Christine (49 page)

"Sir?"

"Yeah, okay, I'll call back," Arnie said. He broke the connection and nearly burst out of the booth, leaving his change scattered on the ledge and the floor. A few people turned around to look at him, mildly interested, and then turned back to their food again.

"Pizza's ready," the counterman said.

Arnie glanced up at the clock and saw he had been in the booth for almost twenty minutes. There was sweat all over his face. His armpits felt like a jungle. His legs were trembling—the muscles in his thighs felt as if they might simply give out and spill him onto the floor.

He paid for the pizza, nearly dropping his wallet as he tucked his three dollars in change back in.

"You okay?" the counterman asked. "You look a little white around the gills."

"I'm fine," Arnie said. Now he felt as if he might vomit. He snatched the pizza in its white box with the word GINO's emblazoned across the top and fled into the cold sharp clarity of the night. The last of the clouds had blown away, and the stars twinkled like chipped diamonds. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking first at the stars and then at Christine, parked across the street, waiting faithfully.

She would never argue or complain, Arnie thought. She would never demand. You could enter her anytime and rest on her plush upholstery, rest in her warmth. She would never deny. She—she—

She loved him.

Yes; he sensed that was true. Just as he sometimes sensed that LeBay would not have sold her to anyone else, not for two hundred and fifty, not for two thousand. She had been sitting there waiting for the right buyer. One who would…

One who would love her for herself alone,
that voice inside whispered.

"Yes. That was it; that was exactly it.

Arnie stood there with his pizza forgotten in his hands, white steam rising lazily from the grease-spotted box. He looked at Christine, and such a confusing whirl of emotions ran through him that there might have been a cyclone in his body, rearranging everything it did not simply destroy. Oh, he loved and loathed her, he hated her and cherished her, he needed her and needed to run from her, she was his and he was hers and

(I now pronounce you man and wife joined and sealed from this day forth for ever and ever, until death do you part)

But worst of all was the horror, the terrible numbing horror, the realization that… that…

(how did you hurt your back that night, Arnie? After Repperton-the late Clarence "Buddy" Repperton-and his buddies trashed her? How did you hurt your back so that now you have to wear this stinking brace all the time? How did you hurt your back?)

The answer rose and Arnie began to run, trying to beat the realization, to get to Christine before he saw the whole thing plain and went mad.

He ran for Christine, running his tangled emotions and some terrible drawing realization a foot race; he ran to her the way a hype runs for his works when the shakes and the jitters get so bad he can no longer think of anything but relief; he ran the way that the damned run to their appointed doom; he ran as a bridegroom runs to the place where his bride stands waiting.

He ran because inside Christine none of these things mattered—not his mother, father, Leigh, Dennis, or what he had done to his back that night when everyone was gone, that night after he had taken his almost totally destroyed Plymouth from the airport and back to Darnell's, and after the place was empty he had put Christine's transmission in neutral and pushed her, pushed her until she began to roll on her flat tires, pushed her until she was out the door and he could hear the wind of November keening sharply around the wrecks and the abandoned hulks with their stellated glass and their ruptured gas tanks; he had pushed her until the sweat ran off him in rivers and his heart thudded like a runaway horse in his chest and his back cried out for mercy; he bad pushed her, his body pumping as if in some hellish consummation; he had pushed her, and inside the odometer ran slowly backward, and some fifty feet beyond the door his back began to really throb, and he kept pushing, and then his back began to scream in protest, and he kept pushing, muscling it along on the flat, slashed tires, his hands going numb, his back screaming, screaming, screaming. And then—

He reached Christine and flung himself inside, shuddering and panting. His pizza fell on the floor. He picked it up and set it on the seat, feeling calm slowly wash through him like a soothing balm. He touched the steering wheel, let his hands slip down it, tracing its delicious curve. He took one glove off and felt in his pocket for his keys. For LeBay's keys.

He could still remember what had happened that night, but it did not seem horrible now; now, sitting behind Christine's steering wheel, it seemed rather wonderful.

It had been a miracle.

He remembered how it had suddenly become easier to push the car because the tires were healing themselves magically, kneading themselves together without a scar and then inflating. The broken glass had begun to re-assemble from nowhere, knitting itself upward with small, scratchy, crystalline sounds, The dents began to pop back out.

He simply pushed her until she was right enough to run, and then he had driven her, cruising between the rows until the odometer ran back past what Repperton and his friends had done. And then Christine was okay.

What could be so horrible about that?

"Nothing," a voice said.

He looked around. Roland D. LeBay was sitting on the passenger side of the car, wearing a black double-breasted suit, a white shirt, a blue tie. A row of medals hung askew on one lapel of his suit-coat—it was the outfit he had been buried in, Arnie knew that even though he had never actually seen it. Only LeBay looked younger and tougher. A man you'd not want to fool with.

"Start her up," LeBay said. "Get the heater going and let's motorvate."

"Sure," Arnie said, and turned the key. Christine pulled out, tires crunching on the packed snow. He had pushed her that night until almost all the damage had been repaired. No, not repaired—
negated.
Negated was the right word for what had happened. And then he had put her back in stall twenty, leaving the rest to do himself.

"Let's have us some music," the voice beside him said.

Arnie turned on the radio. Dion was singing 'Donna the Prima Donna'.

"You going to eat that pizza, or what?" The voice seemed to be changing somehow.

"Sure," Arnie said. "You want apiece?"

Leering: "I never say no to a piece of anything." Arnie opened the pizza box with one hand and pulled a piece free. "Here you g—"

His eyes widened. The slice of pizza began to tremble, the long threads of cheese dangling down beginning to sway like the strands of a spiderweb broken by the wind.

It wasn't LeBay sitting there anymore.

It was
him
.

It was Arnie Cunningham at roughly age fifty, not as old as LeBay had been when he and Dennis first met him on that August day, not that old, but getting there, friends and neighbors, getting there. His older self was wearing a slightly yellowed T-shirt and dirty, oil-smeared bluejeans. The glasses were hornrims, taped at one bow. The hair was cut short and receding. The gray eyes were muddy and bloodshot. The mouth had taken all the tucks of sour loneliness. Because this—this thing, apparition, whatever it was—it was alone. He felt that.

Alone except for Christine.

This version of himself and Roland D. LeBay could have been son and father: the resemblance was that great.

"You going to drive? Or are you going to stare at me?" this thing asked, and it suddenly began to age before Arnie's stunned eyes. The iron-colored hair went white, the T-shirt rippled and thinned, the body beneath twisted with age. The wrinkles raced across the face and then sank in like lines of acid. The eyes sank into their sockets and the corneas yellowed. Now only the nose thrust forward, and it was the face of some ancient carrion-eater, but still
his
face, oh, yes, still his.

"See anything green?" this sept—no, this octogenarian "Arnie Cunningham croaked, as its body twisted and writhed and withered on Christine's red seat. "See anything green? See anything green? See anything—" The voice cracked and rose and whined into a shrill, senile treble, and now the skin broke open in sores and surface tumors and behind the glasses milky cataracts covered both eyes like shades being pulled down. It was rotting before his very eyes and the smell of it was what he had smelled in Christine before, what Leigh had smelled, only it was worse now, it was the high, gassy, gagging smell of high-speed decay, the smell of his own death, and Arnie began to whine as Little Richard came on the radio singing "Tutti Frutti," and now the thing's hair was failing out in gossamer white drifts and its collarbones poked through the shiny, stretched skin above the T-shirt's sagging round collar, they poked through like grotesque white pencils. Its lips were shriveling away from the final surviving teeth that leaned this way and that like tombstones, it was him, it was dead, and yet it lived—like Christine, it lived,

"See anything green?"
it gibbered.
"See anything green?"

Arnie began to scream.

39 JUNKINS AGAIN

The fenders were clickin the guard-rail posts,

The guys beside me were just as white as ghosts.

One says, "Slow down, I see spots,

The lines in the road just look like dots."

— Charlie Ryan

Arnie pulled into Darnell's Garage about an hour later. His rider—if there really had been a rider—was long gone. The smell was gone too; it had undoubtedly been just an illusion. If you hung around the shitters for long enough, Arnie reasoned,
everything
started to smell like shit. And that made them happy, of course.

Will was sitting behind his desk in his glassed-in office, eating a hoagie. He raised one drippy hand but didn't come out. Arnie blipped his horn and parked.

It had all been some kind of dream. Simple as that. Some crazy kind of dream. Calling home, calling Leigh, trying to call Dennis and having that nurse tell him Dennis was in Physical Therapy—it was like being denied three times before the cock crew, or something. He had freaked a little bit. Anyone would have freaked, after the shitstorm he'd been through since August. It was all a question of perspective, after all, wasn't it? All his life he had been one thing to people, and now he was coming out of his shell, turning into a normal everyday person with normal everyday concerns. It was not at all surprising that people should resent this, because when someone changed

(for better or worse, for richer or poorer)

it was natural for people to get a little weird about it. It fucked up their perspective.

Leigh has spoken as if she thought he was crazy, and that was nothing but bullshit of the purest ray serene. He had been under strain, of course he had, but strain was a natural part of life. If Miss High-Box-Oh-So-Preppy Leigh Cabot thought otherwise, she was in for an abysmal fucking at the hands of that all-time champion rapist, Life. She'd probably end up taking Big Reds to get out of first gear in the morning and Nembies or 'Ludes to come down at night.

Ah, but he wanted her—even now, thinking about her, he felt a great, unaccountable, unnameable desire sweep through him like cold wind, making him squeeze Christine's wheel fiercely in his hands. It was a hot wanting too great, too elemental, for naming. It was its own force.

But he was all right now. He felt he had… crossed the last bridge, or something.

He had come back to himself sitting in the middle of a narrow access road beyond the farthest parking-lot reaches of the Monroeville Mail—which meant he was roughly halfway to California. Getting out, looking behind the car, he had seen a hole smashed through a snowbanks and there was melting snow sprayed across Christine's hood. Apparently he had lost control, gone skating across the lot (which, even with the Christmas shopping season in full swing, was mercifully empty this far out), and had crashed through the bank. Damn lucky he hadn't been in an accident.
Damn
lucky.

He had sat there for a while, listening to the radio and looking through the windscreen at the half-moon floating overhead. Bobby Helms had come on singing "Jingle Bell Rock", a Sound of the Season, as the deejays said, and he had smiled a little, feeling better. He couldn't remember what exactly it was that he had seen (or thought he had seen), and he didn't really want to. Whatever it had been, it was the first and last time. He was quite sure of that. People had gotten him imagining things. They'd probably be delighted if they knew… but he wasn't going to give them that satisfaction.

Things were going to be better all the way "around. He would mend his fences at home—in fact, could start tonight by watching some TV with his folks, just like in the old days. And he would win Leigh back. If she didn't like the car, no matter how weird her reasons were, fine. Maybe he would, even buy another car sometime soon and tell her he had traded Christine in. He could keep Christine-here, rent space. What she didn't know wouldn't hurt her. And Will. This was going to be his last run for Will, this coming weekend. That bullshit had gone just about far enough; he could feel it. Let Will think he was a chicken if that's what he wanted to think. A felony rap for interstate transport of unlicensed cigarettes and alcohol wouldn't look all that hot on his college application, would it? A
Federal
felony rap. No. Not too cool.

He laughed a little. He
did
feel better. Purged. On his way over to the garage he ate his pizza even though it was cold. He was ravenous. It had struck him a bit peculiar that one piece was gone—in fact, it made him a bit uneasy—but he dismissed it. He had probably eaten it during that strange blank period, or maybe even thrown it out the window. Whoo, that had been spooky. No more of that shit. And he had laughed again, this time a little less shakily.

Now be got out of the car, slammed the door, and started toward Will's office to find out what he had for him to do this evening. It suddenly occurred to him that tomorrow was the last day of school before the Christmas vacation, and that put an extra spring in his step.