Christine (19 page)

"For helping with the, canoe," Michael said casually.

"Oh."

We drank our beers. I went home. The next day the happy threesome went off together to New York, presumably to rediscover the family unity that had been lost over the latter third of the summer.

The day before they were due back I took a ride down to Darnell's Garage—as much to satisfy my own curiosity as Michael Cunningham's.

The garage, standing in front of the block-long lot of junked cars, looked just as attractive in daylight as it had on the evening we had brought Christine—it had all the charm of a dead gopher.

I pulled into a vacant slot in front of the speed shop that Darnell also ran—well stocked with such items as Feully heads, Hurst shifters, and Ram-Jett superchargers (for all those working men who had to keep their old cars running so they could continue to put bread on the table, no doubt), not to mention a wide selection of huge mutant tires and a variety of spinner hubcaps. Looking through the window of Darnell's speed shop was like looking into a crazy automotive Disneyland.

I got out and walked back across the tarmac toward the garage and the clanging sound of tools, shouts, the machine-gun blast of pneumatic wrenches. A sleazy-looking guy in a cracked leather jacket was dorking around with an old BSA bike by one of the garage bays, either removing the bike's manifold or putting it back on. There was a stutter of road-rash down his left cheek. The back of his jacket displayed a skull wearing a Green Beret and the charming motto KILL 'EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT 'EM OUT.

He looked up at me with bloodshot and lunatic Rasputin eyes, then looked back at what he was doing. He had a surgical array of tools spread out beside him, each one die-stamped with the words DARNELL's GARAGE.

Inside, the world was full of the echoey, evocative bang of tools and the sound of men working on cars and hollering profanity at the rolling iron they were working on. Always the profanity, and always female in gender: come offa there you bitch, come loose, you cunt, come on over here, Rick, and help me get this twat off.

I looked around for Darnell and didn't see him any place No one took any particular notice of me, so I walked over to stall twenty where Christine sat, now pointing nose-out, just like I had every right in the world to be there. In the stall to the right, two fat guys in bowling league shirts were putting a camper cap on the back of a pickup truck that had seen better days. The stall on the other side was deserted.

As I approached Christine, I felt that chill coming back. There was no reason for it, but I seemed helpless to stop it—and without even thinking, I moved a bit to the left, toward the empty stall. I didn't want to be in front of her.

My first thought was that Arnie's complexion had improved in tandem with Christine's. My second thought was that he was making his improvements in a strangely haphazard way… and Arnie was usually so methodical.

The twisted, broken aerial had been replaced with a straight new one that glimmered under the fluorescent bars. Half the Fury's front grille had been replaced; the other half was still flecked and pitted with rust. And there was something else…

I walked along her flank right to the rear bumper, frowning.

Well, it was on the other side, that's all
, I thought.

So I walked around to the other side, and it wasn't there, either.

I stood by the back wall, still frowning, trying to remember. I was pretty sure that when we first saw her standing on LeBay's lawn, with a FOR SALE sign propped against her windscreen, there had been a good-sized rusty dent on one side or the other, near the rear end—the sort of deep dent that my grandfather always called a "hoss-kick". We'd be driving along the turnpike and we'd go by a car with a big dent in it somewhere and Grampy would say, "Hey, Denny, take a look there! Hoss kicked that one!" My grandfather was the sort of guy who had a downhome phrase for everything.

I started to think I must have imagined it, and then gave my head a little shake. That was sloppy thinking. It had been there; I remembered it clearly. Just because it wasn't here now didn't mean it hadn't been then. Arnie had obviously knocked it out, and had done a damn good piece of bodywork covering it up.

Except…

There was no
sign
that he had done anything. There was no primer paint, no gray body fill, no flaked paint. Just Christine's dull red and dirty white.

But it had
been there
, goddammit! A deep dimple filled with a snarl of rust, on one side or the other.

But it sure was gone now.

I stood there in the clatter and thud of tools and machinery and felt very alone and suddenly very scared. It was all wrong, it was all crazy. He had replaced the radio aerial when the exhaust was practically dragging on the ground. He had replaced one half of the grille but not the other. He had talked to me about doing a front-end job, but inside he had replaced the ripped and dusty back seat cover with a bright red new one. The front seat cover was still a dusty wreck with a spring peeking through the passenger side.

I didn't like it at all. It was crazy and it wasn't like Arnie.

Something came to me, a trace of memory, and without even thinking about it, I stood back and looked at the entire car—not just one thing here and one thing there, but everything. And I had it; it clicked into place, and the chill came back.

That night when we had brought it here. The flat tire. The replacement. I had looked at that new tire on that old car and thought it was as if a little bit of the old car had been scratched away and that the new car—fresh, resplendent, just off the assembly line in a year when Ike had been President and Batista had still been in charge of Cuba—was peeking through.

What I was seeing now was like that… only instead of just a single new tire, there were all sorts of things—the aerial, a wink of new chrome from the grille, one taillight that was a bright deep red, that new seat cover in the back.

In its turn, that brought back something else from childhood. Arnie and I had gone to Vacation Bible School together for two weeks each summer, and every day the teacher would tell a Bible story and leave it unfinished. Then she would give each kid a blank sheet of "magic paper". And if you scraped the edge of a coin or the side of your pencil over it, a picture would gradually emerge out of the white—the dove bringing the olive branch back to Noah, the walls of Jericho tumbling down, good miracle stuff like that. It used to fascinate both of us, seeing the pictures gradually emerge. At first just lines floating in the void… and then the lines would connect with other lines… they would take on coherence… take on
meaning…

I looked at Arnie's Christine with growing horror, trying to shake the feeling that in her I was seeing something terribly similar to those magic miracle pictures.

I wanted to look under the hood.

Suddenly it seemed very important that I look under the hood.

I went around to the front (I didn't like to stand in front of it—no good reason why not, I just didn't) and fumbled around for the hood release. I couldn't get it. Then I realised that it was probably inside.

I started to go around, and then I saw something else, something that scared me shitless. I could have been wrong about the hoss-kick, I suppose. I knew I wasn't, but at least
technically…

But this was something else entirely.

The web of cracks in the windscreen was smaller.

I was
positive
it was smaller.

My mind raced back to that day a month ago when I had wandered into LeBay's garage to look at the car while Arnie went into the house with the old man to do the deal. The entire left side of the windscreen had been a spider's web of cracks radiating out from one central, zigzagging fault that had probably been caused by a flying stone.

Now the spider's web seemed smaller, simpler—you could see into the car from that side, and you hadn't been able to before, I was sure of that (
just a trick of the light, that's all
, my mind whispered).

Yet I
had
to be wrong—because it was impossible. Simply impossible. You could replace a windscreen; that was no problem if you had the money. But to make a webbing of cracks
shrink
—

I laughed a little. It was a shaky sound, and one of the guys working on the camper cap looked up at me curiously and said something to his buddy. It was a shaky sound, but maybe better than no sound at all. Of
course
it was the light, and nothing more. I had seen the car for the first time with the westering sun shining fully on the flawed windscreen, and I had seen it the second time in the shadows of LeBay's garage. Now I was seeing it under these high-set fluorescent tubes. Three different kinds of light, and all it added up to was an optical illusion.

Still, I wanted to look under the hood. More than ever,

I went around to the driver's side door and gave it a yank. The door didn't open. It was locked. Of course it was; all four of the door-lock buttons were down, Arnie wouldn't be apt to leave it unlocked in here, so anybody could get inside and poke around. Maybe Repperton was gone, but genus
Creepus
was weed-common. I laughed again—silly old Dennis—but this time it sounded even more shrill and shaky. I was starting to feel spaced-out, the way I sometimes felt the morning after I smoked a little too much pot.

Locking the Fury's doors was a very natural thing to do, all right. Except that, when I walked around the car the first time, I thought I had noticed the door-lock buttons had all been up.

I stepped slowly backward again, looking at the car. It sat there, still little more than a rusting hulk. I was not thinking any one thing specific—I am quite sure of that—except maybe it was as if it knew that I wanted to get inside and pull the release.

And because it didn't want me to do that, it had locked its own doors?

That was really a very humorous idea. So humorous that I had another laugh (several people were glancing at me now, the way that folks always glance at people who laugh for no apparent reason when they are by themselves).

A big hand fell on my shoulder and turned me around. It was Darnell, with a dead stub of cigar stuck in the side of his mouth. The end of it was wet and pretty gross-looking. He was wearing small half-specs, and the eyes behind them were coldly speculative.

"What are you doing, kiddo?" he asked. "This ain't your property."

The guys with the camper cap were watching us avidly. One of them nudged the other and whispered something.

"It belongs to a friend of mine," I said. "I brought it in with him. Maybe you remember me. I was the one with the large skin-tumor on the end of my nose and the—"

"I don't give a shit if you wheeled it in on a skateboard," he said. "It ain't your property. Take your bad jokes and get lost, kid. Blow."

My father was right—he was a wretch. And I would have been more than happy to blow; I could think of at least six thousand places I'd rather be on this second-to-last day of my summer vacation. Even the Black Hole of Calcutta would have been an improvement. Not a big one, maybe, yet an improvement, all the same. But the car bothered me. A lot of little things, all adding up to a big itch that needed to be scratched.
Be his eyes
, my father had said, and that sounded good. The problem was I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

"My name is Dennis Guilder," I said "My dad used to do your books, didn't he?"

He looked at me for a long time with no expression at all in his cold little pig eyes, and I was suddenly sure he was going to tell me he didn't give a fuck who my father was, that I'd better blow and let these working men go about the business of fixing their cars so they could go on putting bread on their tables. Et cetera.

Then he smiled—but the smile didn't touch his eyes at all. "You're Kenny Guilder's boy?"

"Yes, that's right."

He patted the hood of Arnie's car with one pale, fat hand—there were two rings on it, and one of them looked like a real diamond. Still, what does a kid like me know?

"I guess you're straight enough, then. If you're Kenny's kid." There was a second when I thought he was going to ask for some identification.

The two guys next to us had gone back to work on their camper, apparently having decided nothing interesting was going to transpire.

"Come on into the office and let's have a talk he said, then turned away and moved across the floor without even a glance backward. That I would comply was taken for granted. He moved like a ship under full sail, his white shirt billowing, the girth of his hips and backside amazing, improbable. Very fat people always affect me that way, with a feeling of distinct improbability, as if I were looking at a very good optical illusion—but then, I come from a long line of skinny people. For my family I'm a heavyweight.

He paused here and there on his way back to his office, which had a glass wall looking out onto the garage. Darnell reminded me a little bit of Moloch, the god we read about in my Origins of Literature class—he was the one who was supposed to be able to see everywhere with his one red eye. Darnell bawled at one guy to get the hose on his exhaust before he threw him out; yelled something to another guy about how "Nicky's back was acting up on him again" (this inspired a fuming, ferocious burst of laughter from both of them); hollered at another guy to pick up those fucking Pepsi-Cola cans, was he born in a dump? Apparently Will Darnell didn't know anything about what my mother always called "a normal tone of voice".

After a moment's hesitation, I followed him. Curiosity killed the cat, I suppose.

His office was done in Early American Carburetor—it was every scuzzy garage office from coast to coast in a country that runs on rubber and amber gold. There was a greasy calendar with a pin-up of a blond goddess in short-shorts and an open blouse climbing over a fence in the country. There were unreadable plaques from half a dozen companies which sold auto parts. Stacks of ledgers. An ancient adding machine. There was a photograph, God save us, of Will Darnell wearing a Shriner's fez and mounted on a miniature motorcycle that looked about to collapse under his bulk. And there was the smell of long-departed cigars and sweat.