Christine, Page 21

  "That won't do you any good if you can't get into a good school," she countered, shifting her ground deftly as she had in so many department committee meetings when someone dared to question one of her opinions . . . which was not often. She did not concede the point; she simply passed on to something else. "Your grades have slipped."

  "Not enough to matter," Arnie said.

  "What do you mean, 'not enough to matter'? You got a deficient in Calculus! We got the red-card just a week ago!" Red-cards, sometimes known as flunk-cards by the student body, were issued halfway through each marking period to students who had posted a 75-average grade or lower during the first five weeks of the quarter.

  "That was based on a single examination," Arnie said calmly. "Mr. Fenderson is famous for giving so few exams in the first half of a quarter that you can bring home a red-card with an F on it because you didn't understand one basic concept, and end up with an A for the whole marking period. All of which I would have told you, if you'd asked. You didn't. Also, that's only the third red-card I've gotten since I started high school. My overall average is still 93, and you know how good that is--"

  "It'll go lower!" she said shrilly, and stepped toward him. "It's this goddam obsession with the car! You've got a girlfriend; I think that's fine, wonderful, super! But this car thing is insane! Even Dennis says--"

  Arnie was up, and up fast, so close to her that she took a step backward, surprised out of her anger, at least momentarily, by his. "You leave Dennis out of this," he said in a deadly soft voice. "This is between us."

  "All right," she said, shifting ground once more. "The simple fact is that your grades are going to go down. I know it, and your father knows it, and that mathematics red-card is an indication of it."

  Arnie smiled confidently, and Regina looked wary.

  "Good," he said. "I tell you what. Let me keep the car here until the marking period ends. If I've got any grade lower than a C, I'll sell it to Darnell. He'll buy it; he knows he could get a grand for it in the shape it's in now. The value's not going to do anything but go up."

  Arnie considered.

  "I'll go you one better. If I'm not on the semester honor roll, I'll also get rid of it. That means I'm betting my car I'll get a B in Calculus not just for the quarter but for the whole semester. What do you say?"

  "No," Regina said immediately. She shot a warning look at her husband--Stay out of this. Michael, who had opened his mouth, closed it with a snap.

  "Why not?" Arnie asked with deceptive softness.

  "Because it's a trick, and you know it's a trick!" Regina shouted at him, her fury suddenly total and uncontained. "And I'm not going to stand here any longer chewing this rag and listening to a lot of insolence from you! I--I changed your dirty diapers! I said get it out of here, drive it if you have to, but don't you leave it where I have to look at it! That's it! The end!"

  "How do you feel, Dad?" Arnie asked, shifting his gaze.

  Michael opened his mouth again to speak.

  "He feels as I do," Regina said.

  Arnie looked back at her. Their eyes, the same shade of gray, met.

  "It doesn't matter what I say, does it?"

  "I think this has gone quite far e--"

  She began to turn away, her mouth still hard and determined, her eyes oddly confused. Arnie caught her arm just above the elbow.

  "It doesn't, does it? Because when you've made up your mind about something, you don't see, you don't hear, you don't think."

  "Arnie, stop it!" Michael shouted at him.

  Arnie looked at her and Regina looked back at him. Their eyes were frozen, locked.

  "I'll tell you why you don't want to look at it," he said in that same soft voice. "It isn't the money, because the car's let me connect with a job that I'm good at and will end up making me money. You know that. It isn't my grades, either. They're no worse than they ever were. You know that, too. It's because you can't stand not to have me under your thumb, the way your department is, the way he is"--he jerked a thumb at Michael, who managed to look angry and guilty and miserable all at the same time--"the way I always was."

  Now Arnie's face was flushed, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.

  "All that liberal bullshit about how the family decided things together, discussed things together, worked things out together. But the fact is, you were always the one who picked out my school-clothes, my school-shoes, who I was supposed to play with and who I couldn't, you decided where we were going on vacation, you told him when to trade cars and what to trade for. Well, this is one thing you can't run, and you fucking hate it, don't you?"

  She slapped his face. The sound was like a pistol-shot in the living room. Outside, dusk had fallen and cars cruised by, indistinct, their headlights like yellow eyes. Christine sat in me Cunninghams' asphalted driveway as she had once sat on Roland D. LeBay's lawn, but looking considerably better now than she had then--she looked cool and above all this ugly, undignified family bickering. She had, perhaps, come up in the world.

  Abruptly, shockingly, Regina Cunningham began to cry. This was a phenomenon, akin to rain in the desert, that Arnie had seen only four or five times in his entire life--and on none of the other occasions had he been the cause of the tears.

  Her tears were frightening, he told Dennis later, by virtue of the simple fact that they were there. That was enough, but there was more--the tears made her look old in a single terrifying stroke, as if she had made a quantum leap from forty-five to sixty in a space of seconds. The hard gray shine in her gaze turned blurry and weak, and suddenly the tears were spilling down her cheeks, cutting through her makeup.

  She fumbled on the mantelpiece for her drink, jogged the glass instead with the tips of her fingers. It fell onto the hearth and shattered. A kind of incredulous silence held among the three of them, an amazement that things had come this far.

  And somehow, even through the weakness of the tears, she managed to say, "I won't have it in our garage or in this driveway, Arnold."

  He answered coldly, "I wouldn't have it here, Mother."

  He walked to the doorway, turned back, and looked at them both. "Thanks. For being so understanding. Thanks a lot, both of you."

  He left.

  21 / Arnie and Michael

  Ever since you've been gone

  I walk around with sunglasses on

  But I know I will be just fine

  As long as I can make my jet black

  Caddy shine.

  --Moon Martin

  Michael caught Arnie in the driveway, headed for Christine. He put a hand on Arnie's shoulder. Arnie shook it off and went on digging for his car-keys.

  "Arnie. Please."

  Arnie turned around fast. For a moment he seemed on the verge of making that evening's blackness total by striking his father. Then some of the tenseness in his body subsided and he leaned back against the car, touching it with his left hand, stroking it, seeming to draw strength from it

  "All right," he said. "What do you want?"

  Michael opened his mouth and then seemed unsure how to proceed. An expression of helplessness--it would have been funny if it hadn't been so grimly awful--spread over his face. He seemed to have aged, to have gone gray and haggard around the edges.

  "Arnie," he said, seeming to force the words out against some great weight of opposing inertia, "Arnie, I'm so sorry."

  "Yeah," Arnie said, and turned away again, opening the driver's side door. A pleasant smell of well-cared-for car drifted out. "I could see that from the way you stood up for me."

  "Please," he said. "This is hard for me. Harder than you know."

  Something in his voice made Arnie turn back. His father's eyes were desperate and unhappy.

  "I didn't say I wanted to stand up for you," Michael said. "I see her side as well, you know. I see the way you pushed her, determined to have your own way at any cost--"

  Arnie uttered a harsh laugh. "Just like her, in other words."

  "Your mother is going
through the change of life," Michael said quietly. "It's been extremely difficult for her."

  Arnie blinked at him, at first not even sure what he had heard. It was as if his father had suddenly said something to him in igpay atinlay; it seemed to have no more relevance to what they were talking about than baseball scores.

  "W-What?"

  "The change. She's frightened, and she's drinking too much, and sometimes she's in physical pain. Not often," he said, seeing the alarmed look on Arnie's face, "and she's been to the doctor, and the change is all it is. But she's in an emotional uproar. You're her only child, and the way she is now, all she can see is that she wants things to be right for you, no matter what the cost."

  "She wants things her way. And that isn't anything new. She's always wanted things her way."

  "That she thinks the right thing for you is whatever she thinks the right thing is goes without saying," Michael said. "But what makes you think you are so different? Or better? You were after her ass in there, and she knew it. So did I."

  "She started it--"

  "No, you started it when you brought the car home. You knew how she felt. And she's right about another thing. You've changed. From that first day you came home with Dennis and said you'd bought a car; that's when it started. Do you think that hasn't upset her? Or me? To have your kid start exhibiting personality traits you didn't even know existed?"

  "Hey, Dad, come on! That's a little--"

  "We never see you, you're always working on your car or out with Leigh."

  "You're starting to sound just like her."

  Michael suddenly grinned--but it was a sad grin. "You're wrong about that. Just as wrong as you can be. She sounds like her, and you sound like her, but I just sound like the guy in charge of some dumb UN peacekeeping force that's about to get its collective ass shot off."

  Arnie slumped a little; his hand found the car again and began caressing, caressing.

  "All right," he said. "I guess I see what you mean. I don't know why you want to let her push you around like that, but okay."

  The sad, humiliated grin remained, a little like the grin of a dog that has chased a woodchuck a long piece on a hot summer day. "Maybe some things get to be a way of life. And maybe there are compensations that you can't understand and I can't explain. Like . . . well, I love her, you know."

  Arnie shrugged. "So . . . what now?"

  "Can we go for a ride?"

  Arnie looked surprised, then pleased. "Sure. Hop in. Any place in particular?"

  "The airport."

  Arnie's eyebrows went up. "The airport? Why?"

  "I'll tell you as we go."

  "What about Regina?"

  "Your mother's gone to bed," Michael said quietly, and Arnie had the good grace to flush a little himself.

  Arnie drove firmly and well. Christine's new sealed-beam headlights cut the early dark in a clean, deep tunnel of light. He passed the Guilders' house, then turned left onto Elm Street at the stop sign and started out toward JFK Drive. I-376 took them to I-278 and then out toward the airport. Traffic was light. The engine muttered softly through new pipes. The dashboard instrument panel glowed a mystic green.

  Arnie turned on the radio and found WDIL, the AM station from Pittsburgh that plays only oldies. Gene Chandler was chanting "The Duke of Earl."

  "This thing runs like a dream," Michael Cunningham said. He sounded awed.

  "Thanks," Arnie said, smiling.

  Michael inhaled deeply. "It smells new."

  "A lot of it is. These seat covers set me back eighty bucks. Part of the money Regina was bitching about. I went to the library and got a lot of books and tried to copy everything the best I could. But it hasn't been as easy as people might think."

  "Why not?"

  "Well, for one thing, the '58 Plymouth Fury wasn't anybody's idea of a classic car, so no one wrote much about it, even in the car retrospective volumes--American Car, American Classics, Cars of the 1950s, things like that. The '58 Pontiac was a classic, only the second year Pontiac made the Bonneville model; and the '58 T-Bird with the rabbit-ear fins, that was the last really great Thunderbird, I think; and--"

  "I had no idea you knew so much about old cars," Michael said. "How long have you been harboring this interest, Arnie?"

  He shrugged vaguely. "Anyway, the other problem was just that LeBay himself customized the original Detroit rolling stock--Plymouth didn't offer a Fury in red and white, for one thing--and I've been trying to restore the car more the way he had it than the way Detroit meant it to be. So I've just been sort of flying by the seat of my pants."

  "Why do you want to restore it the way LeBay had it?"

  That vague shrug again. "I don't know. It just seems like the right thing to do."

  "Well, I think you're doing a hell of a job."

  "Thank you."

  His father leaned toward him, looking at the instrument panel.

  "What are you looking at?" Arnie asked, a little sharply.

  "I'll be damned," Michael said. "I've never seen that before."

  "What?" Arnie glanced down. "Oh. The odometer."

  "It's running backward, isn't it?"

  The odometer was indeed running backward; at that time, on the evening of November 1, it read 79,500 and some-odd miles. As Michael watched, the tenths-of-a-mile indicator rolled from .2 to .1 to 0. As it went back to .9, the actual miles slipped back by one.

  Michael laughed. "That's one thing you missed, son."

  Arnie smiled--a small smile. "That's right," he said. "Will says there's a wire crossed in there someplace. I don't think I'll fool with it. It's sort of neat, having an odometer that runs backward."

  "Is it accurate?"

  "Huh?"

  "Well, if you go from our house to Station Square, would it subtract five miles from the total?"

  "Oh," Arnie said. "I get you. No, it's not accurate at all. Turns back two or three miles for every actual mile travelled. Sometimes more. Sooner or later the speedometer cable will break, and when I replace that, it'll take care of itself."

  Michael, who had had a speedometer cable or two break on him in his time, glanced at the needle for the characteristic jitter that indicated trouble there. But the needle hung dead still just above forty. The speedometer seemed fine; it was only the odometer that had gotten funky. And did Arnie really believe that the speedometer and odometer ran off the same cables? Surely not.

  He laughed and said, "That's weird, son."

  "Why the airport?" Arnie asked.

  "I'm going to treat you to a thirty-day parking stub," Michael said. "Five dollars. Cheaper than Darnell's garage. And you can get your car out whenever you want it. The airport's a regular stop on the bus run. End of the line, in fact."

  "Holy Christ, that's the craziest thing I ever heard!" Arnie shouted. He pulled into the turnaround drive of a darkened dry cleaner's shop. "I'm to take the bus twenty miles out to the airport to get my car when I need it? It's like something out of Catch-22! No! No way!"

  He was about to say something more, when he was suddenly grabbed by the neck.

  "You listen," Michael said. "I'm your father, so you listen to me. Your mother was right, Arnie. You've gotten unreasonable--more than unreasonable--in the last couple of months. You've gotten downright peculiar."

  "Let go of me," Arnie said, struggling in his father's grip.

  Michael didn't let go, but he loosened up. "I'll put it in perspective for you," he said. "Yes, the airport is a long way to come, but the same quarter that would take you to Darnell's will take you out here. There are parking garages closer in, but there are more incidents of theft and vandalism in the city. The airport is, by contrast, quite safe."

  "No public parking lot is safe."

  "Second, it's cheaper than a downtown garage and much cheaper than Darnell's."

  "That's not the point, and you know it!"

  "Maybe you're right," Michael said. "But you're missing something too, Arnie. You're missing the real point."
r />   "Well suppose you tell me what the real point is."

  "All right. I will." Michael paused for a moment, looking steadily at his son. When he spoke his voice was low and even, almost as musical as his recorder. "Along with any sense of what is reasonable, you seem to have totally lost your sense of perspective. You're almost eighteen, in your last year at public school. I think you've made up your mind not to go to Horlicks; I've seen the college brochures you've brought home--"

  "No, I'm not going to Horlicks," Arnie said. He sounded a little calmer now. "Not after all of this. You have no idea how badly I want to get away. Or maybe you do."

  "Yes. I do. And maybe that's best. Better than this constant abrasion between you and your mother. All I ask is that you not tell her yet; wait until you have to submit the application papers."

  Arnie shrugged, promising nothing either way.

  "You'll be taking your car to school, that is if it's still running--"

  "It'll be running."

  "--and if it's a school that allows freshmen to have cars on campus."

  Arnie turned toward his father, surprised out of his smouldering anger--surprised and uneasy. This was a possibility he had never considered.

  "I won't go to a school that says I can't have my wheels," he said. His tone was one of patient instruction, the sort of voice an instructor with a class of mentally retarded children might use.

  "You see?" Michael asked. "She's right. Basing your choice of a college on the school's policy concerning freshmen and cars is totally irrational. You've gotten obsessed with this car."

  "I wouldn't expect you to understand."

  Michael pressed his lips together for a moment.

  "Anyway, what's running out to the airport on the bus to pick up your car, if you want to take Leigh out? It's an inconvenience, granted, but not really a major one. It means you won't use it unless you have to, for one thing, and you'll save gas money. Your mother can have her little victory; she won't have to look at it." Michael paused and then smiled his sad grin again. "She doesn't see it as money flying away, both of us know that. She sees it as your first decisive step away from her . . . from us. I guess she . . . oh, shit, I don't know."

  He stopped, looking at his son. Arnie looked back thoughtfully.