Christine, Page 50

  "Are you saying your brother killed these people? Are you leading up to telling me that LeBay killed his own daughter?"

  "Not that he killed her, Dennis--never think that. She choked to death. What I am suggesting is that he may have let her die."

  "You said he turned her over--punched her--tried to make her vomit--"

  "That's what Rollie told me at the funeral," George said.

  "Then what--"

  "Marcia and I talked it over later. Only that once, you understand. Over dinner that night. Rollie told me, 'I picked her up by her Buster Browns and tried to whack that sonofabitch out of there, Georgie. But it was stuck down fast.' And what Veronica told Marcia was, 'Rollie picked her up by her shoes and tried to whack whatever was choking her out of there, but it was stuck down fast.' They told exactly the same story, in exactly the same words. And do you know what that made me think of?"

  "No."

  "It made me think of Rollie climbing in the bedroom window and whispering to me, 'If you tell, Georgie, I'll kill you.'"

  "But. . . why? Why would he--?"

  "Later, Veronica wrote Marcia a letter and hinted that Rollie had made no real effort to save their daughter. And that, at the very end, he put her back in the car. So she would be out of the sun, he said. But in her letter, Veronica said she thought Rollie wanted her to die in the car."

  I didn't want to say it, but I had to.

  "Are you suggesting that your brother offered his daughter up as some kind of a human sacrifice?"

  There was a long, thinking, dreadful pause.

  "Not in any conscious way, no," LeBay said. "Not any more than I am suggesting that he consciously murdered her. If you had known my brother, you would know how ridiculous it is to suspect him of witchcraft or sorcery or trafficking with demons. He believed in nothing beyond his own senses . . . except, I suppose, for his own will. I am suggesting that he might have had some . . . some intuition . . . or that he might have been directed to do what he did.

  "My mother said he was a changeling."

  "And Veronica?"

  "I don't know," he said. "The police verdict was suicide, even though there was no note. It may well have been. But the poor woman had made some friends in town, and I have often wondered if perhaps she had hinted to some of them, as she had to Marcia, that Rita's death was not quite as she and Rollie had reported it. I have wondered if Rollie found out. If you tell, Georgie, I'll kill you. There's no proof one way or the other, of course. But I've wondered why she would do it the way she did--and I've wondered how a woman who didn't know the slightest thing about cars would know enough to get the hose and attach it to the exhaust pipe and put it in through the window. I try not to wonder about those things. They keep me awake at night."

  I thought about what he had said, and about the things he hadn't said --the things he had left between the lines. Intuitive, he had said. So single-minded in his few simple purposes, he had said. Suppose Roland LeBay had understood in some way he wouldn't even admit to himself that he was investing his Plymouth with some supernatural power? And suppose he had only been waiting for the right inheritor to come along . . . and now . . .

  "Does that answer your questions, Dennis?"

  "I think it does," I said slowly.

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I think you know that."

  "Destroy the car?"

  "I'm going to try," I said, and then looked over at my crutches, leaning against the wall. My goddam crutches.

  "You may destroy your friend, as well."

  "I may save him," I said.

  Quietly, George LeBay said, "I wonder if that is still possible."

  47 / The Betrayal

  There was blood and glass all over,

  And there was nobody there but me.

  As the rain tumbled down hard and cold, I seen a young man lyin by the side

  of the road,

  He cried, "Mister, won't you

  help me, please?"

  --Bruce Springsteen

  I kissed her.

  Her arms slipped around my neck. One of her cool hands pressed lightly against the back of my head. There was no more question for me about what was going on; and when she pulled slightly away from me, her eyes half-closed, I could see there was no question for her, either.

  "Dennis," she murmured, and I kissed her again. Our tongues touched gently. For a moment her kiss intensified; I could feel the passion those high cheekbones hinted at. Then she gasped a little and drew back. "That's enough," she said. "We'll be arrested for indecent exposure, or something."

  It was January eighteenth. We were parked in the lot behind the local Kentucky Fried, the remains of a pretty decent chicken dinner spread around us. We were in my Duster, and that alone was something of an occasion for me--it was my first time behind the wheel since the accident. Just that morning, the doctor had removed the huge cast on my left leg and replaced it with a brace. His warning to stay off it was stern, but I could tell he was feeling good about the way things were going for me. My recovery was about a month ahead of schedule. He put it down to superior technique; my mother to positive thinking and chicken soup; Coach Puffer to rosehips.

  Me, I thought Leigh Cabot had a lot to do with it.

  "We have to talk," she said.

  "No, let's make out some more," I said.

  "Talk now. Make out later."

  "Has he started again?"

  She nodded.

  In the almost two weeks since my telephone conversation with LeBay, the first two weeks of winter term, Arnie had been working at making a rapprochement with Leigh--working at it with an intensity that scared both of us. I had told her about my talk with George LeBay (but not, as I've said, about my terrible ride home on New Year's morning) and made it as clear as I could that on no account should she simply cut him off. That would drive him into a fury, and these days, when Arnie was furious with someone, unpleasant things happened to them.

  "That makes it like cheating on him," she said.

  "I know," I said, more sharply than I had intended. "I don't like it, but I don't want that car rolling again."

  "So?"

  And I shook my head.

  In truth, I was starting to feel like Prince Hamlet, delaying and delaying. I knew what had to be done, of course: Christine had to be destroyed. Leigh and I had looked into ways of doing it.

  The first idea had been Leigh's--Molotov cocktails. We would, she said, fill some wine-bottles with gasoline, take them to the Cunningham house in the early-morning hours, light the wicks ("Wicks? What wicks?" I asked. "Kotex ought to do just fine," she answered promptly, causing me to wonder again about her high-cheekboned forebears), and toss them in through Christine's windows.

  "What if the windows are rolled up and the doors are locked?" I asked her. "That's the way it's apt to be, you know."

  She looked at me as if I was a total drip. "Are you saying," she asked, "that the idea of firebombing Arnie's car is okay, but you've got moral scruples about breaking some glass?"

  "No," I said. "But who's going to get close enough to her to break the glass with a hammer, Leigh? You?"

  She looked at me, biting at her soft lower lip. She said nothing.

  The next idea had been mine. Dynamite.

  Leigh thought about it and shook her head.

  "I could get it without too much sweat, I think," I said. I still saw Brad Jeffries from time to time, and Brad still worked for Penn-DOT, and Penn-DOT had enough dynamite to put Three Rivers Stadium on the moon. I thought that maybe I could borrow the right key without Brad knowing I had borrowed it-he had a way of getting tanked up when the Penguins were on the tube. Borrow the key to the explosives shed during the third period of one game, I thought, and return it to his ring in the third period of another. The chance that he would be wanting explosives in January, and thus realize his key was missing, was small indeed. It was a deception, another betrayal--but it was a way to end things.

  "No," she said.r />
  "Why not?" To me, dynamite seemed to offer the kind of utter finality the situation demanded.

  "Because Arnie keeps it parked in his driveway now. Do you really want to send shrapnel flying all over a suburban neighborhood? Risking a piece of flying glass cutting off some little kid's head?"

  I winced. I hadn't thought of that, but now that she mentioned it, the image seemed sharp and clear and hideous. And that got me thinking about other things. Lighting a bundle of dynamite with your cigarillo and then tossing it overhand at the object you wanted to destroy . . . that might look okay on the Saturday afternoon Westerns they showed on channel 2, but in real life there were blasting caps and contact points to deal with. Still, I held onto the idea as long as I could.

  "If we did it at night?"

  "Still pretty dangerous," she said. "And you know it, too. It's all over your face."

  A long, long pause.

  "What about the crusher at Darnell's?" she asked finally.

  "Same basic objection as before," I said. "Who gets to drive her down there? You, me, or Arnie?"

  And that was where matters still stood.

  "What was it today?" I asked her.

  "He wanted me to go out with him tonight," she said. "Bowling this time." In previous days it had been the movies, out for dinner, over to watch TV at his house, proposed study-dates. Christine figured in all of them as the mode of transport. "He's getting ugly about it, and I'm running out of excuses. If we're going to do something, we ought to do it soon."

  I nodded. Failure to find a satisfactory method was one thing. The other thing holding us back had been my leg. Now the cast was off, and although I was on stern doctor's orders to use my crutches, I had tested the left leg without them. There was some pain, but not as much as I had feared.

  Those things, yeah--but mostly there had been us. Discovering each other. And although it's going to sound stinking, I guess I ought to add something else, if this thing is going to stay straight (and I promised myself when I began to tell the tale that I'd stop if I found I couldn't get it straight or keep it straight). The spice of danger had added something to what I felt for her--and, I think, to what she felt for me. He was my best friend, but there was still a dirty, senseless attraction in the idea that we were seeing each other behind his back. I felt that each time I drew her into my arms, each time my hand slipped over the firm swelling of her breasts. The sneaking around. Can you tell me why that should have an attraction? But it did. For the first time in my life, I had fallen for a girl. I had slipped before, but this time I had taken the grand head-over-heels tumble. And I loved it. I loved her. That constant sense of betrayal, though . . . that was a snakelike thing, both a shame and a crazy sort of goad. We could tell each other (and we did) that we were keeping our mouths shut to protect our families and ourselves.

  That was true.

  But it wasn't all, Leigh, was it? No. It wasn't all.

  *

  In one way, nothing worse could have happened. Love slows down reaction time; it mutes the sense of danger. My conversation with George LeBay was twelve long days in the past, and thinking about the things he had said--and worse, the things he had suggested--no longer raised the hair on the back of my neck.

  The same was true--or not true--of the few times I talked with Arnie or glimpsed him in the halls. In a strange way, we seemed to be back in September and October again, when we had grown apart simply because Arnie was so busy. When we did talk he seemed pleasant enough, although the gray eyes behind his specs were cool. I waited for a wailing Regina or a distraught Michael to call me on the phone with the news that Arnie had finally stopped toying with them and had given up the idea of college in the fall for certain.

  That didn't happen, and it was from Motormouth himself--our guidance counsellor--that I heard Arnie had taken home a lot of literature on the University of Pennsylvania, Drew University, and Penn State. Those were the schools Leigh was most interested in. I knew it, and Arnie knew it too.

  Two nights earlier, I had happened to overhear my mother and my sister Ellie in the kitchen.

  "Why doesn't Arnie ever come over anymore, Mom?" Ellie asked. "Did he and Dennis have a fight?"

  "No, honey," my mother answered. "I don't think so. But when friends get older . . . sometimes they grow apart."

  "That's never going to happen to me," Ellie said, with all the awesome conviction of the just-turned-fifteen.

  I sat in the other room, wondering if maybe that was really all it was --hallucination brought on by my long stay in the hospital, as LeBay had suggested, and a simple growing-apart, a developing space between two childhood friends. I could see a certain logic to it, even down to my fixation on Christine, the wedge that had come between us.

  It ignored the hard facts, but it was comfortable. To believe such a thing would allow Leigh and me to pursue our ordinary lives--to get involved in school activities, to do a little extra cramming for the Scholastic Achievement Tests in March, and, of course, to jump into each other's arms as soon as her parents or mine left the room. To neck like what we were, which was a couple of horny teenagers totally infatuated with each other.

  Those things lulled me . . . lulled us both. We had been careful--as careful, in fact, as adulterers instead of a couple of kids--but today the cast had come off, today I had been able to use the keys to my Duster again instead of just looking at them, and on an impulse I had called Leigh up and asked her if she'd like to go out to the world-famous Colonel's with me for a little of his world-famous Crunchy Style. She had been delighted.

  So maybe you see how our attention waned, how we became the smallest bit indiscreet. We sat in the parking lot, the Duster's engine running so we could have some heat, and we talked about putting an end to that old and infinitely clever she-monster like a couple of children playing cowboys.

  Neither of us saw Christine when she pulled up behind us.

  "He's buckling down for a long siege, if that's what it takes," I said.

  "What?"

  "The colleges he applied to. Hasn't it hit you yet?"

  "I guess not," she said, mystified.

  "They're the schools you're most interested in," I said patiently.

  She looked at me. I looked back, trying to smile, not making it.

  "All right," I said. "Let's go over it one more time. Molotov cocktails are out. Dynamite looks risky, but in a pinch--"

  Leigh's harsh gasp stopped me right there--that, and the expression of startled horror on her face. She was staring out through the windshield, eyes wide, mouth open. I turned in that direction, and what I saw was so stunning that for a moment I was immobilized too.

  Arnie was standing in front of my Duster.

  He had parked directly behind us and gone in to get his chicken without realizing who it was, and why should he? It was nearly dark, and one splashed and muddy four-year-old Duster looks pretty much like another. He had gone in, had gotten his chow, had come out again . . . and stared right in through the windshield at Leigh and me, sitting close together, our arms around each other, looking deep into each other's eyes, as the poets say. Nothing but a coincidence--a grisly, hideous coincidence. Except that even now a part of my mind is coldly convinced that it was Christine . . . that even at that turn, Christine led him there.

  There was a long, frozen moment. A little moan escaped Leigh's throat. Arnie stood not quite halfway across the small parking lot, dressed in his high school jacket, faded jeans, boots. A plaid scarf was tied around his throat. The collar of his jacket was turned up, and its black wings framed a face that was slowly twisting from an expression of sick incredulity into a pallid grimace of hate. The red-and-white-striped bag with the Colonel's smiling face on it slipped out of one of his gloved hands and thumped onto the packed snow of the parking lot "Dennis," Leigh whispered. "Dennis, oh my God."

  He began to run. I thought he was coming to the car, probably to haul me out and work me over. I could see myself hopping feebly around on my not-so-good
leg under the parking-lot lights that had just come on while Arnie, whose life I had saved all those years going back to kindergarten, beat the living Jesus out of me. He ran, his mouth twisted down in a snarl I had seen before--but not on his face. It was LeBay's face now.

  He didn't stop at my car; instead he ran right past. I twisted around, and that was when I saw Christine.

  I got my door open and began to struggle out, grabbing onto the roof gutter for support. The cold numbed my fingers almost at once.

  "Dennis, no!" Leigh cried.

  I got on my feet just as Arnie raked open Christine's door.

  "Arnie!" I shouted. "Hey, man!"

  His head jerked up. His eyes were wide and blank and glaring. A line of spittle was working its way down from one corner of his mouth. Christine's grille seemed to be snarling too.

  He raised both fists and shook them at me. "You shitter!" His voice was high and cracked. "Have her! You deserve her! She's shit! You're both shit! Have each other! You won't for long!"

  People had come to the plate-glass windows of the Kentucky Fried Chicken and the neighboring Kowloon Express to see what was going on.

  "Arnie! Let's talk, man--"

  He jumped in the car and slammed her door. Christine's engine screamed and her headlights came on, the glaring white eyes of my dream, pinning me like a bug on a card. And over them, behind the glass, was Arnie's terrible face, the face of a devil sick of sin. That face, both hateful and haunted, has lived in my dreams ever since. Then the face was gone. It was replaced by a skull, a grinning death's head.

  Leigh uttered a high, piercing scream. She had turned around to look, so I knew that it wasn't just my imagination. She had seen it too.

  Christine roared forward, her rear tires spinning snow back. She didn't .come for the Duster, but for me. I think his intention was to grind me to jelly between his car and mine. It was only my bad left leg that saved me; it buckled and I fell back inside my Duster, bumping my right hip on the wheel and honking the horn.

  A cold wave of wind buffeted my face. Christine's bright red flank passed within three feet of me. She roared down the take-out joint's IN drive and shot onto JFK Drive without slowing, rear end fishtailing. Then she was gone, still accelerating.