Christine, Page 41

  You don't want to open your mouth. You don't want to frig with me because I can do this . . .

  But even supposing Will knew, who would believe him? It was too late for self-delusion now, and Arnie could no longer put the unthinkable thought away from himself . . . he no longer even wanted to. Who would believe Will if Will decided to tell someone that Christine sometimes ran by herself? That she had been out on her own the night Moochie Welch was killed, and the night those other hoods were killed? Would the police believe that? They would laugh themselves into a hemorrhage. Junkins? Getting warmer, but Arnie didn't believe Junkins would be able to accept such a thing, even if he wanted to. Arnie had seen his eyes. So even if Will did know, what good would his knowledge do?

  Then, with mounting horror, Arnie realized that it didn't matter. Will would be out on bail tomorrow or the next day, and then Christine would be his hostage. He could torch it--he had torched plenty of cars in his time, as Arnie knew from sitting in the office and listening to him yarn--and after she was torched, a burned hulk, helpless, there was the crusher out back. In goes the cindered hulk of Christine on the conveyor belt, out comes a smashed cube of metal.

  The cops have sealed the place.

  But that didn't cut any ice, either. Will Darnell was a very old fox, and he stayed prepared for any contingency. If Will wanted to get in and torch Christine, he would do it . . . although it was much more likely, Arnie thought, that he would hire an insurance specialist to do the job--a guy who would throw double handfuls of charcoal-lighter cubes into the car and then toss a match.

  In his mind's eye Arnie could see the blossoming flames. He could smell charring upholstery.

  He lay on the cell bunk, his mouth dry, his heart beating rapidly in his chest.

  You don't want to open your mouth. You don't want to frig with me . . .

  Of course, if Will tried something and got careless--if his concentration lapsed for even a moment--Christine would get him. But somehow Arnie didn't think Will would get careless.

  The next day he had been taken back to Pennsylvania, charged, then bailed for a nominal sum. There would be a preliminary hearing in January, and there was already talk of a grand jury. The bust was frontpage material across the state, although Arnie was only identified as "a youth" whose name was "being withheld by state and Federal authorities due to his minor status."

  Arnie's name was common enough knowledge in Libertyville, however. In spite of its new exurban sprawl of drive-ins, fast-food emporiums, and Bowl-a-Ramas, it was still a faculty town where a lot of people were living in other people's back pockets. These people, mostly associated with Horlicks University, knew who had been driving for Will Darnell and who had been arrested over the New York State line with a trunkful of contraband cigarettes. It was Regina's nightmare.

  Arnie went home in the custody of his parents--bailed for a thousand dollars--after a brief detour to jail. It was all nothing but a big shitting game of Monopoly, really. His parents had come up with the Get Out of Jail Free card. As expected.

  *

  "What are you smiling about, Arnie?" Regina asked him. Michael was driving the wagon along at fast walking speed, looking through the swirls of snow for Steve and Vicky's ranchhouse.

  "Was I smiling?"

  "Yes," she said, and touched his hair.

  "I don't really remember," he said remotely, and she took her hand away.

  They had come home on Sunday and his parents had left him pretty much alone, either because they didn't know how to talk to him or because they were utterly disgusted with him . . . or perhaps it was a combination of the two. He didn't give a crap which, and that was the truth. He felt washed out, exhausted, a ghost of himself. His mother had gone to bed and slept all that afternoon, after taking the telephone of! the hook. His father puttered aimlessly in his workroom, running his electric planer periodically and then shutting it off.

  Arnie sat in the living room watching a football playoff double-header, not knowing who was playing, not caring, content to watch the players run around, first in bright warm California sunshine, later in a mixture of rain and sleet that turned the playing field to churned-up mud and erased the lines.

  Around six o'clock he dozed off.

  And dreamed.

  He dreamed again that night and the next, in the bed where he had slept since earliest childhood, the elm outside casting its old familiar shadow (a skeleton each winter that gained miraculous new flesh each May). These dreams were not like the dream of the giant Will looming over the slotcar track. He could not remember these dreams at all more than a few moments after waking. Perhaps that was just as well. A figure by the roadside; a fleshless finger tapping a decayed palm in a lunatic parody of instruction; an uneasy sense of freedom and . . . escape? Yes, escape. Nothing else except. . .

  Yes, he escaped from these dreams and back into reality with one repeating image: He was behind the wheel of Christine, driving slowly through a howling blizzard, snow so thick that he could literally see no farther than the end of her hood. The wind was not a scream; it was a lower, more sinister sound, a basso roar. Then the image had changed. The snow wasn't snow any longer; it was tickertape. The roar of the wind was the roar of a great crowd lining both sides of Fifth Avenue. They were cheering him. They were cheering Christine. They were cheering because he and Christine had . . . had . . .

  Escaped.

  Each time this confused dream retreated, he thought, When this is over I'm getting out. Getting out for sure. Going to drive to Mexico. And Mexico, as he imagined its steady sun and its rural quiet, seemed more real than the dreams.

  Shortly after awakening from the last of these dreams, the idea of spending Christmas with Aunt Vicky and Uncle Steve, just like in the old days, had come to him. He awoke with it, and it clanged in his head with a peculiar persistence. The idea seemed to be an awfully good one, an all-important one. To get out of Libertyville before . . .

  Well, before Christmas. What else?

  So he began talking to his mother and father about it, coming down particularly hard on Regina. On Wednesday, she abruptly gave in and agreed. He knew she had talked to Vicky, and Vicky hadn't been inclined to lord it over her, so it was all right.

  Now, on Christmas Eve, he felt that everything would soon be all right.

  "There it is, Mike," Regina said, "and you're going to drive right by it, just like you do every time we come here."

  Michael grunted and turned into the driveway. "I saw it," he said in the perpetually defensive tone he always seemed to use around his wife. He's a donkey, Arnie thought. She talks to him like a donkey, she rides him like a donkey, and he brays like a donkey.

  "You're smiling again," Regina said.

  "I was just thinking about how much I love you both," Arnie said. His father looked at him, surprised and touched; there was a soft gleam in his mother's eyes that might have been tears.

  They really believed it.

  The shitters.

  By three o'clock that Christmas Eve the snow was still only isolated flurries, although the flurries were beginning to blend into each other. The delay in the storm's arrival was not good news, the weather forecasters said. It had compacted itself and turned even more vicious. Predictions of possible accumulations had gone from a foot to a possible eighteen inches, with serious drifting in high winds.

  Leigh Cabot sat in the living room of her house, across from a small natural Christmas tree that was already beginning to shed its needles (in her house she was the voice of traditionalism and for four years had successfully staved off her father's wish for a synthetic tree and her mother's wish to kick off the holiday season with a goose or a capon instead of the traditional Thanksgiving turkey). She was alone in the house. Her mother and father had gone over to the Stewarts' for Christmas Eve drinks; Mr. Stewart was her father's new boss, and they liked each other. This was a friendship Mrs. Cabot was eager to promote. In the last ten years they had moved six times, hopping all over the eastern seabo
ard, and of all the places they had been, her mom liked Libertyville the best. She wanted to stay here, and her husband's friendship with Mr. Stewart could go a long way toward ensuring that.

  All alone and still a virgin, she thought. That was an utterly stupid thing to think, but all the same she got up suddenly, as if stung. She went into the kitchen, over-conscious of that Formica wonderland's little servo-sounds: electric clock, the oven where a ham was baking (turn that off at five if they're not back, she reminded herself), a cool clunk from the freezer as the Frigidaire's icemaker made another cube.

  She opened the fridge, saw a six-pack of Coke sitting in there next to Daddy's beer, and thought: Get thee behind me, Satan. Then she grabbed a can anyway. Never mind what it did to her complexion. She wasn't going with anyone now. If she broke out, so what?

  The empty house made her uneasy. It never had before; she had always felt pleased and absurdly competent when they left her alone--a holdover from childhood days, no doubt. The house had always seemed comforting to her. But now the sounds of the kitchen, of the rising wind outside, even the scuff of her slippers on the linoleum--those sounds seemed sinister, even frightening. If things had worked out differently, Arnie could have been here with her. Her folks, especially her mother, had liked him. At first. Now, of course, after what had happened, her mother would probably wash her mouth out with soap if she knew Leigh was even thinking of him. But she did think of him. Too much of the time. Wondering why he had changed. Wondering how he was taking the breakup. Wondering if he was okay.

  The wind rose to a shriek and then fell off a little, reminding her--for no reason, of course--of a car's engine revving and then falling off.

  Won't come back from Dead Man's Curve, her mind whispered strangely, and for no reason at all (of course) she went to the sink and poured her Coke down the drain and wondered if she was going to cry, or throw up, or what.

  She realized with dawning surprise that she was in a state of low terror.

  For no reason at all.

  Of course.

  At least her parents had left the car in the garage (cars, she had cars on the brain). She didn't like to think of her dad trying to drive home from the Stewarts' in this, half-soused from three or four martinis (except that he always called them martoonis, with typical adult kittenishness). It was only three blocks, and the two of them had left the house bundled up and giggling, looking like a couple of large children on their way to make a snowman. The walk home would sober them up. It would be good for them. It would be good for them if . . .

  The wind rose again--gunning around the eaves and then falling of!--and she suddenly saw her mother and father walking up the street through clouds of blowing snow, holding onto each other to keep from falling on their drunken, lovable asses, laughing. Daddy maybe goosing Mom through her snowpants. The way he sometimes goosed her when he got a buzz on was also something that had always irritated Leigh precisely because it seemed such a juvenile thing for a grown man to do. But of course she loved them both. Her love was a part of the irritation, and her occasional exasperation with them was very much a part of her love.

  They were walking together through a snow as thick as heavy smoke and then two huge green eyes opened in the white behind them, seeming to float . . . eyes that looked terribly like the circles of the dashboard instruments she had seen as she was choking to death . . . and they were growing . . . stalking her helpless, laughing, squiffy parents.

  She drew a harsh breath and went back into the living room. She approached the telephone, almost touched it, then veered away and went back to the window, looking out into the white and cupping her elbows in the palms of her hands.

  What had she been about to do? Call them? Tell them she was alone in the house and had gotten thinking about Arnie's old and somehow slinking car, his steel girlfriend Christine, and that she wanted them to come home because she was scared for them and herself? Was that what she was going to do?

  Cute, Leigh. Cute.

  The plowed blacktop of the street was disappearing under new snow, but slowly; it had only just begun to snow really hard, and the wind periodically tried to clear the street with strong gusts that sent membranes of powder twisting and rising to merge with the whitish-gray sky of the stormy afternoon like slowly twisting smoke-ghosts . . .

  Oh, but the terror was there, it was real, and something was going to happen. She knew it. She had been shocked to hear that Arnie had been arrested for smuggling, but that reaction had been nowhere as strong as the sick fear she had felt when she opened the paper on an earlier day and saw what had happened to Buddy Repperton and those other two boys, that day when her first crazy, terrible, and somehow certain thought had been: Christine.

  And now the premonition of some new piece of black work hung heavily on her, and she couldn't get rid of it, it was crazy, Arnie had been in Philadelphia at a chess tourney, she had asked around that day, that was all there was to it and she would not think about this anymore she would turn on all the radios the TV fill the house up with sound not think about that car that smelled like the grave that car that had tried to kill her murder her--

  "Oh damn," she whispered. "Can't you quit?"

  Her arms sculpted rigidly in gooseflesh.

  Abruptly she went to the telephone again, found the phone book, and as Arnie had done on an evening some two weeks before, she called Libertyville Community Hospital. A pleasant-voiced receptionist told her that Mr. Guilder had been checked out that morning. Leigh thanked her and hung up.

  She stood thoughtfully in the empty living room, looking at the small tree, the presents, the manger in the corner. Then she looked up the Guilders' number in the phone book and dialled it

  "Leigh," Dennis said, happily pleased.

  The phone in her hand felt cold. "Dennis, can I come over and talk to you?"

  "Today?" he asked, surprised.

  Confused thoughts tumbled through her mind. The ham in the oven. She had to turn the oven off at five. Her parents would be home. It was Christmas Eve. The snow. And . . . and she didn't think it would be safe to be out tonight. Out walking on the sidewalks, when anything might come looming out of the snow. Anything at all. Not tonight, that was the worst. She didn't think it would be safe to be out tonight.

  "Leigh?"

  "Not tonight," she said. "I'm house-sitting for my folks. They're at a cocktail party."

  "Yeah, mine too," Dennis said, amused. "My sister and I are playing Parcheesi. She cheats."

  Faintly: "I do not!"

  At another time it might have been funny. It wasn't now. "After Christmas. Maybe on Tuesday. The twenty-sixth. Would that be all right?"

  "Sure," he said. "Leigh, is it about Arnie?"

  "No," she said, clutching the telephone so tightly that her hand felt numb. She had to struggle with her voice. "No--not Arnie. I want to talk to you about Christine."

  42 / The Storm Breaks

  Well she's a hot-steppin hemi with a four on the floor,

  She's a Roadrunner engine in a '32 Ford,

  Yeah, late at night when I'm dead on the line,

  I swear I think of your pretty face when I let her wind.

  Well look over yonder, see those city lights?

  Come on, little darlin, go ramroddin tonight.

  --Bruce Springsteen

  By five o'clock that evening the storm had blanketed Pennsylvania; it screamed across the state from border to border, its howling throat full of snow. There was no final Christmas Eve rush, and most of the weary and shell-shocked clerks and salespeople were grateful to mother nature in spite of the missed overtime. There would, they told each other over Christmas Eve drinks in front of freshly kindled fires, be plenty of that when returns started on Tuesday.

  Mother nature didn't seem all that motherly that evening as early dusk gave way to full dark and then to blizzardy night. She was a pagan, fearsome old witch that night, a harridan on the wind, and Christmas meant nothing to her; she ripped down Chamber of Commerce tin
sel and sent it gusting high into the black sky, she blew the large nativity scene in front of the police station into a snowbank where the sheep, the goats, the Holy Mother and Child were not found until a late January thaw uncovered them. And as a final spit in the eye of the holiday season, she tipped over the forty-foot tree that had stood in front of the Libertyville Municipal Building and sent it through a big window and into the town Tax Assessor's office. A good place for it, many said later.

  By seven o'clock the plows had begun to fall behind. A Trailways bus bulled its way up Main Street at quarter past seven, a short fine of cars dogging its silvery rump like puppies behind their mother, and then the street was empty except for a few slant-parked cars that had already been buried to the bumpers by the passing plows. By morning, most of them would be buried entirely. At the intersection of Main Street and Basin Drive, a stop-and-go light that directed no one at all twisted and danced from its power cable in the wind. There was a sudden electrical fizzing noise and the light went dark. Two or three passengers from the last city bus of the day were crossing the street at the time; they glanced up and then hurried on.

  By eight o'clock, when Mr. and Mrs. Cabot finally arrived home (to Leigh's great but unspoken relief), the local radio stations were broadcasting a plea from the Pennsylvania State Police for everyone to stay off the roads.

  By nine o'clock, as Michael, Regina, and Arnie Cunningham, equipped with hot rum punches (Uncle Steve's avowed Specialty of the Season), were gathering around the television with Uncle Steve and Aunt Vicky to watch Alastair Sim in A Christmas Carol, a forty-mile stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike had been closed by drifting snow. By midnight almost all of it would be closed.

  By nine-thirty, when Christine's headlights suddenly came on in Will Darnell's deserted garage, cutting a bright arc through the interior blackness, Libertyville had totally shut down, except for the occasional cruising plows.

  In the silent garage, Christine's engine gunned and fell off.