Christine, Page 5

  What your mother leaves you is mostly good hard-headed practical advice--if you cut your toenails twice a month you won't get so many holes in your socks; put that down, you don't know where it's been; eat your carrots, they're good for you--but it's from your father that you get the magic, the talismans, the words of power. If the car won't start, curse it . . . and be sure you curse it female. If you went seven generations back, you'd probably find one of your forebears cursing the goddam bitch of a donkey that stopped in the middle of the tollbridge somewhere in Sussex or Prague.

  But Arnie didn't swear at it. He murmured under his breath, "Come on, doll, what do you say?"

  He turned the key. The engine kicked twice, backfired again, and then started up. It sounded horrible, as if maybe four of the eight pistons had taken the day off, but he had it running. I could hardly believe it, but I didn't want to stand around and discuss it with him. The garage was rapidly filling up with blue smoke and fumes. I went outside.

  "That turned out all right, after all, didn't it?" LeBay said. "And you don't have to risk your own precious battery." He spat.

  I couldn't think of anything to say. To tell you the truth, I felt a little embarrassed.

  The car came slowly out of the garage, looking so absurdly long that it made you want to laugh or cry or do something. I couldn't believe how long it looked. It was like an optical illusion. And Arnie looked very small behind the wheel.

  He rolled down the window and beckoned me over. We had to raise our voices to make ourselves heard clearly--that was another thing about Arnie's girl Christine; she had an extremely loud and rumbling voice. She was going to have to be Midasized in a hurry. If there was anything left of the exhaust system to attach a muffler to, that was, besides a lot of rusty lace. Since Arnie sat down behind the wheel, the little accountant in the automobile section of my brain had totted up expenses of about six hundred dollars--not including the cracked windshield. God knew how much that might cost to replace.

  "I'm taking her down to Darnell's!" Arnie yelled. "His ad in the paper says I can park it in one of the back bays for twenty dollars a week!"

  "Arnie, twenty a week for one of those back bays is too much!" I bellowed back.

  Here was more robbery of the young and innocent. Darnell's Garage sat next door to a four-acre automobile wasteland that went by the falsely cheerful name of Darnell's Used Auto Parts. I had been there a few times, once to buy a starter for my Duster, once to get a rebuilt carb for the Mercury which had been my first car. Will Darnell was a great fat pig of a man who drank a lot and smoked long rank cigars, although he was reputed to have a bad asthmatic condition. He professed to hate almost every car-owning teenager in Libertyville . . . but that didn't keep him from catering to them and rooking them.

  "I know," Arnie yelled over the bellowing engine. "But it's only for a week or two, until I find a cheaper place. I can't take it home like this, Dennis, my dad and mom would have a shit fit!"

  That was certainly true. I opened my mouth to say something else-- maybe to beg him again to stop this madness before it got completely out of control. Then I shut my mouth again. The deal was done. Besides, I didn't want to compete with that bellowing muffler anymore, or stand there pulling a lot of evil fried-carbon exhaust into my lungs.

  "All right," I said. "I'll follow you."

  "Good deal," he said, grinning. "I'm going by Walnut Street and Basin Drive. I want to stay off the main roads."

  "Okay."

  "Thanks, Dennis."

  He dropped the hydramatic transmission into D again, and the Plymouth lurched forward two feet and then almost stalled. Arnie goosed the accelerator a little and Christine broke dirty wind. The Plymouth crept down LeBay's driveway to the street. When he pushed the brake, only one of the taillights flashed. My mental automotive accountant relentlessly rang up another five dollars.

  He hauled the wheel to the left and pulled out into the street. The remains of the muffler scraped rustily at the lowest point of the driveway. Arnie gave it more gas, and the car roared like a refugee from the demo derby at Philly Plains. Across the street, people leaned forward on their porches or came to their doors to see what was going on.

  Bellowing and snarling, Christine rolled up the street at about ten miles an horn, sending out great stinking clouds of blue oilsmoke that hung and then slowly raftered in the mellow August evening.

  At the stop sign forty yards up, it stalled. A kid rode past the hulk on his Raleigh, and his impudent, brassy shout drifted back to me: "Put it in a trash-masher, mister!"

  Arnie's closed fist popped out of the window. His middle finger went up as he flipped the kid the bird. Another first. I had never seen Arnie flip anyone the bird in my life.

  The starter whined, the motor sputtered and caught. This time there was a whole rattling series of backfires. It was as if someone had just opened up with a machine-gun on Laurel Drive, Libertyville, U.S.A. I groaned.

  Someone would call the cops pretty soon, reporting a public nuisance, and they would grab Arnie for driving an unregistered, uninspected vehicle--and probably for the nuisance charge as well. That would not exactly ease the situation at home.

  There was one final echoing bang--it rolled down the street like the explosion of a mortar shell--and then the Plymouth turned left on Martin Street, which brought you to Walnut about a mile up. The westering sun turned its battered red body briefly to gold as it moved out of sight. I saw that Arnie had his elbow cocked out the window.

  I turned to LeBay, mad all over again, ready to give him some more hell. I tell you I felt sick inside my heart. But what I saw stopped me cold.

  Roland D. LeBay was crying.

  It was horrible and it was grotesque and most of all it was pitiable. When I was nine, we had a cat named Captain Beefheart, and he got hit by a UPS truck. We took him to the vet's--my mom had to drive slow because she was crying and it was hard for her to see--and I sat in the back with Captain Beefheart. He was in a box, and I kept telling him the vet would save him, it was going to be okay, but even a little nine-year-old dumbhead like me could see it was never going to be all right for Captain Beefheart again, because some of his guts were out and there was blood coming out of his asshole and there was shit in the box and on his fur and he was dying. I tried to pet him and he bit my hand, right in the sensitive webbing between the thumb and the first finger. The pain was bad; that terrible feeling of pity was worse. I had not felt anything like that since then. Not that I was complaining, you understand; I don't think people should have feelings like that often. You have a lot of feelings like that, and I guess they take you away to the funny-farm to make baskets.

  LeBay was standing on his balding lawn not far from the place where that big patch of oil had defoliated everything, and he had this great big old man's snotrag out and his head was down and he was wiping his eyes with it. The tears gleamed greasily on his cheeks, more like sweat than real tears. His adam's apple went up and down.

  I turned my head so I wouldn't have to look at him cry and happened to stare straight into his one-car garage. Before, it had seemed really full--the stuff along the walls, of course, but most of all that huge old car with its double headlights and its wraparound windshield and its acre of hood. Now the stuff along the walls only served to accentuate the garage's essential emptiness. It gaped like a toothless mouth.

  That was almost as bad as LeBay. But when I looked back, the old bastard had gotten himself under control--well, mostly. He had stopped leaking at the eyes and he had stuffed the snotrag into the back pocket of his patented old man's pants. But his face was still bleak. Very bleak.

  "Well, that's that," he said hoarsely. "I'm shut of her, sonny."

  "Mr. LeBay," I said. "I only wish my friend could make the same statement. If you knew the trouble he was in over that rustbucket with his folks--"

  "Get out of here," he said. "You sound like a goddam sheep. Just baa, baa, baa, that's all I hear comin out'n your hole. I think your friend there k
nows more than you do. Go and see if he needs a hand."

  I started down the lawn to my car. I didn't want to hang around LeBay a moment longer.

  "Nothin but baa, baa, baa!" he yelled shrewishly after me, making me think of that old song by the Youngbloods--I am a one-note man, I play it all I can. "You don't know half as much as you think you do!"

  I got into my car and drove away. I glanced back once as I made the turn onto Martin Street and saw him standing there on his lawn, the sunlight gleaming on his bald head.

  As things turned out, he was right.

  I didn't know half as much as I thought I did.

  5 / How We Got to Darnell's

  I got a '34 wagon and we call it a woody,

  You know she's not very cherry,

  She's an oldy but a goody . . .

  --Jan and Dean

  I drove down Martin to Walnut And turned right, toward Basin Drive. It didn't take long to catch up with Arnie. He was pulled in to the curb, and Christine's trunk-lid was up. An automobile jack so old that it almost looked as if it might once have been used for changing wheels on Conestoga wagons was leaning against the crooked back bumper. The right rear tire was flat.

  I pulled in behind him and had no more than gotten out when a young woman waddled down toward us from her house, skirting a pretty good collection of plastic-fantastic that was planted on her lawn (two pink flamingos, four or five little stone ducks in a line behind a big stone mother duck, and a really good plastic wishing well with plastic flowers planted in the plastic bucket). She was in dire need of Weight Watchers.

  "You can't leave that junk here," she said around a mouthful of chewing gum. "You can't leave that junk parked in front of our house, I just hope you know that."

  "Ma'am," Arnie said. "I had a flat tire, is all. I'll get it out of here just as soon as--"

  "You can't leave it there and I hope you know that," she said with a maddening kind of circularity. "My husband'll be home pretty soon. He don't want no junk car in front of the house."

  "It's not junk," Arnie said, and something in his tone made her back up a step.

  "You don't want to take that tone of voice to me, sonny," this overweight be-bop queen said haughtily. "It don't take much to get my husband mad."

  "Look," Arnie began in that same dangerous flat voice he had used when Michael and Regina began ganging up on him. I grabbed his shoulder hard. More hassle we didn't need.

  "Thanks, ma'am," I said. "We'll get it taken care of right away. We're going to take care of it so quick you'll think you hallucinated this car."

  "You better," she said, and then hooked a thumb at my Duster. "And your car is parked in front of my driveway."

  I backed my Duster up. She watched and then joggled back up to her house, where a little boy and a little girl were crammed into the doorway. They were pretty porky, too. Each of them was eating a nice nourishing Devil Dog.

  "Wassa matta, Ma?" the little boy asked. "Wassa matta that man's car, Ma? Wassa matta?"

  "Shut up," the be-bop queen said, and hauled both kids back inside. I always like to see enlightened parents like that; it gives me hope for the future.

  I walked back to Arnie.

  "Well," I said, dragging out the only witticism I could think of, "it's only flat on the bottom, Arnie. Right?"

  He smiled wanly. "I got a slight problem, Dennis," he said.

  I knew what his problem was; he had no spare.

  Arnie dragged out his wallet again--it hurt me to see him do it--and looked inside. "I got to get a new tire," he said.

  "Yeah, I guess you do. A retread--"

  "No retreads. I don't want to start out that way."

  I didn't say anything, but I glanced back toward my Duster. I had two retreads on it and I thought they were just fine.

  "How much do you think a new Goodyear or Firestone would cost, Dennis?"

  I shrugged and consulted the little automotive accountant, who guessed that Arnie could probably get a new no-frills blackwall for around thirty-five dollars.

  He pulled out two twenties and handed them to me. "If it's more-- with the tax and everything--I'll pay you back."

  I looked at him sadly. "Arnie, how much of your week's pay you got left?"

  His eyes narrowed and shifted away from mine. "Enough," he said.

  I decided to try one more time--you must remember that I was only seventeen and still under the impression that people could be shown where their best interest lay. "You couldn't get into a nickel poker game," I said. "You plugged just about the whole fucking wad into that car. Dragging out your wallet is going to become a very familiar action to you, Arnie. Please, man. Think it over."

  His eyes went flinty. It was an expression I had not seen before on his face, and although you'll probably think I was the most naive teenager in America, I couldn't really remember having seen it on any face before. I felt a mixture of surprise and dismay--I felt the way I might have felt if I suddenly discovered I was trying to have a rational conversation with a fellow who just happened to be a lunatic. I have seen the expression since, though; I imagine you have too. Total shutdown. It's the expression a man gets on his face when you tell him the woman he loves is whoring around behind his back.

  "Don't get going on that, Dennis," he said.

  I threw my hands up in exasperation. "All right! All right!"

  "And you don't have to go after the damn tire, either, if you don't want to." That flinty, obdurate, and--so help me, it's true--stupidly stubborn expression was still on his face. "I'll find a way."

  I started to reply, and I might have said something pretty hot, but then I happened to glance to my left. The two porky little kids were there at the edge of their lawn. They were astride identical Big Wheels, their fingers smeared with chocolate. They were watching us solemnly.

  "No big deal, man," I said. "I'll get the tire."

  "Only if you want to, Dennis," he said. "I know it's getting late."

  "It's cool," I said.

  "Mister?" the little boy said, licking chocolate off his fingers.

  "What?" Arnie asked.

  "My mother says that car is poopy."

  "That's right," the little girl chimed. "Poopy-kaka."

  "Poopy-kaka," Arnie said. "Why, that's very perceptive, isn't it, kids? Is your mother a philosopher?"

  "No," the little boy said. "She's a Capricorn. I'm a Libra. My sister is a--"

  "I'll be back quick as I can," I said awkwardly.

  "Sure."

  "Stay cool."

  "Don't worry, I'm not going to punch anybody."

  I trotted to my car. As I slipped behind the wheel I heard the little girl ask Arnie loudly, "Why is your face all messy like that, mister?"

  I drove a mile and a half down to JFK Drive, which--according to my mother, who grew up in Libertyville--used to be at the center of one of the town's most desirable neighborhoods back around the time Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Maybe renaming Barnswallow Drive for the slain President had been bad luck, because since the early sixties, the neighborhood around the street had degenerated into an exurban strip. There was a drive-in movie, a McDonald's, a Burger King, an Arby's, and the Big Twenty Lanes. There were also eight or ten service stations, since JFK Drive leads to the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

  Getting Arnie's tire should have gone lickety-split, but the first two stations I came to were those self-service jobbies that don't even sell oil; there's just gas and a marginally retarded girl in a booth made of bulletproof glass who sits in front of a computer console reading a National Enquirer and chewing a wad of Bubblicious Gum big enough to choke a Missouri mule.

  The third one was a Texaco having a tire sale. I was able to buy Arnie a blackwall that would fit his Plymouth (I could not bring myself then to call her Christine or even think of her--if--by that name) for just twenty-eight-fifty plus tax, but there was only one guy working there, and he had to put the new tire on Arnie's wheel-rim and pump gas at the same time. The operation stretched out
over forty-five minutes. I offered to pump gas for the guy while he did it, but he said the boss would shoot him if he heard of it.

  By the time I had the mounted tire back in my trunk and had paid the guy two bucks for the job, the early evening light had become the fading purple of late evening. The shadow of each bush was long and velvety, and as I cruised slowly back up the street I saw the day's last light streaming almost horizontally through the trash-Uttered space between the Arby's and the bowling alley. That light, so much flooding gold, was nearly terrible in its strange, unexpected beauty.

  I was surprised by a choking panic that climbed up in my throat like dry fire. It was the first time a feeling like that came over me that year-- that long, strange year--but not the last. Yet it's hard for me to explain, or even define. It had something to do with realizing that it was August 11, 1978, that I was going to be a senior in high school next month, and that when school started again it meant the end of a long, quiet phase of my life. I was getting ready to be a grown-up, and I saw that somehow-- saw it for sure, for the first time in that lovely but somehow ancient spill of golden light flooding down the alleyway between a bowling alley and a roast beef joint. And I think I understood then that what really scares people about growing up is that you stop trying on the life-mask and start trying on another one. If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.

  The feeling passed, but in its wake I felt shaken and melancholy. Neither state was much like my usual self.

  When I turned back onto Basin Drive I was feeling suddenly removed from Arnie's problems and trying to cope with my own-thoughts of growing up had led naturally to such gigantic (at least they seemed gigantic to me) and rather unpleasant ideas as college and living away from home and trying to make the football team at State with sixty other qualified people competing for my position instead of only ten or twelve. So maybe you're saying, Big deal, Dennis, I got some news for you: one billion Red Chinese don't give a shit if you make the first squad as a college freshman. Fair enough. I'm just trying to say that those things seemed really real to me for the first time . . . and really frightening. Your mind takes you on trips like that sometimes--and if you don't want to go, it takes you anyway.