Christine, Page 44

  She laughed. Ice-cubes clinked in glasses. Shortly she came back with two glasses of ice and two cans of Canada Dry.

  "Thanks," I said, taking mine.

  "No, thank you," she said, and now her blue eyes were dark and sober. "Thanks for being around. If I had to deal with this alone, I think I'd . . . I don't know."

  "Come on," I said. "It's not that bad."

  "Isn't it? Do you know about Darnell?"

  I nodded.

  "And that other one? Don Vandenberg?"

  So she had made the connection too.

  I nodded again. "I saw it. Leigh, what is it about Christine that bothers you?"

  For a long time I didn't know if she was going to answer. If she would be able to answer. I could see her struggling with it, looking down at her glass, held in both hands.

  At last in a very low voice, she said, "I think she tried to kill me."

  I don't know what I had expected, but it wasn't that. "What do you mean?"

  She talked, first hesitantly, then more rapidly, until it was pouring out of her. It is a story you have already heard, so I won't repeat it here; suffice it to say that I tried to tell it pretty much as she told it to me. She hadn't been kidding about being scared. It was in the pallor of her face, the little hitches and gulps of her voice, the way her hands constantly caressed her upper arms, as if she was too cold in spite of the sweater, and the more she talked, the more scared I got.

  She finished by telling me how, as consciousness dwindled, the dashboard lights had seemed to turn into watching eyes. She laughed nervously at this last, as if trying to take the curse off an obvious absurdity, but I didn't laugh back. I was remembering George LeBay's dry voice as we sat in cheap patio chairs in front of the Rainbow Motel, his voice telling me the story of Roland, Veronica, and Rita. I was remembering those things and my mind was making unspeakable connections. Lights were going on. I didn't like what they were revealing. My heart started to thud heavily in my chest, and I couldn't have joined her laughter if my life had depended on it.

  She told me about the ultimatum she had given him--her or the car. She told me about Arnie's furious reaction. That had been the last time she went out with him.

  "Then he got arrested," she said, "and I started to think . . . think about what had happened to Buddy Repperton and those other boys . . . and Moochie Welch . . ."

  "And now Vandenberg and Darnell."

  "Yes. But that's not all." She drank from her glass of ginger ale and then poured in more. The edge of the can chattered briefly against the rim of the glass. "Christmas Eve, when I called you, my mom and dad went out for drinks at my dad's boss's house. And I started to get nervous. I was thinking about . . . oh, I don't know what I was thinking about."

  "I think you do."

  She put a hand to her forehead and rubbed it, as if she was getting a headache. "I suppose I do. I was thinking about that car being out. Her. Being out and getting them. But if she was out on Christmas Eve, I guess she had plenty to keep her busy without bothering my par--" She slammed her glass down, making me jump. "And why do I keep talking about that car as if it was a person?" she cried out. Tears had begun to spill down her cheeks. "Why do I keep doing that?"

  On that night, I saw all too clearly what comforting her could lead to. Arnie was between us--and part of myself was, too. I had known him for a long time. A long good time.

  But that was then; this was now.

  I got my crutches under me, thumped my way across to the couch, and plopped down beside her. The cushions sighed. It wasn't a raspberry, but it was close.

  My mother keeps a box of Kleenex in the drawer of the little endtable. I pulled one out, looked at her, and pulled out a whole handful. I gave them to her and she thanked me. Then, not liking myself much, I put an arm around her and held her.

  She stiffened for a moment. . . and then let me draw her against my shoulder. She was trembling. We just sat that way, both of us afraid of even the slightest movement, I think. Afraid we might explode. Or something. Across the room, the clock ticked importantly on the mantelpiece. Bright winterlight fell through the bow windows that give a three-way view of the street. The storm had blown itself out by noon on Christmas Day, and now the hard and cloudless blue sky seemed to deny that there even was such a thing as snow--but the dunelike drifts rolling across lawns all up and down the street like the backs of great buried beasts confirmed it.

  "The smell," I said at last. "How sure are you about that?"

  "It was there!" she said, drawing away from me and sitting up straight. I collected my arm again, with a mixed sensation of disappointment and relief. "It really was there . . . a rotten, horrible smell." She looked at me. "Why? Have you smelled it too?"

  I shook my head. I never had. Not really.

  "What do you know about that car, then?" she asked. "You know something. I can see it on your face."

  It was my turn to think long and hard, and oddly what came into my mind was an image of nuclear fission from some science textbook. A cartoon. You don't expect to see cartoons in science books, but as someone once said to me, there are many devious twists and turns along the path of public education . . . in point of fact, that someone had been Arnie himself. The cartoon showed two hotrod atoms speeding toward each other and then slamming together. Presto! Instead of a lot of wreckage (and atom ambulances to take away the dead and wounded neutrons), critical mass, chain reaction, and one hell of a big bang.

  Then I decided the memory of that cartoon really wasn't odd at all. Leigh had certain information I hadn't had before. The reverse was also true. In both cases a lot of it was guesswork, a lot of it was subjective feeling and circumstance . . . but enough of it was hard information to be really scary. I wondered briefly what the police would do if they knew what we did. I could guess: nothing. Could you bring a ghost to trial? Or a car?

  "Dennis?"

  "I'm thinking," I said. "Can't you smell the wood burning?"

  "What do you know?" she asked again.

  Collision. Critical mass. Chain reaction. Kaboom.

  The thing was, I was thinking, if we put our information together, we would have to do something or tell someone. Take some action. We--

  I remembered my dream: the car sitting there in LeBay's garage, the motor revving up and then falling off, revving up again, the headlights coming on, the shriek of tires.

  I took her hands in both of mine. "Okay," I said. "Listen. Arnie: he bought Christine from a guy who is dead now. A guy named Roland D. LeBay. We saw her on his lawn one day when we were coming home from work, and--"

  "You're doing it too," she said softly.

  "What?"

  "Calling it she."

  I nodded, not letting go of her hands. "Yeah. I know. It's hard to stop. The thing is, Arnie wanted her--or it, or whatever that car is-- from the first time he laid eyes on her. And I think now . . . I didn't then, but I do now . . . that LeBay wanted Arnie to have her just as badly; that he would have given her to him if it had come to that. It's like Arnie saw Christine and knew, and then LeBay saw Arnie and knew the same thing."

  Leigh pulled her hands free of mine and began to rub her elbows restlessly again. "Arnie said he paid--"

  "He paid, all right. And he's still paying. That is, if Arnie's left at all."

  "I don't understand what you mean."

  "I'll show you," I said, "in a few minutes. First, let me give you the background."

  "All right."

  "LeBay had a wife and daughter. This was back in the fifties. His daughter died beside the road. She choked to death. On a hamburger."

  Leigh's face grew white, then whiter; for a moment she seemed as milky and translucent as clouded glass.

  "Leigh!" I said sharply. "Are you all right?"

  "Yes," she said with a chilling placidity. Her color didn't improve. Her mouth moved in a horrid grimace that was perhaps intended to be a reassuring smile. "I'm fine." She stood up. "Where is the bathroom, please?"

  "
There's one at the end of the hall," I said. "Leigh, you look awful."

  "I'm going to vomit," she said in that same placid voice, and walked away. She moved jerkily now, like a puppet, all the dancer's grace I had seen in her shadow now gone. She walked out of the room slowly, but when she was out of sight the rhythm of her stride picked up; I heard the bathroom door thrown open, and then the sounds. I leaned back against the sofa and put my hands over my eyes.

  *

  When she came back she was still pale but had regained a touch of her color. She had washed her face and there were still a few drops of water on her cheeks.

  "I'm sorry," I said.

  "It's all right. It just . . . startled me." She smiled wanly. "I guess that's an understatement." She caught my eyes with hers. "Just tell me one thing, Dennis. What you said. Is it true? Really true?"

  "Yeah," I said. "It's true. And there's more. But do you really want to hear any more?"

  "No," she said. "But tell me anyway."

  "We could drop it," I said, not really believing it.

  Her grave, distressed eyes held mine. "It might be . . . safer . . . if we didn't," she said.

  "His wife committed suicide shortly after their daughter died."

  "The car . . ."

  ". . . was involved."

  "How?"

  "Leigh--"

  "How?"

  So I told her--not just about the little girl and her mother, but about LeBay himself, as his brother George had told me. His bottomless reservoir of anger. The kids who had made fun of his clothes and his bowl haircut. His escape into the Army, where everyone's clothes and haircuts were the same. The motor pool. The constant railing at the shitters, particularly those shitters who brought him their big expensive cars to be fixed at government expense. The Second World War. The brother, Drew, killed in France. The old Chevrolet. The old Hudson Hornet. And through it all, a steady and unchanging backbeat, the anger.

  "That word," Leigh murmured.

  "What word?"

  "Shitters." She had to force herself to say it, her nose wrinkling in rueful and almost unconscious distaste. "He uses it. Arnie."

  "I know."

  We looked at each other, and her hands found mine again.

  "You're cold," I said. Another bright remark from that font of wisdom, Dennis Guilder. I got a million of em.

  "Yes. I feel like I'll never be warm again."

  I wanted to put my arms around her and didn't. I was afraid to. Arnie was still too much mixed up in things. The most awful thing--and it was awful--was how it seemed more and more that he was dead . . . dead, or under some weird enchantment.

  "Did his brother say anything else?"

  "Nothing that seems to fit." But a memory rose like a bubble in still water and popped: He was obsessed and he was angry, but he was not a monster, George LeBay had told me. At least . . . I don't think he was. It had seemed that, lost in the past as he had been, he had been about to say something more . . . and then had realized where he was and that he was talking to a stranger. What had he been about to say?

  All at once I had a really monstrous idea. I pushed it away. It went . . . but it was hard work, pushing that idea. Like pushing a piano. And I could still see its outlines in the shadows.

  I became aware that Leigh was looking at me very closely, and I wondered how much of what I had been thinking showed on my face.

  "Did you take Mr. LeBay's address?" she asked.

  "No." I thought for a moment, and then remembered the funeral, which now seemed impossibly far back in time. "But I imagine the Libertyville American Legion Post has it. They buried LeBay and contacted the brother. Why?"

  Leigh only shook her head and went to the window, where she stood looking out into the blinding day. Shank of the year, I thought randomly.

  She turned back to me, and I was struck by her beauty again, calm and undemanding except for those high, arrogant cheekbones--the sort of cheekbones you might expect to see on a lady probably carrying a knife in her belt.

  "You said you'd show me something," she said. "What was it?"

  I nodded. There was no way to stop now. The chain reaction had started. There was no way to shut it down.

  "Go upstairs," I said. "My room's the second door on the left. Look in the third drawer of my dresser. You'll have to dig under some of my undies, but they won't bite."

  She smiled--only a little, but even a little was an improvement. "And what am I going to find? A Baggie of dope?"

  "I gave that up last year," I said, smiling back. " 'Ludes this year. I finance my habit selling heroin down at the junior high."

  "What is it? Really?"

  "Arnie's autograph," I said, "immortalized on plaster."

  "His autograph?"

  I nodded. "In duplicate."

  She found them, and five minutes later we were on the couch again, looking at two squares of plaster cast. They sat side by side on the glass-topped coffee table, slightly ragged on the sides, a little the worse for wear. Other names danced off into limbo on one of them. I had saved the casts, had even directed the nurse on where to cut them. Later I had cut out the two squares, one from the right leg, one from the left. We looked at them silently:

  on the left.

  on the right;

  Leigh looked at me, questioning and puzzled. "Those are pieces of your--"

  "My casts, yeah."

  "Is it . . . a joke, or something?"

  "No joke. I watched him sign both of them." Now that it was out, there was a queer kind of loosening, of relief. It was good to be able to share this. It had been on my mind for a long time, itching and digging away.

  "But they don't look anything alike."

  "You're telling me," I said. "But Arnie isn't much like he used to be either. And it all goes back to that goddam car." I poked savagely at the square of plaster on the left. "That isn't his signature. I've known Arnie almost all my life. I've seen his homework papers, I've seen him send away for things, I've watched him endorse his paychecks, and that is not his signature. The one on the right, yes. This one, no. You want to do something for me tomorrow, Leigh?"

  "What?"

  I told her. She nodded slowly. "For us."

  "Huh?"

  "I'll do it for us. Because we have to do something, don't we?"

  "Yes," I said. "I guess so. You mind a personal question?"

  She shook her head, her remarkable blue eyes never leaving mine.

  "How have you been sleeping lately?"

  "Not so well," she said. "Bad dreams. How about you?"

  "No. Not so good."

  And then, because I couldn't help myself anymore, I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her. There was a momentary hesitation, and I thought she was going to draw away . . . then her chin came up and she kissed me back, firmly and fully. Maybe it was sort of lucky at that, me being mostly immobilized.

  When the kiss was over she looked into my eyes, questioning.

  "Against the dreams," I said, thinking it would come out stupid and phony-smooth, the way it looks on paper, but instead it sounded shaky and almost painfully honest.

  "Against the dreams," she repeated gravely, as if it were a talisman, and this time she inclined her head toward me and we kissed again with those two ragged squares of plaster staring up at us like blind white eyes with Arnie's name written across them. We kissed for the simple animal comfort that comes with animal contact--sure, that, and something more, starting to be something more--and then we held each other without talking, and I don't think we were kidding ourselves about what was happening--at least not entirely. It was comfort, but it was also good old sex--full, ripe, and randy with teenage hormones. And maybe it had a chance to be something fuller and kinder than just sex.

  But there was something else in those kisses--I knew it, she knew it, and probably you do too. That other thing was a shameful sort of betrayal. I could feel eighteen years of memories cry out--the ant farms, the chess games, the movies, the things he had taug
ht me, the times I had kept him from getting killed. Except maybe in the end, I hadn't. Maybe I had seen the last of him--and a poor, rag-tag end at that--on Thanksgiving night, when he brought me the turkey sandwiches and beer.

  I don't think it occurred to either of us that until then we had done nothing unforgivable to Arnie--nothing that might anger Christine. But now, of course, we had.

  44 / Detective Work

  Well, when the pipeline gets broken

  And I'm lost on the river-bridge,

  I'm all cracked up on the highway

  And in the water's edge,

  Medics come down the Thruway,

  Ready to sew me up with the thread,

  And if I fall down dyin

  Y'know she's bound to put a blanket

  on my bed.

  --Bob Dylan

  What happened in the next three weeks or so was that Leigh and I played detective, and we fell in love.

  She went down to the Municipal Offices the next day and paid fifty cents to have two papers Xeroxed--those papers go to Harrisburg, but Harrisburg sends a copy back to the town.

  This time my family was home when Leigh arrived. Ellie peeked in on us whenever she got the chance. She was fascinated by Leigh, and I was quietly amused when, about a week into the new year, she started wearing her hair tied back as Leigh did. I was tempted to get on her case about it. . . and withstood the temptation. Maybe I was growing up a little bit (but not enough to keep from sneaking one of her Yodels when I saw one hidden behind the Tupperware bowls of leftovers in the refrigerator).

  Except for Ellie's occasional peeks, we had the living room mostly to ourselves that next afternoon, the twenty-seventh of December, after the social amenities had been observed. I introduced Leigh to my mother and father, my mom served coffee, and we talked. Elaine talked the most--chattering about her school and asking Leigh all sorts of questions about ours. At first I was annoyed, and then I was grateful. Both my parents are the soul of middle-class politeness (if my mom was being led to the electric chair and bumped into the chaplain, she would excuse herself), and I felt pretty clearly that they liked Leigh, but it was also obvious--to me, at least--that they were puzzled and a little uncomfortable, wondering where Arnie fit into all this.