Christine, Page 47

  "Off my case, hose-head."

  "No, seriously. I've been in hot water ever since you broke your wishbones, and I'm still in hot water. It's a wonder I don't look like a lobster." He laughed heartily. It was not the sound you'd expect of a kid in trouble; it was the laugh of a man--yes, a man--who was enjoying himself tremendously. He put the pan on the stove and poured Wesson Oil over the bottom of it. His hair, shorter than it used to be and combed back in a style that was new to me, fell over his forehead. He flipped it back with a quick jerk of his head and added popcorn to the oil. He slammed a lid over the pan. Went to the fridge. Got a six-pack. Slammed it down in front of me, pulled off two cans, and opened them. Gave me one. Held up his. I held up mine.

  "A toast," Arnie said. "Death to the shitters of the world in 1979."

  I lowered my can slowly. "I can't drink to that, man."

  I saw a spark of anger in those gray eyes. It seemed to twinkle there, like spurious good humor, and then go out. "Well, what can you drink to-man?"

  "How about to college?" I asked quietly.

  He looked at me sullenly, his earlier good humor gone like magic. "I should have known she'd fill you full of that garbage. My mother is one woman who never stuck at getting low to get what she wants. You know that, Dennis. She'd kiss the devil's ass if that's what it took."

  I put my beer-can down, still full. "Well, she didn't kiss my ass. She just said you weren't making any applications and she was worried."

  "It's my life," Arnie said. His lips twisted, changing his face, making it extraordinarily ugly. "I'll do what I want."

  "And college isn't it?"

  "Yeah, I'll go. But in my own time. You tell her that, if she asks. In my own time. Not this year. Definitely not. If she thinks I'm going to go off to Pitt or Horlicks or Rutgers and put on a freshman beanie and go boola-boola at the home football games, she's out of her mind. Not after the shitstorm I've been through this year. No way, man."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I'm taking off," he said. "I'm going to get in Christine and we're going to motorvate right the Christ out of this one-timetable town. You understand?" His voice began to rise, to become shrill, and I felt horror sweep over me again. I was helpless against that unmanning fear and could only hope that it didn't show on my face. Because it wasn't just

  LeBay's voice now; now it was even LeBay's face, swimming under Arnie's like some dead thing preserved in Formalin. "It's been nothing but a shitstorm, and I think that goddam Junkins is still after me full steam ahead, and he better watch out or somebody just might junk him--"

  "Who's Junkins?" I asked.

  "Never mind," he said. "It's not important." Behind him, the Wesson Oil had begun to sizzle. A kernel of corn popped--ponk!--against the underside of the lid. "I've got to go shake that, Dennis. Do you want to make a toast or not? Makes no difference to me."

  "All right," I said. "How about to us?"

  He smiled, and the constriction in my chest eased a little. "Us, yeah, that's a good one, Dennis. To us. Gotta be that, huh?"

  "Gotta be," I said, and my voice hoarsened a little. "Yeah, gotta be."

  We clicked the Bud cans together and drank.

  Arnie went over to the stove and began shaking the pan, where the corn was picking up speed. I let a couple of swallows of beer slide down my throat. Beer was still a fairly new thing to me then, and I had never been drunk on it because I liked the taste quite well, and friends--Lenny Barongg was the chief of them--had told me that if you got falling-down, standing-up, ralphing-down-your-shirt shitfaced, you couldn't even look at the stuff for weeks. Sadly, I have found out since that that isn't completely true.

  But Arnie was drinking like they were going to reinstitute Prohibition on January first; he had finished his first can before the popcorn had finished popping. He crimped the empty, winked at me, and said, "Watch me put it up the little tramp's ass, Dennis." The allusion escaped me, so I just smiled noncommittally as he tossed the can toward the wastebasket. It banged the wall over it and dropped in.

  "Two points," I said.

  "That's right," he said. "Hand me another one, would you?"

  I did, figuring what the hell--my folks were planning to see the New Year in at home, and if Arnie got really drunk and passed out, I could give my dad a call. Arnie might say things drunk that he wouldn't say sober, and I didn't want to ride home in Christine anyway.

  But the beer didn't seem to affect him. He finished popping the corn, dumped it into a big plastic bowl, melted half a stick of margarine, poured it over the top, salted it, and said, "Let's go in the living room and watch some tube. What do you say?"

  "Fine by me." I got my crutches, seated them in my armpits--which just lately felt as if they might be growing calluses--and then groped for the three beers still on the table.

  "I'll come back for them," Arnie said. "Come on. Before you break everything all over again." He smiled at me, and for that moment he was nobody but Arnie Cunningham, so much so that it broke my heart a little bit to look at him.

  There was some dorky New Year's Eve special on. Donny and Marie Osmond were singing, both of them showing their giant white teeth in friendly but somehow sharklike grins. We let the TV play and talked. I told Arnie about the physical therapy sessions, and how I was working out with weights, and after two beers I confessed that I was sometimes afraid that I would never walk right again. Not playing football in college didn't bother me, but that did. He nodded calmly and sympathetically through it all.

  I may as well stop right here and tell you that I have never spent such a peculiar evening in my life. Worse things were waiting, but nothing that was so strange, so . . .so disjointed. It was like sitting through a movie where the picture is almost--but not quite--focused. Sometimes he seemed like Arnie, but at others he didn't seem like Arnie at all. He had picked up mannerisms I had never noticed before--twirling his car-keys nervously on the rectangle of leather to which they were attached, cracking his knuckles, occasionally biting at the ball of his thumb with his upper front teeth. There was that comment about putting it up the little tramp's ass when he tossed his beer-can. And although he had gotten through five beers by the time I had finished my second, just downing them one after the other, he still didn't seem drunk.

  And there were mannerisms I had always associated with Arnie which seemed to have disappeared completely: the quick, nervous pull at his earlobe when he was talking, the sudden stretch of his long legs ending with the ankles briefly crossed, his habit of expressing amusement by hissing air through his pursed lips instead of laughing outright. He did do that last once or twice. But more often he would signal his amusement in a string of shrill chuckles that I associated with LeBay.

  The special finished up at eleven, and Arnie switched around the dial until he found a dance-party in some New York hotel where they kept switching outside to Times Square, where a big crowd had already gathered. It wasn't Guy Lombardo, but it was close.

  "You're really not going to college?" I asked.

  "Not this year. Christine and I are going to head out for California right after graduation. That golden shore."

  "Your folks know?"

  He looked startled at the idea. "Hell, no! And don't you tell them, either! I need that like I need a rubber dick!"

  "What are you going to do out there?"

  He shrugged. "Look for a job fixing cars. I'm as good at that as I am at anything." And then he stunned me by saying casually, "I'm hoping I can persuade Leigh to come with me."

  I swallowed beer the wrong way and began to cough, spraying my pants. Arnie slammed me on the back twice, hard. "You okay?"

  "Sure," I managed. "Just went down the wrong pipe. Arnie . . . if you think she's going to come with you, you're living in a dream world. She's working on her college applications. She's got a whole file of them, man. She's really serious about it."

  His eyes narrowed immediately, and I had a sinking feeling that the beer had betrayed me into saying mo
re than I should have.

  "How come you know so much about my girl?"

  All of a sudden I felt as if I had been dropped into a long field that was full of loaded mines. "It's all she talks about, Arnie. Once she gets started on the subject, you can't shut her up."

  "Chummy. You're not moving in, are you, Dennis?" He was watching me closely, his eyes slitted with suspicion. "You wouldn't do anything like that, would you?"

  "No," I said, lying completely and fully. "That's a hell of a thing to say."

  "Then how do you know so much about what she's doing?"

  "I see her around," I said. "We talk about you."

  "She talks about me?"

  "Yeah, a little," I said casually. "She said that you and she had a fight over Christine."

  It was the right thing. He relaxed. "It was just a little thing. Just a little spat. She'll come around. And there are good schools out in California, if she wants to go to school. We're going to be married, Dennis. Have kids and all that shit."

  I struggled to keep my poker face. "Does she know that?"

  He laughed. "No way! Not yet. But she will. Soon enough. I love her, and nothing's going to get in the way of that." The laughter died away. "What did she say about Christine?"

  Another mine.

  "She said she didn't like her. I think . . . that maybe she was a little jealous."

  It was the right thing again. He relaxed even more. "Yeah, she sure was. But she'll come around, Dennis. The course of true love never runs smooth, but she'll come around, don't worry. If you see her again, tell her I'm going to call. Or talk to her when school starts again."

  I considered telling him that Leigh was in California right now and decided not to. And I wondered what this new suspicious Arnie would do if he knew I had kissed the girl he thought he was going to marry, had held her . . . was falling in love with her.

  "Look, Dennis!" Arnie cried, and pointed at the TV.

  They had switched to Times Square again. The crowd was a huge-- but still swelling--organism. It was just past eleven-thirty. The old year was guttering.

  "Look at those shitters!" He cackled his shrill, excited laugh, finished his beer, and went downstairs for a fresh six-pack. I sat in my chair and thought about Welch and Repperton, Trelawney, Stanton, Vandenberg, Darnell. I thought about how Arnie--or whatever Arnie had become-- thought that he and Leigh had just had an unimportant lovers' spat and how they would end the school year getting married, just like in those greasy love-ballads from the Nifty Fifties.

  And oh God I had such a case of the creeps.

  We saw the New Year in.

  Arnie produced a couple of noisemakers and party favors--the kind that go bang and then release a cloud of tiny crepe streamers. We toasted 1979 and talked a little more on neutral subjects such as the Phillies' disappointing collapse in the playoffs and the Steelers' chances of going all the way to the Super Bowl.

  The bowl of popcorn was down to the old maids and the burny-bottoms when I took myself in hand and asked one of the questions I had been avoiding. "Arnie? What do you think happened to Darnell?"

  He glanced at me sharply, then glanced back at the TV, where couples with New Year's confetti in their hair were dancing. He drank some more beer. "The people he was doing business with shut him up before he could talk too much. That's what I think happened."

  "The people he was working for?"

  "Will used to say the Southern Mob was bad," Arnie said, "but that the Colombians were even worse."

  "Who are the--"

  "The Colombians?" Arnie laughed cynically. "Cocaine cowboys, that's who the Colombians are. Will used to claim they'd kill you if you even looked at one of their women the wrong way--and sometimes if you looked at her the right way. Maybe it was the Colombians. It was messy enough to be them."

  "Were you running coke for Darnell?"

  He shrugged. "I was running stuff for Will. I only moved coke for him once or twice, and I thank Christ that I didn't have anything worse than untaxed cigarettes when they picked me up. They caught me dead-bang. Bad shit. But if the situation was the same, I'd probably do it again. Will was a dirty, scuzzy old sonofabitch, but in some ways he was okay." His eyes grew veiled, strange. "Yeah, in some ways he was okay. But he knew too much. That's why he got wasted. He knew too much . . . and sooner or later he would have said something. Probably it was the Colombians. Crazy fuckers."

  "I don't get you. And it's not my business, I suppose."

  He looked at me, grinned, and winked. "It was the domino theory. At least, it was supposed to be. There was a guy named Henry Buck. He was supposed to rat on me. I was supposed to rat on Will. And then --the big casino--Will was supposed to rat on the people down South that were selling him the dope and the fireworks and cigarettes and booze. Those were the people Ju--the cops really wanted. Especially the Colombians."

  "And you think they killed him?"

  He looked at me flatly. "Them or the Southern Mob, sure. Who else?"

  I shook my head.

  "Well," he said, "let's have another beer and then I'll give you a lift home. I enjoyed this, Dennis. I really did." There was a ring of truth in that, but Arnie never would have made a dorky comment like, "I enjoyed this, I really did." Not the old Arnie.

  "Yeah, me too, man."

  I didn't want another beer, but I took one anyway. I wanted to put off the inevitable moment of getting into Christine. This afternoon it had seemed a necessary step--to sample the atmosphere of that car myself . . . if there was any atmosphere to sample. Now it seemed a frightening and crazy idea. I felt the secret of what Leigh and I were becoming to each other like a large, breakable egg in my head.

  Tell me, Christine, can you read minds?

  I felt a crazy laugh coming up my throat and dumped beer on it.

  "Listen," I said, "I can call my dad to come and get me, if you want, Arnie. He'll still be up."

  "No problem," Arnie said. "I could walk two miles of straight line, don't worry."

  "I just thought--"

  "Bet you're anxious to be able to drive yourself around again, huh?"

  "Yeah, I am."

  "There's nothing finer than being behind the wheel of your own car,"

  Arnie said, and then his left eye slipped down in a bleary old roup's wink. "Except maybe pussy."

  The time came. Arnie snapped off the TV and I crutched my way across the kitchen and worked into my old ski parka, hoping that Michael and Regina would come in from their party and delay things yet a while longer--maybe Michael would smell beer on Arnie's breath and offer me a ride. The memory of the afternoon I had slipped behind Christine's wheel, when Arnie was in LeBay's house, dickering with the old sonofabitch, was all too clear in my mind.

  Arnie had gotten a couple of beers from the fridge--"for the road," he said. I considered telling him that if he got picked up DWI while he was out on bail, he'd probably go to jail before he could turn around. Then I decided I better keep my mouth shut. We went out.

  The first early morning of 1979 was deeply, clearly cold, the kind of cold that makes the moisture in your nose freeze in seconds. The snowbanks ringing the driveway glittered with billions of diamond crystals. And there sat Christine, her black windows cauled with frost. I stared at her. The Mob, Arnie had said. The Southern Mob or the Colombians. It sounded melodramatic but possible--no, more: it sounded plausible. But the Mob shot people, pushed them out of windows, strangled them. According to legend, Al Capone had disposed of one poor sucker with a lead-cored baseball bat. But to drive a car over some guy's snow-covered lawn and slam it through the side of his house and into his living room?

  The Colombians, maybe. Arnie said the Colombians are crazy. But that crazy? I didn't think so.

  She glittered in the light from the house and the stars, and what if it was her? And what if she found out that Leigh and I had our suspicions? Worse yet, what if she found out that we had been fooling around?

  "You need help on the steps, Dennis?" Arnie a
sked, startling me.

  "No, I can handle the steps," I said. "You might have to give me a hand on the path."

  "No problem, man."

  I got down the kitchen steps sidesaddle, clutching the railing in one hand and my crutches in the other. On the path, I set them under me, got out a couple of steps, and then slipped. A dull thud of pain rumbled up my left leg, the one that still wasn't worth doodly-squat Arnie grabbed me.

  "Thanks," I said, glad of a chance to sound shaky.

  "No sweat."

  We got over to the car, and Arnie asked if I could get in by myself. I said I could. He left me and crossed around the front of Christine's hood. I got hold of the doorhandle with one gloved hand, and a hopeless feeling of dread and revulsion swept over me. It wasn't until then that I really began to believe it, deep inside, where a person lives. Because that doorhandle felt alive under my hand. It felt like some living beast that was asleep. The doorhandle didn't feel like chromed steel; dear Christ, it felt like skin. It seemed as if I could squeeze it and wake the beast up, roaring.

  Beast?

  Okay, what beast?

  What was it? Some sort of afreet? An ordinary car that had somehow become the dangerous, stinking dwelling-place of a demon? A weird manifestation of LeBay's lingering personality, a hellish haunted house that rolled on Goodyear rubber? I didn't know. All I knew was that I was scared, terrified. I didn't think I could go through with this.

  "Hey, you okay?" Arnie asked. "Can you make it?"

  "I can make it," I said hoarsely, and jammed my thumb down on the button below the handle. I opened the door, turned my back on the seat, and let myself fall backward onto it, left leg extending stiffly. I got hold of my leg and swung it in. It was like moving a piece of furniture. My heart was triphammering in my chest. I pulled the door shut.

  Arnie turned the key and the motor rumbled to life--as if the engine were hot instead of dead cold. And the smell assaulted me, seeming to come from everywhere, but most of all seeming to pour up from the upholstery: the sick, rich, rotten smell of death and decay.

  I don't know how to tell you about that ride home, that three-mile ride that lasted no more than ten or twelve minutes, without sounding like an escapee from a lunatic asylum. There is no way to be objective about it; just sitting here and trying is enough to make me feel cold and hot at the same time, feverish and ill. There is no way to separate what was real and what my mind might have manufactured; no dividing line between objective and subjective, between the truth and horrified hallucination. But it wasn't drunkenness; if I can assure you of nothing else, I can assure you of that. Any mild high I retained from the beer evaporated immediately. What followed was a cold-sober tour of the country of the damned.