yeah. He’s… he’s not acting healthy about it, Dad. Everything’s the car, the car, the car.”
“People who have not had a great deal tend to do that,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a car, sometimes it’s a girl, sometimes it’s a career or a musical instrument or an unhealthy obsession with some famous person. I went to college with a tall, ugly fellow we all called Stork. With Stork it was his model train set… he’d been hooked on model trains ever since the third grade, and his set was pretty damn near the eighth wonder of the world. He flunked out of Brown the second semester of his freshman year. His grades were going to hell, and what it came down to was a choice between college and his Lionels. Stork picked the trains.”
“What happened to him?”
“He killed himself in 1961,” my father said, and stood up “My point is just that good people can sometimes get blinded, and it’s not always their fault. Probably Darnell will forget all about him—he’ll just be another guy tinkering around under his car on a crawlie-gator. But if Darnell tries to use him, you be his eyes, Dennis. Don’t let him get pulled into the dance.”
“All right. I’ll try. But there may not be that much I can do.”
“Yeah. How well I know it. Want to go up?”
“Sure.”
We went up, and, tired as I was, I lay awake a long time. It had been an eventful day. Outside, a night wind tapped a branch softly against the side of the house, and far away, downtown, I heard some kid’s rod peeling rubber—it made a sound in the night like an hysterical woman’s desperate laughter.
CHRISTINE AND DARNELL
He said he heard about a couple living in the USA,
He said they traded in their baby for a Chevrolet:
Let’s talk about the future now,
We’ve put the past away…
— Elvis Costello
Between working on the construction project days and working on Christine nights, Arnie hadn’t been seeing much of his folks. Relations there had been getting pretty strained and abrasive. The Cunningham house, which had always been pleasant and low-key in the past, was now an armed camp. It is a state of affairs a lot of people can remember from their teenage years, guess; too many, maybe. The kid is egotistical enough to think he or she is the first person in the world to discover some particular thing (usually it’s a girl, but it doesn’t have to be), and the parents are too scared and stupid and possessive to want to let go of the halter. Sins on both sides. Sometimes it gets painful and outrageous—no war is as dirty and bitter as a civil war. And it was particularly painful in Arnie’s case because the split had come so late, and his folks had gotten much too used to having their own way. It wouldn’t be unfair to say that they had blueprinted his life.
So when Michael and Regina proposed a four-day weekend at their lakeshore cottage in upstate New York before school started again, Arnie said yes even though he badly wanted those last four days to work on Christine. More and more often at work he had told me how he was going to “show them”; he was going to turn Christine into a real street-rod and “show them all”. He had already planned to restore the car to its original bright red and ivory after the bodywork was done.
But he went off with them, determined to yassuh and tug his forelock for the whole four days and have a good time with his folks—or a reasonable facsimile. I got over the evening before they left and was relieved to find they had both absolved me of blame in the affair of Arnie’s car (which they still hadn’t even seen). They had apparently decided it was a private obsession. That was fine by me.
Regina was busy packing. Arnie and Michael and I got their Oldtown canoe on top of their Scout and tied it down. When it was done, Michael suggested to his son—with the air of a powerful king conferring an almost unbelievable favour on two of his favourite subjects—that Arnie go in and get a few beers.
Arnie, affecting both the expression and the tones of amazed gratitude, said that would be super. As he left, he dropped a wink my way.
Michael leaned against the Scout and lit a cigarette. “Is he going to get tired of this car business, Denny?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You want to do me a favour?”
“Sure, if I can,” I said cautiously I was pretty sure he was going to ask me to go to Arnie, act the Dutch uncle part, and try to “talk him out of it”.
But instead he said, “If you get a chance, go down to Darnell’s while we’re gone and see what sort of progress he’s making. I’m interested.”
“Why is that?” I asked, thinking immediately it was a pretty damn rude question—but by then it was already out.
“Because I want him to succeed,” he said simply, and glanced at me. “Oh, Regina’s still dead set against it. If he has a car, that means he’s growing up. And if he’s growing up, that means… all sorts of things,” he finished lamely. “But I’m not so down on it. You couldn’t characterize me as dead set against it anyway, at least not anymore. Oh, he caught me by surprise at first… I had visions of some dead dog sitting out in front of our house until Arnie went off to college—that or him choking to death on the exhaust some night.”
The thought of Veronica LeBay jumped into my head, all unbidden.
“But now…” He shrugged, glanced at the door between the garage and the kitchen, dropped his cigarette, and scuffed it out. “He’s obviously committed. He’s got his sense of self-respect on the line. I’d like to see him at least get it running.”
Maybe he saw something in my face; when he went on he sounded defensive.
“I haven’t quite forgotten everything about being young,” he said. “I know a car is important to a kid Arnie’s age. Regina can’t see that quite so clearly. She always got picked up. She was never faced with the problems of being the picker-upper. I remember that a car is important… if a kid’s ever going to have any dates.”
So that’s where he thought it was at. He saw Christine as a means to an end rather than as the end itself. I wondered what he’d think if I told him that I didn’t think Arnie had ever looked any further than getting the Fury running and legal. I wondered if that would make him more or less uneasy.
The thump of the kitchen door closing.
“Would you go take a look?”
“I guess so,” I said. “If you want.”
“Thanks.”
Arnie came back with the beers. “What’s the thanks for?” he asked Michael. His voice was light and humorous, but his eyes flicked between us carefully. I noticed again that his complexion was really clearing, and his face seemed to have strengthened. For the first time, the two thoughts Arnie and dates didn’t seem mutually exclusive. It occurred to me that his face was almost handsome—not in any jut-jawed lifeguard king-of-the-prom way, but in an interesting, thoughtful way. He would never be Roseanne’s type, but…
“For helping with the canoe,” Michael said casually.
“Oh.”
We drank our beers. I went home. The next day the happy threesome went off together to New York, presumably to rediscover the family unity that had been lost over the latter third of the summer.
The day before they were due back I took a ride down to Darnell’s Garage—as much to satisfy my own curiosity as Michael Cunningham’s.
The garage, standing in front of the block-long lot of junked cars, looked just as attractive in daylight as it had on the evening we had brought Christine—it had all the charm of a dead gopher.
I pulled into a vacant slot in front of the speed shop that Darnell also ran—well stocked with such items as Feully heads, Hurst gearboxes, and Ram-Jett superchargers (for all those working men who had to keep their old cars running so they could continue to put bread on the table, no doubt), not to mention a wide selection of huge mutant tyres and a variety of spinner hubcaps. Looking through the window of Darnell’s speed shop was like looking into a crazy automotive Disneyland.
I got out and walked back across the tarmac toward the garage and the clanging sound of tools, shouts, the machine-gun blast of pneumatic wrenches. A sleazy-looking guy in a cracked leather jacket was dorking around with an old BSA bike by one of the garage bays, either removing the bike’s manifold or putting it back on. There was a stutter of road-rash down his left cheek. The back of his jacket displayed a skull wearing a Green Beret and the charming motto KILL EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT EM OUT.
He looked up at me with bloodshot and lunatic Rasputin eyes, then looked back at what he was doing. He had a surgical array of tools spread out beside him, each one die-stamped with the words DARNELL’s GARAGE.
Inside, the world was full of the echoey, evocative bang of tools and the sound of men working on cars and hollering profanity at the rolling iron they were working on. Always the profanity, and always female in gender: come offa there you bitch, come loose, you cunt, come on over here, Rick, and help me get this twat off.
I looked around for Darnell and didn’t see him any place. No one took any particular notice of me, so I walked over to stall twenty where Christine sat, now pointing nose-out, just like I had every right in the world to be there. In the stall to the right, two fat guys in bowling league shirts were putting a camper cap on the back of a pickup truck that had seen better days. The stall on the other side was deserted.
As I approached Christine, I felt that chill coming back. There was no reason for it, but I seemed helpless to stop it—and without even thinking, I moved a bit to the left, toward the empty stall. I didn’t want to be in front of her.
My first thought was that Arnie’s complexion had improved in tandem with Christine’s. My second thought was that he was making his improvements in a strangely haphazard way… and Arnie was usually so methodical.
The twisted, broken aerial had been replaced with a straight new one that glimmered under the fluorescent bars. Half the Fury’s front grille had been replaced; the other half was still flecked and pitted with rust. And there was something else…
I walked along her flank right to the rear bumper, frowning.
Well, it was on the other side, that’s all, I thought.
So I walked around to the other side, and it wasn’t there, either.
I stood by the back wall, still frowning, trying to remember. I was pretty sure that when we first saw her standing on LeBay’s lawn, with a FOR SALE sign propped against her windscreen, there had been a good-sized rusty dent on one side or the other, near the rear end—the sort of deep dent that my grandfather always called a “hoss-kick”. We’d be driving along the turnpike and we’d go by a car with a big dent in it somewhere and Grampy would say, “Hey, Denny, take a look there! Hoss kicked that one!” My grandfather was the sort of guy who had a downhome phrase for everything.
I started to think I must have imagined it, and then gave my head a little shake. That was sloppy thinking. It had been there; I remembered it clearly. Just because it wasn’t here now didn’t mean it hadn’t been then. Arnie had obviously knocked it out, and had done a damn good piece of bodywork covering it up.
Except…
There was no sign that he had done anything. There was no primer paint, no grey body fill, no flaked paint. Just Christine’s dull red and dirty white.
But it had been there, goddammit! A deep dimple filled with a snarl of rust, on one side or the other.
But it sure was gone now.
I stood there in the clatter and thud of tools and machinery and felt very alone and suddenly very scared. It was all wrong, it was all crazy. He had replaced the radio aerial when the exhaust was practically dragging on the ground. He had replaced one half of the grille but not the other. He had talked to me about doing a front-end job, but inside he had replaced the ripped and dusty back seat cover with a bright red new one. The front seat cover was still a dusty wreck with a spring peeking through the passenger side.
I didn’t like it at all. It was crazy and it wasn’t like Arnie.
Something came to me, a trace of memory, and without even thinking about it, I stood back and looked at the entire car—not just one thing here and one thing there, but everything. And I had it; it clicked into place, and the chill came back.
That night when we had brought it here. The flat tyre. The replacement. I had looked at that new tyre on that old car and thought it was as if a little bit of the old car had been scratched away and that the new car—fresh, resplendent, just off the assembly line in a year when Ike had been President and Batista had still been in charge of Cuba—was peeking through.
What I was seeing now was like that… only instead of just a single new tyre, there were all sorts of things—the aerial, a wink of new chrome from the grille, one taillight that was a bright deep red, that new seat cover in the back.
In its turn, that brought back something else from childhood. Arnie and I had gone to Vacation Bible School together for two weeks each summer, and every day the teacher would tell a Bible story and leave it unfinished. Then she would give each kid a blank sheet of “magic paper”. And if you scraped the edge of a coin or the side of your pencil over it, a picture would gradually emerge out of the white—the dove bringing the olive branch back to Noah, the walls of Jericho tumbling down, good miracle stuff like that. It used to fascinate both of us, seeing the pictures gradually emerge. At first just lines floating in the void… and then the lines would connect with other lines they would take on coherence… take on meaning…
I looked at Arnie’s Christine with growing horror, trying to shake the feeling that in her I was seeing something terribly similar to those magic miracle pictures.
I wanted to look under the hood.
Suddenly it seemed very important that I look under the hood.
I went around to the front (I didn’t like to stand in front of it—no good reason why not, I just didn’t) and fumbled around for the hood release. I couldn’t get it. Then I realised that it was probably inside.
I started to go around, and then I saw something else, something that scared me shitless. I could have been wrong about the hoss-kick, I suppose. I knew I wasn’t, but at least technically…
But this was something else entirely.
The web of cracks in the windscreen was smaller.
I was positive it was smaller.
My mind raced back to that day a month ago when I had wandered into LeBay’s garage to look at the car while Arnie went into the house with the old man to do the deal. The entire left side of the windscreen had been a spider’s web of cracks radiating out from one central, zigzagging fault that had probably been caused by a flying stone.
Now the spider’s web seemed smaller, simpler—you could see into the car from that side, and you hadn’t been able to before, I was sure of that (just a trick of the light, that’s all, my mind whispered).
Yet I had to be wrong—because it was impossible. Simply impossible. You could replace a windscreen; that was no problem if you had the money. But to make a webbing of cracks shrink—
I laughed a little. It was a shaky sound, and one of the guys working on the camper cap looked up at me curiously and said something to his buddy. It was a shaky sound, but maybe better than no sound at all. Of course it was the light, and nothing more. I had seen the car for the first time with the westering sun shining fully on the flawed windscreen, and I had seen it the second time in the shadows of LeBay’s garage. Now I was seeing it under these high-set fluorescent tubes. Three different kinds of light, and all it added up to was an optical illusion.
Still, I wanted to look under the hood. More than ever,
I went around to the driver’s side door and gave it a yank. The door didn’t open. It was locked. Of course it was; all four of the door-lock buttons were down, Arnie wouldn’t be apt to leave it unlocked in here, so anybody could get inside and poke around. Maybe Repperton was gone, but genus Creepus was weed-common. I laughed again—silly old Dennis—but this time it sounded even more shrill and shaky. I was starting to feel spaced-out, the way I sometimes felt the morning after I smoked a little too much pot.
Locking the Fury’s doors was a very natural thing to do, all right. Except that, when I walked around the car the first time, I thought I had noticed the door-lock buttons had all been up.
I stepped slowly backward again, looking at the car. It sat there, still little more than a rusting hulk. I was not thinking any one thing specific—I am quite sure of that—except maybe it was as if it knew that I wanted to get inside and pull the release.
And because it didn’t want me to do that, it had locked its own doors?
That was really a very humorous idea. So humorous that I had another laugh (several people were glancing at me now, the way that folks always glance at people who laugh for no apparent reason when they are by themselves).
A big hand fell on my shoulder and turned me around. It was Darnell, with a dead stub of cigar stuck in the side of his mouth. The end of it was wet and pretty gross-looking. He was wearing small half-specs, and the eyes behind them were coldly speculative.
“What are you doing, kiddo?” he asked. “This ain’t your property.”
The guys with the camper cap were watching us avidly. One of them nudged the other and whispered something.
“It belongs to a friend of mine,” I said. “I brought it in with him. Maybe you remember me. I was the one with the large skin-tumour on the end of my nose and the—”
“I don’t give a shit if you wheeled it in on a skateboard,” he said. “It ain’t your property. Take your bad jokes and get lost, kid. Blow.”
My father was right—he was a wretch. And I would have been more than happy to blow; I could think of at least six thousand places I’d rather be on this second-to-last day of my summer vacation. Even the Black Hole of Calcutta would have been an improvement. Not a big one, maybe, yet an improvement, all the same. But the car bothered me. A lot of little things, all adding up to a big itch that needed to be scratched. Be his eyes, my father had said, and that sounded good. The problem was I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
“My name is Dennis Guilder,” I said “My dad used to do your books, didn’t he?”
He looked at me for a long time with no expression at all in his cold little pig eyes, and I was suddenly sure he was going to tell me he didn’t give a fuck who my father was, that I’d better blow and let these working men go about the business of fixing their cars so they could go on putting bread on their tables. Et cetera.
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