Christine, Page 23

  "Come on, Leigh. Don't."

  "Don't like me slapping your girl?" she asked with sudden and unexpected venom. Then she saw the hurt look in his eyes. "Arnie, I'm sorry."

  "Are you?" he asked, looking at her expressionlessly. "Seems like nobody likes my car these days--you, my dad and mom, even Dennis. I worked my ass off on it, and it means zero to everybody."

  "It means something to me," she said softly. "The effort it took."

  "Yeah," he said morosely. The passion, the heat, had fled. He felt cold and a little sick to his stomach. "Look, we better get going. I don't have any snow tires. Your folks'd think it was cute, us going bowling and then getting racked up on Stanson Road."

  She giggled. "They don't know where Stanson Road ends up."

  He cocked an eyebrow at her, some of his good humor returning. "That's what you think," he said.

  He drove back down toward town slowly, and Christine managed the twisting, steeply descending road with easy surefootedness. The sprinkle of earth-stars that was Libertyville and Monroeville grew larger and drew closer together and then ceased to have any pattern at all. Leigh watched this a little sadly, feeling that the best part of a potentially wonderful evening had somehow slipped away. She felt irritated, chafed, out of sorts with herself--unfulfilled, she supposed. There was a dull ache in her breasts. She didn't know if she had meant to let him go what was euphemistically known as "all the way" or not, but after things had reached a certain point, nothing had gone as she had hoped . . . all because she had to open her big fat mouth.

  Her body was in a mess, and her thoughts were the same way. Again and again on the mostly silent drive back down she opened her mouth to try to clarify how she felt . . . and then closed it again, afraid of being misunderstood, because she didn't understand how she felt herself.

  She didn't feel jealous of Christine . . . and yet she did. About that Arnie hadn't told the truth. She had a good idea of how much time he spent tinkering on the car, but was that so wrong? He was good with his hands, he liked to work on it, and it ran like a watch . . . except for that funny little glitch with the odometer numbers running backward.

  Cars are girls, she had said. She hadn't been thinking of what she was saying; it had just popped out of her mouth. And it certainly wasn't always true; she didn't think of their family sedan as having any particular gender; it was just a Ford.

  But--

  Forget it, get rid of all the hocus-pocus and phony stuff. The truth was much more brutal and even crazier, wasn't it? She couldn't make love to him, couldn't touch him in that intimate way, much less think about bringing him to a climax that way (or the other, the real way--she had turned that over and over in her mind as she lay in her narrow bed, feeling a new and nearly amazing excitement, steal over her), in the car.

  Not in the car.

  Because the really crazy part was that she felt Christine was watching them. That she was jealous, disapproving, maybe hating. Because there were times (like tonight, as Arnie skated the Plymouth so smoothly and delicately across the building scales of sleet) when she felt that the two of them--Arnie and Christine--were welded together in a disturbing parody of the act of love. Because Leigh did not feel that she rode in Christine; when she got in to go somewhere with Arnie she felt swallowed in Christine. And the act of kissing him, making love to him, seemed a perversion worse than voyeurism or exhibitionism--it was like making love inside the body of her rival.

  The really crazy part of it was that she hated Christine.

  Hated her and feared her. She had developed a vague dislike of walking in front of the new grille, or closely behind the trunk; she had vague thoughts of the emergency brake letting go or the gearshift popping out of park and into neutral for some reason. Thoughts she had never had about the family sedan.

  But mostly it was not wanting to do anything in the car . . . or even go anywhere in the car, if she could help it. Arnie seemed somehow different in the car, a person she didn't really know. She loved the feel of his hands on her body--her breasts, her thighs (she had not yet allowed him to touch the center of her, but she wanted his hands there; she thought if he touched her there she would probably just melt). His touch always brought a coppery taste of excitement to her mouth, a feeling that every sense was alive and deliciously attuned. But in the car that feeling seemed blunted . . . maybe because in the car Arnie always seemed less honestly passionate and somehow more lecherous.

  She opened her mouth again as they turned onto her street, wanting to explain some of this, and again nothing would come. Why should it? There was really nothing to explain--it was all vapors. Nothing but vague humors. Well . . . there was one thing. But she couldn't tell him that; it would hurt him too badly. She didn't want to hurt him because she thought she was beginning to love him.

  But it was there.

  The smell--a rotten, thick smell under the aromas of new seat covers and the cleaning fluid he had used on the floormats. It was there, faint but terribly unpleasant. Almost stomach-turning.

  As if, at some time, something had crawled into the car and died there.

  He kissed her good night on her doorstep, the sleet shining silver in the cone of yellow light thrown by the carriage lamp at the foot of the porch steps. It shone in her dark blond hair like jewels. He would have liked to have really kissed her, but the fact that her parents might be watching from the living room--probably were, in fact--forced him to kiss her almost formally, as you might kiss a dear cousin.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I was silly."

  "No," Arnie said, obviously meaning yes.

  "It's just that"--and her mind supplied her with something that was a curious hybrid of the truth and a lie--"that it doesn't seem right in the car. Any car. I want us to be together, but not parked in the dark at the end of a dead-end road. Do you understand?"

  "Yes," he said. Up at the Embankment, in the car, he had felt a little angry with her . . . well, to be honest, he had been pretty goddam pissed off. But now, standing here on her stoop, he thought he could understand--and marvel that he could want to deny her anything or cross her will in any way. "I know exactly what you mean."

  She hugged him, her arms locked around his neck. Her coat was still open, and he could feel the soft, maddening weight of her breasts.

  "I love you," she said for the first time, and then slipped inside to leave him standing there on the porch momentarily, agreeably stunned, and much warmer than he should have been in the ticking, pattering sleet of late autumn.

  The idea that the Cabots might find it peculiar if he stood on their front stoop much longer in the sleet at last percolated down into his bemused brain. Arnie went back down the walk through the tick and patter, snapping his fingers and grinning. He was riding the rollercoaster now, the one that's the best ride, the one they really only let you take once.

  Near the place where the concrete path joined the sidewalk, he stopped, the smile fading off his face. Christine stood at the curb, drops of melted sleet pearling her glass, smearing the red idiot lights from the dash inside, and he wondered passingly what the source of that particular bit of slang was--idiot lights; it was an unpleasant term. Then that was wiped out by the more important consideration. He had left Christine running, and she had stalled. This was the second time.

  "Wet wires," he muttered under his breath. "That's all." It couldn't be plugs; he had put in a whole new set just the day before yesterday, at Will's. Eight new Champions and--

  Which of us do you spend more time with? Me . . . or her?

  The smile returned, but this time it was uneasy. Well, he spent more time around cars in general--of course. That came of working for Will. But it was ridiculous to think that . . .

  You lied to her. That's the truth, isn't it?

  No, he answered himself uneasily. No, I don't think you could say I really lied to her . . .

  No? Then just what do you call it?

  For the first and only time since he had taken her to the football game a
t Hidden Hills, he had told her a big fat lie. Because the truth was, he spent more time with Christine, and he hated having her parked in the thirty-day section of the airport parking lot, out in the wind and the rain, soon to be snow--

  He had lied to her.

  He spent more time with Christine.

  And that was--

  Was--

  "Wrong," he croaked, and the word was almost lost in the slick, mysterious sound of the falling sleet.

  He stood on the walk, looking at his stalled car, marvellously resurrected time traveller from the era of Buddy Holly and Khrushchev and Laika the Space Dog, and suddenly he hated it. It had done something to him, he wasn't sure what. Something.

  The idiot lights, blurred into football-shaped red eyes by the moisture on the window, seemed to mock him and reproach him at the same time.

  He opened the driver's side door, slipped behind the wheel, and pulled the door shut again. He closed his eyes. Peace flowed over him and things seemed to come back together. He had lied to her, yes, but it was a little he. A mostly unimportant he. No--a completely unimportant he.

  He reached out without opening his eyes and touched the leather rectangle the keys were attached to--old and scuffed, the initials R.D.L. burned into it. He had seen no need to get a new keyring, or a piece of leather with his own initials on it.

  But there was something peculiar about the leather tab the keys were attached to, wasn't there? Yes. Quite peculiar indeed.

  When he had counted out the cash on LeBay's kitchen table and LeBay had skittered the keys across the red-and-white-checked oilcloth to him, the rectangle of leather had been scuffed and nicked and darkened by age, the initials almost obliterated by time and the constant friction of rubbing against the change in the old man's pocket and the material of the pocket itself.

  Now the initials stood out fresh and clear again. They had been renewed.

  But, like the lie, that was really unimportant. Sitting inside the metal shell of Christine's body, he felt very strongly that that was true.

  He knew it. Quite unimportant, all of it.

  He turned the key. The starter whined, but for a long time the engine wouldn't catch. Wet wires. Of course that was what it was.

  "Please," he whispered. "It's all right, don't worry, everything is the same."

  The engine fired, missed. The starter whined on and on. Sleet ticked coldly on the glass. It was safe in here; it was dry and warm. If the engine would start.

  "Come on," Arnie whispered. "Come on, Christine. Come on, hon."

  The engine fired again, caught. The idiot lights flickered and went out. The gen light pulsed weakly again as the motor stuttered, then went out for good as the beat of the engine smoothed out into a clean hum.

  The heater blew warm air gently around his legs, negating the winter chill outside.

  It seemed to him that there were things Leigh could not understand, things she could never understand. Because she hadn't been around. The pimples. The cries of Hey Pizza-Face! The wanting to speak, the wanting to reach out to other people, and the inability. The impotence. It seemed to him that she couldn't understand the simple fact that, had it not been for Christine, he never would have had the courage to call her on the phone even if she had gone around with I WANT TO DATE ARNIE CUNNINGHAM tattooed on her forehead. She couldn't understand that he sometimes felt thirty years older than his age--no! more like fifty!--and not a boy at all but some terribly hurt veteran back from an undeclared war.

  He caressed the steering wheel. The green cats' eyes of the dash instruments glowed back at him comfortingly.

  "Okay," he said. Almost sighed.

  He dropped the gearshift into big D and flicked on the radio. Dee Dee Sharp singing "Mashed Potato Time"; mystic nonsense on the radio waves coming out of the dark.

  He pulled out, planning to head for the airport, where he would park his car and catch the bus that ran back to town on the hour. And he did that, but not in time to take the 11:00 P.M. bus as he had intended. He took the midnight bus instead, and it was not until he was in bed that night, recalling Leigh's warm kisses instead of the way Christine wouldn't fire up, that it occurred to him that somewhere that evening, after leaving the Cabot house and before arriving at the airport, he had lost an hour. It was so obvious that he felt like a man who has turned the house upside down looking for a vital bit of correspondence, only to discover that he has been holding it in his other hand all along. Obvious . . . and a little scary.

  Where had he been?

  He had a blurry memory of drawing away from the curb in front of Leigh's and then just . . .

  . . . just cruising.

  Yeah. Cruising. That was all. No big deal.

  Cruising through the thickening sleet, cruising empty streets that were plated with the stuff, cruising without snow tires (and yet Christine, incredibly surefooted, never missed her way or skidded around a corner, Christine seemed to find the safe and secure way as if by magic, the ride as solid as it would have been if the car had been on trolley-tracks), cruising with the radio on, spilling out a constant stream of oldies that seemed to consist solely of girls' names: Peggy Sue, Carol, Barbara-Ann, Susie Darlin'.

  It seemed to him that at some point he had gotten a little frightened and had punched one of the chrome buttons on the converter he'd installed, but instead of FM-104 and the Block Party Weekend he got WDIL all over again, only now the disc jockey sounded crazily like Alan Freed, and the voice that followed was that of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, hoarse and chanting: "I put a spell on youuu . . . because you're miiiiiine . . ."

  And then at last there had been the airport with its foul-weather lights pulsing sequentially like a visible heartbeat. Whatever had been on the radio faded to a meaningless jumble of static and he had turned it off. Getting out of the car he had felt a sweaty, incomprehensible sort of relief.

  Now he lay in bed, needing to sleep but unable. The sleet had thickened and curdled into fat white splats of snow.

  It wasn't right.

  Something had been started, something was going on. He couldn't even lie to himself and say that he didn't know about it. The car--Christine--several people had commented on how beautifully he had restored her. He had driven it to school and the kids from auto shop were all over it; they were underneath it on crawlers to look at the new exhaust system, the new shocks, the bodywork. They were waist-deep in the engine compartment, checking out the belts and the radiator, which was miraculously free of the corrosion and the green gunk that is the residue of years of antifreeze, checking out the generator and the tight, gleaming pistons socketed in their valves. Even the air cleaner was new, with the numbers 318 painted across the top, raked backward to indicate speed.

  Yes, he had become something of a hero to his fellow shoppies, and he had taken all the comments and the compliments with just the right deprecatory grin. But even then, hadn't the confusion been there, somewhere deep inside? Sure.

  Because he couldn't remember what he had done to Christine and what he hadn't.

  The time spent working on her at Darnell's was nothing but a blur now, like his ride out to the airport earlier this evening had been. He could remember starting the bodywork on the dented rear end, but he couldn't remember finishing it. He could remember painting the hood-covering the windshield and mudguards with masking tape and donning the white mask in the paint-shop out back--but exactly when he had replaced the springs he couldn't remember. Nor could he remember where he had gotten them. All he could remember for sure was sitting behind the wheel for long periods, stupefied with happiness . . . feeling the way he had felt when Leigh whispered "I love you" before slipping in her front door. Sitting there after most of the guys who worked on their cars at Darnell's had gone home to get their suppers. Sitting there and sometimes turning on the radio to listen to the oldies on WDIL.

  Maybe the windshield was the worst.

  He hadn't bought a new windshield for Christine, he was sure of that. His bankbook would be dented
a lot more than it was if he'd bought one of those fancy wrap jobs. And wouldn't he have a receipt? He had even hunted for such a receipt once in the desk-file marked CAR STUFF that he kept in his room. But he hadn't found one, and the truth was, he had hunted rather half-heartedly.

  Dennis had said something--that the snarl of cracks had looked smaller, less serious. Then, that day at Hidden Hills, it had just been . . . well, gone. The windshield had been clean and unflawed.

  But when had it happened? How had it happened?

  He didn't know.

  He finally fell asleep and dreamed unpleasantly, twisting the covers into a ball as the scud of clouds blew away and the autumnal stars shone coldly down.

  24 / Seen in the Night

  Take you for a ride in my car-car,

  Take you for a ride in my car-car.

  Take you for a ride,

  Take you for a ride,

  Take you for a ride in my car-car.

  --Woody Guthrie

  It was a dream--she was sure, almost until the very end, that it must be a dream.

  In the dream she awoke from a dream of Arnie, making love to Arnie not in the car but in a very cool blue room that was unfurnished except for a deep blue shag rug and a scatter of throw-pillows covered in a lighter blue satin . . . she awoke from this dream to her room in the small hours of Sunday morning.

  She could hear a car outside. She went to the window and looked out and down.

  Christine was standing at the curb. She was running--Leigh could see exhaust raftering up from the straight-pipes--but was empty. In the dream she thought that Arnie must be at the door, although there was no knock as yet. She ought to go down, and quickly. If her father woke up and found Arnie here at four in the morning, he would be furious.

  But she didn't move. She looked down at the car and thought how much she hated it--and feared it.

  And it hated her, too.

  Rivals, she thought, and the thought--in this dream--was not grim and hotly jealous but rather despairing and afraid. There it sat at the curb, there it was--there she was--parked outside her house in the dead trench of morning, waiting for her. Waiting for Leigh. Come on down, honey. Come on. We'll cruise, and we'll talk about who needs him more, who cares for him more, and who will be better for him in the long run. Come on. . . you're not scared, are you?