Christine, Page 40

  By 11:00 A.M., when Dennis Guilder finally left Libertyville Community Hospital (as per hospital regulations, he was not allowed on his crutches until he was actually out of the building; until then he was pushed along in a wheelchair by Elaine), the sky had begun to scum over with clouds and there was an eerie fairy ring around the sun. Dennis crossed the parking lot carefully on his crutches, his mother and father bookending him nervously in spite of the fact that the lot had been scrupulously salted free of even the slightest trace of snow and ice. He paused by the family car, turning his face up slightly into the freshening breeze. Being outside was like a resurrection. He felt he could stand here for hours and not have enough of it.

  By one o'clock that afternoon, the Cunningham family station wagon had reached the outskirts of Ligonier, ninety miles east of Libertyville. The sky had gone a smooth and pregnant slate-gray by this time, and the temperature had dropped six degrees.

  It had been Arnie's idea that they not cancel the traditional Christmas Eve visit with Aunt Vicky and Uncle Steve, Regina's sister and her husband. The two families had created a casual, loosely rotating ritual over the years, with Vicky and Steve coming to their house some years, the Cunninghams going over to Ligonier on others. This year's trip had been arranged in early December. It had been cancelled after what Regina stubbornly called "Arnie's trouble," but at the beginning of last week, Arnie had begun restlessly agitating for the trip.

  At last, after a long telephone conversation with her sister on Wednesday, Regina gave in to Arnie's wish--mostly because Vicky had seemed calm and understanding and most of all not very curious about what had happened. That was important to Regina--more important than she would perhaps ever be able to say. It seemed to her that in the eight days since Arnie had been arrested in New York, she had had to cope with a seemingly endless flood of rancid curiosity masquerading as sympathy. Talking to Vicky on the telephone, she had finally broken down and cried. It was the first and only time since Arnie had been arrested in New York that she had allowed herself that bitter luxury. Arnie had been in bed asleep. Michael, who was drinking much too much and passing it off as "the spirit of the season," had gone down to O'Malley's for a beer or two with Paul Strickland, another factory reject in the game of faculty politics. It would probably end up being six beers, or eight, or ten. And if she went upstairs to his study later on, she would find him sitting bolt upright behind his desk, looking out into the dark, his eyes dry but bloodshot. If she tried to speak with him, his conversation would be horribly confused and centered too much in the past. She supposed her husband might be having a very quiet mental breakdown. She would not allow herself the same luxury (for so, in her own hurt and angry state, she thought it), and every night her mind ticked and whirred with plans and schemes until three or four o'clock. All these thoughts and schemes were aimed at one end: "Getting us over this." The only two ways she would allow her mind to approach what had happened were deliberately vague. She thought about "Arnie's trouble" and "Getting us over this."

  But, talking to Vicky on the phone a few days after her son's arrest, Regina's iron control had wavered briefly. She cried on Vicky's shoulder long-distance, and Vicky had been calmly comforting, making Regina hate herself for all the cheap shots she had taken at Vicky over the years. Vicky, whose only daughter had dropped out of junior college to get married and become a housewife, whose only son had been content with a vocational-technical school (none of that for her son! Regina had thought with a private exultation); Vicky whose husband sold, of all hilarious things, life insurance. And Vicky (hilariouser and hilariouser) sold Tupperware. But it was Vicky she had been able to cry to, it had been Vicky to whom she had been able to express at least part of her tortured sense of disappointment and terror and hurt; yes, and the terrible embarrassment of it, of knowing that people were talking and that people who had for years wanted to see her take a fall were now satisfied. It was Vicky, maybe it had always been Vicky, and Regina decided that if there was to be a Christmas at all for them this miserable year, it would be at Vicky and Steve's ordinary suburban ranchhouse in the amusingly middle-class suburb of Ligonier, where most people still owned American cars and called a trip to McDonald's "eating out."

  Mike, of course, simply went along with her decision; she would have expected no more and brooked no less.

  For Regina Cunningham the three days following the news that Arnie was "in trouble" had been an exercise in pure cold control, a hard lunge for survival. Her survival, the family's survival, Arnie's survival-he might not believe that, but Regina found she hadn't the time to care. Mike's pain had never entered her equations; the thought that they could comfort each other had never even crossed her mind as a speculation. She had calmly put the cover on her sewing machine after Mike came downstairs and gave her the news. She did that, and then she had gone to the phone and had gotten to work. The tears she would later shed while talking to her sister had then been a thousand years away. She had brushed past Michael as if he were a piece of the furniture, and he had trailed uncertainly after her as he had done all of their married life.

  She called Tom Sprague, their lawyer, who, hearing that their problem was criminal, hastily referred her to a colleague, Jim Warberg. She called Warberg and got an answering service that would not reveal Warberg's home number. She sat by the phone for a moment, drumming her fingers lightly against her hps, and then called their family lawyer back. Sprague hadn't wanted to give her Warberg's home telephone number, but in the end he gave in. When Regina finally let him go, Sprague sounded dazed, almost shell-shocked. Regina in full spate often caused such a reaction.

  She called Warberg, who said he absolutely couldn't take the case. Regina had lowered her bulldozer blade again. Warberg ended up not only taking the case but agreeing to go immediately to Albany, where Arnie was being held, to see what could be done. Warberg, speaking in the weak, amazed voice of a man who has been filled full of Novocain and then run over by a tractor, protested that he knew a perfectly good man in Albany who could get the lay of the land. Regina was adamant. Warberg went by private plane and reported back four hours later.

  Arnie, he said, was being held on an open charge. He would be extradited to Pennsylvania the following day. Pennsylvania and New York had coordinated the bust along with three Federal agencies: the Federal Drug Control Task Force, the IRS, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The main target was not Arnie, who was small beans, but Will Darnell--Darnell, and whomever Darnell was doing business with. Those guys, Warberg said, with their suspected ties to organized crime and disorganized drug smuggling in the new South, were the big beans.

  "Holding someone on an open charge is illegal," Regina had snapped immediately, drawing on a deep backlog of TV crime-show fare.

  Warberg, not exactly overjoyed to be where he was when he had planned on spending a quiet evening at home reading a book, rejoined crisply, "I'd be down on my knees thanking God that's what they're doing. They caught him with a trunkload of unstamped cigarettes, and if I push them on it, they'll be more than happy to charge him, Mrs. Cunningham. I advise you and your husband to get over here to Albany. Quickly."

  "I thought you said he was going to be extradited tomorrow--"

  "Oh, yes, that's all been arranged. If we've got to play hardball with these guys, we ought to be glad the game's going to be played on our home court. Extradition isn't the problem here."

  "What is?"

  "These people want to play knock-over-the-dominoes. They want to knock your son over onto Will Darnell. Arnold is not talking. I want you two to get over here and persuade him that it's in his best interest to talk."

  "Is it?" she had asked hesitantly.

  "Hell, yes!" Warberg's voice crackled back. "These guys don't want to put your son in jail. He's a minor from a good family with no previous criminal record, not even a school record of disciplinary problems. He can get out of this without even facing a judge. But he's got to talk."

  So they had gone t
o Albany, and Regina had been taken down a short, narrow hallway faced in white tile, lit with high-intensity bulbs sunken into small wells in the ceiling and covered with wire mesh. The place had smelled vaguely of Lysol and urine, and she kept trying to convince herself that her son was being held here, her son, but achieving that conviction was a hard go. It didn't seem possible that it could be true. The possibility that it was all a hallucination seemed much more likely.

  Seeing Arnie had stripped away that possibility in a hurry. The protective jacket of shock was likewise stripped away, and she felt a cold, consuming fear. It was at this moment that she had first seized on the idea of "Getting us over this," the way a drowning person will seize a life preserver. It was Arnie, it was her son, not in a jail cell (that was the only thing she had been spared, but she was grateful for even small favors) but in a small square room whose only furnishings were two chairs and a table scarred with cigarette burns.

  Arnie had looked at her steadily, and his face seemed horribly gaunt, skull-like. He had been to the barber only a week before, and had gotten a surprisingly short haircut (after years of wearing it long, in emulation of Dennis), and now the overhead light shone down cruelly through what was left, making him appear momentarily bald, as if they had shaved his head to loosen his lips.

  "Arnie," she said, and went to him--halfway to him. He turned his head away from her, his lips pressing together, and she stopped. A lesser woman might have burst into tears then, but Regina was not a lesser woman. She let the coldness come back and have its way with her. The coldness was all that would help now.

  Instead of embracing him--something he obviously didn't want--she sat down and told him what had to be done. He refused. She ordered him to talk to the police. He refused again. She reasoned with him. He refused. She harangued him. He refused. She pleaded with him. He refused. Finally she just sat there dully, a headache thudding at her temples, and asked him why. He refused to tell her.

  "I thought you were smart!" she shouted finally. She was nearly mad with frustration--the thing she hated above all others was not getting her way when she absolutely wanted to have it, needed to have it; this had in fact never happened to her since she left home. Until now. It was infuriating to be so smoothly and seamlessly balked by this boy who had once drawn milk from her breasts. "I thought you were smart but you're stupid! You're . . . you're an asshole! They'll put you in jail! Do you want to go to jail for that man Darnell? Is that what you want? He'll laugh at you! He'll laugh at you!" Regina could imagine nothing worse, and her son's apparent lack of interest in whether or not he was laughed at infuriated her all the more.

  She rose from her chair and pushed her hair away from her brow and eyes, the unconscious gesture of a person who is ready to fight. She was breathing rapidly, and her face was flushed. To Arnie, she looked both younger and much, much older than he had ever seen her.

  "I'm not doing it for Darnell," he said quietly, "and I'm not going to jail."

  "What are you, Oliver Wendell Holmes?" she rejoined fiercely, but her anger was in some measure overmastered by relief. At least he could say something. "They caught you in his car with the trunk loaded with cigarettes! Illegal cigarettes!"

  Mildly, Arnie said, "They weren't in the trunk. They were in a compartment under the trunk. A secret compartment. And it was Will's car. Will told me to take his car."

  She looked at him.

  "Are you saying you didn't know they were there?"

  Arnie looked at her with an expression she simply couldn't accept, it was so foreign to his face--it was contempt, Good as gold, my boy's as good as gold, she thought crazily.

  "I knew, and Will knew. But they have to prove it, don't they?"

  She could only look at him, amazed.

  "If they do drop it on me somehow," he said, "I'll get a suspended sentence."

  "Arnie," she said at last, "you're not thinking straight. Maybe your father--"

  "Yes," he interrupted. "I'm thinking straight. I don't know what you're doing, but I'm thinking very straight." And he looked at her, his gray eyes so horribly blank that she could no longer stand it and had to leave.

  In the small green reception room she walked blindly past her husband, who had been sitting on a bench with Warberg. "You go in," she said. "You make him see reason." She went on without waiting for his reply, not stopping until she was outside and the cold December air was painting her hot cheeks.

  Michael went in and had no better luck; he came out with nothing more than a dry throat and a face that looked ten years older than it had going in.

  At the motel, Regina told Warberg what Arnie had said and asked him if there was any chance he might be right.

  Warberg looked thoughtful. "Yes, that's a possible defense," he said. "But it would be a helluva lot more possible if Arnie was the first domino in line. He's not. There's a used-car dealer here in Albany named Henry Buck. He was the catcher. He's been arrested too."

  "What has he said?" Michael asked.

  "I have no way of knowing. But when I tried to speak to his lawyer, he declined to speak with me. I find that ominous. If Buck talks, he puts the onus on Arnie. I'll bet you my house and lot that Buck can testify your son knew that secret compartment was there, and that's bad."

  Warberg looked at them closely.

  "You see, what your boy said to you is really only half-smart, Mrs. Cunningham. I'll be talking to him tomorrow, before they move him back to Pennsylvania. What I hope to make him see is that there's a possibility this whole thing could come down on his head."

  The first flakes of snow began to swirl out of the heavy sky as they turned onto Steve and Vicky's street. Is it snowing in Libertyville yet? Arnie wondered, and touched the keys on their leather tab in his pocket. Probably it was.

  Christine was still in Darnell's Garage, impounded. That was all right. At least she was out of the weather. He would pick her up again. In time.

  The previous weekend was like a blurred bad dream. His parents, haranguing him in the little white room, had seemed to bear the disconnected faces of strangers; they were heads talking in a foreign language. The lawyer they had hired, Warley or Warmly or whatever, kept talking about something he called the domino theory, and about the need to get out of "the condemned building before the whole thing falls down on your head, boy--there are two states and three Federal agencies bringing up the wrecking balls."

  But Arnie was more worried about Christine.

  It seemed clearer and clearer to him that Roland D. LeBay was either with him or hovering someplace near--he was, perhaps, coalescing inside him. This idea did not frighten Arnie; it comforted him. But he had to be careful. Not of Junkins; he felt that Junkins had only suspicions, and that they all lay in wrong directions, radiating out from Christine rather than in toward her.

  But Darnell . . . there could be problems with Will. Yes, real problems.

  That first night in Albany, after his mother and father had gone back to their motel, Arnie had been conducted to a holding cell, where he had fallen asleep with surprising ease and speed. And he had had a dream--not quite a nightmare, but something that seemed terribly disquieting. He had awakened watchfully in the middle of the night, his body running with sweat.

  He had dreamed that Christine had been reduced in scale to a tiny '58 Plymouth no longer than a man's hand. It was on a slotcar track surrounded by HO-scale scenery that was amazingly apt--here was a plastic street that could be Basin Drive, here was another that could be JFK Drive, where Moochie Welch had been killed. A Lego building that looked exactly like Libertyville High. Plastic houses, paper trees . . .

  . . . and a gigantic, hulking Will Darnell was at the controls that dictated how fast or how slowly the tiny Fury ran through all of this. His breath wheezed in and out of his damaged lungs with a windstorm sound.

  You don't want to open your mouth, kiddo, Will said. He loomed over this scale-model world like the Amazing Colossal Man. You don't want to frig with me because I'm in control;
I can do this--

  And slowly, Will began to turn the control knob over toward fast.

  No! Arnie tried to scream. No, don't do that, please! I love her! Please, you'll kill her!

  On the track, the tiny Christine raced through the tiny Libertyville faster and faster, her rear end switching on the curves as she shimmied on the far edge of centrifugal force, that dish-shaped mystery. Now she was simply a blur of white-over-red, her engine a high, angry wasp-whine.

  Please! Arnie screamed. Pleeeeeaaaaase!

  At last, Will had begun to turn the control back, looking grimly pleased. The little car began to slow down.

  If you start to get ideas, you just want to remember where your car is, kiddo. Keep your mouth shut and we'll both live to fight another day. I've been in tighter jams than this--

  Arnie had reached out to grasp the little car, to rescue it from the track. The dream-Will had slapped his hand away.

  Whose bag is it, kiddo?

  Will, please--

  Let me hear you say it.

  It's my bag.

  Just remember it, kiddo.

  And Arnie had awakened with that in his ears. There had been no more sleep for him that night.

  Was it so unlikely that Will would know . . . well, would know something about Christine? No. He saw a great deal from behind that window, but he knew how to keep his mouth shut--at least until the time was right to open it. He might know what Junkins did not, that Christine's regeneration in November was not just strange but totally impossible. He would know that a lot of the repairs had never been made, at least not by Arnie.

  What else would he know?

  With a creeping coldness that moved up his legs to the root of his guts, Arnie realized at last that Will could have been at the garage the night Repperton and the others had died. In fact, it was more than possible. It was probable. Jimmy Sykes was simple, and Will didn't like to trust him alone.