Christine, Page 28

  Moochie cleared his throat.

  "You ain't mad, are you?"

  Christine's duals suddenly came on, pinning him in harsh white light. The Fury ripped toward him, peeling out, the tires screaming black slashes of rubber onto the pavement. It came with such sudden power that the rear end seemed to squat, like the haunches of a dog preparing to spring--a dog or a she-wolf. The onside wheels jumped up on the pavement and it ran at Moochie that way, offside wheels down, onside wheels up over the curb, canted at an angle. The undercarriage scraped and shrieked and shot off a swirling flicker of sparks.

  Moochie screamed and tried to sidestep. The edge of Christine's bumper barely flicked his left calf and took a chunk of meat. Warm wetness coursed down his leg and puddled in his shoe. The warmth of his own blood made him realize in a confused way just how cold the night was.

  He thudded hip-first into the doorway of the photo shop, barely missing the plate-glass window. A foot to the left and he would have crashed right through, landing in a litter of Nikons and Polaroid One-Steps.

  He could hear the car's engine, suddenly revving up. That horrible, unearthly shrieking of the undercarriage on the cement again. Moochie turned around, panting harshly. Christine was reversing back up the gutter, and as it passed him, he saw. He saw.

  There was no one behind the wheel.

  Panic began to pound in his head. Moochie took to his heels. He ran out into JFK Drive, sprinting for the far side. There was an alley over there between a market and a dry-cleaning place. Too narrow for the car. If he could get in there—

  Change jingled madly in his pants pockets and in the five or six pockets of his Army-surplus duffel coat. Quarters, nickels, dimes. A jingling silver carillon. He pumped his knees almost to his chin. His cleated engineer boots drummed the pavement. His shadow chased him.

  The car somewhere behind him revved again, fell off, revved again, fell off, and then the motor began to shriek. The tires wailed, and Christine shot at Moochie Welch's back, crossing the lanes of JFK Drive at right angles. Moochie screamed and could not hear himself scream because the car was still peeling rubber, the car was still shrieking like an insanely angry, murderous woman, and that shriek filled the world.

  His shadow was no longer chasing him. It was leading him and getting longer. In the window of the dry-cleaning shop he saw great yellow eyes blossom.

  It wasn't even close.

  At the very last moment Moochie tried to jig left, but Christine jigged with him as if she had read his final desperate thought. The Plymouth hit him squarely, still accelerating, breaking Moochie Welch's back and knocking him spang out of his engineer's boots. He was thrown forty feet into the brick siding of the little market, again narrowly missing a plunge through a plate-glass window.

  The force of his strike was hard enough to cause him to rebound into the street again, leaving a splash of blood on the brick like an inkblot. A picture of it would appear the next day on the front page of the Libertyville Keystone.

  Christine reversed, screeched to a skidding, sliding stop, and roared forward again. Moochie lay near the curbing, trying to get up. He couldn't get up. Nothing seemed to work. All the signals were scrambled.

  Bright white light washed over him.

  "No," he whispered through a mouthful of broken teeth. "N--"

  The car roared forward and over him. Change flew everywhere. Moochie was pulled and rolled first one way and then the other as Christine reversed into the street again. She stood there, engine revving and falling off to a rich idle, then revving again. She stood there as if thinking.

  Then she came at him again. She hit him, jumped the curb, skidded around, and then reversed again, thumping back down.

  She screamed forward.

  And back.

  And forward.

  Her headlights glared. Her exhaust pipes jetted hot blue smoke.

  The thing in the street no longer looked like a human being; it looked like a scattered bundle of rags.

  The car reversed a final time, skidded around in a half-circle, and accelerated, roaring over the bleeding bundle in the street again and going down the Drive, the blast of its engine, still winding up to full rev, racketing off the walls of the sleeping buildings--but not entirely sleeping now; lights were beginning to flick on, people who lived over their stores were going to their windows to see what all the racket had been about, and if there had been an accident.

  One of Christine's headlights had been shattered. Another flickered unsteadily off and on, bleared with a thin wash of Moochie's blood. The grille had been bent inward, and the dents in it approximated the shape and size of Moochie's torso with all the gruesome perfection of a deathmask. Blood was splashed across the hood in fans that spread out as windspeed increased. The exhaust had taken on a heavy, blatting sound; one of Christine's two mufflers had been destroyed.

  Inside, on the instrument panel, the odometer continued to run backward, as if Christine were somehow slipping back into time, leaving not only the scene of the hit-and-run behind but the actual fact of the hit-and-run.

  The muffler was the first thing.

  Suddenly that heavy, blatting sound diminished and smoothed out.

  The fans of blood on the hood began to run toward the front of the car again in spite of the wind--as if a movie film had been reversed.

  The flickering headlight suddenly shone steadily, and a tenth of a mile later the deadlight became a headlight again. With an unimportant tinkling sound--no more than the sound of a small boy's boot breaking the thin scum of ice on a mudpuddle--the glass reassembled itself from nowhere.

  There was a hollow punk! punk! punk! sound from the front end, the sound of denting metal, the sound you sometimes get when you squeeze a beer-can. But instead of denting, Christine's grille was popping back out--a bodyshop veteran with fifty years' experience in putting fender-benders right could not have done it more neatly.

  Christine turned onto Hampton Street even before the first of those awakened by the screaming of her tires had reached Moochie's remains. The blood was gone. It had reached the front of the hood and disappeared. The scratches were gone. As she rolled quietly toward the garage door with its honk for entry sign, there was one final punk! as the last dimple--this one in the left front bumper, the spot where Christine had struck Moochie's calf--popped back out.

  Christine looked like new.

  The car stopped in front of the large garage door in the middle of the darkened, silent building. There was a small plastic box clipped to the driver's side sun-visor. This was a little doodad Will Darnell had given Arnie when Arnie began to run cigarettes and booze over into New York State for him--it was, perhaps, Darnell's version of a gold key to the crapper.

  In the still air the door-opener hummed briefly, and the garage door rattled obediently up. Another circuit was made by the rising door, and a few interior lights came on, burning weakly.

  The headlight knob on the dashboard suddenly went in, and Christine's duals went out. She rolled inside and whispered across the oil-stained concrete to stall twenty. Behind her, the overhead door, which had been set on a thirty-second timer, rolled back down. The light circuit was broken, and the garage was dark again.

  In Christine's ignition switch, the keys dangling down suddenly turned to the left. The engine died. The leather patch with the initials R.D.L. branded into it swung back and forth in decreasing arcs . . . and was finally still.

  Christine sat in the dark, and the only sound in Darnell's Do-It-Yourself Garage was the slow tick of her cooling engine.

  31 / The Day After

  I got a '69 Chevy with a 396,

  Feully heads and a Hurst on the floor,

  She's waiting tonight

  Down in the parking-lot

  Outside the 7-11 store . . .

  --Bruce Springsteen

  Arnie Cunningham did not go to school the next day. He said he thought he might be coming down with the flu. But that evening he told his parents that he felt enough
improved to go down to Darnell's and do some work on Christine.

  Regina protested--although she did not come right out and say so, she thought Arnie looked like death warmed over. His face was now entirely free of acne and blemishes, but there was a trade-off: it was much too pale, and there were dark circles under his eyes, as if he hadn't been sleeping. In addition, he was still limping. She wondered uneasily if her son could be using some sort of drug, if perhaps he had hurt his back worse than he had let on and had started taking pills so he could go on working on the goddamned car. Then she dismissed the thought. Obsessed as he might be with the car, Arnie would not be that stupid.

  "I'm really fine, Mom," he said.

  "You don't look fine. And you hardly touched your supper."

  "I'll get some chow later on."

  "How's your back? You're not lifting a lot of heavy stuff down there, are you?"

  "No, Mom." This was a lie. And his back had hurt terribly all day long. This was the worst it had been since the original injury at Philly Plains (oh, was that where it started? his mind whispered, oh really? are you sure?). He had taken the brace off for a while, and his back had throbbed fit to kill him. He had put it on again after only fifteen minutes, cinching it tighter than ever. Now his back really was a little better. And he knew why. He was going to her. That was why.

  Regina looked at him, worried and at a loss. For the first time in her life she simply did not know how to proceed. Arnie was beyond her control now. Knowing it brought on a horrible feeling of despair that sometimes crept up on her and filled her brain with an awful, empty, rotten coldness. At these times a depression so total she could barely credit it would steal through her, making her wonder exactly what it was she had lived her life for--so her son could fall in love with a girl and a car all in the same terrible fall? Was that it? So she could see exactly how hateful to him she had become when she looked in his gray eyes? Was that it? And it really didn't have anything to do with the girl at all, did it? No. In her mind, it always came back to the car. Her rest had become broken and uneasy, and for the first time since her miscarriage nearly twenty years before, she had found herself considering making an appointment with Dr. Mascia to see if he would give her some pill for the stress and the depression and the attendant insomnia. She thought about Arnie on her long sleepless nights, and about mistakes that could never be rectified; she thought about how time had a way of swinging the balance of power on its axis, and how old age had a way of sometimes looking through a dressing-table mirror like the hand of a corpse poking through eroded earth.

  "Will you be back early?" she asked, knowing this was the last breastwork of the truly powerless parent, hating it, unable--now--to change it.

  "Sure," he said, but she didn't much trust the way he said it.

  "Arnie, I wish you'd stay home. You really don't look good at all."

  "I'll be fine," he said. "Got to be. I have to run some auto parts over to Jamesburg for Will tomorrow."

  "Not if you're sick," she said. "That's nearly a hundred and fifty miles."

  "Don't worry." He kissed her cheek--the passionless kiss-on-the-cheek of cocktail-party acquaintances.

  He was opening the kitchen door to go out when Regina asked, "Did you know the boy who was run down last night on Kennedy Drive?"

  He turned back to look at her, his face expressionless. "What?"

  "The paper said he went to Libertyville."

  "Oh, the hit-and-run . . . that's what you're talking about."

  "Yes."

  "I had a class with him when I was a freshman," Arnie said. "I think. No, I really didn't know him, Mom."

  "Oh." She nodded, pleased. "That's good. The paper said there were residues of drugs in his system. You'd never take drugs, would you, Arnie?"

  Arnie smiled gently at her pallid, watchful face. "No, Mom," he said.

  "And if your back started to hurt you--I mean, if it really started to hurt you--you'd go see Dr. Mascia about it, wouldn't you? You wouldn't buy anything from a . . . a drug-pusher, would you?"

  "No, Mom," he repeated, and went out.

  There had been more snow. Another thaw had melted most of it, but this time it had not disappeared completely; it had only withdrawn into the shadows, where it formed a white rime under hedges, the bases of trees, the overhang of the garage. But in spite of the snow around the edges--or maybe because of it--their lawn looked oddly green as Arnie stepped out into the twilight, and his father looked like a strange refugee from summer as he raked the last of the autumn leaves.

  Arnie raised his hand briefly to his father and made as if to go past without speaking. Michael called him over. Arnie went reluctantly. He didn't want to be late for his bus.

  His father had also aged in the storms that had blown up over Christine, although other things had undoubtedly played a part. He had made a bid for the chairmanship of the History Department at Horlicks late in the summer and had been rebuffed quite soundly. And during his annual October checkup, the doctor had pointed out an incipient phlebitis problem--phlebitis, which had nearly killed Nixon; phlebitis, an old folks' problem. As that late fall moved toward another gray western-Pennsylvania winter, Michael Cunningham looked gloomier than ever.

  "Hi, Dad. Listen, I've got to hurry if I'm going to catch--"

  Michael looked up from the little pile of frozen brown leaves he had

  managed to get together; the sunset caught the planes of his face and appeared to make them bleed. Arnie stepped back involuntarily, a little shocked. His father's face was haggard.

  "Arnold," he said, "where were you last night?"

  "What--?" Arnie gaped, then closed his mouth slowly. "Why, here. Here, Dad. You know that."

  "All night?"

  "Of course. I went to bed at ten o'clock. I was bushed. Why?"

  "Because I had a call from the police today," Michael said. "About that boy who was run over on JFK Drive last night."

  "Moochie Welch," Arnie said. He looked at his father with calm eyes that were deeply circled and socketed for all their calmness. If the son had been shocked by the father's appearance, the father was also dully shocked by his son's--to Michael, the boy's eyesockets looked nearly like a skull's vacant orbs in the failing light.

  "The last name was Welch, yes."

  "They would be in touch. I suppose. Mom doesn't know--that he might have been one of the guys that trashed Christine?"

  "Not from me."

  "I didn't tell her either. I'd be glad if she didn't find that out," Arnie said.

  "She may find it out eventually," Michael said. "In fact, she almost certainly will. She's an extremely intelligent woman, in case you've never noticed. But she won't find it out from me."

  Arnie nodded, then smiled humorlessly. "'Where were you last night?' Your trust is touching, Dad."

  Michael flushed, but his eyes didn't drop. "Maybe if you'd been standing outside yourself these last couple of months," he said, "you'd understand why I asked."

  "What the hell does that mean?"

  "You know damn well. It hardly even bears discussing anymore. We just go around and around the same old mulberry bush. Your entire life is jittering apart and you stand there and ask me what I'm talking about."

  Arnie laughed. It was a hard, contemptuous sound. Michael seemed to shrivel a little before it. "Mom asked me if I was on drugs. Maybe you want to check that one out, too." Arnie made as if to push up the sleeves of his warmup jacket. "Want to check for needle-tracks?"

  "I don't need to ask if you're on drugs," Michael said. "You're only on one I know of, and that's enough. It's that goddam car."

  Arnie turned as if to go, and Michael pulled him back.

  "Get your hand off my arm."

  Michael dropped his hand. "I wanted you to be aware," he said. "I no more think you'd kill someone than I think you could walk across the Symonds' swimming pool. But the police are going to question you, Arnie, and people can look surprised when the police turn up suddenly. To them, surprise ca
n look like guilt."

  "All of this because some drunk ran over that shitter Welch?"

  "It wasn't like that," Michael said. "I got that much out of this fellow Junkins who called me up on the phone. Whoever killed the Welch boy ran him down and then backed over him and ran over him again and backed up again and--"

  "Stop it," Arnie said. He suddenly looked sick and frightened, and Michael had much the same feeling Dennis had had on Thanksgiving evening: that in this tired unhappiness the real Arnie was suddenly close to the surface, perhaps reachable.

  "It was . . . incredibly brutal," Michael said. "That's what Junkins said. You see, it doesn't look like an accident at all. It looks like murder."

  "Murder," Arnie said, dazed. "No, I never--"

  "What?" Michael asked sharply. He grabbed Arnie's jacket again. "What did you say?"

  Arnie looked at his father. His face was masklike again. "I never thought it could be that," he said. "That's all I was going to say."

  "I just wanted you to know," he said. "They'll be looking for someone with a motive, no matter how thin. They know what happened to your car, and that the Welch boy might have been involved, or that you might think he was involved. Junkins may be around to talk to you."

  "I don't have anything to hide."

  "No, of course not," Michael said. "You'll miss your bus."

  "Yeah," Arnie said. "Gotta go." But he stayed a moment longer, looking at his father.

  Michael suddenly found himself thinking of Arnie's ninth birthday. He and his son had gone to the little zoo in Philly Plains, had eaten lunch out, and had finished the day by playing Eighteen holes at the indoor miniature golf course on outer Basin Drive. That place had burned down in 1975. Regina had not been able to come; she had been flat on her back with bronchitis. The two of them had had a fine time. For Michael, that had been his son's best birthday, the one that symbolized for him above all others his son's sweet and uneventful American boyhood. They had gone to the zoo and come back and nothing much had happened except that they had had a great time--Michael and his son, who had been and who still was so dear to him.