Christine (29 page)

"Your driving record and whether or not you had driver ed don't have anything to do with it," Arnie went on. "The reason you can't get collision is because their fucking actuarial tables
say
you can't get collision. You can get it at twenty-one only if you're willing to spend a fortune—usually the premiums end up being more than the car books for until you're twenty-three or so, unless you're married. Oh, the shitters have got it all figured out. They know how to walk it right to you, all right."

Up ahead the airport lights glowed, runways outlined in mystic parallels of blue light. "If anyone ever asks me what the lowest form of human life is, I'll tell them it's an insurance agent."

"You've made quite a study of it," Michael commented. He didn't quite dare to say anything else; Arnie seemed only waiting to fly into a fresh rage.

"I went around to five different companies. In spite of what Mom said, I'm not anxious to throw my money away."

"And straight liability was the best you could do?"

"Yeah, that's right. Six hundred and fifty dollars a year."

Michael whistled.

"That's right," Arnie agreed.

Another twinkling sign, advising that the two left-hand lanes were for parking, the right lanes for departures. At the entrance to the parking lot, the way split again. To the right was an automated gate where you took a ticket for short-term parking. To the left was the glass booth where the parking-lot attendant sat, watching a small black-and-white TV and smoking a cigarette.

Arnie sighed. "Maybe you're right. Maybe this is the best solution all the way around.".

"Of course it is," Michael said, relieved. Arnie sounded more like his old self now, and that hard light had died out of his eyes at last. "Ten months, that's all."

"Sure."

He drove up to the booth, and the attendant, a young guy in a black-and-orange high school sweater with the Libertyville logo on the pockets, pushed back the glass partition and leaned out. "Help ya?"

"I'd like a thirty-day ticket," Arnie said, digging for his wallet.

Michael put his hand over Arnie's. "This one's my treat," he said.

Arnie pushed his hand away gently but firmly and took his wallet out. "It's my car," he said. "I'll pay my own way."

"I only wanted—" Michael began.

"I know," Arnie said. "But I mean it."

Michael sighed. "I know you do. You and you mother. Everything will be fine if you do it my way."

Arnie's lips tightened momentarily, and then he smiled. "Well… yeah," he said.

They looked at each other and both burst out laughing.

At the instant that they did, Christine stalled. Up until then the engine had been ticking over with unobtrusive perfection. Now it just quit; the oil and amp dash lamps came on.

Michael raised his eyebrows. "Say what?"

"I don't know," Arnie answered, frowning. "It never did that before."

He turned the key, and the engine started at once.

"Nothing, I guess," Michael said.

"I'll want to check the timing later in the week," Arnie muttered. He gunned the engine and listened carefully. And in that instant, Michael thought that Arnie didn't look like his son at all. He looked like someone else, someone much older and harder. He felt a brief but extremely nasty lance of fear in his chest.

"Hey, do you want this ticket or are you just gonna sit there all night talkin about your timing?" the parking-lot attendant asked. He looked vaguely familiar to Arnie, the way people do when you've seen them moving around in the corridors at school but don't have anything else to do with them.

"Oh yeah. Sorry." Arnie passed him a five-dollar bill, and the attendant gave him a time-ticket.

"Back of the lot," the attendant said. "Be sure to revalidate it five days before the end of the month if you want the same space again."

"Right."

Arnie drove to he back of the lot, Christine's shadow growing and shrinking as they passed under the hooded arc-sodium lights. He found a vacant space and backed Christine in. As he turned off the key, he grimaced and put a hand to his lower back.

"That still bothering you?" Michael asked.

"Only a little," Arnie said. "I was almost over it, and it came back on me yesterday. I must have lifted something wrong. Don't forget to lock your door."

They got out and locked up. Once out of the car, Michael felt better—he felt closer to his son, and, maybe just as important, he felt less that he had played the impotent fool with his jingling cap of bells in the argument that had taken place earlier. Once out of the car, he felt as if he might have salvaged something—maybe a lot—out of the night.

"Let's see how fast that bus really is," Arnie said, and they began to walk across the parking lot toward the terminal, companionably close together.

Michael had formed an opinion of Christine on the ride out to the airport. He was impressed with the job of restoration Arnie had done, but he disliked the car itself disliked it intensely. He supposed it was ridiculous to hold such feelings about an inanimate object, but the dislike was there all the same, big and unmistakable, like a lump in the throat.

The source of the dislike was impossible to isolate. It had caused bitter trouble in the family, and he supposed that was the real reason… but it wasn't all. He hadn't liked the way Arnie
seemed
when he was behind the wheel: somehow arrogant and petulant at the same time, like a weak king. The impotent way he had railed about the insurance his use of that ugly and striking word "shitters"… even the way the car had stalled when they laughed together.

And it had a smell. You didn't notice it right away, but it was there. Not the smell of new seat covers, that was quite pleasant; this was an undersmell, bitter, almost (but not quite) secret. It was an old smell.
Well
, Michael told himself,
the car is old, why in God's name do you expect it to smell new?
And that made undeniable sense. In spite of the really fantastic job Arnie had done of restoring it, the Fury was twenty years old. That bitter, mouldy smell might be coming from old carpeting in the boot, or old matting under the new floormats; perhaps it was coming from the original padding under the bright new seat covers. Just a smell of age.

And yet that undersmell, low and vaguely sickening, bothered him. It seemed to come and go in waves, sometimes very noticeable, at other times completely undetectable. It seemed to have no specific source. At its worst, it smelled like the rotting corpse of some small animal—a cat, a woodchuck, maybe a squirrel—that had gotten into the boot-or maybe crawled up into the frame and then died there.

Michael was proud of what his son had accomplished… and very glad to get out of his son's car.

22 SANDY

First I
walked
past the Stop and Shop

Then I
drove
past the Stop and Shop.

I liked that much better when I drove

past the Stop and Shop,

'Cause I had the radio on.

— Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers

The parking-lot-attendant that night—every night from six until ten, as a matter of fact—was a young man named Sandy Galton, the only one of Buddy Repperton's close circle of hoodlum friends who had not been in the smoking area on the day Repperton had been expelled from school. Arnie didn't recognize him, but Galton recognized Arnie.

Buddy Repperton, out of school and with no interest in initiating the procedures that might have gotten him readmitted at the beginning of the spring semester in January, had gone to work at the gas station run by Don Vandenberg's father. In the few weeks he had been there, he had already begun a number of fairly typical scams—shortchanging gas customers who looked as if they might be in too big a hurry to count the bills he gave back to them, running the remold game (which consists of charging the customer for a new tire and then actually putting on a remould and pocketing the fifteen- to sixty-dollar difference), running the similar used-parts game, plus selling inspection stickers to kids from the high school and nearby Horlicks—kids desperate to keep their death-traps on the road.

The station was open twenty-four hours a day, and Buddy worked the late shift, from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. Around eleven o'clock, Moochie Welch and Sandy Galton were apt to drop by in Sandy's old dented Mustang; Richie Trelawney might come by in his Firebird; and Don, of course, was in and out almost all the time—when he wasn't goofing off at school. By midnight on any given weekend there might be six or eight guys sitting around in the office, drinking beer out of dirty teacups, passing around a bottle of Buddy's Texas Driver, doing a joint or maybe a little hash, farting, telling dirty jokes, swapping lies about how much pussy they were getting, and maybe helping Buddy fiddle around with whatever was up on the lift.

During one of these late-night gatherings in early November, Sandy happened to mention that Arnie Cunningham was parking his machine in the long-term lot out at the airport. He had, in fact, bought a thirty-day ticket.

Buddy, whose usual demeanor during these late-night bull-sessions was one of sullen withdrawal, tipped his cheap contour-plastic chair abruptly back down on all four legs and put his bottle of Driver down on the windscreen-wiper cabinet with a bang.

"What did you say?" he asked. "Cunningham? Ole Cuntface?"

"Yeah," Sandy said, surprised and a little uneasy. "That's him."

"You sure? The guy who got me kicked out of school?" Sandy looked at him with mounting alarm. "Yeah. Why?"

"And he's got a thirty-day ticket, which means he's parked in the long-term lot?"

"Yeah. Maybe his folks didn't want him to have it at…"

Sandy trailed off. Buddy Repperton had begun to smile. It was not a pleasant sight, that smile, and not only because the teeth it revealed were already going rotten. It was as if, somewhere, some terrible machinery had just whined into life and was beginning to cycle up and up to full running speed.

Buddy looked around from Sandy to Don to Moochie Welch to Richie Trelawney. They looked back at him, interested and a little scared.

"Cuntface," he said in a soft, marveling voice. "Ole Cuntface got his machine street-legal and his funky folks have got him parking it out at the airport."

He laughed.

Moochie and Don exchanged a glance that was somehow both uneasy and eager.

Buddy leaned toward them, elbows on the knees of his jeans.

"Listen," he said.

23 ARNIE AND LEIGH

Ridin along in my automobile,

My baby beside me at the wheel,

I stole a kiss at the turn of a mile,

My curiosity running wild—

Cruisin and playin the radio,

With no particular place to go.

— Chuck Berry

WDIL was on the car radio and Dion was singing "Run-around Sue" in his tough, streetwise voice, but neither of them was listening.

His hand had slipped up under the T-shirt she was wearing and had found the soft glory of her breasts, capped with nipples that were tight and hard with excitement. Her breath came in short, steep gasps. And for the first time her hand had gone where he wanted it, where he
needed
it, into his lap, where it pressed and turned and moved, without experience but with enough desire to make up for the lack.

He kissed her and her mouth opened wide, her tongue Was there, and the kiss was like inhaling the clean aroma/taste of a rain forest. He could feel excitement and arousal coming off her like a glow.

He leaned toward her,
strained
toward her, all of him, and for a moment he could feel her respond with a pure, clean passion.

Then she was gone.

Arnie sat there, dazed and stupefied, a little to the right of the steering wheel, as Christine's dome-tight came on. It was brief; the passenger door clunked solidly shut and the light clicked off again.

He sat a moment longer, not sure what had happened, momentarily not even sure of where he was. His body was in a complete stew—a helter-skelter array of emotions and erratic physical reactions that were half wonderful and half terrible. His glands hurt; his penis was hard iron; his balls throbbed dully. He could feel adrenalin whipping rapidly through his bloodstream, up and down and all around.

He made a fist and brought it down on his leg, hard. Then he slid across the seat, opened the door, and went after her.

Leigh was standing on the very edge of the Embankment, looking down into the darkness. Within a bright rectangle in the middle of that darkness, Sylvester Stallone strode across the night in the costume of a young labor leader from the 1930s. Again Arnie had that feeling of living in some marvelous dream that might at any moment skew off into nightmare… perhaps it had already begun to happen.

She was too close to the edge—he took her arm and pulled her gently backward. The ground up here was dry and crumbly. There was no fence or guardrail. If the earth at the edge let go, Leigh would be gone; she would land somewhere in the suburban development loosely scattered around the Liberty Hill Drive-In.

The Embankment had been the local lovers' lane since time out of mind. It was at the end of Stanson Road, a long, meandering stretch of two-lane blacktop that first curved out of town and then hooked back toward it, dead-ending on Libertyville Heights, where there had once been a farm.

It was November 4, and the rain that had begun earlier that Saturday night had turned to a light sleet. They had the Embankment and the free (if silent) view of the drive-in to themselves. He got her back into the car—she came willingly enough—thinking it was sleet on her cheeks. It was only inside, by the ghostly green glow of the dashboard lights, that he saw for sure she was crying.

"What's the matter?" he asked. "What's wrong?"

She shook her head and cried harder.

"Did I was it something you didn't want to do?" He swallowed and made himself say it. "Touch me like that?"

She shook her head again, but he wasn't sure what that meant. Arnie held her, clumsy and worried. And in the back of his mind he was thinking about the sleet, the trip back down, and the fact that he had no snow tires on Christine as yet.