Christine, Page 27

  "Wonders will never cease," Dennis said, and had to laugh again at the unintentional pun.

  "No," Arnie said, "I don't think they ever will." He toasted Dennis over the candles with a bottle of beer. "Prosit."

  "Live forever," Dennis responded. They drank.

  After they had finished the thick turkey sandwiches, Arnie produced two plastic Tupperware pie-wedges from his apparently bottomless bag and pried off the lids. Two pieces of home-made apple pie rested within.

  "No, man, I can't," Dennis said. "I'll bust."

  "Eat," Arnie commanded.

  "I really can't," Dennis said, taking the Tupperware container and a fresh plastic fork. He finished the slice of pie in four huge bites and then belched. He upended the remainder of his second beer and belched again. "In Portugal, that's a compliment to the cook," he said. His head was buzzing pleasantly from the beer.

  "Whatever you say," Arnie responded with a grin. He got up, turned on the overhead fluorescent, and snuffed the candles. Outside a steady rain had begun to beat against the windows; it looked and sounded cold. And for Dennis, some of the warm spirit of friendship and real Thanksgiving seemed to go out with the candles.

  "I'm gonna hate you tomorrow," Dennis said. "I'll probably have to sit on that john in there for an hour. And it hurts my back."

  "You remember the time Elaine got the farts?" Arnie asked, and they both laughed. "We teased her until your mother gave us holy old hell."

  "They didn't smell, but they sure were loud," Dennis said, smiling.

  "Like gunshots," Arnie agreed, and they both laughed a little--but it was a sad sort of laughter, if there is such a thing. A lot of water under the bridge. The thought that Ellie's attack of the farts had happened seven years ago was somehow more unsettling than it was amusing. There was a breath of mortality in the realization that seven years could steal past with such smooth and unobtrusive ease.

  Conversation lapsed a little, both of them lost in their own thoughts.

  At last Dennis said, "Leigh came by yesterday. Told me about Christine. I'm sorry, man. Bummer."

  Arnie looked up, and his expression of thoughtful melancholy was lost in a cheerful smile that Dennis didn't really believe.

  "Yeah," he said. "It was crude. But I went way overboard about it."

  "Anyone would," Dennis said, aware that he had become suddenly watchful, hating it but unable to help it. The friendship part was over; it had been here, warming the room and filling it, and now it had simply slipped away like the ephemeral, delicate thing it was. Now they were just dancing. Arnie's cheerful eyes were also opaque and--he would have sworn to it--watchful.

  "Sure. I gave my mother a hard time. Leigh too, I guess. It was just the shock of seeing all that work . . . all that work down the tubes." He shook his head. "Bad news."

  "Are you going to be able to do anything with it?"

  Arnie brightened immediately--really brightened this time, Dennis felt. "Sure! I already have. You wouldn't believe it, Dennis, if you'd seen the way it looked in that parking lot. They made them tough in those days, not like now when all the stuff that looks like metal is really just shiny plastic. That car is nothing but a damn tank. The glass was the worst part. And the tires, of course. They slashed the tires."

  "What about the engine?"

  "Never got at it," Arnie said promptly, and that was the first lie. They had been at it, all right. When Arnie and Leigh had gotten to Christine that afternoon, the distributor cap had been lying on the pavement. Leigh had recognized it and had told Dennis about it. What else had they done under the hood, Dennis wondered. The radiator? If someone was going to use a tire iron to punch holes in the bodywork, might they not be apt to use the same tool to spring the radiator in a few places? What about the plugs? The voltage regulator? The carburetor?

  Arnie, why are you lying to me?

  "So what are you doing with it now?" Dennis asked.

  "Spending money on it, what else?" Arnie said, and laughed his almost-genuine laugh. Dennis might even have accepted it as genuine if he hadn't heard the real article once or twice over the Thanksgiving supper Arnie had brought. "New tires, new glass. Got some bodywork to do, and then it will be as good as new."

  As good as new. But Leigh had said that they had found something that was little more than a smashed hulk, a carny three-swings-for-a-quarter derelict.

  Why are you lying?

  For a cold moment he found himself wondering if maybe Arnie hadn't gone a little crazy--but no, that wasn't the impression he gave. The feeling Dennis got from him was one of . . . furtiveness. Craftiness. Then, for the first time, the crazy thought came to him, the thought that maybe Arnie was only half-lying, trying to lay a groundwork of plausibility for . . . for what? A case of spontaneous regeneration? That was pretty crazy, wasn't it?

  Wasn't it?

  It was indeed, Dennis thought, unless you had happened to see a mass of cracks in a windshield seem to shrink between one viewing and the next.

  Just a trick of the light. That's what you thought then, and you were right.

  But a trick of the light didn't explain the haphazard way Arnie had gone about rebuilding Christine, the hopscotch of old and new parts. It didn't explain that weird feeling Dennis had gotten sitting behind the wheel of Christine in LeBay's garage, or the sense, after the new tire had been put on en route to Darnell's, that he was looking at an old-car picture with a new-car picture directly underlying it, and that a hole had been cut out of the old-car picture at the spot where one of the old-car tires had been.

  And nothing explained Arnie's lie now . . . or the narrow, thoughtful way he was watching Dennis to see if his lie was going to be accepted. So he smiled . . . a big, easy, relieved grin. "Well, that's great," he said.

  Arnie's narrow, evaluating expression held for a moment longer; then he smiled an aw-shucks grin and shrugged. "Luck," he said. "When I think of the things they could have done--sugar in the gas tank, molasses in the carb--they were stupid. Lucky for me."

  "Repperton and his merry crew?" Dennis asked quietly.

  The suspicious look, so dark and unlike Arnie, appeared again and then sank from sight. Arnie looked grim now. Grim and morose. He seemed to speak, then sighed instead. "Yeah," he said. "Who else?"

  "But you didn't report it."

  "My dad did."

  "That's what Leigh said."

  "What else did she tell you?" Arnie asked sharply.

  "Nothing, and I didn't ask," Dennis said, holding his hand out. "Your business, Arnie. Peace."

  "Sure." He laughed a little and then passed a hand over his face. "I'm still not over it. Fuck. I don't think I'm ever going to be over it, Dennis. Coming into that parking lot with Leigh, feeling like I was on top of the world, and seeing--"

  "Won't they just do it again if you fix her up again?"

  Arnie's face went dead-cold, set. "They won't do it again," he said. His gray eyes were like March ice, and Dennis found himself suddenly very glad he wasn't Buddy Repperton.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'll be parking it at home, that's what I mean," he said, and once more his face broke into that large, cheerful, unnatural grin. "What did you think I meant?"

  "Nothing," Dennis said. The image of ice remained. Now it was a feeling of thin ice, creaking uneasily under his feet. Beneath that, black, cold water. "But I don't know, Arnie. You seem awful sure that Buddy wants to let this go."

  "I'm hoping he'll see it as a standoff," Arnie said quietly. "We got him expelled from school--"

  "He got himself expelled!" Dennis said hotly. "He pulled a knife-hell, it wasn't even a knife, it was a goddam pigsticker!"

  "I'm just telling it the way he'll see it," Arnie said, then held out his hand and laughed. "Peace."

  "Yeah, okay."

  "We got him expelled--or more accurately, I did--and he and his buddies beat hell out of Christine. Evens. The end."

  "Yeah, if he sees it that way."

  "I think he will," Arnie
said. "The cops questioned him and Moochie Welch and Richie Trelawney. Scared them. And almost got Sandy Gal-ton to confess, I guess." Arnie's lip curled. "Fucking crybaby."

  This was so unlike Arnie--the old Arnie--that Dennis sat up in bed without thinking and then winced at the pain in his back and lay down again quickly. "Jesus, man, you sound like you want him to stonewall it!"

  "I don't care what he or any of those shitters do," Arnie said, and then, in a strangely offhand voice he added, "It doesn't matter anymore anyhow."

  Dennis said, "Arnie, are you all right?"

  And for a moment a look of desperate sadness passed over Arnie's face--more than sadness. He looked harried and haunted. It was the face, Dennis thought later (it is so easy to see these things later; too much later) of someone so bewildered and entangled and weary of struggling that he hardly knows anymore what it is he is doing.

  Then that expression, like that other look of dark suspicion, was gone.

  "Sure," he said. "I'm great. Except that you're not the only one with a hurt back. You remember when I strained it at Philly Plains?"

  Dennis nodded.

  "Check this out." He stood up and pulled his shirt out of his pants. Something seemed to dance in his eyes. Something flipping and turning at a black depth.

  He lifted his shirt. It wasn't old-fashioned like LeBay's; it was cleaner, too--a neat, seemingly unbroken band of Lycra about twelve inches across. But, Dennis thought, a brace was a brace. It was too close to LeBay for comfort.

  "I put another hurt on it getting Christine back to Will's," Arnie said. "I don't even remember how I did it, that's how upset I was. Hooking her up to the wrecker, I guess, but I don't know for sure. At first it wasn't too bad, then it got worse. Dr. Mascia prescribed--Dennis, are you okay?"

  With what felt like a fantastic effort, Dennis kept his voice even. He moved his features around into an expression which felt at least faintly like pleasant interest. . . and still there was that something dancing in Arnie's eyes, dancing and dancing.

  "You'll shake it off," Dennis said.

  "Sure, I imagine," Arnie said, tucking his shirt back in around the back brace. "I'm just supposed to watch what I lift so I don't do it again."

  He smiled at Dennis.

  "If there was still a draft, it would keep me out of the Army," he said.

  Once again Dennis restrained himself from any movement that could have been interpreted as surprise, but he put his arms under the bed's top sheet. At the sight of that back brace, so like LeBay's, they had broken out in gooseflesh.

  Arnie's eyes--like black water under thin gray March ice. Black water and glee dancing far down within them like the twisting, decomposing body of a drowned man.

  "Listen," Arnie said briskly. "I gotta move. Hope you didn't think I could hang around a lousy place like this all night."

  "That's you, always in demand," Dennis said. "Seriously, man, thanks. You cheered up a grim day."

  For one strange instant, he thought Arnie was going to weep. That dancing thing down deep in his eyes was gone and his friend was there-- really there. Then Arnie smiled sincerely. "Just remember one thing, Dennis: nobody misses you. Nobody at all."

  "Eat me raw through a Flavor Straw," Dennis said solemnly.

  Arnie gave him the finger.

  The formalities were now complete; Arnie could leave. He gathered up his brown shopping bag, considerably deflated, candle-holders and empty beer bottles clinking inside.

  Dennis had a sudden inspiration. He rapped his knuckles on his leg cast. "Sign this, Arnie, would you?"

  "I already did, didn't I?"

  "Yeah, but it wore off. Sign it again?"

  Arnie shrugged. "If you've got a pen."

  Dennis gave him one from the drawer of the night-table. Grinning, Arnie bent over the cast, which was hoisted to an angle over the bed with a series of weights and pulleys, found white space in the intaglio of names and mottoes, and scribbled:

  He patted the cast when he was done and handed the pen back to Dennis. "Okay?"

  "Yeah," Dennis said. "Thanks. Stay loose, Arnie."

  "You know it. Happy Thanksgiving."

  "Same to you."

  Arnie left. Later on, Dennis's mother and father came in; Ellie, apparently exhausted by the day's hilarity, had gone home to bed. On their way home, the Guilders commented to each other on how withdrawn Dennis had seemed.

  "He was in a blue study, all right," Guilder said. "Holidays in the hospital aren't any fun."

  As for Dennis himself, he spent a long and thoughtful time that evening examining two signatures. Arnie had indeed signed his cast, but at a time when both of Dennis's legs had been in full-leg casts. That first time, he had signed the cast on the right leg, which had been up in the air when Arnie came in. Tonight he had signed the left.

  Dennis buzzed for a nurse and used all his charm persuading her to lower his left leg so he could compare the two signatures, side by side. The cast on his right leg had been cut down, and would come off altogether in a week or ten days. Arnie's signature had not rubbed off--that had been one of Dennis's lies--but it had very nearly been cut off.

  Arnie had not written a message on the right leg, only his signature. With some effort (and some pain), Dennis and the nurse were able to maneuver his legs close enough together so he could study the two signatures side by side. In a voice so dry and cracked he was hardly able to recognize it as his own, he asked the nurse, "Do they look the same to you?"

  "No," the nurse said. "I've heard of forging checks, but never casts. Is it a joke?"

  "Sure," Dennis said, feeling an icy coldness rise from his stomach to his chest. "It's a joke." He looked at the signatures and felt that rising coldness steal all through him, lowering his body temperature, making the hairs on the back of his neck stir and stiffen:

  They were nothing alike.

  Late that Thanksgiving night, a cold wind rose, first gusting, then blowing steadily. The clear eye of the moon stared down from a black sky. The last brown and withered leaves of autumn were ripped from the trees and then harried through the gutters. They made a sound like rolling bones.

  Winter had come to Libertyville.

  30 / Moochie Welch

  The night was dark, the sky was blue,

  and down the alley an ice-wagon flew.

  Door banged open, Somebody screamed,

  You oughtta heard just what I seen.

  --Bo Diddley

  The Thursday after Thanksgiving was the last day of November, the night that Jackson Browne played the Pittsburgh Civic Center to a sellout crowd. Moochie Welch went up with Richie Trelawney and Nickey Billingham but got separated from them even before the show began. He was spare-changing, and whether it was because the impending Browne concert had created some extremely mellow vibes or because he was becoming something of an endearing fixture (Moochie, a romantic, liked to believe the latter), he had had a remarkably good night. He had collected nearly thirty dollars' worth of "spare change." It was distributed among all his pockets; Moochie jingled like a piggy bank. Thumbing home had been remarkably easy too, with all the traffic leaving the Civic Center. The concert ended at eleven-forty, and he was back in Libertyville shortly after one-fifteen.

  His last ride was with a young guy who was headed back to Prestonville on Route 63. The guy dropped him at the 376 ramp on JFK Drive. Moochie decided to walk up to Vandenberg's Happy Gas and see Buddy. Buddy had a car, which meant that Moochie, who lived far out on Kingsfield Pike, wouldn't have to walk home. It was hard work, hitching rides, once you got out in the boonies--and the Kingsfield Pike was Boondocks City. It meant he wouldn't be home until well past dawn, but in cold weather a sure ride was not to be sneezed at. And Buddy might have a bottle.

  He had walked a quarter of a mile from the 376 exit ramp in the deep single-number cold, his cleated heels clicking on the deserted sidewalk, his shadow waxing and waning under the eerie orange streetlamps, and had still perhaps a mile to go when he saw the car par
ked at the curb up ahead. Exhaust curled out of its twin pipes and hung in the perfectly still air, clouding it, before drifting lazily away in stacked layers. The grille, bright chrome highlighted with pricks of orange light, looked at him like a grinning idiot mouth. Moochie recognized the car. It was a two-tone Plymouth. In the light of the maximum-illumination streetlamps the two tones seemed to be ivory and dried blood. It was Christine.

  Moochie stopped, and a stupid sort of wonder flooded through him-- it was not fear, at least not at that moment. It couldn't be Christine, that was impossible--they had punched a dozen holes in the radiator of Cuntface's car, they had dumped a nearly full bottle of Texas Driver into the carb, and Buddy had produced a five-pound sack of Domino sugar, which he had funnelled into the gas tank through Moochie's cupped hands. And all of that was just for starters. Buddy had demonstrated a kind of furious invention when it came to destroying Cuntface's car; it had left Moochie feeling both delighted and uneasy. All in all, that car should not have moved under its own power for six months, if ever. So this could not be Christine. It was some other '58 Fury.

  Except it was Christine. He knew it

  Moochie stood there on the deserted early-morning sidewalk, his numb ears poking out from beneath his long hair, his breath pluming frostily on the air.

  The car sat at the curb facing him, engine growling softly. It was impossible to tell who, if anyone, was behind the wheel; it was parked directly beneath one of the streetlights, and the orange globe burned across the glass of the unmarred windshield like a waterproof jack-o'-lantern seen deep down in dark water.

  Moochie began to be afraid.

  He slicked his tongue over dry lips and looked around. To his left was JFK Drive, six lanes wide and looking like a dry riverbed at this empty hour of the morning. To his right was a photography shop, orange letters outlined in red spelling KODAK across its window.

  He looked back at the car. It just sat there, idling.

  He opened his mouth to speak and produced no sound. He tried again and got a croak. "Hey. Cunningham."

  The car sat, seeming to brood. Exhaust curled up. The engine rumbled, idling fat on high-test gas.

  "That you, Cunningham?"

  He took one more, step. A cleat scraped on cement. His heart was thudding in his neck. He looked around at the street again; surely another car would come, JFK Drive couldn't be totally deserted even at one-twenty-five in the morning, could it? But there were no cars, only the flat orange glare of the streetlights.