Christine, Page 52

  "No," I said, and I suddenly had to put my hand over my eyes. "I don't think you ever do. I loved him too. And maybe it isn't too late for him, even now." That's what I would have prayed: Dear God, let me keep Arnie from getting killed just one more time. Just this one last time.

  "It's not him I hate," she said, her voice low. "It's that man LeBay . . . did we really see that thing this afternoon, Dennis? In the car?"

  "Yes," I said. "I think we did."

  "Him and that bitch Christine," she said. "Will it be soon?"

  "Soon, yeah. I think so."

  "All right. I love you, Dennis."

  "I love you too."

  As it turned out, it ended the next day--Friday the nineteenth of January.

  49 / Arnie

  I was cruising in my Stingray late one night

  When an XKE pulled up on the right,

  He rolled down the window of his shiny new Jag

  And challenged me then and there to a drag.

  I said "You're on, buddy, my mill's runnin fine,

  Let's come off the line at Sunset and Vine,

  But I'll go you one better (if you got the nerve):

  Let's race all the way . . .

  to Deadman's Curve."

  --Jan and Dean

  I began that long, terrible day by driving over to Jimmy Sykes's house in my Duster. I had expected there might be some trouble from Jimmy's mother, but that turned out to be okay. She was, if anything, mentally slower than her son. She invited me in for bacon and eggs (I declined--my stomach was tied in miserable knots) and clucked over my crutches while Jimmy hunted around in his room for his keyring. I made small-talk with Mrs. Sykes, who was roughly the size of Mount Etna, while time passed and a dismal certainty rose inside me: Jimmy had lost his keys somewhere and the whole thing was off the rails before it could really begin.

  He came back shaking his head. "Can't find em," he said. "Jeez, I guses I must have lost em somewhere. What a bummer."

  And Mrs. Sykes, nearly three hundred pounds on the hoof in a faded housedress and her hair up in puffy pink rollers, said with blessed practicality, "Did you look in your pockets, Jim?"

  A startled expression crossed Jimmy's face. He rammed a hand into the pocket of his green chino workpants. Then, with a shamefaced grin, he pulled out a bunch of keys. They were on one of the keyrings they sell at the novelty shop in the Monroeville Mall--a large rubber fried egg. The egg was dark with grease.

  "There you are, you little suckers," he said.

  "You watch your language, young man," Mrs. Sykes said. "Just show Dennis which key it is that opens the door and keep your dirty language in your head."

  Jimmy ended up handing three Schlage keys over to me, because they weren't labelled and he couldn't tell which was which. One of them opened the main overhead door, one opened the back overhead door, the one which gave on the long lot of junked cars, and one opened the door to Will's office.

  "Thanks," I said. "I'll have these back to you just as soon as I can, Jimmy."

  "Great," Jimmy said. "Say hello to Arnie when you see him."

  "You bet," I said.

  "You sure you don't want some bacon and eggs, Dennis?" Mrs. Sykes asked. "There's plenty."

  "Thanks," I said, "but I really ought to get going." It was quarter past eight; school started at nine. Arnie usually pulled in around eight-forty-five, Leigh had told me. I just had time. I got my crutches under me and got to my feet.

  "Help him out, Jim," Mrs. Sykes commanded. "Don't just stand there."

  I started to protest and she waved me away. "Wouldn't want you to fall on your can getting back to your car, Dennis. Might break your leg all over again." She laughed uproariously at this, and Jimmy, the soul of obedience, practically carried me back to my Duster.

  The sky that day was a scummy, frowsy gray, and the radio was predicting more snow by late afternoon. I drove across town to Libertyville High, took the driveway which led to the student parking lot, and parked in the front row. I didn't need Leigh to tell me that Arnie usually parked in the back row. I had to see him, had to strew the bait in front of his nose, but I wanted him as far from Christine as possible when I did it. Away from the car, LeBay's hold seemed weaker.

  I sat with the key turned over to accessory for the radio and looked at the football field. It seemed impossible that I had ever traded sandwiches with Arnie on those snow-covered bleachers. Impossible to believe that I had run and cavorted on that field myself, dressed up in padding, helmet, and tight pants, stupidly convinced of my own physical invulnerability . . . perhaps even of my own immortality.

  I didn't feel that way anymore, if I ever had.

  Students were coming in, parking their cars, and heading for the building, chattering and laughing and horsing around. I slouched lower in my seat, not wanting to be recognized. A bus pulled up at the doors in the main turnaround and disgorged a load of kids. A small cluster of shivering boys and girls gathered out in the smoking area where Buddy had taken Arnie on that day last fall. That day also seemed impossibly distant now.

  My heart was thumping in my chest and I was miserably tense. A craven part of me hoped that Arnie simply wouldn't show up. And then I saw the familiar white-over-red shape of Christine turn in from School Street and cruise up the student drive, moving at a steady twenty, blowing a little plume of white exhaust from her tailpipe. Arnie was behind the wheel, wearing his school jacket. He didn't look at me; he simply drove to his accustomed place at the back of the lot and parked.

  Just stay slouched down and he won't even see you, that craven, traitorous part of my mind whispered. He'll walk right by you, like all the rest of them.

  Instead, I opened my door and fumbled my crutches outside. Leaning my weight on them, I yanked myself out and stood there on the packed snow of the parking lot, feeling a little bit like Fred MacMurray in that old picture Double Indemnity. From the school came the burring of the first bell, made faint and unimportant by distance--Arnie was later than he had been in the old days. My mother had said that Arnie was almost disgustingly punctual. Maybe LeBay hadn't been.

  He came toward me, books under his arm, head down, twisting in and out between the cars. He walked behind a van, passing out of my sight temporarily, and then came back into view. He looked up then, directly into my eyes.

  His own eyes widened, and he made an automatic half-turn back toward Christine.

  "Feel kind of naked when you're not behind the wheel?" I asked.

  He looked back at me. His lips drew slightly downward, as if he had tasted something of unpleasant flavor.

  "How's your cunt, Dennis?" he asked.

  George LeBay hadn't said, but he had at least hinted that his brother was extraordinarily good at getting through to people, finding their soft spots.

  I took two shuffling steps forward on my crutches while he stood there, smiling with the corners of his mouth down.

  "How did you like it when Repperton called you Cuntface?" I asked him. "Did you like it so well you want to turn it around and use it on somebody else?"

  Part of him seemed to flinch at that--something that was maybe only in his eyes--but the contemptuous, watchful smile remained on his lips. It was cold out. I hadn't put on my gloves, and my hands, on the crossbars of the crutches, were getting numb. Our breath made little plumes.

  "Or what about in the fifth grade, when Tommy Deckinger used to call you Fart-Breath?" I asked, my voice rising. Getting angry at him hadn't been part of the game-plan, but now it was here, shaking inside me. "Did you like that? And do you remember when Ladd Smythe was a patrol-boy and he pushed you down in the street and I pulled his hat off and stuffed it down his pants? Where you been, Arnie? This guy LeBay is a Johnny-come-lately. Me, I was here all along."

  That flinch again. This time he half-turned away, the smile faltering, his eyes searching for Christine the way your eyes might search for a loved one in a crowded terminal or bus-station. Or the way a junkie might look for his pusher.

&nb
sp; "You need her that bad?" I asked. "Man, you're hooked right through the fucking bag, aren't you?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about," he said hoarsely. "You stole my girl. Nothing is going to change that. You went behind my back . . . you cheated . . . you're just a shitter, like all the rest of them." He was looking at me now, his eyes wide and hurt and blazing with anger. "I thought I could trust you, and you turned out to be worse than Repperton or any of them!" He took a step toward me and cried out in a perfect fury of loss, "You stole her, you shitter!"

  I lurched forward another step on my crutches; one of them slid a little bit in the packed snow underfoot. We were like two reluctant gunslingers approaching each other.

  "You can't steal what's been given away," I said.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I'm talking about the night she choked in your car. The night Christine tried to kill her. You told her you didn't need her. You told her to fuck off."

  "I never did! That's a lie! That's a goddam lie!"

  "Who am I talking to?" I asked.

  "Never mind!" His gray eyes were huge behind his spectacles. "Never mind who the fuck you're talking to! That's nothing but a dirty he! No more than I'd expect from that stinking bitch!"

  Another step closer. His pale face was marked with flaring red patches of color.

  "When you write your name, it doesn't look like your signature anymore, Arnie."

  "You shut up, Dennis."

  "Your father says it's like having a stranger in the house."

  "I'm warning you, man."

  "Why bother?" I asked brutally. "I know what's going to happen. So does Leigh. The same thing that happened to Buddy Repperton and Will Darnell and all the others. Because you're not Arnie at all anymore. Are you in there, LeBay? Come on out and let me see you. I've seen you before. I saw you on New Year's Eve, I saw you yesterday at the chicken place. I know you're in there; why don't you stop fucking around and come out?"

  And he did . . . but in Arnie's face this time, and that was more terrible than all the skulls and skeletons and comic-book horrors ever thought of. Arnie's face changed. A sneer bloomed on his lips like a rancid rose. And I saw him as he must have been back when the world was young and a car was all a young man needed to have; everything else would just automatically follow. I saw George LeBay's big brother.

  I only remember one thing about him, but I remember that one thing very well. His anger. He was always angry.

  He came toward me, closing the distance between where he had been and where I stood propped on my crutches. His eyes were filmy and beyond all reach. That sneer was stamped on his face like the mark of a branding-iron.

  I had time to think of the scar on George LeBay's forearm, skidding from his elbow to his wrist. He pushed me and then he came back and threw me. I could hear that fourteen-year-old LeBay shouting, You stay out of my way from now on, you goddam snotnose, stay out of my way, you hear?

  It was LeBay I was facing now, and he was not a man who took losing easily. Check that: he didn't take losing at all.

  "Fight him, Arnie," I said. "He's had his own way too long. Fight him, kill him, make him stay d--"

  He swung his foot and kicked my right crutch out from under me. I struggled to stay up, tottered, almost made it . . . and then he kicked the left crutch away. I fell down on the cold packed snow. He took another step and stood above me, his face hard and alien.

  "You got it coming, and you're going to get it," he said remotely.

  "Yeah, right," I gasped. "You remember the ant farms, Arnie? Are you in there someplace? This dirty sucker never had a fucking ant farm in his life. He never had a friend in his life."

  And suddenly the calm hardness broke. His face--his face roiled. I don't know how else to describe it. LeBay was there, furious at having to put down a kind of internal mutiny. Then Arnie was there--drawn, tired, ashamed, but, most of all, desperately unhappy. Then LeBay again, and his foot drew back to kick me as I lay on the snow groping for my crutches and feeling helpless and useless and dumb. Then it was

  Arnie again, my friend Arnie, brushing his hair back off his forehead in that familiar, distracted gesture; it was Arnie saying, "Oh, Dennis . . . Dennis . . . I'm sorry . . . I'm so sorry."

  "It's too late for sorry, man," I said.

  I got one crutch and then the other. I pulled myself up little by little, slipping twice before I could get the crutches under me again. Now my hands felt like pieces of furniture. Arnie made no move to help me; he stood with his back against the van, his eyes wide and shocked.

  "Dennis, I can't help it," he whispered. "Sometimes I feel like I'm not even here anymore. Help me, Dennis. Help me."

  "Is LeBay there?" I asked him.

  "He's always here," Arnie groaned. "Oh God, always! Except--"

  "The car?"

  "When Christine . . . when she goes, then he's with her. That's the only time he's . . . he's . . ."

  Arnie fell silent. His head slipped over to one side. His chin rolled on his chest in a boneless pivot. His hair dangled toward the snow. Spit ran out of his mouth and splattered on his boots. And then he began to scream thinly and beat his gloved fists on the van behind him:

  "Go away! Go away! Go awaaaaay!"

  Then nothing for maybe five seconds--nothing except the shuddering of his body, as if a basket of snakes had been dumped inside his clothes; nothing except that slow, horrible roll of his chin on his chest.

  I thought maybe he was winning, that he was beating the dirty old sonofabitch. But when he looked up, Arnie was gone. LeBay was there.

  "It's all going to happen just like he said," LeBay told me. "Let it go, boy. Maybe I won't drive over you."

  "Come on over to Darnell's tonight," I said. My voice was harsh, my throat as dry as sand. "We'll play. I'll bring Leigh. You bring Christine."

  "I'll pick my own time and place," LeBay said, and grinned with Arnie's mouth, showing Arnie's teeth, which were young and strong--a mouth still years from the indignity of dentures. "You won't know when or where. But you'll know . . . when the time comes."

  "Think again," I said, almost casually. "Come to Darnell's tonight, or she and I start talking tomorrow."

  He laughed, an ugly contemptuous sound. "And where will that get you? The asylum over at Reed City?"

  "Oh, we won't be taken seriously at first," I said. "I give you that. But that stuff about how they put you in the loonybin as soon as you start talking about ghosts and demons . . . uh-uh, LeBay. Maybe in your day, before flying saucers and The Exorcist and that house in Amityville. These days a hell of a lot of people believe in that stuff."

  He was still grinning, but his eyes looked at me with narrow suspicion. That, and something else. I thought that something else was the first sparkle of fear.

  "And what you don't seem to realize is how many people know something is wrong."

  His grin faltered. Of course he must have realized that, and been worried about it. But maybe killing gets to be a fever; maybe after a while you are simply unable to stop and count the cost.

  "Whatever weird, filthy kind of life you still have is all wrapped up in that car," I said. "You knew it, and you planned to use Arnie from the very beginning--except that 'planned' is the wrong word, because you never really planned anything, did you? You just followed your intuitions."

  He made a snarling sound and turned to go.

  "You really want to think about it," I called after him. "Arnie's father knows something is rotten. So does mine. I think there must be some police somewhere who'd be willing to listen to anything about how their friend Junkins died. And it all comes back to Christine, Christine, Christine. Sooner or later someone's going to run her through the crusher in back of Darnell's just on general principles."

  He had turned back and was looking at me with a bright mixture of hate and fear in his eyes.

  "We'll keep talking, and a lot of people will laugh at us, I don't doubt it. But I've got two pieces of cast with Arnie's
signature on them. Only one of them isn't his. It's yours. I'll take them to the state cops and keep pestering them until they have a handwriting specialist confirm that. People are going to start watching Arnie. People are going to start watching Christine too. You get the picture?"

  "Sonny, you don't worry me one fucking bit."

  But his eyes said something different. I was getting to him, all right.

  "It's going to happen," I said. "People are only rational on the surface. They still toss salt over their left shoulder if they spill the shaker, they don't walk under ladders, they believe in survival after death. And sooner or later--probably sooner, with Leigh and me shooting off our mouths--someone is going to turn that car of yours into a sardine can. And I'm willing to bet that when it goes, you'll go with it."

  "Don't you just wish!" he sneered.

  "We'll be at Darnell's tonight," I said. "If you're good, you can get rid of both of us. That won't end it either, but it might give you some breathing space . . . time enough to get out of town. But I don't think you're good enough, chum. It's gone on too long. We're getting rid of you."

  I crutched back to my Duster and got in. I used the crutches more clumsily than I had to, tried to make myself look more incapacitated than I really was. I had rocked him by mentioning the signatures; it was time to leave before I overplayed my hand. But there was one more thing. One thing guaranteed to drive LeBay into a frenzy.

  I pulled my left leg in with my hands, slammed the door, and leaned out.

  I looked into his eyes and smiled.

  "She's great in bed," I said. "Too bad you'll never know."

  With a furious roar, he charged at me. I rolled up the window and slapped down the door-lock. Then, leisurely, I started the engine while he slammed his gloved fists on the glass. His face was snarling, terrible. There was no Arnie in it now. No Arnie at all. My friend was gone. I felt a dark sorrow that was deeper than tears or fear, but I kept that slow, insulting, dirty grin on my face. Then, slowly, I raised my middle finger to the glass.

  "Fuck you, LeBay," I said, and then pulled out, leaving him to stand there in the lot, shaking with that simple, unswerving fury his brother had told me of. It was that more than anything else that I was counting on to bring him tonight.