Christine, Page 35

  Oh, little things, sure. Replacing bulbs in the parking lights. Changing tires. The kid is no dummy about cars: Will sat right in this chair one day and watched him replace the upholstery in the back seat. But no one has seen him working on the car's exhaust system, which was totally shot when he wheeled the '58 in here for the first time late last summer. And no one has seen him doing any bodywork, either, although the Fury's bod, which had an advanced case of cancer when the kid brought it in, now looks cherry.

  Darnell knew what Jimmy Sykes thought, because he had asked him once. Jimmy thought Arnie did the serious work at night, after everyone was gone.

  "That's one hell of a lot of night work," Darnell said aloud, and felt a sudden chill that not even the brandy-laced coffee could dispel. A lot of night work, yeah. It must have been. Because what the kid seemed to be doing days was listening to the greaser music on WDIL. That, and a lot of aimless fooling around.

  "I guess he does the big stuff at night," Jimmy had said, with all the guileless faith of a child explaining how Santa Claus gets down the chimney or how the tooth fairy put the quarter under his pillow. Will didn't believe in either Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, and he didn't believe that Arnie had restored Christine at night, either.

  Two other facts rolled around uneasily in his mind like pool balls looking for a pocket in which to come to rest.

  He knew that Cunningham had been driving the car around out back a lot before it was street-legal, that was one thing. Just cruising slowly up and down the narrow lanes between the thousands of junked cars in the block-long back lot. Driving at five miles an hour, around and around after dark, after everyone had gone home, circling the big crane with the round electromagnet and the great box of the car-crusher. Cruising. The one time Darnell asked him about it, Arnie had told him he was checking out a shimmy in the front end. But the kid couldn't he for shit. No one ever checked out a shimmy at five miles an hour.

  That was what Cunningham did after everyone else went home. That had been his night work. Cruising out back, threading his way in and out of the junkers, headlights flickering unsteadily in their rust-eaten sockets.

  Then there was the Plymouth's odometer. It ran backward. Cunningham had pointed that out to him with a sly little smile. It ran backward at an extremely fast rate. He told Will that he figured the odometer turned back five miles or so for every actual mile travelled. Will had been frankly amazed. He had heard of setting odometers back in the used-car business, and he had done a good bit of it himself (along with stuffing transmissions full of sawdust to stifle their death whines and pouring boxes of oatmeal into terminally ill radiators to temporarily plug their leaks), but he had never seen one that ran backward spontaneously. He would have thought it impossible. Arnie had just smiled a funny little smile and called it a glitch.

  It was a glitch, all right, Will thought. One hell of a glitch.

  The two thoughts clicked lazily off each other and rolled in different directions.

  Boy, that's some pretty car, isn't it? He fixed it up like magic.

  Will didn't believe in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, but he was perfectly willing to acknowledge that there were strange things in the world. A practical man recognized that and put it to use if he could. A friend of Will's who lived in Los Angeles claimed he had seen the ghost of his wife before the big quake of '67, and Will had no particular reason to doubt the claim (although he would have doubted it completely if the friend had had anything to gain). Quent Youngerman, another friend, had claimed to have seen his father, long dead, standing at the foot of his hospital bed after Quent, a steel-worker, had taken a terrible fall from the fourth floor of a building under construction down on Wood Street.

  Will had heard such stories off and on all his life, as most people undoubtedly did. And as most thinking people probably did, he put them in a kind of open file, neither believing nor disbelieving, unless the teller was an obvious crank. He put them in that open file because no one knew where people came from when they were bora and no one knew where people went when they died, and not all the Unitarian ministers and born-again Jesus-shouters and Popes and Scientologists in the world could convince Will otherwise. Just because some people went crazy on the subject didn't mean they knew anything. He put stuff like that in that open file because nothing really inexplicable had ever happened to him.

  Except maybe something like that was happening now.

  November: Repperton and his good buddies beat the living shit out of Cunningham's car at the airport. When it comes in on the tow-truck, it looks like the Green Giant shat all over it. Darnell looks at it and thinks, It's never gonna run again. That's all; it's never gonna run another foot. At the end of the month the Welch kid gets killed on JFK Drive.

  December: A State Police detective comes sucking around. Junkins. He comes sucking around one day and talks to Cunningham; then he comes sucking around on a day when Cunningham isn't here and wants to know how come the kid is lying about how much damage Repperton and his dogturd friends (of whom the late and unlamented Peter "Moochie" Welch was one) did to Cunningham's Plymouth. Why you talking to me? Darnell asks him, wheezing and coughing through a cloud of cigar smoke. Talk to him, it's his fucking Plymouth, not mine. I just run this place so working joes can keep their cars running and keep putting food on the table for their families.

  Junkins listens patiently to this rap. He knows Will Darnell is doing a hell of a lot more than just running a do-it-yourself garage and a junkyard, but Darnell knows he knows, so that's okay.

  Junkins lights a cigarette and says, I'm talking to you because I already talked to the kid and he won't tell me. For a little while there I thought he wanted to tell me; I got the feeling he's scared green about something. Then he tightened up and wouldn't tell me squat.

  Darnell says, If you think Arnie ran down that Welch kid, say so.

  Junkins says, I don't. His parents say he was home asleep, and it doesn't feel like they're lying to cover up for him. But Welch was one of the guys that trashed his car, we're pretty sure of that, and I'm positive he's lying about how bad they trashed it and I don't know why and it's driving me crazy.

  Too bad, Darnell says with no sympathy at all.

  Junkins asks, How bad was it, Mr. Darnell? You tell me.

  And Darnell tells his first and only he during the interview with Junkins: I really didn't notice.

  He noticed, all right, and he knows why Arnie is lying about it, trying to minimize it, and this cop would know why too, if it wasn't so obvious he was walking all over it instead of seeing it. Cunningham is lying because the damage was horrible, the damage was much worse than this state gumshoe can imagine, those hoods didn't just beat up on Cunningham's '58, they killed it. Cunningham is lying because, although nobody saw him do much of anything during the week after the tow-truck brought Christine back to stall twenty, the car was basically as good as new--even better than it had been before.

  Cunningham lied to the cop because the truth was incredible.

  "Incredible," Darnell said out loud, and drank the rest of his coffee. He looked down at the telephone, reached for it, and then drew his hand back. He had a call to make, but it might be better to finish thinking this through first--have all his ducks in a row.

  He himself was the only one (other than Cunningham himself) who could appreciate the incredibility of what had happened: the car's complete and total regeneration. Jimmy was too soft in the attic, and the other guys were in and out, not regular custom at all. Still, there had been comments about what a fantastic job Cunningham had done; a lot of the guys who had been doing repairs on their rolling iron during that week in November had used the word incredible, and several of them had looked uneasy. Johnny Pomberton, who bought and sold used trucks, had been trying to get an old dumpster he'd picked up in running shape that week. Johnny knew cars and trucks better than anyone else in Libertyville, maybe anyone else in all of Pennsylvania. He told Will frankly and flat-out that he couldn't believe it. It's
like voodoo, Johnny Pomberton had said, and then uttered a laugh without much humor. Will only sat there looking politely interested, and after a second or two the old man shook his head and went away.

  Sitting in his office and looking out at the garage, eerily silent in the slack time that came every year in the weeks before Christmas, Will thought (not for the first time) that most people would accept anything if they saw it happen right before their very eyes. In a very real sense there was no supernatural, no abnormal; what happened, happened, and that was the end.

  Jimmy Sykes: Like magic.

  Junkins: He's lying about it, but I'll be goddamned if I know why.

  Will pulled open his desk drawer, denting his paunch, and found his note-minder book for 1978. He paged through it and found his own scrawled entry: Cunningham. Chess tourney. Philly Sheraton Dec. 11-13.

  He called Directory Assistance, got the number of the hotel, and made the call. He was not too surprised to feel his heartbeat shifting into a higher gear as the phone rang and the desk clerk picked it up.

  Like magic.

  "Hello, Philadelphia Sheraton."

  "Hello," Will said. "You have a chess tournament put up there, I th--"

  "Northern States, yessir," the desk clerk broke in. He sounded quick and almost insufferably young.

  "I'm calling from Libertyville, Pee-Ay," Will said. "I believe you have an LHS student named Arnold Cunningham registered. He's one of the chess tourney kids. I'd like to speak to him, if he's in."

  "Just a moment, sir, I'll see."

  Clunk. Will was put on hold. He cocked himself back in his swivel chair and sat that way for what seemed to be a very long time, although the red second-hand on the office clock only revolved once. He won't be there, and if he is, I'll eat my--

  "Hello?"

  The voice was young, warily curious, and unmistakably Cunningham's. Will Darnell felt a peculiar lift-drop in his belly, but none of it showed in his voice; he was much too old for that.

  "Hi, Cunningham," he said. "Darnell."

  "Will?"

  "Yeah."

  "What are you up to, Will?"

  "How you doing, kid?"

  "Won yesterday and drew today. Bullshit game. Couldn't seem to keep my mind on it. What's up?"

  Yes, it was Cunningham--him without a doubt.

  Will, who would no more call someone without a cover story than he would go out without his skivvies on, said smoothly, "You got a pencil, kiddo?"

  "Sure."

  "There's an outfit on North Broad Street, United Auto Parts. You think you could go by there and see what they've got for tires?"

  "Retreads?" Arnie asked.

  "First-lines."

  "Sure, I can go by. I'm free tomorrow afternoon from noon until three."

  "That'll be fine. You ask for Roy Mustungerra, and mention my name."

  "Spell that."

  Will spelled it.

  "That's all?"

  "Yeah . . . except I hope you get your ass whupped."

  "Fat chance," Cunningham said, and laughed. Will told him goodbye and hung up.

  It was Cunningham, no doubt about that. Cunningham was in Philadelphia tonight, and Philadelphia was almost three hundred miles away.

  Who could he have given an extra set of keys to?

  The Guilder kid.

  Sure! Except the Guilder kid was in the hospital.

  His girl.

  But she didn't have a driver's license or even a permit. Arnie had said so.

  Someone else.

  There was no one else. Cunningham wasn't close to anyone else except for Will himself, and Will knew damned well Cunningham had never given him a dupe set of keys.

  Like magic.

  Shit.

  Will leaned back in his chair again and lit another cigar. When it was going and the neatly clipped-off end was in his ashtray, he looked up at the raftering smoke and thought it over. Nothing came. Cunningham was in Philly and he had gone on the high school bus, but his car was gone. Jimmy Sykes had seen it pulling out, but Jimmy hadn't seen who was driving it. Now just what did all of that mean? What did it add up to?

  Gradually, his mind turned into other channels. He thought of his

  own high school days, when he had had the lead part in the senior play. His part had been that of the minister who is driven to suicide by his lust for Sadie Thompson, the girl he has set out to save. He had brought down the house. His one moment of glory in a high school career that had been devoid of sporting or academic triumphs, and maybe the high point of his youth--his father had been a drunk, his mother a drudge, his one brother a deadbeat with his own moment of glory coming somewhere in Germany, his only applause the steady pounding of German 88s.

  He thought of his one girlfriend, a pallid blonde named Wanda Haskins, whose white cheeks had been splattered with freckles which grew painfully profuse in the August sun. They almost surely would have been married--Wanda was one of four girls that Will Darnell had actually fucked (he excluded whores from his count). She was surely the only one he had ever loved (always assuming there was such a thing-- and, like the supernatural events he had sometimes heard about but never witnessed, he could doubt its existence but not disprove it), but her father had been in the Army, and Wanda had been an Army brat. At the age of fifteen--perhaps only a year before the mystic shift in the balance of power from the hands of the old into those of the young--she and her family had moved to Wichita, and that had been the end of that.

  There was a certain lipstick she had worn, and in that long-ago summer of 1934 it had tasted like fresh raspberries to a Will Darnell who was still quite slim and clear-eyed and ambitious and young. It had been a taste to make the left hand stray to the erect and enthusiastic root of the penis in the middle of the night. . . and even before Wanda Haskins consented, they had danced that sweet and special dance in Will Darnell's dreams. In his narrow child's bed that was too short for his growing legs, they had danced.

  And, now thinking of this dance, Will ceased to think and began to dream and, ceasing to dream, began to dance again.

  He awakened from a sleep that had never really deepened solidly some three hours later; he awoke to the sound of the big garage door rattling up and the inside light over the door--no fluorescent but a blaring 200-watt bulb--coming on.

  Will tilted his chair back down in a hurry. His shoes hit the mat under his desk (BARDAHL written across it in raised rubber letters), and it was the shock of pins and needles in his feet more than anything else that brought him awake.

  Christine moved slowly across the garage toward stall twenty and slipped in.

  Will, hardly convinced even now that he was awake, watched her with a curious lack of excitement which perhaps only belongs to those summoned directly from their dreams. He sat upright behind his desk, hamlike arms planted on his dirty, doodled-upon blotter, and watched her.

  The engine raced once, twice. The bright new exhaust pipe shot blue smoke.

  Then the motor shut down.

  Will sat there, not moving.

  His door was shut, but there was an intercom, always on, between the office and the long, barnlike garage area. It was the same intercom on which he had heard the beginnings of the Cunningham-Repperton title fight back in August. From the intercom's speaker he now heard the steady tick of metal as the engine cooled. He heard nothing else.

  No one got out of Christine, because there was no one in her to get out.

  He put stuff like that in an open file because nothing really inexplicable had ever happened to him . . . except maybe something like that was happening now.

  He had seen her cross the cement to stall twenty, the automatic door rattling shut against the cold December night behind her. And experts, examining the case later, could say: The witness had dozed and then fallen asleep, he admits that much, and that he was dreaming . . . what he claims to have seen was obviously nothing more or less than an extension of that dream, an outward stimulus causing a subjective range of spontan
eous, dream-oriented imagery . . .

  Yes, they could say that, just as Will could dream of dancing with fifteen-year-old Wanda Haskins . . . but the reality was a hard-headed man of sixty-one, a man who had long since jettisoned any last romantic notions.

  And he had seen Cunningham's '58 glide across the garage empty, the steering wheel moving all by itself as the car slipped into her accustomed stall. He had seen the headlights go off, and he had heard the eight-cylinder engine as it died.

  Now, feeling oddly boneless, Will Darnell got up, hesitated, went to the door of his office, hesitated again, and then opened it. He walked out and moved down the ranks of slant-parked cars to stall twenty. His footfalls echoed behind him and then died out in a mystery.

  He stood beside the car with her rich two-tone body, red and white.

  The paintjob was deep and clear and perfect, unmarred by the smallest chip or the slightest touch of rust. The glass was clear and unbroken, not marked by so much as a nick caused by a random-flying pebble.

  The only sound now was the slow drip of melting snow from the front and rear bumpers.

  Will touched the hood. It was warm.

  He tried the driver's side door, and it opened freely. The smell that issued forth was the warm smell of new leather, new plastic, new chrome--except that there seemed to be another, more unpleasant smell beneath it. An earthy smell. Will breathed deep but could not place it. He thought briefly of old turnips in his father's basement vegetable bin, and his nose wrinkled.

  He leaned in. There were no keys in the ignition. The odometer read 52,107.8.

  Suddenly, the empty ignition slot set into the dashboard revolved, the black slit heeling over of its own accord past ACC to START. The hot engine caught at once and rumbled steadily, full of contented high-octane power.

  Will's heart staggered in his chest. His breath caught. Gasping and whooping noisily for breath, he hurried back to his office to find the spare aspirator in one of his desk drawers. His breath, thin and impotent, sounded like winter wind under an entryway door. His face was the color of old candlewax. His fingers caught in the loose flesh of his throat and pulled restlessly.

  Christine's engine turned off again.

  No sound now but the tick and click of cooling metal.