Christine, Page 43

  Never do it, Will thought. And even if you get into the driveway, what then? You think I'm going to come out and play?

  Wheezing more sharply than ever, he went back to the phone, looked up Cunningham's home number, and started to dial it. His fingers jittered, he misdialled, swore, hit the cutoff buttons, started again.

  Outside, Christine's engine revved. A moment later there was a crunch as she hit the embankment for the third time. The wind wailed and snow struck the big picture window like dry sand. Will licked his lips and tried to breathe slowly. But his throat was closing up; he could feel it.

  The phone began to ring on the other end. Three times. Four.

  Christine's engine screamed. Then the heavy thud as she hit the snowbank the passing plows had piled up at both ends of Will's semicircular driveway.

  Six rings. Seven. Nobody home.

  "Shit on it," Will whispered, and slammed the phone back down. His face was pale, his nostrils flared wide, like the nostrils of an animal scenting fire upwind. His cigar had gone out. He threw it on the carpet and groped in his bathrobe pocket as he hurried back to the window. His hand found the comforting shape of his aspirator, and his fingers curled around its pistol grip.

  Headlights shone momentarily in his face, nearly blinding him, and Will raised his free hand to shield his eyes. Christine hit the snowbank again. Little by little she was bludgeoning her way through to the driveway. He watched her back up across the road and wished savagely for a plow to come along now and hit the damned thing broadside.

  No plow came. Christine came again instead, engine howling, lights glaring across his snow-covered lawn. She struck the snowbank, pushing mounds of snow violently to either side. The front end canted up and for a moment Will thought she was going to come right over what was left of the frozen, hard-packed embankment. Then the rear wheels lost traction and spun frantically.

  She backed up.

  Will's throat felt as if its bore was down to a pinhole. His lungs strained for air. He took the aspirator out and used it. The police. He ought to call the police. They would come. Cunningham's '58 couldn't get him. He was safe in his house. He was--

  Christine came again, accelerating across the road, and this time she hit the bank and came over it easily, front end at first tilting up, splashing the front of his house with light, then crashing back down. She was in the driveway. Yes, all right, but she could come no further, she . . . it . . .

  Christine never slowed. Still accelerating, she crossed the semicircular driveway on a tangent, plowed through the shallower, looser snow of the side yard, and roared directly at the picture window where Will Darnell stood looking out.

  He staggered backward, gasping hard, and tripped over his own easy chair.

  Christine hit the house. The picture window exploded, letting in the shrieking wind. Glass flew in deadly arrows, each of them reflecting Christine's headlamps. Snow blew in and danced over the rug in erratic corkscrews. The headlights momentarily illuminated the room with the unnatural glare of a television studio, and then she withdrew, her front bumper dragging, her hood popped up, her grille smashed into a chrome-dripping grin full of fangs.

  Will was on his hands and knees, gagging harshly for breath, his chest heaving. He was vaguely aware that, had he not tripped over his chair and fallen down, he probably would have been cut to ribbons by flying glass. His robe had come undone and flapped behind him as he got to his feet. The wind streaming in the window picked up the TV Guide from the little table by his chair, and the magazine flew across the room to the foot of the stairs, pages riffling. Will got the telephone in both hands and dialled 0.

  Christine reversed along her own tracks through the snow. She went all the way back to the flattened snowbank at the entrance to the driveway. Then she came forward, accelerating rapidly, and as she came the hood immediately began to uncrimp, the grille to regenerate itself. She slammed into the side of the house below the picture window again. More glass flew; wood splintered and groaned and creaked. The big window's low ledge cracked in two, and for a moment Christine's windshield, now cracked and milky, seemed to peer in like a giant alien eye.

  "Police," Will said to the operator. His voice was hardly there; it was all wheeze and whistle. His bathrobe flapped in the cold blizzard wind coming in through the shattered window. He saw that the wall below the window was nearly shattered. Broken chunks of lathing protruded like fractured bones. It couldn't get in, could it? Could it?

  "I'm sorry, sir, you'll have to speak up," the operator said. "We seem to have a very bad connection."

  Police, Will said, but this time it wasn't even a whisper; only a hiss of air. Dear God, he was strangling, he was choking; his chest was a locked bank vault. Where was his aspirator?

  "Sir?" the operator asked doubtfully.

  There it was, on the floor. Will dropped the telephone and scrabbled for it.

  Christine came again, roaring across the lawn and striking the side of the house. This time the entire wall gave way in a shrapnel-burst of glass and lathing, and incredibly, nightmarishly, Christine's smashed and dented hood was in his living room, she was in, he could smell exhaust and hot engine.

  Christine's underworks caught on something, and she reversed back out of the ragged hole with a screech of pulling boards, her front end a gored ruin dusted with snow and plaster. But she would come again in a few seconds, and this time she might--just might--

  Will grabbed his aspirator and ran blindly for the stairs.

  He was only halfway up when the revving whine of her engine came again and he turned to watch, leaning on the railing more than grasping it.

  The stairwell's height lent a certain nightmare perspective. He watched Christine come across the snow-covered lawn, saw her hood fly up so that now her front end resembled the mouth of a huge red and white alligator. Then it snapped off altogether as she struck the house again, this time doing better than forty. She ripped away the last of the window frame and sprayed more splintered boards across his living room. Her headlights bounced upward, glaring, and then she was in, she was in his house, leaving a huge torn hole in the wall behind her with an electrical cable hanging out onto the rug like a black severed artery. Little clouds of blown-in fiberglass insulation danced on the cold wind like milkweed puffs.

  Will screamed and couldn't hear himself over the blatting roar of her engine. The Sears Muzzler 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 tailpipe.

  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 then 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 zigzag pattern of snowy tire 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 center of the stairs into a jumbled wreck. A long splinter of wood fell into her engine. The fan chewed it up and spat
out coarsegrained 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 tires 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 tires 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 gearshift 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 tires 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 gearshift lever 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 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 tires 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 hood began to reappear, from the windshield end down, looking weirdly like a scarf or cardigan being knitted by invisible needles; the raw metal drew itself out of nothing, gleamed steel-gray, and then darkened to red as if filling with blood.

  The cracks in the windshield 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 odometer 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 skirled across the ripped and tattered seats, their balding floor carpets.

  Her engine ticked slowly, cooling.

  43 / 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 titled "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 make sure your 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 sic
k."

  "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 a lighter, 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 color 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 falling 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.