Christine, Page 48

  We went back in time, for one thing.

  *

  For a while Arnie wasn't driving at all; it was LeBay, rotting and stinking of the grave, half skeleton and half rotting, spongy flesh, greenly corroded buttons. Maggots squirmed their sluggish way up from his collar. I could hear a low buzzing sound and thought at first it was a short circuit in one of the dashboard lights. It was only later that I began to think it might have been the sound of flies hatching in his flesh. Of course it was wintertime, but--

  At times, there seemed to be other people in the car with us. Once I glanced up into the rearview mirror and saw a wax dummy of a woman staring at me with the bright and sparkling eyes of a stuffed trophy. Her hair was done in a 50s pageboy style. Her cheeks appeared to have been wildly rouged, and I remembered that carbon monoxide poisoning was supposed to give the illusion of life and high color. Later, I glanced into the mirror again and seemed to see a little girl back there, her face blackened with strangulation, her eyes popping like those of some cruelly squeezed stuffed animal. I shut my eyes tight and when I opened them it was Buddy Repperton and Richie Trelawney in the rearview mirror. Crusted blood had dried on Buddy's mouth, chin, neck, and shirt. Richie was a roasted hulk--but his eyes were alive and aware.

  Slowly, Buddy extended his arm. He was holding a bottle of Texas Driver in one blackened hand.

  I closed my eyes once more. And after that, I didn't look into the rearview anymore.

  I remember rock and roll on the radio: Dion and the Belmonts, Ernie K-Doe, the Royal Teens, Bobby Rydell ("Oh, Bobby, oh . . . everything's cool. . . we're glad you go to a swingin' school. . .").

  I remember that for a while red Styrofoam dice seemed to be hanging from the rearview mirror, then for a while there were baby shoes, and then there was neither one.

  Most of all I remember seizing the idea that these things, like the smell of rotting flesh and mouldy upholstery, were only in my mind-that they were no more than the mirages that haunt the consciousness of an opium-eater.

  I was like someone who is badly stoned and trying to make some kind of rational conversation with a straight person. Because Arnie and I did talk; I remember that, but not what We talked about. I held up my end. I kept my voice normal. I responded. And that ten or twelve minutes seemed to last hours.

  I have told you that it is impossible to be objective about that ride; if there was a logical progression of events, it is lost to me now, blocked out. That journey through the cold black night really was like a trip on a boulevard through hell. I can't remember everything that happened, but I can remember more than I want to. We backed out of the driveway and into a mad funhouse world where all the creeps were real.

  We went back in time, I have said, but did we? The present-day streets of Libertyville were still there, but they were like a thin overlay of film--it was as if the Libertyville of the late 1970s had been drawn on Saran Wrap and laid over a time that was somehow more real, and I could feel that time reaching its dead hands out toward us, trying to catch us and draw us in forever. Arnie stopped at intersections where we should have had the right-of-way; at others, where traffic lights glowed red, he cruised Christine mildly through without even slowing. On Main Street I saw Shipstad's Jewelry Store and the Strand Theater, both of them torn down in 1972 to make way for the new Pennsylvania Merchants Bank. The cars parked along the street--gathered here and there in clumps where New Year's Eve parties were going on--all seemed to be pre-60s . . . or pre-1958. Long portholed Buicks. A DeSoto Firelite station wagon with a body-long blue inset that looked like a check-mark. A '57 Dodge Lancer four-door hardtop. Ford Fair-lanes with their distinctive taillights, each like a big colon lying on its side. Pontiacs in which the grille had not yet been split. Ramblers, Packards, a few bullet-nosed Studebakers, and once, fantastical and new, an Edsel.

  "Yeah, this year is going to be better," Arnie said. I glanced over at him. He raised his beer-can to his lips, and before it got there his face had turned to LeBay's, a rotting figure from a horror comic. The fingers that held the beer were only bones. I swear to you, they were only bones, and the pants lay nearly flat against the seat, as if there was nothing inside them except broomsticks.

  "Is it?" I said, breathing the car's foul and choking miasma as shallowly as possible and trying not to choke.

  "It is," LeBay said, only now he was Arnie again, and as we paused at a stop sign, I saw a '77 Camaro go ripping past. "All I ask is that you stand by me a little, Dennis. Don't let my mother drag you into this shit. Things are going to turn out." He was LeBay again, grinning fleshlessly and eternally at the idea of things turning out. I felt my brains beginning to totter. Surely I would scream soon.

  I dropped my eyes from that terrible half-face and saw what Leigh had seen: dashboard instruments that weren't instruments at all, but luminescent green eyes bulging out at me.

  *

  At some point the nightmare ended. We pulled up at the curb in an area of town I didn't even recognize, an area I would have sworn I had never seen before. Tract houses stood dark everywhere, some of them three-quarters finished, some no more than frames. Halfway down the block, lit by Christine's hi-beams, was a sign which read:

  MAPLEWAY ESTATES

  LIBERTYVILLE REALTORS SOLE SELLING AGENTS

  A Good Place to Raise YOUR Family

  Think About It!

  "Well, here you go," Arnie said. "Can you make it up the walk yourself, man?"

  I looked doubtfully around at this deserted, snow-covered development and then nodded. Better here, on crutches, alone, than in that terrible car. I felt a large plastic smile on my face. "Sure. Thanks."

  "Negative perspiration," Arnie said. He finished his beer and LeBay tossed it into a litter bag. "Another dead soldier."

  "Yeah," I said. "Happy New Year, Arnie." I fumbled for the doorhandle and opened it. I wondered if I could get out, if my trembling arms would support the crutches.

  LeBay was looking at me, grinning. "Just stay on my side, Dennis," he said. "You know what happens to shitters who don't."

  "Yes," I whispered. I knew, all right.

  I got my crutches out and heaved myself up onto them, careless of any ice that might be underneath. They held me. And once out, the world underwent a swimming, twisting change. Lights came on--but of course, they had been there all along. My family had moved into Mapleway Estates in June of 1959, the year before I was born. We still lived here, but the area had stopped being known as Mapleway Estates by 1963 or '64 at the latest.

  Out of the car, I was looking at my own house on my own perfectly normal street--just another part of Libertyville, Pa. I looked back at Arnie, half-expecting to see LeBay again, taxi-driver from hell with his benighted cargo of the long-dead.

  But it was only Arnie, wearing his high school jacket with his name sewn over the left breast, Arnie looking too pale and too alone, Arnie with a can of beer propped against his crotch.

  "Good night, man."

  "Good night," I said. "Be careful going home. You don't want to get picked up."

  "I won't," he said. "You take care, Dennis."

  "I will."

  I shut the door. My horror had changed to a deep and terrible sorrow --it was as if he had been buried. Buried alive. I watched Christine pull away from the curb and head off down the street. I watched until she turned the corner and disappeared from sight. Then I started up the walk to the house. The walk was clear. My dad had scattered most of a ten-pound bag of Halite over it with me in mind.

  I was three-quarters of the way to the door when a grayness seemed to drift over me like smoke and I had to stop and put my head down and try to hold onto myself. I could faint out here, I thought dimly, and then freeze to death on my own front walk where once Arnie and I had played hopscotch and jacks and statue-tag.

  At last, little by little, the grayness started to clear. I felt an arm around my waist. It was Dad, in his bathrobe and slippers.

  "Dennis, are you okay?"

  Was
I okay? I had been driven home by a corpse.

  "Yeah," I said. "Got a little dizzy. Let's get in. You'll freeze your butt off."

  He walked up the steps with me, his arm still circling my waist. I was glad to have it.

  "Is Mom still up?" I asked.

  "No--she saw the New Year in, and then she and Ellie went to bed. Are you drunk, Dennis?"

  "No."

  "You don't look good," he said, slamming the door behind us.

  I uttered a crazy little shriek of laughter, and things went gray again . . . but only briefly this time. When I came back, he was looking at me with tight concern.

  "What happened over there?"

  "Dad--"

  "Dennis, you talk to me!"

  "Dad, I can't."

  "What is it with him? What's wrong with him, Dennis?"

  I only shook my head, and it wasn't just the craziness of it, or fear for myself. Now I was afraid for all of them--my dad, my mom, Elaine, Leigh's folks. Coldly and sanely afraid.

  Just stay on my side, Dennis. You know what happens to shitters who don't.

  Had I really heard that?

  Or had it been in my mind only?

  My father was still looking at me.

  "I can't."

  "All right," he said. "For now. I guess. But I need to know one thing, Dennis, and I want you to tell me. Do you have any reason to believe that Arnie was involved some way with Darnell's death, and the deaths of those boys?"

  I thought of LeBay's rotting, grinning face, the flat pants poked up by something that could only have been bones.

  "No," I said, and that was almost the truth. "Not Arnie."

  "All right," he said. "You want a hand up the stairs?"

  "I can make it okay. You go to bed yourself, Dad."

  "Yeah. I'm going to. Happy New Year, Dennis--and if you want to tell me, I'm still here."

  "Nothing to tell," I said.

  Nothing I could tell.

  "Somehow," he said, "I doubt that."

  I went up and got into bed and left the light on and didn't sleep at all. It was the longest night of my life, and several times I thought of getting up and going in with my mom and dad, the way I had done when I was small. Once I actually caught myself getting out of bed and groping for my crutches. I lay back down again. I was afraid for all of them, yes, right. But that wasn't the worst. Not anymore.

  I was afraid of losing my mind. That was the worst.

  The sun was just poking over the horizon when I finally dropped off and dozed uneasily for three or four hours. And when I woke up, my mind had already begun trying to heal itself with unreality. My problem was that I could simply no longer afford to listen to that lulling song. The line was blurred for good.

  46 / George LeBay Again

  That fateful night the car was stalled Upon the railroad track,

  I pulled you out and you were safe, But you went running back . . .

  --Mark Dinning

  On Friday the fifth of January I got a postcard from Richard McCandless, secretary of the Libertyville American Legion Post. Written on the back in smudgy pencil was George LeBay's home address in Paradise Falls, Ohio. I carried the card around in my hip pocket most of the day, taking it out occasionally and looking at it. I didn't want to call him; I didn't want to talk to him about his crazy brother Roland again; I didn't want this crazy business to go any further at all.

  That evening my father and mother went out to the Monroeville Mall with Ellie, who wanted to spend some of her Christmas money on a new pair of downhill skis. Half an hour after they were gone, I picked up the telephone and propped McCandless's postcard up in front of me. A call to the operator placed Paradise Falls in area code 513--western Ohio. After a pause for thought I called 513 directory assistance and got LeBay's number. I jotted it on the card, paused for thought again--a longer pause, this time--and then picked up the phone a third time. I dialled half of LeBay's number and then hung up. Fuck it, I thought, full of a nervous resentment I could not recall ever feeling before. Enough is enough so fuck it, I'm not calling him. I'm done with it, I wash my hands of the whole crappy mess. Let him go to hell in his own handcar. Fuck it.

  "Fuck it," I whispered, and got out of there before my conscience could begin to bore into me again. I went upstairs, took a sponge bath, and then turned in. I was soundly asleep before Ellie and my folks came back in, and I slept long and well that night. A good thing, because it was a long time before I slept that well again. A very long time.

  While I slept, someone--something--killed Rudolph Junkins of the Pennsylvania State Police. It was in the paper when I got up next morning. DARNELL INVESTIGATOR MURDERED NEAR BLAIRSVILLE, the headline shouted.

  My father was upstairs taking a shower; Ellie and two of her friends out on the porch, giggling and cawing over a game of Monopoly; my mother working on one of her stories in the sewing room. I was at the table by myself, stunned and scared. It occurred to me that Leigh and her family were going to be back from California tomorrow, school would start again the day after, and unless Arnie (or LeBay) changed his mind, she would be actively pursued.

  I slowly pushed away the eggs I had scrambled for myself. I no longer wanted them. Last night it had seemed possible to push away the whole ominous and inexplicable business of Christine as easily as I'd just pushed away my breakfast. Now I wondered how I could have been so naive.

  Junkins was the man Arnie had mentioned New Year's Eve. I couldn't even kid myself that it hadn't been. The paper said he had been the man in charge of Pennsylvania's part of the Will Darnell investigation, and it hinted that some shadowy crime organization had been behind the murder. The Southern Mob, Arnie would have said. Or the crazy Colombians.

  I thought differently.

  Junkins's car had been driven off a lonely country road and battered to so much senseless wreckage (That goddam Junkins is still after me full steam ahead, he better watch out or somebody might just junk him . . . Just stay on my side, Dennis. You know what happens to shitters who don't . . .) with Junkins still inside it.

  When Repperton and his friends were killed, Arnie had been in Philly with the chess club. When Darnell was killed, he was in Ligonier with his parents, visiting relatives. Cast-iron alibis. I thought he would have another for Junkins. Seven--seven deaths now, and they formed a deadly ring around Arnie Cunningham and Christine. The police could surely see that; not even a blind man could miss such an explicit chain of motivation. But the paper didn't say that anyone was "aiding the police in their inquiries," as the British so delicately put it.

  Of course, the police are not in the habit of just handing everything they know over to the newspapers. I knew that, but every instinct I had told me that the state cops weren't seriously investigating Arnie in connection with this latest murder by automobile.

  He was in the clear.

  What had Junkins seen behind him on that country road outside of Blairsville? A red and white car, I thought. Maybe empty, maybe driven by a corpse.

  A goose ran squawking over my grave and my arms broke out in cold bumps.

  Seven people dead.

  It had to end. If for no other reason than because maybe killing gets to be a habit. If Michael and Regina wouldn't go along with Arnie's crazy California plans, either of them or both of them might be next. Suppose he walked up to Leigh in study hall period three next Tuesday and asked her to marry him and Leigh simply said no? What might she see idling at the curb when she got home that afternoon?

  Jesus Christ, I was scared.

  My mother poked in. "Dennis, you're not eating."

  I looked up. "I got reading the paper. Guess I'm not that hungry, Mom."

  "You have to eat right or you're not going to get well. Want me to make you oatmeal?"

  My stomach churned at the thought, but I smiled as I shook my head. "No-but I'll eat a big lunch."

  "Promise?"

  "Promise."

  "Denny, do you feel okay? You've looked so tired and peaked lately.
"

  "I'm fine, Mom." I widened my smile to show her how fine I was, and then I thought of her getting out of her blue Reliant at the Monroeville Mall, and two rows back was a white-over-red car, idling. In my mind's eye I saw her walk in front of it, purse over her arm, saw Christine's transmission lever suddenly drop into DRIVE--

  "Are you sure? It's not your leg bothering you, is it?"

  "No."

  "Have you taken your vitamins?"

  "Yes."

  "And your rosehips?"

  I burst out laughing. She looked irritated for a moment, then smiled. "Ye're a sassbox, Dennis Guilder," she said in her best Irish accent (which is pretty good, since her mom came from the auld sod), "and there's no kivver to ye." She went back to the sewing room, and in a moment the irregular bursts of her typewriter began again.

  I picked up the newspaper and looked at the photo of Junkins's twisted auto, DEATH CAR, the caption beneath read.

  Try this, I thought: Junkins is interested in a lot more than finding out who sold illegal fireworks and cigarettes to Will Darnell. Junkins is a state detective, and state detectives work on more than one case at a time. He could have been trying to find out who killed Moochie Welch. Or he could have been--

  I crutched over to the sewing room and knocked.

  "Yes?"

  "Sorry to bother you, Mom--"

  "Don't be silly, Dennis."

  "Are you going downtown today?"

  "I might be. Why?"

  "I'd like to go to the library."

  *

  By three o'clock that Saturday afternoon it had begun to snow again. I had a slight headache from staring into the microfilm reader, but I had what I wanted. My hunch had been on the money--not that it had been any great intuitive leap.